There were dollhouses and ride-on trains for Kirsopp's younger cousins and a basketball hoop for his brother, but it was the TARDIS VHS cabinet - a near perfect replica of the one he had coveted from the pages of a magazine for months - that brought the 13-year-old boy to tears he thought he was too big for.

"I had my first subscription to a Doctor Who magazine and on the back of the magazine was the TARDIS video cabinet which was released by the BBC," he says.

"At the time it cost about 600 pounds to get it shipped from England to Australia which was completely out of reach for my family but my granddad took the advertisement and took the measurements from the advertisement and built a replica one."

That cabinet is now one of the most prized pieces in Kirsopp's collection of more than 3000 items of Doctor Who memorabilia.

While the collection ordinarily occupies a room of its own at his home - "An average bedroom. Not a master bedroom or anything like that," he is quick to point out - it has temporarily taken up residence in the Open Collections space at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, where it will remain until late November.

His eclectic assortment of Doctor Who-themed books, figurines, props and costumes might be the largest private collection in the world, and Kirsopp intends to lay claim to that with a Guiness World Record.

Like Kirsopp's grandfather at Christmas in '93, the British science-fiction television program has something for everyone.

Tangled in its ever-expanding universe are stories and characters that are beloved by children and adults alike.

And like the time-travelling humanoid alien it's based on, the series keeps regenerating.

Its concept has endured in various iterations - television programs, films and books - since 1963, pre-dating other cult classics like Star Wars and Star Trek.

With each new Doctor, a new generation topples into his magical world where each adventure weaves the past with possibility.

For Kirsopp, whose family emigrated from England to Australia between 1969 and 1972, hiding behind the couch when the Daleks came on screen was almost as British an institution as tea-time and Bovril.

"During the 80s Dapto only had two TV stations - Win and the ABC. Win only ever had the cricket and I hated the cricket but the ABC... You'd get home after school, you'd go and play with some mates and you'd be home by 5 o'clock when the lights were going out and you'd get Count Duckula and The Goodies, Roger Ramjet and a half-hour of Doctor Who. Then it was a half-hour of Eastenders and I had to go to bed," he says.

Heroes like GI Joe, the Ninja Turtles and HeMan were the zeitgeist of Kirsopp's childhood but none quite captured his imagination like the eccentric Doctor, bumbling through the universe with his wide-eyed sense of wonder.

But it wasn't the oft-maligned special effects of the early episodes that kept him waking up at 4am to tune in.

"It was the stories. I've got a lot of friends who get into the production side of it and know which cameraman did what, but to me they've always been really, really good stories. The faulty sets and the wobbly walls never bothered me," he says.

As Kirsopp grew older, the stories grew with him, like an old friend.

Now 36, he still loves the series but for different reasons.

"When I was a kid it was just a good fun show with people running around, lots of explosions, lots of monsters, but as you grow up you look at different parts," he says.

"I'm wondering now how I even understood what the story was back then."

Doctor Who's ability to cross generations is a peculiarity that the Canberra teacher has been able to observe with his own students at Harrison School.

He's seen children shriek with delight at monsters that have most adults jumping out of their seats.

"I've worked with children with autism before who absolutely love Doctor Who and I've never been able to find out an explanation why, they just absolutely love it," Kirsopp says.

"I've even taught children maths using Doctor Who."

Among diehard Whovians, there's still a hunger to own a piece of the original series that whisked them away to worlds among the stars as children.

"The hardest things to track down are props from the original series. People hang onto those," Kirsopp says.

"I was lucky I got my hands on a little communicator from one of my favourite episodes, Terror of the Vervoids, which is a Colin Baker episode. It's small but it comes with a certificate of authenticity and it's the only on-screen prop in my collection that I've been able to get. But you can actually watch the episode and go 'it's that!'."

It also set him back $550, but that's small change compared to some of the prices fans are prepared to pay to own a piece of the action.

"There was recently an auction in England and they had an original Dalek from the Peter Cushing movie and it was estimated to go for 15,000 pounds and it ended up going for 38,000 pounds. Anything from the original series is massively expensive," Kirsopp says.

Time is also something Kirsopp has invested heavily into his collection.

He spent 15 years searching for a cook book he once spied in a Doctor Who magazine as a child, but hasn't cooked from it once.

"It took me a long time to find that cook book. Growing up in the 80s I was a Cub Scout and my mum was my Cub leader. When I moved up to Scouts my mum stayed at Cubs so she'd drop me off at the local library and she'd go and run the pack and I'd go through all of the Doctor Who magazines at the library and I loved the merchandise pages. A radio, a pattern book and the cookbook were three that I remembered from the merchandise pages. The pattern book wasn't too hard to find, the cookbook took me about 15 years to find and the radio I only got earlier this year," he said.

Kirsopp believes part of the series' lasting appeal is that "it can do anything it wants", with all of space and time to play with.

"If it wants to do a Victorian mystery, it goes and does a Victorian mystery. If it wants to isolate people in a futuristic lighthouse, it'll go and do that. We've had the Titanic floating around in space, and mummies aboard the Orient Express. Really there's no boundaries on what the stories can do," he said.

While his collection enjoys a stay at CMAG, Kirsopp has another project he's working on.

He plans to gut the Doctor Who room, rebuild all of the shelving and turn it into a nursery for the little one he and his wife Jess are hoping to welcome one day soon.

"It just means I've got to buy bookcases with doors," he says shyly.

Bigger on the inside: Collecting Dr Who will run at the Canberra Museum and Gallery from July 16 to November 20.