I was very young – only four or five – when I began watching Doctor Who. This was back in 1977-8, when Tom Baker was newly the Doctor. However, due to the wonderful way that the ABC was constantly showing (and thus repeating) the program on every weeknight, I got to see an awful lot of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, and thus – as his recurring foil – Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, played by Nicholas Courtney.
Nicholas Courtney, according to various reports, has died at the age of 81, and we’ve lost another of our links to one of the great eras of the program. Unfortunately, the Brigadier never got to appear on the new series of Doctor Who, but he did appear on its spin-off series, the Sarah-Jane adventures.
One of the most astonishing bits of trivia about Nicholas Courtney is that he got to appear with each of the first five Doctors in the show – as the Brigadier with the second through fifth Doctors, but as a different role with the first: Bret Vyon, a Space Security Agent in The Dalek’s Masterplan. Only one episode remains of this first appearance, and nothing of his first appearance as Lethbridge-Stewart (only the first episode of The Web of Fear remains, and he didn’t appear until episode 3!) A few stills remain, though…
Nicholas Courtney as Colonel (not yet Brigadier) Lethbridge-Stewart on the left, Patrick Troughton as the Doctor on the right, from the Web of Fear.
It was a very long time before I got to see any Patrick Troughton, so my memories of Nicholas Courtney are of him appearing with Jon Pertwee and (briefly) with Tom Baker. Later on, he appeared in two Peter Davison stories (Mawdryn Undead and The Five Doctors), but his really important days on the program were when Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was exiled to Earth and working for UNIT, the organisation of which the Brigadier was the head of the English branch.
It was a great time, and some really memorable stories came of it. The one remembered by the cast and crew of the time with the most fondness is that of the end of Season 8: The Daemons, in which the Master (Roger Delgado) summons up an extremely powerful being and tries to get it to aid him. It’s got some great Brigadier moments in it, along with one of his most famous lines: “Chap with wings there. Five rounds rapid!”
(Of course, the gargoyle is, sadly, untouched by the subsequent attack).
He was a huge part of the Doctor Who mythology, and it saddens me greatly to learn that he’s no longer with us.