BAKER, TOM (1934 - ) Actor – To this day Billy Ure persists in the delusion that he might one day be recognised as an author. This misconception was borne of his Dr Who story winning a Blue Peter competition. Rather than write about a Time Traveller, of course, Billy might have drawn on personal experience of assisting me in various cases. While the competition specified that Dr Who feature as a leading character, there was no stipulation against his being investigated. A story in which Who was exposed as a clandestine menace would, I suspect, have been vastly superior to Billy's entry, which involved him joining forces with Rabbie Burns to destroy a nest of daleks. By any dispassionate analysis, the end product was poorly written and devoid of tension. Billy failed to adequately explain either Burns' presence in 20 th century Callender or the daleks' motivation in conquering the town's woollen mill. That good, predictably, triumphed over evil was attributable to luck and inconceivable co-incidence rather than any skilled plotting on Billy's part.

While recent scandals involving the BBC's competition selection process render all previous results questionable, it would be ungenerous at this late stage to steal Billy's moment of glory. Despite my misgivings about the story's quality, I didn't begrudge Billy's success. Far from it! Nobody applauded him more ardently! I even broke my own ‘no television' rule to watch him receive his award. There he sat on the Blue Peter couch, two feet away from noted Soho degenerate, Tom Baker, the former hurdy-gurdy man who portrayed Dr Who at the time. As Billy recoiled from Baker's boggle eyes and mirthless grin, I was overwhelmed by such a profound sensation of primeval cruelty that I took an ornament from the mantelpiece and hurled it into the television before being overwhelmed by a twenty minute seizure. Baker's richly sardonic tones, pulsating with netherworld vibrations, still activate my radar as he advertises products from dog food to tabloid newspapers.

In her book, incidentally, Nina Kelly sees fit to remind readers that Billy's triumph was tarnished by the revelation that he adapted Norman Whyte's story ‘Rabbie Takes a Nap', introduced Dr Who and some Daleks before presenting it as his own work. Need we dwell on his humiliation? The world has surely moved on since the drizzly November morning when BBC employees emerged from the mist to reclaim his prize: a fully sized Dalek which Billy's jealous classmates had already rolled down Mackie Brae, its proud owner trapped inside. Later that week, as if he hadn't suffered enough, Billy was publicly denounced by gormless Blue Peter presenter Simon Groome. See Also DARK MAESTRO

 

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