Tom Baker: 'Nobody failed as Doctor Who - I certainly didn't'

He takes in his first sight of his successor. Ncuti Gatwa in navy pinstripe. Ncuti Gatwa in an orange jumper and butterscotch tartan coat. Ncuti Gatwa in frills and britches. "A handsome young man!" he whistles. "Marvellous cheekbones. These things are important as you get near to death."

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Baker is approaching 90, though he has been giving oblivion a cheerful wave since the last years of the 20th century, when he acquired the tombstone that waits for him, gathering lichen, in the churchyard of Boughton Malherbe in Kent.

Between the ages of 19 and 21 he was a monk in a Catholic brotherhood – now, old age has given him the appearance of a medieval saint: long bones beneath a halo of white hair.

He keeps satsumas in his coat pockets and distributes them like indulgences. Much of his conversation seems to come from a cloud of playful unknowing, as if he were floating between this world and the next, and you were his only conduit to reality.

"The 60th anniversary?" he muses, apparently unaware that Doctor Who has reached this landmark, despite agreeing to our interview and photoshoot to celebrate it.

"And is it still a huge success?" Yes. "Will they show all the old stuff, too?" Oh yes, on iPlayer, all the time. "Nobody failed as Doctor Who did they?" There’s now a mischievous glint in his eye. "Well, we mustn’t be ungenerous to anyone. But certainly I didn’t."

He didn’t. Tom Baker holds the record for the longest tenure in the Tardis (seven years, 1974–81) and the show’s highest ratings (13.6 million if you discount episodes aired during ITV strikes).

Under him, Doctor Who received a triumphant American launch, gained its own magazine (still running) and established imagery that has stuck in the public imagination (when the Doctor appears on The Simpsons, it’s in Baker’s hat and scarf).

His era also haunts the present relaunch: the diamond-shaped logo is back, while David Tennant’s first special – The Star Beast – is an adaptation of a 1980 comic strip written for Baker’s Doctor.

Is there anything he thinks Ncuti Gatwa should know? "Knowing anything is a bit dangerous when you play Doctor Who," he says. "It’s better to know nothing. And to be good-natured. The trick is to respond generously to other actors, which halves your task because you don’t have to be driving it all the time."

A 60th anniversary reunion with his fellow Doctors is not on the cards. "I avoid them, you know. Not with any malice. A degree of contempt, perhaps. But mildly. Mildly contemptuous."

I mention that the old Tarzans – Ron Ely, Buster Crabbe, Johnny Weissmuller – would often lunch together to speak of those things that only Tarzans know. Baker snorts in horror at the idea of a Doctor Who equivalent.

"Unthinkable! Fancy being round a table with old Doctor Whos! Though I’d quite like to walk into a restaurant and find 12 of them around the table – I’d enjoy doing that double take, as I desperately tried to remember who they were. I could keep that going for hours. Oh! I can feel the malice rising."

Baker has usually preferred to stand apart from the other Doctors. In 1983, he rejected the opportunity to return for the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors (they used footage from an unfinished TV story and brought his Madame Tussauds waxwork to the photocall).

For years he declined to appear at conventions with the other actors who have played the role. "Inevitably, comparisons are made," he says, "and I find them odious."

This history is why many fans found his cameo in the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor in 2013 such an overwhelming experience. I saw it in an audience of 3,000 fans. When Baker appeared, the man beside me fell prostrate to the floor in a kind of religious awe.

Baker doesn’t remember Doctor Who’s debut in 1963. Nor hearing the news of the Kennedy assassination the previous day.

That period wasn’t the happiest in his life. He’d left his drama school, Rose Bruford, without finishing the course. "I think I made a girl pregnant," he muses, as though his biographical headlines were the details of a part he once played. "They disapproved of impregnating girls. In those days, you had to do the decent thing."

His first wife’s family, a dynasty of Nottinghamshire rose cultivators, didn’t welcome him. "I became a minor member of the girl’s family and had to put up with being treated offhandedly because I’d spoiled their daughter."

They had two sons, from whom Baker says he’s more or less estranged today. “I very rarely see my children. They’re middle-aged men now. I don’t know what their ages are. I’m coming up to 90 so the boys must be 60.”

And despite Baker becoming, in his own words, "quite skilful at selling roses", the marriage didn’t last. "I never see her now, you know." He looks at me beadily. "You don’t seem at all surprised."

His time on Doctor Who now seems to him a golden period – the product of some alchemical reaction between his personality and the part. He could knock on doors on a Saturday teatime and be assured a place on the sofa of an amazed family. Parents of sick children would appeal for his help. One family summoned him to hospital to raise their son from a coma.

"I tried to be very modest and hide the fact that it gave me a certain degree of real pleasure," he says. "Of power. It’s nothing I’m proud of, but there we are. It’s nice to feel powerful."

Other Saturdays he spent in the Colony Room Club, the boozy epicentre of Bohemian Soho, where the painter Francis Bacon would gaze, baffled, at Doctor Who playing on the TV above the bar.

"He didn’t really understand why everyone was excited by it. He thought it was very odd." He was excited by Baker, though. "Francis was very flirtatious. He would get closer and closer and say, 'Mmm? Mmm?' as if he were absolutely electrified."

It couldn’t last forever. Baker left Doctor Who in 1981, having found a second wife in co-star Lalla Ward, who played his companion Romana. That union broke up in 1982, but Doctor Who and Baker’s personal life stay entwined – he married his current wife Sue Jerrard, a former assistant editor on the show, in 1986.

Baker’s post-Who career has also had its ups and downs. A year after he left, he was Sherlock Holmes in a dramatisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Roles in Blackadder, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Monarch of the Glen and Little Britain would follow.

But for many, for all time, Baker is the Doctor – and he knows it. So perhaps it’s no surprise that in recent years his Five Doctors-era reluctance has thawed, allowing him to return for the 50th anniversary, release a Who novel and record new plays as the Doctor for audio production company Big Finish.

We look at some photographs of a party held for Doctor Who’s 15th anniversary, which, for a reason he cannot fathom, he attended dressed as Oscar Wilde. "Wilde had a large influence on me," he reflects. "He was a very sad sort of fellow, but he was funny and he was adored. I was very keen on being adored. Still am, really."

And, Baker concedes, he has pursued his own form of Wildean self-construction. It’s visible on screen, when he plays the Doctor. It shapes his interactions with fans, in whom he stirs memories of ancient childhood pleasures and securities. It’s in our conversation, too, in which he mixes warm reminiscence with admissions that might chill those unfamiliar with his manner.

"I’ve found this performance, which I’ve done non-stop ever since," he says. "People like that harmless, occasionally disturbing quality, which is natural to me, because I’m not really certain about anything. I’ve discovered a way of giving an impression that I’m trying to hide something. It’s been very successful so far."

He gets up to have his photograph taken. He needs little persuading to wrap up in a replica of his Doctor Who scarf. Perhaps it comforts him as much as it comforts me. Something of the power of the Doctor, he suspects, remains with him.

"Though after all this time," he says, "it’s quite hard to go on believing it."

As the camera clicks away, he mutters quietly under his breath; holds his fingers in a priest-like manner. It looks like a gesture of absolution. Disbelief seems very far away.

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Doctor Who's first 60th anniversary special The Star Beast airs at 6:30pm on Saturday 25th November on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Classic episodes are available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here.

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