Thus you can get English people in dress with a French flavour to it influenced by something they

Thus, you can get English people in dress with a French flavour to it, influenced by something they might have seen on their travels abroad, just as we are today. It’s when you’re losing your way with a costume that you can find yourself clutching at all kinds of straws – like putting lace on a skirt – if you can’t get satisfied with it.”Simplicity does not come cheap with O’Neill’s period costumes. “I’m not a decorative designer, I think things are much more powerful when they are simple. I’ll probably get lots of letters complaining, saying, ‘they weren’t actually like that, you know’,” laughs O’Neill.All this research means that O’Neill comes to the actual creation of a costume quite late in the process, after several weeks of “prep time”.

“Frock coats were often black, but there were lots of paler colours around in France and because Dickens travelled to France and referred to it a bit, the country was relevant to that community, so I’ve shown its influence. For me, it’s the essence of a period that has to be caught.”
The costumes O’Neill creates are originals, either made from scratch or adapted from existing costumes from places like Angels & Bermans costumiers in London. Naturally O’Neill has to do an awful lot of research if he has to come up with something original, yet still exciting, for an audience that has by now “been fed period drama in huge doses”. After reading and re-reading the novel and then the script, O’Neill then subsumes himself in tiny libraries, scouring their archives for ideas. He is most excited when he finds evidence of a person dressed in any way out of the accepted ordinary for that era. “It’s like you’ve been given a licence by the someone of that era to go ahead and make something a little bit different,” he explains. So, it’s not just a case of thinking: “what did they wear in the 1860s? How did it look?”, and then recreating it.

This, O’Neill thinks, leads to a studied approach to costume design that can become “anal”. “You end up trying to meet the expectations that you might get if you were doing a retrospective at the V & A, recreating the costumes from the 1860s and putting them in a display. He explains that he tries to get into a character’s way of thinking, so that he can discover what influences these characters would have been under, what choices they would have made about what they wore. “I think, ’shit – if I’d taken another route with that character’s journey, then…’” muses this rangey, rather gothic-looking Mancunian

O’Neill is a charmer. The Queen herself is regally throaty in a highly personalised “Grandma’s Hands”, which eases into a powerful version of Marvin Gaye’s “Abraham, Martin and John”. Standing well over 6ft tall, with the air of the rock star about him, he explains what he thinks his job as costume designer consists of.

Watching Our Mutual Friend, the BBC’s new period dramatisation of Dickens’s last completed novel, will be an ordeal for the man responsible for the costumes, because he will be focusing on what he thinks he may have done differently if he could go back and start over. AT NINE o’clock tomorrow evening, Mike O’Neill will switch on his TV set, turn to BBC2 and sit in what he describes as “torture” for the next 90 minutes. The finale, “Everything Picture” sounds like Jarvis Cocker covering Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Strobe lights flash Flurries of confetti flutter over the audience No really, it’s not prog-rock I promise.. True, you shouldn’t start listening to one of their tracks if there’s somewhere else you have to be in half an hour, but Ultrasound don’t write long songs because they want to show off their years of classical training: they do it because they want to construct dynamic, Bowiesque, stately-but-sleazy rock’n'roll epics And remarkably often, they succeed.