Steven Moffat

Steven Moffat (born 1961 in Paisley, Scotland) is a television writer who has written many shows in the drama and / or comedy genre, most notably "Press Gang", "Coupling", and "Jekyll".

He is notable for writing the first piece of televised Doctor Who since the 1996 TV movie: the 1999 Comic Relief story The Curse of Fatal Death, which brought the Daleks, the Master and multiple incarnations of the Doctor to the screen, as well as the Hugo award winning storylines The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, and Blink. Steven also wrote Time Crash the first multi-Doctor story of the new series. He has also contributed short fiction to collections such as Decalog 3: Consequences and Doctor Who Annual 2006.

On 20th May 2008, Steven Moffat was announced to be the executive producer and head writer of Doctor Who starting on the fifth season in 2010, taking over from Russell T Davies, the man who revived the show in 2005. He said in a BBC press release [1]: "My entire career has been a Secret Plan to get this job. I applied before but I got knocked back 'cos the BBC wanted someone else. Also I was seven. Anyway, I'm glad the BBC has finally seen the light, and it's a huge honour to be following Russell into the best - and the toughest - job in television. I say toughest 'cos Russell's at my window right now, pointing and laughing."

Steven Moffat's work on Doctor Who has exhibited three major themes: romance and sexuality (especially concerning The Doctor), the power behind the Doctor's real name, and the consequences of time travel and its resulting paradoxes. Other recurring elements in his stories include children's fears (whether they be bombs dropping in World War II, monsters under the bed, statues coming to life and the most common childhood fear, the dark) and the Doctor having a lonely childhood.

Moffat refuses to tell fans what he'll do differently when he's in charge, because there's two years until his first season in charge starts, but he will state that there will not be old Doctor Who villains coming back as he feels that the new Doctor Who should belong to the current generation of Doctor Who fans.

Mid-nineties opinions of the original series

Prior to his first script for Doctor Who, Steven Moffat was a fan who sometimes publicly opined on his love-hate relationship with the program. In the mid nineties, he was wont to extoll the virtues of Peter Davison's acting abilities, saying that the reason "he's played more above-the-title lead roles on the telly than the rest of the Doctors put together" is "because — get this! — he's the best actor." Furthermore, he has called Snakedance and Kinda, "the two best Who stories ever".

During a discussion after at least one round of drinks with Andy Lane, Paul Cornell and David Bishop, he claimed that although "as a television format, Doctor Who equals anything", he couldn't hold up the program as an exemplar of great television to "anybody I work with in television". He went on to call the original program "slow", "embarrassing", and "limited by the relatively meagre talent of the people who were working on it". He spoke particularly harshly of Sixties Doctor Who, saying:

If you look at other stuff from the Sixties they weren't crap — it was just Doctor Who. The first episode of Doctor Who betrays the lie that it's just the Sixties, because the first episode is really good — the rest of it's shit.Steven Moffat

Moreover, he expressed some disdain for the Virgin New Adventures, which were, at the time of the discussion, the then-dominant form of Doctor Who fiction. "There's 24 of them a year. That's too bloody many! I've never wanted 24 new Doctor Who adventures a year in my life. Six was a perfectly good number." However, he did call "brilliant" the notion that the NA's "sometimes successfully" reinterpreted a television program "aimed at 11-year olds" for adults, involving "a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television". This criticism didn't, however, prevent Moffat from contributing the Seventh Doctor short story "Continuity Errors" to the 1996 anthology Decalog 3: Consequences.

Although Steven Moffatt cast 26-year old Matt Smith into the role, Moffatt had previously been quoted to prefer older actors playing the role of The Doctor. "Although I loved Peter Davison and Paul McGann, probably the best two actors in the role, I don't think young, dashing Doctors are right at all. He should be 40-plus and weird-looking - the kind of wacky grandfather kids know on sight to be secretly one of them."

Filmography

Doctor Who - TV stories

• The Empty Child
• The Doctor Dances
• The Girl in the Fireplace
• Blink
• Time Crash
• Silence in the Library
• Forest of the Dead

Doctor Who parodies

• The Curse of Fatal Death

Who-related bibliography

Short fiction

• "Continuity Errors" - (Decalog 3: Consequences)
• "What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow" (Doctor Who Annual 2006)

Later adapted for television as Blink.

• "Corner of the Eye" (Doctor Who Storybook 2007)
• "A Letter from the Doctor" (Doctor Who Storybook 2009)

External links

• Steven Moffat at the Internet Movie Database