What an honour it is to interview the man behind the Masked Singer costumes, Managing Director of Plunge Creations, Tim Simpson. TMS reddit users asked, and Tim answered.
1) Back in 2019, what were your first thoughts on the show’s premise?
When Bandicoot came to me I’d never heard of the show and had to do a bit of research to begin to understand it. It looked pretty dotty and though it seemed it was gaining traction in the US it’s hard to know how a show will translate for a UK audience. Either way it looked like a lot of fun and I couldn’t really believe they were asking me and the team at Plunge to work on it with them.
2) Has your son Ted had any other mask ideas since Robobunny?
Loads. Ted is always coming up with costume ideas but I have to keep most of them under wraps in case we decide to run with any of them in the future. This season it was Pigeon, or Frumpy Pigeon as we know her, that was inspired by Ted. Frumpy Pigeon is his gaming handle and was inspired by a singer and cabaret Performer I’ve know for a long time called Sarah Louise Young. She sometimes sings as an Edith Piaf style character whose name roughly translates to The Frumpy Pigeon and she’s brilliant.
3) How many of the celebrities do you know before the show airs? What’s it like keeping the secrets?
In the first series we didn’t know any of the celebs before we were on set and even now I generally only find out about a few of them in order to make sure the costumes are going to work for them. It turns out I’m dreadful with names and faces and so keeping the secrets is really pretty easy. We only ever refer to performers by their character names and so after a week or so we’ve forgotten who they are entirely and I can then enjoy the guessing game along with everyone else. Often the only chance for me to meet any of the performers is on set and even then it’ll only be one or two that each of our team get to meet. We have allocated dressers for each character and they are often the only members of the team who ever get to know who they are. I think we’ve all become really good at keeping secrets as the show depends on it. Nobody wants to be the person to ruin the fun.
4) How do the celebrities choose their costumes? The celebs get to choose from a range of designs that we think will suit them. By the time the show is being cast we already have most of the character designs worked up and we don’t really want to open up a can of worms (now there’s an idea) by asking each performer what they’d like to be dressed as. We might just end up with a lot of cute cuddly bunnies or something. 5) How do you integrate costume clues without being too obvious? Are there any we may have missed? There is a dedicated clue team on the show and they will often get in touch with cryptic requests for slight changes to the costumes. As we often don’t know who the celebs are when we’re making the costumes we are then as much in the dark as to what the clues are as the public are when they watch the show. The trick is to make sure that any clues in the costume are not too glaringly obvious. They need to make sense within the context of the rest of the costume and it might be as simple as the colour or the shape of a pair of shades. 6) Which contestant made you think “OMG, I made a costume for —!” All of them really. I still can’t believe I get the chance to design daft costumes and then get to put celebrities in them. I was delighted to dress Sue Perkins us as a Dragon but felt a little odd meeting Sir Lenny Henry for the first time. I looked him in the eye, said hello, apologised for what I was about to do, popped his mask on and turned him into Blob. I’m not sure it’s quite what I imagined all those years ago watching him on TV. 7) What type of costumes do you prefer making? I really like the weird ones. This season it was Knitting which was my partner Sarah Mead’s idea. A bundle of wool, no eyes and knitting needles spiked through the head. If it wasn’t so fluffy it would be like something from a a nightmare. In the last season of Masked Dancer I loved the concept of Onomatopoeia. Who’d have thought we’d get that name into prime time telly! 8) What is your favourite costume you've made so far? To be honest it keeps changing. There are so many that it’s hard to pick a favourite thought I was a real fan of Robobunny as it was even more of a challenge and the idea os a robot and bunny puppet came together really well. 9) Are there any costumes you really want to make, but logistically can’t? I’d really like to make a bubble, or something based around bubbles but the problem with bubbles is that you can see through them and that’s an absolute no no. I’m going to have to keep chewing it over to see what I can come up with. 10) What was the banned mask that was “a little bit too sexy”? I did come up with a bat costume which was kind of gothic and was deemed too sexy for the show. I could have frumped it up a bit but instead I’ve left it on the back burner. Who knows, there might be a late night version of the show one day! 11) Which costumes were the most challenging to make? Most of the costumes have challenges but the trickiest ones tend to be the ones with spikes or things that stick out a lot. Hedgehog was a bit of a nightmare and was almost a heath and safety issue on set as the spines could have taken someone’s eye out. Lionfish was tricky as we wanted to make it move with the effortless lightness of a fish under water. We ended up using complicated combinations of fibreglass rods and industrial brush bristles of different thicknesses woven into the hand painted silk fronds. 12) Which costume took the shortest time to make? Panda was pretty speedy. There had been numerous design changes and Natalie Imbruglia was one of the last contestants to be cast that year and the clue team kept throwing new clues at us and so the costume took a little over a week. We had a big team on it and it simply had to be ready. We try not to work late nights but Panda pushed us to the limit. 13) Which costume is the hardest to see out of? Almost all of the costumes in season one were hellish. I honestly can’t understand why anyone put up with them. Octopus was particularly tricky ad it was a bit like being inside a massive letter box with a very small hole in the front. 14) How many of the masks have you worn? I’ve worn nearly all of them. I need to know that they fit well and that they present at the right angle when worn. Every so often we get a costume that won’t sit well on the performer and we need to make changes to the internal rigging to get it to work. We’ve done a lot of work on how to do this easily on set but it’s always a bit or a struggle. 15) If you were to be a costume, what would you be?
I rather fancied being Dragon, but I think I’d have wanted to be a somewhat scarier dragon than the one Sue Perkins wore. It really suited her and was a massive hit on the show but I’d want to breathe fire rather than just smoke. 16) How many costumes are designed for each series to get narrowed down to 12? Soooo many. Last season I think I drew something in the order of 40-50 rough designs, from something like 60-70 crazy ideas. Some were awful and so most were rejected at the sketch stage but occasionally we get a design that’s nearly there but needs tweaking. The tweaking can end up with a muddled design and so with Pearly King on Masked Dancer I think there must have been a dozen changes and re-draws. We tend to hone it down to a set of 15-18 proper designs to present to the celebs. 17) What were the differences between designing a masked dancer and singer costume? With Masked Singer we can go so much bigger and sillier. Masked Dancer is a bit of a different discipline. The costumes need to be stretchy and much more lightweight, as do the masks. We also get odd requests part way through production like "Can scarecrow spin on her head?”. We then need to build that functionality into the mask or costume. 18) What happens to the costumes once the show is over?
The costumes are locked in a top secret vault near Brighton. Because of the popularity of the show they are being used elsewhere quite a lot. They make special appearances at award ceremonies or on TV and there are several of them performing live at Butlins over this summer. We also get requests from other territories to use the costumes and so a number of the went out to Lebanon a year or so back and there are more appearing in Europe soon. It’s good to see them have an extended life.
19) Do you get inspired by other countries’ masks?
It’s fun to see what other countries are creating and funny to see that we sometimes end up at a similar point without meaning to. Occasionally I’ll be told to make sure that an idea we’re working up doesn’t end up looking like so and so from another territory but generally we try to make sure we’re coming up with totally new ideas. A peacock did get suggested in series one but as the US had already done one we wanted to avoid it. It’s more fun to be original if you can be.
20) Do you have any concept art you could show us? I’ve uploaded a few sketches and making-of photos here. You’ll spot that the drawing for knitting says DRAFT at the bottom. Usually I’d work up a drawing to look a bit more polished but it turned out ITV was sold on the idea with the sketch alone.
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