The BBC has posted another of those sorts of articles about Doctor Who fans who decide to build a real life version of the TARDIS police box exterior. (The BBC News people like this sort of thing, although the tone this time round is less bewilderment that people do this sort of thing and more on a thoroughly British sense of practicality and attention to detail; both of the interviewed builders have come up with clever alternative uses for their boxes, one as a garden shed and the other as a cat hang-out, complete with swinging cat door). All much in keeping with the long and honourable tradition of a show in which the "found sound" of keys on an old piano was the first sound effect and crossovers with Blue Peter for "Dalek Sandwiches" and the like.

They also called in Michael Pickwoad, the show's production designer, for a comment; "matching the show version is tricky because the look of the TV Tardis is not nailed down. From story to story we add bits and pieces...Sometimes it's aged over 500 years suddenly. The colours have changed and its now slightly bluer than it was," said Mr Pickwoad, adding that there might be changes to that colour in the future. "If I was to do another one, another box, we might paint it a different hue of the same colour," he said."


The article makes mention of the site TARDIS Builders, which has a few hundred people and several thousands posts worth of discussion about the ways and means of constructing a home TARDIS and other props, with everything from consoles to police box exteriors to K9. The lady in the video, Yoz, has a quite fascinating series of posts there as to how she went about construction.