FOR A TIME MACHINE, TIME seems to stand still when you’re inside the TARDIS. Because it’s so mind-boggling and, quite frankly, overwhelming to step into – especially when you’re doing so before it’s been seen on television.
It’s housed in Stage 6 at Wolf Studios in Cardiff – the biggest of them all. What you see on screen is all actually there physically. It’s housed up metal steps, accessible via two flights, where the Police Box doors welcome you (and us, the first non-licensed publication on set) to the console room. It’s enormous. When you hear it described as “cathedral-like”, they’re not exaggerating. But apparently that still wasn’t quite enough…
“This is the tallest stage we have, 50 feet tall, and we couldn’t build it to 50 feet because we need to make allowances for lights and structure and things above it,” production designer Phil Sims explains. “But we built it as high as we possibly could. It’s part of the reason that it has a squatter kind of doughnut shape, like a tokamak generator shape.
“We tried a sphere in here that was the circumference of the space, horizontally, but it just broke through the floor and the ceiling
