I take no responsibility for this question - but Mr. Nuff is annoying me and if I don't get an answer he'll carry on annoying me until the next stupid question he can think of.

(I'm angry with him for only being on Chapter 5 of Harry Potter when I want to talk about it now...)

He says:

If someone was holding onto the outside of the Tardis when it dematerialised, what would happen to them?

Any answers gratefully appreciated...

Probably fall over if they're leaning on it at the time.

As far as I am aware you've got to be inside for anything to happen to you, and in the last series, snowflakes that were on the TARDIS were seen as floating down after it dematerialised, which seems to confirm this theory.

Nothing I expect............the ground is usually touching the Tardis when it dematerialises, but nothing happens to the ground !




In fact isn't the 'outside' of the Tardis merely an optical illusion


the strangest thing about the Tardis is this............in the 1960s it was fine because the idea was that it could land in England, mid 20th C, and no one would bat an eyelid because there were police boxes all over the place. But now they've almost disappeared yet they the Doctor still makes the Tardis take the form of a Police Box, thus drawing immediate attention to it when he lands in present day London..............why doesn't he make it look like a silver coloured car or a Port-o-Kabin ?


hah, not so clever after all.................

The idea was that the Tardis should do exactly this but the BBC realised it was too expensive to have a new prop for each episode so they made up the story that it had got stuck in one form. Over time this turned into a running joke with The Doctor trying to fix it from time to time only to have it go wrong again and revert to the 1950s police box.

It would look that out of place in Edinburgh, provided it had a few posters on it.

Maybe these days they should make it look like an offlicence,then it would have 14 year old chavs hanging round it!!

David Tennant has been getting in some useful practice for his forthcoming Doctoring, come to think of it. He's been playing PC Andy Crawford in Dixon of Dock Green on Radio 4 in recent weeks, smack in middle of 1950's London, he must have been popping in and out of authentic police boxes throughout

Or some Australians selling you coffee from it.

Mmmm...coffeeeee....



VB

They mentioned this in the series
"Boomtown", I think, where the Tardis landed in the middle of a Cardiff square. The Dr said Humans had a wonderful ability to ignore what was staring them in the face, so a blue box could be left indefinitely in a busy square and everyone would assume it was supposed to be there.

The Chameleon Circuit (or "Cloaking circuit" in the TV movie) is used to adapt the TARDIS to its local surroundings (at least in the Type 40 model the Doctor has). When the Doctor landed in the junk merchant I. M. Forman's Totter's yard in c. 1963, the circuit got jammed and stuck in the shape of a public call box.

Now a couple of times since then the Doctor's tried to fix it. Most noticably was in "Logopolis" where the Doctor went to Logopolis to try and use its famous block transfer computations to try and heal the circuit. Instead he died and nearly ended the universe, so didn't quite go according to plan. The circuit is then irrevocably damaged except...

If you're getting nerdy about it, the 7th Doctor then does fix the TARDIS circuit in the Virgin spin-off novels. This is because he's using a TARDIS from an alternate dimension which was never irrevocably destroyed (from the alternate 3rd Doctor incarnation). For a number of novels, the TARDIS changes shape appropriately until eventually the Doctor deliberately sabotages it back to its original form at the conclusion of an arc, demonstrating how things are back to normal.

Other TARDIS encountered, such as the Meddling Monk and the Master, have had their TARDIS cloaked into such things as an altar, a grandfather clock, and a computer bank as appropriate.

If you go by the novels, newer TARDIS went one better and disguised themselves as living, walking people that blended into their surroundings...

In the Ninth Doctors own words, what happens if you put a big blue box in a public place? Us humans walk straight past it and rarely blink an eye.

Colin Baker's Doctor also managed to fix the chameleon circuit for a while, in Attack of the Cybermen.

At the end of The Happiness Patrol, the Tardis had been painted. When the Tardis left at the end of the story, the paint didn't drop off.

Would that mean that the next time the Tardis changed shape, it would have loads of extra paint on the outside of whatever shape it turned into?!

chuff.x.

I got confused when it materialised around the Dalek in the last episode - does that mean the Dalek would still be there (albeit broke) when it unmaterialised again?

Well, in Logopolis, Tom Baker's Doctor materialised the Tardis around a 'real' police box in order to measure it. When he dematerialised, the original police box was still there, so I suppose the Dalek would be too.

It (the TARDIS) turned into a harmonium, didn't it?

Yes, and then a cupboard or column-type thing that looked like it came from the Palace of Versailles.

No, because using that logic, when the TARDIS dematerialises, it would leave the Doctor and Rose behind!

Not a very effective travelling machine (or a means of escape ) if it does that!

Its probably best not to tie yourself up in back-story that will confuse the hell out of you, and just ride the wave.

It depends how he dematerialises the Tardis..

When he landed the Tardis around Rose, this was not a normal landing but programmed by the Doctor. Usual landings take place in the nearest empty place to where the Doctor wants to be (the Tardis systems are pre-programmed so that it doesn't land on people.)

lmao good question, never though of that one before, but I suppose they would fall off!. I don't have a clue really.

So there must be some sort of override for special events.

I wonder if it looks a bit like Mr Spoon's Big Red Button To Land?

And depending on which Doctor operated the controls, this could be on any of the facets of the console