Yahoo News Jonathan Creek creator turned down Doctor Who
Speaking exclusively to Digital Spy, outgoing Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has revealed a big name he approached to pen an episode for the Time Lord... but who turned him down.
"The one I always wanted to get to do a Doctor Who, but he just didn't like it, was David Renwick," he said.
"I thought he would have been a great Doctor Who writer. But he really, really just didn't like Doctor Who very much."
Steven joked: "I thought, 'What do you mean you don't like it?! How can you not like it!? What's wrong with you?'"
Renwick is the man behind the BBC mystery crime drama Jonathan Creek, starring Alan Davies. Running for 20 years, the show has also starred Caroline Quentin, Julia Sawalha, Sheridan Smith and Sarah Alexander.
The writer also created the hugely popular BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, which ran for 10 years and peaked with over 20 million viewers in 1993.
Looking to the future, and Doctor Who under new showrunner Chris Chibnall, Steven told us he'd like to see Jamie Mathieson (who penned fan-favourite 'Mummy on the Orient Express' and the recent 'Oxygen' for the show) write for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor.
"Jamie's always got about 12 ideas. He's full of high-concept ideas that he'd be better off, and richer, if he sold to the movie industry rather than splurge on 45 minutes of Doctor Who. But I hope they bring him back at some point."
Moffat extolled the virtues of the numerous writers on Doctor Who in his final years, while also revealing the challenges in finding new talent for the show. He said, "The world isn't bristling with people who can do Doctor Who. People think it is, but it's not.
"I think our current bunch are really good. Particularly towards the end, I felt I was finding a brilliant new writer for Doctor Who regularly.
"It was difficult at the beginning, but now we've got Sarah Dollard, Jamie Mathieson, Peter Harness, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Mike Bartlett and Rona Munro, coming in at the end there, and I thought, 'God, they're out there!'
"For ages, I thought they weren't, I'll be honest. I was thinking, 'Where are the new ones?' Then suddenly wham, wham, wham, wham! It was brilliant."
Dollard, Mathieson, Harness, Cottrell-Boyce, Bartlett and Munro all contributed to the most recent run of episodes, Doctor Who series 10 – available as a boxset on DVD and Blu-ray from Monday, November 13.
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