Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 3, 1993                   TAG: 9310010063
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By Patricia Brennan The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RUSSELL BAKER IS UNEASY ON THE SET

Most likely. Baker takes over Alistair Cooke's chair (in which Cooke rarely, if ever, sat on camera) as host of PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre" Sunday night, when he introduces the 23rd-season opener, "Selected Exits." It stars Anthony Hopkins as Welsh novelist/playwright Gwyn Thomas.

On this day, however, Baker was in the brick building that he uses as an office, just two blocks from the Loudoun County courthouse and only a few miles from his birthplace in tiny Morrisonville. His son Michael, who restored Baker's office and residence in 1985, lives in the village, only 200 yards or so from the house in which Russell Baker was born.

Russell and Mimi Baker moved into their Leesburg house in 1986, after deciding they'd had enough of New York's steep rents. Baker, 68, continues writing his twice-weekly "Observer" column for The New York Times. Indeed, he seems more comfortable doing that than in transforming himself into the television personality he has signed on to be.

"It's interesting," he said after having made his first batch of introductions for the series. "It's completely different from journalism. Journalism, at least what I do, is such a lonely, anti-social type of work that it's just a delight to go out and work with a whole group of people.

"But in a way, it's terribly distracting, because they're fussing at you all the time. There's a woman who comes out, and she powders your nose between takes, and there's a fellow who comes out and he blots the dandruff off your blazer. And then the sound person, who happens to be a girl, comes over and she reaches her hand in your pants to arrange the wires, because you're wired under your shirt.

"These people are constantly laying hands on you and tending to you, really. I haven't had such an experience since I was in the hospital with a broken back, and I lay helpless and people would come and do things for me."

So far, Baker said, the "Masterpiece Theatre" folks have allowed him to continue cutting his own hair, something he's done for the past 25 years. It's a task that he views as simple if you've got a three-way mirror. But recently, he's come to realize that people, especially television people, seem to make a great deal of fuss about hair.

"This is what I look like," he said. "You can make too much of hair. I've never understood why hair is so important. Appearance is everything, I guess, in television. I didn't think about that, really, until I was deep into this. If I'd thought about it a little longer, I might have changed my mind."

There's something else that makes Baker uneasy: the camera. "The problem of being in front of the camera is that you're talking to a piece of furniture, and most people don't talk to furniture," he said. Well, there is one exception, he admits. "When I write, actually I move my lips all the time, because it's got to sound right."

On the set at WGBH in Boston, where the introductions to both "Masterpiece Theatre" and "Mystery!" - done by Diana Rigg - are taped, the idea is intimacy.

"You're supposed to be alone, talking to one or two people, and you have all these people fluttering around you and people rolling cameras. I've done it a couple of times, and I'm not quite relaxed with it yet. I hope I get relaxed. If I don't relax, if I bomb, I'm not going to stay with it."

When the season opens, viewers will still be greeted with J.J. Mouret's "Fanfare for the King's Supper," but they will see a new video opening, the first since 1978. An apartment-style set has been designed for Baker, a lanky man at 6 feet 2.

He'll begin by talking about Gwyn Thomas's work, which Baker said has never been published in the United States. A man who believes in extensive preparation, Baker asked "Masterpiece Theatre" to send some of Thomas's poems, novels and short stories.

"I found I liked him, once I started to read," he said. "I'd never heard of this guy, but he's terrific. I saw the film and read the book and wrote some notes.