Our hero is suddenly engaged to be married, and in an episode showing no trace of technology later than the telescope. What genre does this show even belong to? After five episodes, we ought to know, but somehow we never do.

An answer of a kind is provided by the costumes. Of all the television crafts, costuming is the one most neglected by studies of telefantasy, but looking at the costumes in a production can be instructive. Hundreds of outfits appear in this one, and though it’s an eclectic collection, it’s far from a random assortment. An exhibition of tailor’s dummies, arranged in a series of rooms numbered 1 to 13, would give you quite a lot of the plot. You would start in room 1 among the hats and tweeds and homespun dresses of a land of small-holdings and rural towns: the England of an H. G. Wells novel — Kipps, say, from 1905.[1] Next you would see sailors and fishermen, perhaps from old Cornwall, with exotic travellers mingled among them. This is more like Daphne du Maurier territory, circa 1815.[2] In the third room, black police uniforms which appear Napoleonic French, contrasted with the distressed rags of the oppressed. Very much Victor Hugo’s land.[3] Room 4 just needs some dry ice to be a Depeche Mode or Spandau Ballet video, and couldn’t be more 1980s. By the time we reach the Chateau, there’s fine tailoring with a timeless, mid-twentieth-century look to it. And so forth.

Costume design for The Tripods, then, reveals fragments of many different historical settings. That’s equally true of the human technology we see, which runs from simple mechanisms like crossbows right up to steam engines with steel boilers. Porcelain willow-pattern plates are used in Wherton, but there are wooden plates and pewter mugs in Rhymney. Uniquely, the show is a fantasy in which different zones of a future world have regressed by varying degrees into different pasts which their people find comfort in. In that sense, it is a journey through time as well as through England and France, for all that the travel is on foot. The Tripods is a time-travel yarn without a time machine.

In every show costuming is used for story-telling, but the contrasts between costumes across multiple zones and seasons are particularly important in this production. Winter clothes must not be like summer clothes. Farmers in southern England must look nothing like farmers in the Alps. Vagrants should not dress like the Capped. Clothes show how people fit into this strange society, and that is especially true at Chateau Ricordeau, where clothing is a constant index of rank. Early in episode 5, Eloise and the Countess dress Will up in blue silk pyjamas and a dressing-gown so opulent as to be practically a fur coat. In making him their doll, Eloise and the Countess erase Will’s humble origins: see how comfortable he has become in these outfits by the time we reach episode 7.

Even the fact that Will changes his clothes points up another notable costuming choice. Our main characters are not given signature outfits, as if they are poseable action-figures kept on the move from one adventure to another — like the Doctor Who of 1984, and his companions Turlough, Tegan and Peri. Nor are they dressed in aspirational clothes which young viewers might like for themselves, as many Doctor Who companions have been through the ages: consider Susan’s Mary Quant dresses in 1963, Jo’s trouser-suits in 1972, Sarah-Jane’s tomboyish dungarees in 1975, or Rose’s baggy lounge-wear in 2005. Instead, our three travellers struggle along in whatever they can get. This is another clue to the programme’s genre: within the compass of the fantasy, it’s aiming for realism rather than something more stylised.

Works cited:

  1. Kipps (1905), by H. G. Wells. Wikipedia
  2. Jamaica Inn (1936), by Daphne du Maurier. Wikipedia
  3. Les Misérables (1862), by Victor Hugo. Wikipedia

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