Bill Strutton was born on 23 February 1923, in South Australia. Although he was a highly intelligent student, he abandoned higher education to work as a clerk in Adelaide. He joined the Australian forces in 1939, at the start of the Second World War, but was captured by German soldiers during the fall of Crete. For the next four years he was a prisoner in Stalag VII; during this time he learnt a number of languages and edited the camp newspaper. Following his release at the end of the war, Strutton moved into journalism, working for the Australian Consolidated Press. His first novel, A Jury of Angels, was published in 1957 and this was followed by The Secret Invaders (1958) and The Island of Terrible Friends (1961). During this time he began to write for British television, contributing scripts to the film series Ivanhoe, Top Secret, The Avengers and The Saint. Until the early Seventies he also wrote for Dr Finlay's Casebook, The Man in Room 17, Strange Report and the TV version of Paul Temple. Strutton's six scripts for the Doctor Who serial 'The Web Planet' came in 1965. He claimed that his inspiration for the tale came from a childhood encounter with two bull-ants in Australia, and he credited his wife with inventing the name 'Zarbi'. In 1970 he was commissioned to write a four-part story for Doctor Who, entitled The Mega. The commission went no further and Bill Strutton retired from writing in the mid-1970s. Having lived for a time in Surrey, he suffered a heart attack in 1978, and later moved to Palafrugell, Catalonia. He died there, aged 80, on 23 November 2003, forty years to the day since the original transmission of Doctor Who.