Posted by Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Feel free to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself.
Andrew pointed out to us that back in the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who, the Cybermen wore batting gloves sprayed silver.
Batting gloves? pic.twitter.com/6WH16QlzS1
— Andrew Milner (@AndyMilner1980) March 4, 2020
The Cybermen are a species of emotionless space-faring lads who’ve swapped out most of their soft fleshy body parts for metal ones.
That’s got to be a wise move if you’re likely to be facing express pace bowling.
They aren’t exactly twinkle-toed though. You’d fancy skittling them with a bit of spin.
That double guard thing over the first two fingers is so late 80s. It seemed to be saying – you thought cricketers were just boring, middle-aged men for whom fashion meant a new pair of brown slacks, but no, look, weird hands. Alternatively, it might have been done in solidarity with the Norfolk Cricket Association, to allow their players to blend in.
Anyway, top spotting. Sylvester McCoy was hands-down the worst Doctor, even worse than Colin Baker. No wonder the BBC cancelled the series after them two.
There were some Cybermen with normal batting gloves. We invested far too much time trying to get a screengrab of the one with the old double guard.
I always thought it was added protection against broken fingers.
Is there an episode where the Cybermen are set upon by a mob of broken fingers?
When I was very young and started watching Dr Who, for some reason it was the Cybermen that frightened me the most of all the Dr Who monsters. Daleks were sort of pantomime villains to me, even when I was small, whereas I found the Cybermen distressing. I was never a “hide behind the sofa” kid, but I remember being genuinely scared.
I think it might have been the story in which they invaded London which led to me being spooked – it all felt very close to home.
https://youtu.be/xH-k25Di9_0
No 1980’s batting gloves in those late 1960s shows, of course. But the 1960s Cyberfolk’s gloves were probably as effective as those pimply so-called batting gloves we wore at school in the early to mid 1970s.
And of course we had a Dr Who in those days with a fine cricketing descendent in the pipeline: Patrick Troughton, grandfather of Jamie.
I think it was the groany noise the Cybermen made that spooked me the most about them. It was probably achieved through the simple expedient of recording voices at 7.5 ips and playing them at 1.875 ips. Or more likely (professional style) 15 ips recordings at 3.75 ips.
I never really liked Doctor Who.