Matthew Sweet (writer)

Matthew Sweet is an English journalist, broadcaster, author, and cultural historian. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he has been interviewed on many documentaries about television for the BBC and Channel 4.

Early life
Born in Hull, Sweet received a doctorate from Oxford on Wilkie Collins.

Career
Sweet was among the contributors to The Oxford Companion to English Literature and was both film and television critic for The Independent on Sunday.

Sweet's book, Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (2005) is a history of the British film business from the silent days, and includes interviews with surviving figures from the period. A television documentary series was adapted from the book.

Sweet has written other television films and series, including Silent Britain, Checking into History, British Film Forever, The Rules of Film Noir, Truly, Madly, Cheaply!: British B Movies, and A Brief History of Fun. He presented a BBC Radio 4 programme The Philosopher's Arms, a show recorded in front of a live audience in which classic philosophical concerns were explored. He is the host of the BBC Radio 3 programme Sound of Cinema, which is concerned with film scores and their composers, and a regular presenter of Night Waves (now titled Free Thinking) on the same network.

Sweet is a fan of the science fiction television series Doctor Who and has written several Doctor Who audio plays and short stories. He has also presented several documentaries about the series for the DVD range, including Chain Reaction (about The Caves of Androzani) and Nice or Nasty?: The Making of Vengeance on Varos, as well as conducting in-depth interviews with prominent cast and crew members for the Doctor Who: The Collection  Blu-Ray box sets. He also presented the 50th-anniversary retrospective of the series for The Culture Show called Me, You and Doctor Who in 2013. Piers Morgan interviewed him on Good Morning Britain in 2017 about the casting of the first woman to play The Doctor.

Audio dramas

 * Doctor Who: Year of the Pig
 * Doctor Who: The Magic Mousetrap
 * Bernice Summerfield: The Diet of Worms
 * Jago and Litefoot: The Man at the End of the Garden
 * Jago and Litefoot: The Lonely Clock
 * The Voyages of Jago & Litefoot: Voyage to the New World
 * Jago and Litefoot: Return of the Repressed
 * Jago and Litefoot: Maurice

Short stories

 * "The Lampblack Wars" - Short Trips: The History of Christmas
 * "The Earwig Archipelago" - Short Trips: Time Signature