Steven Moffat

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Steven Moffat (born 18 November 1961 in Paisley, Scotland) is Doctor Who's most award-winning writer. More significantly, he is the current head writer for the programme, a position he undertook at the beginning of the Matt Smith era.

Prior to Doctor Who

Moffat came to Doctor Who after a successful career of writing for situation comedies that began in the 1990s. He was a major creative force on Press Gang and Coupling. His love of Doctor Who sometimes crept into his scripts for these programmes. In Coupling, for instance, the character of Steve explains the use of sofas as protection against Daleks. The character of Oliver, introduced in the 4th season of Coupling, worked at a comic book and sci-fi/fantasy specialty shop, which allowed for a number of Doctor Who references. One episode, for example, shows Oliver having a pretend conversation with his girlfriend, using a life-sized Dalek replica as the stand in for his ex. In another episode, Oliver arrives at a dinner party wearing what he thinks is a nice, formal sweater, forgetting that the sweater says "Bring Back Doctor Who" on the back.

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 extol 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.Steven Moffat

Moreover, he expressed some disdain for the Virgin New Adventures, which were, at the time of the discussion, the 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" took a television program "aimed at 11-year olds" and reinterpreted it for adults, involving "a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television."[2]

Work on Doctor Who

Writer

It is unsurprising, then, that he didn't significantly contribute to the flood of Doctor Who prose that was published in the 1990s — though his first piece of professional Doctor Who fiction was a 1996 short story for Virgin Books called "Continuity Errors". "Errors" is one of the few non-televised Doctor Who stories Moffat has written and established a pattern of Moffat only writing short stories in prose.

Unlike many of the writers for the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who, he has predominantly written for television. Soon after "Errors", he wrote the first piece of televised Doctor Who after the 1996 TV movie — the 1999 Comic Relief story The Curse of Fatal Death. When the BBC Wales version of the program started in 2005 he began writing a string of BAFTA- and Hugo- award-winning storylines, which included 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, as well as Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. His only prose contributions during this period were three more short stories, each for a version of the old Doctor Who annual concept.

Head writer

On 20 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:

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 on the Doctor Who official website, May 2008[3]

Although Steven Moffat 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."

Major themes

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 being a very lonely soul. Another common characteristic is that "Everyone lives": two of his stories feature no deaths at all, while the other two feature only deaths by natural causes - which is possibly why he killed most of the characters in Flesh and Stone. Another characteristic is antagonists who are not necessarily evil, merely doing what they are made to do. Three times Moffat has used time-travel to very quickly build an emotional relationship between someone and the Doctor when they encounter him fleetingly, and see him again many years later - Madame de Pompadour, Sally Sparrow, Amy Pond) and even Amy and Liz 10 with themselves in The Beast Below. We have the reverse happening between the Doctor and River Song in Silence in the Library.

TARDIS Telephone

Moffat uses the TARDIS as a telephone box on a number of occasions to even surprise the Doctor. The Empty Child could make the TARDIS outside phone ring. At the end of The Beast Below, the Doctor enters the TARDIS and the console phone is ringing.

Monsters

Moffat's monsters are all very basic looking, but intricately designed. The Empty Child look like people wearing gas masks, but are actually mutants created by subatomic robots modelled after a dead child. The Clockwork Droids look like people in standard French dress, but are actually clockwork repair droids using time-windows to try and repair their ship with human parts. The Weeping Angels look like statues, but are actually ancient perception-locked time-trapping assassins. The Vashta Nerada look like shadows, but are actually carnivorous swarms taken from trees and manufactured into books. Prisoner Zero looks like a man with a dog, but is actually a shape-shifting worm hiding in Amy Pond's house via a Time Crack. The Smilers look like dummies, but are actually androids involved in a killer government conspiracy. Moffat's monsters have also been highly regarded by fans as the scariest monsters, though Paul Cornell's Family of Blood and Russell T Davies's "Midnight Entity" have been also regarded.

Awards & Recognition

Steven Moffat with Benedict Cumberbatch and Matt Smith.

Throughout his involvement with the revived series, Moffat has been something of a Hugo Awards "juggernaut". Not only have the episodes he wrote for each of the first four seasons; The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances; The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead all been nominated in the 'Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form' category, but for he also received two nominations during his first year as executive producer. Both The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and A Christmas Carol were nominated in 2011.

Moffat set a record for winning the Hugo three years consecutively (2006, 2007, 2008), with his episodes defeating episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and a Star Trek fan film, as well as others from Doctor Who and Torchwood. The winning streak came to an end when Moffat's Library two-parter was defeated by the Internet production, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, although only by approximately 100 votes.[4] Despite this however, Moffat won the award once again for the series 5 finale in 2011.

As an individual writer, Moffat has twice been nominated for the 'Best Script' Nebula award (Girl in the Fireplace and Blink), and his work on Blink resulted in 'Best Writer' and 'Best Screenwriter' awards at the 2008 Television BAFTA and BAFTA Cymru awards respectively. As part of the collective writers of Series 3, he was also awarded the Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for 'Best Soap/Series (TV)'.

Moffat's work on Doctor Who has also been recognised amongst those writing for other well known franchises, the preface to the Star Trek "novel Watching The Clock" features a quote from Blink, accredited to Moffat.

Although generally successful as head writer for Dr Who, Moffat has been critisised extensively by fans that feel his series have demonstrated a distinct "make it up as he goes" attitude. This view has gained significant momentum following the episodes Let's Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song in which characters ('mels' pond) or plot devices (tesselecta-doctor) were seemingly 'stuck in' at the last minute to make sense out of an overly open ended or (in the case of the doctor's death) impossible plot-line.

Furthermore, it is felt that Moffat overuses "attention grabbing" initially exciting but ultimately predictable and repetitive storylines and plot devices (such as having 3 regenerations and 2 "deaths of the doctor" in a single season), possibly just to get ratings, and that he then closes up the plot far too early and in an anti-climactic manner leaving fans with a slightly bitter aftertaste and setting nothing up for future head writers to draw from - something which has always been a fundamental aspect of Dr who.

Personal life

Moffat is married to his frequent production partner, Sue Vertue, who produced The Curse of Fatal Death. By her, he has two children who are, as of 2010, in the target audience age range of Doctor Who. His children have been seen on Doctor Who Confidential, making backstage visits to the set of The Girl in the Fireplace. Moffat has disclosed in Doctor Who Magazine that he often shares details about newly-arrived scripts with his kids.

Filmography

Doctor Who - TV stories

Doctor Who parodies

Who-related bibliography

Short fiction

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Moffat, Steven. "Season 19 Overview". In-Vision #62. 1996. Posted to doctorwhoforum.com. Registration required.
  2. ↑ Bishop, David. "Four Writers, One Discussion" Time Space Visualiser #43. March 1995.
  3. ↑ Doctor Who official website press release on the accession of Steven Moffat
  4. ↑ 2009 Hugo Awards Final Ballot results
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