Helen Raynor (born March 1972) is aWelshtelevision screenwriter andscript editor fromSwansea. She is best known for her work on the relaunched BBC science fiction seriesDoctor Who. She previously worked as atheatre director. Besides television episodes, Raynor has written theatrical plays, radio plays, and short stories.
Raynor was born inSwansea and attendedTrinity Hall, Cambridge. Her initial career was in thetheatre, where she worked for eight years as adirector and assistant director for theBush Theatre, theRoyal Shakespeare Company,Clwyd Theatr Cymru, theRoyal Opera House,English Touring Opera andOpera North. Her RSC Fringe production ofSoho byRebecca Lenkiewicz won a Fringe First at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival.[1]
She also wroteCake, a fifteen-minute television short forBBC One'sBrief Encounters strand shown in May 2006, and for radio, a sixty-minute playRunning Away with the Hairdresser forBBC Radio 4, broadcast in June 2005.[2] For the theatre she has writtenWaterloo Exit Two, a short play presented as part ofPaines Plough's Wild Lunch season at theYoung Vic in 2003, and contributed toCardiff based Dirty Protest's series of rehearsed readings.
Switching to television, from 2002 to 2004 she was a script editor on BBC One's daytime medicalsoap operaDoctors. Raynor's TV writing career would take off when she was working as a script editor onDoctor Who. In addition to her production duties for the show, Raynor wrote the two-part story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks" for thethird series, in which theDaleks invadeNew York City in 1930. She was the first woman to write for the new series, as well as the first woman to write a Dalek story inDoctor Who's history.[3] She then wrote another two-part story forseries 4,[4] entitled "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky" in which the Doctor's old enemies theSontarans, last seen in 1985's "The Two Doctors", make their re-imagined return.UNIT andMartha Jones also returned in these episodes. She also continued her script editing duties in the same series, working on theSteven Moffat two-part story "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" andRussell T Davies' "Midnight".
Outside broadcasting, she has written forDoctor Who Magazine and compiled the script book ofDoctor Who series 1 forBBC Books. She also provides anaudio commentary for theDoctor Who episode "World War Three" in the 2005 season DVD boxset, released in November 2005. She later provided a second audio commentaries for theseries 2 episode "School Reunion" and series three's "Daleks in Manhattan". Raynor also contributed the story "All of Beyond" to theDoctor Who short story collectionShort Trips: Snapshots, published in June 2007. This was her first professionally published work ofprose.
Raynor wrote two episodes forTorchwood, "Ghost Machine" for Series 1, and "To the Last Man" for Series 2. Both make extensive use of locations in the city ofCardiff where she lives.[5]
Raynor, with her partnerGary Owen, co-created and wroteBaker Boys, aBBC Wales drama about a recession-hit small town in the south Wales Valleys.Baker Boys ran for two series in 2011/2012.Russell T. Davies acted as creative consultant, and the show starredEve Myles,Matthew Gravelle,Mark Lewis Jones,Amy Morgan,Steven Meo,Boyd Clack andCara Readle. In 2015 she was lead writer on ITV's period dramaMr Selfridge, starringJeremy Piven, after joining the writers' room for series 3 in 2014. In 2020 she wrote an episode ofCall the Midwife.
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