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Thirty Days of Doctor Who: Day Four
Aug. 6th, 2010 11:13 pmDay Four: Your Favourite Doctor
There's something funny about Tom Baker, and it's not just his wide-eyed stare. To this day, he is so strongly associated with the role that fans who don't count him among their favourites have to explain why. And on the flip side, every time I tell someone that I love the Fourth Doctor best of all, I feel compelled to defensively state that I am familiar with the others. (Because, yes, I have had people say 'if Tom Baker is your favourite Doctor you can't have watched much Doctor Who' to my face. On more than one occasion, even.) Popularity is weird, and so is fandom.
There it is, though: I love my goggle-eyed Doctor with the long scarf best of all. There's a moment in The Seeds of Doom that sums up why exactly. He's standing contemplating the prone body of a man infected by the Krynoid when a villain with a gun enters the room behind him and orders him sternly to 'turn around'. So he does. He spins in a circle and goes back to what he was doing, expression not altering one jot. Is he making dangerous, deadpan fun of the gunman? Or did he misunderstand the human idiom because he's so focussed on the problem at hand? There's no way of knowing what just went on in that curly head of his.
That is why I love, love, love the Fourth Doctor. The character fascinates me most when he's an alien, when that emotional distance is firmly in place. Whether he's clowning or serious, Tom Baker's performance always danced across that gulf with unparalleled grace. Nobody ever gave a better impression of being a Time Lord who just happened to look like a 6"4 human from Liverpool. There have been better actors to play the role, but there have been none more suited to it.
( The rest of the days. )
There's something funny about Tom Baker, and it's not just his wide-eyed stare. To this day, he is so strongly associated with the role that fans who don't count him among their favourites have to explain why. And on the flip side, every time I tell someone that I love the Fourth Doctor best of all, I feel compelled to defensively state that I am familiar with the others. (Because, yes, I have had people say 'if Tom Baker is your favourite Doctor you can't have watched much Doctor Who' to my face. On more than one occasion, even.) Popularity is weird, and so is fandom.
There it is, though: I love my goggle-eyed Doctor with the long scarf best of all. There's a moment in The Seeds of Doom that sums up why exactly. He's standing contemplating the prone body of a man infected by the Krynoid when a villain with a gun enters the room behind him and orders him sternly to 'turn around'. So he does. He spins in a circle and goes back to what he was doing, expression not altering one jot. Is he making dangerous, deadpan fun of the gunman? Or did he misunderstand the human idiom because he's so focussed on the problem at hand? There's no way of knowing what just went on in that curly head of his.
That is why I love, love, love the Fourth Doctor. The character fascinates me most when he's an alien, when that emotional distance is firmly in place. Whether he's clowning or serious, Tom Baker's performance always danced across that gulf with unparalleled grace. Nobody ever gave a better impression of being a Time Lord who just happened to look like a 6"4 human from Liverpool. There have been better actors to play the role, but there have been none more suited to it.
( The rest of the days. )