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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 BBCs Casualty and its spin-off series Holby City and Granadas 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 childrens medical drama Children's Ward and created his own childrens 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 Granadas 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 Companys 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 Companys 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
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