Tom Baker because the Fourth Physician (1974–1981)
A Saturday night, April 1975. A person with a mop of tumbling curls and a colossal multicolored, striped scarf holds two threads in his palms. Hit them collectively and the best evil to ever go to the universe won’t ever exist. However the man’s expression is of not possible torment. “Simply contact one wire to the opposite and that is it, the Daleks stop to exist,” breathes the Fourth Physician. “Do I’ve that proper?”
Nobody who has seen this thrilling scene in Episode 5 of Genesis Of The Daleks has ever forgotten it. Not solely is it a pivotal second on this time journey saga, it’s the time journey story, the final word ethical query: might you kill the younger Hitler? And it really works primarily as a result of it is performed by an actor whose outrageous charisma and searing ethical depth – and absurdist levity elsewhere – have been highly effective sufficient to utterly reshape everybody’s concept of who and what the Physician is. A long time afterward, when comedians and cartoonists spoofed Physician Who, it was the fourth incarnation, Tom Baker, that they have been doing, together with his scarves, hats, Jelly Infants and robotic canine Ok-9. The longest working Physician, with seven years of Tardis time, Baker made himself the definitive article.
Baker, a former novice monk born in Liverpool, was between jobs engaged on a development web site when he received the decision to switch Jon Pertwee. As an alternative of Pertwee’s pleasant Time Lord, he reinvented the Physician as a type of intergalactic Toulouse Lautrec, an unpredictable cosmic flâneur with bohemian appears and a supernova grin. The Fourth Physician could be heat, dim-witted and typically shockingly insensitive – he tells a group of Antarctic explorers about to be absorbed by the alien plant monster the Krynoid: “It’s a must to assist your self” – however he at all times landed along with the fitting aspect in the long run.
Better of all, the youngsters’s present that adults now cherished now had a star who loved being a giant child himself. On the finish of his first story, Robotic, the Fourth Physician regales companion Sarah Jane Smith (a GOAT herself) together with his code of life: “There is not any level in being an grownup if you cannot be infantile typically.” Is not that, in a nutshell, the enjoyment of the present? Time, house, the limitless battle of fine versus evil… and Jelly Infants.
Andrew Harrison
