Shopkeeper Lee Dubois stands next to the full-sized TARDIS he is raffling off at the Crossroads Market, Calgary, Alberta.
(Photo by Alex Frazer-Harrison).
In "
Flatline," we saw the TARDIS grow and shrink over the course of 45 minutes. Lee Dubois can relate.
Earlier this year, the owner of Silverado Skies Corner Garden, a business in Calgary, Alberta, specializing in products like birdhouses and other outdoor items, started stocking birdfeeders in the shape of a miniature TARDIS (roughly the same size as the one Clara had stuffed in her handbag). Unfamiliar with
Doctor Who, he was caught by surprise at how popular they were.
“One of my suppliers for my birdhouses sent me this [TARDIS] birdfeeder six months ago; I had no idea what I’d got,” Dubois says in an interview with Doctor Who News. “I had about eight of them and they were gone the first weekend, lots of fans coming in. I ordered more and, boom, they were gone, too. So someone said I should make one of those full-size.”
Visitors to Dubois’ stall at the weekend Crossroads Market can see the result: a full-size wooden TARDIS, measuring more than nine feet tall, with tempered glass spelling out the iconic “POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX” sign. A fellow market vendor supplied the “PULL TO OPEN” and St. John Ambulance labels; another provided a vintage telephone perfect for recreating “that phone call” in "
Deep Breath."
“On the Internet, nobody is really free with giving out all the dimensions, so I went between three different sets of drawings, and [used] educated guesses,” says Dubois, who spent 200 hours of his spare time over more than four months building it.
Dubois is raffling his TARDIS (which weighs 450 lbs, but dismantles for transport and is on coasters, which the Doctor would have found hand-y in "Flatline") for $5 a ticket, with all funds supporting Kids Help Phone, a national non-profit helpline for youth in crisis. Only 2,000 tickets will be sold, with the draw expected in February (“or whenever I run out of tickets,” he says). Dubois says whoever wins will have the option of donating the TARDIS
back to be raffled again.
Meanwhile, there are lots of pictures being taken at Crossroads, and Dubois says excited fans can borrow the key to peek inside (no blackboards, but the ceiling features the Union Jack). And, of course, he still has TARDIS birdfeeders for sale.
“It’s really iconic, and it’s part of not only BBC history, but world history,” says Dubois. “I met a guy here a few weeks ago, and he was in his 80s, and he said, ‘Back in the ‘60s, I was thrown in one of those by the cops because I was drunk and disorderly!’” (No word whether the old fellow found himself nursing a hangover while being chased by Zarbi.)
For information about Kids Help Phone, visit
kidshelpphone.ca.
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