Building the TARDIS!

In an attempt to make The Tamaras Crisis much more believable and professional than our previous stories, we decided that we’d go the whole hog and build a full size TARDIS police box prop and also a working console for the interior scenes, and the realisation of these props was my responsibility, primarily because nobody else was confident enough to give it a go. It’s ironic that nowadays I take for granted my competency at DIY and woodwork, but back then I’d had no experience of woodworking other than a few lessons at school. The materials used for prop building were mostly paid for by Andrew, for which I am eternally grateful (he was quite rightfully credited on the end titles as ‘Properties Buyer’), but if I am to be honest I more than paid my own way in almost single-handedly building everything myself.

The police box was built using the blueprints from the TARDIS Technical Manual, and so was full size and all in perfect proportion. When I say full size, it was actually only half a police box; only two sides and half the roof were built but filmed in such a way that you only ever saw the two complete sides. This later posed a slight problem as we had to have some way of screening off

the rest of the world which could clearly be seen once the door was opened, which was eventually achieved by a surplus member of the cast holding up a blue sleeping bag behind it to block out the view. Unfortunately it was very unconvincing and fell out of position on more than one occasion, as can clearly be seen in a couple of shots, and is a shame is it tends to ruin an otherwise highly effective prop.

When it came to painting the TARDIS we all joined in with this fairly simple task, and it was definitely to our advantage that the battered-looking nature required of the paintwork meant that we didn’t need to take too much care. It was down to Andrew’s younger brother David, who’s always been quite creative with artwork, to carefully paint on the ‘Free for use of public’ text onto the fake telephone access panel on the front, though I must admit that the ‘Police Public Call Box’ lettering above the doors was created using

pre-printed letters bought from B&Q which were very conveniently white-on-blue! The lantern on top of the roof wasn’t a working prop as I deemed it unnecessary to go to the trouble of installing a light when we would be filming outside in sunny weather, so the finished article was actually the empty blue paint pot used for the rest of the prop which was painted white and just placed on top of the roof during filming!

A DIY trait which has remained with me to this day when constructing anything from wood is my tendency to use five-hundred screws where ten will suffice, and building the TARDIS is where it all started. Standing ‘inside’ the prop revealed the hardboard construction peppered with row upon row of screws, and my over-use of these fixings would often result in my sending Andrew off on his bike to our local B&Q to replenish my dwindling stock. In hindsight I’m glad that I built the prop to this sturdy specification, as the subsequent battering it took on its journeys to and from filming locations, as well as the filming itself, would I’m sure have resulted in its rapid demise had it been constructed to any lesser standard.

Although we had far more electronic effects wizardry at our disposal for The Tamaras Crisis, we didn’t have the facility to create an authentic TARDIS de-materialisation and materialisation effect on screen. We had to make do with very slowly fading the picture to grey, and then reversing the process with the TARDIS either in or out of shot, depending on which type of sequence we were trying to achieve. It was actually surprisingly effective when viewed with the authentic sound effect

dubbed over it, but I was extremely annoyed to learn that Peter Clancy had acquired a Genlock facility (a device which allows mixing between shots) shortly after we had finished editing the story! Nevertheless, we simply had to re-use the original tapes and create the effect properly, which looked infinitely better, but for some reason we never got round to editing it into the story.

Next Episode: Constructing the Console!