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young master Baker prayed for a bomb to drop on
his mother so he’d be orphaned and eligible for treats
from the Americans. By the age of nine he’d become a
thurible swinger and learned to fake tears at funerals to
get bigger tips. A year later, he discovered the joys of
solvent abuse (“I couldn’t walk past a tin of floor polish
without having a furtive snort”), which helped set him
on the path to a lifetime of misery and self-loathing,
abetted by National Service, the National Theatre and a
failed attempt to please his family by becoming a monk.
A recurring theme is that common actors’ lament, the
lack of any sense of identity, which isn’t helped by the
fact that he’s so frequently mistaken for Jon Pertwee,
Jonathan Miller and – bizarrely – Shirley Williams. But
although he’s understandably irked to be accosted by
strangers about the havoc he wreaked on the grammar
schools, Baker seems curiously flattered when people
remark, as they often do, that he reminds them of a
favourite aunt. Not that they want to be around him for
long. “I’m afraid I have no gift for friendship,” he writes
at one point. “I quickly get tired of people and off they
go. Only the other day I tried to think of a single friend
I had made in my life and drew a blank.”
But while Baker wallows in his own perversely appealing
creepiness, he doesn’t get anywhere near an
answer to the question posed by the book’s title. His
long-suffering wives, who might have been invited to
BUY Tom Baker books online from and
shed some light on this mystery, get the briefest of
walk-on parts – barely a paragraph in the case of Lalla
Ward, who buggered off to shack up with proselytising
Darwinist Richard Dawkins – when Baker wishes
to illustrate his talent for appalling misjudgement or
self-pity. He once even failed to recognise an ex-wife
at a party.
Nor does the story end, as one might expect, with
timelord totty excess, as Baker went on to enjoy several
Soho Boozing Years with the late Jeffrey Bernard,
Francis Bacon and chums, which provide a further rich
seam of anecdotes. These days he happily potters about
in his local graveyard polishing his own tombstone, enjoying
strange encounters with scary fans paying their
respects, and occasionally treats himself to lengthy
visits to the household goods department of John
Lewis. “I particularly enjoy the ironing-board section.
I find I can pass an hour or more admiring the various
ironing boards. The Brabantia is my favourite. I have a
very good model with a flowered cover, pretty though
fading slightly. It folds so smoothly that all fear flees.
It’s the folding action of good modern boards that has
removed the terror that so many men used to feel at the
prospect of opening or closing the old, temperamental
type of ironing board when naked.”
Call me a sick fuck if you must, but I closed the book
liking him even more. �
025
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