Over the weekend, Piranha, Cricket and Bigfoot battled it out to win a singing competition – having already beaten the likes of Dippy Egg, Weather, Bubble Tea and Air Fryer. So gloriously weird and wonderful is The Masked Singer’s guessing game about which celebrities are singing underneath the elaborate costumes that the series has been a global hit, winning a TV Bafta and an International Emmy. But where do these colourful characters that audiences go so wild for even come from?
“It starts off as a whim on a phone call, like, ‘Oh, let’s go for a Dippy Egg!’, or, ‘All the kids are into bubble tea,’” says the show’s costume designer, Tim Simpson, as he juggles talking over the phone and making a giant martini glass in his Plunge Creations costume and props workshop. “Then it’s, ‘Shall we have a landmark?’ and along comes the Eiffel Tower.”
He will sketch about 25 designs, he says, usually without knowing who the talent is. The producers then try to match a singer with a character – or mismatch them to throw people off the scent of their real identity. He then works on making them as comfortable as possible for singing in and seeing out of (“That’s not easy when you’re making a Chicken Caesar costume”). The celebrities are not always instant fans, though.
“Weather [Dionne Warwick] hadn’t been able to have her costume fitted because she was in the States,” Simpson says. “She put it on, took it off and said: ‘I’m never wearing that again – it’s not very comfortable and I don’t like it.’” Simpson had four hours to reconfigure the internal mask. “I went into her dressing room and said I hope it fits. She looked me in the eye and said: ‘It’ll fit.’”
Then there are the technical issues: “Air Fryer terrified me this season – I had to learn how to programme [her LED face] and left the crew with the tech during filming. When I was watching the show, I was still nervous that her face wouldn’t work.” He also pulled off the feat of season three’s Robobunny, a huge robot with a singing bunny rabbit in its front compartment: “It was designed by my son. I liked how we got a puppet into it – when he came on stage and sang with two different voices, it came to life.”
Aside from the theatrics and technology, clearly a lot of heart goes into these designs. So strong is the fandom’s connection that one woman has even written a film script about all the characters. “We all fall in love with characters from our childhood and I think people are engaging with these in just the same way,” says Simpson. “It’s quite a responsibility to make sure I put one in there that someone will fall in love with. This season it seems to be Dippy Egg – who knew!”
A series that, 60 years on, continues to captivate fans with its strange and spectacular costumes is Doctor Who. Louise Page was the award-winning costume designer on the first Russell T Davies era between 2005 and 2010 – and she introduced many aliens and villains to Who’s legacy with her terrifying designs, including the Sycorax, the clockwork droids, the Judoon, the scarecrows and the Sisters of Plenitude (“the cat nuns”).
“Everything came from Russell, absolutely everything,” says Page about making the new characters come to life during script read-throughs. “His scripts were so incredible that they would jump off the page at you.”
It took a mighty collaboration between costume, special effects, hair and makeup plus props to make things happen within 10 months each series. Page won a Welsh TV Bafta for the clockwork man and woman in the Madame de Pompodour episode. “The most sinister thing about those were the masks,” she says. “I can’t take all the credit for that – they were by Millennial FX who did all the prosthetics. They were scary for children!” The amount of stunts was a constant factor too. “They had knives and things that shot out of their arms, which were strapped to the actors’s arms under the sleeves. It was a bit of a last-minute experiment.”
The cat nuns were another favourite: “It’s just a normal nun outfit, but that face was all prosthetics – all the hairs were put in individually, it was about three hours in makeup.” This is an absolute must: covering every inch of flesh. “That’s probably the most important thing about any of the creatures and monsters in Doctor Who!”
While the pressure was on to live up to such a precedent, the payoff was almost unbelievable for Page. “Most costume designers don’t get to have action figures of costumes they have designed … it is rather lovely,” she says, “I also attended a big convention in Los Angeles a few years back, where many fans were wearing their versions of my designs, such as David Tennant’s 10th Doctor. And I had a couple of teenagers approach me who wanted to be costume designers having watched the series.”
Another beloved show that continues to wow audiences with its wardrobe department is Strictly Come Dancing. Since it started 20 years ago, the development of theme weeks and slick top-tier productions have demanded spectacular costumes, especially during the Halloween and Movie weeks. Vicky Gill, who has been the show’s Costume lead since 2012, says they have fewer than seven days to turn round the next live show’s costumes (last year there were 875 items in total, made by a core team of nine). Anyone who tunes in will agree it’s an almost incomprehensible achievement.
“It’s intense. Over the years, we’ve created a system that makes people think anything is possible at short notice – we’re victims of our own success,” she says. After a creative meeting every Tuesday, her team has between Thursday and Saturday to make sure the costumes are just right for the live dances. “For Strictly, that’s the super power we have.”
Take Dianne Buswell’s Marge Simpson costume – complete with the tower of blue hair. How did the do stay in place during her lively routine? “That’s us gelling with the hair and makeup team in such a short time frame – that’s what I think people maybe don’t understand,” says Gill. “The time restraints are really tricky, and that’s what everybody deals with so well.”
Her team – who already knows the professionals’ likes and dislikes (and what scares them) – speak to the celebrities to learn theirs. “We don’t want unhappy people, we just want people to feel comfortable and able to perform their best. But it’s not always the most favourite thing they’ve ever worn … ”
In fact, there have been a few malfunctions over the years – some more disastrous than others: “When we did the Christmas show last year, Dan Snow was the gingerbread man and his trousers split when we did the record. And that was it. There was nothing we could do about it.” And while Jay McGuinness did his Pulp Fiction jive in 2015, which scored 10s, Gill winced as she watched on, knowing that he had safety pins in his trouser hems. “It was such a shame … It pained me knowing that.”
Despite making such memorable costumes on one of the UK’s most beloved shows, Gill always finds herself unhappy when watching the series. “You always think: ‘Ah, a little bit more time and I could have done better with that.’ I’m very hard on myself.” And yet, she wouldn’t have it any other way. “Maybe I’ll never retire,” she laughs. “Maybe one day I’ll just stop and pop my clogs because we’re so used to just working on adrenaline. What will happen to us when we stop?”
These creations are mostly put into storage – a sad thought. Still, it makes space for imaginations to continue running wild. And many mentioned have been reused, sent to exhibitions or auctioned off. “Some Masked Singer costumes are being used at Butlin’s for weekend performances,” says Simpson. “People want to see these characters again. It’s really lovely.”
