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.

The Machines

I was thinking about the various plot devices that allow time travel. In addition to opening the way for a time travel plot, the nature of the device can itself be a symbol, or it can add to a novel or film in other ways - it can give a film a unique style, say something about the traveller, or it can be a source of humour.

Before H.G. Wells, time travel was something spiritual - the ghosts of Christmas Past or Future in A Christmas Carol - or accidental, as in the blow to the head of the Connecticut Yankee. Wells introduced the mechanical Time Machine, bringing time travel into the realm of human control. These trends continue in more recent sci-fi - mechanical Time Machines include the garage physics experiment in Primer, while accidental time travel includes the genetic disorder described in The Time Traveller's Wife. The blow to the head method is also alive and well in Life On Mars, a series heavily inspired by the Mark Twain novel. There are less spiritual time travellers these days. However it makes perfect sense, for example, that Nick Hornby's Sam might be sent back to revisit key moments in his life by his Tony Hawk poster as it represents a kind of father figure/guardian angel.

I've mentioned Kate and Leopold before: it's not my favourite film. However it is a good example of time travel symbolising the risks that are taken in life; and this is portrayed as literally jumping off a bridge.

The bizarre series of committee meetings that led to the creation of the Tardis has been well described. However I think it's also reasonable to think of the Police Box as an authority image, which along with the Doctor's title, is consistent with Doctor Who's interventionalist themes. Another telephone box time machine features in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, perhaps as a reference to Doctor Who, but this time the process of time travel becomes a comic search through a telephone directory and network.

My final example is a classic time machine: the deLorean in Back To The Future - and as Dr. Emmett Brown says: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"