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{{article | publication = West Lancashire Evening Gazette | file = 1990-11-24 West Lancashire Evening Gazette.jpg | px = 450 | height = | width = | date = 1990-11-24 | author = Tim Oglethorpe | pages = 9 | language = English | type = | description = | categories = | moreTitles = | morePublications = | moreDates = | text = New role for Tom but he's still under The Doctor TOM BAKER has a novel response to the familiar question: Do you regret giving up Dr Who? Nine years on, Tom says he still IS the time traveller, appearing regularly, in character, at Dr Who Conventions in the USA. "They call me the beloved Tom Baker," he says, proudly. "I'm feted when I go there. "Some of the people clearly believe I am something more than just an actor. If they have migraines, they ask me to lay my hands on their head. Beastly home moans WHAT would you think if a friend approached you with a tape-recorder, asked you questions about your home, and then said you were going to be "turned into an animal"? That is exactly how animator Nick Park collected material for his film Creature Comforts, which took the BFI award for Best British Animation. He used the responses as the voice-track for a mock-documentary, where plasticine animated zoo animals talk about life behind bars. A jaguar moans about the cold and not having enough red meat. A gorilla complains about not getting out and about. "The voice of the jaguar is a Brazilian student," says Nick, who works with Bristol-based Aardman Animations." Creature Comforts will be shown next Friday on Channel 4. "And I received the most extraordinary letter from a woman in Baitimore who claimed I had inspired her to lose six-and-a-half stone and give up smoking and drinking." But it isn't just the convention that allow Tom to remain as Dr Who. Back on TV as the eccentric Puddlegum makes his first appearance tomorrow night in The Chronicles of Narnia, he admits that the doctor has never really left him. "You don't play a 700-year-old man with two hearts for six years without feeling some lasting effect. "And when I took on the role, I gave Dr Who my characteristics. I gave him my humour, my sympathies and my fears. He became me and, in some ways, I became him." Perhaps not surprisingly, the 56-year-old has found it hard to find other roles. "The problem is that if you become well known for a particular part, or type of part, it is hard to disassociate yourself from it. You wouldn't expect Peter Barkworth or Richard Briers to play child molesters, would you? "And there were parts I was offered which didn't suit my style. "And even those roles which did suit me haven't necessarily been offered to me. There is the most ferocious competition for any part. All of which means that for the last nine years little has been seen of Tom on television. He appeared in Blackadder, as a maniacal sea captain, and played Sherlock Holmes in a TV version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. But that is about as far as it goes. However, his Dr Who association has not driven him to the breadline. On the contrary, it has made him quite rich. Dr Who Conventions in the USA can be very lucrative. Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier, has earned more than £1,000 for a two day appearance while actors who have played the title role can expect to take home considerably more than that. And then there are the spin-offs. Tom, now a well known name in the States, will shortly embark on a Dickens Tour Of America, starting in New York with a reading of Christmas Carol. "They think I'm deeply moving as Scrooge," he confides. "Dickens actually toured America himself, in 1868, and came home with a profit of £28,000. I shall have to see if I can be as successful!" The American tour will mean an extended break from his beautiful, if rather unusual, home deep in the Kent countryside. Tom, and his third wife, ITV director Sue, live in a converted Victorian school in a churchyard. "I'm very fond of the dead," he says. The couple are childless but share their home with 14 cats. Life seems good for the actor who played Dr Who on television for longer than anyone. But does he ever wish he had stayed in the role and helped secure the future of a programme that has lived under fear of the axe, in recent years? "There are occasions when I regret it because they were such happy times for me. But I'm happy with my life now. "However, if they'd asked me to play the leading role in the film version of Dr Who which is being made in the US I would definitely have been interested." }}

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