Helen Raynor

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Helen Raynor (born March 27, 1972) is a British television and theatre writer and script editor. Since 2004 she has been one of the two script editors of the revived version of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who. Her own writing work includes Cake, a fifteen-minute television short for BBC One's Brief Encounters strand shown in May 2006, and a sixty-minute play Running Away With the Hairdresser for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in June 2005. For the theatre she has written Waterloo Exit Two, a short play presented as part of Paines Plough's Wild Lunch season at the Young Vic in 2003.

Raynor attended Trinity Hall at Cambridge University. Her initial career was in the theatre, where she worked for eight years as a director and assistant director for the Bush Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, the Royal Opera House and Opera North. Her RSC Fringe production of Soho by Rebecca Lenkiewicz won a Fringe First at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival. Switching to television, from 2002 to 2004 she was a script editor on BBC One's daytime medical soap opera Doctors.

Outside of broadcasting, she has written for Doctor Who Magazine and compiled the script book of the 2005 season of Doctor Who for BBC Books. She also provides an audio commentary for the Doctor Who episode World War Three in the 2005 season DVD boxset, released in November 2005. She later provided a second audio commentary for the series two episode School Reunion in April 2006, this time for free download from the bbc.co.uk Doctor Who website.

In Doctor Who Magazine issue 366 (dated March 1, 2006), it was announced that Raynor would also be script editing the Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood, also produced by BBC Wales. She went on to write one episode of the series herself, with the instalment — entitled Ghost Machine — broadcast on October 29, 2006.

She has written a two-part story (the first part of which is titled Daleks in Manhattan) for the 2007 series of Doctor Who in which the Daleks invade 1930s New York. She is the first woman to write for the new series, as well as the first woman to write a Dalek story in Doctor Who's history.

In 2007, she contributed to the Doctor Who short-story collection Short Trips: Snapshots.