Tom Baker joined a monastery at the age of 15
'I was an affectionate boy in those days, and I was quite willing to show God some if that was what He fancied,' Baker observed drily in his autobiography, Who on Earth is Tom Baker? 'For a time it was all worthwhile just to be in a frock.' But after eight years, the bloom was off the rose, as Baker relates in some hair-raising passages: vicious discipline, fumbling in the dark, chanting every morning. 'Some mornings I suspected I could hear God tutting at the indignity of it all.' He ended up polishing floors and washing pots until a visiting priest encouraged him to be honest about his loss of faith. Baker left the monastery after six years. 'I felt full of optimism,' he wrote, 'full of hope that I could at last get out of God's clutches, sign up with the Devil and get on the old primrose path to pleasure, even if it did lead to Hell.'
