Doctor Who Experience

Philip Murphy, the BBC’s Managing Director of Live Entertainment, reveals what’s in store with the Doctor Who Experience.

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.

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 and the Davison era, 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, 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.”

The interactive adventure will also feature new footage of Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor. “The Experience is programmed to last half an hour, so there’s a whole load of Matt Smith footage that’s been filmed specifically for this that has been written for us by Steven Moffat. So it’s properly true to the current incarnation. That obviously comes in and out during the half hour with all the other physical interactions with the various sort of surprises and visual effects and monsters that appear during the course of that adventure. It’s very much aimed at a family audience so we’re not going to try to scare people to death. However, it wouldn’t be Doctor Who unless it was a little bit scary in places.”

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