Between 1978 and 1981 June Hudson designed some of the most memorable costumes in Doctor Who’s history. Here, she recalls the sometimes difficult journey from the drawing board to the studio  oor.

Interview by PIERS BRITTON

Left: June Hudson pictured outside the BBC’s Acton rehearsal rooms in July 1979. The bus queue also includes cast members from Destiny of the Daleks – a Movellan, Tom Baker (as the Doctor) and Lalla Ward (as Romana).

Right: Sketches showing how June tried to integrate question marks into the Doctor’s new costume for The Leisure Hive (1980).

Irealised very quickly, working on Doctor Who, that there was huge interest in how the programmes were made,” says June Hudson, “and that that interest was only going to grow. I think I knew in my bones that one day someone would be asking us costume designers for our drawings for something like this.”

By “something like this”, June means the Special Edition of Doctor Who Magazine you’re currently holding in your hands.

It was during her work on the 197980 series of Doctor Who that June got into the habit of keeping her preparatory drawings for favourite BBC productions. Even before then she’d held on to a couple from the original 1972 Comedy Playhouse that was developed into Are You Being Served?, together with six or seven from the 1976 pilot episode of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Of her 1980s work, she retains more than two dozen from Dombey and Son, a score or so each from Much Ado About Nothing and The Comedy of Errors, and nearly 40 from The Theban Plays. And from Doctor Who? The better part of a hundred.

The techniques and media involved vary widely, as does the scale and choice of paper. Detailed, highly finished images in vivid colour can be found alongside quick sketches in pencil or felt pen. Other items include a sheet of lined A4 paper with a swatch of black corduroy sellotaped to it – the same black corduroy that was originally intended for Tom Baker’s trousers (later rethought as breeches) in The Leisure Hive (1980), together with notes and a quick biro sketch demonstrating to tailor Arthur Davey how June envisaged the rear vent in the skirts of the Doctor’s great coat

For a variety of reasons, June couldn’t hang on to all her drawings. For example, much of her work for Warriors’ Gate (1981) was kept by the BBC for almost 15 years. “I thought those drawings were gone forever, because the BBC chucked a whole lot of design drawings at one point, to make space,” she recalls. “Then in the 1990s a very lugubrious chap turned up on my doorstep with a John Lewis bag, said ‘I believe these are yours,’ handed the bag to me, and left.”