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Pip Baker and his wife and co-writer Jane kept Doctor Who on the road in 1986. When scripts by other people repeatedly fell through they wrote nine episodes at incredibly short notice as its production team self-destructed. One script was commissioned & delivered in 5 days flat.
Their stories - which divided fandom - are fun; full of big ideas, florid dialogue & larger than life characters. They also contain allusions & themes that haven’t received the attention their tendency towards the polysyllabic has, even as those stories have been reappraised.
Pip, named after the protagonist of Great Expectations by his Dickens loving father, met Jane during the 1955 election. She was a Labour paper candidate. He was her election agent. They married not long after, and wrote films, books & television together for forty years.
Their chief contribution to Doctor Who is the Rani. A research chemist turned ruler, & one with imperial pretensions, she is first seen victimising the miners of north east England and initially appeared in 1985. They would laugh off the obvious comparison with knowing looks.
I am personally grateful to Pip, whose memory of horse races he had bet (& lost) on enabled me to fix the time of a phone call from the Doctor Who production office to the Bakers’ home down virtually to the minute. From such things are production histories written!
Production history is the key here. I am entirely convinced that their speed-written, thrilling & cathartic Part 14 is not just better than what it replaced, it is them fulfilling an impossible brief - and likely saving Doctor Who from cancellation in the process. RIP.
