New Pastures was the second story in the The Brigadier Adventures series, released by BBV Productions. The story was written by James Hornby and read by Bill Baggs.
Publisher's summary[]
The recently retired Brigadier takes a holiday to the Yorkshire Dales, but finds he cannot relax. Is he ready to leave the army behind, or does he need one last adventure to get it out of his system?
Plot[]
Giles examines some papers about the life of Sir Alistair — diary entries written shortly after he retired from his "soldiering". As told in those notes, the Brigadier, after retiring, goes spend a holiday in a "quaint village" in the Yorkshire Dales a week before he is due to take up his new job at a local public school. After moving into his lodgings at the Golden Fleece, he tries to enjoy the lush countryside. However, he keeps being reminded of the various horrors he faced over the years when trying to take quiet walks.
Hearing rumours that tourists have been going missing on the moors, he gives in to the temptation to investigate, thinking of it as "one last adventure" before he becomes a teacher. He locates a natural cave in the area where tourists have been going missing, and finds gruesomely mutilated human bodies inside. Keeping his cool, he begins theorising that this must be the work of some alien scientists trying to understand human physiology with particularly crude methods. However, when the dweller of the cave arrives, he is a thoroughly unimpressive, very-much-human man with an unstable disposition. Arresting the murderer, the Brigadier is told by the authorities that the man he helped apprehend was a perfectly mundane deranged serial killer, Harold Alton.
Although proud that he still managed to save lives by putting Alton back behind bars, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is left to ponder how his decades dealing with the supernatural have warped his perspective on things. He muses that although formally retiring was an important first step, he still has a lot more efforts to expend to truly put his old life behind him.
Characters[]
Crew[]
- Writer - James Hornby
- Cover - James Hornby and Warren Lewis
Worldbuilding[]
- Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart's old position was taken over by a man "hand-picked by the boffins at Geneva" following his retirement.
- The Brigadier finds a holiday to a village in the Yorkshire Dales "much preferable to being called to a quarry in Dorset".
- He recalls having once been posted in Sierra Leone, where a man "could go for days without meeting another soul".
- His writings mention "tales of Odysseus" which feature sirens who lured men to their doom with the sound of their voice.
- The Brigadier is familiar with the Drofen, whom he describes as "cannibals".
Notes[]
- Although the character could not be referenced by name, the Doctor is subtly alluded to: at one point, the Brigadier makes brief reference to his old "scientific advisor", singular, before talking about his scientific advisors in the plural in the next sentence. This echoes his lines "Wonderful chap, both of him" and "Wonderful chap, all of them" in the multi-Doctor stories The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors.
Continuity[]
- Giles is continuing to look through documents concerning Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (AUDIO: Memories of Tomorrow)
- Following his retirement from "thirty years of soldiering", the Brigadier intends to become a maths teacher. He expresses an apparent wish to leave his years as a soldier investigating the strange and supernatural behind. (TV: Mawdryn Undead)
- The Brigadier mentions his stay in Sierra Leone. (PROSE: Transit)
- The exact date of the Brigadier's retirement was redacted from the official files "as part of the contemporary dating protocol". (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
- The Brigadier recalls encounters with the Yeti (TV: The Web of Fear) "killer plastic dummies", (TV: Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons) and a race of intelligent lizards dwelling beneath the Earth's crust, with whom his dealings were "checkered". (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians)
External links[]
- Official New Pastures page at bbvproductions.co.uk
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