Anecdotes

The original Docteur Who (1963) series inspired Moffat to become a writer.

He graduated with a degree in English from the University of Glasgow and worked as a teacher before becoming a successful writer.

He is the son of Bill Moffat and the son-in-law of Beryl Vertue, who was the executive producer of Six sexy (2000). His children are called Louis and Joshua.

He was asked to write Daleks in Manhattan (2007)/Evolution of the Daleks (2007), but he was busy with _Jekyll_. When it became clear that he wouldn't be able to write the Dalek two-parter, he volunteered to write the Doctor-lite episode of the season. That turned out to be Blink (2007), one of the most beloved episodes of Doctor Who (2005).

He was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to Drama. He is a television writer in London, England.

He was originally going to write The Crimson Horror (2013), but he realized he would not be able to and called his "old friend" Mark Gatiss.

Like David Tennant, he is a huge fan of Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor. Moffat was one of the principal interviewees for the Davison-era Docteur Who (1963) documentary Come in Number Five (2011). He also stated in an interview in 1995 that he thought Davison was the best actor to have played the Doctor.

He is so ashamed of his sitcom Chalk (1997) that he refuses to even name the series, joking that he might get attacked in the street. The series earned the dubious distinction of being named by the British newspaper Metro as one of the "10 sitcoms even worse than The Wright Way (2013)".

He named The Beast Below (2010) as his least favourite Doctor Who (2005) he wrote, calling it "a bit of a mess".

During production of the second series of La rédac (1989), Moffat was experiencing an unhappy personal life as a result of the break-up of his first marriage. The producer was secretly phoning his friends at home to check on his state. His wife's new lover was represented in The Big Finish? (1990) by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie's boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.

In 1999, he was one of the writers asked to write Docteur Who (1963) audio plays for Big Finish. He was only interested in writing for the Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, who hadn't signed on yet, so he dropped out. He has since written a short story for one of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield anthologies.

As well as being thanked in the book's foreword for plotting Dr Smith's fantasy story, Moffat was rewarded with a cameo in Paul Cornell's 1995 Seventh Doctor novel "Human Nature" as Mr Moffat, bibulous bursar at Hulton College School: "a Scotsman with curly hair and a permanently perplexed eyes.".

A lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan who read all the stories in order, his favourite actor in the part is Basil Rathbone.