The Tardis required neither expensive special effects nor a complex plot to imagine a British space programme. The Tardis looked like a police box, the audience eventually learned, because it had a 'chameleon circuit' allowing its shape to change to blend in with each new environment, and this circuit had broken when the Doctor first arrived in London.
2001, Nicholas Cull, “‘Bigger on the inside...’: Doctor Who as British cultural history”, in Graham Roberts, Philip M. Taylor, editors, The Historian, Television and Television History, page 99