Tom Baker

Watch Baker's Doctor faced with something that means to kill him and reaching into his coat for a paper bag. The jelly baby comes out, the grin comes with it, and the eyes do something else entirely. Amusement and displeasure sit close together in this performance, so close that a child cannot always tell which one is on its way, and we suspect the actors inside the monsters could not either. The scarf and the floppy hat, worked out with the costume designer James Acheson, told you he was harmless. The voice, deep and slow and inclined to wander off in the middle of a sentence, told you nothing of the kind.

He came to it late and sideways. Years in a monastic order, then drama school, then repertory and the National Theatre company from 1968, alongside Laurence Olivier, who recommended him. Franklin J. Schaffner cast him as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and he arrives in that long, careful film with a beard, a stare and a voice pitched between a priest and a drunk; the picture is livelier whenever he is in it and he is not in it enough. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) gave him a fantasy villain, Prince Koura, and the producer Barry Letts gave him the Doctor in 1974. He kept the part for seven seasons, until 1981, longer than anyone has managed since.

What he did with it was to make the alien the point. Hartnell had been sharp, Troughton watchful, Pertwee in charge; Baker was delighted by everything and by nothing in particular, and could turn a line from a joke to a rebuke without moving his face. There is a moral seriousness under the clowning that we put down to the monastery, though he would probably put it down to the scripts. We laughed at him a good deal the first time round, and going back as adults we found the laughing had been a way of not looking at the eyes, which never join in; we were more unsettled than we expected by a man in a long scarf and a silly hat.

The cost was the one everybody warns about. After 1981 there was theatre, narration and a great deal of audio work that continues into the 2020s, and one piece of screen comedy that shows what the rest of television missed: Captain Rum in Blackadder II (1983), the same voice and the same stare turned wholly to nonsense. He came back to the Doctor himself, briefly and differently, in The Day of the Doctor (2013). He has said of the original run that "I was the Doctor and the Doctor was me". Most actors would say that as a warning. From him it sounds like a recommendation.