More Doctor Who Experience Details
BBC Worldwide’s managing director of live entertainment, Philip Murphy, chatted to Digital Spy about The Doctor Who Experience – the new interactive London exhibition opening in 2011. Here’s some of the more interesting bits.
What does The Doctor Who Experience offer that past exhibitions didn’t?
“There’s two answers to that! The first thing is something completely new. We have an immersive, interactive adventure, which lasts for basically about a third of the programmed time. It’s estimated at 90 minutes and a third of that time is spent in an adventure. You’re basically one of The Doctor’s companions for a scripted walk-through adventure, with special effects and monsters. The most crucial thing is that you get to go inside the Tardis and you get to fly it!”Does the interactive experience feature newly-written scenes with Matt Smith?
“That’s exactly right. I obviously don’t want to give the whole plot of the adventure away, but the basic premise of it is that thanks to the nefarious plans of the villains, The Doctor has been separated from his Tardis and he needs someone to help him get it back. Given that Amy’s not around, the public get the chance to do it instead!”And there’s a full recreation of the Eleventh Doctor’s Tardis interior?
“Absolutely, yeah. It’s a faithful 100% reproduction of the current Matt Smith Tardis, with the addition of a couple of gadgets which The Doctor has sensibly planned ahead to include, to enable the public to fly it! Obviously there’ll be more than one person in the room at a time. There will be batches of 50 people, so we’ve got some slight additions there that Steven Moffat has scripted in for us. But other than that, it’s a 100% reproduction of the Tardis set as it currently stands down in Cardiff.”Was Steven Moffat involved in writing the script for this mini-adventure?
“[He has written] all of The Doctor’s parts that were filmed for it, yeah. The actual premise for the adventure came from us and from the exhibitions and attractions company that we’re working with. We then got Steven to work with us on making sure that all of the stuff involving The Doctor was spot-on, compared to the TV series.”The walk-through finishes with a 3-D finale. What can you reveal about that?
“There’s a bunch of special effects throughout the whole walk-through, involving the Tardis and where you fly it to. It then culminates in a CGI sequence that involves 3-D animation. I should stress that it’s the finale, but it’s not a big part of it. It’s a couple of minutes at the end of the sequence, but it ends things with a really impressive bang!”What can you tell us about the exhibition element of The Doctor Who Experience?
Within the exhibition, we’ve got loads of props and memorabilia that have never been seen before. We’ve got the whole David Tennant era Tardis set – the original set that was blown up in his final episode. It’s been rebuilt for us, so you actually get to stand in the real set. We’ve also got a Peter Davison era Tardis set from back in the ’80s. They’re both genuine sets, not recreations. We’ve got lots of genuine props and then obviously some recreations, because things have been destroyed or just aren’t safe to make available to the public!”
Sounds great! You can read the rest of the interview here. The exhibition launches February 20th at London’s Olympia Two venue and you can book tickets here.