Each season Doctor Who has raised the bar with exciting locations, costumes, and aliens. Considering they don’t have the budget afforded to many US sitcoms, it’s quite the trick to get it to come together.

The British Academy of Film and Television, better known as BAFTA, talked with this year’s production designer, Michael Pickwoad, on how to make credible fantasy week after week without a million dollar budget.

So, calling on all his experience which also includes, way back, no fewer than 13 films for the Children’s Film Foundation – “where I first learned NOT to spend money” – Pickwoad cuts his cloth carefully and very flexibly.

Take for instance that very classy, 360 degree Oval office set which was built for the first episode of the latest series – ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ – in which Doctor Who arrived at Richard Nixon’s White House in 1969 around the time of the first Moon landings.

With some crafty re-design, that Presidential set would mutate in later episodes, first, into the acid well in the crypt of a medieval monastery before then going all futuristic as a birthing chamber in one of the series’ more revelatory sequences.

“It was getting a bit tatty by now,” admits Pickwoad, “and still it didn’t die because in our pirate episode it finally became an alien spaceship. All those incarnations were in the first half of the new series – and, hopefully, no-one will have noticed.”

You can read the entire article on the BAFTA site.

How do you think this season of Doctor Who holds up against previous seasons in the when it comes to the sets?