On The Set : The New Master : RUSSELL BAKER ASSUMES THE DUTIES OF ‘MASTERPIECE THEATRE’S’ WARM-UP HOST

The walls are sponge-painted in soft, melon tones, somewhere between Architectural Digest and the produce section. The overstuffed couches and chairs that appear from time to time are deep forest green, presumably to suggest the hunt country. A large, unpainted pine escritoire connotes a writer who has made enough money to spend it on English antiques. And, of course, there is a desktop globe, the kind that for sure was bought at auction.

The producers of “Masterpiece Theatre” think this new set looks “warm and cozy, like the new host.”

Here’s what the new host of the PBS series says about his surroundings:

“It’s part Warner Bros. warehouse area, part death-penalty execution zone. It’s an environment that’s completely alien. It’s not a room in which people like you and I are used to working.”

That’s Russell Baker speaking, already making it clear that a memorable--and occasionally mordant--turn of phrase will mark the passing of the torch at “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Alistair Cooke, after all, is best remembered both for his magnificent white hair and for his rich, mellifluous voice. American ears loved listening to him. He sounded so intelligent, and well-informed. He sounded so ... British.

But it may, in fact, be difficult to recall (or, for that matter, to care) precisely what in his 21-year reign Cooke said beyond that sonorous “Good evening.”

By contrast, New York Times columnist and best-selling author Baker speaks as he writes, in quick, quotable and eminently American phrases.

To describe one of the helium-head socialites from P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves & Wooster,” for example, Baker borrows from a long-gone member of Congress, Tom Reed of Maine, to observe that “with a few more brains, he could have been a half-wit.”

In introductory remarks about Gwyn Thomas, a novelist from South Wales, Baker needles the current vogue for political correctness. Thomas was intellectually precocious, Baker reports, “or ‘tested well,’ as they say nowadays.”

Marveling at Thomas’ audacity in trading a tenured position at Oxford for a career as a novelist, Baker offers a phrase to warm the soul of any aspiring auteur.

“Free-lancing at 50,” says Baker, with a half-smile of admiration. “What courage.”

But words are Baker’s stock-in-trade. He uses them lovingly, respectfully--albeit in a voice that in person (as on tapes of the first few installments of “Masterpiece Theatre”) sometimes drops into the gravel pit. What other TV person might be inclined to explain taking on the “Masterpiece Theatre” assignment because “my life is sort of a farrago, isn’t it?”

Baker, not surprisingly, cringes at the possibility that he might actually be thought of as a “TV person.” He was perfectly happy writing his column, at home with his family and his Pulitzer Prizes in Leesburg, Va. Baker declined WGBH’s initial entreaties until his daughter Kasia convinced him that every living smart American watches “Masterpiece Theatre,” and that Russell Baker was just the man to host it. Maybe the timing was finally right.

“I hadn’t written a book for a while,” says Baker. “And I like to do strange things once in a while. I like to adventure, as long as it doesn’t require physical exertion.”

Plunging into television at the age of 68 “is my substitute for jogging,” Baker quips.

Most joggers, however, take a spin around the block before they try a marathon. Weeks before air time, Baker apparently panicked at the implications of succeeding--WGBH in Boston is careful not to use the word replacing-- Alistair Cooke. He banned reporters from the set during taping, as if that ritual were some form of ablution. He admitted that he was somewhat intimidated, and not at all relaxed.

When the takes of his first few forays in front of the camera came back, “it was almost painful,” Baker says.

Television is notoriously unforgiving, and “when you see yourself on TV, it is like there’s this famous man that you have always admired. You always wanted to meet him, then you meet him and it’s a disappointment, a letdown. It is sort of devastating.”

Until he gazed at those early efforts, Baker hadn’t realized that his hands fly about when he speaks. “Everything is so much bigger on TV. The small gesture is enormous,” he says. “If you raise your hands and flop them too hard, people will recoil across America.”

To subdue his manual expressiveness, Baker’s producers have come up with lots of props for him to hold. A straw skimmer. A pair of glasses. A leather-bound book.

(In his introduction to a segment set in Italy, his producers tried handing him a bunch of grapes. Baker ate them.)

They have also, to his dismay, made a change in his footwear. Evidently if one is to walk in the shoes of Alistair Cooke, one should not be wearing Wallabies--the suede, country-gentleman shoes seen in Baker’s “Masterpiece Theatre” debut. Henceforth, he looks downright bankerlike in black dress shoes and a proper gray suit.

But no one, not even the wardrobe gods of “Masterpiece Theatre,” will mess with Russell Baker’s hair. He made certain of that when he agreed to the job.

Baker has been cutting his own hair for years, ever since the price of a haircut soared from $2 to $2.25. Not even an audience of millions will change that.

“Masterpiece Theatre” premieres its new season with “Selected Exits,” starring Anthony Hopkins, Sunday at 8 p.m. on KVCR and at 9 p.m. on KCET and KPBS.