John Higgs begins his foray into the long-standing BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who with a personal anecdote about going to the pub with Tom Baker, the notoriously bibulous actor who played the part of the Doctor from 1975 to 1981 – still longer than anyone else. For me, as for Higgs, Baker was ‘my doctor’. He was the one I first watched as a child and who instantly comes to mind whenever I think about the character: sonic screwdriver, long stripy scarf, bags of jelly babies and tin dog companion. At the height of his Who fame, Baker turned, as Higgs doesn’t shirk from saying, into a ‘monster’, behaving appallingly on set and off. And, having become typecast by the role, he clearly struggled, mentally and professionally, in its aftermath. His disastrous real-life marriage to his co-star, Lalla Ward, during his final season, Higgs suggests, looks like the desperate act of a ‘man trying to cling to the Doctor even as he knew his time was up’.
But then the Doctor, like Sherlock Holmes, is a role that has sometimes extracted a heavy price from those called to play it. And like Holmes, Higgs argues, the Doctor at this juncture is closer to a national folk hero, the stuff of near legend and myth, than a fictional creation from a cheaply made TV series.
Yet the programme that spawned the character was nearly canned before a single episode ever aired, and the figure of the Doctor, it turns out, was practically an afterthought. So much so that when the first Doctor, William Hartnell, went on holiday, stories ran without him, much in the way that whole series of Blake’s 7, created by the former Doctor Who scriptwriter Terry Nation, subsequently passed minus its namesake.
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