TOTAL CONTROL

With a new TARDIS control room expected for the Thirteenth Doctor, it’s time to take a look back at all those other transdimensional interiors…

1963–1989 Created by Peter Brachaki, the original TARDIS set is the show’s design classic. Its blinding white futurism is pure 1960s but also perfectly timeless and otherworldly. Most of the first seven Doctors’ control rooms are variants of this: roundels, hexagonal console and all.

1972 The classic design of the control room gets a fleeting, unloved tweak in Jon Pertwee tale “The Time Monster”. Gone are the roundels, replaced by plastic bowls for some ’70s Tupperware party chic. “Oh, just a spot of redecoration, that’s all,” the Doctor shrugs, but this version is never seen again.

1976 “The Masque Of Mandragora” introduces a secondary control room to the TARDIS. It’s a compact, protosteampunk alternative whose Victorian trimmings – wood panels, stained glass panels – conjure the spirit of Jules Verne or HG Wells. Improbably, there’s also a shaving mirror mounted on the console.

1996 The TARDIS interior gets a cluttered, gothic makeover for the Paul McGann TV movie. Part church, part library, part musty bolthole of an opium-raddled poet, it has echoes of the secondary control room in its woodpanelled console. Another cool touch: interplanetary views are projected on the ceiling.

2005 Doctor Who returns from the TV wilderness with a radical take on the TARDIS set. There’s an organic feel to this one, with a bone/coral aesthetic, and the rusted, hexagon-studded walls suggest years of service in the Time War. The interior police box doors homage the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies.

2010 David Tennant’s explosive regeneration into Matt Smith compels the TARDIS to reconfigure itself into a Tim Burton-style cave of whimsy. The new console is pieced together from typewriters and taps, a fitting aesthetic given we first stumbled upon this particular timeship in a junkyard in 1963.

2012 Skulking above the clouds in self-imposed exile, the Doctor shakes up the “desktop theme” to banish memories of departed chums Amy and Rory. This one’s stark, functional and coldly neon-lit, with a console that recalls the original. A key inspiration was the Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator.

2014 The Twelfth Doctor keeps his predecessor’s control room but takes the lights right down and adds bookshelves and blackboards. SFX once poked around the upper tier and found a human skull, a book on the French revolution and a VHS tape labelled “On Safari – Biggins.” True. nick setchfield