Feature by PIERS BRITTON
With Tom Baker’s penultimate season only crossing over from 1979 into 1980 by a hair’s breadth, the 1980s began in earnest for Doctor Who with Baker’s last series in the role. This was also the first season produced by the incoming John Nathan-Turner.
Under JNT, the visual identity of the programme was massively overhauled. The most immediate and startling change was a new title sequence, but much higher production values were also clearly evident in set construction. Only in the area of costume was there more continuity than change – even, perhaps, an intensification of the ‘operatic’ style that had characterised much of the previous year. June Hudson, who had designed half of the screened serials in the 1979-80 series, became principal costume designer at Nathan- Turner’s behest, alternating stories with Amy Roberts. The two designers’ aesthetics, though distinct, meshed well: both favoured blocks of single or closely related colours, dramatic silhouettes, and a romantic, allusive approach to world-building. In stories such as State of Decay (1980) and Warriors’ Gate (1981) Robson and Hudson drew on historical imagery in non-specific, hybridising ways that created plausibly dense but still dramatic, and instantly compelling, images.
June Hudson left Doctor Who at the end of the 1980-81 series and Amy Roberts worked on only two further serials before finally parting company with the programme in 1983. After this, Doctor Who never exhibited the same kind of coherence in costume design until the 2005 revival under Russell T Davies. As in the later 1970s, during the early-to-mid-80s there was little consistency in the allocation of designers; it became a rarity for anyone to work on more than two productions per year.
That being said, the loss of stylistic coherence didn’t occur all at once. During the first two series of Peter Davison’s tenure as the Fifth Doctor, the character of costume imagery didn’t significantly change; either by good fortune or through pressure from the producer, the designers assigned to the show were mostly sympathetic to the established tone. In particular, Odile Dicks-Mireaux’s delicate, diaphanous costumes for the inhabitants of the eponymous city in Davison’s debut story, Castrovalva (1982), echoed the dark fairy-tale quality of the costumes in The Keeper of Traken (1981) and the magical prefiguring of destiny in Logopolis (1981). In short, costume helped to create the sense that Castrovalva was the concluding chapter of a strange art-house trilogy.
Dicks-Mireaux was by no means the only designer in the 1982 and 1983 series to uphold the early Nathan- Turner aesthetic. Dee Robson, who designed Arc of Infinity and Terminus for the 20th anniversary series in 1983, boasted a flair quite comparable to June Hudson and Amy Roberts. Robson’s panache was shown to best effect in her opulent and fantastical costume for the returning villain Omega in Arc of Infinity. Both Omega’s vaguely insectoid mask – realised in collaboration with visual effects designer Richard Gregory – and his mottled armour and robes invite audiences to understand them as a kind of chrysalis for the new body he is seeking to build for himself throughout the story. Robson also devised the costume with a view to its working well in negative, which is how it was mostly seen in the early part of the serial.