"Doctor Who"

Remember how you wished you had a TARDIS like Dr Who when you were a kid so you could be in Brunei this minute and in London the next minute!

Those who have watched Dr Who would not forget his TARDIS. The TARDIS is the time machine used by the title character of the BBC television programme Doctor Who. The name TARDIS is in fact the acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. As well as being able to travel to any point in time and space, the TARDIS has a chameleon circuit, which enables it to alter its external shape so as to blend in inconspicuously with its surroundings. When the Doctor visited Earth in late 1963, his TARDIS materalised in the shape of a police box. The chameleon circuit then promptly failed, leaving the TARDIS stuck as a police box.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the TARDIS is that its exterior and interior do not exist in the same dimension. The practical upshot of this is that its interior is dimensionally transcendental; in other words, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside. The decision by the production team for the TARDIS to be permanently in the shape of a police box was probably made for budgetary reasons, as otherwise a new exterior would have been required for each story.

The remake of Doctor Who was launched on 26th March 2005 to the small screen, with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. A new TARDIS prop was constructed for the new show. One interesting fact I found out recently: although the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast on 23rd November 1963, it wasn't until the mid-1970's that the first police box marketed as official Dr Who merchandise became available.

When I was 6 or 7 years old, a girl classmate in school had a TARDIS money box - she told the class it was a gift from his uncle who was studying in London at that time. I could still recall how upset I was seeing that she had something that I could never ever had - something that I really liked at that time. London was too far from me when I was a kid. I was upset for almost a month, and one afternoon when I came home from school I saw on our dining table stood a red money box that replicated the British phone booth.

The word TARDIS now is an official word in the English language with an entry in the 2002 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.