William Grantham
At the age of nine, William Grantham of Colchester, Essex, won the Blue Peter "Design-a-Monster Competition".
His entry, the Abzorbaloff, was featured in Love & Monsters and he was noted as having created the monster in the episode's end credits. He also got to spend a day on set with Peter Kay, who portrayed the alien, and Neill Gorton, the prosthetics designer who finalised the design for filming. Producer Phil Collinson claimed in the commentary that accompanied the episode that Grantham was somewhat displeased with Gorton's rendering, as he had imagined the creature to be "the size of a double-decker bus". However, in the 2010 BBC DVD documentary Who Peter, Grantham contradicted Collinson by saying that he had been "stunned" by how well-realised the creature was. Andrew Pixley's notes for Love & Monsters in DWMSE 14 (cover-dated 9 November 2006) offered something of a compromise between the two accounts, claiming Grantham was impressed by Millennium's realisation of the Abzorbaloff but was also bemused that no-one realised the creature was supposed to be the size he imagined.
In early 2021, an adult Grantham posted a retrospective on his time with Doctor Who on his YouTube channel Channel Pup.
At the same time, as part of the Doctor Who: Lockdown! tweetalong of Love & Monsters, he also helped judge a new monster design competition, whose winner, the Krakanord, ended up appearing in an original Doctor Who minisode, The Genuine Article, facing the Tenth Doctor alongside an Abzorbalovian. Grantham acted as director and chief animator for the short animated episode, which was written by Dominic G. Martin and produced by Emily Cook.
