How are the inner and outer doors of the original series TARDIS connected?

Question

In the 2005 revival, we see that the doors of the TARDIS are consistent from inside to outside (from the inside, they look like you'd expect them to in a real police box). But the original series depicted them very differently. The "honeycomb" wall had a panel that opened and somehow connected to the police box doors as seen from the outside.

In the revival series, this allows for views directly from outside to inside (or vice versa), and shots like that of the motorcycle ridden straight into and around the console.

In the original series, you never (that I recall) see through the open doors into the console room from outside the police box like has been done a number of times in the revival. There is always a sort of shadowy blackness within the police box that characters emerge from or disappear into. Likewise, they just seem to disappear around the edge of the interior door.

So, I have always wondered: is there any canon depiction or explanation of the connection between the inner and outer doors of the original series TARDIS? Is there a hallway or vestibule?

Answer 1

The only time they allowed you to see through the doors was the pilot, An Unearthly Child. You can see a shot where, in the original pilot, they tried to have a "look through the doors' effect.

There was another shot toward the end, where you could see a snowscape through the doors.

The problem was that Doctor Who was shot live, with minimal post-production, as most TV shows were filmed by the BBC that way. It's one of the reasons why early Doctor Who shows contain so many glitches and bodged lines; if it was good enough they moved forward.

In just about every other shot, they were careful to shoot the doors obliquely, so you couldn't see quite inside.

Now, at 45 degree angles or so, one could see inside the tardis while people were dashing in; because it's just a plexiglas prop, you'd see the dark interior (reboot-Who uses bluescreen effects to comp in the interior.).

In Classic Who, there were two separate sets of doors, exterior and interior, connected via a dark hallway. This was the explanation for the "dark interior" of the TARDIS prop; it was also the explanation as to why the outer doors were always operated by hand, while the interior doors were automatic.

In Logopolis, we learn a lot more on how Time Lord Technology works (specifically Block Transfer Computation, where the Universe can essentially have things created with pure math), and we also learn about the "Real World Interface," the hallway where people translate from the dimensionally transcendental interior to regular space. This connection between the "shell" and the interior could be broken by Siege Mode (Flatline) or via wibly-wobbly shenanigans (Father's Day).

Head canon tells me that the "tunnel" doors were a feature of early TARDISs, like the Doctor's Mark 40, because we see the same in the Rani's TARDIS and The Master's updated TARDIS. Sometime between Doctor 8's initial regeneration and The Great Time War, it looks like the doors were upgraded to remove the tunnel.