Marc Platt

Marc Plat in the 80s. (DOC: Doctor Who: Endgame)

Marc Platt wrote several Doctor Who novels and the TV story Ghost Light.

Platt was "in love" with Doctor Who "from 23 November 1963" and had a "total obsession" with the show. He loved William Hartnell's portrayal of the First Doctor but thought of Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor as his Doctor. In 2014, he said that in the then-recently rediscovered stories The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World, Troughton was "absolutely wonderful" in them. (DWM 476)

Platt continued to watch the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras of the show by bringing a portable television into work. While he held "slightly less affection" for the Pertwee era than the earlier eras, and thought of Pertwee as "very different", he thought that the show "didn't lose its magic at all". He also "liked early Tom Baker very much". He felt that a few seasons prior to him joining as a writer, the show had been "down to the depths" and "aimless and [...] suffered from shallowness", but thought that after Andrew Cartmel joined as script editor, "it was well on the mend" and that Cartmel "had the vision to put it back on track". (DWM 476)

Platt wasn't a fan of the 21st century series' 42-minute format. He believed that after the show returned in 2005, "it had a lot of potential but the stories were too short. They had a lot more two-parters back then, but they seem to have been abandoned in favour of story arcs across the season, which become too convoluted and tangled." He thought that the modern producers and writers "[s]ometimes [... got] it right, but mostly they're just desperately piling so much stuff in" and that the show was "Doctor Who-light" and "too fast and superficial sometimes". Nonetheless, Platt did enjoy some of the individual modern stories. He "really liked" The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit for "getting back to the original style", while according to Platt, The Doctor's Wife was "extraordinary", "fresh", "really had some depth" and "was really made with love". (DWM 476)

Bibliography

Television

Doctor Who

• Ghost Light

Direct-to-video

• Downtime

Prose

Novels and novelisations

Virgin New Adventures

• Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
• Lungbarrow

Virgin Missing Adventures

• Downtime (novelisation of the video)

Target Books

• Doctor Who — Ghost Light (novelisation of his own script)
• Doctor Who — Battlefield (novelisation of the script by Ben Aaronovitch)

Short stories

• Future Imperfect
• The Duke of Dominoes
• Whiskey and Water
• The Ruins of Heaven
• Last Rites
• Outsourcing
• Christmas Special
• The Innocents
• The Hunting of the Slook

Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories

• Loups-Garoux
• Spare Parts
• Valhalla
• The Skull of Sobek
• Time Reef
• The Three Companions
• Paper Cuts
• An Earthly Child
• The Cradle of the Snake
• The Silver Turk
• The Butcher of Brisbane
• Eldrad Must Die!
• Philip Hinchcliffe Presents (adapted from scripts by Philip Hinchcliffe)
  • The Ghosts of Gralstead
  • The Devil's Armada

Doctor Who Unbound

• Auld Mortality
• A Storm of Angels

The Companion Chronicles

• Frostfire
• Mother Russia
• The Doll of Death
• Quinnis
• The Flames of Cadiz
• The Beginning

Other

Doctor Who script books

• Ghost Light (scriptbook)

External links

• Marc Platt at the Internet Movie Database
• On Target - A comprehensive guide to Marc Platt