The Mobile Phones of Doctor Who: Paradise Towers

I'm loving the fact that BBC iPlayer has all the classic Who stories available to stream. I've been dipping in and out of the ones I don't have in my DVD collection. Paradise Towers is a brilliant story. It is well directed (which makes a nice change) and the story actually makes sense (mostly). The set decoration and story elements directly influence the modern series.

And - most importantly of all - it contains a mobile phone!

I'm not talking about the Walkie-Talkies which are non-functioning props. I'm talking about this beauty:

(From Episode 2)

There's also a shot of it being used by Blue Kang:

But could that be just a regular phone with a long cord?

There's a clearer shot when the Chief Caretaker is disposed of:

And a slightly sideways angle:

It looks like there are buttons on the back of the handset - the opposite side from the speaker and microphone. Most touch-tone phones that I remember had the buttons on the same side. Here's the Argos catalogue from 1987 to prove my memory isn't faulty:

So I think this is a carphone. Specifically, the Panasonic VM1 which was used to launch Vodafone in 1985.

It has the same physical shape - with the angled mouthpiece. The button configuration is the same - 6 rows of 3. Above the buttons looks like like the display grid. And the bottom appears to have a white logo.

Here's a couple of crappy composites.

The "Send" and "End" buttons on the top row are slightly darker on both. You can see more shots on the product page for the EB-6301. Various photos of the phone show it with Racal branding.

The phone model is relatively famous; it was used by Ernie Wise as part of Vodafone's launch.

I think that might be the only commercially available carphone used by The Doctor in the original series. There are some non-cannon appearances - but I'll keep my eyes pealed for more.

In the meantime, you can browse through the Mobile Phone of Doctor Who archives.