Thirty years ago, at the midpoint of Doctor Who’s lifespan today, we finally got to see something the show had always promised but never delivered: a shot from outside the TARDIS, looking in through the doors at its improbably bigger interior. And a tracking shot, no less, so the viewer seemed to be entering the ship. It didn’t happen in an actual Doctor Who story, but in Kevin Davies’ documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS (1993). While it was a thrilling moment, it was also a frustrating one.
Doctor Who had always struggled against the limitations of its effects budget, its supposedly subpar space vistas being cited by mid-1980s BBC1 Controller Michael Grade as a reason to discontinue the programme, prior to its permanent cancellation at the decade’s end. Technology marched on, bringing new imagery within reach – but Doctor Who was no longer around to take advantage.
To a contemporary viewer, it may seem odd that the original production team of Doctor Who conceived the TARDIS in a way they couldn’t fully execute. But the ship remains a perfect example of how production limitations shaped the programme’s iconography. Its fading into and out of existence now seems a natural way for a time machine to travel, but basically this was just an effect the production team could achieve regularly and cheaply, using radiophonic sound to give it more impact. And making the ship explicitly bigger on the inside was an elegant, inventive solution to a practical problem: a large spaceship prop would have been impossible to fit into the limited space in Lime Grove Studio D, but the TARDIS interior set needed to be big enough to accommodate the multi-camera set-up. Whether this was a conscious or unconscious choice, the concept fitted the production’s requirements precisely. Not being able to show the inside from the outside was a minor issue.