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Unit: Declassified - April 2008 |
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Patrick Mulkern investigates Unit's 40-year involvement in Doctor Who.
"Jenkins! Chap with the wings there. Five rounds rapid!" Good old Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. He always stood fast against new and deadly foes with all guns blazing - though he admitted to Tom Baker's Doctor: "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets!"
From 1968, when the template was set for the hugely popular Unit stories, the Brigadier and his staff were some of the staunchest allies the Time Lord ever had. They provided a permanent base for Jon Pertwee's Doctor during the 1970s, as well as fire power against the invasion plans of everything from Axons to Zygons. They saw off Daleks, Cybermen, a Sontaran, the Autons (twice) - and the Master's schemes were thwarted half a dozen times.
Writer/producer Derrick Sherwin formulated Unit (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) - for dramatic and economic purposes - as a way of "bringing the series down to Earth, making it very much a Quatermass-y concept".
They were to be an international elite, combining military and scientific expertise to combat alien attacks. Colonel Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, who'd already helped Patrick Troughton's Doctor battle Yeti in the Underground, was promoted to Brigadier and brought in as head of Unit's British branch.
Actor Nicholas Courtney recalls: "Pat Troughton was leaving and Jon Pertwee was coming in - exiled to Earth by the Time Lords for 'misbehaving in time' - and the BBC asked me to become a regular for a couple of years. Head of Unit. I was over the moon. A bit of security when my first daughter was born."
Besides soldier boys, the Unit set-up afforded some 70s glamour, with PhD-laden professor Liz Shaw and ditzy but keen Jo Grant employed as the Doctor's personal assistants. (This gave rise to the now frowned-upon term "assistant" - applied to companions long after the Doctor had resumed his travels.)
Unit was phased out c 1976 but, to fans' delight, the Brig popped up again twice during Fifth Doctor Peter Davison's tenure. Then, in 1989, the final year of the classic series, he came out of retirement to help Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and his own successor, Brigadier Winifred Bambera.
In 2005, Unit resurfaced briefly in Aliens of London. Then, in The Christmas Invasion, fledgling PM Harriet Jones was taken to Unit HQ under the Tower of London. She and Unit CO Major Blake were beamed aboard the Sycorax spaceship where Blake met an unpleasant end - incineration by whiplash.
Coming bang up to date, we've seen that, thanks to the Doctor's string-pulling, erstwhile companion Dr Martha Jones has landed a high-profile appointment with Unit. (NB The acronym now stands for Unified Intelligence Taskforce, as the BBC can no longer arbitrarily link its fiction to the very real UN.)
The troops as ever provide a lot of ray-gun fodder for rampaging aliens - this time the Sontarans - while the Doctor buddies up with a modern-day Jenkins (Private Ross) and clashes with Colonel Mace (Rupert Holliday Evans).
But what of the Brigadier? Where is he in this new era of Unit? Fans will be hoping for, at the very least, a courtesy namecheck in Saturday's episode, The Poison Sky. He'll get one - surely…?
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Read our interview with Nicholas Courtney - or take a look at our full Doctor Who guide.
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