Thomas Duncan-Watt

Thomas Duncan-Watt is an Australian screenwriter and playwright. He has won three AWGIE awards for his screenplays from five nominations. His work on UK series Dennis & Gnasher earned the series its first BAFTA nomination. In 2017, he was one of the mentors at the Arts/Screen Hackathon, along with Sarah Houbolt and others, which was organized by Australia Council for the Arts. In 2021, he won the Johne Hinde Award for Excellence in Science Fiction Writing for his work on the series Space Nova. In 2022 his original series The Eerie Chapters of Chhaya was announced as the winner of the Kindred co-production initiative between the ABC and CBC networks.

TV writing

Duncan-Watt began his career as a writer on Australian comedy series Good News Week. His series credits include Dennis & Gnasher, Pirate Express, Winston Steinburger & Sir Dudley Ding-Dong, Beat Bugs, Alien TV. In 2018, Duncan-Watt was brought on as one of the writers on sci-fi action series Space Nova, for which he also wrote the pilot. The series was subsequently nominated for two AWGIE awards, with Duncan-Watt winning the award for his episode Ghost Station. In 2019, Duncan-Watt, and collaborator, Suren Perera won Best in Show at the Asian Animation Summit in Seoul for their 'original concept', Escape from Pirate Asylum. Duncan-Watt and Perera were also the first international winners of the Ottawa Animation Festival’s ‘Pitch THIS’ competition, for their original series, Owl & Cloud.

Plays

Duncan-Watt is the co-creator of two comedy plays, Thank You For Being a Friend and That Golden Girls Show: A Puppet Parody, both of which use Muppets-style puppets to parody the 1980s television series The Golden Girls. Thank You For Being a Friend toured Canada, where it won ‘Best Independent Theatre Production’ at the Broadway World Awards. That Golden Girls Show: A Puppet Parody debuted in 2016 Off-Broadway. The show commenced a US tour in 2019.

In 2016, Duncan-Watt, with the producers of the show Thank You For Being a Friend, Neil Gooding and Matthew Henderson, sued long-term collaborator Jonathan Rockefeller and his companies in New York state court over his puppet parody "That Golden Girls Show!";alleged breaches of the license agreement, fraud, tortious interference with contract, defamation, other claims. The complaint by Duncan-Watt and his producers claimed that Rockefeller "stole the show"; deprived them of royalties; and harassed them. The suit was only partially dismissed in 2018 with presiding Judge Justice Andrea Masley allowing several complaints against Rockefeller to proceed.

In a separate case in Australia filed in 2017, Rockefeller and his company sued Duncan-Watt for defamation. In 2020, the Federal Court of Australia dismissed Rockefeller's defamation claims. In his ruling, Justice Thomas Thawley concluded that the Gooding's post was not defamatory because it was "substantially true" that Rockefeller had stolen the show from Duncan-Watt.