Get ready for a whole new style of Doctor Who exhibition, as the Doctor Who Experience plunges you into an adventure which sees you at the controls of the TARDIS. Philip Murphy, the BBC’s Managing Director of Live Entertainment, reveals what’s in store
You’ll be able to fly the TARDIS with instructions from the Doctor, learn how to walk like a monster, create sound effects and see Doctor Who sets and costumes that have never been on display before. The Doctor Who Experience will be the biggest, boldest, most interactive and longest Doctor Who exhibition ever when it opens at London’s Olympia Two next February (before moving to a permanent home in Cardiff) and for fans who grew up with the Longleat exhibition it’ll be culture shock. Whereas at the Longleat effort, after you entered the Police Box doorway, you had a certain sense of “it seems smaller on the inside”, the Doctor Who experience has been designed to keep you entertained for at least 90 minutes, with no less than three TARDIS sets to keep you occupied. Hey, and if you love a little shop, there’s one of those too. And a cafe.
Unlike previous Doctor Who exhibitions, which have been licensed out, The Doctor Who Experience is being produced wholly by BBC Worldwide, and, according to Philip Murphy, the BBC’s Managing Director of Live Entertainment, it’ll be “a game of two halves. There’s a walk-through, interactive, immersive adventure where you get to get to be part of the story, and then there’s a fully-fledged exhibition, which is by far the biggest exhibition of Doctor Who props, and memorabilia and actual sets that’s every been done. Way bigger than anything else.”
How big? “At 4,000 square metres, it’s getting on to the size of a football pitch. So, it’s a big old thing. This is something that we’re doing 100% ourselves rather than involving external companies or licensees or anything like that. This is an entirely BBC owned and run project. So it’s essential that we do it well.”
So was there a feeling that previous Doctor Who exhibitions hadn’t quite lived up to the standards of the series?
“Each exhibition has to be taken on its own merits and I wasn’t personally involved in licensing any of them so I can’t really speak about them. I think a lot of people visited and enjoyed all the previous exhibitions. Could they have been better? Well, by its very definition, what we’re doing with the Doctor Who Experience will demonstrate that they can be done better, but it’s an expensive business. You need the size and scale to be able to make something like this work.”
Rumour has it that the interactive adventure starts with you stepping through the infamous “crack” we saw throughout series five.
“That’s correct,” says Murphy. “Basically, it’s a storyline that’s been generated from the fans that we asked. We asked the how them how they wanted to interact with the show outside the TV medium. The number one thing they said to us was that they wanted to get inside the TARDIS. So our whole process from then was to try to work out the best way we could do that, and making it more interesting than, ‘This is the inside of the TARDIS, now move on.’ So creating that whole storyline to give people the chance to be part of an adventure, and be the Doctor’s companion for the day – to help him out in this particular story – seemed like the perfect way of doing that, then leading through into the more traditional, free-flowing exhibition, albeit we’ve got interactive elements in the exhibition too.”
In the Experience as a whole there will be three TARDIS sets, Murphy explains. The Exhibition will feature the actual sets used during the Tennant era (“reconstructed after its catastrophic destruction”) and the Davison era (“There’ll be some differences in production value between the two of them, obviously”) but the set used in the interactive Experience adventure is a, “100% reproduction of the actual Matt Smith TARDIS that you’ll fly.” Also, while the Tennant and Davison sets will obviously be open on one side (hey, the cameras had to peek in somehow), the Smith set will be completely enclosed, “so it’s going to feel even more like the real thing,” says a genuinely excited Murphy. “To be inside this thing – which is just enormous – and feel the scale of it, it brings out the inner geek of me. I’m looking forward to seeing people’s faces for the first time when they get to be stood inside the TARDIS for the first time, and then take photos and put them on FaceBook.”
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