Sam Bishop

Lieutenant Sam Bishop was a soldier and a troubleshooter for UNIT.

Early life
Sam Bishop's mother was a teacher and his father was an accountant. (AUDIO: Game Theory) He once described himself as coming from a family of bookkeepers and teachers but also had a great-grandfather who fought with the Eighth Army in North Africa during World War II and served in battlefronts such as El Alamein, Tobruk and Gazala. (AUDIO: Earthfall)

Inspired by his great-grandfather's stories and the video games that he enjoyed playing as a child - ones concerning secret agents - Sam joined the British Army (AUDIO: Earthfall, Game Theory) and ascended to the rank of lieutenant. (AUDIO: Vanguard)

Joining UNIT
Sam was recruited into UNIT by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart after he helped him and the Ninth Doctor face the Cybermen. (AUDIO: The Forth Generation) He became a troubleshooter, a job which entailed a large amount of travelling (AUDIO: Earthfall) and long periods of being away from the United Kingdom. (AUDIO: The Sontaran Project)

Stopping a Nestene invasion
With UNIT, Bishop often went on dangerous missions. Kate Stewart sent him on a mission to the Gobi Desert to track a Nestene energy units. On this mission, a group of Autons attacked him. He was then sent to Puerto Rico to track the energy units landing. (AUDIO: Earthfall)

He sent Kate and Colonel Shindi to Black Archive 5, as there was something useful in the vault. (AUDIO: Armageddon)

Tengobushi incident
When he came back to the United Kingdom, he was supposed to meet with Kate Stewart but he missed her as she was on her way to Geneva. He helped Josh to realise that the Tengobushi killed Anna Burges to get information on where Osgood was going. (AUDIO: Death in Geneva)

On Kate's orders, he followed Felicity Lyme to Antarctica and discovered her facility in there, which was generating enough electricity to supply the British Isles. He posed as a man from an energy company to find this information. He managed to get the other territorial powers on the continent to show a force of strength against Bergam's forces. (AUDIO: Ice Station Alpha)

Investigating the Silence
He thought that Kenneth LeBlanc was idiotic. After hearing both Kate and Osgood's memories about the incident at Helena Faversham, he decided to investigate further. He looked at the CCTV footage of the raid and convinced Kate that it had happened. He then helped Osgood to investigate the people who McGee said had visited the house. (AUDIO: Square One)

He had to deputise for Carter when he went AWOL. He found the footage in the Apollo 11 moon landing telling the humans to kill the Silents on sight. He then went with Osgood to find out where Carter had sent a set of explosives. Going with Kate and Osgood to LeBlanc constituency count, he took a set of troops to destroy the Silents there and disarm a bomb. (AUDIO: Silent Majority)

He went with Osgood to the UNIT satellite to fix something there, but they were knocked unconscious upon arrival. He explored the space station and discovered that the crew had been killed. Due to the Silents editing his memory, he forgot this and aided Osgood in finishing her mission. He decided to get Osgood and himself off the station piloting the Suez capsule. (AUDIO: In Memory Alone)

Jastrok's revolution
Kate asked Sam to join her and Osgood at a Silurian research base in Greece, but he was unable to get there immediately as he was being shot at when he received the invitation. He saved Kate by administering a broad-range antivenom after she was poisoned by Tryska and later broke Tryska's fear trigger, which she had used on Osgood, and took her captive. Tryska escaped and activated the self-destruct before the humans could gather any technology; to escape, Sam attached a device that attracted reptiles to her before they swam to safety and were rescued by Josh. (AUDIO: Retrieval)

Sam informed Kate that conventional weapons could not harm Krelix's hybrids which were besieging Great Britain. She later sent him to a Lyme Industries weather station to change the Gulf Stream and make it snowy and thus inhospitable for the Silurians. This also enabled UNIT to get past the sea creatures keeping them at bay. Once Jastrok and Kalana were arrested, Sam headed to South America with Osgood and Jo Jones to relocate the sea creatures. (AUDIO: United)

Sam goes missing
Sam provided the intelligence about a local resistance force in South America had obtained alien technology. (AUDIO: The Dalek Transaction)

After this, he disappeared for some time, although Kate wasn't overly concerned. (AUDIO: The Sontaran Project)

Eventually he did get back in contact with more information on The Auctioneers and their worldwide network. (AUDIO: False Negative)

The Auctioneers and the Cyber-invasion
He was captured by the Auctioneers and placed in a cell with Julia Hartley-Price. He managed to escape and found one of their captures which didn't have a face. He worked out that the ship was in the Bermuda Triangle, according to the map they had found. When Julia revealed that she knew his full name he became very suspicious. Soon afterwards he had to start over again but he had started to remember previous times he had done this. He worked out that they were in a virtual reality game. Osgood unlocked the box he was kept in in London. (AUDIO: Game Theory)

He was placed under observation by Parsons. He started to hear voices related to the VR machine and then of his colleagues within the world. Soon afterwards he became paranoid. He was the link between the parallel world and his world. He eventually heard his colleagues voices which allowed him to escape partially from the conditioning. The VR machine tried to upgrade Sam. (AUDIO: Telepresence)

Osgood stopped the Cybermen from fully converting him. When he came into contact with Kate she knocked him out. (AUDIO: Code Silver)

Osgood sent him and Shindi after Kate, and Carter. They were traced to the Auctioneers base. The Master managed to interrupt the connection to the Cybermen and reversed the conversion. The Master tried to hypnotise him using his reasons for joining the army. (AUDIO: Master of Worlds)

Investigating Christina
Bishop was ordered by UNIT to investigate Lady Christina de Souza. (AUDIO: It Takes a Thief) Soon after, he received a phone call from Christina to help clean up the mess left by the Amber. (AUDIO: Skin Deep) Bishop became aware of a person by the name of El Guapo, who was picking up where the Auctioneers had left off. El Guapo had hired two robbers to steal a sentient, alien painting. This led Bishop to go under deep cover as Juan Pablo in Spain, posing as a worker of El Guapo, and interim boss of the two hired hands. Before long, Bishop and the two robbers became aware of a second party trying to steal the painting from them, one of whom was a Sontaran. At this point, El Guapo, who revealed herself to be Lady Christina de Souza in disguise, rendered the Sontaran unconscious.

Bishop, de Souza and the other two travelled to the auction house at Argentina to rescue to the painting. Believing that she could trust neither Sam Bishop nor UNIT, Christina used alien technology to force him off her modified, flying double decker bus and escaped his potential custody. (AUDIO: Portrait of a Lady)

Hot on her tail, Bishop followed de Souza to Edinburgh Castle. While performing the heist of a lifetime, Christina herself was foiled by the Slitheen family, who planned to sell the castle's riches in order to pay off their off-world debts. Armed with a jar of pickled onions, a captured Bishop and Christina de Souza were rescued by Jacqui McGee, who was herself investigating a case of her own.

Escaping in the 200, the three of them used Christina's alien technology to tunnel through the old town beneath the city to divert the lava from a Slitheen lava bomb. When the last survivor of the Slitheen created a volcano in Edinburgh, Lady Christina used her alien tech to fly Edinburgh Castle into the volcano, plugging it, seemingly dying in the process. According to Bishop's update from UNIT, this was a diversion from de Souza to ditch them and escape from UNIT custody. Her bus was sighted flying over Skye Bridge. This time round, Bishop wasn't disappointed in her escape. (AUDIO: Death on the Mile)

Alfred's infection
Sam Bishop later caught up with Christina off the coast of Zanzibar, where Christina was attempting to stop her father, Lord Alfred de Souza, from stealing and selling sentient, infectious, extra-terrestrial crystals. However, Bishop had received Christina's call too late and, infected with the crystals, Christina's father had escaped on Bishop's speedboat, with the potential to infect others around the world. They watched as Christina used her own alien technology to send the crystaline creature safely back into space. (AUDIO: The Wreck)

Shortly afterwards, Bishop was joined in the outback by Jacqui McGee. McGee noted disapprovingly that Bishop was on familiar terms with Christina, who remained a person of interest to UNIT. Whilst helping Christina to solve mystery surrounding the apparent alien abduction of her great aunt Eugenia de Souza, they found a cover-up which was protecting an alien fountain of life and a sentient swarm of moths. Both Bishop and McGee were present when Eugenia, who had lied about her abduction, attempted to use the fountain of life for her own gain. Eugenia was torn apart by the alien forces. (AUDIO: Outback)

Bishop and McGee caught up with de Souza again at the Royal Northcote, following the disappearances of numerous bookmakers, to which Christina's father owed a lot of money. Bishop and McGee soon realised that those who had owned these bookies hadn't simply vanished, but had been infected with Lord Alfred's alien virus, turning them into jewels. After a confrontation and a difference of opinion on how to deal with the situation, it became clear to Bishop that, as far as Christina was concerned, blood was thicker than water, and the two of them became at odds. Yet again, Christina thought she had the upper hand when she staged her father's execution at her own hand with Sam as witness. However, Bishop was fully aware of Christina's plans to infiltrate UNIT with her accomplice disguised as Bishop himself as part of her grander scheme to fake her father's death. Lord Alfred was once again free, although now losing himself to the virus, and de Souza was at large. (AUDIO: Long Shot)

Personality
Josh Carter described Sam as a "good man". (AUDIO: Earthfall)

Behind the scenes

 * Sam Bishop and Jake Willis are both portrayed by Warren Brown. In 2022, Big Finish Productions used promotional images of Jake to represent Sam Bishop in Old Friends.