Footage from Doctor Who conventions is, to be brutally honest, of variable quality, both technically and in terms of content. This is not to criticise the good folk who did a highly impressive job of getting the Doctor Who convention thing off the ground in the first place, but in the sanitised 21st century where all things Doctor Who have a carefully protected slickness to them, the wobbly video footage from last century’s gatherings can creak a little.
And yet, and yet… there’s an honesty to what’s preserved in these archives that we wouldn’t get from the overproduced present, as well as an anarchic quality that, when placed in the right hands, can yield absolute gold. And you don’t get more anarchic, or any righter, than the hands of the Fourth Doctor himself, Thomas Stewart Baker. I’m not denying the charms of a Katy Manning, or a McCoy and Aldred double act. But nobody owns the stage like Tom Baker, and nobody else can talk like him; he is perhaps the only Doctor Who celebrity (at least since Jon Pertwee died) to whom you could apply the label raconteur.
When I first watched these convention excerpts I was surprised by the fact that sometimes the stars were just announced and left to wander on by themselves, but any potential awkwardness is swept away when the giant (in every sense) form of Baker strolls on, sometimes wearing a coat and clutching a plastic bag as if he’s just walked in off the street and, grinning from ear to ear, begins to regale the audience with (it would appear) pretty much anything that pops into his head. He is effortlessly charming, occasionally savage (‘the lecherous old bags!’), unashamedly smutty (he knows his audience), verbose, absurd, and effortlessly turns out phrases that most writers would labour over for hours. And he is, it goes without saying, endlessly, brilliantly, quotably funny.
So number 9 on my countdown of best special features is The Panopticon Archive: Tom Baker 1997, to be found on The Collection: Season 17 (Blu-ray). I could just have easily chosen other appearances, but he is on particularly dazzling form here, spinning a yarn about ironing, John Lewis, The Royal Academy andl an encounter at his own gravestone, all the while ruminating on his favourite topics (God, religion and death), before he announces that he has written a book and charmingly fields questions from the justifiably delighted crowd.
Is any of it true? The odd detail, perhaps. It doesn’t really matter when you’re having this much fun – and, when a voice (which it turns out is that of Archivist Supreme Richard Bignell) asks how much of his book should be believed, Baker gives the perfect response.
Blissful, unmissable stuff. And if this isn’t the last time Tom Baker crops up on this list, you shouldn’t be too surprised.
Next: ‘somebody just said in my ear “I think that’s enough on Doctor Who“…’
Talk To Rex 
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