In the first of a two-part Tomfile, I take a look at Colin Baker’s time as the Doctor both on screen and on audio and see what has happened to the Sixth incarnation of Britain’s most loved alien.
Colin Baker made his first appearance in Doctor Who in the 1983 Peter Davison story Arc of Infinity. He then appeared as the Sixth actor to play the TV Doctor on March 16th 1984. Over the course of the next two years the show would suffer due to lack of support from BBC management. After the show was cancelled in 1989 many fans seemed unsympathetic towards Colin Baker’s Doctor. However since 1999 the Sixth incarnation has undergone some what of a re-evaluation and is now considered one of the best Doctors in the Big Finish range.
During his time as the Doctor on television it wasn’t so much Colin Baker himself that was the problem, it was just the wrong time for him. The BBC was being run by people who cared more about their reputation and what people thought of them than providing programming that the licence paying public would want to see. The budget for the show in 1984 was the same roughly as in 1963 and there seemed no desire to increase it to produce better production values and a more attractive programme. By the time Colin Baker had become the Doctor for his first full season in 1985, the show had returned to its traditional Saturday tea time slot. Except this time the show would be 45 minutes long and run for half the time it had done before. The main problem with the show at the time was the critics were out to get the show and would use anything to form an argument no matter how feeble it was. For example, it was accused that the Doctor pushes two guards into a tub of acid when if you actually watch it you will see that one guard falls into it and pulls the other one in. The only bad thing that could be said was the line that the Doctor uses and that it “You’ll wont mind if I don’t join you!”. Also strangling your companion is a pretty bad thing to do at 6pm on a Saturday night. I suppose it’s a sensible thing to say that making the Doctor different from previous incarnations was a pretty smart thing to do to try and breathe new life into a show which at that point had been running for 22 years. But I think they went to far with the outfit. The ‘outfit’ was out of date back then and is still out of date and it’s the one of the few things that you could get embarrassed about.
Colin Baker only had 31 TV Episodes to his name and 14 of them were in the mixed story ‘The Trial of a Timelord’. But despite that short run he did have some good stories. For example The Mark of the Rani is well worth a look. It sees the return of the Master following his firey ending at the end of Planet of Fire. It also sees the introduction of the Rani as played by Kate O’Mara. What is so good about this story is the location filming, it is some of the best in Doctor Who. Then there is the Two Doctors. Forget the pointless reason for filming the location footage in Spain or the point for bringing Patrick Troughton back at all. It was alright when the show was celebrating the 20th Anniversary but two years later it seemed rather a mute point. But to see a truly wonderful Colin Baker story then look no further than Revelation of the Daleks which saw Davros and had everything in the story and that is why it is one of the better Dalek stories of the 1980’s. Following the return of Doctor Who in 1986, Colin Baker was axed from the role in payment for the return of the show in 1987. To me his treatment was disgusting. I can understand why he decided not to do the regeneration sequence but what they did to make up for that was a joke. It would be over 20 years before the glimmer of the 6th Doctor would shine. Colin Baker made a few appearances as the Doctor like in 1989 when he starred in the Stage play The Ultimate Adventure and in 1993 to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Doctor Who he return to appear in a bizarre Children in Need special.
On March 6th and 7th 1999, Colin Baker joined Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy in recording the first official audio adventure for Doctor Who. The Sirens of Time wasn’t that bad but compared to today’s standards its quite poor. It wasn’t until the third story Whispers of Terror that Colin Baker got his own adventure for the first time in 23 years. In this story the Doctor is reunited with Nicola Bryant as Peri. This story like The Sirens of Time wasn’t anything special. Colin Baker’s third story was The Marian Conspiracy which is an important milestone because it was the first companion to created specially for audio. Dr. Evelyn Smythe had never been seen or mentioned in TV Doctor Who and so we were able to know her story from the beginning. For those of us who weren’t really watching Doctor Who when it was on originally this is the first companion that we have seen from the beginning. I really liked this story and it wasn’t really the plot that I liked. It was the relationship between the Doctor and Evelyn that made this so memorable. The opening seen really set it up for me, Smythe trying to do her job and the Doctor interrupting to try and satisfy his curiosity. As the story progresses it just gets better and better and shows what potential this partnership has. The next adventure was the Spectre of Lanyon Moor. this story was special because it had the Brigadier in it but the story was another good one. The story was a really good one for the Doctor and started to show what he could do.
The Apocalypse Element was another solid story and it saw the return of Lalla Ward as Romana. The next story it also featured the Daleks and in my opinion was better than the previous story the Daleks appeared in which was The Genocide Machine. Evelyn Smythe took a rest in the next story which was The Holy Terror and featured Frobisher who had only appeared in other Doctor Who media. I didn’t listen to this when it was released and it was one of the last ones that I did and I actually liked it. It was a gentle and nice story which wasn’t really meant to be taken seriously and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I don’t think he should be a full-time companion because I think the American Penguin character might get a bit to annoying after a few adventures. He should come back for the odd adventure maybe every 18 months or so. The next story wouldn’t be until the summer of 2001 due to the first series of Paul McGann adventures. This was Bloodtide which was the best so far for Colin Baker. He was superb as well as Maggie Stables and also the return of the Silurians was another bonus point. Baker’s next story immediately followed Bloodtide and it was even better which I thought would be impossible. Project: Twilight was a vampire tale set on Earth, what this story showed was that with a nice strong story Colin Baker can show what sort of Doctor he can be and even considering the early ones Colin Baker has had more impressive stories than he ever did on TV. The final story of 2001 was a comedy and it was a much more obvious one than The Holy Terror. This story was called The One Doctor and it saw the Doctor reunited with Mel for the first time on audio. It was a really good story and was a fitting end to a quality year for the Sixth Doctor.
The start of 2002 was given over to Paul McGann’s second series of adventures, building on the success on the first season. As a result, Colin Baker only had two adventures that year and neither of them were particularly memorable. The first was …ish which was a wordy story in more ways than one. It featured Peri as the companion whereas I think Evelyn would have suited this story much better as her character is a teacher. The next story was The Sandman which saw the return of Anneke Wills to the series. Wills played Polly between 1966 and 1967 overseeing the change of William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. The story was a really hard one to get through and I think that Baker suffered because of that. You have to give Big Finish credit for trying this sort of story but it just didn’t work. So as a result of these stories 2002 was a disappointment when you compare it to the previous year. I think if there had been more CB stories then it might have been a better year for him. The use of the wrong companions for the wrong stories also didn’t help the stories.
2003 was a very good year for the Sixth Doctor. The first story of the year was Jubilee which is what the 2005 Christopher Eccleston story Dalek is based on. This story saw the return of the Daleks following their so-so story The Time of the Daleks. This was another superb story which allowed Colin Baker to shine. Any opportunity that a Doctor has to battle the Daleks or a famous monster then they run with it and this one was no different. A short while later saw Doctor Who go all musical in Doctor Who and the Pirates. With any other Doctor then this story would have flopped badly but with Colin Baker in the main role it became a glorious and fun filled adventure. The addition of Bill Oddie also added to the enjoyment. The next story in the 6th Doctor range was Project: Lazarus which is a truly superb story that is better than Twilight which I thought was not possible. The story was perhaps one of the darkest and most gruesome stories that I have ever known in Doctor Who. This story also featured two Doctors which is obviously something that shouldn’t happen very often and when it does then something special or different should happen. In this case the 6th Doctor had been cloned and it was the Seventh Doctor that had to save the day. What I liked most about this story was Colin Baker’s performance. It was unlike any performance of this character that we had seen for quite sometime and at times it was quite off-putting because we are not use to seeing him that way. McCoy was also good in this story and his Doctor served the story well.
In the run up to celebrate Doctor Who’s 40th Anniversary and Big Finish’s 50th release. Three adventures were commissioned with the 5ht, 6th and 7th Doctors all facing foes from the Doctors past. For the sixth Doctor it was Davros in Davros. This story was the best of the trio and what absolutely fantastic because it gave Colin Baker and Terry Molloy (Davros) the chance to have so good dialogue together. Also Wendy Padbury is in it as Lorraine Baines who with Bernard Horsefeld playing her husband played the typical characters of thinking they could control Davros when in fact they couldn’t. Colin Baker made a guest appearance in Zagreus but the following month saw The Wormery. This is not only the worst 6th Doctor story but it is one of the worst Big Finish stories to date. Despite the fact that it had Katy Manning (Jo Grant) in it the story was confusing and didn’t interest me in the slightest. Not very often that I give a story 1/5 but this one was an easy decision. After three years of Doctor Who stories featuring the Four Doctors who were aliving and willing to do these stories it was the Sixth Doctor that had developed the best. He still sounded like the Doctor and Colin Baker put in the same passionate performance that he always did on TV and with the right scripts it was possible to see what Baker could have been like if he was given the chance.
As 2003 rolled into 2004 we were treated to what would be Evelyn Smythe’s last adventure in terms of chronology (because us Doctor Who fans love to put stories into order). Arrangements for War was a fitting story for Evelyn but the story helped expose how different the Doctor and Evelyn are as characters despite how well they have bonded. Following the events that occurred in Project: Lazarus it was obvious that this story would see Smythe change it some way. I wont say it was one of my Top 5 but it is an ok story that works well and Colin Baker yet again puts in another fine story. Medicinal Purposes was the next story and this is one of the stories that would go into my Top 5. I love when Doctor Who does historical and in this one it was in a period of history that I remember vividly from school. Burke and Hare were two Grave Robbers who stole dead bodies for people to do medical research on. What Big Finish did that was clever was insert the Doctor and Evelyn into it. This was a good story because it gave the Doctor a good opponent to try and work against. Not Burke or Hare but Dr Robert Knox who we thought at the time was another Timelord because he had a TARDIS but he in fact wasn’t from Gallifrey and he had won the TARDIS in a game of cards. Knox was played by Carry On legend Leslie Philips. Philips was absolutely superb and was a fitting opposition to Colin Baker. Another note of interest was David Tennant who played Daft Jamie. This story was good because it gave Colin a chance to do all sorts of emotions ranging from anger to sympathy. Hi s relationship with Daft Jamie was a poignant one and what made it even sadder was that the Doctor knew of Daft Jamie’s impending death because its in proper history.
The next story was The Juggernauts. This was with Bonnie Langford and saw Mel separated from the Doctor. This story was another strong script that enabled Colin Baker to not only develop a better relationship with Bonnie Langford’s Mel character but to also have some very good scenes and dialogue with Terry Molloy’s Davros. The story also sees the return of the Mechanoids. Their only appearance was in the 1965 William Hartnell adventure The Chase. The next story for the Sixth Doctor was Catch 1782. This was similar to the Juggernauts in that the Doctor and Mel become separated. Where Catch was different was in that the Doctor took more of a back seat in this one as Mel tried to regain her memory whilst the Doctor tries to find her. Its an interesting piece that works because the stories doesn’t feature aliens trying to slaughter another race of aliens or someone trying to invade but just a simple rescue mission that takes on an emotional twist. The next story that features the Sixth Doctor is Thicker Than Water and is a sequel to Arrangements for War. This features both Bonnie Langford and Evelyn Smythe. This isn’t a story that I remember well and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the acting it is just that the story doesn’t really reward the listener with anything in my honest opinion. 2005 was on the whole a very good year for the Sixth Doctor. For me the best story for Colin Baker was The Juggernauts though Catch 1782 comes a close second.. This year was another solid display from Colin Baker and he continues to be able to change peoples attitude towards his Doctor.
In the second part, we look at the Sixth Doctor adventures from 2006 to 2008 and also the special adventures Real Time, Her Final Flight and Cryptobiosis.
Colin Baker made his first appearance in Doctor Who in the 1983 Peter Davison story Arc of Infinity. He then appeared as the Sixth actor to play the TV Doctor on March 16th 1984. Over the course of the next two years the show would suffer due to lack of support from BBC management. After the show was cancelled in 1989 many fans seemed unsympathetic towards Colin Baker’s Doctor. However since 1999 the Sixth incarnation has undergone some what of a re-evaluation and is now considered one of the best Doctors in the Big Finish range.
During his time as the Doctor on television it wasn’t so much Colin Baker himself that was the problem, it was just the wrong time for him. The BBC was being run by people who cared more about their reputation and what people thought of them than providing programming that the licence paying public would want to see. The budget for the show in 1984 was the same roughly as in 1963 and there seemed no desire to increase it to produce better production values and a more attractive programme. By the time Colin Baker had become the Doctor for his first full season in 1985, the show had returned to its traditional Saturday tea time slot. Except this time the show would be 45 minutes long and run for half the time it had done before. The main problem with the show at the time was the critics were out to get the show and would use anything to form an argument no matter how feeble it was. For example, it was accused that the Doctor pushes two guards into a tub of acid when if you actually watch it you will see that one guard falls into it and pulls the other one in. The only bad thing that could be said was the line that the Doctor uses and that it “You’ll wont mind if I don’t join you!”. Also strangling your companion is a pretty bad thing to do at 6pm on a Saturday night. I suppose it’s a sensible thing to say that making the Doctor different from previous incarnations was a pretty smart thing to do to try and breathe new life into a show which at that point had been running for 22 years. But I think they went to far with the outfit. The ‘outfit’ was out of date back then and is still out of date and it’s the one of the few things that you could get embarrassed about.
Colin Baker only had 31 TV Episodes to his name and 14 of them were in the mixed story ‘The Trial of a Timelord’. But despite that short run he did have some good stories. For example The Mark of the Rani is well worth a look. It sees the return of the Master following his firey ending at the end of Planet of Fire. It also sees the introduction of the Rani as played by Kate O’Mara. What is so good about this story is the location filming, it is some of the best in Doctor Who. Then there is the Two Doctors. Forget the pointless reason for filming the location footage in Spain or the point for bringing Patrick Troughton back at all. It was alright when the show was celebrating the 20th Anniversary but two years later it seemed rather a mute point. But to see a truly wonderful Colin Baker story then look no further than Revelation of the Daleks which saw Davros and had everything in the story and that is why it is one of the better Dalek stories of the 1980’s. Following the return of Doctor Who in 1986, Colin Baker was axed from the role in payment for the return of the show in 1987. To me his treatment was disgusting. I can understand why he decided not to do the regeneration sequence but what they did to make up for that was a joke. It would be over 20 years before the glimmer of the 6th Doctor would shine. Colin Baker made a few appearances as the Doctor like in 1989 when he starred in the Stage play The Ultimate Adventure and in 1993 to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Doctor Who he return to appear in a bizarre Children in Need special.
On March 6th and 7th 1999, Colin Baker joined Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy in recording the first official audio adventure for Doctor Who. The Sirens of Time wasn’t that bad but compared to today’s standards its quite poor. It wasn’t until the third story Whispers of Terror that Colin Baker got his own adventure for the first time in 23 years. In this story the Doctor is reunited with Nicola Bryant as Peri. This story like The Sirens of Time wasn’t anything special. Colin Baker’s third story was The Marian Conspiracy which is an important milestone because it was the first companion to created specially for audio. Dr. Evelyn Smythe had never been seen or mentioned in TV Doctor Who and so we were able to know her story from the beginning. For those of us who weren’t really watching Doctor Who when it was on originally this is the first companion that we have seen from the beginning. I really liked this story and it wasn’t really the plot that I liked. It was the relationship between the Doctor and Evelyn that made this so memorable. The opening seen really set it up for me, Smythe trying to do her job and the Doctor interrupting to try and satisfy his curiosity. As the story progresses it just gets better and better and shows what potential this partnership has. The next adventure was the Spectre of Lanyon Moor. this story was special because it had the Brigadier in it but the story was another good one. The story was a really good one for the Doctor and started to show what he could do.
The Apocalypse Element was another solid story and it saw the return of Lalla Ward as Romana. The next story it also featured the Daleks and in my opinion was better than the previous story the Daleks appeared in which was The Genocide Machine. Evelyn Smythe took a rest in the next story which was The Holy Terror and featured Frobisher who had only appeared in other Doctor Who media. I didn’t listen to this when it was released and it was one of the last ones that I did and I actually liked it. It was a gentle and nice story which wasn’t really meant to be taken seriously and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I don’t think he should be a full-time companion because I think the American Penguin character might get a bit to annoying after a few adventures. He should come back for the odd adventure maybe every 18 months or so. The next story wouldn’t be until the summer of 2001 due to the first series of Paul McGann adventures. This was Bloodtide which was the best so far for Colin Baker. He was superb as well as Maggie Stables and also the return of the Silurians was another bonus point. Baker’s next story immediately followed Bloodtide and it was even better which I thought would be impossible. Project: Twilight was a vampire tale set on Earth, what this story showed was that with a nice strong story Colin Baker can show what sort of Doctor he can be and even considering the early ones Colin Baker has had more impressive stories than he ever did on TV. The final story of 2001 was a comedy and it was a much more obvious one than The Holy Terror. This story was called The One Doctor and it saw the Doctor reunited with Mel for the first time on audio. It was a really good story and was a fitting end to a quality year for the Sixth Doctor.
The start of 2002 was given over to Paul McGann’s second series of adventures, building on the success on the first season. As a result, Colin Baker only had two adventures that year and neither of them were particularly memorable. The first was …ish which was a wordy story in more ways than one. It featured Peri as the companion whereas I think Evelyn would have suited this story much better as her character is a teacher. The next story was The Sandman which saw the return of Anneke Wills to the series. Wills played Polly between 1966 and 1967 overseeing the change of William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. The story was a really hard one to get through and I think that Baker suffered because of that. You have to give Big Finish credit for trying this sort of story but it just didn’t work. So as a result of these stories 2002 was a disappointment when you compare it to the previous year. I think if there had been more CB stories then it might have been a better year for him. The use of the wrong companions for the wrong stories also didn’t help the stories.
2003 was a very good year for the Sixth Doctor. The first story of the year was Jubilee which is what the 2005 Christopher Eccleston story Dalek is based on. This story saw the return of the Daleks following their so-so story The Time of the Daleks. This was another superb story which allowed Colin Baker to shine. Any opportunity that a Doctor has to battle the Daleks or a famous monster then they run with it and this one was no different. A short while later saw Doctor Who go all musical in Doctor Who and the Pirates. With any other Doctor then this story would have flopped badly but with Colin Baker in the main role it became a glorious and fun filled adventure. The addition of Bill Oddie also added to the enjoyment. The next story in the 6th Doctor range was Project: Lazarus which is a truly superb story that is better than Twilight which I thought was not possible. The story was perhaps one of the darkest and most gruesome stories that I have ever known in Doctor Who. This story also featured two Doctors which is obviously something that shouldn’t happen very often and when it does then something special or different should happen. In this case the 6th Doctor had been cloned and it was the Seventh Doctor that had to save the day. What I liked most about this story was Colin Baker’s performance. It was unlike any performance of this character that we had seen for quite sometime and at times it was quite off-putting because we are not use to seeing him that way. McCoy was also good in this story and his Doctor served the story well.
In the run up to celebrate Doctor Who’s 40th Anniversary and Big Finish’s 50th release. Three adventures were commissioned with the 5ht, 6th and 7th Doctors all facing foes from the Doctors past. For the sixth Doctor it was Davros in Davros. This story was the best of the trio and what absolutely fantastic because it gave Colin Baker and Terry Molloy (Davros) the chance to have so good dialogue together. Also Wendy Padbury is in it as Lorraine Baines who with Bernard Horsefeld playing her husband played the typical characters of thinking they could control Davros when in fact they couldn’t. Colin Baker made a guest appearance in Zagreus but the following month saw The Wormery. This is not only the worst 6th Doctor story but it is one of the worst Big Finish stories to date. Despite the fact that it had Katy Manning (Jo Grant) in it the story was confusing and didn’t interest me in the slightest. Not very often that I give a story 1/5 but this one was an easy decision. After three years of Doctor Who stories featuring the Four Doctors who were aliving and willing to do these stories it was the Sixth Doctor that had developed the best. He still sounded like the Doctor and Colin Baker put in the same passionate performance that he always did on TV and with the right scripts it was possible to see what Baker could have been like if he was given the chance.
As 2003 rolled into 2004 we were treated to what would be Evelyn Smythe’s last adventure in terms of chronology (because us Doctor Who fans love to put stories into order). Arrangements for War was a fitting story for Evelyn but the story helped expose how different the Doctor and Evelyn are as characters despite how well they have bonded. Following the events that occurred in Project: Lazarus it was obvious that this story would see Smythe change it some way. I wont say it was one of my Top 5 but it is an ok story that works well and Colin Baker yet again puts in another fine story. Medicinal Purposes was the next story and this is one of the stories that would go into my Top 5. I love when Doctor Who does historical and in this one it was in a period of history that I remember vividly from school. Burke and Hare were two Grave Robbers who stole dead bodies for people to do medical research on. What Big Finish did that was clever was insert the Doctor and Evelyn into it. This was a good story because it gave the Doctor a good opponent to try and work against. Not Burke or Hare but Dr Robert Knox who we thought at the time was another Timelord because he had a TARDIS but he in fact wasn’t from Gallifrey and he had won the TARDIS in a game of cards. Knox was played by Carry On legend Leslie Philips. Philips was absolutely superb and was a fitting opposition to Colin Baker. Another note of interest was David Tennant who played Daft Jamie. This story was good because it gave Colin a chance to do all sorts of emotions ranging from anger to sympathy. Hi s relationship with Daft Jamie was a poignant one and what made it even sadder was that the Doctor knew of Daft Jamie’s impending death because its in proper history.
The next story was The Juggernauts. This was with Bonnie Langford and saw Mel separated from the Doctor. This story was another strong script that enabled Colin Baker to not only develop a better relationship with Bonnie Langford’s Mel character but to also have some very good scenes and dialogue with Terry Molloy’s Davros. The story also sees the return of the Mechanoids. Their only appearance was in the 1965 William Hartnell adventure The Chase. The next story for the Sixth Doctor was Catch 1782. This was similar to the Juggernauts in that the Doctor and Mel become separated. Where Catch was different was in that the Doctor took more of a back seat in this one as Mel tried to regain her memory whilst the Doctor tries to find her. Its an interesting piece that works because the stories doesn’t feature aliens trying to slaughter another race of aliens or someone trying to invade but just a simple rescue mission that takes on an emotional twist. The next story that features the Sixth Doctor is Thicker Than Water and is a sequel to Arrangements for War. This features both Bonnie Langford and Evelyn Smythe. This isn’t a story that I remember well and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the acting it is just that the story doesn’t really reward the listener with anything in my honest opinion. 2005 was on the whole a very good year for the Sixth Doctor. For me the best story for Colin Baker was The Juggernauts though Catch 1782 comes a close second.. This year was another solid display from Colin Baker and he continues to be able to change peoples attitude towards his Doctor.
In the second part, we look at the Sixth Doctor adventures from 2006 to 2008 and also the special adventures Real Time, Her Final Flight and Cryptobiosis.
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