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"Doctorin' the Tardis" is a 1988 electronic novelty pop single by The Timelords ("Time Boy" and "Lord Rock", aliases of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, now better known as The KLF). The song is predominantly a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music, Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part Two)" with sections from "Blockbuster!" by Sweet. The single was panned by critics but a commercial success, reaching number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and charting highly in Australia and New Zealand.
The Timelords followed up their chart-topping record with a "how to have a number one" guide, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).
The release of "Doctorin' the Tardis" followed a self-imposed break from recording of Drummond and Cauty's sampling outfit, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs). The single continued The JAMs' strategy of plagiarising and juxtaposing popular musical works. However, unlike the cultish limited releases of The JAMs, in which Drummond's Clydeside rapping and social commentary were regular ingredients, "Doctorin' The Tardis" was an excursion into the musical mainstream, with the change of name to "The Timelords" and an overt reliance on several iconic symbols of 1970s and 80s British popular culture, including Glitter, Doctor Who (the theme song, and the references to Daleks and the TARDIS), Sweet's "Blockbuster!" and Harry Enfield's character 'Loadsamoney'. The song also features the riff from another of Glitter's recordings, "I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am)". Its name is a reference to "Doctorin' the House" by Coldcut.
Drummond and Cauty often claimed that the song was the result of a deliberate effort to write a number one hit single. However, in interviews with SnubTV and BBC Radio 1, Drummond offered a more plausible explanation. "We went into the studio on a Monday, thinking we were going to make a house track, a regular underground dance house track using the Doctor Who theme tune... [but] we [then] realised it was in triplet time and you can't have house tracks in triplet time. The only beat that would work with it was the Glitter beat. By Tuesday evening we realised we had a number one and we just went totally for the lowest common denominator". Radio 1 interviewer Richard Skinner called the record an "aberration", to which Drummond pleaded "guilty", adding that "we justified it all by saying to ourselves 'We're celebrating a very British thing here... you know, something that Timmy Mallett understands'".
In a KLF Communications information sheet, Drummond called "Doctorin' the Tardis" "probably the most nauseating record in the world" but added that "we also enjoyed celebrating the trashier side of pop".
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