Name	Tom Baker
Caption	Tom Baker in 2007
Birth name	Thomas Stewart Baker
Birth date	January 20, 1934
Birth place	Liverpool, England
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1968–present In December 1980 he married Lalla Ward who had co-starred in Doctor Who (playing his companion Romana) with him for two years. However, the marriage lasted only 16 months.
Name	Tom Baker
Alternative names	Thomas Stewart Baker
Short description	English actor
Date of birth	January 20, 1934
Place of birth	Liverpool, England
Place of death	}}

Category:Alumni of Rose Bruford College Category:Audio book narrators Category:English film actors Category:English humanists Category:English radio actors Category:English television actors Category:English voice actors Category:English Buddhists Category:Former Roman Catholics Category:Actors from Liverpool Category:People from Rye, East Sussex Category:1934 births Category:Living people

Name	Pier Paolo Pasolini
Imagesize	200px
Birthdate	March 05, 1922
Birthplace	Bologna, Italy
Deathdate	November 02, 1975
Deathplace	Ostia, Rome, Italy
Occupation	Novelist, poet, intellectual, film director, journalist, linguist, philosopher
Notableworks	Accattone Salò Ragazzi di vita Le ceneri di Gramsci La religione del mio tempo
Influences	Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Novalis, Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giovanni Pascoli, Antonio Gramsci
Influenced	Sylvia Plath, Alberto Moravia, Sergei Parajanov, Ermanno Olmi, Nanni Moretti, Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás
Signature	Pier Paolo Pasolini signature.svg

Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 – November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure. He demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process.

Life

Pasolini was born in Bologna, traditionally one of the most leftist of Italian cities. He was the son of a lieutenant of the Italian Army, Carlo Alberto, who had become famous for saving Benito Mussolini's life, and who married an elementary school teacher, Susanna Colussi, in 1921. Pasolini was born in 1922 and was named after his paternal uncle. His family moved to Conegliano in 1923 and, two years later, to Belluno, where another son, Guidalberto, was born. In 1926, Pasolini's father was arrested for gambling debts, and his mother took the children to her family's house in Casarsa della Delizia, in the Friuli region.

Pasolini began writing poems at the age of seven, inspired by the natural beauty of Casarsa. One of his early influences was the work of Arthur Rimbaud. In 1933 his father was transferred to Cremona, and later to Scandiano and Reggio Emilia. Pasolini found it difficult to adapt to all these moves, though in the meantime he enlarged his poetry and literature readings (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Novalis) and left behind the religious fervour of his early years. In the Reggio Emilia high school, he met his first true friend, Luciano Serra. The two met again in Bologna, where Pasolini spent seven years while completing high school: here he cultivated new passions, including football. With other friends, including Ermes Parini, Franco Farolfi, Elio Meli, he formed a group dedicated to literary discussions.

In 1939 Pasolini graduated and entered the Literature College of the University of Bologna, discovering new themes such as philology and aesthetics of figurative arts. He also frequented the local cinema club. Pasolini always showed his friends a virile and strong exterior, totally hiding his interior travail. He took part in the Fascist government's culture and sports competitions. In 1941, together with Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi and others, he attempted to publish a poetry magazine, but the attempt failed due to paper shortages. In his poems of this period, Pasolini started to include fragments in Friulian, which he had learned from his mother.

First poetical works

After the summer in Casarsa, in 1941 Pasolini published at his own expense a collection of poems in Friulian, Versi a Casarsa. The work was noted and appreciated by intellectuals and critics such as Gianfranco Contini, Alfonso Gatto and Antonio Russi. His pictures had also been well received. Pasolini was chief editor of the Il Setaccio ("The Sieve") magazine, but was fired after conflicts with the director, who was aligned with the Fascist regime. A trip to Germany helped him also to discover the "provincial" status of Italian culture in that era. These experiences led Pasolini to rethink his opinion about the cultural politics of Fascism and to switch gradually to a Communist position.

In 1942, the family took shelter in Casarsa, considered a more tranquil place to wait for the conclusion of the war, a decision common among Italian military families. Here, for the first time, Pasolini had to face the erotic disquiet he had suppressed during his adolescent years. He wrote: "A continuous perturbation without images or words beats at my temples and obscures me".

In the weeks before the 8 September armistice, Pasolini was drafted. He was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. He managed to escape disguised as a peasant, and found his way to Casarsa. Here he joined a group of other young fans of the Friulian language who wanted to give Casarsa Friulian a status equal to that of Udine, the official regional dialect. From May 1944 they issued a magazine entitled Stroligùt di cà da l'aga. In the meantime, Casarsa suffered Allied bombardments and forced enrollments by the Italian Social Republic, as well as partisan activity.

Pasolini tried to remain apart from these events. He and his mother taught students unable to reach the schools in Pordenone or Udine. He experienced his first homosexual love for one of his students. At the same time, a Slovenian schoolgirl, Pina Kalč, was falling in love with Pasolini. On 12 February 1945 his brother Guido was killed in an ambush. Six days later Pasolini and others founded the Friulian Language Academy (Academiuta di lenga furlana). In the same year Pasolini joined the Association for the Autonomy of Friuli. He graduated after completing a final thesis about Giovanni Pascoli's works.

In 1946 Pasolini published a small poetry collection, I Diarii ("The Diaries"), with the Academiuta. In October he travelled to Rome. The following May he began the so-called Quaderni Rossi, handwritten in old school exercise books with red covers. He completed a drama in Italian, Il Cappellano. His poetry collection, I Pianti ("The cries"), was also published by the Academiuta.

Adherence to the Italian Communist Party

On 26 January 1947 Pasolini wrote a controversial declaration for the front page of the newspaper Libertà: "In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture." The controversy was partly due to the fact he was still not a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

He was also planning to extend the work of the Academiuta to other Romance language literatures and knew the exiled Catalan poet, Carles Cardó. After his adherence to the PCI, he took part in several demonstrations. In May 1949, Pasolini attended the Peace Congress in Paris. Observing the struggles of workers and peasants, and watching the clashes of protesters with Italian police, he began to create his first novel.

In October of the same year, Pasolini was charged with the corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places. As a result, he was expelled by the Udine section of the Communist Party and lost the teaching job he had obtained the previous year in Valvasone. Left in a difficult situation, in January 1950 Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother.

He later described this period of his life as very difficult. "I came to Rome from the Friulian countryside. Unemployed for many years; ignored by everybody; riven by the fear to be not as life needed to be". Instead of asking for help from other writers, Pasolini preferred to go his own way. He found a job as a worker in the Cinecittà studios and sold his books in the 'bancarelle' ("sidewalk shops") of Rome. Finally, through the help of the Abruzzese-language poet Vittorio Clemente, he found a job as a teacher in Ciampino, a suburb of the capital.

In these years Pasolini transferred his Friulian countryside inspiration to Rome's suburbs, the infamous borgate where poor proletarian immigrants lived in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions.

Success and charges

In 1954, Pasolini, who now worked for the literary section of Italian state radio, left his teaching job and moved to the Monteverde quarter, publishing La meglio gioventù, his first important collection of dialect poems. His first novel, Ragazzi di vita (English: Rent boys), was published in 1955. The work had great success but was poorly received by the PCI establishment and, most importantly, by the Italian government. It initiated a lawsuit against Pasolini and his editor, Garzanti. Though totally exonerated of any charge, Pasolini became a victim of insinuations, especially by the tabloid press.

In 1957, together with Sergio Citti, Pasolini collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le notti di Cabiria, writing dialogue for the Roman dialect parts. In 1960 he made his debut as an actor in Il gobbo, and co-wrote Long Night in 1943.

His first film as director and screenwriter is Accattone of 1961, again set in Rome's marginal quarters. The movie aroused controversy and scandal. In 1963, the episode "La ricotta", included in the collective movie RoGoPaG, was censored and Pasolini was tried for offence to the Italian state.

During this period Pasolini frequently traveled abroad: in 1961, with Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia to India (where he went again seven years later); in 1962 to Sudan and Kenya; in 1963, to Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Jordan, and Israel (where he shot the documentary, Sopralluoghi in Palestina). In 1970 he travelled again to Africa to shoot the documentary, Appunti per un'Orestiade africana.

In 1966 he was a member of the jury at the 16th Berlin International Film Festival.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the era of the so-called "student movement". Pasolini, though acknowledging the students' ideological motivations, thought them "anthropologically middle-class" and therefore destined to fail in their attempts at revolutionary change. Regarding the Battle of Valle Giulia, which took place in Rome in March 1968, he said that he sympathized with the police, as they were "children of the poor", while the young militants were exponents of what he called "left-wing fascism". His film of that year, Teorema, was shown at the annual Venice Film Festival in a hot political climate. Pasolini had proclaimed that the Festival would be managed by the directors (see also Works section).

In 1970 Pasolini bought an old castle near Viterbo, several miles north of Rome, where he began to write his last novel, Petrolio, which was never finished. In 1972 he started to collaborate with the extreme-left association Lotta Continua, producing a documentary, 12 dicembre, concerning the Piazza Fontana bombing. The following year he began a collaboration for Italy's most renowned newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera.

At the beginning of 1975 Garzanti published a collection of critical essays, Scritti corsari ("Corsair Writings").

Death

Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car, dying on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, near Rome. Pasolini was buried in Casarsa, in his beloved Friuli.

Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler, was arrested and confessed to murdering Pasolini. Thirty years later, on 7 May 2005, he retracted his confession, which he said was made under the threat of violence to his family. He claimed that three people "with a southern accent" had committed the murder, insulting Pasolini as a "dirty communist".

Other evidence uncovered in 2005 pointed to Pasolini having been murdered by an extortionist. Testimony by Pasolini's friend Sergio Citti indicated that some of the rolls of film from Salò had been stolen, and that Pasolini had been going to meet with the thieves after a visit to Stockholm, November 2, 1975. Despite the Roman police's reopening of the murder case following Pelosi's statement of May 2005, the judges charged with investigating it determined the new elements insufficient for them to continue the inquiry.

Works

Pasolini's first novel Ragazzi di vita (1955) dealt with the Roman lumpenproletariat. The resulting obscenity charges against him were the first of many instances where his art provoked legal problems. Accattone (1961), also about the Roman underworld, also provoked controversy with conservatives, who demanded stricter censorship.

He then directed the black-and-white The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). This film is widely hailed as the best cinematic adaptation of the life of Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui). Whilst filming it, Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view", but later, upon viewing the completed work, saw he had instead expressed his own beliefs.

In his 1966 film, Uccellacci e uccellini (literally Bad Birds and Little Birds but translated in English as The Hawks and the Sparrows), a picaresque - and at the same time mystic - fable, he hired the great Italian comedian Totò to work with one of his preferred "naif" actors, Ninetto Davoli. It was a unique opportunity for Totò to demonstrate that he was a great dramatic actor as well.

In Teorema (Theorem, 1968), starring Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger, he depicted the sexual coming-apart of a bourgeois family (later repeated by François Ozon in Sitcom and Takashi Miike in Visitor Q).

Later movies centered on sex-laden folklore, such as Boccaccio's Decameron (1971) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (literally The Flower of 1001 Nights, released in English as Arabian Nights, 1974). These films are usually grouped as the Trilogy of Life.

His final work, Salò (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), exceeded what most viewers could then stomach in its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. Based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, it is considered his most controversial film. In May 2006, Time Out's Film Guide named it the Most Controversial Film of all time.

Significance

As a director, Pasolini created a picaresque neorealism, showing a sad reality. Many people did not want to see such portrayals in artistic work for public distribution. Mamma Roma (1962), featuring Anna Magnani and telling the story of a prostitute and her son, was an affront to the morality of those times. His works, with their unequaled poetry applied to cruel realities, showing that such realities are less distant from us than we imagine, made a major contribution to change in the Italian psyche.

The director also promoted in his works the concept of "natural sacredness," the idea that the world is holy in and of itself. He suggested there was no need for spiritual essence or supernatural blessing to attain this state. Pasolini was an avowed atheist.

General disapproval of Pasolini's work was perhaps caused primarily by his frequent focus on sexual mores, and the contrast between what he presented and publicly sanctioned behavior. While Pasolini's poetry often dealt with his same-sex love interests, this was not the only, or even main, theme. His interest and approach to Italian dialects should also be noted. Much of the poetry was about his highly revered mother. As a sensitive and intelligent man, he depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as few other poets could do. His poetry was not as well-known as his films outside Italy.

Legacy and honors

His films won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Italian National Syndicate for Film Journalists, Jussi Awards, Kinema Junpo Awards, International Catholic Film Office and New York Film Critics Circle.

Political views

Pasolini generated heated public discussion with controversial analyses of public affairs. For instance, during the disorders of 1969, when the autonomist university students were carrying on a guerrilla-like uprising against the police in the streets of Rome and all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, describing the disorders as a civil fight of proletariat against the System, Pasolini, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police; or, more precisely, with the policemen. He considered them true proletariat, sent to fight for a poor salary and for reasons which they could not understand, against pampered boys of their same age, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study, referring to poliziotti figli di proletari meridionali picchiati da figli di papà in vena di bravate (lit. policemen, sons of proletarian southerners, beaten up by arrogant daddys' boys ). This ironic statement, however, did not stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.

Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s. He was particularly concerned about the class of the subproletariat, which he portrayed in Accattone, and to which he felt both humanly and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the pre-industrial popular culture was rapidly vanishing, a process that he named la scomparsa delle lucciole (lit. "the disappearance of glow-worms"). The joie de vivre of the boys was being rapidly replaced with more bourgeois ambitions such as a house and a family. He described the coprophagia scenes in Salò as a comment on the processed food industry. He often described consumeristic culture as "unreal", as it had been imposed by economical power and had replaced Italy's traditional peasants culture, something that not even fascism had been able to do. In one interview, he said: "I hate with particular vehemency the current power, the power of 1975, which is a power that manipulates bodies in a horrible way; a manipulation that has nothing to envy to that performed by Himmler or Hitler"

He was angered by economic globalization and the cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South. He felt this was accomplished through the power of TV. He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulian, the regional language of his childhood. Despite his left-wing views, Pasolini opposed the liberalization of abortion laws.

Sexuality

The LGBT encyclopedia states the following regarding Pasolini's homosexuality:

While openly gay from the very start of his career (thanks to a gay sex scandal that sent him packing from his provincial hometown to live and work in Rome), Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies. The subject is featured prominently in Teorema (1968), where Terence Stamp's mysterious God-like visitor seduces the son and father of an upper-middle-class family; passingly in Arabian Nights (1974), in an idyll between a king and a commoner that ends in death; and, most darkly of all, in Salò (1975), his infamous rendition of the Marquis de Sade's compendium of sexual horrors, The 120 Days of Sodom.

In 1963 he met "the great love of his life," fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli who he later cast in his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini (literally Bad Birds and Little Birds but translated in English as The Hawks and the Sparrows), Pasolini became his mentor and friend. "Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion, as well as appearing in six more of his films."

Quotes

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief. (1966)

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life. (Interview in documentary, late 1960s)

One should never hope for anything. Hope is a thing invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.

New York Times interview, 1968

I suffer from the nostalgia of a peasant-type religion, and that is why I am on the side of the servant. But I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. That is why my films are never naturalistic. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance.

In general, I choose actors because of what they are as human beings, not because of what they can do. Terence Stamp was offended by this because I never asked him to demonstrate his acting ability. It was like stealing from him, using his reality. I had a similar experience with Anna Magnani on ‘Mamma Roma.’ She also felt I was stealing from her.

I’m in love with New York. I have a passion beyond words for it. Like Romeo and Juliet—love at first sight. It is the most beautiful city in the world. I love the huge mingling of enormous amounts of people, races. The mixture of cruelty and innocence. New York is a piece of mythical reality, as beautiful as the Sahara Desert.

A Film Maker's Life (1971)

Power has two ways of bringing racist hatred against the poor. The first point: leave them poor and a poor person comes to be hated. Make them policemen and they're accused of being killers. The moment a poor person becomes a killer he's open to racist hatred. This is horrible, we shouldn't experience this. I am obviously against the police. It's the arm upon which every power structure is built. And the power structure always tends towards the Right. I do, however, refuse to share in any type of racial hatred.

I had a strong love for my father until the age of three. The fundamental task I set myself is that of being rigorously disciplined. By this I mean, rigorously disciplined as the intellectual, I was decidedly a Marxist straight after the war. I had to defend myself against an excess and clarity, against an excess of familiarity and, almost, banality.

My problem is an artistic one, a formal one, and art, as you very well know, is never clear. My films are the works of an author with very singular individual characteristics.

I've never talked about the importance of the family, I'm against the family, the family is an archaic Remnant. During my childhood I had certain conflicts with my family whose background was definitely middle-class. My father represented the worst element I could imagine. It's rather difficult to talk about my relationship with my father and mother because I know something about psychoanalysis. What I can say is that I have great love for my mother. My origins are fairly typical of petty bourgeois, Italian society. I'm a product of unity of Italy as a Republic.

I've never wanted to make a conclusive statement. I've always posed various problems and left them open to consideration.

I've stated various times that "Oedipus Rex" is an autobiography: my father who was an officer and my mother was more or less the woman played by Silvana Mangano. I live the Oedipus complex in a kind of laboratory fashion, in an almost elementary and schematic way.

When I make a film I'm always in reality, among the trees and among the people; there's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there's in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. I have never conceived of making a film that would be a work of a group, I've always thought of a film as a work of an author, not only the script and the direction but the choices of sets and locations, the characters, even the clothes. I choose everything, not to mention the music.

I've never been religious unless you can count a very ridiculous religious crisis at fourteen years of age, I was still very innocent. Then from one day to the next, I didn't believe anymore. I was born Catholic by mere chance because I was born in Italy, but I was never particularly Catholic and I came to my criticism of the Church as every Italian intellectual has. I had a very agnostic upbringing; this led me to Marxism so therefore I arrived at it in the most obvious and natural way. The Church in Italy has always been an instrument of power but I don't think it's an ideological power as opposed to its practical power, as any influence over the Italian peasant. An Italian's not religious. I don't want to say pagan because that would be generic but he's pre-Catholic in as much as he's remained in the state in which Catholicism found him, above all, in the South. It is a superficial cross over the Italian people and I believe it would only take a strong confrontation to destroy these ideals.

I think that the Gospel is one of the many books of religious propaganda that had been written. There will come a time when the Gospel will be linguistically incomprehensible to humanity. The Gospel is tied to time and its historic place. The Church can only survive if it continues to change and put into continual crisis its own institutionality. I'm now preparing a film on Saint Paul. In the film we bring into question not the validity of the Church but its mere motive of existence.

The Church will probably be able to continue for centuries to come if it creates an ecclesiastic assembly that continually negates and re-creates itself. My criticism is against the Church as power as it is today. I said that when I was a boy I believed, I prayed... but it wasn't anything very serious. I think there're some facets in my character that have something of a mystifying quality. I'd say this is a part of the trauma that dominates my existence. Nature doesn't seem natural to me, it is a sort of an act between me and the naturalness of nature. Philosophically, nothing that I have ever done has been more fitted to me than "Gospel According to St. Matthew" because of my tendency always to see something sacred, mythical and epic quality in everything, even in the most simple and banal objects and events.

The working class belongs to the modern world, it belongs to our time, our history. Here in Italy the policemen for the most part are poor boys who come from very poor families in the South. I hope that the union confrontations and the student movement will bring us new advances in the people's movement and in revolutionary movement. The idea of Marxism being rational is true when it's a science but the moment Marxism is an action or revolution, it ceases to be rational. The moment a Marxist goes into action, purely pragmatic elements or purely revolutionary sentiments existed contains something of a religious or mystical nature.

Filmography

Feature films

All titles listed below were written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini unless stated otherwise. Although obviously Oedipus Rex and Medea are loosely based on plays by Sophocles and Euripides respectively, significant liberties were taken with original texts and titles do not credit anyone except Pasolini. The latter is also true in the case of St. Matthew.

Documentaries

Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)

Comizi d'amore (The Assembly of Love, 1964)

Appunti per un film sull'India (1969)

Appunti per un romanzo dell'immondizia (1970)

Le mura di Sana'a (1971)

''12 Dicembre 1972 (long and short version) (1972)

Pasolini e la forma della città (1975)

Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1975)

Episodes in omnibus films

La ricotta in RoGoPaG (1963)

First segment of La rabbia (1963)

La Terra vista dalla Luna in Le streghe (The Witches, 1967)

Che cosa sono le nuvole? Capriccio all'Italiana (1968)

La sequenza del fiore di carta in Amore e rabbia (1969)

Selected bibliography

Narrative

Poems

Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955)

Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959)

Il sogno di una cosa (1962)

Amado Mio - Atti Impuri (1982, originally composed in 1962)

Alì dagli occhi azzurri (1965)

Reality (The Poets' Encyclopedia, 1979)

Petrolio (1992, incomplete)

Poetry

La meglio gioventù (1954)

Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957)

L'usignolo della chiesa cattolica (1958)

La religione del mio tempo (1961)

Poesia in forma di rosa (1964)

Trasumanar e organizzar (1971)

La nuova gioventù (1975)

Roman Poems. Pocket Poets #41 (1986)

Essays

Passione e ideologia (1960)

Canzoniere italiano, poesia popolare italiana (1960)

Empirismo eretico (1972)

Lettere luterane (1976)

Le belle bandiere (1977)

Descrizioni di descrizioni (1979)

Il caos (1979)

La pornografia è noiosa (1979)

Scritti corsari (1975)

Lettere (1940–1954) (Letters, 1940-54, 1986)

Theatre

Orgia (1968)

Porcile (1968)

Calderón (1973)

Affabulazione (1977)

Pilade (1977)

Bestia da stile (1977)

Footnotes

Additional reading

Aichele, George. "Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to Pasolini - filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini - Critical Essay." Cross Currents (2002). FindArticles.

Distefano, John. "Picturing Pasolini." Art Journal (1997).

Eloit, Audrene. "Oedipus Rex by Pier Paolo Pasolini The Palimpsest: Rewriting and the Creation of Pasolini's Cinematic Language." Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles.

Forni, Kathleen. "A "cinema of poetry": What Pasolini Did to Chancer's Canterbury Tales." Literature Film Quarterly (2002). FindArticles.

Frisch, Anette. "Francesco Vezzolini: Pasolini Reloaded." Interview, Rutgers University Alexander Library, New Brunwick, NJ.

Green, Martin. "The Dialectic Adaptation."

Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasilini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990.

Meyer-Krahmer, Benjamin. "Transmediality and Pastiche as Techniques in Pasolini’s Art Production", in: P.P.P. - Pier Paolo Pasolini and death, eds. Bernhart Schwenk, Michael Semff, Ostfildern 2005, p. 109 - 118

Passannanti, Erminia. "Deconstruction and redefinition of the Italian Catholic Identity in Pier Paolo Pasolini's La ricotta, in Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary, Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson (eds.), Series New Studies in European Cinema series, Peter Lang (2010).

Pugh, Tison. "Chaucerian Fabliaux, Cinematic Fabliau: Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury.", Literature Film Quarterly (2004). FindArticles.

Restivo, Angelo. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. London: Duke UP, 2002.

Rohdie, Sam. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1995.

Rumble, Patrick A. Allegories of contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of life. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1996.

Schwartz, Barth D. Pasolini Requiem. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Siciliano, Enzo. Pasolini: A Biography. Trans. John Shepley. New York: Random House, 1982.

Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California P, 1993.

Willimon, William H. "Faithful to the script", Christian Century (2004).

Films about Pasolini

Ebbo Demant: 'Das Mitleid ist gestorben'. Pier Paolo Pasolini und Italien. Documentary. Germany, 1978.

External links

Piers Paolo Pasolini, Italian website with extensive commentary

"Piers Paolo Pasolini", Senses of Cinema

BBC News report on the reopening of the murder case

Guy Flatley: "The Atheist Who Was Obsessed with God", MovieCrazed

Doug Ireland, "Restoring Pasolini", ZMag

Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea

Pasolini's own notes on Salo from 1974

Pier Paolo Pasolini poems Original Italian text.

Enzo Biagi)">Video (in Italian): Pasolini on the destructive impact of television (interrupted and half-censored by Enzo Biagi)

Italian website dedicated to Pasolini

Category:Assassinated Italian people Category:Gay writers Category:Italian atheists Category:Italian communists Category:Italian film directors Category:Italian Marxists Category:Italian novelists Category:Italian journalists Category:Italian film critics Category:Italian poets Category:LGBT directors Category:LGBT people from Italy Category:Marxist journalists Category:Murdered entertainers Category:Murdered filmmakers Category:Murdered writers Category:People from Bologna Category:People murdered in Italy Category:1922 births Category:1975 deaths Category:Unsolved murders in Italy Category:Italian Communist Party politicians Category:Viareggio Prize winners

Name	Jon Culshaw
Birth date	June 02, 1968
Birth place	Ormskirk, Lancashire, England
Nationality	English
Active	1980s-present
Genre	Impressions, sketch comedy
Notable work	Dead Ringers (2000–2007)2DTV (2001–2004)The Impressionable Jon Culshaw (2004) Headcases (2008–present) The Impressions Show with Culshaw and Stephenson (2009)

Jonathan Peter Culshaw (born 2 June 1968 in Ormskirk, Lancashire) is an English impressionist and comedian. He was educated at St Bede's RC High School, Ormskirk, and St John Rigby College, in Orrell, Wigan.

He is famous for his work on BBC Radio 4 and BBC2's Dead Ringers , ITV's 2DTV and his contributions to BBC Radio 1, particularly on The Chris Moyles Show. He also appeared in ITV's Heartbeat on 26 November 2006.

Broadcasting career

His radio career began in hospital radio in Ormskirk. His first job was at Red Rose Radio (now Rock FM) in Preston in 1987, where even then he used to occasionally read the weather in the voice of Frank Bruno. He did voice-over work then was catapulted to prominence with Spitting Image, where he voiced around forty characters, including John Major, the then Prime Minister.

For around four years in the late 1980s, he was a DJ on the commercial radio station Viking FM, based in Hull, and also had a breakfast show on Pennine Radio (now The Pulse of West Yorkshire) and Radio Wave in Blackpool. It was a receptionist at Viking FM who persuaded Culshaw he should go onstage with his impressions and make it his living. He later appeared on BBC Radio 2's It's Been a Bad Week, appeared as a guest on the BBC2 Star Trek Night Quiz in August 1996, and was also a regular guest on the Chris Moyles afternoon show on BBC Radio 1 from 1998–2002, where he would phone up commercial organisations such as a Kwik-Fit garage in the voice of Patrick Moore or Obi-Wan Kenobi, politely requesting whether they could service his X-wing fighter, and how much time it would take.

Radio 4 years

He rose to fame in January 1998 by impersonating William Hague while working for Capital Radio, and succeeding in contacting Number 10 Downing Street. He was put through to Tony Blair who, despite instantly discovering the ruse, had a lengthy conversation with him until a member of Blair's staff ended the call.

Between 2001 and 2002 he had a programme on ITV called Alter Ego where he interviewed male celebrities in their own style of speaking, a form of simultaneous translation. On ITV he also appeared on 2DTV, a cartoon version of what Dead Ringers would do when transposed to TV. Using the same production team, in early 2004, he had his own programme, The Impressionable Jon Culshaw which was commissioned for ITV1. His most famous impressions are ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Obi-Wan Kenobi (in the Alec Guinness persona), Russell Crowe, President George W. Bush, Ozzy Osbourne, Dale Winton, the newsreader Brian Perkins, Sir Patrick Moore and Tom Baker (who played the fourth incarnation of The Doctor in Doctor Who).

He also appeared in the Doctor Who webcast "Death Comes to Time" and audio drama The Kingmaker. In the latter, he got to perform his Tom Baker impression "for real" (voicing tape recordings of the fourth Doctor), although his nominal part was that of Earl Rivers.

In 2005, Culshaw was a celebrity contestant on Comic Relief does Fame Academy.

In January 2006, he began presenting the BBC show Jon Culshaw's Commercial Breakdown shown on Friday Nights. In 2006, he received an honorary fellowship from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.

Culshaw was one of the final judges in Let's Dance for Comic Relief.

In August 2007, he appeared on a celebrity edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with John Thomson.

In January 2008, he appeared on , as part of a pub-quiz team, with Chris Moyles. In May 2008 he appeared in the BBC documentary series Comedy Map of Britain.

He is also voicing Piston Pete in the upcoming film Agent Crush.

On 29 December 2008, Culshaw appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. His specialist subject was British Pop of the 80s. He came third with 23 points.

In November 2007, and again in December 2008, Culshaw appeared on The Sky at Night and is a keen amateur astronomer.

On 31 October 2009, Culshaw started a new comedy sketch show with Debra Stephenson, The Impression Show with Culshaw and Stephenson.

In 2010, Culshaw appeared in the television series, Missing, as Des Martin.

Filmography

References

External links

Alter Ego.

Article in The Stage

BBC Dead Ringers.

Honorary fellowship

Viking FM photo

Audio clips

Prank call.

The Time Lord contacts terrestrial organisations by telephone.

Voice over work.

Viking FM jingle

Talking about his work on Dead Ringers.

Interviewed on Radio Lancashire in July 2006

Helping out with Budget 2005 on Radio Five Live

Would You featuring celebrity vocals

Talking on Danny Baker's programme.

This is the Radio Four News with Brian Perkins.

Are you sitting comfortably? It's time for Dead Ringers to begin.

Video clips

Receiving his honorary degree in Preston (YouTube)

Category:1968 births Category:Living people Category:English comedians Category:English Roman Catholics Category:People from Ormskirk Category:British impressionists (entertainers) Category:Fame Academy participants

John Royds Culshaw (28 May 1924 – 27 April 1980) was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He recorded a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958.

Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer. After a brief period working for Capitol Records, Culshaw returned to Decca in 1955 and began planning to record the Ring cycle, employing the new stereophonic technique to produce recordings of unprecedented realism and impact. He disliked live recordings from opera houses, and sought to put on disc specially made studio recordings that would bring the operas fully to life in the listener's mind. In addition to his Wagner recordings, he supervised a series of recordings of the works of Benjamin Britten, with the composer as conductor or pianist, and recordings of operas by Verdi, Richard Strauss and others.

Culshaw left Decca in 1967 and was appointed head of music programmes for BBC Television, where he remained until 1975, employing a series of innovations to bring classical music to the television viewer. He later undertook several academic posts. However, he remains best remembered for his Decca records. Along with Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge, he was one of the most influential producers of classical recordings. The Times said of him that "he stood in that great tradition of propagandists from Henry Wood to Leonard Bernstein, who seek to bring their love and knowledge of music to the widest audience."

Biography

Early years

Culshaw was born in Southport, Lancashire, one of at least two children of Percy Ellis Culshaw, a bank inspector, and his first wife, Dorothy née Royds. He was educated first at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby, which he despised for its snobbery and its sports-obsessed philistinism. and in 1941 he volunteered to join the Fleet Air Arm as soon as he reached the minimum recruitment age in May 1942. After many rejections, his first substantial article to be accepted for publication was a piece on Rachmaninov, for The Gramophone, published in March 1945.

Decca

After demobilisation from the forces, Culshaw joined the Decca recording company in November 1946, writing musical analyses and biographies of recording artists for Decca's classical albums. His first book, a short biography of Rachmaninov, was published in 1949 and was well-received. The critic of The Times praised it for its discriminating judgment, conciseness and discretion. Among the recordings Culshaw was able to make for Capitol were a Brahms Requiem conducted by Solti in Frankfurt, and what Peter Martland in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls "a series of remarkable recordings of performances by Eduard van Beinum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam."

In early 1955, Lewis warned Culshaw that he had heard rumours that Capitol was on the point of severing its ties with Decca. Within days it was announced that Capitol had been taken over by EMI. Capitol sessions already booked were completed, including two records of Jacques Ibert conducting his own works, but EMI made it clear that it would put an end to Capitol's classical activity, which was regarded as superfluous. A year after his return he was made manager of the company's classical recording division, a position of great influence in the classical music world. The Gramophone obituarist wrote of him in 1980: "To meet John Culshaw for the first time, quiet, charming, sharp-eyed but with no signs of aggressiveness about him, was to marvel that here was one of the two great dictators of recording art. If Walter Legge in a flash had one registering extrovert forcefulness in the very picture of a dictator, John Culshaw's comparable dominance was something to appreciate over a longer span. … [H]e transformed the whole concept of recording."

Culshaw hoped to record Die Walküre with Flagstad, whom he persuaded out of retirement, as Brünnhilde. Flagstad, however, was over sixty, and would not agree to sing the whole opera. To capture as much of her Wagner as she was willing to record, Culshaw produced separate sets of parts of the opera in 1957. Act 1 was conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch with Flagstad in the role of Sieglinde; in the other set the "Todesverkundigung" scene from Act 2 and the whole of Act 3 were conducted by Solti with Flagstad as Brünnhilde. In those early years of stereo, Culshaw worked with Pierre Monteux in recordings of Stravinsky and Ravel, and with Solti in a recording of Richard Strauss's Arabella. He also recorded the first of many New Year's Day concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and Willi Boskovsky.

Culshaw went to unprecedented pains to ensure that Wagner's musical requirements were met. Where in Das Rheingold the score calls for eighteen anvils to be hammered during two brief orchestral interludes – an instruction never followed in opera houses – Culshaw arranged for eighteen anvils to be hired and hammered. Similarly, where Wagner called for steerhorns, Culshaw arranged for them to be used instead of the trombones habitually substituted at Bayreuth and other opera houses. In The Gramophone, Edward Greenfield wrote:

It was thanks to Culshaw's devotion to Wagnerian intentions – ever encouraged by the engineer who was at his right hand through the whole project, Gordon Parry, himself a devoted Wagnerian – that in the Solti Ring cycle one is able to hear the scores in a way literally impossible in the theatre. Siegfried's voice made to sound like Gunther's, the voice of Fafner from his cave, not to mention the splendour of anvils and rainbow bridge harps in Rheingold, all transcend what is heard in the opera-house. Culshaw thought that of all his recordings that of Britten's War Requiem was the finest. Greenfield says of it, "another recording which confounded the record world not just by its technical brilliance but by the way it sold in huge quantities." The recording was made in London in 1963, the year after the premiere of the Requiem at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. For the recording Culshaw managed to assemble the three singers whom Britten had in mind when writing the work, uniting Russian, German and English soloists to represent the former enemy nations – Galina Vishnevskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears. Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music." He moved from the record industry to become BBC Television's head of music programmes. He inaugurated, and supervised several series of, André Previn's Music Night, in which Previn would talk informally direct to camera and then turn and conduct the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), whose members were dressed not in evening clothes but in casual sweaters or shirts. The programme attracted unprecedented viewing figures for classical music; an historian of the orchestra wrote, "More British people heard the LSO play in Music Night in one week than in sixty-five years of LSO concerts." He later initiated the Benson and Hedges music festival at Snape and was planning the fourth season at the time of his death. Some of his BBC programmes have been preserved on compact disc, including films of the Amadeus Quartet playing works by Schubert and Britten. He frequently served as a commentator for broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera performances, and his 1976 book, Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", was based on the series of interval talks he gave during the broadcasts of the Met's Ring cycle in 1975.

Publications

A lesser-known part of Culshaw's work was writing fiction. He published two novels in the early 1950s; the first, The Sons of Brutus (1950) had been inspired by what he had seen during trips to ruined German cities in the aftermath of the war. It was chosen by The Observer as one of its books of the year in 1950. At the time of its publication he was working on a second novel. He gave it the title A Harder Thing, but was persuaded by his publisher to change it to A Place of Stone. It was published in 1951.

Culshaw's musical books were: Sergei Rachmaninov, 1948; The Concerto, 1949; A Century of Music, 1951; Ring Resounding: The Recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1967; Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", 1976; Wagner: The Man and His Music, 1978; and Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw, 1981.

Notes and references

;Notes ;References

Bibliography

External links

Link to talk by Culshaw on Die Walküre An audio file from a Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast intermission feature (scroll to "From The Archives - March 1, 1975 - John Culshaw discusses Die Walküre; you will need Real Player to hear this)

Category:1924 births Category:1980 deaths Category:English record producers

The Fourth Doctor is the fourth incarnation of the protagonist of the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who.

He was portrayed by Tom Baker for seven consecutive years, and remains the longest-lived incarnation of the Doctor in the show's on-screen history- counting both the classic and modern series. Because of the length of his tenure, he came to be regarded by many as "THE Doctor". For audiences in the United States, who saw the show only in syndication (mostly on PBS), it was this incarnation of the Doctor who is the best known, as his episodes were the ones most frequently broadcast stateside. Further proof of his popularity in the US came when American Distributor Time Life began selling his stories on VHS in the late 1970s. Time Life added Narration by Howard da Silva at the beginning and end of each episode. It was during the Fourth Doctor's time that the series' fandom took off, including the first convention in 1977 and the launch of Doctor Who Weekly in 1979.

Within the series' narrative, the Doctor is a centuries-old Time Lord alien from the planet Gallifrey who travels in time and space in his TARDIS, frequently with companions. When the Doctor is critically injured, he can regenerate his body; in doing so, his physical appearance and personality change.

Overview

The Fourth Doctor's eccentric style of dress and speech — particularly his trademark long scarf and fondness for jelly babies — made him an immediately recognizable figure and he quickly captivated the viewing public's imagination. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe has often stated that the Fourth Doctor's Bohemian appearance and anti-establishment views appealed to older, college-age students. The Fourth Doctor's time enjoyed a significant boost in viewing figures, averaging between 8 to 10 million viewers in just his first year (20-25 percent of the entire viewing audience of Britain). By 1979, the figures averaged between 9 to 11 million, going as high as 16.1 million for the final episode of The City of Death!

This incarnation is generally regarded as the most recognizable of the Doctors and one of the most popular, especially in the United States. In polls conducted by Doctor Who Magazine, Tom Baker has lost the "Best Doctor" category only three times: once to Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh Doctor) in 1990, and two times to David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor) in 2009.

The Fourth Doctor appeared in 172 episodes (180, counting his regenerations scenes and the aborted "Shada") over a seven-year period, from 1974 to 1981. This makes him the longest running on-screen Doctor of both series. He also appeared in the specials The Five Doctors (via footage from the incomplete Shada) and made his final appearance as the Doctor in Dimensions in Time,(aside from a series of television advertisements in New Zealand in 1997).

There are also novels and audio plays featuring the Fourth Doctor. Two early audio plays featuring Tom Baker voicing the Fourth Doctor date from Baker's television tenure as he had mainly declined to appear in any further audio plays since leaving the series. In 2009, however, it was announced that a new five part series would be produced by BBC Audio (see below).

Biography

After contracting radiation poisoning from the crystals of the planet Metebelis 3, the Third Doctor makes his way back to UNIT headquarters, where the Time Lord K'Anpo Rimpoche aids him in regenerating (Planet of the Spiders).

In his new incarnation, the Doctor is eager to leave Earth in favor of exploration, thus drawing back from continuous involvement with UNIT (with which he had worked closely as the Third Doctor). He has also grown tired of working for the Time Lords. Despite attempts to avoid them altogether, the Time Lords continue to send him on occasional missions, including an attempt to prevent the creation of the Daleks (Genesis of the Daleks), during which he also meets a new adversary, Davros. The Doctor travels with journalist Sarah Jane Smith, whom he had befriended prior to his regeneration, and, for a time, with UNIT Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan.

After a battle with Zygons in Scotland, Harry (having just spent an entire season with the Doctor as they tried to get back to the TARDIS) decided that taking the train was safer than the TARDIS, which the Doctor and Sarah chose to try and make an appointment in London. Instead they ended up on the planet Zeta Minor (Planet of Evil), located at the far edge of the known universe. From this point on the Doctor and Sarah traveled alone.

The Doctor's companionship with Sarah Jane came to an end when he received a telepathic summons to Gallifrey, as humans were not then allowed on the planet. The summons turns out to be part of a trap set by his enemy the Master. The renegade Time Lord has used up all his regenerations and has degenerated into little more than a withered skeletal husk. The Doctor is framed for the assassination of the President of the High Council of Time Lords and put on trial. In order to avoid execution (by vaporization), the Doctor invokes an obscure law and declares himself a candidate for the office, giving himself the time he needs to prove his innocence and expose the real culprit. This ultimately results in a climactic battle with the Master (The Deadly Assassin).

The Doctor is seen to travel alone for the first time since season 1, returning to a planet he had visited centuries before. During his previous visit, he had accidentally imprinted his own mind on a human colony ship's powerful computer, Xoanon, leaving it with multiple personalities. On his second visit the Doctor is now remembered as an evil god by the descendants of the colonists, some of whom had become a warrior tribe called the Sevateem. After the Doctor cures the computer, one of the Sevateem, Leela, joins him on his travels (The Face of Evil). The Doctor brings the intelligent but uneducated Leela to many locales in human history, teaching her about science and her own species' past. In Victorian London, the pair encounters the magician Li Hsien Chang and his master, the self-styled Weng-Chiang (The Talons of Weng-Chiang). Weng-Chiang is revealed to be a time-jumping criminal from the Earth's distant future.

Later, the Doctor and Leela visit the Bi-Al Foundation medical centre, where they acquire the robot dog K-9 (The Invisible Enemy). While K-9 is malfunctioning, a time distortion leads the TARDIS back to contemporary rural England. While investigating the distortion, he and Leela are confronted by an ancient being that feeds on death from Time Lord history, called the Fendahl (). Eventually, the Doctor returns to Gallifrey and declares himself Lord President, based on the election held during his previous visit. This is in fact a ploy to reveal and defeat a Sontaran invasion plan. In the aftermath Leela and K-9 decide to remain on Gallifrey. The Doctor comforts himself by producing K-9 Mark II (The Invasion of Time).

Shortly afterward, the powerful White Guardian assigns the Doctor the task of finding the six segments of the Key to Time, sending a young Time Lady named Romana to assist him. The two Gallifreyans travel to a variety of planets, encountering strange and unusual allies and enemies, gathering the six segments and defeat the equally powerful Black Guardian- who sought the Key for himself. After the conclusion of the quest, Romana regenerates into a new form (Destiny of the Daleks).

In an effort to evade the Black Guardian, the Doctor installs a "Randomizer" in the TARDIS so that not even the Black Guardian can anticipate where they go. Ironically, the first place the Randomizer sends them is the home planet of the Daleks, Skaro (Destiny of the Daleks). Perhaps because of this, the Doctor begins frequently overriding the machine- first traveling to Paris for a holiday, only to get caught up in an alien scheme to steal the Mona Lisa (The City of Death). He eventually discards the device altogether, remarking that he's fed up with not knowing where he's going.

Shortly after this, the Fourth Doctor and Romana are projected outside the known universe and into a universe of negative coordinates, known as Exo-Space. The TARDIS lands on a planet called Alzerius (Full Circle), where they are joined by a young prodigy named Adric. It's in E-Space that the Doctor destroys the last of a race of giant Vampires who had once threatened all life in his universe. Eventually, the Doctor and his two companions find themselves in a white void with no coordinates- a sort of membrane between the two universes. A way out soon forms, but Romana and K-9 chose to remain behind to help free a race of enslaved creatures in E-Space (Warriors' Gate).

The Doctor and Adric have only just made it back when they're asked to help the people of Traken from a creature known as "Melkur." On Traken, Adric and the Doctor are introduced to the aristocratic Nyssa of Traken. Both Nyssa and her father, Tremas, assist the Doctor in stopping Melkur- who is in fact a TARDIS-like vessel controlled by the Master. The Master is narrowly defeated, but managed to take over Tremas' body- thus giving himself a new incarnation.

The Doctor decides to travel to Earth to scan a real Police Box as part of a plan to repair the "Chameleon Circuit"- the shape-changing mechanism in the TARDIS. However, the Doctor soon spots a mysterious ghostly figure looking at him in the distance. He eventually confronts the figure, who warns him of future dangers.

As the Doctor prepares to travel to the planet Logopolis to get the Chameleon Circuit fixed, Tegan Jovanka appears in the console room (having previously gotten lost in the corridors of the TARDIS). The conduit between E-Space and our own universe is revealed to be a Charged Vacuum Emboitment (CVE) — created by the mathematicians of Logopolis as part of a system to allow the Universe to continue on past its point of heat death. Nyssa shows up, explaining that she was brought to Logopolis by the same figure that the Doctor encountered. Logopolis soon falls under the Master's control, but the stasis field he is generating ends up releasing Entropy and eroding matter throughout the universe- threatening to destroy the entire universe!

The Master agrees to help the Doctor stop the spread of Entropy by adapting the Pharos Project radio telescope on Earth so that they are able to reopen the CVEs. However, when the Master tries to take control of it, the Doctor runs out under the upturned radio dish to sever the cable linking the Master to the CVEs. The Master makes the dish start rotating so that the Doctor will fall to his death. Before he falls, he manages to tear out the cable, only to leave his companions watching as he clings to the cable. As his grip begins to slip, he sees visions of all the enemies he's faced over the years, then falls. Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan gather around the mortally wounded Doctor and call out his name. The Doctor begins seeing visions of all his companions and even the Brigadier calling his name.

He then looks up at the three of them and utters his last words: "It's the end-- but the moment has been prepared for..." He then motions to the white-clad figure of the Watcher, who begins approaching the Doctor. The Watcher, a manifestation of the Doctor's future incarnation, merges with the Doctor and triggers his regeneration. "So he was the Doctor all the time?" remarks Nyssa, as the three watch him transform into the Fifth Doctor.

The Fourth Doctor appears once more in the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors. A renegade Time Lord attempts to pull the first five incarnations of the Doctor out of time, inadvertently trapping the Fourth Doctor (and Romana) in a "time eddy" from which they are later freed. Brief holographic clips of the Fourth Doctor appear in "The Next Doctor" and "The Eleventh Hour"

Personality

The Fourth Doctor is a natural bohemian who permanently left UNIT in order to return to a life of deep universal wandering. More so than his previous incarnations, he is thrilled by discovery and adventure. Galvanized by higher purpose, he is disarmingly loopy (constantly offering friends and foes jelly babies; this trait is referenced by the Eighth Doctor using the offer of a jelly baby to outsmart a policeman, and in the Tenth Doctor episode 'The Sound of Drums', where the John Simm incarnation of the Master is seen enjoying a bag of jelly babies on board the Valiant), brilliant and entirely serious, all at the same time. To an extent, the Fourth Doctor is the most unpredictable of his incarnations, befuddling all with his intelligence, constantly leaving others wondering if they have his full attention and using his more off the wall mannerisms against adversaries to distract them while arranging to take control of the situation. His keen judge of character also enables him to navigate his way through situations with new people, helping him to discern friend from foe. Although like all his selves he prefers his brain over his brawn, he is a capable swordsman and fighter, following on from the martial expertise of his immediate former self. He improvises non-lethal weaponry when necessary (Genesis of the Daleks) but was also not averse to more lethal weaponry as a necessity, against both sentient and non-sentient beings- like the matter-destroying DeMat Gun (The Invasion of Time) or contemporary firearms ( and The Talons of Weng-Chiang).''

Despite his charm and offbeat humour, the Fourth Doctor is arguably more aloof and sombre than his previous incarnations. He could become intensely brooding, serious and even callous, and would keenly scrutinize his surroundings even when playing the fool. In stories such as Pyramids of Mars he is concerned that he is approaching middle age and often contemplates his outsider status. He could also be furious with those he saw as stupid, frivolous, misguided or evil. When taking charge, he could be considered authoritative to the point of egocentricity, but as it is, he is usually the only one capable of solving the situations he finds himself in. He generally maintained his distance from the Time Lords, remarking in The Pyramids of Mars that while being from Gallifrey, he doesn't consider himself a Time Lord. He clearly resents that even after they had lifted his exile, they continue re-entering his life when they deemed it necessary. Not only did he seem more inclined toward a solitary existence (The Deadly Assassin), he also emphasized his distance from humanity, although he has stated on more than one occasion that he found mankind to be his favourite species.

Two of the Doctor's most significant companionship occur during his fourth incarnation. His friendship with Sarah Jane Smith is implied to be deeper than the relationships he shared with other companions to that point (as alluded to in the Tenth Doctor episode School Reunion). She is consequently still profoundly affected by their separation many years later in her personal time line. His relationship with Romana (specifically her second incarnation) borders on romantic attraction while being bolstered by her capacity to maintain pace with his mental processes. The largest proof of his influence on her is when she chooses to exile herself from Gallifrey to explore new worlds and help others, as he himself has done.

Appearance

Imposingly tall, with eyes that seem to constantly boggle, a mass of curls for hair and prominently displayed teeth, the Doctor favours an outfit that usually consists of a shirt, waistcoat, trousers, a frock coat (with pockets containing a seemingly endless array of apparently useless items that would nevertheless suit the Doctor's purposes when used), a wide-brimmed hat and, most famously, his impractically long, multicolored scarf, which was apparently knitted for him by Madame Nostradamus (whom he refers to as a "witty little knitter"). Designer Roger Murray-Leach had commissioned a friend of his, who famously went on to make the iconic scarf.

Producer Philip Hinchcliffe had wardrobe create three distinct coats for Baker to wear depending on the type of story. The first being the reddish-brown blazer that he wore throughout all of his first season. The other two (full-length) coats were dark brown (for the darker horror stories) and light gray (for more action-packed stories). The Wardrobe Department also provided a brown wide-brimmed felt fedora. The rest was often picked from his own clothes (like neckties, trousers and a waistcoat). A wider, brighter-colored scarf debuted with Baker's fourth season and a light brown coat was introduced late his fifth season. Baker also appeared in a one-off Sherlock Holmes inspired costume in "The Talons of Weng-Chiang".

According to both the creators of the show and Baker, the character's look was originally based on paintings and posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of his friend, Aristide Bruant, a singer and nightclub owner whose trademark was a black cloak and long red scarf.

It's noteworthy to mention that characteristics such as pockets that store an infinite amount of junk (a common gag of his tenure), his wild curly hair, overcoat, and the Fourth Doctor's grinning wide-eyed general appearance have many viewers, including DW historian David F. Chapman, making comparisons between him and comedian/film star Harpo Marx.

Other viewers have noted similarities between the fourth Doctor's clothing and the hat/scarf/coat ensemble worn by Malcolm McDowell at the start of director Lindsay Anderson's film If.... (1968).

When John-Nathan Turner became the show's producer in Baker's last year, the Fourth Doctor was the first to sport an item of clothing adorned with red question marks as a motif. In this case, above the points on his shirt collars. His overall costume was redesigned, changing the color focus from brown to red. Designer June Hudson later revealed in an interview that JNT had even given her permission to remove the scarf altogether she wanted to. Hudson opted to keep the scarf as it was such an iconic part of the character.

The new outfit included a full-length burgundy overcoat and wide-brimmed fedora, a matching blazer (worn under the overcoat) and trousers, and a vest worn over a specially made white dress shirt. The new, redesigned scarf (which consisted of varying reds and purples) proved to be longer than an previous scarf Baker had worn. After just one story, the blazer was discarded and the hat was relegated to a hat and coat stand in the background. His boots returned by his third story.

Story style

The early stories of the Fourth Doctor were characterized by a strong "Gothic Horror" theme. The duo of writer/script editor Robert Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe consciously tapped into horror icons like mummies (The Pyramids of Mars) and Frankenstein (The Brain of Morbius, Robot), Jekyll and Hyde (Planet of Evil), and even transformation (The Ark in Space) and various themes like alien abduction. In these stories, they were given a science fiction explanation, rather than the typical magic.

While the Hinchcliffe Era (1974–1977) is generally seen by fans and critics as the best era in the classic series run, the increasing horror elements and depictions of violence attracted much criticism, notably from Mary Whitehouse, who had previously attacked the Barry Letts era for shows like Terror of the Autons. Hinchcliffe was moved on to police drama Target in 1977 at the conclusion of his third year. Graham Williams was brought on to take over as producer for Baker's fourth season.

Williams was given specific instructions to lighten the tone of the stories, thus playing to Baker's strengths. However, the first three stories (which were geared towards the previous style) had already been commissioned. Robert Holmes had agreed to stay on to edit them, but he ended up leaving after only doing the first two, Horror of Fang Rock and The Invisible Enemy. The task of editing fell to his successor Anthony Read. The season was only narrowly finished. With the cast and crew suffering from burn out and lack of resources, the season finale The Invasion of Time was completed largely to it having been written to make use of preexisting sets, props, and costumes.

For their second season, Williams and Read had planned out an overarching storyline that would run through the whole of the season. With more editorial control, it was also decided that the writers would put more emphasis on elements of fantasy and humour. Holmes wrote the first story The Ribos Operation and the writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin handled what would be the final story of the season, The Armageddon Factor. Douglas Adams wrote the second story, The Pirate Planet while another newcomer, David Fisher, wrote the third and fourth stories. Again, difficulties began to arise when the fifth story fell through. Robert Holmes consented to writing what would become The Power of Kroll.

Williams third and final year on the show proved even more difficult, as he found Tom Baker increasingly hard to cope with. Douglas Adams became script editor and his distinctive style can be seen in the dialogue and stories. For example, in Destiny of the Daleks, Adams included a scene of the Doctor trapped under a boulder that resembles of similar scene in the second series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Adams brief tenure (1979–1980) is controversial with fans, some of whom believe that the humorous elements had gotten out of hand, while others cite Adam's stories as some of the best. His time as script editor was beset by problems; Adams often ended up having to greatly edit and even rewrite stories. Once again, facing burn-out and lack of funds, Adams eventually agreed to write the final story Shada. Production proved difficult and ended up being unfinished due to a strike at the BBC. Williams left the show, dissatisfied with having left on what he considered to be a low note.

In Season 18, John Nathan-Turner became the series' producer. He instituted a number of changes to the show, including toning down the humour and introducing more science fiction concepts. During this season the Fourth Doctor became very much subdued and, on occasion, melancholy. Baker began the season in poor health, though he eventually recovered. Both the actor and the character seemed noticeably older and tired, due to Baker's gaunt appearance and greying hair. Baker had been finding the role harder and harder to maintain and the previous season had been particularly draining on him. Many of this season's stories also had an elegiac tone, with entropy and decay being a recurring theme.

New script editor Christopher Bidmead found himself faced with a serious problem from the outset of his time on the show. He ultimately deemed many of the stories left to him by Adams to be unusable, being too close to the humour-driven stories of the previous season. The only one he ended up using was The Leisure Hive, though only after heavily editing it. Bidmead asked a pair of writing friends to come up with what would be the second story of the season, Meglos, which ended up being regarded as one of the weakest shows in the series history up to that point. In recent years, some have suggested that Meglos was meant to be a comedy. This may make sense, as many of the elements seem to be satires of common SciFi archetypes.

Bidmead only began to gain some momentum by the fifth story Warrior's Gate. The story is notable for the Doctor's sombre mood and seeming death wish, as well as the surprisingly adult nature of the story. The surreal, even dream-like elements, such as time shifts and walking through mirrors, also earned the story some distinction. At John Nathan-Turner's insistence the Master was brought back. This was accomplished by Bidmead changing the villain in The Keeper of Traken into the Master.

The overarching theme of decay reaches its conclusion in Baker's final story Logopolis, which Bidmead personally wrote. The story is particularly sombre, even grim at times. Themes of decay and death are constant in the story, personified in the ghostly Watcher, effectively a harbinger of the Fourth Doctor's 'death'.

The Fourth Doctor's stories saw fewer recurring (or returning) enemies than in previous eras. The Daleks only appeared twice and the Cybermen only had one story, Revenge of the Cybermen. UNIT, which had featured in most of the Third Doctor's adventures, only appeared in four early Fourth Doctor stories, playing a minor role in their last appearance, Season 13's The Seeds of Doom in which none of the regular UNIT staff appeared.

At the same time, stories such as The Deadly Assassin established most of the mythology surrounding the Time Lords and the Doctor's home planet Gallifrey and that would remain a key feature for the rest of the classic series and still be felt in the revived series. For example, it is established that Time Lords only have a limited number of regenerations, which is a driving plot point in the stories Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, The Trial of a Time Lord and the 1996 telemovie.

Other mentions

Visions of the Fourth Doctor appear in Earthshock, Mawdryn Undead, Resurrection of the Daleks, "The Next Doctor", "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Lodger".. The Fourth Doctor also appears in Sarah Jane's flashback in The Mad Woman in the Attic, via footage taken from The Hand of Fear. Similar flashbacks appear in The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor.

Other appearances

Spoofs

The Fourth Doctor's distinctive appearance and manner have made him a target for affectionate parody. The character has appeared several times on The Simpsons and twice on Robot Chicken. In the computer game Hugo II, Whodunit?, the player can save the Fourth Doctor from a Dalek in return for his sonic screwdriver. He is frequently impersonated by impressionist Jon Culshaw on the radio and television series Dead Ringers, who also voiced the Doctor for the Big Finish audio The Kingmaker. In an episode of Barney Miller, an eccentric man wearing a long striped scarf claimed to be a time-traveler. Archival footage of the Fourth Doctor's first title sequence was used in the Family Guy episode "Blue Harvest" to parody Star Wars hyperspace. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure featured a time machine in the form of a phone booth, as well as casual meeting by the protagonists with noteworthy figures of history. As the narrator of Little Britain, Tom Baker has himself referenced Doctor Who.

Advertisements

In 1980, Tom Baker played the Fourth Doctor (alongside Lala Ward's Romana) in a series of television commercials for Prime Computers. In 1997, Baker reprised the role once again in a spot for New Zealand's National Superannuation insurance company.

Argo Records Audio Drama

Doctor Who and the Pescatons

BBC Audio Dramas

*

Hornets' Nest

Demon Quest

Tom Baker also recorded narration, in character as the Fourth Doctor, for a 1976 audio release of Genesis of the Daleks, which was subsequently re-issued by the BBC on cassette and CD as a radio drama. Baker returned again to Doctor Who for the 1990s audio cassette releases of "lost" Doctor Who stories. For some of these stories, he is in character as the Doctor. For others, he merely provides descriptive narration.

Big Finish Audio Dramas

The Kingmaker (cameo voiced by Jon Culshaw—see above)

The Beautiful People (adventure related by the character Romana II)

The Catalyst (adventure related by the character Leela)

Empathy Games (adventure related by the character Leela)

Stealers from Saiph (adventure related by the character Romana I)

The Pyralis Effect (adventure related by the character Romana II)

The Time Vampire (adventure related by the character Leela)

The Invasion of E-Space (adventure related by the character Romana II)

Ferrill's Folly (adventure related by the character Romana I)

Audio books

Glass

Old Flames

Novels

Virgin New Adventures

by John Peel

by Paul Cornell

Virgin Missing Adventures

Evolution by John Peel

The Romance of Crime by Gareth Roberts

System Shock by Justin Richards

Managra by Stephen Marley

The English Way of Death by Gareth Roberts

The Shadow of Weng-Chiang by David A. McIntee

A Device of Death by Christopher Bulis

The Well-Mannered War by Gareth Roberts

Past Doctor Adventures

Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore

Last Man Running by Chris Boucher

Millennium Shock by Justin Richards

Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Tomb of Valdemar by Simon Messingham

Heart of TARDIS by Dave Stone (Also features the Second Doctor, although neither Doctor meets the other, each Doctor simply tackling a different end of the same crisis with only the Fourth aware of his other self's involvement)

Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris

Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans

Psi-ence Fiction by Chris Boucher

Drift by Simon A. Forward

Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner (Also features the Eighth Doctor, although neither are aware of the other's actions due to the Eighth Doctor's current amnesia, the Fourth simply tying up loose ends left by the Eighth)

Match of the Day by Chris Boucher

Eighth Doctor Adventures

The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

Seen in the TARDIS mirror in Camera Obscura

Telos Doctor Who novellas

Ghost Ship by Keith Topping

Comics

TV Comic

Death Flower

Return of the Daleks

The Wreckers

The Emperor's Spy

The Sinister Sea

The Space Ghost

The Dalek Revenge

Virus

Treasure Trails

Hubert's Folly

Counter-Rotation

Mind Snatch

The Hoaxers

The Mutant Strain

Double Trouble

Dredger

The False Planet

The Fire Feeders

Kling Dynasty

The Orb

The Mutants

The Devil's Mouth

The Aqua-City

The Snow Devils

The Space Garden

The Eerie Manor

Guardian of the Tomb

The Image Makers

TV Comic Annual

Woden's Warrior

The Tansbury Experiment

Jackels of Space

TV Comic Specials

The Sky Warriors

Doctor Who Magazine

Black Destiny

Victims

The Iron Legion

City of the Damned

K9's Finest Hour

Timeslip

The Star Beast

The Dogs of Doom

The Time Witch

Dragon's Claw

The Collector

Dreamers of Death

The Life Bringer

War of the Words

Spider-God

The Deal

End of the Line

The Freefall Warriors

Junkyard Demons

Neutron Knights

Doctor Who Magazine Specials

The Naked Flame

Rest and Re-Creation

The Seventh Segment

Starbeast II

Junkyard Demons II

Video games

Dalek Attack

Destiny of the Doctors

See also

Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday — a stage play that opened two weeks before Baker began his tenure as the Doctor. In the play, Trevor Martin plays an alternate version of the Fourth Doctor.

References

External links

The Fourth Doctor on the BBC's Doctor Who website

Fourth Doctor Gallery

Fourth Doctor's theme music

Fourth Doctor title sequence

Category:Fictional characters introduced in 1974 04 04