I've just recently watched The Twin Dilemma on DVD (wrists gaffer-taped to the arms of my chair, to avoid involuntary clawing out of my own eyes); it was a horrible story on almost all levels, from the slapdash set design, the stilted performances and soul-crushing dialogue, to the feeble monster/villain (which was supposedly a giant man-slug, but looked and moved more like a penguin wearing deeley-boppers, who'd been mud-surfing at the Glastonbury festival). Most offensive of all though, was the costume design - they made space cop Hugo Laing dress up as if Liza Minnelli had just enrolled in a karate class, and somehow they even managed to make Nicola Bryant look awful! Oh yes, her outfit had the requisite amount of reveal built into it, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's an eye-clashing ensemble; it's as if they wheeled in a hamper full of panto clothes, switched the studio lights off and told everyone to partake in a costume lucky dip.
And that of course brings us to the 6th Doctor's choice of costume (not Colin's, because we all know he hated it as much as us); a lot of people claim that his initial unlikeable portrayal of the Doctor doomed his tenure from the start (I personally liked it, although it could have been tempered a little with what he now reveals to us in his Big Finish portrayal), but it was that bloody silly costume that hamstrung him from the start, because we could never quite take him seriously, and also because we were so distracted by our musings on what he should have been wearing that we never paid him quite as much attention as we should have.
After burning The Twin Dilemma on a Last of the Time Lords-style Master funeral pyre, and salting the earth afterwards so that nothing could grow from it, it finally came to me, after all these years of musing on what the 6th Doctor's outfit - not costume - should have been. So here we go:
A silvery-grey double-breasted pinstripe suit, with a shirt and tie of alternating colours and patterns (people DO change their clothes, J N-T!); I thought of a lilac shirt with a darker purple spotted kipper tie with matching hankerchief in the breast pocket, and yuppie-style bright red braces (or suspenders, if you're American). I like the shoes and spats thing he had going on, but I would have made the shoes black and the spats white. Like Tennant's 10th Doctor, he would have occasionally wore a camel coat over this ensemble, and to set the whole thing off, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his suit jacket. The look would have captured the 80s London city gent/yuppie zeitgeist of the time, with just an anachronisitic hint of 20s Chicago mobster thrown in. I would have also toned down the hair, kept it long but also kept it natural and more dark, not the peroxide frizz it was, which, combined with the colourful costume, made him look like a negative of John Nathan-Turner. The 6th Doctor really was his Mary-Sue, wasn't he?
Anyway, opinions, comments on my choice of outfit? And I'd love to hear what your musings over the years have come up with; I just hope you don't need to watch The Twin Dilemma to bring them to mind...
And that of course brings us to the 6th Doctor's choice of costume (not Colin's, because we all know he hated it as much as us); a lot of people claim that his initial unlikeable portrayal of the Doctor doomed his tenure from the start (I personally liked it, although it could have been tempered a little with what he now reveals to us in his Big Finish portrayal), but it was that bloody silly costume that hamstrung him from the start, because we could never quite take him seriously, and also because we were so distracted by our musings on what he should have been wearing that we never paid him quite as much attention as we should have.
After burning The Twin Dilemma on a Last of the Time Lords-style Master funeral pyre, and salting the earth afterwards so that nothing could grow from it, it finally came to me, after all these years of musing on what the 6th Doctor's outfit - not costume - should have been. So here we go:
A silvery-grey double-breasted pinstripe suit, with a shirt and tie of alternating colours and patterns (people DO change their clothes, J N-T!); I thought of a lilac shirt with a darker purple spotted kipper tie with matching hankerchief in the breast pocket, and yuppie-style bright red braces (or suspenders, if you're American). I like the shoes and spats thing he had going on, but I would have made the shoes black and the spats white. Like Tennant's 10th Doctor, he would have occasionally wore a camel coat over this ensemble, and to set the whole thing off, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his suit jacket. The look would have captured the 80s London city gent/yuppie zeitgeist of the time, with just an anachronisitic hint of 20s Chicago mobster thrown in. I would have also toned down the hair, kept it long but also kept it natural and more dark, not the peroxide frizz it was, which, combined with the colourful costume, made him look like a negative of John Nathan-Turner. The 6th Doctor really was his Mary-Sue, wasn't he?
Anyway, opinions, comments on my choice of outfit? And I'd love to hear what your musings over the years have come up with; I just hope you don't need to watch The Twin Dilemma to bring them to mind...
