Stephen Wyatt

Stephen Wyatt wrote the Doctor Who serials Paradise Towers and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, both of which he novelised for the Target Books range.

In a talk with script editor Andrew Cartmel for Doctor Who Magazine, Wyatt admitted to being a "big fan" of William Hartnell's First Doctor and Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor, with Troughton described as Wyatt's favourite Doctor. He used to watch the show "religiously", but after he was studying for his A levels, he "sort of lost interest". The Jon Pertwee era was a "complete blank", but he saw "some" of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor and "dipped into" The Trial of a Time Lord, which he "didn't understand a word of". (DWM 473)

The mythology of Gallifrey and the Time Lords was something which "never interested" Wyatt. Wyatt said he avoided the mythology and had "no backstory about the Doctor whatsoever" when he wrote Paradise Towers in order to go back to the essence of Doctor Who "as it was when [he] was a kid", at a point where none of the backstory to do with the Time Lords had been invented yet. (DWM 473)

Regarding the 21st century Doctor Who that he watched, Wyatt was concerned that you needed to know "a lot of the backstory to understand what you were watching". Wyatt felt this in particular after watching The Day of the Doctor, which due to him not having seen "much else of the show recently", there were "chunks" of the story he didn't understand. (DWM 473)