Doctor Who (1963) - Season 4

Continued from Doctor Who (1963) - Season 3

'The Tenth Planet'

The Cybermen were the work of the costume department, with costume designer Alexandra Tynan (credited as Sandra Reid) visualized them on paper and constructed the main body suit and mask. Tynan explained in a documentary;

'I only did one design for the first Cyberman, largely due to the fact that we had very little time. (...) The fabric over their faces was a silk jersey, because I wanted something stretchy. We didn't have fabrics with lycra and all these kinds of things we had later on, so it was a case of making the bodysuit from a wool jersey I think it was, or some kind of jersey fabric anyway.

Then there was a layer of plastic on top of that, soft plastic sheeting. It was an ideal way to lose weight! It was the most wonderful slimming suit that you could possibly have thought of! (...) The tubing that ran down between one layer and the other was in fact 'crin'

It's a woven plastic fabric which can be made into all shapes and sizes, it can be made into a tube, it can be made into flat patterns, all kinds of things like that. I had it painted in different colours so that it would register in tones, because we were working in black and white.'

The helmets and the chest units were outside the skills of the wardrobe department, and so had to be be constructed by specialists. The BBC's own Visual Effects Department constructed the lamp helmets, while Jack Lovell constructed the chest units. Lovell recalled;

'We were given a rough drawing to work from and I think we built about six of them, mainly from Perspex and plastic parts, fixed onto a sturdy metal frame.

They were fitted with lights and heavy duty batteries, so the actors portraying the Cybermen had quite a bit of weight to carry around. The plastic grill at the lower front of the chest unit is the underside of a lampshade, which is very recognizable once you know what it is.

My son (John Lovell) and I attended the studio recordings to assist (Tynan's) team with the dressing of the actors and to change the batteries in the chest units when they ran down.'

The helmet and chest unit made an already very uncomfortable costume even harder to wear, as Tynan recounted in an interview with Doctor Who Bulletin.

'I was very lucky, in that the people who played those parts were very co-operative and totally professional – they weren’t going to whinge about something not being comfortable or whatever went wrong. We used a lot of sticky tape for the first Cybermen and we learnt a lot. There’s a photograph of me with Derek Martinus and Edwina Craze pulling a Cyberman up off the ground, because once they fell down they couldn’t get up.'

Tynan had an amusing explanation as to why the first Cybermen had human hands, not gloves. 'The short answer is that I forgot! They should have had gloves, so on the first day of filming Gillian James, the make-up supervisor, came rushing into the wardrobe area and said, 'Sandra, what are you going to do about the hands - you said you were going to use gloves!'

So what we had to do was to make their hands up with a silvery make-up and, in retrospect, I think that was a good thing because it showed that there was a humanod element still there whereas with the second lot (in 'The Moonbase') it was much more stylized and they just had the thumb, forefinger and then the rest of the hand.'

Interestingly, the images below depict a Cybermen helmet and chest unit being worn by a Shawcraft Models employee in a home movie recorded at the company's workshop.

As Shawcraft preciously handled the electronics of the original TARDIS console prop for 'An Unearthly Child', did they also work on the electronics of the Cybermen costume's hard parts?

'The Moonbase'

The Cybermen returned, yet again made by Alexandra Tynan and Jack Lovell. Tynan explained the reasons for the Cybermen's revamped design. 'The second lot of Cybermen looked different because we had more money, simple as that! Having more money meant that I could be a bit more adventurous, and so this time for the tubing down their arms I used vacuum cleaner hose! (...) And I used practise gold balls on the arms as a kind of joint.

It wasn't a double layer costume, it was single-layer and made of a new fabric. Vinyl with a fabric base glued to the back of it so it was fused, something very new! The design was sleeker, and that was because in discussions, we decided we coul fine tune (the Cybermen), and it certainly would have been a mistake to do them like we had done in 'The Tenth Planet'.

The vinyl fabric was a problem for the cutters in the BBC's wardrobe department, according to Tynan. 'We bought silver vinyl for the costumes and the people who made them up nearly went bananas. They broke machine needles and they just went round the bend working on those costumes. Very difficult stuff to sew. It was topstitched and hard to get under the foot of the sewing machines because it would slide. They had to try different tactics to stitch it properly'.

Jack Lovell recalled how the 'hard parts' of the new Cybermen costumes were made. 'We were commissioned to cast up the full head fibreglass helmet and a brand new aluminium chest unit design with a removable gun at the bottom.

The helmets were constructed with a removable back panel fastened with small hooks, to allow the actor’s head entry. Inside the mouth was a simple hinged mechanism operated by the actor’s chin and used to indicate which Cyberman was speaking.

There was also a bright light fitted in the top section, complete with batteries, which was turned on and off from a switch on the side of the chest unit. Clear Perspex ear-handles were made separately before being fixed permanently into position either side of the helmet.

The one piece vinyl jumpsuits were delivered to us with the three-fingered hands integral to the costume, we then had to attach the vacuum cleaner tubing and plastic golfball joints.'

The Cybermen costumes made for 'The Moonbase' were later reused in the following season's 'Tomb of the Cybermen'; to depict the 'Cyber-Controller' ruling the Cybermen, one of the helmets was altered to have an egg-shaped, brain-like dome.

'The Macra Terror'

Shawcraft Models provided the large Macra prop, which was designed to have its claws, mouth and antennae operated from inside the prop. However, this would prove to be the last time Shawcraft provided a creature prop to the BBC.

The BBC had grown increasingly dissatisfied with Shawcraft's work, deeming the Macra prop a failure. On the following serial 'The Faceless Ones', Shawcraft provided miniature effects, which unfortunately broke during studio recording.

This series of failures, combined with competition from other freelancers such as Jack Lovell, and the BBC's own Visual Effects Department now having the resources to handle work on it's own, meant that by the end of the season, Shawcraft would never again work for the BBC.

'The Faceless Ones'

There is little information on the grisly masks and gloves worn by the actors playing alien 'Chameleons' in the natural state; was this the work of the BBC's makeup department, an early foray for the Visual Effects Department, or was it made by Jack Lovell?

'The Evil of the Daleks'

This serial would prove to be the BBC Visual Effects Department's first major foray on Doctor Who, overseeing the miniature effects, explosions and, of course, the Dalek props.

Shawcraft Models had previously built and refurbished all the Dalek props it made but from now on the TV Dalek props were now in the BBC' hands. Any future refurbishment of the Dalek props would now be done 'in-house', rather than at Shawcraft.

The Visual Effects Department made a new Dalek prop for the serial, with a quirk to its design; as it was designed to be able to fit into the narrow doorways of Grim’s Dyke Mansion House, where location footage was done, and so had a much narrower skirt section.

As the serial is mostly lost, it's hard to find images of this particular Dalek prop, and its oddly-shaped construction meant it was never used again in the show. It was kept in storage and eventually auctioned off at Bonhams.

The highlight of the serial was the Emperor Dalek, constructed by the Visual Effects Department as a massive prop. Interestingly, the Emperor Dalek prop's 'crown' seens to be cannibalised from one of the Chumblie props Shawcraft Models provided for 'Galaxy 4'.

The Visual Effects Department were tasked with the Daleks destruction - both in full-scale and miniature* - but a last minute addition was made to the Emperor Dalek prop during its demise.

Timothy Combe, who directed 'Evil of the Daleks', remembered how he got a frantic phone call from Doctor Who producer Innes Lloyd just as he was about to film the props being destroyed.

'"Tim, I've had a word with Sydney Newman. Don't kill off the Daleks! Terry Nation wants to write more". "Oh" I said, "Well I'm all set to blow them up!" He said, "Well, don't!". What am I going to do, I'm all set up! "Well, think of something. Keep them alive!"

So we had a conference, and I said, the only way of gettng around this is there's got to be a heartbeat. I searched around Ealing Studios and found the most powerful lightbulb, inserted it into (the Emperor Dalek prop) and protected it with metal stuff all around it so it didn't get blown up, and we shot it. We left the pulse going on, so your Dalek still lives today!'

*The miniature sequences of the Dalek city being destroyed utilized commercially available toy Daleks sold by Marx Toys. A similar sequence in the same season's 'Power of the Daleks' utilized Dalek toys sold by the company Herts.

'Design a Doctor Who Monster!'

The BBC Visual Effects Department worked on a Doctor Who-themed competition on the children's variety show Blue Peter, capitalizing on the show's reputation for strange aliens.

This was the 'Design a Doctor Who Monster' contest, where kids sent their drawings of a 'monster that could defeat the Daleks' and the lucky winners would have their monster fabricated as real props by the Visual Effects Department.

Out of the three winning monsters, the 'Aqua Man' and the 'Hypnotron' were realized as suits, while the 'Steel Octopus' was a static prop.

Sources:

• The Doctor's Effects (Steve Cambden, 2001)
  
• 'The Cyber Story' featurette
  
• 'The Dalek Factor' featurette
  
• Dalek 6388 fansite (A history of Doctor Who's Dalek props)
  

Continued in Doctor Who (1963) - Season 5