Monday, 23 March 2015

Great Unreleased Doctor Who Merchandise - part ten



This week marks ten years since the BBC decided that Doctor Who wasn't a crappy old TV show it was still highly embarrassed by so to celebrate, here's a selection of titles that weren't in the first vanguard of merchandise in 2005.

Looking through their back catalogue of books that had been released based on the series, someone at the BBC saw the short-lived Target range, 'The Companions of Doctor Who'. These were a handful of books that were based on the lives of some of the Doctor's most popular travelling companions. Three were published including 'Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma' by Tony Attwood and 'Harry Sullivan's War' by Ian Marter.

The new books took these as their templates and applied them to two of the characters from the new series. 

Although there is no record of this, the covers seem to suggest that the contents of the novels were simply edited versions of the original ones with the characters of Turlough and Harry Sullivan replaced with Jackie Tyler and Captain Jack respectively. 

They certainly weren't new novels as Ian Marter was uncontactable during rights negotiations for the books on account of his death some twenty or so years earlier.

Alas, it wasn't until after contracts had been signed and covers designed that someone pointed out it how unsuccessful the original range was and decided to call it a day.

Here's the covers anyway...