Born: 18th July 1926
Died: 24th October 2005 (aged 79 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1970-1974

Robert Sloman was born in Oldham, Lancashire but raised in Plymouth, Devon. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1944 and, after demobilisation, attended Exeter University, where he became involved in amateur dramatics. This led to work as an actor and a stage manager in repertory theatre at Newton Poppleford. There he met actress Mary Saffery, whom he married in 1954; they would have a son, Guy, and a daughter, Carol. Unhappy with the plays being performed by his company, Sloman decided to write his own, and continued even after taking up a new job with the Sunday Times circulation department.

Sloman soon formed a writing partnership with Laurence Dobie, a Sunday Times colleague. Their play The Gold Hunter was adapted for television in 1961. Another, called The Tinker, was made into the 1962 movie The Wild And The Willing, which provided John Hurt with his first film role. Sloman and Dobie's Dynamite became a production for German television as Dynamit in 1969. The pair also wrote for radio. Meanwhile, Sloman had met Barry Letts through their respective wives. When Letts became the producer of Doctor Who, he suggested that they collaborate on a serial. Sloman agreed, on the condition that a pseudonym be employed to avoid giving the appearance that his partnership with Dobie had ended. The result was 1971's The Daemons; the much-loved adventure was credited to “Guy Leopold”, an alias drawn in part from the name of Sloman's son.

Sloman wrote three more Doctor Who stories over the next three years, each time working in tandem with Letts, albeit now under his real name. The Atlantis-set The Time Monster was a replacement for an earlier storyline, “The Daleks In London”. In The Green Death, Sloman helped write out companion Jo Grant. Lastly, Planet Of The Spiders was the final adventure for Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor, who had featured in all of Sloman's scripts for the show. With Letts moving on from Doctor Who, Sloman decided to wind up his involvement as well; he offered one further submission in November 1974, which went unproduced. Around the same time, Sloman left the Sunday Times, and became the wholesale distributor for all the Sunday newspapers. He would never earn another screen credit after his work on Doctor Who; indeed, he ceased writing professionally, which he found increasingly taxing. Sailing became increasingly important to Sloman, especially following his retirement from the newspaper business, when he began living part-time in Spain. Sloman died on October 24th, 2005.