Look Who's Talking

LOOK WHO’S TALKING?

An interview with Colin Baker

LATE LAST month, the Carrick Biz caught up with the former Doctor Who actor Colin Baker at the Genesis Convention in the Park Avenue Hotel in east Belfast.

  Colin Baker – the Sixth doctor – took time out from his busy schedule of events to talk exclusively to the Carrick Biz.

  I was a little bit wary of attending the Genesis Convention.  Perhaps the media stereotype of Trekkies and Whovians as a bunch of peculiar obsessive might have something to it. Would it be a bunch of weirdoes obsessing about obscure parts of the plots of an episode aired some 30 years ago?

  The evidence suggests that any such fears are overblown. The folk who turned up seem to be from all age groups between nine and fifty. The gender balance was not as extreme as I had anticipated. I’d say that between a quarter and a third were female. In contrast, the audience at the last Les McKeown gig I attended was 98% female.

   I mentioned this to Colin, confessing my slight apprehension. 

 “The media in the main do like to create a stereotype. Very often when they come with cameras they’ll ignore the more than 98% of normal fans who quite like the programme and want to come along and meet some stars and talk about – and aren’t barking mad.  There are always a tiny proportion who carry their obsessions to slight extremes.  Of course, the media do love extremes so quite often the poor fans are characterised as something they’re not.”

  I recently discovered that some of the classic Doctor Who characters live on in another format.  A company called Big Finish has been licensed by the BBC to produce new audio dramas on CD.  I recently listened to one of these stories starring Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri. In this story they were trapped on a tramp steamer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The production values are as high on these CDs as any of the Friday night or Saturday afternoon plays on Radio Four.

  I mentioned this to Colin. ‘They are very good. Audio is the perfect medium for horror because you do all the work. The beautiful girl is the beautiful girl that you would like and the scary monster is the scary monster that would scare you. It’s the perfect medium for it and Big Finish have some excellent writers writing for them. I’ve done some cracking stories: stories with Davros.  I’ve got a new companion, an older lady who is a professor of English who is a foil to the Doctor because she’s his intellectual equal, Dr Evelyn Smythe.  She’s a great companion. That’s the great thing about audio – I can have a new companion and still do runs with Nicola and Bonnie (Langford).”

  Asked if more Dr Who CDs are in the pipeline, Colin told me that there are. “Dr Who is going to be a part of my life for some time to come. It’s not a major part in the terms of time I devote to it. This (Genesis Convention) is a day that fits in between two weeks of work in the theatre.  The joy of the big fisnish audios is that hyou don’t hav to learn any lines. You turn up at the recording studio and doe it in two days. I do about five or six of those a year.  It’s up to number 100. I just recorded the hundredth last week. As there’s only four of us Doctors doing them – Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann and Peter Davidson besides me - that means I’ve done around 25 of them. The last one had the Doctor and Mel landing on a planet where two batty old ladies live in a little house in the woods and do unspeakable things to ghosts.  It’s a ghost story in reverse. We rescue the ghosts. It’s quite a spooky story and it’s coming out quite soon.”

  We at Carrick Biz are looking forward to it.  Check out Big Finish’s own website for more details of their excellent audio productions.