Bob Baker interview

The fabulous Baker boy

It’s 13 May 2017 and later tonight on BBC One is Doctor Who’s spaciest episode in yonks. So it seems entirely fitting that on the day of Oxygen’s transmission I’m meeting perhaps Doctor Who’s spaciest writer.

Bob Baker’s Doctor Who career is one of the longest of the programme’s history, stretching from the very beginning of the 1970s to its very fag end. He notched up a not unimpressive eight Doctor Who story credits during the decade – seven with his then writing partner Dave Martin and one solo – The Nightmare of Eden.

With Martin having passed in 2007, Baker is one of only three writers from that era still alive and kicking. And when DWM meets him at a restaurant in the heart of Bristol, there’s not much to betray his age (he’s an eye-poppingly fit looking 77) except that he’s on the mineral water. “I can’t drink very much these days with all the pills I’m on,” he laughs.

Back in the day, Baker and Martin had quite the reputation for concocting crazy, leftfield, budget-busting ideas. Barry Letts said of their writing, that it was like taking LSD, and there is something mad and trippy and mindbanging about their best stuff. Out of Baker’s eight Doctor Who stories, only one takes place entirely on Earth, and even the ones that start there – The Three Doctors and The Hand of Fear – seem itching to get off-world and into the blackness of space.

“Space has been constantly with me since I was a child,” Baker says, in a quiet corner of the bar, while nursing a hangover-free fizzy water. “Myself and mates of mine used to do nothing except for draw rockets and wonder what it would be like to travel to the stars. So when it came to writing Doctor Who I was pleased as punch.”

It seems strangely ironic that Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Doctor Who’s most prolific purveyors of outer space spectaculars should have joined the show when it was at its most obstinately Earth-bound. In fact, The Claws of Axos, their debut story, is the only one that takes place entirely on this here planet.

“In the original script we had all kinds of crazy things going on,” Bob says, casting his mind back 46 years. “I came across in the archives a few letters from Terrance Dicks and he was always saying, ‘We can’t do this!’ I mean, it’s budget isn’t it? I thought Doctor Who was a high-budget show. It’s not, it’s a very low-budget show and we failed to realise that. They kept saying, ‘we’re not MGM!’”

The pair’s original script had the alien Axons landing their skull-shaped ship in the middle of Hyde Park. Obviously way out of the BBC’s price range, but a year’s worth of redrafts (as well as slimming it from a six-parter to a four) eventually brought The Claws of Axos down to manageable BBC levels. Even with the shrinkage, it’s still a remarkable looking piece of television, a trippy, psychedelic adventure with a killer idea behind it, of a “thinking” molecule than can replicate any substance.

“The idea of all the neurons and things that became the monsters was I think quite new to science fiction television,” says Bob, not unproudly.

Despite the struggles Dicks had with the pair (“they were Hell’s delight to work with,” he would later say, “madly inventive, full of ideas and completely undisciplined!”), the writers known to the production team as ‘the Bristol boys’ were swiftly asked back for a six-parter for the show’s ninth season.

Despite the bulk of the Pertwee era being confined to Earth, the Bristol boys were allowed free reign in cooking up their second tale. The Mutants would take the Doctor and Jo far from Earth and UNIT HQ, to the planet of Solos, a human colony in the 30th century that is on the verge of gaining independence from the Earth Empire.

“It was based on Britain’s withdrawal from empire,” Bob tell us. “Solos was really India in 1947. The idea was that the planet that was part of the Earth empire was not suitable for Earth people to live on. The Indians, in other words the mutants, were a different race and the Marshall, who was in charge of everything, was trying to change the atmosphere so it would be alright for humans.”

Definitely a political story then?

“It was the time of the Cold War and we were quite left-wing,” he says. “Anti-Vietnam War and all that stuff. We were pretty pessimistic about mankind at the time.”

The Mutants’ political content reverberates even today. At one point in episode one, Geoffrey Palmer’s Administrator calls for “a strong and stable system of government.” When Theresa May used the exact same phrase ahead of the General Election, Twitter wasn’t slow in noticing that the line had first been said, on Doctor Who, back in 1972.

“I didn’t know that,” Bob laughs. “I’ll have to charge her!”

The production team’s faith in the Bristol boys led to a prestigious offer. They were asked to pen the tenth anniversary story, a four-parter that would unite all three - to date - Doctors on screen. A big ask.

“We knew we had to include the three Doctors, but that was it,” Bob reflects. “But the story was totally ours. We’d been reading about black holes a lot and they’d only recently been started to be taken seriously. It sounded exciting – event horizons and all that stuff.”

Although The Three Doctors kicks off on Earth it only takes an episode and a half for the Third Doctor and Jo to be whisked off to another universe via “a black hole in space”.

Given that the script continually refers to the phenomenon as “a black hole in space”, was that because the concept was new to people then and needed, well, explaining?

Bob nods. “They now know they’re in practically every galaxy there is, but back then they just thought there were one or two. And even then it was only theoretical. We’d read a book called Black Holes and it went through everything that was known about black holes at that time. We thought, okay, we’ll use the bits that work for us.”

Such research wasn’t untypical. Both Bob and Dave were, at the time, and unusually for Doctor Who writers, voracious readers of the latest science tomes and of the latest science fiction novels.

“Dave and I used to read Scientific American and things like that,” Bob says. “I particularly liked to base things on a sure and solid base which was technically correct, then of course you put the art into it. And of course we read a lot of science fiction, particularly Dave. His tastes were more Philip K Dick. But from a kid, I was fascinated with space travel. It was Dan Dare started me off, and then of course 2001: A Space Odyssey came along. That was my dream film at the time.”

By their next commission, two years later, Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts had both departed and a fresh Doctor was in the TARDIS driving seat. This time, it was new script-editor Robert Holmes who came calling, only this time the commission came with a small list of instructions. After rethinking the shape of Tom Baker’s first season, the planned six-parter was canned and a two-parter hastily scheduled.

“We were phoned up in a bit of a panic,” Bob recalls. The checklist for the episode was for it to include the Sontarans (or **a** Sontaran at least) and that it would be entirely filmed on location. The resulting story, originally titled The Destructors, carried on from the end of the previous story, The Ark in Space, and had the Doctor, Sarah and Harry transported to a far-future Earth which was being surveyed by a Sontaran named Styre ahead of a planned invasion.

“We did it in breakneck time,” Bob says, “but the story works I think.”

The Hand of Fear, their next Who gig, was a more regular commission, even though the story ended up as being more momentous than they’d been expecting. They penned the second story of season 14 initially unaware that they were writing the final outing for Sarah Jane Smith. Their original final scene was jettisoned and the story’s final moments ended up being written by Tom Baker, Elizabeth Sladen and Robert Holmes.

“They said, Sarah Jane’s going, would you like to write the scene? But we were so busy at that time,” Bob reflects.

Although primarily Earth-based (and filmed, incidentally, at a power station just down the road from where Baker lived at the time), there was no way a space-lusting pair like Bob Baker and Dave Martin were going to finish the story without jetting off to somewhere more interesting and so the fourth episode relocates the action to the planet of Kastria. But all told, The Hand of Fear is an abnormal tale from a duo whose imaginations were at their best when freed from the shackles of terra firma.

The pair’s next story was perhaps more typical of the Baker/Martin brand. Although it suffers from the cruel budget slicing of the Graham Williams era, The Invisible Enemy has enough mad and dizzily inventive ideas to forgive the sometimes shabby execution.

“We thought that if people are in space, there’s bound to be hospitals,” Baker says. “We had this idea of a kind of research hospital on Titan [Saturn’s largest moon]. NASA at the time had just taken received of close-up pictures of Titan and so we picked up on that. But the main idea was that instead of having monsters and monsters you could see, we thought of the idea of a germ, a virus that couldn’t be seen. I’m not vouching for the actual prawn that came but the idea was good.”

Similar budget squeezes would threaten to sabotage the pair’s next story. Underworld was, for the time maybe, a unwisely ambitious four-parter about a planet that had formed around an ancient spaceship. With no dosh for location filming, the story was recorded using more CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) than had ever been attempted in the programme.

“It was all they could do,” Bob reflects now, his disappointment still evident. “It was a mid-season show.”

The Armageddon Factor, from season 16, would be Bob’s last work with Dave Martin, who told his writing partner he wanted to walk away from his TV work. “Dave wanted to write the great play or the great novel,” Bob says. “He just felt like he was going down a cul-de-sac.”

A blistering Cold War parable, The Armageddon Factor was to close the loosely-arced Key to Time season, and is largely set on Atrios, a planet which has been involved in a long-scale conflict with its neighbour Zeos.

The story is probably best remembered now for the character of Drax, a fellow Time Lord from the Doctor’s days at the Prydonian Academy, played with barrow-boy charisma by Barry Jackson. Baker and Martin had created the character for another, sadly unmade story, about the stealing of the Crown Jewels, and resurrected him for this one.

“He’s a bit ‘a bit of this, a bit of that’,” Bob chuckles, “a bit of a rough Time Lord, from across the tracks.”

Very different to the Time Lords that the pair had written in The Three Doctors then, which were much more regal.

“Well, they’d already set the precedent for that,” he says, “back at home base, as it were.”

With Martin gone and Baker having remarried and moved to a house in Cornwall, there was a grim period of unemployment for the newly solo writer. But after a year of thumb twiddling came a gig to pen the second episode of a new Bristol-based crime show, Shoestring, which had been created by former Who scribe Robert Banks Stewart. A show whose production office happened to be opposite Doctor Who’s, as luck would have it.

“I said hello now and again to people I knew and I heard that they were after something low budget and so I went in and pitched,” Bob remembers. “But it turned out they spent more on that story than any of the others!”

The Nightmare of Eden is certainly one of season 17’s boldest and most brazenly science-fiction adventures. It’s a story fizzing with ideas, even if, as ever with one of Bob Baker’s scripts, the production team can’t quite match the level of ambition in the script.

“I thought that because of the CET (Continual Event Transmuter) Machine, that you could bring the planet into the studio,” he says of the show’s most ingenious creation. “I thought that would be tremendous.”

The Nightmare of Eden would become Bob Baker’s sayonara story for Doctor Who after eight years. In 1981 he’d go on to create his own family science fiction show with HTV’s Into the Labyrinth, before jobbing as script editor on another Robert Banks Stewart ‘tec show, Call Me Mister. And even today, at 77, he’s still writing. And indeed still watching Doctor Who.

“I don’t watch EVERY one,” he says. “But I’ll certainly watch tonight’s. I do like Capaldi, but I’ve found some of the scripts a bit hit-and-miss. When they're good they're very very good but when they're not they're disappointing to say the least.”

And what about his preference for Earth-based stories vs space-set ones? Have his preferences changed since the 1970s?

“Oh, I tend to prefer the off-Earth stories, definitely,” he smiles. “It gives much more scope for story invention!”

BOXOUT 1

A MAN’S BEST FRIEND

At the convention held by the Doctor Who Appreciation Society in May, Bob Baker unveiled plans for a new K9 movie…

You’ve announced that you’re working on a new K9 movie, Timequake. What can you tell us about it?

After a long and disappointing time trying to attract a team that would 'understand' what we were about with Timequake!, we now believe we have now found the right combination of talents to get on with the job. We will be in pre-production in June, designing and making the various alien characters and monsters. Paul Tams [Baker’s partner on the project] is going to be very busy!

Sorry we can't name our collaborators at present - until the legal side of things have been sorted at least. All I will say is that Paul and I are in a good place as far as the movie is concerned!

You’ve redesigned K-9 for the movie, haven’t you.

We felt the K-9 in the Australian series wasn't quite right - especially the ears (that was a stipulation by Disney!). Paul has given the latest version an upgrade. He's not that much different, but we've had more time to make small differences - not least the gun-metal silver colour and the synchronised lights that match his voice.

Will it have any connection to the K-9 series?

No, none at all.

Will John Leeson be back as the voice of K-9?

We hope that John will be involved. He's been made aware of our wish for him to do the voice… John IS K-9 in our book!

BOXOUT 2

WRITING FOR THE ENEMY

Sky

There are definite shades of The Man Who Fell To Earth is this trippy ITV six-parter about a group of teens who discover an alien who has been sent on a mission to help planet Earth. Set in the Bob and Dave’s beloved west country, it’s a beguiling mix of folk horror, science fiction and ecological thriller, it’s a powerful reminder of when children’s TV was often more dynamic and provocative than its primetime counterparts.

King of the Castle

"Kafka for kids" is how Bob and Dave described this HTV series which told the story of a lonely boy who lives in a council flat but who finds himself transported to a strange fantasy world where people and places are twisted variations of his real life. A potent blend of Ballard, Gilliam and L Frank Baum, King of the Castle is a bold, imaginative script sadly let down by a woefully inadequate budget.

Into The Labyrinth

Bob cooked up the idea for Into the Labyrinth, as well as acting as its script editor. Another HTV production, about a couple of feuding sorcerers and their fight to possess a magical object of limitless power called the Nidus, Into The Labyrinth lasted three seasons and is fondly remembered by those who were entranced by its screening in the early 1980s. Pamela Salem makes for a supremely hissable enemy in Belor, while the late Ron Moody gives us a glimpse of what his Doctor might have been like as her nemesis, Rothgo.

K-9

With the rights to K-9 with its creators and not the BBC, Bob was free to pursue a solo telly venture for the much loved robo-mutt. This Australian-made series introduced a newly redesigned K-9 (though still voiced by John Leeson) who finds himself allied to a couple of teenagers, Starkey and Jorjie in a near-future London. Though it wasn’t able to reference Doctor Who directly (leaving its canonicity in doubt), there are some subtle nods to its parent show sprinkled throughout the series.