In which Tom Baker and Lalla Ward cheer me up
I was in a weird mood and exhausted all day today. I cheered up a bit over dinner, but was still a little off-kilter. But tonight, I was just about to settle in for a couple hours of magazine stuff before bed when I saw a note from Jere7my pointing to a YouTube video of all the PR1ME Computer ads that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward did in 1980.
We had a PR1ME at Swarthmore, so I had heard of these, but had never seen them. They turn out to be charmingly silly--and I hadn't previously realized that in these ads, Baker and Ward were in character as the Doctor and Romana. Romana was my favorite Companion of original-series Dr. Who, and even though she doesn't have much of a part in these ads, just watching her cheered me up quite a bit. Now I'm tempted to go re-watch her episodes. (Also, I gather these ads were made before Baker and Ward got married in real life--to see why that's relevant, you'll have to watch the ads.)
And then I followed a link from there to a contextless video that appears to be Tom Baker holding forth in a pub (or possibly sort of being interviewed), circa 1999 (?). The audio is very not work-safe--Baker starts out talking about spending six years in training to be a monk in his teens, and he uses some rather explicit language there, and then he goes on to fondly recount an anecdote he heard from gay painter Francis Bacon. I really enjoyed just listening to him talk. That video ends in mid-anecdote; the end of that story, including the punch line, is in part 2. There's also a part 3, which is worth watching but not as much fun as the first two parts; and presumably there's more to the video, but the other parts don't appear to be on YouTube yet.
The total of the three parts is about 25 minutes; if you like Baker, it's well worth watching, and quite entertaining. If you only have 15 minutes, watch the first two.
Thanks, Jere7my!
