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 was mentioned (though not seen) when the Brigadier thinks the Third Doctor has gone into a coma. (DW: Planet of the Spiders)

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. After the Doctor's third regeneration, Sullivan is called in to attend him, and ends up travelling aboard the the Doctor's TARDIS with his fourth incarnation and Sarah Jane Smith for several subsequent adventures.(DW: Robot)

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. He called Sarah Jane Old Thing several times when he encountered a Sontaran. (DW: The Sontaran Experiment)

In Harry's last trip in the Doctor's TARDIS he encountered the Zygons and the Loch Ness Monster. He decided to go home to London by train not TARDIS. (DW: Terror of the Zygons )

He did, however, meet the Doctor again in the Android Invasion (DW: The Android Invasion)

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 novelisations Doctor Who and the Ark in Space and Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, putting him in the unique position of adapting two stories in which he himself acted.

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. A reference to the character is made in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Invasion of the Bane when Sarah Jane considers Harry as a possible name for her adopted son, Luke Smith. It has yet to be established whether Harry Sullivan still lives in the present-day continuity of the revived Doctor Who franchise.

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