Bye-bye, Brigadier…

Thirteen years ago today we lost Nicholas Courtney, one of Doctor Who fandom’s best-loved actors. It’s not a big round number anniversary but let’s mark it all the same.

Courtney’s first Doctor Who role was Bret Vyon in The Daleks’ Master Plan, but it was as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart that we came to love him. Here I present Courtney’s ten ‘best’ moments as the Brigadier. These may not necessarily be the character’s finest moments, but they’re my favourites.

The Web of Fear

Still a Colonel in the character’s debut and not yet in charge of UNIT, Lethbridge-Stewart leads from the front, taking his men up against the yeti in the battle of Covent Garden. I love the moment he taps one of his men on the head as the signal to fire his bazooka. Filmed by master director Douglas Camfield, he looks fantastic here. We’ll gloss over the fact that this skirmish is a disaster and all his men are killed. He manages better leading his men against the Cybermen in his next appearance, in The Invasion.

Spearhead from Space

Sitting back at his desk in his secret underground base, the Brigadier explains to sceptical Liz Shaw that UNIT: “deal with the odd, the unexplained, anything on Earth, or even beyond.” He’s at his most suave here, relaxed in his own office and blatantly trying to impress Dr Shaw with science talk of the sort he will soon be able to leave to his scientific staff.

The Ambassadors of Death

Episode one’s warehouse battle scene has the Brigadier at his hard-as-nails best. We’ve seen him in combat before, but only against faceless alien menaces. This time he tackles human opponents with equal efficiency, mercilessly blasting away at henchmen all around him.

Inferno

The ‘alternative universe’ conceit turns the Brigadier into the fascistic Brigade Leader, giving Courtney the chance to play his character with sadistic and cowardly streaks. In episode three he casually looks up from his paperwork and cuts through the Doctor’s babble about not existing in his world with the retort: “Then you won’t feel the bullets when we shoot you.”

The Mind of Evil

The Brigadier shoots down convict Mailer, saving the Doctor’s life, and looks decidedly unimpressed with the Doctor’s ungrateful response. Here we see him out of uniform for the first time. He adopts the disguise of a tradesman as part of a Trojan Horse ruse to gain entry to the prison and uses his best mockney accent on the guard at the gate. They don’t teach that at Sandhurst.

The Dæmons

All together now… “Chap with wings there, five rounds rapid.” Courtney manages to deliver one of the oddest commands in military history entirely straight. This illustrates that, despite all he’s learned from the Doctor, the Brigadier’s mind continues to work on conventional militaristic lines: presented with a living gargoyle, the most obvious solution is still to shoot it. And then he’d rather have a pint than partake in a fertility dance with Captain Yates. Top soldiering.

The Three Doctors

The infamous “Looks like Cromer…” scene. It’s not just a wonderful spot of comedy but in its absurdity perfectly encapsulates the Brigadier’s resolve to tackle any situation on his own terms and carry-on-regardless. This is probably the start of the Brigadier-as-Blimp-figure trope but it’s undeniably fun to see the character so at sea and grasping for commonplaces.

Robot

It may not be the Brigadier’s finest hour but he admirably takes witnessing a regeneration in his stride. Later, we find him in sardonic mode, highlighting one of the show’s dramatic conventions: “You know, just once I’d like to meet an alien menace that wasn’t immune to bullets.”

The Five Doctors

The Brigadier is a spare part for much of this story, but it does give him the chance to finally land a punch on the Master, giving him the KO. He’d been wanting to do that since 1971. He also gets a line that will live in Doctor Who history, referring to the Doctor as “Splendid fellows, all of you” (which, we never seem to mention, is a reworking of a Brigadier line from The Three Doctors: “wonderful chap, both of him.”)

Battlefield

The Brigadier does well in his swansong. His gun to the head of Mordred, with Morgaine observing that he’s “steeped in blood”, confirms him as a soldier and a killer, not a comic foil buffoon, just as we saw in his earliest stories. The Brigadier’s matter-of-fact “I just do the best I can” response to Morgaine’s taunt sums him up perfectly. But it’s his David-and-Goliath “Get off my world” moment with the Destroyer that gives him his ultimate hero moment.

Images © BBC

This is a heavily reworked version of an article first published in Panic Moon in April 2011.