It’s is an icon intensely associated with the BBC and it’s landmark drama Doctor Who, yet doubts have been expressed about whether the Corporation actually owns the right to use the TARDIS.


Stef Coburn, the son of Tony Coburn who wrote the first Doctor Who episode An Unearthly Child in 1963, insists that the BBC is in breach of copyright by using blue police call box.

Mr Coburn claims that any informal rights his father gave the BBC to use the TARDIS expired after his death in 1977 and that the copyright of all of his ideas passed to his mother Joan, who subsequently gave them to her son earlier this year.

Coburn has demanded that the BBC stop using the TARDIS in the show, or compensate his family for its every appearance since his father’s death.

He told the Independent: “It is by no means my wish to deprive legions of Doctor Who fans (of whom I was never one) of any aspect of their favourite children’s programme.

“The only ends I wish to accomplish, by whatever lawful means present themselves, involve bringing about the public recognition that should by rights always have been his due, of my father James Anthony Coburn’s seminal contribution to Doctor Who, and proper lawful recompense to his surviving estate.”

Coburn also told the paper he was “extremely angry” that, in his view, Mark Gatiss’s dramatisation of how the show began – An Adventure in Space and Time, which airs on November 21 – does not properly credit his father’s role in the show.

A BBC spokewoman issued a statement which said: “The BBC registered the TARDIS trade mark in the 1980s unchallenged and there have been no challenges since.


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