Sylvester Sundays - Time And The Rani

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 Time And The Rani starts with the TARDIS being knocked off course(1), crashing into a quarry with a dirty pink sky while being guided by what looks suspiciously like a rainbow. Then Kate O’Mara walks in and declares ‘Leave the girl it’s the man I want’(2) only for Harpo Marx to regenerate into Sylvester McCoy due to tumultuous buffeting.

Lets be honest, as a start to a brand new era it doesn't immediately fill you with an overriding sense of confidence.

 Here’s the thing, Time And The Rani it’s nobodies favourite and with pretty good reason, however as much as I understand the larger fan consensus I personally have a certain amount of fondness for it. As I explained in a previous post it's the first story I actually brought so I'm perhaps slightly more forgiving than some. I genuinely enjoyed it at the time and even though exposure to more Who made me realise that it wasn’t exactly a shining example of the shows strengths it's still a story I can watch. Given the circumstances behind the story it's amazing it doesn't just end up being 4 episodes of the production team sitting down and crying.

 Following the monumental behind the scenes cluster-fuck that was The Trial Of A Time Lord, long time producer and fandom punching-bag John Nathan Turner was forced by the BBC to fire Colin Baker, this combined with the fact that script editor Eric Saward had quit to start a career as a hard bitten cliché ridden mercenary(3), meant that Doctor Who as a programme was pretty much screwed. But as far as JNT was concerned at least he would be allowed to leave the programme. Imagine his surprise when after returning from holiday(4)  he was told he wouldn't be leaving and could he please start work on the next series despite the fact that he had no Doctor, no script editor and no scripts. Under these desperate circumstances he made two surprisingly good decisions, he hired the incredibly inexperienced Andrew Cartmel to be script edit and the relatively unknown Sylvester McCoy to be Doctor number 7, however because no one is perfect  he also commissioned a script by Pip and Jane Baker.

 Now as much as a lot of people might not, quite justifiably, like Pip and Jane there is a definite logic to hiring them. They’d already proved that they could knock out a script in double quick time when they had had to write Trial part 14 pretty much over a weekend and when taken into consideration that episode holds up remarkably well. And it’s not like the BBC where going to give Doctor Who any more time as the official management position on it was not to give a toss. So Pip and Jane wrote Time And The Rani without even knowing whether it would be Colin Baker’s last or Sylvester’s first, an important point we’ll get back too later.

 Now I don’t want to talk about Cartmel’s strengths and weaknesses in this entry because he had so little influence over this story that it really wouldn’t be fair, however there is one interesting tale that arose from the making of documentary on the DVD. Pip and Jane talk about how the story originally opened with King Soloman, who the Rani would kidnap for his wisdom, and Cartmel asked them to change it to Albert Enstien. Now this may seem like a minor detail but I think it’s especially interesting when you take into account one of Cartmel’s biggest influences when he started on Who where comics(5). Put it this way, while Eisten was obviously one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, he’s also been used in various works of fiction, his image appears on t-shirts and posters and E=Mc2 is probably the most well known and quoted scientific formula, in other words he’s a genuine part of pop culture and Cartmel will slowly reconnect Doctor Who to pop culture in a  fashion that would continue when it returned in 2005.

 If you haven’t already guessed, I’m skirting round the actual story itself but before I get into particular plot details there’s one observation I want to make that will no doubt upset some Who fans if they don’t give me a chance to place it in context. Anyway here we go, the story that Time And The Rani shares the most qualities with is Tom Baker’s own début Robot. Now I can hear a few gasps of horror but let me explain. Part of the fun of Robot is that it is a 3^rd Doctor UNIT story that is missing the velvet elegance of Pertwee and has this gangly, wild eyed, curly haired loon in his place. It makes sense, ease the audience in to the new Doctor by surrounding him with familiar elements. Of course the Pertwee era was one that launched the programme into new heights of popularity, the Colin Baker era less so. But that’s what we get, a 6^th Doctor story that’s missing the larger than life(6) operatically theatrical Mr Baker and instead has this small Scottish clown who does prat falls and plays the spoons. If nothing else it provides an immediate contrast between the two. What we get here is almost pure clown, something that McCoy has stated he regrets, but given how last minute this all was he went with his natural instincts and he can't be blamed for that. He may prat fall and play the spoons but he's also immensely likeable, even while being grumpy. He's less imposing than Baker  but he's still able to bring a real sense of energy when he's on-screen. 

 Supporting this new Doctor we have Kate O’Mara,who, as always, is able to make The Rani work far better than Pip and Jane’s script deserves. I mean the poor woman must have  been more than a little surprised to find that she was going to have to cosplay as Bonnie Langford for the bulk two episodes. I mean don’t get me wrong she does the best she can and she makes it fun to watch, especially in those moments where her contempt for the Doctor accidentally shows through, with either a disgusted facial expression or a muttered aside, but at the same time it’s a gob smackingly dumb idea(7). Of course the idea of cosplaying isn’t nearly as dumb as her actual plan, she needs to blow up an asteroid but she has to do it at a certain time because despite the fact she has time travel she can’t build a missile platform that can move? And when something breaks she has a whole load of geniuses to chose from but she decides to kidnap the Doctor, even Mel points out what a stupid idea this is. Also at one point the Doctor stumbles upon the the device that she used to bring down the TARDIS and it's basically a futuristic hand gun, which does lead to the rather amusing image of The Rani walking out into the open pointing the gun up and just firing it into the empty air(8).  

If you’re expecting me to talk about Mel, you’ll have to wait until I tackle Paradise Towers, all I will say is that for the first time ever I noticed how pert her bottom was.

 So yes this story is stupid and like nothing else in the McCoy era but here’s the thing, I genuinely loved it when I was 15 and I still can’t entirely condem it now. Because despite it's script stupidities it moves along at a decent pace and if given a choice between Time And The Rani, The Mutants, The Time Monster or Attack Of The Cybermen I'd chose this every time(9).  

1 Seemingly while visiting the galaxy of texture-less CGI. 
2 Gay agenda.
3 To go along with his part time career of whining about his time on Doctor Who.
4 Which one imagines probably involved burning giant wicker effigies of Saward and Ian Levine.
5 It's pretty well established that Cartmel would often tell his writers to read Alan Moore's The Ballad Of Halo Jones, which was originally published in 2000 AD, while not one of his best works it's an interesting read especially if you look at it through the lens of Series 25. 
6 Not a fat joke.
7 She should be lucky the Doctor was no longer travelling with Peri, not only would she have had to put on a unconvincing American accent but perhaps a shockingly ugly top with plunging neck line. 
8 Also the Doctor says it would bring down any passing space-ship which means the TARDIS just happened to be near the planet when The Rani wanted him. Going on the Doctor's Wife I suppose the TARDIS took him there because he was needed, which seems to indicate that even the TARDIS didn't like the 6th Doctor.  
9. Yes that is what they technically call damning with faint praise.