Born: 1943 (as Christopher Franklin Boucher)
Died: 11th December 2022 (aged 79 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1977

Chris Boucher was born in Maldon, Essex. He joined Calor Gas as a management trainee, and his employers supported his completion of a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Essex. In 1966, Boucher married Lynda Macklin. When the first of three sons was born in 1969, Boucher decided to supplement his income through writing. He started contributing jokes to Braden's Week, and then wrote for other comedy series such as Dave Allen At Large and Romany Jones. In early 1975, Boucher began seeking writing opportunities beyond comedy. A lifelong fan of science-fiction, he submitted a storyline entitled “The Silent Scream” to the Doctor Who production office. Although producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes found it unusable, they saw enough potential in Boucher's writing to warrant further discussions.

Over several months, the three men worked together to develop The Face Of Evil. It featured Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and aired at the start of 1977. Here Boucher introduced a clever savage named Leela, who was so popular with Hinchcliffe and Holmes that they decided to keep her as an ongoing companion. As such, Boucher was also commissioned to write the subsequent adventure, The Robots Of Death. The following season, he contributed Image Of The Fendahl. Boucher was discussing a fourth Doctor Who serial when he was offered the chance to become the script editor of Blake's 7, the BBC's new, more adult science-fiction drama. He remained with the show throughout its four-season run and wrote nine episodes, including the 1981 series finale.

Boucher then became the script editor of crime dramas Shoestring, Juliet Bravo, Bergerac and The Bill, contributing scripts to each of them. He made contact with the Doctor Who production office again in 1984 with a proposal entitled “The Pool Of Death”, but nothing came of it. Boucher finally returned to science-fiction in 1987 with his own creation, Star Cops, only to find himself frequently at odds with its producer; it was cancelled after a single season. Boucher turned to prose during the Nineties, first producing five Star Cops novelisations. BBC Books later published a sequence of four new adventures for the Fourth Doctor and Leela, starting with Last Man Running in 1998. In 2002, he wrote an audio drama called Death's Head for Magic Bullet Productions. It was part of the Kaldor City range which drew upon elements of both The Robots Of Death and Blake's 7. Boucher died on December 11th, 2022.