Matthew Sweet

Matthew Sweet is an English journalist, broadcaster, author, and cultural historian.

Early life Sweet received a doctorate from the University of Oxford on Wilkie Collins.

Career Sweet was among the contributors to The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He has also been a director's assistant at the Royal Shakespeare Company, a columnist for The Big Issue and a film critic for The Independent on Sunday.

Sweet's book Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (2005) is a history of Shepperton Studios and 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. From 2013 until October 2025 he was the presenter of the BBC Radio 3 programme Sound of Cinema, which is concerned with film scores and their composers, He is also a regular presenter of Night Waves (now titled Free Thinking) on the same network.

Sweet has been interviewed on many documentaries about television for the BBC, Channel 4 and 5. He 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.

In 2024, Sweet was announced as a co-writer of the crime drama television series Bookish with Mark Gatiss.