Ian Geoffrey Levine (born 22 June 1953)^[1] is a British songwriter, producer, and DJ. A moderniser of Northern soul music in the UK, and a developer of the style of hi-NRG, he has written and produced records with sales totalling over 40 million.^[2] Levine is known as a fan of the long-running television show Doctor Who.^[3]

Levine was born into a Jewish family; his parents owned and ran the "Lemon Tree" complex in Blackpool, including its casino and nightclub.^[4] Levine is openly gay.^[5] He suffered a major stroke in July 2014, leaving him with severely limited movement on the left side of his body.^[6][7]

Levine is well known as a fan of the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who.^[3] Levine was, in part, responsible for the return of a number of missing episodes of the show to the BBC's archives. He also retained many off-air recordings. Levine was consulted by members of the production team about continuity for a while during the mid-1980s.^[16][17]

In 1985, when the BBC announced that the series would be placed on an eighteen-month hiatus, and the show's cancellation was widely rumoured, Levine was heavily involved with the media protest covertly organised by series producer John Nathan-Turner. He appeared on the ITN's News at One^[18] arguing against the decision, and together with the series' production manager Gary Downie gathered a group of actors from the series to record "Doctor in Distress".^[19] The single was universally panned.^[20]

Levine also organised a private project to recreate the incomplete 1979 Doctor Who story Shada with animation and newly recorded dialogue from many surviving cast members. Levine had hoped that the project would be released on DVD, but the commissioning editor of the Doctor Who DVD range did not use Levine's animation on the DVD release of the story.^[21][22] The completed Levine version appeared on torrent sites almost two years later, on 12 October 2013.

Levine has been responsible for producing a number of extras on the Doctor Who DVD releases: the documentaries Over the Edge and Inside the Spaceship were included on the 3-disc set The Beginning, while Genesis of a Classic appeared on the release for Genesis of the Daleks. He also co-wrote the theme music for K-9 and Company, a pilot for a proposed Doctor Who spin-off series featuring the robotic dog and Sarah Jane Smith.

In October 2017, Levine received criticism for his negative reaction to the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, with some deeming his comments sexist.^[23][24] In response, Levine claimed he had quit Doctor Who fandom^[25] though he later set up a Facebook group Ian Levine's Doctor Who Group.^[26]

Levine owned the only complete set of DC Comics in the world, completed in 2004,^[27] with at least one copy of each DC comic book sold at retail from 1935 to 2015. His collection was photographed in D.C.'s own official history book.^[28] He later sold the collection. Starting November 2023, the entire collection was auctioned off by PBA Galleries^[29] in Berkeley, California.^{[1][30][31][32]}

Levine started working on his family tree^{[citation needed]} after his grandmother Golda Cooklin died on February 18, 1995. In July 1996, they organised a Cooklin Reunion in London for 400 people, covered on the BBC Evening News. They discoved that Cooklin was an anglicised version of Kuklya, from Latvia.^[33] In July 2017, they organised a huge Kuklya Reunion in Watford for 500 people from all over the world which was covered in a five-minute piece on the BBC One's The One Show^[34][35] and a two-page centre spread of the Sunday Mirror.^[36][37] In October 2018, a group of 100 family members gathered in Rezekne in Latvia to lay a memorial stone to the family, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust.^[38] In September 2019, there was another reunion in Haifa in Israel, for 150 family members.^[39][40] In 2016, Levine made a four disc, eighteen hour documentary on DVD called The Cooklins Anthology, distributing one thousand copies for the entire family. In February 2017, Levine wrote and created a 608-page book, The Kukla Chronicles, again distributing one thousand copies for the entire family. Levine is distantly related to Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, and Bob Dylan, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth Ephraim Mirvis, the celebrated writer Saul Bellow and the film director Harold Ramis. He further published a hardback book on his family tree, Kuklya Encyclopedia (2018 full-colour pages, endorsed by Chief Rabbi Mirvis), accompanied by the Kuklya Family Tree (1086 p.), and a 1154 p. fictional-based-on-fact novel Kukla, all three books covered in Manchester Jewish Telegraph.^{[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]}