Some of you may or may not know of my slight….slight obsession with vintage Doctor Who. Yes indeed, coupled with my love of Blakes 7, The Avengers and Sapphire and Steel I think that gives me fairly impressive geek credentials, no? A lot of it is childhood nostalgia, particularly in the Eighties series which I grew up with but also for the occasional Seventies story which my brother would acquire via third generation videotapes recorded from Australian TV, but even the episodes I didn’t grow up watching hold a magical quality for me. Not least because The Doctor was always adept at finding himself aided by a gorgeous companion wearing seriously groovy gear from her own time. Even the few exceptions to this (Leela – Warrior Princess and Romana – Time Lady) look very much ‘of’ the time in which the stories were made.

So I’ll start by introducing you all to the notable young ‘Who girls of the Swinging Sixties.

It began with the Queen of the Ankle Twist, Susan (Right: Carole Ann Ford 1963-65) and her Mary Quant outfits. Susan was The Doctor’s granddaughter and a schoolgirl of exceptional talents. The actors often wore their own clothes due to budget limitations and Carole Ann Ford has said that a lot of her gear was Mary Quant. The show began in 1963 and in many ways is an interesting time capsule for the dramatically changing fashions of the time and I think Carole was the archetypal Quant girl with her elfin hair and boyish figure. The clothes were fairly simple, little jumpers and cropped trousers or pinafore dresses and roll neck sweaters.

Her immediate successor was a young girl from the future named Vicki (Left: found on the planet Dido, I kid ye not!), played by Maureen O’Brien (1965), who somehow seems to have found the off-screen Tardis boutique and was usually dressed in a similar manner to Susan. Nothing extraordinary, just your very average girl about town for the time. Although it was 1965 and the advent of the mini skirt, her hemlines remained very modest as you can see in the picture to the left.

The ridiculously named Dodo (Jackie Lane 1966) was the next gal Billy Hartnell ‘picked up’, running straight into the Tardis from Swinging Sixties London of 1966. Yes indeed, Dodo was conceived as a trendy young thing designed to appeal to the more fashionable young audience. Sadly, she didn’t last long and remains something of a joke to most serious Who fans, but she wore some very groovy little numbers (as we can see on the right from The Celestial Toymaker [Sorry, I had to have a picture of the divine Peter Purves in his youth *licks lips*] she’s working the op-art look!) and deserved more of a send-off than the disappearing act she manages in The War Machines….

…..Which itself introduced us to Polly. Ahhhh, now that’s more like it! Polly (Anneke Wills 1966-67) was a modern London girl with long legs, long blonde hair and big dolly girl eyes. Her introduction was possibly the first time that there was a bit of a something for the dads, with her mini skirts and beauty she was more sexy and womanly than any of her predecessors had ever been. She was also, unfortunately, ill-used mainly for tea-making (Polly put the kettle on?) and screaming in her brief tenure in the Tardis and sadly most of her episodes have been wiped/burned (a fate which has befallen most of the Sixties girls to some degree or another). Polly was the companion who eased the viewers into the regeneration of Hartnell to Patrick Troughton, but eventually left him to return to her own time.

High Priestess of the Piercing Scream, Deborah Watling, entered the Tardis as Victorian orphan and Dalek survivor, Victoria (1967-68). Her transition from crinoline to mini skirt was swift and amusing but fairly inevitable. And she really went for it, from the modest little dress she dons in Tomb of the Cybermen to the super micro hippy girl mini dress she is happily traipsing around in by The Web of Fear, via a gorgeous tweed jacket and knickerbocker ensemble in The Abominable Snowmen. Victoria gets a hard time for her girlishness and screaming (utilised to defeat a monster in her departure story Fury from the Deep) but I think her portrayal of a fish out of water is very poignant and she would certainly benefit from having more stories in existence today.

Finally we come to Zoe (Wendy Padbury 1968-69) who, in contrast to Victoria, was a brainbox girl from the future. Zoe has achieved legend status mainly from her infamous silver catsuit in The Mind Robber and the arse contained within it, but she was also known for running around the universe in some eye-wateringly short mini skirts. The maxi was beginning to creep in by this point, out in the real world, but Doctor Who would not embrace the long skirt for a good while yet.

My favourite Zoe outfit is a toss up between the [what looks like a John Bates] mini dress from The Dominators and what may well be a Celia-print Ossie Clark ensemble from The Invasion. [They mention shopping at Quorum in the commentary for this episode, but her friend is wearing a fantastic Zandra Rhodes lipstick print Fulham Road Clothes Shop ensemble so it’s perfectly possible Zoe’s is as well, I just can’t see it clearly enough to tell!]

Zoe was sent back to her own time and her memory wiped, let’s just hope she managed to keep some of her outfits!