Harry Sullivan

Harry Sullivan
Place of origin:	Earth
Appearances:	Full List of Appearances
Main actor:	[[actor::Ian Marter|Ian Marter]]

Harry Sullivan was a physician in the employ of UNIT. Assigned to take care of the Doctor medically following his regeneration, he travelled with him and Sarah Jane Smith briefly. Later, he would work for NATO.

Profile

Harry was originally a doctor in the Royal Navy, who was attached as medical officer to UNIT.

He is first mentioned (though not seen) in Planet of the Spiders, when the Brigadier thinks the Third Doctor has gone into a coma. The Brigadier calls "Doctor Sullivan" and asks him to come to the Doctor's laboratory, but tells him not to bother when Sergeant Benton wakes the Doctor by offering him a cup of coffee. In the next serial, Robot, after the Doctor's third regeneration, Sullivan is called in to attend him, and ends up travelling aboard the TARDIS with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (played by Elisabeth Sladen) for several subsequent adventures.

Harry is rather old-fashioned and stereotypically English in his attitudes. He often employs slightly archaic language — for example, referring to Sarah affectionately as "old thing". He is nonetheless depicted as possessing great bravery and a "can-do" attitude, adapting well to the many strange situations in which he finds himself. He can, however, also be quite clumsy and unsubtle, leading the Doctor to once declare, in a moment of frustration, that "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!" Nonetheless he is well-liked by the Doctor and Sarah, and has a slightly flirtatious relationship with the latter.

The character was originally devised by the production team as a means of handling any action scenes required in episodes when they had envisioned that the new Doctor would be played by an older actor (Sarah even jokingly compares Harry to James Bond at one point). When forty year-old Tom Baker was cast, however, this was no longer a concern and the decision was taken to write Harry out — something producer Philip Hinchcliffe later admitted was probably a mistake, as Harry was a likeable and popular character who worked well with both of his fellow leads.

Harry's last regular appearance is in the season thirteen opener Terror of the Zygons, which had actually been made at the conclusion of the twelfth production block and held over to start the following season. At the conclusion of this story he chooses to return to London by train rather than by TARDIS with the Doctor and Sarah, who continue their adventures without him. He does, however, reappear two stories later in The Android Invasion, both as the original Harry and an android double. This is the character's final appearance in the programme.

A later production team gave some consideration to bringing Harry Sullivan back for a guest appearance in the 1983 story Mawdryn Undead, part of the programme's twentieth anniversary season. Their first choice was the character of Ian Chesterton, but those plans fell through due to actor William Russell being unavailable. In the end, they decided to use the character of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by Nicholas Courtney) instead. Harry is mentioned in the story, however — the Brigadier tells the Fifth Doctor that he was "seconded to NATO" and was last heard of "doing something 'hush-hush' at Porton Down."

Appearances in other media

After leaving the cast of the programme, Ian Marter went on to pen several novelisations of Doctor Who stories for Target Books, writing an original novel, Harry Sullivan's War for them in 1985. In Harry Sullivan's War, the character has become an MI5 operative. Marter was believed to have been planning a sequel at the time of his tragic death from a diabetic coma the following year.

Marter also wrote the novelisation Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, putting him in the unique position of adapting a story in which he himself appeared.

Between 1994 and 2003, the character of Harry has appeared in several novels from Virgin Publishing and BBC Books. Some of these stories are set in gaps between televised adventures featuring the character, but in several books he has been seen either earlier or later in life.

In the Virgin Missing Adventures novel System Shock (1995) and the BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel Millennium Shock (1999), both by Justin Richards, he is seen during the 1990s as a Deputy Director of MI5. An even later early-21st century Harry has a cameo in the New Adventure Damaged Goods by Russell T. Davies.

The New Adventure Blood Heat (1993) by Jim Mortimore briefly depicts a parallel universe version of Harry serving on a nuclear submarine in a dystopian world ruled by the Silurians, where he manages to save the life of the Seventh Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield.

In David A. McIntee's Past Doctor Adventure The Face of the Enemy (1998) Harry is seen still working for the Royal Navy before his secondment to UNIT, which he first encounters in the novel.

The find your fate-style gamebook The Rebel's Gamble features Harry in an adventure with the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown.

In the Big Finish Productions audio drama UNIT: The Wasting (2005), Commodore Sullivan (who is working with NATO) is called on by the Brigadier for a favour but does not have a speaking part.

Harry's previously unknown younger stepbrother, Will Sullivan (also a medical doctor), appears in the second series of the Sarah Jane Smith (2005-2006) audio plays by Big Finish, voiced by Tom Chadbon. Harry is mentioned by both Will and Sarah, but he is apparently on some secret assignment and neither has seen him for a long time. Will is eventually revealed to be a sleeper agent of a religious cult targeting Sarah, and dies during the course of the series.

Behind the scenes

Although various spinoff media have depicted Harry living into the 21st century, in real life the actor who portrayed him, Ian Marter, died in 1986.