Born: 10th February 1970 (as Robert Charles Shearman)
Episodes Broadcast: 2005

Robert Shearman was born in Horsham, Sussex and graduated from the University of Exeter in 1992. Although he appeared on stage during his time as a student, Shearman gravitated towards scriptwriting, working with producer Alan Ayckbourn on multiple occasions. He began winning awards for his work during the early Nineties and, in 1993, he became the resident dramatist at his alma mater's Northcott Theatre. A Doctor Who fan since his youth, Shearman wrote the audio play Punchline for BBV; released in 2000 and credited to the pseudonymous “Jeremy Leadbetter”, it featured Sylvester McCoy as a character based upon the Seventh Doctor. Shearman then contributed several highly-regarded scripts to the range of Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish Productions. The first was 2000's The Holy Terror, which starred Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. Around the same time, Shearman started writing regularly for BBC Radio 4. He married actress Jane Goddard in 2002.

Shearman's first work for television was a 2003 episode of Born And Bred. Meanwhile, new Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies had taken note of another of Shearman's Big Finish scripts, 2003's Jubilee, which featured a distinctive take on the Daleks. Davies liked its focus on the menace of a single, isolated Dalek and he asked Shearman to adapt elements of the play for television. The result was 2005's Dalek, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. Although it was Shearman's only televised Doctor Who story, he was invited to develop ideas for Matt Smith's inaugural year as the Eleventh Doctor in 2010. By this time, however, Shearman's focus had increasingly turned to prose -- his first short story anthology, the award-winning Tiny Deaths, had been published by Comma Press in 2007 -- and he struggled to develop workable ideas for televised Doctor Who.

Over the years that followed, Shearman tackled increasingly bold and sophisticated writing projects, such as the three-volume We All Hear Stories In The Dark from PS Publishing in 2020. Shearman also maintained his connection to science-fiction on television, contributing a short story for the 2008 Doctor Who collection The Story Of Martha from BBC Books. In 2009, Mad Norwegian Press released Shearman's Wanting To Believe: A Critical Guide To The X-Files, Millennium And The Lone Gunmen, analysing the successful trio of American genre series. The following year, the same publisher issued the first volume of Running With Scissors, in which Shearman and fellow fan Toby Hadoke embarked upon a rewatch of the entire Doctor Who canon. In 2021, BBC Books published Shearman's novelisation of Dalek.