Born: 1st July 1928 (as Philip Baker)
Died: 14th April 2020 (aged 91 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1985-1987

Pip Baker was born to a father who adored the work of Charles Dickens, naming his son after the main character of the 1861 novel Great Expectations. Baker and his wife, Jane, began writing together in the late Fifties. In 1961, their play A Moment Of Blindness was adapted as the movie thriller The Third Alibi. The same year, the Bakers earned their first television credits with several episodes of The Pursuers. An episode of Detective followed in 1968, while film work included the 1969 family adventure Captain Nemo And The Underwater City. They also began a sideline developing educational books and games for young children, drawing upon Jane's prior experience as a schoolteacher. During the Seventies, the Bakers wrote for programmes such as Circus, The Expert, Space: 1999 and Z Cars. They worked with producer Graham Williams on the abortive thriller series The Zodiac Factor and, when he moved over to Doctor Who, he tried but failed to encourage them to write for the show.

More success was had by Williams' successor, John Nathan-Turner, who found the Bakers' script for The Zodiac Factor in the Doctor Who production office and was impressed by its quality. Nathan-Turner was familiar with the Bakers from their active role in the Writers' Guild, and he knew that they had a reputation for efficiency. Although the Bakers remained reluctant to write for Doctor Who, they finally agreed to develop 1985's The Mark Of The Rani, which pitted Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor against a new, female Time Lord villain.

The Bakers provided an emergency replacement for the concluding installment of The Trial Of A Time Lord

In 1986, Nathan-Turner was struggling to pull together scripts for Doctor Who's troubled twenty-third season when he happened to meet the Bakers in a lift at BBC Television Centre. They had briefly been attached to a narrative called “Gallifrey” in 1985, but they now agreed to supply The Trial Of A Time Lord (Segment Three) at short notice. As such, they were tasked with introducing new companion Melanie Bush. The Bakers then provided an emergency replacement for the concluding installment of The Trial Of A Time Lord after former script editor Eric Saward withdrew permission for Nathan-Turner to use his original version.

The same year, the Bakers brought the Rani to print for the Make Your Own Adventure With Doctor Who book Race Against Time from Severn House. They reused elements of its plot for their final Doctor Who serial, 1987's Time And The Rani. It was originally conceived as the Sixth Doctor's final adventure before being reworked to introduce Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. The Bakers novelised all of their Doctor Who scripts for Target Books, with the Season Twenty-Three serials becoming Doctor Who: Terror Of The Vervoids and Doctor Who: The Ultimate Foe.

In the Nineties, the Bakers created the children's series Watt On Earth, which ran for two seasons in 1991 and 1992. They also wrote the mini-series Ruby for German television. The Bakers' final Doctor Who-related work was the audio drama The Rani Reaps The Whirlwind, released by BBV in 2000. Predeceased by his wife, Pip Baker died on April 14th, 2020 after suffering a fall.