The Frock Coat Of Evil

After last week’s grey tweed frock coat, this week I completed work on what chronologically was Tom’s next coat, the brown velvet version which debuted in Face Of Evil!


This too was a client-led project, and something I hadn’t done before so again the production time inevitably became quite drawn out.


The main challenge was to source a velvet in just the right shade of brown.

I have a couple of suppliers I go to for velvets. It’s from these that I sourced the velvets for the Sixth Doctor Frock Coat, as well as the collar of my City of Death coat.

One of my UK based supplier has over 40 colours and up till now hasn’t let me down, but for this particular coat the range of browns they stock just didn’t match the screen-worn shade I was after.

Next I looked to a manufacturer I use for corduroy and moleskin who also has a range of velvets, but again their range was too narrow to cover what I was looking for.

Next on my list was a stockist in Germany who have a good range, but it’s difficult sometimes to communicate the shade you want and the range of browns they sent still didn’t have what I was looking for. They also were a little on the heavy side, and given the fluid drape I need for the skirt part of the coat, the cloth really wasn’t suitable.

This left a final option - the various cloth and fabric shops of London’s Soho.

To be honest I don’t like to use Soho for a coats like this, as although you can sometimes find what you want, the stock isn’t repeatable and be a dead-end for future coats. When the Doctor Who costume designers find cloth here, like off-the-peg clothing used on the series, by the time you find where it came from the last of the cloth as gone and can’t be restocked.

However, I did find a couple of potential fabrics I was happy to show to the client, and sent him swatches. He wasn’t convinced and we went back and forward before agreeing that one of them could work.

Sadly though, by the time I got back to the shop my fears had come true - the last of that shade had been sold!
Despondent I looked through a couple more shops before heading home and chanced upon a PERFECT match - even better than the first choice I had sent the client.

Rather than let it slip through my fingers, I snapped up enough to make the coat, plus a second for myself, which I’ll make at a later date.

I conveyed the results of my trip back to the client and put a swatch in the post - but time was now of the essence and I needed to crack on with making the coat in time for his deadline around Halloween.

To cut the coat, I used a combination of the Eighth Doctor Night Of The Doctor coat I made, with the grey Android Invasion coat I did recently.






To be frank - having studied photos of the brown velvet frock coat - I don’t much care for it.

I feel the original was probably made in a rush and wasn’t best thought out or executed.

It has a set of waistline level pockets, but the flap are disproportionately large and look to have been hand sewn in place as an after thought. You can see the hand stitching in this screencap (see left).

Having discussed this with the client, we agreed to make the flaps large, but just pull back a little from their near comical size, so I used the pattern size of the lower pockets from the City Of Death and Android Invasion coats as a guide.

The buttons for this coat are very easy to match as they are simply self-covers buttons.
All I had to do was keep hold of some scraps of cloth left over during sewing, and took them along when I had the buttonholes sewn. The guy that does them also makes covered buttons while you wait!


The tailoring on this coat has been deliberately loose and lightweight. Where I would usually use a horse-hair or calico backing to support the cloth, I have erred on the side of a lighter weight or even a cotton pocketing fabric. This has made the the skirt of the coat hang very limp and the body is a lot looser on the the chest.

Although this doesn’t make it my best work in that regard, it’s given the coat a saggy pre-worn look I feel original had.

In hide-sight there are a couple of changes I might have made to the cut, but as it is the first time I have made this coat you can’t always 100% predict how it will turn out.

I’d love to hear what you think of the coat, as it’s taken quite a while to get to this stage!

Invasions Of The Frock Coats

Once in a while I am client-led when it comes to what new garments I make. And here is a case in point. What follows is a bit of an insight into how I work towards making one of my replicas.

After already making one Tom Baker coat for a client - who was over the moon with the result - he asked me if I could make another for him, but one as yet I hadn’t done - the grey frock coat that debuted in season 13’s The Android Invasion.

As it happened I had found sone PERFECT brown corduroy fabric a few years back, with the distinctive wide/narrow configuration.
It’s quite a chestnut brown colour, but being 100% cotton it means over-dyeing it to the required dark chocolate brown will not be a problem when it comes to it.

The main tweed fabric, however, is something more of a challenge.

It’s been often described and mis-identified as a Donegal akin to Matt Smith’s series five jacket. This is what is known as a classic hopscotch weave - one over/one under which forms a sort of checkerboard design.

But if you look closely you can see it actually is more of a vertical and horizontal grid pattern, so is a much more complex structure.

This detail rarely showed up the broadcast episodes as the definition of cameras back in the 1970s tended to mush the appearance of the coat into a single light grey colour.

Similarly most publicity stills fail to capture this detail of the fabric.

So finding a suitable cloth was going to be a problem, which in the end took months of research to track down, and endless discussions with a number of weavers with a view to recreating it from scratch.

After heading down the former then latter route, I chanced upon a near identical weave in the perfect colour way freely available in a fabric supplier’s catalogue. before rushing to buying the cloth I took a swatch to mull it over.


Convinced it was a good option, I first ordered one metre so I could do a drape and photography test.

It’s all very well finding a palm-sized swatch, but how the cloth will look en-mass in a garment is a whole other thing.
I think the scale of the weave is maybe a fraction large, but I am interested in how it looks at a distance, comparable with a publicity still, and to see if the weave forms an even grey colour.

I felt it was a success -  so finally the coat was on!

At this stage I shan’t bore you with the ins and outs of making the coat, I’m sure you want me to skip to the end and show you how it came out, so here it is!

This the the coat with the whole ensemble - shirt, waistcoat, cravat and of course scarf!

Losing the scarf so you can see more of the coat itself, here it is.

And this is how the coat looks from the back.




You can see how the cuffs are laid-in, with buttons aligning with the back seam, above which is the unusually sewn-in leather elbow patches.


I have also faithfully as I can recreated the deceptive closure of the coat. Although it has a button and buttonhole configuration for a double breasted coat, it is intended to be worn single breasted, with a toggle made from two buttons sewn together to pull the leading edges together.




As far as I have been able to find, this was only ever seen once, early on in The Android Invasion. For the rest of the coats appearances, the toggle was left dangling, often from the lower from buttonhole, as you can see in this photo from Horror Of Fang Rock.

I have drawn the line though at having the missing buttons which plagued the coat’s appearances down the years!

I managed to track down some buttons, which I think are a really great match to those used on the original. They were a chance find and now they are on the coat they look fab!

I’d love to hear what you think of the coat, as it’s taken quite a while to get to this stage.

Tomorrow’s World: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction

Last night saw the final episode of the BBC2 documentary series Tomorrow’s World: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction.

Presented by Dominic Sandbrook, episode four was all about time travel, and naturally encompassed Doctor Who.

Interviewed were lead writer Steven Moffat, actors David Tennant and Karen Gillan as well as Neil Gaiman who talked in gerbil terms about sic-fi rather than specifically about Doctor Who.

The Doctor Who section of the programme was linked with Dominic walking around the Experience in Cardiff.

The thing that really caught my eye though was seeing the Tom Baker coat from the classic series Doctor costumes display.

This is a coat I made for the exhibition, and it was on display during 2012 and 2013.

The BBC website for the series can be found here

Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction

Episode four about time travel can be found here, with the Doctor Who section from 5:20 into the programme

BBC iPlayer - Tomorrow's Worlds:
The Unearthly History of Science Fiction
Episode 4 - Time

First-hand review - season 16 Frock Coat

A little while back I had the chance to get my grubby mitts on one of the replica season 16 Frock Coats out there.

It was interesting to see how another tailor had interpreted the coat, and knowing the original a bit more than most, how it fared. Forgive me for being brutal!

There are a multitude of things that strike me about this coat, but the first I’d have to address is fabrics used.



Rather than the plain and flecked coloured heavy, coarsely woven tweed, a relatively thin suiting cloth has been used which for me makes the feel of the coat just wrong.

The fabric is a good quality, allegedly sourced from Holland & Sherry, a Savile Row tailors suppliers. That said, a quality fabric doesn’t make for a quality cut if the essence of the pattern is wrong.



The rear of the coat is my main worry about the pattern used. A frock coat should have a continuous drape of fabric all the way from the shoulders, down between the two back buttons and through to the hem. The skirt panels should then be between the front edges all the way around to meet these narrow tails.
Here we essentially have a jacket with a skirt attached at a waistline seam running the full circumference of the coat.

It has the tails as a frock coat, but they are too wide which pushes the buttons quite far apart. The skirt is in two sections, with an aggressive dart down to the rear pockets to create some girth, but this broadens the hips rather than spreads the skirt through to the hem, thus lacking the hourglass flare that is so typical of a real frock coat.

The pattern for the upper body of the coat has one panel each side too many. Essentially the vertical seam passing just behind the rear pocket simply shouldn’t be there.

Turning to the collar and lapels, these aren’t too bad and are a good interpretation of the screen worn coat.

The placement of the buttonholes and buttons is pretty accurate, though the buttons are disappointing as they are plain plastic rather than leather.







The split lapel has been well cut, giving the front of the coat a good appearance.



With an appropriate scarf to hide the rest of the coat (here the one my mum knitted me in the 70s) it looks not so bad.

The chocolate brown piping has been cheaply sourced and is nothing more than a cotton bias binding worth less than a quid a metre.

It has been skilfully applied, but I don’t like they way the visible side has a line of stitching on show, whereas the underside is overlapped to hide the stitching.

The pocket flaps are all simple rectangular shapes, lacking the characterful outward slope. It’s subtle but makes the difference for me.

Internally the coat goes off on its own tangent, making things up as it goes along.

The design of the internal pockets is very typical of the Far East tailors, with a multitude of sizes and positions on offer - one on the right side and three on the left.

I’ve seen this in a number of suits originating from the orient.

This over eggs the simplistic four patch pockets of the original coat.

The coat is very competently made (aside from a burn to the velvet on the collar point - oops) but this doesn’t make up for the failure to appreciate what it should be made from or how it is cut and drapes.

That said it could make for a good day-to-day wear that has been inspired by the costume, rather than quality screen accurate time of cosplay.

I AM Tom Baker!

With the 50th Anniversary taking place all round us, there’s a lot of amateur photoshop artists making up some nice tribute images.

It’s funny to see the picture pulled together from a variety of sources, spanning many years and different photoshoots, coming together to make one coherent image.

But sometimes they get them from places even I wouldn’t expect.....

Would be nice to be asked next time!

The Fourth Doctor in 50 Years trailer

This week has seen the BBC release a fantastic new trailer celebrating the full 50 years of Doctor Who.



In one way or another all eleven Doctors are represented, some only fleetingly others more visibly.

It goes without saying that the Fourth Doctor is seen quite prominently at around 20 seconds into the one minute trailer, floating around surrounded by spilt Jenny Babies and an erroneous third Doctor sonic screwdriver.

But what has stirred up some debate is the clothes The Doctor is seen wearing.
The image has been achieved by compositing Tom Baker’s face onto someone wearing the costume.

The coat is clearly the Power Of Kroll frock coat, known also for its appearance in City Of Death.

The waistcoat appears to have a tweed checked pattern, but is not the classic version he is seen in many episodes.

But the scarf, as ever, fires up the blood of the Fourth Doctor fans. It’s been suggested it was the season15 version with the pattern repeated - or even the promotional scarf which was worn for a variety of photo shoots and personal appearances.

Eitherway, that coat, waistcoat and scarf don't belong together!

Romana the Third

Back in January this year I shared some great professional studio pictures of my friend Bob Mitsch wearing the Tom Baker coat I made him (see right).

What I couldn’t tell you at the time was that a month or so before these shot were taken, another photoshoot with the coat had taken place.
This time with Juliet Landau (daughter of Martin Landau), who at the time had just been cast as Romana III for the Big Finish productions Gallifrey VI and Luna Romana.

The idea was to recreate the classic shots of Lalla Ward from part one of Destiny Of The Daleks where she is seen wearing a copy of Tom’s costume - something by co-incidence I had done recently with the real Lalla Ward!



Here’s a little selection of the best shots from the Juliet Landau shoot.

Photo by Deverill Weekes

Photo by Deverill Weekes

Photo by Deverill Weekes

Photo by Deverill Weekes

Photo by Deverill Weekes

I’d just like to thank Bob Mitsch for passing on the photos and for Deverill Weekes for allowing their use.