10 Most British Doctor Who Moments

2. The TARDIS

These days the image of the TARDIS is quintessentially British in its own right. So it’s easy to forget that it borrowed from another, long-forgotten piece of British design: the police box.

Of course many will know that these exact police boxes used to line the streets of Britain during the mid-20th century.

Essentially miniature police stations, they allowed officers to temporarily contain prisoners or even fill out paperwork, while also enabling members of the public to report crimes using the built-in phone. They would have been very familiar to original Doctor Who viewers in the early 1960s.

In-universe the TARDIS looks like a police box because that’s the form it took when the First Doctor and Susan arrived in 1960s London, but of course the real, creative reason was to ground the show in the everyday. It’s one thing to ask viewers to accept a bigger-on-the-inside time machine, but if you disguise that time machine as something familiar, something that you might find on a random street corner, then it becomes real.

And what of those original police boxes? Most were destroyed, but some still exist – including in Glasgow, where at least five remain! Londoners can also grab a selfie next to a police box outside Earl's Court tube station, which is a popular spot for fans and non-fans alike.

Given its roots, the TARDIS is arguably the most British thing about Doctor Who, although it never really gets looked at that way.

Probably because most people now associate the police box shape with the TARDIS more than they do its original historical function, and you can't really blame them!