From Bergerac to Wallace and Gromit

Jayne Kirkham meets screenwriter Bob Baker

There are few screenwriters who leave a real mark on popular culture, who create characters that are not only remembered but also well loved. Bob Baker is one of those writers.

Bob’s television credits reach back to the early seventies, which means he must have started writing very young. His school being a secondary modern, he tells me, he had left without any O or A-levels and had wondered what to do. “I really wanted to be an artist” he says, “but my parents said ‘you’ve got to be joking. When are you going to earn some money?’”

So Bob became an apprentice monumental mason with the Co-op in Bristol where he learned masonry and then letter cutting: doing inscriptions on gravestones. “So, I was always a writer,” Bob smiles. “It was the happiest five years. It was the guys there that really set me on the way, that and friends.”

Friends included Keith Floyd, John Fortune and Bill Stair. Bob played in a trad jazz band with Fortune. “We were dead keen on music but we were keen on everything else. We used to go for walks, sit around and we used to talk and talk and talk. After gigs we’d talk about things we’d like to do and what we all really wanted to do was make a film.”

So they made a film. “All we had was a little 16mm box brownie but we made a film, which I look at now and I think, my God, it’s got master shots, close ups, panning, tracking - the lot! The only thing it didn’t have was sound. Having done it I thought I want to be involved in this: I like it.”

Getting near

Consequently, on finishing his apprenticeship, Bob went to college. He studied painting but took film-making as a subsidiary course. The course was actually led by an animator so Bob began to make a few animated films and then the group decided to make an animated film. John Boorman saw it and then wanted them to make some film for a TV show - “So I felt we were getting near”.

Writing duties fell to Bill Stair and Bob, although Bob points out that it was, “Not what I’d call ‘writing’ now, we just used to construct it if you know what I mean. But I thought this is it. I was the ‘film executive’. I used to go and see John Boorman on my bike with my briefcase on the handlebars, and my bicycle clips… However, Boorman then went to Hollywood to make Point Blank (1967) and Bill went with him.”

Bob was unsure what to do next. “I restored old houses, drove lorries, drove taxis, crewed on yachts, played in a rock group, drove a lorry to the south of France and back delivering wine with Keith Floyd, made model aeroplanes, invented toys. But I still didn’t know what I actually wanted to do!”

However, down in his basement he still had the animation rostrum that his film making friends had built, and “suddenly people started coming to me saying ‘Excuse me I want to make a film. Can I use your equipment and will you help me to do it?’” One such person wanted to make a film based on George Crabbe’s Peter Grimes. The proposed film was a series of black and white drawings but Bob was so moved when he read the poem that he wanted to do something more. The other guy pulled out but Bob kept thinking about it.

Round about this time he was refurbishing a late night shop. Beginning work after the shop shut, he got talking about his Peter Grimes idea to a man who regularly came in just as the shop was about to close. His name was Dave Martin, a successful advertising copywriter well known for some highly profitable slogans and campaigns. “So he was this pretty big guy and here was me with no O levels and worrying about how I could write it and he said, let’s write it together. And so we wrote Peter Grimes.”

Bob’s old animation lecturer was a friend of director Clive Donner (What’s New Pussy Cat, 1965). When Clive came to Bristol to shoot a film he enlisted Bob to find locations. “I got to know Clive pretty well, so of course the first thing I did after we finished the script was to try and get him to do Peter Grimes. It didn’t quite happen because the house of cards you have to build to get the money together all fell down. But having got that far, I thought this is amazing: our first project it so nearly came off so let's carry on. So we just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote – piles and piles and piles of scripts.”

It was also around this time that HTV West brought in a new head of programmes, Patrick Dromgoole. They decided that they wanted to promote local talent and produced a series of half hour programmes by West Country writers. A script by Dave and Bob was chosen to be one of the seven late night dramas.

However, seeing their names on television, may have given them the bug but it didn’t mean they were in. “We kept on writing but the rejections piled up,” Bob explains.

Doctor Who

Finally they were invited to the BBC to discuss a script they had sent in. The producer didn’t want to make the script, but they did want Dave and Bob to write for Doctor Who. Bob and Dave wrote for two different Doctors, Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee.

“Tom Baker was so easy to write for, you knew exactly what he would say: you could hear him saying it.” It surprises Bob when I suggest he is perhaps most revered now for creating K9. “We just put him in as a character,” Bob tells me, “and they came back to us saying they wanted to make more of him and we thought ‘Great, it will be like the Daleks - money, money, money’. It wasn’t quite like that, although he has been very good for us. The BBC had been stupid giving away rights to the Daleks but they’d learnt by the time we came along. So we own the character rights and the BBC owns the physical rights, or whatever.”

One other claim to fame is that one of Bob and Dave’s Dr Who episodes had the highest viewing figures. “But other than that,” Bob says , “it was a just bit of an earner. Obviously I’d seen Dr Who and I love science fiction. But I had no idea there would be conferences and people still making the monster noise they’d made in the show thirty years on, or that I’d be asked to go on a dinner table with fans and they’d ask searching questions. I’m working on a new K9 project now with Jetix. It’s live action with CGI movement for the dog. So it’s a strange phenomenon, which I thank God for because when you’re having a bit of a rough time, suddenly you get a cheque.”

Bob and Dave wrote Dr Who for ten years and were known affectionately as The Bristol Boys by the production team. They didn’t always enjoy it but it established them and got them into other things. These included a number of children’s seven-part series for HTV, including the BAFTA nominated King of The Castle, which Bob describes as “Kafka for kids”. They also wrote Thick As Thieves, which starred Leonard Rossiter and won a British Television Society best regional drama award.

A real movie

Then Bob and Dave did their first 90-minute drama, Machine Gunner: “A real movie. Or as the critics called it, ‘an unashamed movie’”. Bob describes HTV West at that time as like being in a family. “During productions we often went for supper at Floyd’s. Dave and I were extras in most of the things we did so we knew everyone in the production, which was great. Patrick Dromgoole was the kind of the guy who liked to have the writing team with the film unit."

Eventually however, they parted ways amicably and Bob was invited by Robert Banks Stewart to write an episode of Shoestring. He then became script editor: “a move towards being part of the process rather than just writing”. Of Robert Banks Stewart, Bob says: “He’s a very hard taskmaster and taught me a hell of a lot and I’m forever grateful for him. There was such a pressure on – sometimes we’d have to rewrite an entire script over the weekend. But some of those total rewrites came out better than some of the ones that we’d worked up for ages. That’s the way it goes.”

Then came the ITV strike and Shoestring hit the top viewing figures and Bob found he was suddenly in demand. “So,” he says, “I decided to work with Patrick Dromgoole as the overall HTV script editor. That meant quite a lot. Along with my three readers (one of whom was Tony Robinson) I had to read, comment and reply on every scrap of script or idea that came in, whether it came on lavatory paper or from an agency wrapped up in cellophane. If we found something that had particular merit we’d pass it up to Patrick.

Along with that I had a special brief to encourage as many West Country writers we could find. We helped finance a few little things like lunch time theatre and we’d end up filming some, just keeping things going. “But, remembering my beginnings, it got to the point where I said if I don’t help these people let the steam out, give them something where their talent can be recognised then my job is pointless. So Patrick gave me a late night half hour slot and we made Function Room in which we had a one room set and the writers had to make something of it.

Of the seven writers eventually broadcast, one is now a professional television writer, one writes for fringe theatre in New York and one has done very well writing novels. In fact I was outside a cinema not so long ago, by a poster for Master and Commander and there was his name in the writing section. So of seven, three became professional writers and I was very pleased about that.”

Bob also found time to devise and edit three series of the children’s sci-fi drama, Into the Labyrinth, before he left HTV in 1990. “That was the year we did a film, Succubus (starring the late Barry Foster), that Dave and I had written some years ago. It was a French co-production. Dave and I got together to do the rewrite and toddled around in France with Patrick who directed it.” It was the year of the franchise renewal and with ITV fragmenting; the old order was breaking up. The broadcasters wanted to take programmes from outside sources.

An expensive disaster

With a firm commitment from HTV, Bob was encouraged to set up his own company. With his new business partner, Roger Crago, he set up an office in the middle of Bristol and got involved in a film in Spain: “There we met various people and there was some suggestion of making a film in Moscow so my partner and I went to Moscow to talk about a deal. On our return we saw a local newspaper in the stand and it said ‘bad news for local film company’. We thought ‘ooh wonder who that is?’ And It was us! HTV had pulled out completely and left us standing there with absolutely nothing! We never found out why.”

The film turned out to be a surprise success, but the attempted follow up was an expensive disaster. “I lost absolutely everything and you can feel that gnawing in your stomach: will the distributor give you that extra money and will it just be going into a black hole… it’s awful. Fortunately, at the nadir of that period I met a man called Nick Park.”

Bob had come into contact with Aardman Animations when he was at HTV but it was a producer at BBC2 that felt Nick could use the guidance of a writer. “This was after A Grand Day Out and they put us together to see how we got on - and, of course, we got on very well. We ended up making The Wrong Trousers. And then we did A Close Shave, and then Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.”

Bob has written for other media: The Millennium Dome spectacular Ovo with Peter Gabriel in 2000, and the stage adaptations A Grand Night Out and Watership Down. He has also developed teaching materials. For example, with the Space Museum in Leicester: “Kids solve problems – they’re on a moon of Saturn and bang there’s a problem and the kids have to sort themselves out a solution. It’s a simple story that involves some sort of danger and the kids have all the data stored to solve it or the spacemen all die”.

Bob clearly enjoys educational projects. He worked closely with Oxford University Press on their English as a Foreign Language programme. “They’d always had rather iffy stories and students didn’t get involved. Then this new producer, Rob Maidment, went to work for OUP, said ‘Lets have a proper drama, a thriller.’ And he asked me to do it.” Hardly the glamour of writing a feature length Wallace and Gromit, perhaps, but equally as challenging and rewarding. “One of them, for a lower level English, had to be completely in the present tense, which was quite difficult. But I loved it.”

Bob is still very interested in working with new writers. He works half a day a week at Filton College - it’s not like before when he had the resources of HTV behind him but ITV West still run a writing workshop for which he leads an evening class.

Variety

The sheer variety of Bob’s credits is amazing: Z Cars, Sky, M+M, Item, The Curse of The Were-Rabbit… too many to mention. Bob clearly loves all genres. “I’ll do anything. I’ve done documentaries, teaching, I’ve even done comedy. But my forte is crime. The Wrong Trousers started as a domestic drama but moves into crime and I loved that. Science fiction is a favourite but I love doing everything. I’ve just written an historical thing set in 1780 that’s doing the rounds at the minute. One thing I couldn’t do was a children’s cartoon about a little dog – Kipper. I tried but I just couldn’t do it. I’ve done a lot for older children – Kafka for kids. You say now what’s the best thing to do with kids? As a onetime Dr Who Editor Bob Holmes used to say, ‘Let's frighten the little buggers to death’. That’s my philosophy too.”

With K9, a new Wallace and Gromit film, and a new writing/production partner , Bob is very busy. I ask him where he actually writes. At one point he and Dave Martin wrote together they worked in a converted barn and regularly lunched in the convivial surroundings of the pub we are now meeting in. Now Bob tends to write in his shed: “I still paint so it’s my studio. I write a bit then just turn around and paint a bit then do a bit more writing. It’s a nice environment where I feel relaxed and it’s very cool except at the moment it’s damp and bloody horrible. It’s been raining for about two weeks non-stop. My shed takes me away from the house. It’s good to be somewhere else. Now I’m working with Aardman I’m down there a lot spending all day or half a day with Nick. We could do with a place to write. It 'd be nice to go to Marbella for a couple of weeks so we wouldn’t have anybody looking over our shoulders but Nick has to be at Aardman for other things.”

It’s clear that Bob genuinely loves being a writer. “The worst things are the deadlines,” he tells me. “I don’t think I’ve ever missed one but they’re always looming over the next horizon. But those weekend trials with Robert Banks Stewart were such a good lesson. You can’t have writers block, you just can’t. So if I am stuck I just write something. Then you can at least do something with it. I’ve never stopped writing. The best thing about writing, I've always said, is it's a lot better than working.”

Jayne Kirkham is a writer and producer.

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Spring 2007)