TIME AND THE RANI

An article written for an ultimately abandoned "Fanzine" project that was going to focus upon, re-evaluate, and re-examine some of the stories from the TV series “Doctor Who”  that are considered less than successful, even by some of its greatest fans. “Time And The Rani” (from 1987) is considered to be one of the very worst, but I promised that I would try and come up with some nice things to say about it, and this is the result...

TIME AND THE RANI

You know, I think that I’ve always been a Doctor Who fan, or at least I have been for as long as I can remember, and certainly as far back as the now long-forgotten day when that mysterious “someone” bought me my first copy of “Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks” and, perhaps, cursed me forever.

We’ve had our “moments” of course down through the years, those times when I buried my fandom so deeply under a large (and metaphorical) burgundy overcoat that I would have been devastated – annihilated! - to be spotted by a colleague buying a Doctor Who video at lunchtime in the W H Smiths near to where I worked, or buying the latest Target novelisation when my fellow students were devouring Iris Murdoch or someone equally worthy.

The problem is that I love the show.

Bloody. Love. It.

Always have. Probably always will.

In all its various formats, and with all its faults, quirks, and foibles, I still can find something to enjoy in every single episode, even the ones that I might struggle to go and actually pick up from the shelf on a dull evening can give me something to delight in during the gentle mocking of an online “Tweetalong”  - “The Android Invasion” I’m thinking of you - or some other random chatter. Some moments, I’ll admit, do take some loving, and there will always be episodes I’m more likely to pop into the machine ahead of others, but nevertheless, I don’t really have a “favourite” era, or a “favourite” Doctor because I can see something wonderful in all of them.

This, of course, might suggest to some, perhaps less “blind”, personalities that I am undiscerning, or have very low standards, or just aren’t enough of a “fan” (whatever that is) but then I remember just how this “funny little kid’s show” has been the only constant throughout an otherwise fairly unremarkable life, and I think  “sod ‘em”.

The show is embedded into my personality so deeply that those nine letters run through me like they used to in those sweet, sticky pink sticks of rock that I used to be given once we’d visited the Doctor Who Exhibition on Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Mention in passing “The Power of the Daleks” and my brain will leap – perhaps unwisely – to thoughts of the newly “renewed” (it wasn’t regeneration yet) Doctor talking about himself in the third person without (as became apparent on Twitter the last time this happened) the necessary explanation.

Mention of that long-lost “classic” and highly-regarded (often by people who’ve never seen it) debut of the Second Doctor does bring us, by a rather circuitous route, to “Time and the Rani” the less-loved debut of his successor, the Seventh Doctor.

It’s no secret that both of the last two Doctors of the “classic” era had opening stories that are neither much-loved, nor gave them the best of starts in their limited televisual lives. About “The Twin Dilemma” much, I’m certain, will be written in these pages, but, as you’ll have noticed by the headline to this piece, I’m supposed to be talking about “Time and the Rani”, so “Time and the Rani” is what I’m going to talk about.

Because, way, way back in those far-off days at the back end of 1987, a time when I was nothing but an unemployed Toblerone-eater looking for my first job, when that new season first came on TV in the aftermath of the sacking of dear old Sixie, and before it had yet had chance to become so publicly and universally loathed by – it seems – one and all, I thought that that short moment of what is now considered to be “pre-credits” madness, full of camp overplay and blond wigs, leading into a then “state-of-the-art” graphics sequence was bloody wonderful, and, so shortly afterwards, I came away from the fresh colour and excitement of that first twenty-five minutes feeling both elated and exhilarated.

“Why was that?” you might ask.

Well, the thing is, you have to look at the context. That episode is the first thing screened after the very public sacking of the previous Doctor after the season-long “Trial” a year before which hadn’t exactly inspired much confidence, even in the most loyal of the programme’s fanbase. There’s a lot to like in “Trial of a Time Lord” but the 14 week long single story experiment seemed to have alienated and confused just as many people as it had attracted, and the various problems behind the scenes had left the audience really beginning to wonder what was next, if anything, for their beloved hero.

Many of us were left wondering if the show had a future at all, and whether, despite some of the impressive work that had been done on the last two episodes to raise the standard of the season, maybe that ambiguous ending with the Doctor trapped in the vortex fighting the dark side of himself might not have been a better way for the series to bow out, especially as the bracketing story in the courtroom had sometimes managed to feel far too static, stagey and contrived.

However, all that was behind us now, and we had a new Doctor and a potentially bright new future to look forward to, so sitting down and switching on the television on that long, dark, autumnal evening did bring along with it a certain amount of trepidation, and the bright colourfulness, confidence, and downright animation that “Time and the Rani” showed during it’s first segment seriously got at least this viewer’s adrenaline pumping with the sense that this brave new world might actually have something going for it.

After all, in those few minutes you get a set of brand new titles, a brand new version of the theme tune, a returning villainess who had chosen to return to this “silly little kid’s TV show” after a couple of years working in America on one of the most high profile international television series then being made.

Not only that, but there had been some rather exceptionally impressive seeming visual effects, and the rather astonishing use of point-of-view camerawork to introduce some (as yet unseen) creatures, all of which had made the entire episode seem to be light-years ahead of some of the more static trial scenes that had been played out nine months before.

Now, if you’ve watched the episode since, you might find yourself wondering why I thought all of this was so impressive. Was I blind? Am I insane? Well, I have just been to visit my optician, and so I think I’m able to deny the former, but the jury’s still out on the latter, so perhaps I ought to take a moment to explain.

The much maligned season 24 of the original classic series was the very last one aired before I acquired a video cassette recorder, and so, having sat myself down for the new series, I got one shot at each episode and then had to wait until the “same time, same channel” next week for the story to continue. I also lived I a kind of “isolation bubble” when it came to being a “Doctor Who Fan” and didn’t have a network of pals with whom I could discuss the ups and downs, or the wheres and the whyfores, of any new episode.

Heck, back then I didn’t even have any colleagues to pour scorn on the episode’s equivalent of a “flying space turd” (if it had one) as they would the following year after “Silver Nemesis” aired during my first year of employment. All I had was myself, in a room, pasting my cuttings into my scrapbooks and thinking “Yes, I actually liked that!”

Okay, I’ll accept that this was all the better part of three decades ago now, and hindsight can be both a wonderful and terrible thing. After all, within a few years I’d be able to own “Time and the Rani” forever on video and, after reading throughout those years how dismal both it and the rest of that season that I had once found so fresh, experimental, and invigorating were considered as being, maybe popping that tape into the player wasn’t done with quite such an open mind, and it might not have appeared to be quite as successful as it once have seemed to me.

However, we come here not to bury “Time and the Rani”, but to praise it, and the truth is, even in its digitally remastered, shiny disc glory (because I did actually buy it all over again on another format) the story has a lot to recommend it.

There’s Sylvester, for one, hitting the ground running and totally becoming “The Doctor” in the space of moments. After the unfortunate incident in the curly wig at the beginning (which wasn’t anything like as noticeable on the “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” first showing) he is, quite frankly, rather wonderful. Now I know that he has his denigrators, those who claim he “can’t act” or is playing it far too much for laughs, but I really feel that I must disagree, even if his delivery of “The Rani!” at one point does make you suspect that he was hoping for another take in the yet to be mastered, mad old world of being “The Doctor”.

Some dislike the fact that he plays the spoons, which is again something I would question now that the actor’s love of football, or even playing the guitar, has now been allowed to become a character trait. Sylvester was known for playing the spoons so why the hell not? After all, if you’re experimenting with the boundaries of what a brand new body is capable of, surely it’s as good a test as anything if your instincts take you that way? I also find a lot to enjoy in the scene where he tries on the various clothes in the TARDIS after running around – rather successfully I find - in the previous Doctor’s outfit for far longer than had ever been previously done. Sylvester’s clowning is beautifully underplayed in that scene, and the nods to the past do lift that scene, leaving him wearing what was a unique version of what became of his costume, with the braces on show and the tartan accessories.

Which brings us to Bonzo. Now I know that I’m one of the few people who is prepared to stand up and say that I have a lot of time for Bonnie Langford – maybe because we’re almost the same age give or take a week or so and I can only respect and admire the fact that she’s done a lot more with her span on this planet that I am ever likely to with mine - but she is rather wonderful in this. In fact, even if you loathe her, you should at least grudgingly accept that she never gives less than her all in the twenty episodes in which she features and plays her role with utter conviction throughout, sometimes in the face of great silliness. Even if you think that she is overplaying in this particular story, I think that it’s because she has to give Mel enough recognisable key physical attributes so that the Rani is able to mimic them with conviction during the scenes where she attempts to convince the still befuddled Doctor that she is indeed that most loyal of companions.

“Time and the Rani” it must be said is not a story without its faults. The Lakyertians are, on the whole, a disappointing bunch design-wise – although, on the whole, no more or less than any other hard-bitten, freedom-fighting aliens in Spandex of their time – and I maintain that their “look” would have worked so much better in the forest setting that they were intended to be living in. There is some frankly bonkers science going on which might have been tempered by a firmer hand being on the script editing tiller, and some of the studio design (with it’s strangely IKEA-styled pyramids and that huge blobby brain) does show a limited budget being stretched far beyond breaking point – although when it works (like in the very creepy lair of the Tetraps) it works very well indeed.

On the whole the location work – and the model work – for this story is of a very high quality and, in the end, whilst it might have added up to less than the sum of its parts, its reputation seems to be built upon a lot of received opinion from people who have never seen it, or refuse to watch it on the grounds that they’ve been told how awful it was. Obviously, there are those who did watch it and loathed every second of it, and they are entitled to their opinions too, although I maintain that it is no better or worse than many fairly average episodes in several eras of the show, and it is attempted with such bravado and gusto, that it remains a hell of a lot of fun, which is more than you can say for a lot of the po-faced telly from that particular time. I’d still rather watch this than half a dozen episodes of “Howards Way” for example.

In the end, “Time and the Rani” might not have been a stone-cold classic but, in rising from the embers of despair that still glowed in the aftermath of the “Hiatus” and the post-Trial sacking of the lead actor, it laid the foundations for the classics that were still to come from the team then making the show, and, by giving the show any kind of future when so many were ready to shove its still-breathing body into a pit and shovel the dirt on top of it, ought to be loved just a little bit more, no matter how begrudgingly.

And, if you’re in the right frame of mind, or with a group of mates who are prepared to be kind, it can be a hell of a lot of fun, and, really, what more could you ask for than that?