Image © Robert Skinner, 1985

Debuting in July 1985 as a combined audio cassette and printed fanzine, Terminus was billed as “a revolutionary new fanzine: part tape, part book. Something totally new in Doctor Who fandom.” This claim was not entirely accurate, since Terminus arrived more than two years after Vortex – A History of UNIT had pioneered this dual format approach, and several months after Renegade and, less obviously, Time Listener had also adopted it. This is not stated in order to denigrate Terminus, which was a lively and engaging publication, but rather to illustrate that when fans were producing a new tapezine – or indeed fanzine – they were not always aware of what had gone before. In the case of Terminus, its co-editors Julian ‘Jules’ Burt and Duncan Skinner had heard several tapezines – “UNIT Tapezine was always my favourite,” says Jules – but the pair had clearly not encountered the dual format titles.

Jules and Duncan’s friendship dates back to secondary school and still endures to this day. “We met in the second year at Eggbuckland Comprehensive School,” Jules explains. “We were about 12 or 13 years old. Although in different classes, we found each other and became friends through our mutual love of all things science fiction. I’d been into Doctor Who from as far back as I can remember. I recall seeing The Time Warrior and Planet of the Spiders quite clearly. After that, I was hooked. Season 12 was the point at which I knew this was amongst the best TV I’d ever seen.”

Duncan was drawn to the series at much the same time: “I remember coming in at the end of Planet of the Spiders, just before Pertwee regenerated – it was the omnibus repeat, right before Robot. My memories up to that point are very hazy as I would have been four or five years old then. I remember a few shadowy images pre-Planet of the Spiders, but it was with Robot onwards that I was properly there. The scare factor was a huge part of the appeal for me – and it really was scary. As a kid, that kept me going back for more. It’s been a lifelong love affair for me. I’ve got a million religions – Doctor Who, Star Trek, Blake’s 7, Sapphire and Steel, The Prisoner, Hammer movies, Bond, Batman – a billion things, but Doctor Who’s the big one. Yeah, I live and breathe it.”

A gathering of the Plymouth DWAS Local Group in 1985
Image © Jules Burt, 1985

Having joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and noted the proliferation of local groups all over the United Kingdom, Jules endeavoured to start one for fans living in his own locality: “I started the Plymouth DWAS Local Group in early 1984. We advertised in a local bookshop that always had the new Target paperbacks out a week or two early, and also in the February 1984 Celestial Toyroom. We used to meet up about once a fortnight and were fortunate to have a few contacts back then who supplied us with old stories on VHS tape, years before they were released officially.”

Interestingly, that February 1984 issue of Celestial Toyroom also carried a classified ‘Swap Shop’ advertisement by Jules which, in addition to the usual offer to trade Doctor Who memorabilia, asked for contributions to his forthcoming fanzine Terminus – nearly 18 months prior to the title’s actual debut – suggesting that initially it was to be a printed magazine. This led to contributors such as Miles Booy and Steven Jessup writing for the first issue, though, in both cases, their submissions were read out by Duncan and Jules and were somewhat out of date by the time they were heard.

During the early days of its development, Duncan and Jules had discussed what their publication should be called. “The trend was to name fanzines after stories – you’d go for what was current, and what hadn’t been used yet,” Duncan points out. “I remember Jules saying that Terminus wasn’t a great title as it wasn’t a great story. Well, at some point, I suggested Frontios, but I think we both agreed that Terminus sounded better as it starts with a hard ‘T’ rather than a soft and fluffy ‘F’ – though Frontios is a great title for Frontios, which is a great story.”

As Terminus began to take shape, the decision was taken to split the publication into two parts, with an audio cassette accompanying the printed fanzine. Why? “It just seemed like a good idea at the time,” says Duncan. Jules elaborates: “I loved listening to audiobooks and missing Doctor Who stories on bootleg cassettes. I would buy almost all the tapezines I saw advertised in Celestial Toyroom, and thought it would be fun to do our own.”

A momentous encounter that would prove to beneficial for Terminus
Image © Jules Burt, 1985

It seems likely, however, that the decision to incorporate an audio element into Terminus was due to a remarkable opportunity that presented itself in October 1984. The Fourth Doctor himself, Tom Baker, was then touring in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Plymouth’s Theatre Royal was on the itinerary – and an interview was arranged. “It all came about as Duncan’s mother was the general manager of the local free paper, The Plymouth Star. They arranged the interview through the theatre,” Jules explains. “It was very exciting to meet our childhood hero. The interview is a revelation, recorded less than a year after The Five Doctors. Tom seemed a bit bitter about the whole affair, but was incredibly kind to us. We saw She Stoops to Conquer the next day with the local DWAS group, where once again we mobbed him and he signed stacks of stuff for us all.”

Duncan also remembers the occasion with a great deal of affection: “Bill Anderson, the editor of The Plymouth Star, arranged the interview for us and took part in it, publishing a photo and short feature in the newspaper. It wasn’t daunting beyond the whole thing of ‘Oh, wow, here he is, looming over us!’ Tom came up the corridor, booming, ‘Are you with Bill Anderson?’ and then we went upstairs with him. We sat around drinking orange juice and did the interview. We weren’t like gibbering nervous wrecks or anything. It was brilliant. He at no point talked down to us like we were kids, even when – at the age of fourteen – I said, ‘Do you remember any really bad mistakes that were made during filming?’ There was this pause that went on forever... and then he eventually came out with, ‘You know, you chaps are completely corrupted by watching chat shows, aren’t you?’ ” The interview formed an important part of the first Terminus audio cassette, and the Plymouth Star press coverage and photographs from He Stoops to Conquer were reproduced in the Terminus print supplement.

The first issue also included an interview with Peter McGowan, an actor who had featured in an uncredited role as a UNIT marksman in The Green Death (1973). “Peter was in a play at the Theatre Royal, which is where I interviewed him,” says Duncan. “As a 14-year-old, I was in a play – Kes by Barry Hines, along with a bunch of other kids – so I was hanging about the theatre. It must have been a play that I went to see as Peter wasn’t in our play. His Doctor Who role must have been mentioned in his actor’s biography in the play’s programme. It was pre-internet, and the VHS release of The Green Death was still years away, but I would have seen that and realised I had to organise something. It was fun to do and Peter’s now part of my Facebook network.”

Specially designed labels were added to Terminus cassettes
Image © Duncan Skinner, 1985

Although Duncan and Jules were joint editors of Terminus, their responsibilities were split in line with their specific talents: “Duncan was much more artistic than me, so he laid the magazine out and did almost all the artwork. I supplied the stills and bits of other text.” Duncan concurs: “Our input was probably 50/50 on the tapezine. All the mucking around and the silly jokes, that was mainly me. The print supplement was mostly me. My brother Robert got involved there as well. I remember him doing a squeaky American accent, trying to be Nicola Bryant, during a funny sex scene, with me doing the Cyberleader’s voice whilst speaking into a big plastic tube – the sort of thing you put rolled up posters in.” Duncan’s artistic leanings also led to Terminus including custom-printed cassette labels, a feature that is believed to be unique to this tapezine.

Bar the interviews, the audio component of Terminus was recorded on basic equipment in the editors’ homes. “Interviews were done with a small recorder and a little lapel microphone – stuff that was just lying around,” says Duncan. “I had a tape-to-tape deck – a boombox or ‘ghetto blaster’ to use Q’s vernacular – so it was just tape-to-tape in real time. We recorded everything on the same machine that we dubbed copies on. I don’t think if we had a faster way of doing it we would have found the time to record new material. The intention was there, but it just fell by the by.”

The print supplement – entitled Terminus: The Zine and printed on the school photocopier – ran to 20 A5-sized pages and, aside from a track- and credit-listing pertaining to the cassette, was devoted entirely to visual material. Notable among these are Duncan’s single-page cartoons and his eyecatching comic strip, Servant of Darkness Part 1, which was never concluded. “It was terrible,” admits Duncan. “That was me just making it all up as I went along. I was just an infantile 14-year-old copying the likenesses from other, brilliant artists, and trying to do something with it, without an actual script. I was just putting stuff down as I thought of it. It was garbage! It may have looked okay, but it went nowhere.”

A page from Duncan's Servant of Darkness comic strip
Image © Duncan Skinner, 1985

Advertised in the July 1985 Celestial Toyroom, Terminus Issue 1 sold respectably. “I seem to remember it sold really well, maybe 50 copies. Having the Tom Baker interview probably helped,” Jules suggests. Duncan, meanwhile, thought that the editorial approach went down well with listeners. “For something that was brand new and untested, it didn’t do badly. I think people who bought it actually enjoyed it. I think they liked the fact that we weren’t taking it too seriously.”

The first issue was followed up with the cassette-only Winter Special 1985, comprising an interview with actor Richard Franklin conducted at a local group meeting in Eggbuckland, with proceeds from the tapezine going to the Franklin’s Bow-Wows Ethiopia charity. The decision not to include a print supplement with this cassette was influenced by two factors, as Duncan explains: “This was because it was a special – and also because there wasn’t anything ready, so we thought, ‘Let’s just put this out on its own.’ If Issue 2 had ever come out, there would have been the print supplement with it.”

Duncan Skinner, Pete Pearce and John Causey fool about at the Richard Franklin event
Image © Jules Burt, 1985

The Richard Franklin interview had come about when the Plymouth and Exeter DWAS local groups hooked up to invite the actor to a meeting. “I think Jules and someone else got in touch with Richard and arranged for him to come down to Austin Farm Primary School in Eggbuckland, where I went to primary school,” comments Duncan. “It’s got these prefabricated buildings where the infant classes, the first two years – very young kids – were taught. A school friend tells me the huts are still there. So, Richard came down with a friend of his and did his Franklin’s Bow-Wows thing. There was a good crowd of us there – people from two local DWAS groups – and it was just like a forum. He did his entertainment thing and then took questions from the audience. It was good fun. A good day.”

The day’s events were not restricted to the manic swinging of toy dogs, the singing of kids’ songs, or interrogations about the UNIT era. Indeed, an impromptu sporting event took place, as Jules recalls: “The Exeter group were slightly older than us and had been around a bit longer. We played a game of football. Duncan was definitely there on that memorable day. How could I forget it? I was definitely not offside! It was a great day.”

In the most bizarre and amusing send-off for any tapezine, Terminus advertised a very special product in the October 1986 edition of Celestial Toyroom. “I made a little gag about a Michael Grade handkerchief whilst talking to Richard Franklin at the local group meeting in the school hut, but I had it in mind to do it – and I did do it,” Duncan reveals. “I just sketched a picture with a biro, copying a photograph of Michael Grade, and put it together with some dry transfer lettering. It said, ‘The Michael Grade Handkerchief – Blow Your Nose on the Man That Cancelled Dr. Who’. My father’s lodger did the printing for me. We bought a load of handkerchiefs – seconds, a batch that had some sort of flaw or whatever – and printed about fifty. I sold a handful, but then I was just using up the handkerchiefs for years. I don’t have any of them anymore – they’ve gone the way of all snotty handkerchiefs – but Michael Grade had six of them, because it occurred to me that I should get permission, not that he would have sued a schoolkid. At some point, I got a call from his assistant, who said, ‘Go ahead, and he wants six,’ so I sent him six handkerchiefs. I got a letter back that said, ‘Thanks for the handkerchiefs, I will keep them safe or give them to friends,’ or something like that. It was a very short letter. But that’s a fun fact – I sent Michael Grade six of those handkerchiefs. I’m sure he gave them all away, or maybe kept one, relishing his role as the ‘Boo-Hiss’ villain that did for Doctor Who.”

The ultimate Doctor Who accessory. You know you want one.
Image © Duncan Skinner, 1986

And so, Terminus drew to a close in a memorable, if wildly unexpected, fashion. There had been plans for a second issue, but as Duncan recalls, “Life just got in the way. We were going to continue. I was gathering stuff together for a second issue, but it never happened.”

Looking back, both editors are positive about what they achieved with Terminus, even if they perhaps underrate some of their work on it. “We had a great time putting it together,” recalls Jules, a sentiment echoed by Duncan: “Of course I remember those times fondly. A lot of what was in the printed thing was just me throwing stuff together, thinking I was doing something awesome. Beyond that, we were just mucking around, being silly and doing silly voices and making jokes and messing around, which was great. We were having a blast!”

The highlight of the two Terminus issues has to be the Tom Baker interview in Issue 1. This was conducted in October 1984 by Julian Burt, Duncan Skinner, Martin Pook and Bill Anderson, editor of the Plymouth Star, during the run of She Stoops to Conquer at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth. Baker was on good form: “I got started in acting thanks to the Germans bombing Liverpool during the war, which kept me away from school – and because we were away from school, we were encouraged to entertain ourselves. That’s how I got started as an actor, as a boy – I was very small. As for Doctor Who, that was just another accident. I was out of work, the job was empty, and I had written an indignant letter – not to ask to do that – and the letter went to a feller who had just come away from a casting session. At that time, there was a picture out that I’d done, I think called The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which was a special effects picture directed by Ray Harryhausen, and this feller that had been to the casting session went to see this film and proposed me. By the time they’d [all gone] to see that film and rang me back, they had decided that if I really wanted to do that job, then they would give it to me. [The costume I came to wear as the Doctor was] designed by an amazing young man called Jim Acheson, who then went on to do films, and that came along by accident, again. We just went out to play. We used to try on clothes before he drew any pictures. In the ordinary way, a designer has an idea and they draw pictures and make up the clothes, but we had enough time to go out together – to get to know each other – and we used to go out and get dressed up in all sorts of costume departments of the BBC, or Morris Angel, or places like that, and gradually a sort of figure began to emerge – and then we decided to have a scarf. Jim had seen a man in a pub with a scarf in those colours – the original colours, just an ordinary woollen scarf – and he wrote down that colour scheme. We bought some wool and gave it to a woman called Begonia Pope, who had never worked for the BBC before but she was famous as a knitter. We knew nothing about knitting, and when we went to pick up the scarf, we’d bought too much wool, and she’d knitted it all up – and this scarf went right across the room! And that’s how it happened – it was all an accident.”

Asked if he enjoyed working with the Doctor Who team, his reply was quintessentially Tom Baker: “Yes, as long as they agreed with me, I adored working with them, yeah. I adore people who agree with me, don’t you? I can’t stand people who disagree with me, but if they did what I wanted them to do, I adored them, and if they forced me to do what they wanted to do, I hated them. A bit like family life, really – sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad!”

The Plymouth Star newspaper report from October 1985.
Image © Star Newspapers (Plymouth), 1985

Tom went on to reveal his opinions about a much-loved element of the series: “I was very bored with UNIT and maybe I influenced [its] annihilation. I thought all those realistic soldiers, running around firing guns, were very tedious. Indeed, I often complained bitterly that the resolution of stories in Doctor Who used to exhaust me, since they were nearly always resolved with explosions. I find that incredibly tedious – that’s how you resolve things in this world. If you’re thinking of this person from another galaxy, travelling the entire galaxy, it seemed to me that there wasn’t enough difference between the Earth and those other planets we were on. Always blowing things up! It wasn’t strange enough. It would have been much funnier to turn the villains into, say, cockroaches. That strikes me as being really neat, instead of blowing them up. And then what happens is they’re all scuttling along the street, and you can hear them with the wonderful equipment you’ve got – and some terrible, casual people come walking down the street [and crush them]. I think that would be fun – the children would like that.”

Finally, Baker was asked what tips he had for prospective actors: “None at all. I would have thought that anyone who’s silly enough to want to become an actor wouldn’t take tips anyway because when you want to do something like wanting to become an actor, you’re not really being rational, are you? It’s such a stupid thing to want to be, because the chances of any kind of success at all are so utterly remote. I think the unemployment rate among actors is 86 per cent, so the miners, or the steelworkers, or the carpenters, have got nothing on actors. 86 per cent are out of work, so your chances of earning a living as an actor are nearly zero, even if you’re very good – maybe especially if you’re very good, because the factors that go into being successful have often got very little to do with whether you’re good or not. So, I’d say nothing – but if anyone insisted on me saying something, I’d just say, ‘You’re mad. And if you’re mad, you don’t need tips.’ You can’t advise mad people, can you?”

Actor Peter McGowan, who was cast in Doctor Who in a background role, was also interviewed for the first issue: “My agent got a phone call about the series they were doing – it was called The Green Death. Jon Pertwee was Doctor Who at the time and I was cast as an army marksman – one of the UNIT group. We were in Wales, near a coal mine. It was a speaking part but it was only a couple of scenes. It was at the point where there were giant maggots who were running along the ground and a couple of us who were marksmen were called in to try and shoot them – and of course all the bullets bounced off because they were armour-plated. Great big things. [There was one thing that went wrong.] The Brigadier told me to let off a dozen rounds at the particular maggot I was shooting at – and I fired 13 times instead of 12. When I stopped, we all had a laugh. It was a self-loading rifle – rapid fire – but otherwise it was quite straightforward. [The other actors were] fine, a very friendly bunch. The regular people like the Sergeant and the Brigadier and Jon Pertwee himself were great fun. We had lots of fun off the set and we used to go to the pub together. [I still watch Doctor Who.] Peter Davison, the present Doctor, is a mate of mine. I worked with his wife, Sandra Dickinson, in a theatre production in Birmingham – and I met him there. He’s a nice chap.”

Jules with David Tennant while filming Rise of the Cybermen, November 2005.
Image © Jules Burt, 2005

Jules Burt has been a collector of vintage paperbacks, amongst other things, for over thirty years. In his lifetime, he has owned and run a comic, book and record store, Purple Haze, been a book shop manager and book buyer for a national UK chain as well as, when time allows, doing a bit of acting, including an appearance in a David Tennant Doctor Who, Rise of the Cybermen, in which he was zapped by a Cyberman – an experience which he ranks even more highly than interviewing Tom Baker for Terminus! Jules has written for many magazines and books in his time but now concentrates his efforts on YouTube, where he shares his many passions and collections with a wider audience. His videos have now surpassed 4.5 million views, with a 25,000 subscriber base. You can also find Jules on Twitter/X and Instagram.

Duncan Skinner is a British actor, writer, producer and voiceover artist living in Athens, Greece. He is known for numerous Greek feature films including Smyrna (2021), Adults in the Room (2019), God Loves Caviar (2012), Emma Blue (2008), for which he was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Maverick Movie Awards, and The Light Touch (2021), which gained him the Best Comedy Actor award at the Gelos Comedy Film Festival in Moscow. He is also involved as writer, performer and director of Bunny Poo Salad, a British sketch comedy show made in Greece.

In producing Terminus, Duncan Skinner and Jules Burt struck a good balance between intelligent content and humour. Their on-tape banter is amusing and endearing, and it’s fun to hear them break off from presenting their articles to enquire after the other’s opinions. Gradually, the style morphs towards discussion, and this proves to be very effective. Likewise, it’s enjoyable when Duncan slyly changes the backing music to get a reaction from Jules – Anything Goes, indeed! Don’t worry, though, as the listeners “won’t notice the difference!” or that it has nothing to do with Doctor Who. The dual format approach works well, with the audio and print parts of Terminus showing a clear division of content – articles, reviews and humour on the tape, and comic strips, cartoons, photographs and artwork on the printed page. The audio interviews with Tom Baker, Richard Franklin and Peter McGowan are the icing on the cake – and, as an aside, it’s odd that McGowan remains uncredited in Doctor Who production histories to this day. Many years after it was produced, Terminus remains a well put together and wonderfully entertaining experience which affords the listener / reader a fascinating peek into 1980s fandom.

Alan Hayes