Simon Ashdown
Simon Ashdown is a British television writer, best known as being a BAFTA award-winning EastEnders writer.
The son of politician Paddy Ashdown, he was raised in Britain and Hong Kong.
Simon has written for EastEnders for around ten years, and was involved in writing storylines for the Slater family. He along with other writers actually wrote the characters around the actors themselves, rather than the other way around. He wrote a special television episode of EastEnders focusing on Ricky and Bianca. He is currently EastEnders story consultant, in which he created the role of Max Branning and developed the Stacey Slater / Max affair storyline, and the death of the show's matriach Pauline Fowler in Christmas 2006.
Having written for the BBC1 medical drama Casualty, more recently, he is becoming known as one of two writers of Funland (the other being Jeremy Dyson of The League of Gentlemen), a television series that first aired on Sunday 23rd October 2005 on digital channel BBC Three. Even before the first episode, it was already being billed as the next Little Britain in terms of success and it has been described as an innovative comedy.