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Marc Platt was born in
Wimbledon. When he heard a plane go over the tennis on TV, he
could go into the garden and see it go over his home too. He wanted
to be a zoo keeper, a ballet dancer, a chef and a polar bear.
Then the BBC unleashed Doctor Who on the unsuspecting world
and Marc's long-suffering parents in particular, and Marc wanted
to be a Dalek, or a writer. At the age of 11, his family moved
to Pevensey Bay near Eastbourne - truly the land that time forgot-on-sea.
At school, he bored people about Doctor Who, discovered
opera and earned a lasting notoriety for skiving off games. He
particularly recommends arranging cello lessons when he's meant
to be at Gym. He wrote a couple of not entirely original plays
for his English group, appeared in a couple of school productions,
won a poetry prize and made films costumed by raiding the School
Dramatic Society's wardrobe. He also wrote highly derivative Doctor
Who stories when he should have been doing his homework.
Back in London, he spent several gloomy years
in catering management, when he really wanted to do the cooking
and live in a seat at the Royal Opera House. Eventually, fed up
with the inhuman hours and being polite to people, he sold his
car and escaped from Trust Houses Forte to concentrate on having
some sort of existence - any sort of existence. He worked for
19 years at the BBC. First as a cataloguer of radio programmes,
and then as a selector in the Sound Archives covering news and
programmes on transport, food, weather, literature, the Caribbean
and dance, but not polar bears. He has lately taken to travelling
abroad on the principal that he should see as much as possible
before it's not there to see, and that what ever he imagines can
never be as weird or wonderful as what he hasn't seen yet.
Since the mid-seventies, he had sent numerous
storylines to radio and tv production departments, eventually
being picked up by the Doctor Who office. The result was
Ghost Light, the last story recorded before the show's
untimely axing in 1989. He novelised both Ghost Light and
another Doctor Who story, Battlefield and wrote
the video film Downtime (also novelised.) Doctor Who
novels include Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Lungbarrow.
Doctor Who audio plays for Big Finish Productions include
Loups-Garoux and Spare Parts (both with Peter Davison
as the Doctor) and the Doctor Who Unbound stories Auld
Mortality and Storm of Angels (both with Geoffrey Bayldon.)
He has contributed articles and stories to Doctor Who Magazine
as well as several short stories to a number of Doctor Who
anthologies.
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