Rikki Don't Lose That Number [Sci-Fi Telephone Booths]

We're all familiar with a certain Time Lord and her preferred mode of telephonic transport:

But while the Doctor was one of the first, she is far from unique - in fact there's a long and respectable tradition of science fiction heroes travelling in telephone booths. Excluding the good Doctor, here are my top five long distance callers:

#1 Bill And Ted

Doctor Who has spawned many spin-off series and movies over the years. My favourites were the Bill and Ted movies - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bogus Journey (1991). It's a blast - a great time-travel comedy and a decent attempt to create an American Doctor Who. It's absolutely canon. The eponymous heroes, played by Alex Winter and Keanu someone or other, travel through time in a US phone booth "borrowed" from Time Lord Rufus (who strictly speaking should be called The Rufus), encountering historical celebrities in their quest to complete their homework and ultimately secure the future of civilization through music. A nice touch is that this TARDIS is actually controlled by looking up the desired historical period in a phone book and dialling the number.


#2 Harry Potter

Why waste time with flying cars, boring broomsticks, itchy Floo powder or those blasted Portkeys when you can travel in style in a phone booth? The phone booths in Harry Potter are secret entrances to the Ministry of Magic.

#3 Professor Branestawm

In the BBC's fun adaptation of Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm, starring Harry Hill, the Professor invents a slightly slower-moving phone.

#4 Neo

The Matrix is another of my favourite Doctor Who spin-offs. The links to original Who are subtle, but Whovian fans should be well aware that in Doctor Who, the Time Lords have a supercomputer called the Matrix. In the Matrix, there is also a supercomputer called The Matrix. If you are exploring the Matrix and need to leave in a hurry, you get to a phone booth.

#5 Superman

The final entry in this list is Superman. He only rates #5 as he doesn't actually travel in a phone booth, he just changes in one. This will be hard to explain to the mobile phone generation.

Location, Location, Location

Indie filmmakers are often advised to limit films to the minimum number of sets, and I can personally vouch for this: moving from place to place and setting up over and over again in new locations wears everyone out and eats up valuable slate time.

Some films make a virtue out of this minimalist approach: Exam (review to follow) and the Cube series are all based around ingeniously designed one-room sets, while Buried goes even further and sets all the action in a coffin. Other variations include 127 Hours featuring a protagonist trapped on a mountain, while the two swimmers in Open Water spend the entire movie treading water and avoiding sharks.

This inventiveness also extends to other minimalist films like Phone Booth which is based around one location although the action does cut away sometimes, or The Hole (2001, starring Thora Birch, not the many other films with the same name) with a single location for about two-thirds of the film.

This is not a new phenomenon and there are some classic one-room films: Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men is superb and influential (leading into, for example, several of Tony Hancock’s television plays.) Several people also recommended Hitchcock’s Rear Window to me, a classic film I have yet to see.

There are also plenty of films that are limited to a single building or suite of rooms such as 1408 or Paranormal Activity. Films set inside aeroplanes also have a similar feel – Flightplan, Snakes On A Plane, Airplane! A group of people trapped in a house is a trope of the whodunnit genre, from Agatha Christie’s novels and their adaptations to another classic Sleuth: as with Cube, Exam and Paranormal Activity, the limitations are part of the puzzle which has to be solved if we are to escape.

One-location films subvert the potential scope of cinema – the freedom of the camera, and therefore the narrative, to go anywhere. It’s closer to theatre where, with exceptions, a small number of locations is the rule. These films also create an intense experience by playing on common fears of confinement. There may be a metaphorical explanation for many of these locations: life itself, or the Earth, is limited in all sorts of ways, and ultimately there is only one escape from it although we may dream of others.

With thanks to all the blogcatalog members who helped me research this article.