Bob Baker obituary | Television

Writer Bob Baker, who died at the age of 82, made a creative contribution to the on-screen career of two very different, but extremely popular canine creations: Doctor Who K9’s robot dog and the largely silent Gromit. but comically expressive in Oscar winner Aardman Animation. movie theater.

Baker was first teamed up with host Nick Park to co-write The Wrong Trousers (1993), the second short starring goofy inventor and cheese lover Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and his older dog. clever Gromit. Filled with comedic backdrops including a chaotic wave of destruction caused by a pair of wayward robotic pants and a mind-boggling streak on a miniature train requisitioned by a deceptive penguin, it won the 1994 Oscar for Best Animated Short and the Bafta of better animation.

Baker and Park collaborated again on A Close Shave (1995), which introduced a new character, Shaun the Sheep, and found Wallace falling in love with a shopkeeper, Wendolene (voiced by Anne Reid), who was secretly rustling sheep with his robot dog, Preston. Baker also co-wrote the Wallace and Gromit feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) and, again in short, the based bakery A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008). All three have won Oscars, Baftas and more.

Years earlier, in 1977, when they were firmly established with the long-running BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who, Baker and his writing partner Dave Martin designed – as one character – the mobile computer. K9, a knowledge repository with an attitude. Voiced by John Leeson (and for a short time by David Brierley), the character ultimately stayed with the series until 1981 before receiving his own spin-off pilot, K9 and Company (1981), who paired him with the former companion of Doctor Sarah. Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen).

In 2006, K9 returned with Sarah Jane for an episode of Russell T Davies’ successful Doctor Who resurrection – which led to her sporadic appearances in a more successful second spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-11). Baker and producer Paul Tams, after years of trying, got the character for his own show and 26 episodes of K9 (2009-10) were made and aired in Australia, and distributed internationally by Disney XD , Cartoon Network, BBC Kids and SYFY USA, among others.

Baker was born in St George, Bristol, the youngest son of Roma (née Coleman) and Stanley Baker. His father was a sign writer who spent Bob’s childhood in the war overseas repairing damaged planes. Bob was educated at modern Air Balloon Hill High School, but left at age 15 without passing O. He became an apprentice monumental mason at Bristol Co-op, carving inscriptions on gravestones (” So I’ve always been a writer, ”he joked).

He played in a jazz group with John Fortune, directed a few 16mm short films and enrolled in 1959 at the West of England College of Art in Bristol to study painting, with animation and cinema as a subsidiary. After helping Clive Donner scout Bristol locations for the movie Some People (1962) and a collaboration with filmmaker John Boorman, which ultimately came to naught, he did various jobs including restoring old houses, including he turned one into a small store.

Holding the cash register, he met Martin, a regular late-night customer who was a copywriter, and they decided to try writing together. “Dave said it was kind of like a sexless marriage,” Baker recalled of their successful relationship, which involved a lively, albeit contrasting, sense of humor and an instinctive anticipation of what the other was. thought.

A productive collaboration with producer Patrick Dromgoole at HTV spawned a number of projects, including their first TV play and two dramas, Thick as Thieves (1971) and Machinegunner (1976), both with Leonard Rossiter. Dromgoole also produced their children’s drama series Sky (1975), about a group of children trying to help a time-traveling youth with special powers, and King of the Castle (1977), the story of a troubled boy who uses fantasy to escape his difficult life at home and at school. This dark, disturbing and surreal series remained one of their favorite engagements and was nominated for a Bafta.

Meanwhile, they had scripted the BBC based on the antics, during military service, of Bob’s good friend Keith Floyd (the future TV chief), and it resulted in their first order for Doctor Who, The Claws of Axos (1971), which found Jon Pertwee’s Time Lord facing an alien race trying to take advantage of humanity’s greed.

It was the first of seven adventures they wrote for the series including The Mutants (1972), a clever satire on colonialism in which the natural evolution of an alien planet is hampered by interference from a depiction. futurist of the British Empire, and The Three Doctors (1972-73) which united Pertwee to his predecessors Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell (whose failing health required a hasty rewrite).

The Invisible Enemy (1977) debuted with K9 and featured a miniaturized Doctor (now Tom Baker) injected into his own body in order to fight an alien virus. Baker also contributed to a solo effort – Nightmare of Eden (1979) – an ambitious story in which two spaceships merge after a hyperspace jump and find themselves caught up in the intergalactic drug trade.

Other collaborations with Martin included Z-Cars (1974), Hunter’s Walk (1974-76) and the tough crime drama Target (1977-78) and although they broke up professionally, they remained good friends until upon Martin’s death in 2007.

Baker scripted and wrote episodes for Shoestring (1979) and Call Me Mister (1986), designed and scripted Into the Labyrinth (1982, another fantasy show with elements of time travel) and wrote the 1992 TV movie The Jazz Detective. An autobiography – K9 Stole My Trousers – came out in 2013 and upon his death he was developing a number of projects, some related to K9.

Two marriages ended in divorce. Baker is survived by his third wife, Marie (née Hum), whom he married in 1991, and his children, Jo, Clare, Rachael and Sarah Jane; a daughter, Cathy, and a son, Martin, from her first marriage, to Vicki Hollis; a son, Andy, and a daughter-in-law, Laura, from his second marriage to Angela Wynne; and seven grandchildren. A son, Paul, from his first marriage, died in 2020.