Time and the Rani
"Push me in a corner and I'll scream. Just give me one more, one more chance. One more, one more chance. Tonight."
Nicholas Pegg, the writer, actor and director who is probably best known to readers of this Doctor Who newsletter as one of the post 2005 Dalek operators, offers a compelling theory of David Bowie's artistry in his dizzyingly great The Complete David Bowie. Actually, he offers several, sometimes more than one on the same page, but there's one that feels particularly relevant to Doctor Who. It's the idea, I paraphrase here, that every David Bowie album is noticeably a transitional point between the one before and the one after it.
A logical implication of this is that there aren't really jumping on (or indeed jumping off) points in Bowie's career. Wherever you come in, you can backtrack and see the path to what you've already heard. If you go forward you can see how the next one developed from where you started. Now, if you'll forgive the drift into Thought for the Day-ese, "Doctor Who is a bit like that." It's why there are surprisingly few "jumping on" points in the old show. An Unearthly Child, of course. Maybe Spearhead from Space.
So many of the others, even Doctor debuts, make the reasonable assumption that the general audience knows a lot about the basics of the show. Wherever you jump in, even if it's the start of a season or a Doctor, you can see that this is a show that's been around for a while, and is part of a continuum. It's genuinely startling how many Tom Baker era series openers start with some minor scene in the TARDIS, rather than the kind of scene setting common in the "cold opens" of post 2005 Doctor Who. (About which more another time.)
Rose, The Eleventh Hour and The Woman Who Fell To Earth all have Year One qualities. The Church on Ruby Road works brilliantly, compellingly, as a one-off cold start introduction to Doctor Who. Sure, it's plugged into The Giggle in a similar way to how Deep Breath is plugged into The Time of the Doctor or Robot is to Planet of the Spiders, but you could show Ruby Road to someone completely ignorant of the show, and it would teach them everything they need to know, even though just 16 days separate The Giggle and Christmas 2023. That's barely time to get your tree up. It's an amazing example of Russell T Davies' great genius for having his (Christmas) cake and eating it.
Time and the Rani, which is after all the ostensible subject of this essay, perhaps should be one of Doctor Who's cold starts. So, perhaps, should The Mysterious Planet have been. Both are opportunities for the programme to re-engage with an audience that has drifted away from it. Neither uses this opportunity as well as they could.
So, while Time and the Rani has a new Doctor in Sylvester Mccoy, a new composer (Keff McCulloch), brand new opening titles and even has a go at developing a new visual style, thanks to new-to-Who director Andrew Morgan, it also has a returning companion in Melanie (Bonnie Langford) and a returning villain in the Rani (Kate O'Mara), both of whom the audience is clearly meant to recognise. It's also written by returning writers Pip and Jane Baker, who had penned five of the last six episodes to be transmitted the previous year for producer John Nathan-Turner, whose seventh series of Doctor Who opened with Time and the Rani.
It's thus on a Venn diagram in a way those 21st century examples above really aren't. If you start here, you're not just aware that there was a show before this one, it’s not even that you may know that some of the people making it have been around for a long time, you can also see people from it still wandering about onscreen.
There's a kind of mini Pip and Jane Baker era of Doctor Who, one that doesn't get noticed because it overlaps the change of lead actor and shift in production aesthetics over 1986 and 1987. Because not only is Time and the Rani the third time in a few months that Pip and Jane had been called upon by Nathan-Turner to bang out a Doctor Who script because no one else could, it's also the last four of nine consecutive episodes in production order that they'd written. As such, Time and the Rani shares much in common with "Terror of the Vervoids" and the finale to The Trial of a Time Lord. So much so that Doctor Who Magazine's (near) contemporary review of their novelisations called them "one long trilogy", and it's an interesting and valid idea that never really had its moment in the sun.
This is, oddly, despite fan instinct being to sever Time and the Rani from the eleven stories that followed it, the last eight especially. Pip and Jane would not write any of them. They were not in sympathy with Doctor Who's newly minted script editor / head writer Andrew Cartmel, who had his own ideas about how Doctor Who should go on. Cartmel would later say that he should have declined credit on these four episodes, with him having neither commissioned them nor made, he thought, a significant contribution to them, for good or ill.
Yet for all this, Time and the Rani is undeniably an attempt at a new start. It is absolutely contemporary; it's of 1987, not even of 1986. Or for that matter 1988. It's as exactly of its precise time as the brand new grey and pink striped foam chair I sat watching it on the nights it went out. In black and white, incidentally, because the second TV in our house in those days was a monochrome portable you tuned with a dial, and my parents were keen viewers of Coronation Street. I have subsequently bought Time and the Rani at least three times on home media, plus a book and a reading of said book. They certainly can't remember anything specific about the Coronation Street of 1987. (I can.)
That black and white television had been moved into my bedroom during a school holidays in 1987 so I could watch The Monkees, which was being run early in the morning, and the telly had not yet made it back to its natural home of my parents' room. I'm not sure when it did or why, but it was at some point between 7th December 1987 and 5th October 1988. Such are the advantages of measuring out your life in verifiable Doctor Who transmission dates.
An age’s worth of those transmission days later, Time and the Rani came 198th in the Mighty 200 survey of all Doctor Who conducted by Doctor Who Magazine, to commemorate the series 200th story in 2009. That's a fair measure of old school reaction to it at the time, and its stock has risen little since then. Yet, I've long thought that there's an easily conceivable version of this story that then old-time, now positively ancient, fans would have loved. One where the attic in which the giant brain is discovered is accessed by a spiral staircase, and the hill in which the castle that contains it is surrounded not by a location video taped quarry but a nighttime indoor forest with a backdrop against the longer wall of TC8. One that, in short, looked like The Brain of Morbius. You'd not have to change a word. You probably wouldn't even have to change the cast. Just the desktop theme. (Certainly fan rage at the "Doctor chooses his new clothes scene", functionally identical to and no sillier than that in Robot, would seem to support the point.)
Fans who longed for the immediate post war vibe of Dudley Simpson and his bass clarinet were unimpressed by the standard orchestra stabs on the same analogue synth machine used by Nathan-Turner’s beloved Pet Shops Boys on their imperial phase album actually, which was released the same day Time and the Rani bowed to 5.1m viewers on BBC One. The near wall to wall music in this serial, whatever one thinks of it, combines with Morgan's often showy direction to create a new atmosphere for the story, one unique in Doctor Who up to that point.
Time and the Rani is fairly allusive as Doctor Who stories go. The title nods at Time and the Conways, J B Priestley's class and time travel tragedy. Equally startling is that not only does the script out Mel as a CP Snow fangirl, but mentions that she and the previous Doctor discussed the writer in sufficient depth for him to be aware of her enthusiasms. (Perhaps this is something she and Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor could shortly return to? We can only hope.) The Doctor mentions The Beatles, Elvis and Mrs Malaprop from Sheridan's play The Rivals (1775), figures as district as Einstein, Louis Pasteur and Hypatia make cameos.
But then that makes sense, the Rani's plan is to wind back time and allow history to unroll more "rationally". i.e differently to how it turned out due to blind chance. "Creation's chaotic. I shall introduce order," she says, "Wherever evolution has taken the wrong route, I shall redirect it." The only way to make an audience understand a threat as abstract as that is to direct it towards Earth, and towards things they like and value, and I'd bet that given their prominence in the story the works and people above are things that Pip and Jane saw as "of value". They're saying "Look what will be lost if the Rani succeeds".
If that immediacy is itself lost because of the out-there setting of an outer space quarry planet that nevertheless looks and sounds exactly like the day it's transmitted, that does suggest a failure in approach. It's one echoed further down the series history in stories like The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (2018) which similarly fails to translate its far, distant settings' threat to contemporary Earth and all that its companion characters value. Readers well versed in Doctor Who's meta-texts will appreciate the irony of the author of that later episode being one of the long term fans who were intensely critical of the Bakers' approach to Doctor Who in the high 1980s. (Although as I understand it, he now regrets the form of his criticism now, if not his negative opinion, which he is, of course, wholly entitled to hold.)
But, in the face of that criticism, let's look at some of the things there are to like about Time and the Rani. I was at junior school, several years younger than Mr Chibnall, and my demographic was at least as important to the show's future as his. (If not me personally, as a commentator, compared to him, a producer of the show.) I enjoyed the story, which was also the first I was able to record and keep for posterity. This enabled me to watch it several times over the course of 1987 and early 1988. It's an irony, given my criticisms of Time and the Rani as a jumping on point that for many years I had a video cassette of it labelled "Doctor Who Volume 1".
There's lots about Time and the Rani’s production that's impressive, if we're honest. Some of it impressive now. The Rani's bubble traps. Her citadel and the other buildings on Lakertya, and the way they jut out of the rock on location via special effects cunningly integrated into live action.
This is a programme that is trying to impress, trying to change, trying to be worthy of the chance its been given, in the words of then Head of Drama Jonathan Powell, "one more chance.. to take off with public". It's also responding to Powell's direct criticisms of Doctor Who's dramaturgy in the preceding era. I've recently had cause to write about the transition from horror to adventure that characterises 1977's Doctor Who, and something similar is happening here.
Time and the Rani is, at least in my opinion, often exciting. But it's never horror. Its overall vibe has been compared to CBBC (although in truth it is much lighter than e.g. The Box of Delights (1984)), but a frantic, comic adventure series for all the family is a reasonable response to management requests for more humour and less violence, in exactly the way Mindwarp isn't. And there's no doubt at all that Time and the Rani is a more suitable form of Doctor Who for the tween demographic than that of a year or so before. The monsters are honestly great too. I was delighted to be able to buy an action figure of one a few months later and - as with the Vervoids - I and my schoolfriends were always slightly baffled they never came back. These days they would. Even if only in the background.
Sylvester McCoy's performance in this story, given with very little preparation, has been subject to much criticism. Certainly the chaotic prat-falling of his first scene angered some of those old school fans. But curiously those are some of the last scenes shot for the serial. McCoy is odder, more melancholy, more like he'll turn out to be in the long run, when on location, in the scenes shot first for the story (at Clonford Quarry from 4th April 1987). His earliest in-story dialogue was done almost exactly a month later, on 3rd May. Intuitively, that's the right decision, giving him time to settle in before shooting the scene that would introduced him to audiences, but as ever production factors on Doctor Who were unpredictable. That, at least, had not changed since the previous year.
Personally I find McCoy's energy in that opening scene (written by Cartmel, not the Bakers) compelling. The falling over? Less so. But there, the real problem is recording it so late in the schedule, with time running out in the studio and director Morgan forced to shoot in long takes on a set that almost demands an outdated proscenium arch approach, in order to get enough material onto tape in time.
In terms of the dynamic between the leads, things have also radically changed from the recent past. The sheer affection that McCoy and Langford's performances display towards each other is about as far away from the series' last Doctor debut as can be imagined. They even invade each others' personal space, the Mel ruffles the Doctor's hair and he places his forehead against hers as they confer; indicative of a deep trust the performers had developed when working together in the West End where their characters "got married every night and twice on matinee days" for over a year, as McCoy would later quip.
The result is a Doctor and companion relationship that seems warm, trusting and healthy; and it seems staggering that it's a matter of just eight episodes since the previous Doctor and his companion parted company after he (seemingly) tortured her and left her to die. I mean, the new Doctor's relationship with Rani's impersonation of Mel (beautifully judged by O'Mara as it is) feels healthier than the old one's with Peri. Because Mindwarp feels a very long way away from Time and the Rani, even though "Terror of the Vervoids" doesn't; and this is what I mean about Time and the Rani and overlapping eras of Doctor Who.
The final words of this story are the New Doctor's "I'll grow on you Mel, I'll grow on you." and they really do feel like a deliberate inversion of The Twin Dilemma's ending of "I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not!" Both seem addressed to the programme's audience as much as the other character onscreen, but they come from very different places. Time and the Rani's is a more humble statement of intent from a humbled programme. One that knows it has to regain its audience's trust.
Our putative Pip and Jane Baker era ends with that line. One area where, had they been inclined, Cartmel and the Bakers might have been able to find common ground, was politics. Cartmel had startled and impressed Nathan-Turner at his job interview by expressing, seemingly quite sincerely, that Doctor Who could be used as a television vehicle to "bring down Thatcher" and the Bakers, although of a different generation, were very much of the left themselves. It's long established that the Rani is one of 1980s Doctor Who's Thatcher-avatar villains. She being, as I've said in this newsletter more than once, a research chemist turned tyrant, created by lifelong leftists, and introduced in a story in which she engages in social experiments on mining communities.
The Bakers' interests also appear in how the Rani (and I love, deeply love this) deliberately uses a non recyclable plastic when there’s a recyclable one to hand. People who do this, Pip and Jane seem to say, are absolute stinkers. There's also the moment where rebel leader Ikona destroys the antidote to the insects in the globe. Something of benefit to his civilisation, but ultimately supplied to them by the Rani as part of their corrupt bargain. Mel is appalled, but is firmly told that the Lakertyans believe they should solve their "... own problems from now on." It's a reflection of a strain in anti-colonial ideas prevalent in 1980s, and another indication that the Bakers were far from the speedy suppliers of cheery, empty fluff they're often caricatured as.
This, though, brings up another question. Given the state of UK politics in 1987, and the sympathies of the writers and script editor of this story, is it just a coincidence that the leader of resistance to the Thatcher avatar Rani's rule, Ikona, has a name which is a partial anagram of Kinnock?
Yes, yes it is. Pure coincidence. Glad I could clear that up for you.
