During his time with UNIT, Benton faces the Cybermen, the Daleks, the Nestene forces, and the Master. Benton is characterised as reliable, loyal, uncomplicated, and possessing good common sense. Aside from the regular companions and the Brigadier, Benton is the only recurring character in the classic series to travel in the TARDIS.
Benton is loyal to the people he works with and is willing to disobey orders to help them (in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, he encourages the Doctor to knock him out and escape after the Doctor is falsely accused). He offers himself as a test subject for the Doctor's psychic-scanner, remarking that he is expendable (Planet of the Spiders).
Very little is known of Benton outside of his UNIT duties, other than that he has a younger sister and is fond of ballroom dancing. His first name is never revealed in the television series. He flirts briefly with Jo Grant, the Third Doctor's assistant, as well as Sarah Jane Smith, but this does not get beyond good-natured banter.
Benton's last on-screen appearance in the series is in The Android Invasion. In Mawdryn Undead, set in 1983, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart says he left the British Army in 1979 and became a used car salesman. In Battlefield set in the 1990s, Lethbridge-Stewart hypothesises on still having Benton to assist wth a gardening project.
Benton is one of the most popular recurringsupporting characters in the television series, is often listed as a companion of the Doctor,[1] including on the official BBC Doctor Who website.[2] Some sources, however, like John Nathan-Turner's book Doctor Who: The Companions, exclude Benton.
Benton is one of the few adult characters to have been portrayed by a child actor in pre-2005 Doctor Who: Darren Plant in The Time Monster and Steven Stanley in the direct-to-video Wartime.
John Levene reprised the role of Benton in the spin-off videoWartime, produced by Reeltime Pictures in 1987. This establishes a first name for Benton. Levene and Terrance Dicks determined this during the early 1970s, though it was not used in any official production before Wartime.[3] The name John Benton has subsequently been used in spin-off novels and other fiction.
In 2013, Levene reprised the role again for the Big Finish Companion Chronicle Council of War and in 2017 for "UNIT: Assembled".
Benton appears alongside the Sixth Doctor in the unlicensed fan fiction novel Time's Champion by Chris McKeon, based on notes by Craig Hinton.