In both series, he is the commander-in-chief of Spectrum, the security organisation dedicated to defending Earth against the Mysterons, a race of Martians.

"[2] The original script for Captain Scarlet's first episode, written by Anderson and his wife Sylvia, described the character's appearance as "an odd mixture of youth and middle age".

The only episodes in which he is seen to leave the base are "White as Snow", "Spectrum Strikes Back", "Special Assignment" and "Flight to Atlantica".

In an article on Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Jim Sangster and Paul Condon criticised Colonel White's "often desperate attempts to frame even Spectrum's most humiliating defeats as a step forward", describing them as "misjudged and more than a little trite" and one of the "few bad points" of the series.

[5] Writing for Starburst magazine, Andrew Pixley and Julie Rogers noted the character's "fatherly" nature and his habit of concluding episodes "with a rather pompous, patriotic speech about how Earth will triumph over the Mysterons.

[10][11] On black-and-white dualism, Guyanese actor Cy Grant, who voiced Lieutenant Green and praised the series for its multiculturalism, commented that "the 'darkness' of the Mysterons is most easily seen as the psychological rift — the struggle of 'good' and 'evil' — of the Western world as personified by Colonel White and his team.

[2][9][12][13][14] Both Robin Turner of Wales Online and Chris Jenkins of Total DVD magazine compare White to God seated in his "heavenly Cloudbase" (defended by a fighter squadron that happens to be codenamed "the Angels").