Doctor Who Prop Hunt

Hey! It’s been ages but I’m back. And it’s update time again. Crack out the John Barry cos this one has a James Bond theme. It’s all stuff I have posted about before but now I have found a bunch of them in OO7 flicks.  I posted about this grey computer a couple of times recently. It can be found in The Green Death, The Three Doctors, and a load more stories. You can read about it here and here . I think I’ve now possibly found their origin. Check out the screen grabs below for their Bond appearances. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, 1971 THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, 1974 Unsurprisingly, the ever green UFO props also appear in Bond. I’ve posted extensively about these wide blue computer units that show up everywhere in the 1970s. Too many to link, you’ll have to find all the posts or refer to The Catalogue .  They get a paint job for Bond. Scroll down to see how they appeared in screen. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, 1971 And yet another popular UFO prop. Scroll to see its big screen cameo. It ca...

This week on Instagram I posted pictures with a ‘seating’ theme. One of them featured this designer chair  This is an Elda chair designed by Joe Columbo in the Sixties. I normally shy away from posting about ‘real world’ items that you could conceivably buy (if you happened to have a spare 10K). Partly because when you see it in multiple shows it’s unlikely to be the same prop. And partly because other people have covered this very well elsewhere. When it comes to chairs the absolute key source is Tim Dickinson’s sublime Pink For Your Actual Pterodactyl . I’m indebted to Tim for the information in this post. Other blogs Film and Furniture and catacombs.space1999.net also proved to be invaluable. THE WHEEL IN SPACE, 1968 Here’s that picture I mentioned at the top. It’s a really familar image of Zoe in a massive chair. But I’d never noticed how much that chair turns up elsewhere.  THE WHEEL IN SPACE, 1968 Here’s another image from Wheel so you can see the whole thing. DAY OF T...

The name’s Bond, James Bond. Yes that’s right, this week’s prop is from the world of that famous fictional British spy, James Bond. It’s this control panel here and it’s found in the underground lair of Dr. Kananga from Live and Let Die. LIVE AND LET DIE, 1973 Here it is on screen. In the film Bond taps on a tombstone with a sword and that signals to the henchman to give him access to the lair. THE ARK IN SPACE, 1975 Two years later this control panel starts to turn up in Doctor Who. You can see it on the right of this screen grab from The Ark in Space. PLANET OF EVIL, 1975 The following season two of these panels turn up in Planet of Evil. One wall mounted and the other on a table. The one on the wall has been positioned upside down, at least compared to its other appearances. Here is a better look at the one on the table. THE INVISIBLE ENEMY, 1977 It’s another couple of years before we see this again. This time it’s in season 15’s The Invisible Enemy.  SPACE FALL, 1978 Blakes 7’s...

I didn’t think I be back on this topic so soon. But following my last post both Bob Johns (@whilom_music on Instagram) and Zoe’s Feather Boa (@zoesfeatherboa.bsky.social) reached out with more information on those grey computer panels I have been looking at. It turns out that what I thought was just a prop, a bit of wood with few lights and switches, is actually a real computer! Created in 1962, the ICT1301 was a British made business computer from International Computers and Tabulators. As you can see from the image above, the grey panels from Doctor Who were just a small part of a very large machine. Very few of these computers still exist. The most famous example can be found at  The National Museum of Computing and is fondly referred to as Flossie. You can read all about the restoration of Flossie here . Zoe’s Feather Boa also made me aware of a few Doctor Who appearances of the ICT1301 panels that I had missed. So here they are.  MEGLOS, 1980 WARRIORS OF THE DEEP, 1984 TH...