Their first contribution to the show was "The Mark of the Rani" (1985), in Colin Baker's (no relation) first season as the Doctor. This was a historical story set in the early Industrial Revolution, featuring the Master and introducing new Time Lord villainess the Rani.
The following season was due to feature the Rani again in a story penned by veteran Who writer Robert Holmes, and the Bakers gave permission to use the character, but after an internal squabble between the show's production staff and BBC executives nearly took the show off the air, the season was overhauled into The Trial of a Time Lord, a 14-part story arc made up of four interconnected serials billed as one. The Bakers wrote the third of those stories, "Terror of the Vervoids" (1986), which introduced new companion Melanie "Mel" Bush (Bonnie Langford). Unusually, she was introduced as a companion who had already been travelling with the Doctor for some time, with the story being set in the Sixth Doctor's future.
The finale for The Trial of a Time Lord, "The Ultimate Foe", ended up being beset with further difficulties: Holmes was contracted to write both parts of it, but died before he could finish the second, resulting in script editor Eric Saward taking over. However, when John Nathan-Turner objected to its Bolivian Army Ending, fearing that it would give the BBC an excuse to cancel the show, Saward walked out and took his script with him. Thus, Nathan-Turner commissioned the Bakers to write a new second part for "The Ultimate Foe" instead, divulging nothing of Holmes or Saward's plans for legal reasons.
Their final script for Doctor Who was the immediate follow-up to "The Ultimate Foe", "Time and the Rani" (1987), the opening story of Season 24. Initially intended to be Colin Baker's regeneration story, it was rewritten into Sylvester McCoy's debut after C. Baker declined to appear; he'd been fired from the role at the request of BBC executives and lobbied to be given a full season (since his contract wouldn't allow him to take on other projects in the meantime if he only got the one story).
Pip and Jane Baker continued to contribute to the Doctor Who franchise after the TV series' cancellation in 1989, writing novelizations of their past stories, the choose-your-own-adventure book Race Against Time, and the 2000 BBV audio play The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind, a direct sequel to "Time and the Rani".
They're also known in Who fandom for being the two writers of the show who, alongside Nathan-Turner, took part in a panel in 1986
in which they were confronted by a teenaged Chris Chibnall about the perceived Seasonal Rot connected to the tenure of the Sixth Doctor (and The Trial of a Time Lord in particular); Chibnall would go on to write for the revival series and even become the series' showrunner from 2018 to 2022.
Tropes present in their work:
- Camp: A driving element of the Bakers' scripts, featuring plenty of Ham-to-Ham Combat, flowery language, and ostentatious designs, which contributed to their Lighter and Softer nature.
- Lighter and Softer: The Bakers' stories were considerably less grim and cynical than the rest of the Sixth Doctor's era, with "Time and the Rani" in particular marking the first serial in the much more lighthearted debut season of the Seventh Doctor.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The Bakers were notorious for penning verbose dialogue.
- In "The Mark of the Rani", they have the Master proclaim that "'fortuitous' would be a more apposite epithet" (i.e. "'lucky' would be a better word").
- In "The Ultimate Foe", the Valeyard warns the Doctor that "There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality," a roundabout way of saying "if your morals are phony, you'll get your comeuppance."
