Citroën Berlingo
Blue box bigger on the inside but rusty on the outside.
If, like me, you’ve wasted periods of your life wondering what kind of car a Timelord would drive, then you might not be at all surprised to learn that Tom Baker favours a Berlingo. When he closed the door on his beloved police box in 1981, Baker had to wait fifteen years for its replacement to arrive, but no doubt appreciated the innumerable cubby-holes for his jelly babies. Like many of we earthlings, he too will have quizzically asked if this new contraption was merely a van with seats and windows… or a groundbreaking new mini-mpv concept that shared the ‘bigger on the inside’ philosophy of the TARDIS. Whatever the case, and for the benefit of Doctor Who nerds, the chameleon circuit of my own TARDIS is also broken and it’s very much stuck in the form of a large blue pile of scrap metal.
This old Citroën was actually one of the more useful things I bought online during this pandemic. I’ve been after a decent example for the past few years, anticipating it to be exactly the kind of car I need – spacious and cheap to run and in a world where it is currently very difficult and/or impossibly expensive to find a reasonably priced holiday anywhere, I reasoned a small van-based car would make the ideal sleeping pod for 2021. Being the picky sort, I wanted my Berlingo in TARDIS blue, with the brilliant (pre-dpf
twaddle) 2-litre HDI and air con.
Rot boxed
Mine is an MOT failure but with an unusually perfect interior and good evidence of a pampered life in the North East, so I paid the owner £300 and sent Our Clive to fetch it. When it returned to the workshop and I saw the state of the sills, I was – not for the first time - reminded how risky it is to buy sight unseen. Last time this happened, I’d bought a 1971 Saab 96 that turned out to be a total basket case and cost me a fortune. Luckily, more than two-million examples of the Berlingo/ Partner have been sold since it first appeared