The Doctor first encountered Lethbridge-Stewart when he was a Colonel in the Scots Guards. He had been sent to take over command of the Goodge Street underground fortress following the death of its previous commander. This was during an invasion attempt by the Great Intelligence which had paralysed central London with a dense fog, under cover of which robot Yeti were operating. The Intelligence manifested itself as a thick web-like substance which moved around the Underground network, but had also taken over the corpse of an army Staff Sergeant named Arnold. The Colonel had been travelling to Goodge Street in a convoy which had been attacked and destroyed by Yeti. He had found himself alone in the tunnels, where he encountered the Doctor who was himself wandering lost following a meeting with the robots.
At the time no-one knew about Arnold and so everyone was suspicious as to who the human agent of the Intelligence might be. Being the sole survivor of the convoy, some suspected Lethbridge-Stewart.
After leading an expedition to the surface in search of supplies at Covent Garden, the Colonel witnessed another massacre of his men by the Yeti - an event which almost broke him. He later seriously considered handing over the Doctor to the Intelligence if it would depart. He was also open to the idea of the Doctor having a time machine, capable of fitting inside a Tube station, and was happy to lead a mission to find it.
Following this incident, Lethbridge-Stewart was instrumental in setting up a specialist force designed to tackle similar events. Military-led, it would have a scientific foundation. The resultant organisation came under the auspices of the United Nations, with its command based in Geneva. Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to Brigadier and placed in command of the British section of UNIT - the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. The Brigadier based himself in a converted cargo aircraft for mobility purposes. Under him he had a Captain - Jimmy Turner - and a Sergeant named Walters. Another member of the team was a Corporal named Benton.
Soon after its formation UNIT was called upon to investigate a series of UFO sightings clustered around the factory compound belonging to International Electromatics, owned by Tobias Vaughn. IE made electronic components which were used in equipment all over the world. A number of people seen entering IE's headquarters were later found to be changed in terms of personality, whilst others disappeared altogether. Of concern to Lethbridge-Stewart was that his immediate superior - Major General Rutlidge - was one of those who had changed. Initially supportive of the Brigadier's investigations into Vaughn, he suddenly turned against them shortly after a visit to IE's London offices.
The Brigadier was extremely pleased to be reunited with the Doctor, who had come to Earth to repair some TARDIS circuits. He helped to reveal that Vaughn was in league with the Cybermen.
Following the death of Vaughn and the destruction of the Cyberman invasion attempt, the Brigadier decided to recruit a scientific adviser of his own, who could replace the absentee Doctor.
A small fall of meteorites in Essex was followed six months later by a larger fall. The Brigadier sought out an expert in the field and had Dr Liz Shaw come and meet him at UNIT's London HQ, built beneath St Pancras Station.
As he was interviewing Cambridge-based Liz, word came in that the TARDIS had turned up in the same location as the most recent fall. He and Liz went to see the Doctor in the local hospital, but he was disappointed to find a stranger. However, the man recognised him. It soon transpired that this was the Doctor after all, but a regenerated one with a new face and personality.
The Brigadier once again had to deal with an antagonistic superior - this time an Auton duplicate.
Once the Nestene attack had been repelled, the Brigadier offered the Doctor a full-time role with UNIT as scientific adviser - knowing that he was now unable to leave Earth in the TARDIS. Liz agreed to stay on as his assistant. The Brigadier made him his own personal responsibility.
Great friends for the most part, the relationship between the Brigadier and the Doctor could often be a stormy one. The Doctor deeply resented his exile to Earth and longed to get back into Time and Space to explore. He disliked having to be part of a military organisation, but felt trapped. This frustration would often be taken out on the Brigadier, but he would good humouredly shoulder the Doctor's insults.
He would always defend the Brigadier when he in turn had to deal with civil servants and other officials. The two trusted each other implicitly. A good example of the bond between the two was when the Brigadier was ordered to destroy the Silurian shelter in Derbyshire, which the Doctor hoped to exploit for its scientific secrets. Some would have walked away from UNIT, but the Doctor accepted that his friend was bound by his orders.
On an authoritarian parallel Earth the Doctor encountered a version of the Brigadier - the Brigade Leader of the Republican Security Force - who was a coward and a bully, lacking any of the Brigadier's attributes.
When Liz Shaw returned to Cambridge, the Brigadier had no need to replace her. After a run of captains on secondment from the Regular Army the Brigadier obtained a full time captain named Mike Yates. Corporal Benton was promoted to Sergeant. At the same time the Brigadier had an eager new recruit foisted upon him, thanks to an influential uncle. He decided to give Jo Grant to the Doctor as a new assistant. When the Doctor rejected her, the Brigadier ensured that his scientific adviser should be the one to tell her - knowing that the Doctor would relent.
The arrival of Mike Yates and Jo Grant coincided with the first appearance of the Master on Earth, an evil rogue Time Lord. He brought a number of alien menaces to the planet, which the Brigadier and UNIT had to combat with the Doctor's help.
One threat was an ancient one that came from the Earth itself - a long-dormant Daemon, which took over the village of Devil's End. The Brigadier had been attending a regimental dinner and awoke to find that his helicopter had been taken by Yates and Benton. By the time he followed, a heat barrier had sealed off the village. He witnessed the destruction of the helicopter when it crashed into this, after being stolen by one of the Master's followers.
A living stone gargoyle posed no danger to the Brigadier, who simply asked one of his men to shoot it.
Throughout their time together, the Brigadier had never set foot in the TARDIS, and often doubted many of the stories told by the Doctor. One day UNIT HQ came under attack and the Brigadier was forced to take refuge in the TARDIS. He was also confronted by the Doctor in the form he had first encountered back in the London Underground, and again fighting against the Cybermen.
This combination of events almost broke the Brigadier, who thought the TARDIS an illusion, and he explained away the Doctor's change of appearance as him having reverted to his earlier incarnation - rather than accept there might be two Doctors. He then had to confront the idea of a third.
When the entire HQ building was transported through a Black Hole to an alien world, the Brigadier was convinced they had only moved to another country, though it was more likely they had only moved as far as Cromer in Norfolk.
Once he accepted he was on another planet, the Brigadier made the most of available resources - co-opting game warden Mr Ollis into his two man army.
Following the lifting of the Doctor's exile by the Time Lords, he tended to spend less time on Earth.
When UNIT came to investigate the activities of Global Chemicals, the Brigadier found himself caught in a conflict of interests. He was compelled to provide security to the company, despite the Doctor and Jo allying against it. He got round this by placing Mike Yates inside the company as a mole.
Jo left soon after, and then the Brigadier was confronted by a conspiracy which involved his Regular Army superior General Finch and the Government official Sir Charles Grover. Worse - Mike was also involved. The Brigadier was prepared to commit mutiny to stand up to Finch, such was his trust in the Doctor.
It was towards the end of the Third Doctor's incarnation that some of the Brigadier's personal life slipped out. A clairvoyant named "Professor" Clegg had been given his wrist-watch, and was able to identify that it had been given to him in Brighton by a young woman named Doris by way of a thank-you...
During an encounter with a huge robot, the Brigadier thought that he had a means to destroy it without the Doctor's help. He used a powerful energy weapon on it. However, it absorbed the energy and grew to enormous size, making things much worse. The newly regenerated Doctor had to sort things out after all.
With this new regeneration, the Doctor decided to distance himself from Earth and from UNIT. The Brigadier met him only one more time in this incarnation - at a village near Loch Ness in Scotland. The Brigadier had been left a device to summon the TARDIS back to Earth in the event of an emergency, and he used it when a number of North Sea oil rigs were attacked and destroyed by an unseen force. For the occasion of revisiting his ancestral home, the Brigadier adopted a kilt of his Clan Stewart tartan.
Once the Zygons had been defeated, the Brigadier found himself increasingly spending time at UNIT central command in Geneva. He also held an office at the UK Space Defence Agency, but rarely used it.
Irritated by the amount of time spent at Geneva, away from front-line operations, the Brigadier elected to retire from UNIT in 1977.
He took up a teaching post at Brendon, a minor public school for boys. Here he taught mathematics, coached rugby, and ran the school regiment. Shortly after arriving he found his past catching up with him. The TARDIS arrived, and he met the Doctor's latest companions Tegan and Nyssa. With them was the regenerated Doctor, who was gravely ill. He joined them in the TARDIS when it travelled to a spaceship in temporal orbit above Earth.
The Doctor, meanwhile, had arrived at the school in 1983 using a transmat pod from the spaceship, and he met the Brigadier from that year - a man who had suffered some nervous breakdown, his memories of the Doctor missing. The Doctor helped him regain his memories, then the two travelled to the spaceship by pod. The Brigadier erroneously assured the Doctor that he had not gone with Tegan and Nyssa. When the two versions of the Brigadier encountered each other it shorted the temporal differential and triggered his nervous breakdown - but also resolved the issue of Mawdryn and his fellow mutants.
Soon after, the Brigadier attended a UNIT reunion at his old HQ, hosted by Colonel Crichton, his replacement as UK section commander. He met the Doctor in his second incarnation, who had read about the event in the next day's newspaper. As the two reminisced in the grounds they came under attack by a time scoop, which carried them both to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. He met all five incarnations of the Doctor, plus the latest incarnation of the Master, as well as a number of the Doctor's companions - of whom he already knew Sarah and Tegan. He also had to confront the Cybermen again, plus a rogue Yeti. When the Master attempted to capitalise on the situation, it was the Brigadier who knocked him out with a well-aimed punch.
Despite two regenerations, the Brigadier recognised his old friend immediately - just because of the bizarre situation he found him in.
The Brigadier was happy to act as the representative of the human race against the witch-queen Morgaine and her demonic ally the Destroyer.
When it appeared that the Brigadier had sacrificed himself to kill the Destroyer the Doctor revealed that he was aware of his old friend's fate - that he was due to die in bed of old age. The Brigadier had survived however, but decided that he was now too old to support the Doctor.
Knighted, he refused to settle down completely. He became a noted ambassador, and it was in this role that he found himself stranded in Peru during an invasion attempt by the Sontarans and a later attack by the Daleks.
When Sarah Jane Smith needed to gain access to UNIT's Black Archive, it was to the Brigadier that she turned. He was annoyed at the way the organisation he helped to found was now run, so was happy to assist her - smuggling her and her companion Rani into the Archive compound.
He helped capture an alien Bane which had been impersonating the Archive's commander.
In what he thought to be his final incarnation, facing his own mortality, the Doctor tried to contact the Brigadier for advice. He was now living in a care home, where he would keep a glass of whisky by his bedside should the Doctor ever call in for a visit. The Doctor was saddened to hear that he had just missed his old friend, who had died peacefully in bed as he had foreseen.
UNIT was to rebrand itself as the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, and came under the command of the Brigadier's daughter Kate. She only used the surname Stewart, not wishing to ride on her father's coat-tails. She was a scientist rather than a soldier, and her father had told her that science should lead for the organisation to be successful.
When the female incarnation of the Master - Missy - resurrected the dead to become an army of Cybermen, Kate Stewart was saved by one of them. The Doctor suspected that this might have been the Brigadier. The Cyberman saluted him then flew off into space.
Played by: Nicholas Courtney. Appearances: The Web of Fear (1967), The Invasion (1968), Spearhead From Space (1970) to Terror of the Zygons (1975), Mawdryn Undead (1983), The Five Doctors (1983), Battlefield (1989), SJA 2.6 Enemy of the Bane (2008).
- Nicholas Courtney was back-up choice to play King Richard in The Crusade. Director Douglas Camfield, who frequently employed him, thought that Julian Glover would turn the role down.
- Camfield later cast him as Bret Vyon in The Daleks' Master Plan. William Hartnell convinced him to change agent (to his son-in-law) but Courtney then found himself out of work for a year.
- When not acting he worked in a model soldier shop in Kensington.
- Courtney was due to play Captain Knight in The Web of Fear (Camfield again) - a character who dies. However, the actor due to play Lethbridge-Stewart (David Langton) pulled out late in the day, and Courtney was promoted, in more ways than one.
- When it came to The Invasion, Courtney's was the easiest and cheapest character from Web to be brought back, as any replacement officer would be too close to the Colonel anyway. Prof. Travers and his daughter Anne were replaced.
- Courtney was asked about becoming a regular for Season 7 during the making of the Cyberman story.
- He and Pertwee did not hit it off immediately. Pertwee accused him of drinking too much on their first story together. Courtney did like a lunchtime drink, which helped settle his nerves. He also suffered from depression.
- During the making of Terror of the Autons he had a minor breakdown, and is replaced by a double in some of the location scenes.
- Many of the Brigadier's best known lines were Courtney's own, ad libs, or ones that he fought to retain when Terrance Dicks threatened to cut them (including his iconic "Chap with wings... five rounds rapid").
- The Brigadier was almost killed off on a couple of occasions - including the original draft version of The Hand of Fear and then again in Battlefield. Courtney was okay with this, so long as it was a brave death.
- With the Brigadier featuring less and less in the series, Courtney embarked on stage work which prevented him from featuring in The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom. He and John Levene had foreseen this situation during the making of Robot.
- The Brigadier was actually third choice to appear in Mawdryn Undead, after Ian Chesterton and Harry Sullivan. Neither William Russell nor Ian Marter was available.
- The Five Doctors saw the first real moustache for the Brigadier.
- Ill health prevented him from featuring opposite David Tennant's Doctor in The Sontaran Stratagem and The Stolen Earth two-parters.
- He and Lis Sladen died within a couple of months of each other in 2011. Reference to the Brigadier's death was added to The Name of the Doctor by way of a tribute. Steven Moffat then screwed things up by having him resurrected as a Cyberman. Moffat was very good at undermining his own work.
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