Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Terminus

Or, One Big Bang Deserves Another. 4-part story for season 20. Lost and infected on a quarantine ship, Nyssa’s trail leads the Doctor to a mystery that lies at the heart of the known universe.

As with Warriors’ Gate, the scripts were novelised by their author and published under the pseudonym John Lydecker by W H Allen and Target Books.

Halfway through the run of Terminus, the Radio Times published a letter from the British Leprosy Association, in effect complaining that we were giving leprosy a bad name. Producer John Nathan-Turner contributed a reply, the wording of which I don’t recall but which was along the lines of, it’s only a story and we don’t mean to offend. I know that it’s the producer’s place to speak for the show, but I wish they’d passed it over to me. At the heart of the story was a stigmatised disease that proved to be eminently curable when the application of rational knowledge took the place of fear and superstition. Which surely was the Society’s own point.

Stephen Gallagher