Meet June, the costume queen of Doctor Who
‘All Jinkx’s costumes are exquisite’
There can’t be many people who have enjoyed a long and successful career as a costume designer, only to follow that with a whole new one as an actor. June Hudson must be unique in claiming both these credits for one TV show, a series very dear to her heart — Doctor Who. She tells RT, “I feel utterly thrilled and honoured.”
June has landed a guest role in The Devil’s
Chord, the second of this Saturday’s new episodes. “I play a lonely old woman who’s sitting alone in her flat when she faintly hears this strange music that everybody is transfixed by.” Soon she is being terrorised in her own home by “this frightful, beautiful monster” — a deadly new foe called Maestro, played by the American drag queen Jinkx Monsoon.
“I get murdered, of course,” says June, 91, with sheer delight. “A very gruesome demise. I think I’m torn to pieces, though you don’t see it on screen. The role required a lot of screaming.” Months after filming, she was called back to rerecord her wailing in sync with the edited sequence. “They wanted much, much louder screams.”
June is actually Doctor Who royalty. For its legion of fans, she’s one of the most highly regarded costume designers ever to work on the series. In the late 1970s, she was tasked with not only creating monsters on a shoestring budget, but designing an elegant wardrobe for Romana, the Doctor’s
Time Lady companion (played first by Mary Tamm, then by Lalla Ward). For Tom Baker’s final season in 1980, June refined his famous costume with its seemingly endless scarf in shades of burgundy. RT reunited the pair in 2003 for
Doctor Who’s 40th anniversary, commissioning June to make a brand-new outfit for the Time Lord. They had forged an enduring friendship. “Tom still emails me from time to time,” she says fondly.
While relishing the otherworldly freedom allowed by sci-fi shows (she also worked on Blake’s 7), June’s three decades in the BBC costume department provided more down-to-earth assignments. Think of Mrs Slocombe and Mr Humphries in Are You Being
Served? or soap legends Den and Angie Watts, and it was June who gave them the clothes they stood up in. In fact, she had to source an entire wardrobe for every Walford resident when EastEnders launched in 1985.
In the past two decades you’re more likely to have seen her on screen, acting under the name Laura June Hudson, in sitcoms such as This
Country and Ricky Gervais’s Derek. She’s the casting directors’ go-to “little old lady” in
countless TV commercials, and just this year popped up as “Outraged Woman” in the British comedy film Wicked Little Letters.
In April 2023, though, the Tardis finally came calling again and whisked her to Cardiff to appear in The Devil’s Chord. “It was a very happy day. I even had my own trailer, and was introduced to the new Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, and Millie Gibson [Ruby]. Both so lovely.”
She enjoyed meeting her modern counterpart, costume designer Pam Downe. “I had the honour of being personally fitted by Pam. She took the time to show me her workroom and all the costumes for Jinkx. Wow, what exquisite clothes! Not only wonderfully designed but beautifully made. I was lost in admiration.”
Whether tacking hems in the 1970s or screaming her lungs out in the 2020s, June says, “You use every single ounce of creativity you have, scraping every last speck, in your desire to give everything. You don’t want to miss it — the many-splendoured thing. It was overwhelming, really, to be trusted on the show as an actor. I thought, ‘I do not want to regret that I didn’t give my all’ — to
Doctor Who above all.”