Born: 6th August 1980 (as Thomas Anthony MacRae)
Episodes Broadcast: 2006, 2011

Tom MacRae was born in Weedon Bec, Northamptonshire and became an avid Doctor Who viewer during the late Eighties, when Sylvester McCoy was playing the Seventh Doctor. He started acting while at school, and worked as a magician for children's birthday parties. After graduation, MacRae spent a couple of years studying filmmaking at Daventry Tertiary College before he began pursuing an anthropology major at Goldsmiths, University of London. Around the turn of the century, he began working entry-level positions in television production, which provided him with the opportunity to get his own scripts in front of potential producers. The result was the 2002 broadcast of School's Out for Channel 4's Off Limits drama strand, which earned MacRae a BAFTA nomination. He subsequently wrote for programmes such as Mayo.

MacRae had struck up a friendship with Russell T Davies after they met at a book signing in 1999, and Davies had given him feedback on his early screenplays. As such, MacRae was a natural candidate to write for Doctor Who when Davies became its executive producer -- in fact, he had already borrowed his friend's surname for a character in 2005's The Long Game. MacRae initially contributed 2006's Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel, which reintroduced the Cybermen as parallel-universe nemeses of David Tennant's Tenth Doctor. A second script for the Tenth Doctor, the reality television spoof “Century House”, was ultimately dropped from the 2008 season due to its tonal similarity to another story. Meanwhile, MacRae was also providing scripts for shows like Agatha Christie's Marple and Lewis.

In 2006 MacRae published Opposite, the first of several children's books

MacRae's writing interests were not solely confined to television and, in 2006, he published Opposite, the first of several children's books. He also contributed short stories to both the 2007 and 2008 editions of Panini Publishing's Doctor Who Storybook. In 2011, MacRae conceived The Crash Of The Elysium, an interactive Doctor Who show. The same year, he created the sitcom Threesome and returned to televised Doctor Who with the emotionally-fraught The Girl Who Waited for Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor. He also scripted Up All Night, a prelude to the same year's Closing Time which appeared on the season's DVD release.

The year 2017 was something of a watershed for MacRae, and included his marriage to his boyfriend, Dannie Pye. The couple relocated to Los Angeles so that MacRae could take up a co-producing job on the supernatural drama The Librarians; he would also write four episodes of the series. The same year, the stage musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie debuted, featuring MacRae's book and song lyrics. It was so successful that it soon transferred to the West End; MacRae's BAFTA-nominated movie adaptation followed in 2021.