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Paul Cornell

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Paul Cornell appearing on Doctor Who Confidential
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Paul Cornell appearing on Doctor Who Confidential

Paul Cornell (born July 18 1967) is a British writer best known for his work in television drama as well as Doctor Who fiction, and as the creator of one of the Doctor's spin-off companions, Bernice Summerfield. He has written for some popular drama programmes on British television, including the BBC’s Casualty and its spin-off series Holby City, as well as Granada’s ITV soap opera Coronation Street.

Cornell is married to Caroline Symcox, who has also written Doctor Who-based audio plays for Big Finish Productions on her own and with Cornell.

Contents

Professional biography

Already known in Doctor Who fan circles, Cornell's professional writing career began in 1990 when he was a winner in a young writers’ competition and his entry, Kingdom Come, was produced and screened on BBC Two. Soon after he wrote [[Timewyrm: Revelation]], a novel for the Virgin New Adventures series of Doctor Who novels. Timewyrm: Revelation was a re-working of a serialised fan fiction piece Cornell had penned previously for the fanzine Queen Bat. Several other Doctor Who novels followed.

Cornell then began working for Granada Television, where he wrote for their popular children’s medical drama Children's Ward and created his own children’s series Wavelength for Yorkshire Television, which ran for two series. He made the crossover to working in adult television full-time in 1996, when he was one of the main contributors to Granada’s supernatural soap opera Springhill, which ran for two years on Sky One and later on Channel 4.

After a short stint on Coronation Street, he began working for other production companies, including in 1999 contributing an episode to Red Production Company’s anthology drama series Love in the 21st Century for Channel 4. His episode, entitled Masturbation, starred Ioan Gruffudd as Jack. He was due to be one of the writers on Red Production Company’s planned Queer as Folk spin-off series Misfits, but the series was never made, being abruptly cancelled by Channel 4.

In recent years he has been writing mainly for the BBC, contributing episodes to all three of their regular medical dramas; Casualty, Holby City and the daytime soap opera Doctors. He has also contributed to the 1950s-set Sunday evening prime time drama series Born and Bred and was one of the writers of the 2005 series revival of Doctor Who — he wrote the episode Father's Day and has been commissioned to write a two-part episode for the 2007 series. In February 2006, Cornell announced in [a post on his weblog] that he would be writing an episode for the BBC's forthcoming Robin Hood, produced by Tiger Aspect Productions for the same Saturday evening family slot as Doctor Who. He later announced on his blog that he was also writing a second Robin Hood episode for later in the first series.

Outside of television, he has been active in various other media, having written six Doctor Who novels for Virgin Publishing and BBC Books during the 1990s, two Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish Productions (with a third reportedly due for release in 2006) and a fully-animated internet-broadcast Doctor Who adventure, Scream of the Shalka (starring Richard E. Grant as the Ninth Doctor) for BBCi in 2003. He has also written two mainstream science-fiction novels, Something More and British Summertime for Gollancz, and various novels, short stories and audio dramas based around a character he created for the New Adventures, Professor Bernice Summerfield, and whom he later licensed to Big Finish Productions.

He has also co-authored (often working with Keith Topping and Martin Day) several non-fiction books on television, including The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, X-treme Possibilities (a guide to The X-Files), and The Discontinuity Guide (a humorous guide to Doctor Who). (Topping and Day's Doctor Who novel The Devil Goblins from Neptune was also based on an original idea with Cornell.) He has also written comics, both for Doctor Who Magazine and 2000AD spin-off Judge Dredd Megazine.

Cornell currently describes himself as being both a Christian and a pagan. Spiritual themes are not uncommon in his work (for example his novel Something More). Other frequent references in his work include owls.

Novels

Other Doctor Who novels

Other novels

Non-fiction

Audio plays

Comics

External links

 

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