Marc Platt

Marc Platt
Birth date:	1953
Work in the DWU
Main jobs:	Writer
Stories:	See credits section
Main time period active:	1989-97, 2001-21
Career highlights
Notable non-DWU work:	Blake's 7, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dan Dare, The Time Machine, Timeslip
IMDb profile

Marc Platt (born 1953) wrote several Doctor Who novels, the TV story Ghost Light and many audio stories for Big Finish Productions.

Platt was "in love" with Doctor Who "from 23 November 1963" and had a "total obsession" with the show. He loved William Hartnell's portrayal of the First Doctor but thought of Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor as his Doctor. In 2014, he said that in the then-recently rediscovered stories The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World, Troughton was "absolutely wonderful". (DWM 476)

Platt continued to watch the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras of the show by bringing a portable television into work. While he held "slightly less affection" for the Pertwee era than the earlier eras, and thought of Pertwee as "very different", he thought that the show "didn't lose its magic at all". He also "liked early Tom Baker very much". He felt that a few seasons prior to him joining as a writer, the show had been "down to the depths" and "aimless and [...] suffered from shallowness", but thought that after Andrew Cartmel joined as script editor, "it was well on the mend" and that Cartmel "had the vision to put it back on track". (DWM 476)

Platt wasn't a fan of the 21st century series' 45-minute format. He believed that after the show returned in 2005, "it had a lot of potential but the stories were too short. They had a lot more two-parters back then, but they seem to have been abandoned in favour of story arcs across the season, which become too convoluted and tangled." He thought that the modern producers and writers "[s]ometimes [... got] it right, but mostly they're just desperately piling so much stuff in" and that the show was "Doctor Who-light" and "too fast and superficial sometimes". Nonetheless, Platt did enjoy some of the individual modern stories. He "really liked" The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit for "getting back to the original style", while according to Platt, The Doctor's Wife was "extraordinary", "fresh", "really had some depth" and "was really made with love". (DWM 476)

He also contributed to the charity reference book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, as well as Ghost Light's audio commentary and the documentary The Writer's Room: Season 26.

Credits

Marc Platt in the 1980s. (DOC: Doctor Who: Endgame)

Television

Doctor Who

• Ghost Light

Direct-to-video

• Downtime
• Dæmos Rising (Script Consultant)

Novels

Target Novelisations

• Ghost Light
• Battlefield

Virgin New Adventures

• Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
• Lungbarrow

Virgin Missing Adventures

• Downtime (novelisation of the video)

Short stories

Doctor Who Yearbook

• Future Imperfect
• Encounter on Burnt Snake Flat
• Loop the Loup

Virgin Decalogs

• The Duke of Dominoes

Short Trips

• Whiskey and Water (in Short Trips: A Universe of Terrors)
• The Ruins of Heaven (in Short Trips: Steel Skies)
• Last Rites (in Short Trips: Monsters)
• Outsourcing (in Short Trips: 2040)
• Christmas Special (in Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)
• The Innocents (in Short Trips: The History of Christmas)
• The Hunting of the Slook (in Short Trips: Time Signature)

Bernice Summerfield Short Stories

• The Ship of Painted Shadows (in Old Friends)

The Doctor: His Lives and Times

• Extract from London's Greatest Ghosts

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

• The Arboreals

Comic strips

Doctor Who Magazine

• Cat Litter

Audio

Doctor Who Main Range

• Loups-Garoux (in which he also voiced a tourist)
• Spare Parts
• Valhalla
• Time Reef
• Paper Cuts
• The Cradle of the Snake
• The Silver Turk
• The Butcher of Brisbane
• Eldrad Must Die!
• Planet of the Rani
• The Behemoth

Special Releases

• An Earthly Child
• Night of the Stormcrow

The Lost Stories

• Point of Entry (adapted from script by Barbara Clegg)
• Thin Ice
• The Children of Seth (adapted from script by Christopher Bailey)

The Fourth Doctor Adventures

• The Skin of the Sleek / The Thief Who Stole Time
• Purgatory 12

Philip Hinchcliffe Presents

• Philip Hinchcliffe Presents (with Philip Hinchcliffe)
  • The Ghosts of Gralstead
  • The Devil's Armada
• The Genesis Chamber (with Philip Hinchcliffe)
• The Helm of Awe (with Philip Hinchcliffe)
• The God of Phantoms (with Philip Hinchcliffe)

The Eighth Doctor Adventures

• The Skull of Sobek
• Relative Dimensions

Doom Coalition

• The Galileo Trap
• The Gift

Third Doctor Adventures

• The Tyrants of Logic

The First Doctor Adventures

• The Phoenicians

The Early Adventures

• The Doctor's Tale

The Companion Chronicles

• Frostfire
• Mother Russia
• The Doll of Death
• The Three Companions
• Quinnis
• The Flames of Cadiz
• The Beginning

Doctor Who Unbound

• Auld Mortality
• A Storm of Angels

Jago and Litefoot

• The Case of the Gluttonous Guru

Other

Doctor Who script books

• Ghost Light (scriptbook)

External links

• Marc Platt at the Internet Movie Database
• The Marc Platt Interview: In conversation with Eddie