Steven Moffat
Steven Moffat 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 Comic Relief story The Curse of the 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, and The Girl in the Fireplace, Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead. Steven also wrote Time Crash the first multi-doctor story of the new series.
On the 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. His takeover from Russell T. Davies, the man who revived the show in 2005, was met with joy. 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 two major themes: the power behind the Doctor's real name, and the consequences of time travel and its resulting paradoxes.
Mid-nineties opinions of the original series
Prior to his first script for Doctor Who, Steven Moffat was a fan of Doctor Who 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".[1]
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.
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".[2]
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
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Moffat, Steven. "Season 19 Overview". In-Vision #62. 1996. Posted to doctorwhoforum.com. Registration required.
- ↑ Bishop, David. "Four Writers, One Discussion" Time Space Visualiser #43. March 1995.
