{"id":11873,"date":"2009-02-10T01:02:59","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T09:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/02\/10\/11873.html"},"modified":"2009-02-10T01:02:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-10T09:02:59","slug":"in-which-tom-baker-and-lalla-w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/02\/10\/in-which-tom-baker-and-lalla-w\/","title":{"rendered":"In which Tom Baker and Lalla Ward cheer me up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward did in 1980.<\/p>\n

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<\/cite>, 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<\/em> Baker and Ward got married in real life--to see why that's relevant, you'll have to watch the ads.)<\/p>\n

And then I followed a link from there to a contextless video that appears to be Tom Baker holding forth in a pub<\/a> (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<\/a>. There's also a part 3<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thanks, Jere7my!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in a weird mood and exhausted all day today. I cheered up a bit over dinner, but was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-video","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}