the eighth doctor ought to (aughts) wrote in noexits,
Not British. Gallifreyan, more precisely.
No, it's a cloaking technology. Each time my ship materializes, it calculates a twelve dimensional data map of everything within a thousand mile radius and determines which outer shell would blend in best, all within a nanosecond.
Then it ignores the data and takes the form of a police telephone box from England, 1963. Probably should look into that eventually.