10 Doctor Who “Mistakes” That Were Totally Intentional

6. A Load Of Sheet (Battlefield)

Doctor Who The End of Time Verity Newman mistake
BBC Studios

By the time Season 26 of classic Who rolled around, it's no surprise that certain sets were starting to wear down - including the TARDIS itself.

After the recording of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy during the previous season, the centre console and the walls that made up Gallifrey's finest time machine were in a serious state of disrepair. As a result, the walls were junked, meaning that there wasn't a TARDIS set available to use.

This proved quite problematic while filming Battlefield, the first serial of Season 26. How do you shoot a TARDIS scene without any TARDIS walls? Well, the production crew worked around this issue in a fairly clever way - they hung up a sheet and dimmed the lights so nobody could tell!

If you look closely, you can actually make out the creases and folds in the sheet. Ace even mentions how dark it is in the episode, and the Doctor, perfectly in-character, doesn't provide a satisfactory explanation.

With the TARDIS in such a bad way, maybe it's a good thing that the old girl was about to take a 16-year holiday from our screens.

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Jacob Simmons has a great many passions, including rock music, giving acclaimed films three-and-a-half stars, watching random clips from The Simpsons on YouTube at 3am, and writing about himself in the third person.