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sort of wheezing, groaning noise. Or they might say it sounds like the trumpeting of elephants. Some might even tell you it is the sound of a front door key being scraped down a piano wire


The unbroadcast pilot episode of Doctor Who made in 1963 reached its dramatic climax with the Doctor throwing the controls of his spaceship and the machine was set in motion



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For this pilot episode the job of creating this vital found fell to Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and his first dematerialisation of the TARDIS was signified mainly by a series of discordant beeps

Only intermittently, the roaring of that famous front door key comes in, but not in the pattern we are now familiar with

The take off and subsequent landing was one complete event and as the hissing noise died away, the TARDIS had already come to rest on a prehistoric landscape, with no accompanying materialisation

It wasn't until this episode was re-shot as part of the An Unearthly Child serial that the complete TARDIS sound effect was formed as we know it. However as with the pilot there was no additional sound to indicate the machine's arrival in the world of the cavemen

In the final episode of this serial, television history was made as the audience viewed the time machine's departure from the outside, simply dissolving into nothing. It was accompanied by the complete TARDIS sound which began with a thud, followed by a series of the famous "vworps", and then a whooshing noise. For the next few stories, as was the norm in the early 60s, the viewer 

was always inside the TARDIS when it landed


During the first ever Dalek story, the TARDIS makes an attempt to leave the Dalek homeworld but the Doctor has deliberately sabotaged his own ship. In doing so, it causes the engines to stall, and grind. We hear a slowed-down and echoed dematerialisation sound effect which is inter-cut between the normal take-off sound


Its arrival on the glass beach was also the first time a model shot had been used to represent the time machine and it shows us that the materialisation of the TARDIS is completely silent. However, at the end, contrary to what had been established, the the TARDIS takes off at the end completely silently too! It would certainly not be the last time the TARDIS's behaviour was inconsistent


The rest of season one followed the same pattern. Take-offs were noisy and landings were never seen

The intention of this time machine was to go unnoticed because it was created by a race who wished to observe other species without causing a disturbance. What would be the value of a working chameleon circuit if a new tree appeared in a wood with the screeching of a machine from beyond the stars?

And what sound do you think announces this thirteenth materialisation in the programme's history? It's a kind of warbling sound! It was actually the sound of the TARDIS computer first heard in The Daleks, and has never been used before or since for a TARDIS landing! Have a very careful listen in the video clip here for this quiet oddity