For Sale: TARDIS Roundels, Barely Worn
Are Propstore firesales a smart way for scrapped shows to recoup some cash, or are they just cultural vandalism with an official seal?
This week, the BBC started selling off the TARDIS.
Okay, not exactly—spiritually, they're already in the process of that as Doctor Who navigates a return to TV through the tender process, and although the corporation is definitely strapped for cash at the moment, selling a fictional phone box-shaped spaceship will not aid that process all that much physically.
More specifically, the BBC is selling off TARDIS roundels, the circular lighting reliefs that stud the walls of the console room filming set. The latest TARDIS interior set—created for David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa's 14th and 15th Doctors back in 2023—was purportedly torn down this summer when it became clear that this iteration of Doctor Who was well and truly dead, and now these last remaining chunks of it are being sold off to diehard fans for roughly $530 apiece through Propstore. As of writing, every one of the presumably hundred available has been sold.
Aside from letting some very specifically geeky Whovians own a part of it all, this process is logical in many ways. There's no point in this current TARDIS set being maintained at Bad Wolf Studios, now that the production company is officially no longer part of making Doctor Who. Whoever comes next will want to build their own sets in their own shooting spaces, and maintaining a standing set as large as this latest interior would be foolish without it being used. And, as previously mentioned, the BBC is not exactly in a lucrative state at the moment, shutting down TV and radio channels and slashing the jobs of hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists in an attempt to lean itself out.
But this is also not a problem unique to Doctor Who. In recent years, more and more franchises have had their archives sifted through for auctioning, taking history out of curation and into the hands of private collections. And it raises a question: at what point do these attempts to raise cash become vandalism of history that should be maintained and celebrated by these franchises' owners?