Biography

Sarah Dollard was born in Australia on 21st January 1980 and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of McKinnon. As a child, she followed daily reruns of Doctor Who on ABC, and this interest in television continued into her teens. She had soon amassed a collection of off-air videotapes of her favourite shows, which she would watch and rewatch religiously. “Which, it turns out,” she recalled to Insha Fitzpatrick in 2017, “is actually an ideal way to absorb the craft of story structure, scene structure, joke structure, the lot.”

Dollard earned a diploma in screenwriting at Melbourne’s RMIT University. Her first job following this was in the story room of Australian soap opera Neighbours, where she worked mainly as a storyliner and script editor. She left for the United Kingdom in 2008, partly inspired by the revived Doctor Who, and was soon in the same ballpark, script editing Merlin (2009) and Primeval (2010-11).

In 2013, Dollard wrote an episode of Being Human, the horror comedy-drama created by Toby Whithouse. She worked with Whithouse again on serious drama fare The Game (2014). The same year, Dollard developed her own Welsh language romcom, Cara Fi (translation: Love Me), which was broadcast on S4C. It concerned a Welsh village running low on single women, forcing men to advertise themselves on milk cartons.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Doctor Who finally came knocking in 2015, and débutante Sarah was faced with the daunting task of writing Clara Oswald out of the show. To begin with, she had grand plans for her script, Face the Raven – as she recalled in 2016, “The original pre-credits scene was actually a scene in Jane Austen’s England, with Jane and Clara and the Doctor sitting around the table playing poker with a couple of other characters.” Despite losing this beat in the early stages of development, the result was one of the most praised episodes of the Peter Capaldi era.

Dollard’s second, and to date final, Doctor Who episode was 2017’s Thin Ice. This was similarly well-received, with the Radio Times’ Patrick Mulkern applauding how Dollard “wipes away a dusting of frost to give us a window into the Doctor’s soul and examines his moral code.” Sarah herself hasn’t ruled out a return to the show, saying “it would be an honour to (...) write for Thirteen.”

Recent work for Dollard has been in the sphere of costume drama, with credits including The White Princess (2017), A Discovery of Witches (2018) and Bridgerton (2020).

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

◤━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◥

Bibliography

The Complete History Volume 86

Geek’d-Out! (interview)

Whovian Feminism (interview)

Wikipedia

RadioTimes (review)

Further Reading

Face the Raven full script

Thin Ice full script

◣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◢

:arrow_down: PHOTO GALLERY :arrow_down:

Kathryn Prescott was the main guest star of Dollard’s episode of Being Human, having made her name in the teen drama Skins (2007-13)

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Tom Hughes in the BBC cold war thriller The Game (2014), on which Dollard worked

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Sarah with Maisie Williams, star of Face the Raven

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Dollard on set with Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Dollard at the 2017 Gallifrey One convention, with a Face the Raven inspired cosplayer on the left, and in costume herself as Donna Noble on the right

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Dollard was a writer and producer of Netflix’s highly successful Bridgerton

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀