When Colin Baker was awarded the role of the Sixth Doctor, he decided that he wanted to stay in the TARDIS for as long as possible – maybe even beat Tom Baker’s record. As such, he and the production team came up with a plan to ‘peel the banana’ over the many years he’d be travelling in time and space.
And when we talk about peeling the banana, we are of course talking about peeling back the layers of character. Colin Baker wanted to play the Sixth Doctor for as long as the BBC wanted him, and so it was decided that it would be an interesting idea to come up with a multi-year plan to reveal more and more about his persona over a number of seasons.
This meant that, essentially, viewers would start off with a version of the Sixth Doctor that they might not like. And indeed, in the Sixth Doctor’s very first story ‘The Twin Dilemma,’ there isn’t much to warm people to his new incarnation, on the surface. The Time Lord is quite brazen, and arrogant; he dons a costume that threatens not only to chew the scenery on any given occasion, but to positively raze it to the ground. He carries himself with an air of great pomposity, stepping out of the TARDIS with all the subtlety of a Dalek at a Thal convention.
Indeed, when the Sixth Doctor sees his new face for the first time, his remarks are far from self-effacing. “Ah, a noble brow,” he gasps. “Clear gaze. At least it will be, given a few hours sleep. A firm mouth. A face beaming with a vast intelligence…”
This is perhaps not the most challenging moment in ‘The Twin Dilemma,’ though. There is a particularly disturbing scene where the Sixth Doctor tries to strangle Peri, his mind addled by the regenerative process. He believes her to be an alien spy, and decides that she must be disposed of. Similarly, there is a moment later on where the Doctor tries to persuade his captors to let him go free and take Peri instead.
All of this leads to the famous scene in the TARDIS at the end of the adventure where Peri scalds the Doctor for being so dismissive when saying goodbye to their friend Hugo. “I would suggest, Peri, that you wait a little before criticising my new persona,” he retorts. “You may well find it isn’t quite as disagreeable as you think… Whatever else happens, I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not.”
This, of course, is quite ‘meta’ in that the Sixth Doctor is also addressing the viewers when he says, “I am the Doctor, whether you like it nor not.” Because there would have been many viewers who did not like this new incarnation, and this was a conscious decision on the part of the production team. They wanted to start the Doctor on his long journey in an uncomfortable place, so that they could gradually soften him as the seasons progressed.
This was something that Colin Baker was in favour of. Speaking on The Colin Baker Years VHS tape, Baker said that he quite liked the idea that the viewers might be left with a Doctor that they were unsure about, and felt that it was good for the audience to be challenged by the programme.
Certainly, the Sixth Doctor did go on to provoke his audience throughout his first season. One of the most controversial scenes from his era was the acid bath sequence in ‘Vengeance on Varos,’ where he seemingly shoved two Varosian guards into a bubbling pool without batting an eye lid. He also gunned down a Cyberman in ‘Attack of the Cybermen,’ although it should be noted that the Fifth Doctor did a similar thing in ‘Earthshock’ a few years before.
And then there was the moment where he killed the character of Shockeye by smothering him with a cyanide-covered cloth in ‘The Two Doctors,’ following it up with a rather passive, “Ah, your just desserts!”
Unfortunately, the production team’s plans for the Sixth Doctor were disrupted when the BBC took the unprecedented decision to suspend the programme for 18 months in 1985. But when the series returned in 1986, there was a notable shift in the Sixth Doctor’s behaviour, particularly in his relationship with Peri. Indeed, the first episode of ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ shows them walking arm-in-arm through the forests of Ravolox, chatting and joking as if they were best friends.
In fact, the Doctor’s true depth of feeling for his companion is further emphasised in part eight of the story where she is seemingly killed at the hands of the surgeon Crozier. The Doctor is clearly mortified, and grief-stricken – a far cry from the heartless disregard for death he showed in the previous season. The loss of Peri obviously affects him.
By this time, the Sixth Doctor was also showing himself to be more playful and humorous, such as when he escapes from Drathro’s robot by playing the ‘look behind you!’ trick, and then trying to thwart a stoning by deflecting the blocks with an umbrella.
Of course, this was never intended to be the Sixth Doctor’s final season, but the BBC’s unhappiness with the programme was putting more pressure on the producer John Nathan-Turner, who was instructed to fire Colin Baker. Thus, ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ turned out to be the Sixth Doctor’s final season, and Baker was never given the opportunity to ‘peel the banana’ further. His character arc was aborted and (for various reasons) he declined to film the regeneration scene at the beginning of the next season.
And so Colin Baker really is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of Doctor Who history. What would have happened to the Sixth Doctor if his character arc had been allowed to reach to its proper conclusion? And what kind of Time Lord would he have turned out to be, in the end?
We will never know – although his plethora of Big Finish audio adventures does give us a glimpse into what a more mature Sixth Doctor might have been like…
Have you tried the Big Finish website and App recently? They’ve been updated, meaning they don’t work and they’re not user-friendly! Get a grip, Big Finish!
Colin Baker always said that the BBC did him dirty. I always thought it was sour grapes.
He was right. It showed. Glad for the explanation, finally. I was born in ’88, and grew up watching my dad’s tapes.
I met the man at a con before he started. They opened the con by showing his first episode. He had just transformed from Peter, and was lying there. Peri was bent over him, and the entire audience was hunched forward in their seats. All of a sudden, he sat up and the entire room was thrown back in their seat.
When Colin came out, he was hysterical. I knew this would be my favorite doctor, and I was right. Then I saw him again on another tour in ‘17 and told him I’d written him a song. He was very surprised and helpful