Andrew Cartmel

Andrew Cartmel
Andrew Cartmel at a Doctor Who fan convention in 2012
Born	1958 (age 58–59)
Nationality	British
Area(s)	Writer

Andrew Cartmel (born 1958) is a British author and journalist, and former script editor of Doctor Who. He has also worked as a script editor on other television series, as a magazine editor, as a comics writer, as a film studies lecturer, and as a novelist.

Cartmel took a post-graduate course in Computer Studies and worked on computer-aided design for Shape Data Ltd (now UGS Corp) in Cambridge, England during the mid-1980s. He then turned more to writing and managed to gain an agent on the strength of two unproduced scripts, also attending workshops run by the BBC Television Drama Script Unit.

In late 1986, when he was in his late twenties, Cartmel was hired as the script editor for the twenty-fourth season of the science-fiction programme Doctor Who, having been recommended to the producer John Nathan-Turner by the producer's agent, who had seen some unproduced scripts Cartmel had written. Cartmel worked on the programme for the next three years, overseeing the final three seasons of its original run on BBC One. He brought in several young, new writers and despite declining ratings, tried to take the series in a new creative direction.

The most significant legacy of this new direction might have been the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan", a backstory developed with other writers that restored some of the mystery of the Doctor's background and could have explained exactly who he was. Although hints were dropped in the two full series Cartmel edited, the proposed revelations never materialised on screen because the programme was taken off the air in 1989.

When production of Doctor Who was placed on indefinite hold, Cartmel became script editor on the BBC's popular medical drama series Casualty for one season. During the 1990s he wrote comic strips for Judge Dredd Megazine and Doctor Who Magazine and three Doctor Who novels for Virgin Books in their New Adventures series. This series had used elements of the "masterplan" as part of their overall story arc for the Doctor, particularly in the last Seventh Doctor novel Lungbarrow, written by Marc Platt.