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| Cover art by Clayton Hickman |
Neil's excellent book Flying Onto Shelves covers the history of the figurines themselves; my job was to write stuff for the magazine issued with each figurine, delving more into the history of the costume depicted.
Dressing the First Doctor
Costume feature by Simon Guerrier
On 26 March 1963, the head of the BBC’s script department, Donald Wilson, held a meeting to agree the format of a new science-fiction series. With Alice Frick and John Bryabon – who’d already conducted a survey into the potential of the genre – and CE Webber, they devised The Troubleshooters about three scientific investigators: a young hero and heroine plus what their proposal described as a “maturer man, 35-40, with some ‘character’ twist.”
Head of Drama Sydney Newman rejected this idea. Instead, as he explained in the 1986 book Doctor Who – The Early Years, “I dreamed up the character of a man who is 764 years old; who is senile but with extraordinary flashes of intellectual brilliance. A crotchety old bugger (any kid’s grandfather)”. Soon, this series had a title – Dr Who, the name given to the old man by the three younger characters (the hero and heroine now joined by a “with-it” 15 year-old school girl). The Doctor was described as “a frail old man lost in time and space,” having stolen an erratic time machine from his own people.
In May, Rex Tucker was appointed acting producer of the new series. He offered the lead role to 37 year-old actor Hugh David, a versatile actor Tucker had worked with several times before. David declined, apparently reluctant to be tied to a series for a whole year. Besides, incoming producer Verity Lambert favoured an older actor in the role to reduce the time spent in make-up on what would already be a technically arduous series, and to add authenticity. Mervyn Pinfield, acting as technical adviser, recommended 59 year-old actor Leslie French; According to Lambert in The Doctor Who File (p. 25), incoming script editor David Whitaker* advocated 52 year-old Cyril Cusack; 49 year-old Geoffrey Bayldon and 56 year-old Alan Webb were also considered. All four men turned down the role.
Lambert recalled this difficulty in 1996 in her preface to the biography, Who’s There? “Choosing the actor to play the title role of the Doctor was obviously the most important and crucial piece of casting,” she said. “The Doctor was a mysterious and complex character. He had a child-like quality, was unpredictable, sometimes crotchety, very knowledgeable about some things and completely ignorant about others. He could be frightening but was also stalwart and kind. Above all, he was an outsider who did things in his own individual way.” She knew of 55 year-old actor William Hartnell from his film work, but cited two particular roles: “the irascible Sergeant Major in the television series The Army Game [in which Hartnell appeared from 1957 to 1961] and his moving performance as ‘Johnson’ in This Sporting Life [released earlier in 1963].”
An approach was made to Hartnell’s agent (and son-in-law) Terry Carney, who rang Hartnell on 11 July. “I was a little taken aback [by the call],” Hartnell’s wife Heather remembered in Doctor Who Magazine in 1983, “and asked if it was a tough guy part. ‘No, it’s an old man with long white hair, an old professor who’s a bit round the bend’. Well, I said ‘Bill will love it’.” The following day, Hartnell travelled to London to meet Lambert and director Waris Hussein.
“We had a full three hours, lunched by his agent Terry Carney, having already decided among ourselves that Hartnell would do.” - Waris Hussein in his diary, 13 July 1963
By then, writer Anthony Coburn’s draft script detailed the Doctor’s clothes: “He wears a Napoleonic trench coat, a woollen balaclava, mittens, fur lined boots, and on top of the balaclava an Astrakhan hat.” The same costume survived into a subsequent draft, though the footwear was now specified as “fur lined RAF boots”. Later drafts just said, “his clothes are bizarre” – in the camera script, this is the only description of any of the regulars.
Costume supervisor Maureen Heneghan had worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company and for costumier Morris Angel before joining the BBC in 1957. After moving to Ontario in 1960 to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, she returned to the BBC in July 1963 and was soon given the job of realising the Doctor’s distinctive look, with little in the way of a brief. “I vaguely recall that Waris Hussein suggested that the Doctor should look ‘time traveller like’” she told Richard Bignell in an interview published in Nothing at the End of the Lane in 2015, admitting that this was “not very helpful.”
“It had to be something related to the 20th century but not too far away from it,” she told 3 Story Magazine in 2013, “so I thought why not go into the 19th century. The streetwear at the time was Edwardian-ish. He had to have fobs and a chain and a pocket watch – it was part of the script – so we gave him a waistcoat. Then he had to have a muffler, because all travelers seemed to wear mufflers.” She told Nothing at the End of the Lane that these items were not taken from stock – as viewers often spotted reused pieces. “Items from second-hand outlets would bring a valued worn-look following my slogan of ‘clothes not costume.’ The fur hat, jacket, cloak, waistcoat, scarf and checked trousers were all brought from there but his shirts probably would have come from BBC stock as he certainly would have needed more than one.”
She told 3 Story Magazine that Hartnell initially wanted to wear a cloth clap (as he had done in This Sporting Life). Heneghan convinced him to try a karakul – the “Astrakhan hat” of the earliest versions of the script. “He liked it with his face,” Heneghan remembered. “The most important things on TV are the extremities – the hands and face – because that’s what you see most of. And the hat was great with a wig.” She told Nothing at the End of the Lane that the hat covered the brightness of the wig and so prevented lighting problems in studio: “All my choices were made with lighting problems in mind.” Another issue was the star. “William Hartnell was not an easy man to work with,” she told 3 Story Magazine. “He was an angry actor, not simpatico. And he had definite ideas of what he wanted Doctor Who to look like. I was stuck in the middle and told to please both of them.”
Hartnell attended his first fitting and make-up test (with Heneghan and make-up supervisor Elizabeth Blattner) on 7 August at TV Centre. Make-up hid the faint birthmark on the actor’s cheek. There were further fittings on 13 and 29 August, and a final fitting and make-up session 9 September. On 20 September, Hartnell and the other regular cast members were in costume for a photo call held at TV Centre on sets representing the school and junkyard from the opening episode. In those photos, the Doctor looks eccentric and mysterious. The following day, rehearsals began on the first episode of Doctor Who, which was recorded on 27 September. In this, the Doctor’s costume seems less eccentric: he removes his cape and scarf to reveal a simple black suit jacket, black tie and ordinary shirt. The jacket is buttoned up so we can’t see the light-toned waistcoat of the photo call. It’s an austere, unadorned look – matching the severity of the character.
Newman was unimpressed by this first episode when he saw it on 30 September and asked for the production to be remounted with significant changes. These included modifications to the Doctor’s character and costume to make him more “cute”. Newman later recalled that he wanted the Doctor to be more relatable to characters as a grandfather figure. For the remount, recorded on 18 October, Hartnell wore a more eccentric version of his costume: cloth-top boots instead of ordinary shoes, high-waisted but tapered trousers in hound’s-tooth check, the candlewick waistcoat of the photo call, but a new wing-collared shirt, foulard tie and short-fitted morning coat. A photograph from rehearsals on The Forest of Fear (see for example the Complete History, p. 51) shows the high-waisted check trousers worn with braces. This costume would remain largely unchanged throughout Hartnell’s time in the series and the Edwardian style has often been a touchstone for subsequent Doctors.
Despite the eccentric outfit, Lambert was keen that Hartnell and the other actors gave the story a sense of realism. As the first story unfolded, that was conveyed through make-up and costume, too: the Doctor and his friends get increasingly dirty and bedraggled. Costume was also a significant marker of difference between the regulars and the cave people they meet in this first story, who comment on their “strange skins” and mistake their shoes as “strange feet”.
Heneghan stayed with the BBC for six months, so only oversaw the first Doctor Who story. She was succeeded by Daphne Dare, who had just joined the BBC after working for Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Bristol Old Vic and productions in London’s West End. She told TV Zone in 1994 that she “absolutely adored,” working on the series, thriving on the pace of production and the variety of stories, alternating between the past and the future. Yet over the two years she oversaw almost all the episodes of the series, the Doctor’s costume changed very little from Maureen Heneghan’s design.
In the second story, The Daleks, the Doctor wears spectacles rather like the ones Hartnell had in This Sporting Life. He has a Panama hat instead of his karakul, suggesting that the TARDIS has landed somewhere hot. The glasses and both hats would return infrequently through Hartnell’s tenure. The Doctor also dons in this story special binocular glasses to spy on the Dalek city which are not seen again. In the next story, The Edge of Destruction, he wears a bandage round his head but sets a precedent for the next few stories to follow: while the other regulars change into other outfits, the Doctor remains in his usual clothes.
One small change is made in The Sensorites, when the Doctor sports a monocle on a long piece of dark ribbon. In fact, the Doctor’s distinctive, unchanging manner of dress helps the Sensorites tell him apart from other humans. Later in the story, his jacket is torn from him, necessitating a different but similar dark jacket in the next story, The Reign of Terror.
This story marked two major developments in the Doctor’s costume. On 15 June 1964, while Hartnell began rehearsals for the final episode of The Sensorites, actor Brian Proudfoot donned his costume and wig to double as the Doctor in the series’ first outside location shoot. The modest shot – of the Doctor, seen from a distance, strolling down a lane of Poplar trees – was a dry run for the more ambitious location shoot in central London in August for The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It was also the first time someone other than Hartnell had played the Doctor, and its success was largely the result of the Doctor’s recognisable outfit. Production assistant Timothy Combe directed the shoot, and recalled for The Doctors in 1994, “this poor guy … who we had to train to be Doctor Who. It was hysterical, like watching a great ballet diva training a protégé. ‘No, no man! Hold the shoulders straight, walk with dignity!”
In the story’s third episode, the Doctor barters his distinctive ring for a striking new set of clothes: the hat and sash signifying the position of regional officer of the French provinces, with accompanying clothes tailored to match. As well as being the first major change in the Doctor’s wardrobe, this was the first time writer Dennis Spooner used the Doctor’s ring as a plot point: in a 1966 episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan, the Doctor uses his ring to get back into the TARDIS, while later that year, in The Power of the Daleks (on which Spooner did an uncredited rewrite), the ring slips from the finger of the rejuvenated Doctor, suggesting he’s not the same man.
The Reign of Terror was the last story of Doctor Who’s first series and, perhaps to re-establish the character for the audience, he’s back in his usual outfit for the next story to be broadcast, Planet of Giants. He’s in that same “hero outfit” when he faces The Dalek Invasion of Earth. This was the final story to be made in the first production block on Doctor Who, episode six recorded on 23 October – a year and five days after the remounted An Unearthly Child. In the second block, there’d be more variation. As well as different neck ties and waistcoats, there are more drastic changes, including period dress in The Romans, a space anorak in The Web Planet, an old-fashioned bathing costume in The Space Museum and a monk’s cowl in The Time Meddler. But these are exceptions: for the most part, the Doctor retains the distinctive look created by Maureen Heneghan.
* See also my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
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