Robot:
Tom Baker’s
Debut as The Doctor
By Steven Harris
On 28th December 1974 my
own personal relationship with Doctor Who
changed forever. From being a programme I watched if I happened to be indoors
on a Saturday it transformed into essential viewing, something I became
obsessed with (an obsession of which I haven’t particularly been cured since).
The reason? Tom Baker. THE Doctor. The definite article, as he tells Harry
Sullivan in this very episode.
The programme was written by former
script editor and long-serving show stalwart Terrance Dicks and directed by
another long-term associate of the show, Christopher Barry. Their steady hands
and deep understanding of the character of the Doctor despite externally
changing personalities and faces, allowed for as assured a debut in the role as
there has ever been. Or perhaps it was just that Tom Baker was a hand-in-glove
fit for the part. Certainly no-one else, before or since, has quite so
successfully convinced me that they possibly are an alien masquerading as a
jobbing human actor.
When the previous season had ended,
Jon Pertwee had been well mashed up by the Spiders of Metebelis Three and by radiation
poisoning. He collapsed back at UNIT headquarters and a funny abbot man
appeared on a flaming pie (well on some clever BBC special effects) and told
Sarah-Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart that the Doctor was about to regenerate.
Robot, then, opens with that
regeneration, Pertwee rapidly transmuting into Baker while Sarah-Jane and the
Brig look on. “Well, here we go again” mutters the Brig, who has seen two
previous incarnations of the Timelord already. He calls for the UNIT medical
officer to ensure that the Doctor is checked over once he has changed.
The Fourth Doctor’s first words are
some burbling nonsense which Sarah-Jane swears is connected to stuff his
previous face had uttered on Metebelis Three. He then jabbers more audibly –
“If the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of its parts, why is a
mouse when it spins?” – and Sergeant Benton arrives and asks who the hell this
nutjob on the floor might be. Well he doesn’t quite put it like that but he’s
clearly thinking it. When he is told it’s the Doctor he drums home the fact of
the Timelord’s regeneration for anyone watching who has not yet cottoned on: “You
mean he’s done it again? He’s changed?”
The action switches to an exterior shot
of a sentry guarding some military installation. We then see him through a
distorted camera, as though someone is filming through a 60s style, thick and
panelled school toilet window. We can just about read that the installation is
a research centre. Bleepy noises accompany this creepy view and a metallic arm
smashes down on the sentry who is rendered unconscious, or worse (probably
worse as we are later told there are no eye witnesses). The creepy bleepy thing
enters the building, casting a Robby the Robot shadow against a back wall.
Back to UNIT, evidently on a different
day. The Brig is telling Sarah-Jane about the theft we have just witnessed and
bemoaning the fact that the Doctor is still unconscious. Sarah-Jane wants a
favour; can UNIT give her a special pass to interview the people at Think Tank,
a highly secretive research development institute. Of course, says the Brig and
they head for his office.
As they pass we see the Doctor
skulking in a side corridor wearing a long nightshirt and carrying his shoes.
He wanders into the room where the Tardis is standing and, finding his time
machine locked eventually remembers that the key is in one of his shoes, just
as it was when Troughton had regenerated into Pertwee. The Doctor is seemingly
about to scarper for pastures new when Dr. Harry Sullivan enters and orders him
back to the sick bay.
There follows a little back and forth
on the matter of who is a doctor and who isn’t, which is where we hear Baker’s
assertion that he is THE Doctor. He chops a brick in half with his bare hands
to prove his fitness, runs on the spot like a loon, and checks his hearts with
Sullivan’s stethoscope. Then we get the by now obligatory look in a convenient
mirror so that the Timelord can assess his new physiognomy. “Well, nothing’s
perfect…I think the nose is a definite improvement.” decides the Doctor before
trying to take his leave of Sullivan. The doctor (the UNIT one, not the Tom
Baker one) is having none of it so the Doctor (the Tom Baker one, not the UNIT
one) grabs an overly long Bunsen burner hosepipe and they skip in unison like
infant schoolboys.
In the next scene The Brigadier and
Sarah-Jane enter the same room to find it empty. A knocking noise is coming
from a cupboard which the Brig opens to discover Harry Sullivan tied up with
Bunsen burner hosepipe. At this moment the Tardis begins to make clearing off
noises and Sarah-Jane yells at the Doctor not to go. The noises stop and the
Doctor’s head pops out of the Tardis door to say goodbye. He is convinced that
the Brigadier needs his help and finally recognises both Lethbridge-Stewart and
Sarah-Jane. We are to take it that the regeneration has taken and he is fit as
a fiddle (or whatever instrument would indicate fitness on Gallifrey).
Beepy creepy is at it again, killing a
perfectly innocent looking electric fence and then a security guard who has
foolishly tried to bar a door with an obvious BBC balsawood prop instead of a
thick chunk of purpose-built wood. Creeping and beeping his way inside another
interior, the metallic thing (ok, we know already that it’s a robot because of
the story title but, you know, suspense and all that) steals some stuff from a
shelf which just happens to be at a perfect height for his clicky-clacky hands.
The action is broken up again by a
sequence in which the Doctor tries on several different costumes in front of
the bemused Brigadier and Harry Sullivan. Not exactly in front of them, they
don’t see his pants or anything. He pops out of the Tardis in a Hunnish outfit,
then as the King of Hearts and as a Pierrot clown (a look David Bowie pretty
much rips off entirely for his Ashes to
Ashes video some years later). At last the scarf and hat make an appearance
and we can get back to the plot.
At the scene of the latest robbery the
Brig and Harry are checking out the broken fence while the Doctor is going all
ecological and perusing a crushed dandelion on the floor. Except he’s not being
all green politics and knit your own head, he’s calculating that to crush
vegetable matter so completely the thing stepping on it would need to weigh
about a quarter of a ton. The Brig eyes him suspiciously before rattling off
the information that the parts stolen would go very well with the plans that
were originally stolen to give someone virtually everything they need to make a
disintegrator gun.
Meanwhile we get a little gag about
feminism when Sarah-Jane arrives at Think Tank and mistakes the female
director’s assistant for the person in the top job. Oh what laughs. Before we
can repair our splitting sides we are back with the Brig who, prompted by the
Doctor, realises that the only component the thief or thieves now lack if they
want to make a disintegrator gun is a focusing generator. He orders a complete
military lockdown of the electronics firm making such parts and they all rush
off in their jeep.
At Think Tank Sarah-Jane appears to be
getting on quite well with the director after their initial poor start. So much
so that she is able to barge her way into an empty room with little resistance
from the director or her assistant. The journalist notices that the name on the
door says ‘Kettlewell’ and asks if that is professor Kettlewell who recently
resigned from the Think Tank robotics programme. Yes, is the answer but before
she can make anything of it Sarah-Jane slips on something and once she’s
recovered her composure she finds herself ushered out of the room again.
At the electronics factory countless
UNIT soldiers are guarding the place. The Brig is boasting to the Doctor that
the vault containing a sealed box of focusing generators is impregnable. The
Doctor tells him they have not accounted for anything tunnelling from below. As
if on cue (or as if the editing team have placed one scene logically right
after another) we see creepy beepy tunnelling up into the vault. A soldier
rushes in on hearing the noise, fires ineffectively and is eradicated. By the
time the Brig and the Doctor have entered the vault (Harry in tow) the box of
focusing generators is open and empty, the soldier lies dead on the floor and
the Doctor proceeds to measure the depth of the tunnel with his scarf, an ‘I
told you so’ look on his face.
Sarah-Jane has located Professor
Kettlewell by this time but he is not very forthcoming about his reasons for
leaving Think Tank other than to say he did not like the direction their
research was going. He is now dedicating his time to researching alternative
energies, apparently but does confidently dismiss the notion that anyone back
at Think Tank would be competent to continue his work in robotics.
Sarah-Jane decides to head back to
Think Tank after her unsuccessful interview with Kettlewell. While she is
driving there we get a quick flash to the Doctor who has worked out that the
tunnel digger has to be mechanical – well, duh! There are huge, robotic
footprints near the tunnel entrance. Sarah-Jane has now arrived at the
institute and climbed over a wall to head for the same room she slipped in. She
has just confirmed her suspicion that it was a patch of oil which caused her to
lose her footing when a dirty great robot appears from a side room and demands
to know who she is.
Sarah-Jane backs away and we now see
her as viewed by the robot. What a surprise, the view looks just as it would if
filmed through a 60s style, thick and panelled school toilet window. Not only
that, but the creepy beepy noises are back. Cue credits.
The viewing figures for Robot were 10.8 million, which pretty
much spanks every single Pertwee story apart from The Three Doctors, which was a Pertwee, Troughton, Hartnell story
anyway. Tom Baker’s Doctor would continue to break its own viewing figures
again and again until the final Baker season which saw a dramatic drop in
viewers (thanks a bunch, Nathan-Turner). For this reason alone the onscreen
claim to be the definitive Doctor seems pretty indisputable when it comes to
classic Who, anyway.
The Fourth Doctor is unique in certain
respects. He rarely allows himself to get flustered, or at least brilliantly
covers up and flusters with a development of the Troughton style of clowning
that served the Second Doctor so well. Yet Baker’s Doctor is clearly no fool
right from the off. Whereas the Second Doctor seems content to let people
assume he is an idiot in order to gain some tactical advantage, the Fourth
Doctor is evidently as sharp as a tack and yet as mad as a box of frogs. Not
mad for effect, genuinely fruitloop. As a boy of nine at the time I can attest
that it was this lunacy which endeared him to me more than anything. Given the
viewing statistics for most of his seven years in the role, I can hardly have
been alone.
All subsequent Doctors, even in the
modern era, have had to live with the shadow of Tom Baker. All have dealt
admirably with this shadow with varying degrees of public and critical success.
Sneak previews of the forthcoming 50th Anniversary episode have
shown various nods to the Timelord’s past, one of which is a ridiculously long
scarf seen around the neck of somebody in conversation with the Brigadier’s
daughter, Kate Stewart, who is now heading UNIT.
The character of Harry Sullivan was
something of an incongruity. Although he proved popular with fans he had
originally been included in the cast before the new Doctor had himself been
chosen in case the job went to an older actor who was less capable of the
running, jumping stuff. As a result Sullivan would make only two further
appearances after this series, the opener of series thirteen, Terror of the Zygons, and The Android Invasion, three storylines
later.
Sarah-Jane and the fourth Doctor would
go on to develop possibly the most affectionate pairing of the original shows.
Although this episode has them barely onscreen together at all the Doctor’s
fondness for the young journalist grows throughout her time on the show and her
departure at the end of The Hand of Fear
in 1976 is genuinely moving. Perhaps that’s why she was the companion to end up
with her own show (twice) and to return most frequently for specials and during
the Russell T. Davies era.
As Robot
progresses we see many of the Fourth Doctor’s trademark tics, from the
infectious yet slightly maniacal grin to the proffering of jelly babies to
enemies and friends alike. Tom Baker simply hit the ground running and, for
this viewer at least, forever keeps me in touch with the nine year old I once was
when I first sat down to watch him take over the role. I can only hope that his
importance to the show is marked by more than somebody’s long scarf when it
comes to the 50th anniversary later in the year.
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