A New Man in the Armchair

By Martha Duffy

The news came as a cultural shock. After nearly 22 years and some 800 programs, during which he had occupied 65 different armchairs in clubby library sets, Alistair Cooke, 84, was retiring as host of Masterpiece Theatre. For millions of PBS viewers, Cooke was like the guest they always hoped to meet at a party -- charming, informed but never overbearing as he steered them urbanely through such series as Upstairs, Downstairs, I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, discoursing on Edwardian manners, the English public school or life in the sunlit empire.

Who could possibly replace such an institution? Various names were bruited in the rumor mill -- stage actors, a few Hollywood eminences, novelist John Updike. But the winner turned out to be a dark horse: Pulitzer-prizewinning memoirist and New York Times columnist Russell Baker, 68, who originally declined the offer by saying, "I don't want to be the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke. I want to be the man who succeeds the man who succeeds Alistair Cooke." Baker was won over by the zeal of Christopher Lydon, a newscaster at Boston's WGBH, the station that produces Masterpiece Theatre. Lydon, now a candidate for mayor of Boston, considered the aw-shucks Baker "a great television event waiting to happen. He's Cooper, Ray Milland, all the great movie faces wrapped into one."

Baker -- no Cooper, but a classic Yank with a long, friendly, shovel-shaped face -- begins his new assignment on Sunday with Selected Exits, a biographical tribute to Welsh author and raconteur Gwyn Thomas, starring Anthony Hopkins. Already Baker has found that the job is like sailing a ship in a very small bottle. "Most of the time you have two or 2 1/2 minutes," he says. "That's one page, double-spaced. My columns are three pages. On TV, that would be like being Hubert Humphrey -- Will this guy ever shut up?"

Baker does his own research at home in Leesburg, Virginia, and will journey to Boston several times a year to tape the introductions. The programs imported for Masterpiece Theatre run in Britain with no introduction; the notion of a host is American. "We like to be told what's coming," says Baker. "It reassures us." An advance look at his first efforts reveals that the onscreen Baker is indeed reassuring -- an intelligent, amiable presence, with a healthy respect for the camera. "You have to do your damnedest to be yourself," he says. "It's hard, like having your picture taken."

Cooke had an uncanny knack for seeming to settle into the viewer's living room. He credited it to the fact that he was one of the few TV performers to memorize his lines and speak without a TelePrompTer. Baker will stick with the TelePrompTer, thank you. "Alistair was amazing because he appeared so spontaneous," he says. "I'm so uneasy now, I just couldn't do it."

Some followers of Masterpiece Theatre fear that its peak is past, that new offerings lack the luster of the glory days in the '70s and '80s. But Baker thinks of the series as a necessary antidote to insulting commercial programming: "The week all three networks had Amy Fisher shows on revealed absolute contempt for the human race." And so, as he turns out his single page for each week, he humbly paraphrases Peter De Vries' acid remark about Henry James and hopes that he will not chew more than he bit off.