The TARDIS (; acronym for "Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space") is a fictional hybrid of a time machine and spacecraft that has, since 1963, appeared in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its various spin-offs. While a TARDIS is capable of disguising itself, the exterior appearance of the Doctor's TARDIS typically mimics a police box, an obsolete type of telephone kiosk that was once commonly seen on streets in Britain in the 1940s and 50s. Its interior is shown as being much larger than its exterior, commonly described as being "bigger on the inside".
Due to the significance of Doctor Who in popular British culture, the shape of the police box is now more strongly associated with the TARDIS than its real-world inspiration. The name and design of the TARDIS is a registered trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), although the design was originally created by the Metropolitan Police Service.UK Trade Mark no. EU000333757 filed 25 July 1996; Classes 9, 16, 25, 28, and 41. See https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/4/EU000333757 .
Name TARDIS is an acronym of "Time And Relative Dimension in Space". The word "Dimension" is alternatively rendered in the plural. The first story, An Unearthly Child (1963), used the singular "Dimension". The 1964 novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks used "Dimensions" for the first time and the 1965 serial The Time Meddler introduced the plural in the television series – although the script had it as singular, actor Maureen O'Brien changed it to "Dimensions". Both continued to be used during the classic series; in "Rose" (2005), the Ninth Doctor uses the singular (although this was a decision of actor Christopher Eccleston—the line was plural in the script for the episode) and the series has continued with the singular from that point forward. The acronym was explained in the first episode of the show, An Unearthly Child (1963), in which the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, claims to have made it up herself. Despite this, the term is used commonly by other Time Lords to refer to both the Doctor's and their own time ships.
Generally, "TARDIS" is written in all uppercase letters, but may also be written in title case as "Tardis". The word "Tardis" first appeared in print in the Christmas 1963 edition of Radio Times, which refers to "the space-time ship Tardis".
Description
In the fictional universe of the Doctor Who television show, TARDISes are space- and time-travel vehicles of the Time Lords, an alien species from the planet Gallifrey. Although many TARDISes exist and are sometimes seen on-screen, the television show mainly features a single TARDIS used by the show's protagonist, a Time Lord who goes by the name of the Doctor. He noted in Episode 3 of The Chase that he had built it himself.
TARDISes are built with a "chameleon circuit", a type of camouflage technology that changes the exterior form of the ship to blend into the environment of whatever time or place it lands in. The Doctor's TARDIS always resembles a 1960s London police box, an object that was very common in Britain at the time of the show's first broadcast, owing to a malfunction in the chameleon circuit before the events of the first episode of the show, An Unearthly Child. The Doctor has attempted to repair the chameleon circuit, unsuccessfully in Logopolis (1981) and with only temporary success in Attack of the Cybermen (1985). In "Boom Town", the Doctor reveals that he has stopped trying to repair the circuit as he has become fond of its appearance. The other TARDISes that appear in the series have chameleon circuits that are fully functional.
The TARDIS is famously "bigger on the inside". A much larger control room lies inside the police box, at the centre of which is a console for operating the TARDIS. In the middle of the console is a moving tubular device, typically referred to as the time rotor, which moves in sequence with the flight sound effects. The presence of a physically larger space contained within the police box is explained as "dimensionally transcendental", with the interior being a whole separate dimension containing an infinite number of rooms, corridors and storage spaces, all of which can change their appearance and configuration.
The TARDIS also has a telepathic feature/translation circuit that allows the Doctor and others to communicate with people who speak languages other than their own, as well as turn all written languages to English. The translation circuit has been explored in comparison with real-world machine translation, with researchers Mark Halley and Lynne Bowker concluding that "when it comes to the science of translation technology, Doctor Who gets it wrong more often than it gets it right. However, perhaps we can forgive the artistic license if we recognise that, as in other science fiction works, the presentation of some type of ubiquitous translation tool is necessary to explain to the audience how people from other countries, time periods, and even other worlds, can understand each other and indeed appear to speak (mostly) flawless English."Halley, M., & Bowker, L. (2021). "Translation by TARDIS: The science of multilingual communication in Doctor Who". In L. Orthia & M. Harmes (eds.), Doctor Who and Science: Essays on Ideas, Identities and Ideology in the Series. McFarland. pp. 62–77 The TARDIS is also able to generate a "perception filter" that causes people to ignore it, thinking that it is normal.
Conceptual history
Exterior design When Doctor Who was being developed in 1963 the production staff discussed what the Doctor's time machine would look like. To keep the design within budgetHowe; Walker (2003), p. 23 it was decided to make the outside resemble a police telephone box, a common piece of street furniture that had originally been designed in the 1920s by the Scottish architect Gilbert Mackenzie Trench. The idea for the police-box disguise came from a BBC staff writer, Anthony Coburn, who rewrote the programme's first episode from a draft by C. E. Webber.Howe; Walker (2003), p. 15–16 While there is no known precedent for this notion, a November 1960 episode of the popular radio comedy show Beyond Our Ken included a sketch featuring a time machine described as "a tall telephone box".
The concept of a cloaking mechanism (later referred to as the "chameleon circuit") was devised to explain this. In the first episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), the TARDIS is first seen hidden in a London scrapyard in 1963, and after travelling back in time ("The Cave of Skulls") to the Paleolithic era, the police box exterior persists. In a subsequent story, The Time Meddler (1965), the First Doctor explains that the TARDIS should automatically adopt a disguise, such as a howdah (a carrier on the back of an Indian elephant in the Indian Mutiny) or a rock on a beach.
Accounts differ as to the origin of the police box prop. While the BBC asserts that it was constructed specially for Doctor Who, it has been claimed that the box was a reused prop from the BBC television police dramas Z-Cars or Dixon of Dock Green (a claim repeated by Doctor Who producer Steven Moffat).
The dimensions and colour of the TARDIS police box props used in the series have changed many times, as a result of damage and the requirements of the show, and none of the BBC props has been a faithful replica of the original MacKenzie Trench model. Numerous details have been altered over time, including the shape of the roof, the signage, the shade of blue paint, the presence of a St John Ambulance emblem and the overall height of the box. The original prop remained in use for around 13 years until it collapsed – reportedly on Elisabeth Sladen's head. A new prop was introduced for The Masque of Mandragora in 1976, and there have been at least six versions in total. The evolution of the prop design was referenced on-screen in the episode "Blink" (2007), when the character Detective Inspector Shipton says the TARDIS "isn't a real [police box]. The phone's just a dummy, and the windows are the wrong size."
Interior design The original TARDIS console room was designed for the first episode by set designer Peter Brachacki and was unusually large for a BBC production of this time. It was noted for its innovative, gleaming white "futuristic" appearance.
Like the police box prop, the set design of the TARDIS interior has evolved over the years. From the inception of the show in 1963 up until the end of the "classic series" in 1989, the design of the TARDIS console room remained largely unchanged from Brachacki's original set, a brightly lit white chamber, lined with a pattern of roundels on the walls and with a central hexagonal console which contained a cylindrical "time rotor" that moved when the TARDIS was in transit. Numerous alterations were made to the central console and to the layout, but the overall concept remained constant. In Season 14 (1976–77), a dark wood-panelled "Control Room Number 2" was briefly used for a few episodes, but the white console room set was reinstated in Season 15, due to the set warping in storage. After the cancellation of the television show, a radically redesigned TARDIS set was used in the 1996 TV movie, heralding a move to a more steampunk-inspired set design, which later influenced the set design in the revived series from 2005 onwards.
Depiction of time travel
The production team conceived of the TARDIS travelling by dematerialising at one point and rematerialising elsewhere, although sometimes in the series it is shown also to be capable of conventional space travel. In the 2006 Christmas special, "The Runaway Bride", the Doctor remarks that for a spaceship, the TARDIS does remarkably little flying. The ability to travel simply by fading into and out of different locations became one of the trademarks of the show, allowing for a great deal of versatility in setting and storytelling without a large expense in special effects. The distinctive accompanying sound effect – a cyclic wheezing, groaning noise – was originally created in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by sound technician Brian Hodgson by recording on tape the sound of his mother's house key scraping up and down the strings of an old piano. Hodgson then re-recorded the sound by changing the tape speed up and down and splicing the altered sounds together. When employed in the series, the sound is usually synchronised with the flashing light on top of the police box, or the fade-in and fade-out effects of a TARDIS. Writer Patrick Ness has described the ship's distinctive dematerialisation noise as "a kind of haunted grinding sound", while the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips traditionally use the onomatopoeic phrase "vworp vworp vworp".
Other appearances Television spin-offs The sound of the Doctor's TARDIS featured in the final scene of the Torchwood episode "End of Days" (2007). As Torchwood Three's hub is situated at a rift of temporal energy, the Doctor often appears on Roald Dahl Plass directly above it in order to recharge the TARDIS. In the episode, Jack Harkness hears the tell-tale sound of the engines, smiles and afterwards is nowhere to be found; the scene picks up in the cold open of the Doctor Who episode "Utopia" (2007) in which Jack runs to and holds onto the TARDIS just before it disappears.