Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma
“And If You Can't Be With the One You Love, Honey …”
It's our first ever guest post on Psychic Paper this week, as the brilliant Dale Smith takes us for a tour around the publishing event of 1986, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma. (Shurely shome mishtake - Ed)
In 1986, I’d been a Doctor Who fan for at least four years and my mother was my school librarian, so as you can imagine I had quite the social life. In a brief window in my packed summer holiday schedule, she took me to a nondescript tower block on the edge of Leicester city centre and made a deal with me. Inside, was the organisation that provided library books to schools: if I would help her pick some new books that people my age might like, she would let me borrow any books I wanted, so long as I returned them before the holidays were over. I still dream of that room: books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, in piles on the floor. Brand new books, and I could pick as many as I wanted.
Obviously the first thing I did was look for Target novelisations, but instead I found a book with a familiar logo but an unfamiliar title: Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma. Probably because of the sheer length of that title, the words “Doctor Who” don’t even appear on the spine: just what was this strange book?
The story that author Tony Attwood told was that - off the back of two Blake’s 7 books published by Target - he had been invited to a convention that Mark Strickson was attending. Over a few drinks, Strickson convinced Attwood that someone really should write a book starring Turlough, who had just left our television screens in Planet of Fire. Being reminded of the conversation the next morning, Attwood realised it was a good idea and promptly pitched The Companions of Doctor Who to Christine Donougher, the editor of the Doctor Who novelisations for WH Allen, with what became Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma as the first book of many.1
Incoming Target Books editor Nigel Robinson remembers it slightly differently:2 coming into a publisher who released twelve novelisations of Doctor Who stories a year when the BBC had just announced a desire to stop making the show altogether, the future of the range was already a pressing concern. Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma had been commissioned as a standalone book3 without the Doctor, as producer John Nathan-Turner objected to Target creating original Doctor Who novels whilst there were still un-novelised television stories. But the idea of focusing on the companions instead seemed like a compromise, and JNT was happy for Robinson to start planning a new range. Robinson’s obvious choice for the next book was author and actor Ian Marter, who has played companion Harry Sullivan in 1975 and was a regular contributor to multiple W H Allen ranges, not just Doctor Who. Marter pitched a story called Harry Sullivan’s War of Nerves: the book would have ended with Harry’s untimely death until Robinson expressed an interest in seeing a sequel to what became simply Harry Sullivan’s War.
Finding out that their characters might have an afterlife, actors Janet Fielding and Richard Franklin both pitched novels4 and Robinson tentatively sounded out Marter about a Sarah Jane novel and Nicholas Courtney about a Brigadier novel.5
But the process of getting Turlough back into print wasn’t an easy one. Target’s agreement with the BBC was only for producing the novelisations, and anything else had to be individually negotiated. On top of that, the copyright situation was … murky.
Most of Doctor Who was written by freelance writers on a contract with a “separation of rights” clause that meant writers retained the copyright of anything in the script that wasn’t created by someone else or briefed to them by BBC staff: hence Haisman and Lincoln retaining copyright of the initially one-off character of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, and receiving a fee for every television serial in which he appeared subsequently. Various production teams were well aware of this issue, and so when it came time to deliberately create a new companion for the show the usual practice was for the Script Editor and/or Producer to “create” the character6 and hand them over to the writer of their first story so that the BBC owned the copyright.
But it wasn’t always clear cut: sometimes a character or actor unexpectedly impressed and was promoted to companion7 or sometimes the lines of demarcation just got blurred. Turlough fell into No-Man’s Land: as the alien exiled to Earth who appears in Mawdryn Undead, he was created by the production team without any detailed history; his background as a scion of the planet Trion exiled by counter-revolutionaries, was created by Grimwade for Planet of Fire and it’s ambiguous whether that history is owned by the BBC along with the rest of the character.
It took something like a year for all the squabbles around publishing the Turlough book to be ironed out, leaving Attwood with two months to actually write it. Even then, when the novel was announced, Robinson received telephone calls from JNT and Peter Grimwade’s agent stating that Grimwade owned the copyright to Turlough.8 After all that, the final sales of the book weren’t spectacular: Doctor Who had just broken America and the novelisations had received a healthy boost in sales as a result, which Robinson suspects provided an unreasonable benchmark.9 With the golden goose still laying eggs, WH Allen’s sales team decided that The Companions of Doctor Who were more effort than the return warranted, and plans for future books were shelved.10
Tony Attwood, who had once claimed plans to write Companions books for Nyssa and even Adric 11 wasn’t asked to contribute anything else to Target Books and went off to set up his own small press, publishing self-penned educational books. Nigel Robinson eventually moved on from Target Books, only to be invited to write one of the first in a new range of original Doctor Who stories featuring the Doctor and Ace: with Doctor Who no longer on TV and even relatively obscure audio plays like Doctor Who and The Pescatons having been novelised, JNT relaxed his objections and let the Virgin New Adventures be born.
The Companions of Doctor Who are seen now as an oddity, a potential what-if of some missed stories by old favourites but ultimately, probably deservedly, gone. But they were more than that: they were the start of the New Adventures, the first stumbling attempts to keep Doctor Who alive in print when it was clear that its days on screen were numbered. Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma was arguably the first full length original Doctor Who novel ever published, and without the constraints that trying to be a prose recreation of a Saturday night tea-time family story, Attwood jumped straight to a number of tropes that would be familiar to readers of the New Adventures: an admission that sex exists; a smattering of the author’s own theories about the unanswered questions of Doctor Who; and an engagement of the politics of the age.12
By dint of being the first, The Companions of Doctor Who hit a number of obstacles that no-one had seen beforehand, and that eventually brought them down. But it also gave Peter Darvill-Evans an idea of the terrain ahead when he tried to succeed where others had failed: he negotiated a licence that would let him make the books he wanted to without having to renegotiate each release, and he licensed two characters and a TARDIS that the BBC knew without a doubt they owned. Perhaps that’s why he asked Nigel Robinson to write one of the first novels of the range: as an acknowledgement and a thank you for his hard work, and the ground he’d broken for Doctor Who books.
Dale Smith's Black Archive on The Greatest Show In The Galaxy is available now.
1 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/rtp365
2 Author’s email correspondence, 2024
3 Of the kind that Target occasionally produced; mostly non-fiction - programme guides, quiz books or (at the urging of John Nathan Turner) cook books.
4 Fielding was more successful than Franklin, who suggested an adaptation of his UNIT Recalled stage play that was rejected. Franklin would later write The Killing Stone, featuring Yates.
5 Much of the focus on The Companions of Doctor Who since they were shelved was which books we might have got, so for clarity I will point out there were no books except those that were published that were beyond the early discussions stage and at least some of the books that have been claimed as cancelled along with the range had already been rejected, and at least some of the others mooted wouldn’t have made it all the way to print.
6 Sometimes this was little more than picking a name and inventing a bit of backstory that would never be relevant, such as JNT’s creation of Melanie “Mel” Bush
7 Nyssa, for example.
8 Robinson wasn’t sure that JNT knew this for certain or if he was just covering his own back by passing on the writers’ objection. However, rather than get into a legal battle, he offered to publish an original novel by Grimwade as compensation: the novel - Robot - took the opportunity to poke some fun at certain people within Doctor Who.
9 It should be noted that years later, the Virgin New Adventures also achieved only modest sales, but were seen as a success because they did it predictably. The Companions of Doctor Who may have proved equally as consistent.
10 The branding was used a year later when statistical oddity K9 & Company was novelised, but it didn’t reflect a desire to try again with the range.
11 No pitches for these were made, and Robinson suspects that Attwood didn’t have serious intentions to write them.
12 The main thrust of the story is the threat of nuclear destruction and an ongoing debate between its two main characters on whether it is better to protest and be silenced or try to change the system from within. And famously the main antagonist is an attempted semordnilap of Thatcher, the divisive Prime Minister of the UK when the book was published. This seems to have been done for no reason other than the amusement of Tony Attwood, which may be the most teenage thing a 39-year-old man has ever done in the world of Doctor Who.