The Longleat Cyberman - A Doctor Who Monster Story

BBC Publicity Photos The costume's TV career lasted only six months, meaning a significant question still remained unanswered: given that very little exists from filming of Doctor Who in the 1960s, how did this costume manage to survive the sixteen years until being auctioned in 1983?
The costume certainly never reappeared in Doctor Who after 1967, so the only chance of tracing its whereabouts during later years would be if it happened to appear somewhere in a photograph; there followed a long trawl through magazines and the internet for every Cyberman photo I could find in search of potential clues. My luck was in again, as it turned out the BBC made use of the costume for the very purpose of being photographed and several excellent images existed of a quality I had not dared to hope for.
Even though new Cybermen costumes had been made in 1968 for The Wheel in Space and again for The Invasion, the Cybercontroller bodysuit was still being used for later publicity photos. The Moonbase / Tomb Cyberman / Cybercontroller costume is easily differentiated in photographs from a standard Mark II Cyberman thanks to the presence of the unique shoulder tubes, the double leg tubes, and the ankle balls, coupled with the absence of slits in the vinyl for chest unit straps.
	Although the pictures above are identified as "1967 Publicity Photo" on the BBC's Doctor Who website, they were actually taken around the end of 1969 or in 1970. The same photoshoot features Jon Pertwee, and costumes from Season Seven including a Silurian and a spacesuit made for The Ambassadors of Death (which was filmed in January to March 1970).
	For this appearance with its fellow monsters and the new Doctor, the Cybercontroller costume had an Invasion-type chest unit tied on around the waist, and was topped off with a Wheel in Space head. The resulting hybrid Cyberman was unlike any that ever appeared in the TV programme. I couldn't even guess how many times I've seen this odd looking Cyberman over the years in magazines and websites, never imagining that part of the subject was my own Cyberman costume. Close examination of high-resolution images from this photo session confirms that details of the costume, such as numbers of rings on tube sections, are identical to both the Tomb Controller and the Longleat costume. Again using the distinctive broken ring on the right shoulder as an example, it is evident that just as the TV episode costume matches the Longleat Cyberman, the one used in the publicity photographs is a match to them both. The pictures from this photosession (and also the subsequent one shown below) reveal the cause of the damage to the Longleat costume's ankle ball attachments. When worn by anyone of less than true Cyberman stature, the lower leg tubes flex and buckle quite severely, putting a heavy strain on the stitching at the ankle fixing points.
The next sighting of the Cybercontroller costume is three years later, in a location photoshoot for the Radio Times Special published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who in 1973. The back cover of this magazine had been the source of my earliest doubts about the Longleat Cyberman's origin. Now I discovered that, although not the one on the cover, my costume had been right there on those very pages all along. An article on past companions featured pictures of Michael Craze and Anneke Wills, who had played Ben and Polly in both The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, being chased along a beach by two Cybermen. One is the Cybercontroller costume with the distinctive extra tubes on the legs and shoulders, plus the Tomb "talker" Cyberman head and a Tomb chest unit. The other is a standard Tomb Cyberman costume with a Wheel in Space head, and may well be the costume which appears on the magazine's back cover (with an Invasion head). While checking thoroughly for any marks to help with identification I had been very surprised to find that the Longleat costume has sand adhering to the lower leg tubes, but nowhere else. These Radio Times pictures revealed that the costume had been for a day out at the seaside in 1973 and, as it was unlikely to have ever been cleaned properly since, the origin of the sand became less mysterious - as the actors held the costumes to climb into them, the lower legs would have dragged on the sand and stones of the beach.
The main costume's fate in the six years immediately following its TV career was now known; retained by the BBC for use in publicity photographs. Whether the Longleat costume's chest unit is one of those used in the Radio Times photos cannot be determined. The question of the chest unit's history and even its authenticity was to be my next area of investigation.
<<<BACK >>MAIN<< NEXT>>>