PARAGRAPH: TWO

The Mighty Tom…

When I was about ten, I thought that my best friend in the world ever was a tall, white-haired bloke with a blue box who fought monsters every week, so much so that when the big spiders finally did for him, I had to watch it through the doorway from a strategic position halfway up the stairs. We didn’t have a sofa in the living room in those days, just some rather alarming swivel armchairs. I was still a few years away from being told I needed glasses then (although it could just have been the tears I was stoically trying to blink away) but when he lay down on the ground and changed his appearance I was convinced he had turned into someone who looked like the puppet Lord Charles (complete with monocle). A few months later, the trailers started for the new series and who should come stepping out of the smoke left after the recent explosion of some landmines but a bizarre figure with a beaming smile, a ridiculous scarf and a floppy hat who looked nothing like Lord Charles at all. To say I was confused was an understatement, but when we cautiously sat down as a family on one dark Saturday evening a few weeks later, we were totally hooked by a mesmerising performance that managed to fixate me onto a television programme that I’m still as keen on today. That show was “Coronation Street”. No, of course it wasn’t, but the geekish credentials I wear with occasional pride to this day are probably due to the performance of that tall actor with the tombstone toothed grin and the biggest eyes this side of Marty Feldman, a certain ex-monk known as Mr Tom Baker. I once went to a viewing of the surviving two episodes of “The Quatermass Experiment” which was hosted by the writer Stephen Gallagher and who also presented a video of a ghost story read by that very same actor and who he described that evening, because he knew him, as being “As mad as a box of snakes” and somehow that might have been an insult to anyone but the person I choose to refer to as “The Mighty Tom”. I rather suspect that, if he had been there, he might have regarded it as being a bit of a compliment. He had a birthday last week and is now 77 years old, not bad for someone who seems to have had his gravestone ready and waiting with his name and the first date already carved for at least twenty years. In interviews he once said that on melancholy days he would go and chalk in the second date, which shows me, at least, that behind the wild and eccentric persona is a very deep human being. I have only met him once, at a book signing for his bizarre, mad-as-a-box-of-snakes children’s book “The Boy Who Kicked Pigs” and all that I really remember about it now is that I was dying for the loo, after having had too many pre-event pints of beer, and so the queuing up process was rather a painful blur and I can’t remember all that much about it, but he did sign both that book and his autobiography, so I don’t suppose I was too annoying. Another memory, also sadly drink related, is that it was entirely due to reading about his misadventures during his days as a crony of Jeffrey Bernard that I had a bit of a mind-bleaching dabble with the concoction known as “White Wine and Vodka” for a few, mostly forgotten, liver-knackering months, so maybe perhaps that is the most appropriate memory to have of that night and reminds me that we shouldn’t ever try to emulate or be influenced too much by the lives of those whom we admire. Sadly, when I mentioned that it was the Mighty Tom’s birthday at work the other day, they thought I was referring to Sir Tom Jones, which made me a little bit sad, but at least they still knew who it was I was talking about and I am rather grateful that they didn’t assume that I was referring to Tom Cruise.