Exactly who wrote a story can sometimes be a matter of debate. Or there could be some legal issue that stops the true author from being named. Or it could just be that they don't want their name involved with the project. In those cases, a pseudonym has to be used.
The Writers' Guild of America used to have an official pseudonym, 'Alan Smithee', that was to be used in the event of a film director wanting to take their name off of a film (generally because they were dissatisfied with the final production and did not have enough creative control over the project). The BBC had a similar name to be used in the event of a contested writing credit, 'David Agnew'. There are a couple of known uses of this name, and the last two are what makes the name particularly notable.
Mr Agnew made his screenwriting debut on a Play for Today entitled "Hell's Angel", which was originally broadcast on 21 January 1971. It was about an adopted child and the cast included Michael Kitchen and Angharad Rees. The writer's real name was Anthony Read, although why the pseudonym was used I couldn't find out for sure. Mr Read would use the name again on an edition of BBC2 Playhouse, "Diana", which concerned the titular 13-year-old's father becoming dependent on her when her mother walked out and was directed by Alan Clarke.
The pen name's third use was in an episode of Target, as originally broadcast on 16 September 1977. This time Agnew was covering for Roger Marshall, who had written a two-hour screenplay which had to be cut down to half that length, leading Marshall to walk out before the rewrites could happen and leaving director Douglas Camfield to, in Marshall's words, 'butcher' it. The 30 September 1977 edition of the show was also credited to Agnew according to the Radio Times, although IMDB states that the writers were Doctor Who mainstays Bob Baker and Dave Martin; I don't know why they would have had their names taken off the episode (they wrote several other episodes of the show and were credited with their real names there).
What's interesting is that the producer of Target, Philip Hinchcliffe, had previously been the producer on Doctor Who, serving with script editor Robert Holmes. After a controversy about the show becoming too 'horrific' for children, Hinchcliffe was moved to Target and a new producer, Graham Williams, was brought in (Williams having been originally developing Target before the decision was made to move Hinchcliffe from Who - the two producers effectively swapped jobs). Holmes departed a short while after, and was replaced by a new script editor by the name of... Anthony Read.
The other two known uses of 'David Agnew' are both Doctor Who serials. The first was 1978's The Invasion of Time, which was written at the end of the season when time and money had run out, and another story (The Killers of the Dark, sometimes referred to as The Killer Cats of Gen Singh) was deemed unusable and scrapped due to being far too ambitious to ever realise on the show's budget (featuring such set pieces as a stadium full of cat people). The result was that Graham Williams and Anthony Read both had to lock themselves away for two weeks and quickly write a replacement (it was a 6-part serial, so no mean feat). However, the producer and script editor were prohibited from being credited as writers under BBC guidelines, so out came the pseudonym. Two seasons later, City of Death was a similar story - David Fisher was unable to perform the rewrites required, and new script editor Douglas Adams had to sit down with Williams and perform a complete rewrite. The resulting script couldn't be credited to Fisher because it was so different to what he'd written, but of course it couldn't be credited to Adams and Williams instead... so enter Mr Agnew.
Now, here's a thing that maybe nobody has ever noticed before. Most stories about the productions of those two Who tales describe David Agnew as being a standard in-house name regularly used by the BBC. And yet all known cases of its use are somehow linked to Doctor Who! Unless there are examples I've missed, could it be that it was a name created by Anthony Read, and was recycled by Hinchcliffe who'd somehow heard of it from him, and then later by Graham Williams when he remembered it from the script they'd worked on together? Or is it just a big coincidence?
Perhaps the most telling thing is that there were other cases on Who where the writer had to be credited under a pseudonym, and they didn't use the Agnew name - infamously, Terrance Dicks objected to the rewrites Robert Holmes performed on his 1976 story The Brain of Morbius and requested the serial go out under "some bland pseudonym". The story was duly transmitted bearing the legend 'by Robin Bland'. If Agnew was the BBC's go-to alias, wouldn't it have appeared somewhere else? Maybe, just maybe, the name was Anthony Read's creation?
Thanks to Lee Carey for pointing out to me that Graham Williams was originally working on Target before moving to Doctor Who!
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