4. Doctor Who - The TARDIS
An iconic spaceship from an enduring science fiction series created in the sixties? Am I repeating myself already? Well, the story behind Doctor Who's famous time machine once again comes down to that oh-so-persistent nag - budget concerns. The image of the TARDIS - that piercing blue police box, standing out in some bygone land in all its anachronistic glory, is about as iconic as it gets. For most (fans and casual viewers alike) it's the immediate image that springs to mind when remotely thinking about the show, and is often used as the logo for various Who-related promotional material (so instantly recognisable is the TARDIS that it was even embedded in the recent series' title logo). Well, that police box could have disappeared for good way back in 1963, if the BBC had more money to throw at set design back then. The well-known premise of the Doctor's ship is that it is equipped with a "chameleon circuit" a feature that allows its shell to appear as an object befitting whatever time or place it lands in. The running joke in the show is that the chameleon circuit is broken and the TARDIS must remain looking like a police box from the sixties, but that wasn't the plan back in the day. Producers Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert originally planned for the TARDIS to take on a different shape each week in other words actually doing its job. It's purely because they didn't have the budget to build a new prop for every episode that the stuck appearance of the police box was written in. And thus a British icon was accidentally born.