Born: 1958
Episodes Broadcast: 1987-1989

Andrew Cartmel was born in Woolwich, London but spent his formative years in Canada. He returned to England to attend the University of London, and later completed graduate studies in computer science. Cartmel found a job in computer-aided design, while also trying to establish himself as a writer. He attended workshops offered by the BBC Script Unit and developed samples, one of which found its way to Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner. Urgently seeking a script editor for the programme's 1987 season, Nathan-Turner invited Cartmel to an interview, where the two men found that they enjoyed a good rapport.

Cartmel spent three years as Doctor Who's script editor, during which he tried to invest the series with a different narrative energy, one which owed a debt to the pioneering graphic novels of the Eighties. He managed to recruit several new writers to the show, and was so successful in redeveloping the aura of mystery which surrounded the Doctor that fans would speculate for years afterwards about the unrevealed secrets of the “Cartmel masterplan”. Following the cancellation of Doctor Who following its 1989 season, Cartmel spent a year on the medical drama Casualty before taking an extended sabbatical from television.

Cartmel helped oversee Doctor Who audio plays inspired by ideas originally planned for the unmade 1990 season

Much of Cartmel's subsequent career focussed on prose, and this new emphasis regularly brought him back into Doctor Who's orbit. Beginning with Cat's Cradle: Warhead in 1992, he wrote several novels for both Virgin Publishing's Doctor Who: The New Adventures series and for its successor series at BBC Books. Cartmel also wrote comic strips, including a number of stories for Doctor Who Magazine. In the late Nineties, he spent a brief period working as an editor, including a stint on the science-fiction magazine Starburst. Cartmel's first original novel, The Wise, was published in 1999. He wrote the Fifth Doctor audio play Winter For The Adept, released in 2000 by Big Finish Productions. Cartmel later helped oversee a run of Big Finish's Doctor Who: The Lost Stories strand, which was inspired by ideas originally planned for the unmade 1990 season.

Cartmel returned to television as a script editor on the fantasy series Dark Knight, and wrote its final episode in 2002. He developed “Jinx” for the third season of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood in 2009, but it fell victim to an overhaul of the show's format. Likewise, a contribution to Midsomer Murders went unproduced. He enjoyed more success writing for the stage, while starting to perform stand-up comedy. Cartmel also compiled a memoir of his time on Doctor Who, in the form of 2005's Script Doctor: The Inside Story Of Doctor Who 1986-1989. After branching out into other tie-in media -- such as a 2008 novel based upon The Prisoner -- he published two original spy thrillers in 2012, and then the first in a long-running series of Vinyl Detective mystery novels in 2016. He returned to comics the same year, co-writing a series of tie-ins to the popular Rivers Of London fantasy crime novels originated by Ben Aaronovitch, one of Cartmel's Doctor Who success stories.