Paul Cornell
Paul Cornell (born July 18 1967) is a highly experienced television drama writer, who has written for some of the most popular drama programmes on British television, including the BBC’s Casualty and its spin-off series Holby City and Granada’s powerhouse ITV soap opera Coronation Street.
His career in television 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. He 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 his 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, rather frankly entitled Masturbation, starred Ioan Gruffudd, who has subsequently gone on to find fame in the Hornblower series for ITV. He was due to be one of the writers on Red Production Company’s planned Queer as Folk spin-off series Misfits, before this series was abruptly and surprisingly 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 is one of the writers working on the new series of science-fiction classic Doctor Who, due to be screened in early 2005.
Outside of television, he has been very active in various other media, writing six Doctor Who novels for Virgin Publishing and BBC Books during the 1990s, two Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish Productions 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, Professor Bernice Summerfield, for Virgin Publishing and Big Finish Productions.
He has also co-authored several 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 look at Doctor Who). His comic strip series, Xtnct, ran in Judge Dredd Megazine.
Novels
- Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Revelation (ISBN 0426203607)
- Doctor Who: Love and War (ISBN 0426203852)
- Doctor Who: The Scream of the Shalka (ISBN 0563486198)
- Doctor Who: Human Nature (ISBN 0426204433)
- Doctor Who: Happy Endings (ISBN 0426204700)
- Doctor Who: No Future (ISBN 0426204093)
- Doctor Who: Goth Opera (ISBN 0426204182)
- Doctor Who: The Shadows of Avalon (ISBN 0563555882)
- Bernice Summerfield: Oh No It Isn't! (ISBN 0426205073)
- Bernice Summerfield: Life During Wartime
- Bernice Summerfield: A Life of Surprises (editor)
- Something More (ISBN 0575072032)
- British Summertime (ISBN 0575074043)
- The Uninvited (ISBN 0-7535-0220-8) (novelisation of 1997 ITV science-fiction drama serial)
Non-fiction
- "Avengers" Dossier: The Definitive Unauthorised Guide (ISBN 0863697542) with Martin Day and Keith Topping
- Licence Denied: Rumblings from the Doctor Who Underground (ISBN 075350104X) (editor)
- X-treme Possibilities: Irreverant Rummage Through the "X-files" (ISBN 0753502283) with Day and Topping
- The Discontinuity Guide (ISBN 0426204425) with Day and Topping
- The Guinness Book of Classic British TV with Day and Topping
- The New Trek Programme Guide (ISBN 0863699227) with Day and Topping
Audio Plays
- Doctor Who: Seasons of Fear
- Doctor Who: The Shadow of the Scourge
- Bernice Summerfield: Oh No It Isn't!
- Bernice Summerfield: The Grel Escape
- Bernice Summerfield and the Axis of Evil