Time and The Rani: Rank - 283

 Time and The Rani

(Series 24 (20th Century), Dr 7 with Mel, 7-28/9/1987, producer:  John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writers: Pip and Jane Baker, director: Andrew Morgan)

Rank: 283

‘Leave the gull – it’s the Macaw I want’ (‘Time and The Rani – ornithologist adaptation’)

'Leave the gorilla – it’s the Mara I want’ (‘Time and The Rani – Manussian Jungle adaptation’)

‘Leave the governor – it’s the I want, man’ (‘Time and The Rani – Plutocracy Sunmakers adaptation’)

‘Leave the ghoul – it’s the man I want’ (‘Time and The Rani – The Investigators From ‘Hide’ adaptation’

‘Leave the girl – it’s the man I want’ (‘Time and The Rani – Dr 15 in ‘Rogue’ adaptation’) 

Ah, the ‘strange matter’ of The 7^th Doctor’s debut, the story that broke the few fans who’d remained loyal through the ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ crisis. This one story became associated with everything that was ‘bad’ about 1980s Dr Who.  How did one story come to take so much flak from the Dr Who community, to the point where it was being slagged off in the press by its own fan appreciation society and came bottom in practically every poll for the best part of twenty years (till ‘Fear Her’ gave it some competition)? Probably because where other bad stories get one or two things wrong, finding things to complain about with this story is like shooting Skarasen in a barrel. That script! (particularly the dialogue). The incomprehensible plot! Those lurid colours! The acting! The slapstick! Sylvester McCoy floundering in his debut, part silent movie comedian and part an irritating git who won’t shut up! Kate O'Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford! (That one alone might just be the most misguided moment in all of 20th century Who). It’s the stuff of nightmares for most Dr Who fans, most of whom carried on seeing this story in lurid pink hues every time they shut their eyes. We’d been kidding ourselves that Dr Who wasn’t dead ever since the hiatus but this was the first time we truly couldn’t ignore how bad things were.  The result was like seeing an old friend on life support.

Most of all though it’s the timing: in any other era a bad story could have slipped through the cracks but this one was sent out into the spotlight, with as close to a publicity blitz as the series ever got in between ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘The TV Movie’. The whole world (well, a million more viewers than usual) were watching and it felt somehow as if ‘we’ had let them down, with a story that was as bad as everyone had begun saying Dr Who always had been.  We were in last chance saloon by now, the show had only recently been ‘rested’ and its lead actor sacked. BBC head Michael Grade was doing his level best to exterminate the show, openly mocking it both inside and outside the corporation to the point where Dr Who had gone, within a couple of years, from being a much-loved institution to a punching bag for jokes about wobbly sets and children’s TV. We’d just sat through a muddled season that made little to no sense and even long-term fans were beginning to get anxious: this one really really had to be good. And it was bad – not just poor, but bad. This would have been the perfect time for Dr Who to be completely re-thought, to become gritty and ‘real’ and adult, to be everything it had once been. Instead we get The Chuckle Brothers in space, in a story that no one takes seriously up to and very much including the people making it. ‘Time and The Rani’ is hated mostly because it gave ‘our’ enemies ammunition, finally sinking to where this show was as bad as its detractors said it would be. How did Dr Who fall so low in such a short space of time? 

A million and one reasons as it happened. In the aftermath of ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ the show had lost its script editor Eric Saward and its star Colin Baker - ironically the only person who wanted to be there – sacked. The problems kept piling up and the deadline for season twenty four kept getting nearer, but producer John Nathan-Turner was past caring – this was all meant to be someone else’s problem because he was 99% out the door, fed up of the fandom that kept calling for his head. It should have been the perfect time for some fresh blood and he’d asked to leave, with Michael Grade promising to move him on, but nope – come the 11^th hour JNT was told that there were no suitable vacancies and no other candidates who wanted the job (surely a lie: even at its lowest ebb so many children-turned-BBC staff would have given anything to work on this show, especially as they had nothing to lose: if things went wrong they could just have blamed it on the ‘old’ guard). The only thing this series had ready was Bonnie Langford, still under contract for another year even though most of fandom had been pleading for her to go too and a postcard reply from Kate O’Mara, a surprise response when JNT had jokingly written to her on the Hollywood set of ‘Dynasty’ with that year’s Dr Who postcards (which featured her in her Rani crone’ costume’ from ‘Mark’) telling her how ‘glamorous’ she looked and asking if she wouldn’t rather be up to her knees in mud in a British quarry instead? (He was amazed when she said yes, fed up with the ‘fakery’ of her new home and the emptiness of her series; Kate was about the only  person who still believed Who to be the best most imaginative thing on TV).

Such circumstances would have sunk lesser men and this story really shows off the best and worst of JNT. On the plus side he snapped back into problem solving mode immediately, somehow cobbling together a new series with nothing more than hope and a bit of string and sheer confident bravado, inspiring the few people around him left to cobble together. On the minus side things would have been so much easier if JNT had brought in some old hands who were itching to steer the Dr Who ship back to what it was, but he turned them all down, insecure enough to fear having anyone on the series who had more experience than he did.  As with Eric Saward JNT sought out youth and inexperience, perhaps figuring that his new script editor could be bossed around and moulded into shape – instead he got lucky with Andrew Cartmel who in many ways was perfect for the job, new and well-mannered enough to be polite but also fiery enough to stand up for his own ideas and care more for the job than simply turning up (at the interview JNT asked the script editor what he most wanted to do with his time in the show and was tickled when Cartmel replied ‘tear down the government’).  Cartmel had written lots of scripts and been a regular at the BBC’s script course but so far nobody held enough faith in him to give him the TV experience he craved. He was the suggestion of Richard Wakeley, the agent who just signed him and had at one time been JNT’s agent too, back in the days when he was plugging his ‘A Day In The Life Of A TV producer’ book (a rather fun day as it turned out, however fictional: JNT must have longed to have such simple days again six years on). Cartmel was the first script editor since producer Peter Bryant filled in during the Troughton era not to have written for the show first and the first since (obviously) first script editor David Whittaker not to have seen the show before being invited to the job. Instead Cartmel knew the series through comics, being a huge fan of Alan Moore who by 1987 was big in Marvel Comics and 2000AD but who had started out life writing and drawing strips for Dr Who Weekly. Indeed, Moore was the first writer the new script editor reached out to but, having put his early days behind him and being super busy, Moore turned him down. That’s the deeper, darker, ‘Batman Returns’ type comics rather than the ‘Batman’ TV show type by the way: many fans in 1987, who only knew Cartmel from soundbites about his love of comics in Dr Who Magazine, assumed it was all his fault that ‘Time and The Rani’ turned into the silliest ‘TV Comic’ style since ‘Underwater Menace’ but no: that was someone else’s fault entirely (Cartmel says that his input into ‘Time and The Rani’ was reading the final script as a fait accompli and his only suggestion, a new opening, became null and void once Colin Baker turned it down. But then everyone has tried to distance themselves from this story, pretty much).

Instead it’s Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker, returning for their third story in a row, even though most of fandom hated their guts too. You can see why JNT did it: after coming to his rescue for ‘Vervoids’ and ‘Ultimate Foe’ they were about the only people who hadn’t let him down lately (even though fandom felt the opposite) and it made sense, if Kate O’Mara was interested, in getting The Rani’s creators back on board and using her fame as a launchpad for the new season. Most of all they were quick workers. Perhaps a bit too quick: much mocked for their fairytale ideas, archaic language and sloppy worldbuilding, their work had always felt like a ‘first draft’ anyway, even back in the days when there was a decent script editor around to sharpen their work up. ‘Time’, written quicker than any of them, is riddled with errors and sullied with an incomprehensible plot. The Rani, for reasons best known to herself,  wants to take over the world and rule over it, causing order through chaos. Wjich admittedly is an argument I’ve seen a few black hole-style dense Brexiteers argue but really The rani is a huge brain herself, she shoud know this isn’t going to work. This also couldn’t have been further away from the amoral scientist we first got to know in ‘Mark Of The Rani’, the sort of foe that couldn’t care less if their test subjects lived or died as long as they got results. Turning her into The Master just doesn’t work. And it’s a very ‘Master’ plan too: kidnap some of the biggest brains in the universe and accumulate their knowledge in one big brain to create a ‘scientific formula’. Only Pip ‘n’ Jane only seem to know three geniuses (with others taken from across the rest of the universe) and none of them seem built for this sort of thing. Einstein, a theoretical scientist, is especially ‘wrong’ for a story about chemistry – it would be like, well, expecting Mel Bush to know scientific theory beyond computers (a mistake the writers had already made in ‘Foe’ as it happened). To show how much research the writers did he’s even wearing socks, which he famously always refused to do. Worryingly Einstein is used for his ‘mathematical ability’, which in reality was near zilch (Einstein got other people to do his sums for him as his grasp of numbers was so poor). More than that though, intelligence, like time, is relative. I probably know a lot more than Roman astronomer Hypatia simply by virtue of the fact that I live in a time when the internet and vast libraries mean any scientific information I need is at my fingertips. Stick Hypatiai in my time and show her how to use a computer, though, and she’d know more than I ever possibly could within an hour. Plus this is perhaps the worst example of the ‘grandfather paradox’ in the series: if The Rani did succeed and change history, wiping out life across time including on Earth, all three of these people would be dead. It’s a plan doomed to disaster – and The Rani, unlike The Master, doesn’t stoop to disaster.

It doesn’t help that the plan is sold to us using more technobabble per minute than perhaps any other story. Pip’s brother was a research scientist so the Bakers grilled him over scientific ideas and were delighted in a way that only scifi writers can be when he started talking about ‘restless quarks’, as discovered by Edward Witten (who the Bakers refer to as simply the ‘Princeton Scientist’ – perhaps bro Baker couldn’t remember his name for them?) Funnily enough, since the alien race The Quarks had appeared in ‘The Dominators’ in 1968 scientists had discovered that they were indeed ‘dominated’ in ways that seemed to defy logic. Basically for decades it had been assumed that quarks could change between protons, electrons and neutrons, depending how much ‘charge’ they carried in their ‘fractions’ when added together: sometimes the numbers were below a ‘whole’, sometimes above, sometimes spot-on. However having quarks with ‘up’ and ‘down’ numbers in perfect synch did something weird: they created something called a ‘Lambuda particle’ which is impossibly heavy – planet size heavy in just a few grams, while the charge remains stable rather than dissipating the way it normally would. It’s as if the quarks had a ‘reset’ button, like the way holding control alt and delete all at the same time resets your laptop, only more complicated because science always is. That’s a rather weird idea for a Dr Who plot (why would having something heavy help you take over the universe? By rights The Abzorbaloff should be running everything in the Dr Who worlds) but there are a lot of weird Dr Who plots to be fair. What’s a bigger way is how it’s explained, endlessly, in ‘bafflegab’ jargon that leaves you absolutely lost. Just take a sample: one notorious sentence alone invokes a fictional gas, the fictional idea of a ‘chronon shel’ (chronons being particles of time), a scientifically plausible but suspect use of gamma rays to ‘wake them up’ and a deeply unscientific procedure involving an experiment on primitive cortexes in the brain. I can’t tell you the amount of guidebooks and scientific papers I’ve studied to get that far while going ‘eh?’ and I’ve probably missed something out there because, well, this is a plot for scientific researchers, not your typical Dr Who viewership.

The plot isn’t all the Bakers’ fault though. It was JNT’s suggestion of a ‘big brain’, because that was the only idea he could think of that Dr who hadn’t done yet. The Bakers had also done a lot of genuinely thoughtful world-building for their planet of Lacheyerta, making it like the ‘Garden of Eden’, a paradise full of lush trees and ripe fruits that makes it all the worse when (much like Traken, though the Bakers also seem to have come up with the metaphor that the modern equivalent of a lazy paradise is a ‘leisure centre’ without knowing about ‘The Leisure Hive’) it’s invaded by an evil outside source (that wasn’t the only Biblical reference either: ‘Loyhargil’, the lost artefact/‘solution’ at the end, is an anagram, of ‘Holy Grail’. Though there the Bible references stop, unless there’s something about playing spoons or hanging upside down like a bat I missed in my RE lessons). The whole point of the Lachertyans is that they’re soporific, not weak, the lush warm climate making them naturally lazy. Only director Andrew Morgan worried that filming in a forest would make this look like a historical (as if planets can’t have a history like Earth’s) and instead decided that it would make a nice change if the story was…recorded in a quarry. Three to be exact: Cloford Quarry (Shepton Mallett), Wetdown Quarry and Whatley Quarry, Frome (and thus just round the corner from where F1 world champion Jenson Button was born: he’d have been seven at this point and might well have got there on his bike). Only nobody thought to change the script, so you have a lot about the Lachertyans living in paradise that just looks like slate and gravel to me. Usually when we have dystopian settings like this in Who it’s for stories like ‘Androzani’ where scratching out a living in such hardship turns these people ‘hard’ and tough too. Instead the Lachertyans are a pretty weedy bunch all round, the sort who would rather take a nap than go to war to defend their planet. You’d think growing up here they’d all talk like characters from ‘Trainspotting’, yet somehow end up at ‘Ivor The Engine’. It’s also hard to think of this planet as a restful paradise with so much noise going on – even with lines overdubbed in post-production sometimes all you can hear is shifting gravel (or maybe Lachertyans are weird and find the sound comforting?!) Weirdly the Bakers seem to have taken the name from the Latin for ‘lizard’ and the costume designer picks up on this by giving them scales, but they’re not cold-blooded; indeed they’re so emotional that at time they make Bonnie Langford’s reactions seem ‘normal’. It doesn’t help that the beings on this planet, who reportedly evolved so greatly, seem to have stopped somewhere around 1985: what with their day-glo green skin, hairdoes that are a unique cross between a Mohican and a Mullet and shoulder pads they look as if they’re taking part on ‘Fun House’ and were dressed by Pat Sharp.

Ah yes, talking of children’s telly somewhere along the way someone (the director perhaps?) has got the idea that he’s making children’s TV. Many fans talk about the pantomime aspects of this story and it’s hard to watch without going ‘they’re behind you!’ every few seconds. The slapstick quote is brutally high, whether it’s the new Doctor going limp in classic ‘Rentaghost’ style, the slapstick and continual pratfalls or The Doctor playing the spoons down Kate O’Mara’s chest (which sounds, off the back of Dynasty as if Dr Who is going in for ‘sexy’ but most definitely isn’t). The Bakers, incidentally, defended most of this story to their dying day but always claimed they were horrified when this last scene was inserted  (after McCoy kept the production team amused during the location hotel wrap party) and if the Bakers were ashamed of something then you know it has to be bad. For his part McCoy assumed the producer was both joking and a bit tipsy so was shocked to find it was actually included in the script. It’s not just one scene though: 90% of this story is played for laughs, with some of the worst excesses of Dr who acting, even from those who’d been in the series before and ought to know better (such as Donald Pickering, playing ‘Beyus’ – named for ‘Obey us’ according to the Bakers - who’d been so good in ‘The Faceless Ones’ and Wanda Vantham who’d also been great in ‘The Faceless Ones’ (weird coincidence that – we won’t get another actor from that story returning until Pauline Collins becomes Queen Victoria in ‘Tooth and Claw’) and ‘The Image Of Fendahl’. Incidentally, her son Benedict Cumberbatch is ten years old by now so this may well have been his first exposure to Dr Who – and might explain why he’s never been in it, even though his links through his mum and being in Steven Moffat’s ‘Sherlock’ make him the single biggest obvious actor we haven’t had in the series yet). Bonnie Langford, still a TV newbie, spends most of the story declaiming as if she’s talking to the back row and even Kate O’Mara starts winking to the camera and breaking the fourth wall as if she wants the audience to boo and hiss her, in total contrast to her last appearance. It’s weird.

Especially when we get the usual sudden bursts of random violence that seem to pepper all sorts of Who scripts in the 1980s and seem to come out of nowhere. The Lachertyans might be a weak bunch but they deserve a better fate than they get in this story, trapped in The Rani’s lethal ‘time bubbles’ that hurl them against the high cliffs (trees in the script) as they haplessly batter against the edges where they explode, their skin vapourised so they turn into skeletons). What makes it worse is that the two Lacherytans that suffer this fate are arguably the nicest, certainly the most innocent, young girls of the sort you would normally put money on surviving until the end credits. The Doctor, too, causes an even more innocent alien, the bat-like Tetrap, into a trap so that he dies an equally horrid death – so much for this being children's TV, it might well be the wickedest thing he does to an individual outside Shockeye in ‘The Two Doctors’ (assuming the guards he knocks into a vat of acid in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ is an accident). This wouldn’t be so bad if the effects were bad – but such is the brilliance of the computer graphics that they seem like the most ‘real’ thing here. And that’s perhaps the biggest issue with ‘Time and The Rani’ – it’s a story crying out to be real, to be gritty, to be done as if it hurts. But director Morgan doesn’t know what to do with a script like this so makes it all seem like a fairytale (my theory is that he was hired to make things easier for Colin if he did decide to come back for one last story which had been the original intention – the two had become close on the last series the actor had made before getting his Who role, as Dr Dudgeon in ‘Swallows and Amazons Forever!’, the rather shoddy adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s brilliant novels. Though admittedly that story borrows from the two weakest, ‘Coot Club’ and ‘The Big Six’ where The Norfolk Broads are no substitute for the beauty of The Lake District). The Bakers just about got away with things in ‘Mark Of the Rani’ because their story was set to the grim and soot of the Industrial Revolution, while ‘Vervoids’ had a ‘real’ industrial spaceship setting and everything in ‘Ultimate Foe’ was fake. But ‘Time’ has none of that to help it. So we end up with a fairytale story where nothing seems real and nothing seems to matter.

This might not have mattered if they had got Colin back as planned and made him the still, brooding centre of the story, but they’ve hired Sylvester McCoy, an actor who – despite his background with the Royal Shakespeare Company and some gritty plays – was still in 1987 best known for being the sort of eccentric stuntman who stuffed a ferret down his trousers on live TV and spent his weekends being shot out of canons in the Ken Campbell Roadshow. JNT had no ideas who should play the part this time, beyond wanting a contrast to Colin Baker’s height, weight and Sixie’s ego. Sylvester ended up the only real person on JNT’s very short shortlist and hired in a manner very reminiscent of how both Pertwee and Tom Baker were hired: McCoy had spent his whole life being told ‘you’d make a great Dr Who’ on account of being surely the most eccentric actor not to have yet been in the show and with nothing to lose dropped a line to the production office when he heard Colin was leaving. By coincidence one of the few people JNT still looked up to at the BBC, former Who vision mixer turned BBC producer Clive Doig, bumped into the producer and on hearing he needed an actor suggested someone he’d really enjoyed working with on a children’s TV series, Sylvester McCoy. JNT was annoyed at first: given how things with Saward had turned out he assumed it was all part of a ruse to get one over on him, but Doig persisted: McCoy was appearing round the corner in a play built round him, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’ and maybe the producer should check him out. JNT went and realised his friend was right: McCoy was everything he wanted – short, thin, silly, reminding him of the first Doctor he’d worked with as production manager, Patrick Troughton. It helped that he was a good friend of Bonnie Langford’s, having spent the best part of two years playing opposite her in a touring production of ‘Pirates Of Penzance’ (‘I got married to her every night of the week – and twice on Saturdays’ he quipped to DWM). Best of all, JNT was nervous of asking anyone to be in the programme given the toxic environment when everyone was against the show but he already knew McCoy was interested. Typically the BBC highups didn’t agree, Jonathan Powell insisting they audition McCoy with two other names, since long forgotten: Dermot Crawley best known for 1990s Irish play ‘The Weir’) and David Fielder (who had a small role in ‘Superman III’). The auditions were held in a hurry; so much of a hurry that Bonnie Langford was busy in a stage production of ‘Peter Pan’ (the one where McCoy later crashed her photocall and appeared in all the papers). Instead JNT called on an old friend, Janet Fielding, to read opposite his new Doctors. Given that she was almost the only other person the producer still trusted he was relieved when she too told him that McCoy was easily the best. JNT bravely told Powell to get stuffed and that he’d found his Doctor – amazingly he and Grade let him run with it (indeed, it’s a sign of how anti-Colin Grade was that he considered ‘Time and The Rani’ a ‘huge improvement’).

The thing is though, McCoy isn’t who the fanbase expected or wanted.  They wanted big dramatic names who would take the role seriously, not a little weird man playing the spoons. It’s like they made the new Doctor deliberately unpopular and weedy from the first: in 2005 a newly regenerated 10^th Doctor has the power to re-grow a hand, but this one is so feeble-minded he can’t even work out when The Rani, someone he’s known almost all his life (and is still, somehow, on her first regeneration against all the odds while he’s on his 7^th!) is dressed as his companion. It’s like they tried so hard to go the other way from ‘The Twin Dilemma’ (a regeneration with a violent, unstable Doctor) that they went to the silly comical extreme instead rather than something in between that, I don’t know, wouldn’t put people off watching. McCoy was thrust into the part too quickly without time to think about what his Doctor would be like. It speaks volumes that he ends up wearing the same straw hat he wore to the auditions and that his biggest ‘trademark’ is an adapted version of the 6^th Doctor’s umbrella from ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ (purely because someone handed McCoy an umbrella during the first and inevitably wet day of location filming and the producer thought it looked good; the idea was to go against the 6^th Doctor’s brash costume by having one that looked normal in long shot but eccentric close up. Incidentally, the best scene in the story is the largely improvised one, added at McCoy’s suggestion, of him leafing through the Tardis wardrobe and trying on the Doctor costumes that still survived. There’s even one of JNT’s Hawaiian shirts there as an injoke!) Andrew Cartmel is so new he hasn’t had time to sit down with McCoy and discuss anything yet, while Pip ‘n’ Jane wrote for Colin’s Doctor, assuming (rather naively) that he would come around to the offer of recording one last story, even though it most likely meant being out of work for another year to fit round it at a time when he really needed work quickly. The only person with only power to tell McCoy what he ought to be doing is JNT, who’s only suggestion is comedy. When Pertwee was hired on the back of his comedy voices he had people around him to tone it down and give him the confidence to go the other way and be ‘straight’, but Sylvester doesn’t have that. not yet. It doesn’t help that, whilst a keen Whovian in his youth, McCoy hasn’t seen any since the 1970s and not regularly since the 1960s, when everyone still considered the show ‘children’s telly’. So Sylvester ends up looking dazed, playing the spoons and falling over the way he always did on every other kid’s show and nobody thought to tell him ‘no’. A sizeable amount of fans tuned in for the first episode, where the 7^th Doctor is newly regenerated and unstable and one step away from hurling custard pies and mashed potato at The Rani, and thought everyone had lost the plot. McCoy will get so much better – even as early as episode three he’s finding his feet and playing things from drama and tension as well as laughs – and by the end of his run will arguably be as great as actor in the lead role. Unfortunately it takes him time to get there and his performance in episode one especially ranks amongst the worst in the series, unbeaten until as late as ‘Deep Breath’ (when Peter Capaldi is every bit as unsure). The one part of this new Doctor I like that nobody else seems to is his mistaken twisted sayings, a JNT idea worked on by Cartmel (much to Pip n Jane’s horror). At their best they’re really funny, in a script that so often isn’t – ‘every dogma has it’s day’ is one of my favourite lines of the 1980s in fact, while I’m quite fond of ‘absence makes the nose grow fonder’ and ‘fit as a trombone’ (though, yes, ‘time and tide waits for snowman’ is perhaps a pun too far). At its worst it makes the 7^th Doctor so different to the 6^th in an easily identifiable way: Colin’s Doctor got angry with Peri if she so much as messed up a phrase from a quote but now Sylvester’s Doctor is merrily going his own way, on the boundaries between enlightenment and absurdity.  We knew how the ‘old’ Doctor was going to behave – they throw the comedy gags at the 7^th in the hope that will make him more like the 2^nd Doctor even though that wasn’t how he worked at all (well, only in reunion stories), but what makes him most like Troughton is that unpredictability, after two Doctors in a row you could count on at all times. It’s almost enough to forgive the comedy pratfalls and spoon playing. Almost. 

Episode one is rightly seen by fandom as the worst of the worst, the lowest point to which the series sunk. Particularly the opening pre-credits sequence. From the pathetically ordinary regeneration (seriously? They couldn’t come up with anything better than ‘tumultuous buffeting’, the phrase the Bakers used in their Target novel? See the ‘prequels/sequels’ section below for all the many writers for the spin-off books and Big Finish audios who refused to let that pass. Though to be fair to the Bakers the regeneration was planned for the end of the story and re-written last minute when Colin understandably told everyone to sod off) to the sight of Sylvester in a curly blonde wig with sparkly pixie effects to Kate O’Mara dressed as a sexy pantomime dame murmuring ‘leave the girl – it’s the man I want’ it’s the single biggest cringefest in the history of the programme bar none. Over the top of this is Keff ‘Cocophony’ McCulloch, the most inexperienced incidental composer the series ever had working out how to write TV on the spot – and failing (for years a rumour went round that he got the job because JNT fancied his girlfriend, currently the lead in his panto ‘Cinderella’ who also happened to be the niece of Dolores Whitman, Tegan’s Aunty Vanessa from ‘Logopolis’. Which makes them either TV sisters or TV cousins! This was of course before fandom found out JNT was gay and he was just being kind, offering a friend some work). Keff was actually hired to redo the theme tune but, on finding out that Ron Grainer’s contract meant only he could be credited and not the arranger, he got this score as a consolation prize. Alas Keff had just been given another much needed first job which landed the same week, the very different job of musical director on Irish singer Rose Marie’s Telstar record ‘Sentimentally Yours’ which he worked on during the day and Who at night, complicated by the fact that he was given a faulty copy of the rough edit with the timings and ‘pulses’ all out – rather than ring up for another copy, Keff simply re-recorded from scratch every single scene playing all the way through). Even if you hang around till the end of the episode the unbelievable sight of The Doctor being fooled by Kate O’Mara dressed as a Bonnie Langford that’s clearly aged a few decades and changed her voice there’s slim pickings for Whovians. Nobody believes in this story, nobody acts like it matters, clearly nobody wants to be there including the actors writers and producer and there’s nothing to get your teeth into, nothing to care about. Other stories can get away with things that go wrong because they feel like they’re making an important point, whether it’s about what it is to be a Human, or an alien, or anywhere in between. Most Dr Who stories can get around that if the dialogue is top notch and the regulars get lots of lovable banter, but this s a pip n jane script where everyone talks like theoretical scientists from Bonnie Langford on down and with a companion made to be deliberatelty unlikeable and a dr we don’t know even when story ends. It’s the television equivalent of candyfloss, but the naff sort that taste of chemicals. If it has no nutritional value and isn’t nice to taste then why bother consuming it all? The general public and casual fans alike turned away, never to come back for the rest of the century. Honestly Colin got lucky, though it probably didn’t feel that way at the time: just think how awful it would have been if he’d come back and had this as his last story?

However the rest of the story isn’t actually that bad. I mean it’s not good, barely even okay but equally it’s not as bad reputation suggests. There’s a nice sub-plot in the story about identity, Pip and Jane actually going away and thinking about what it would mean to wake up in a new body, confused and going through a crisis of confidence. We’re used to seeing newly hatched Doctors unstable but the 7^th Doctor is more haunted than unstable, convinced by The Rani that he used to be a ‘bad man’ (an idea Steven Moffat will recycle in ‘Deep Breath’) and desperate to break away from everything he was. In the context of what was going on with the series that says a lot more about the state of the show than any amount of laborious ‘trial’ scenes. The Doctor doesn’t know who he is yet, in a story where everyone else is pretending (at least when The Rani is dressed up as Mel – most fans would have been happy to have Kate O’Mara stay in the part for good), still the one spark of truth left in a world full of illusions and lies. Not since ‘Power Of the Daleks’ has a regeneration story so obviously played around with this idea, making the Doctor the only ‘stable’ thing that can save the world, even when he isn’t himself stable. I like the Tetraps too: of all the aliens-evolved-from-animals-and-gaining-sentience scenarios in the series bats make the most sense: they can see differently (four eyes and 360 degree vision! Even if comically the actors forget and still tilt their heads the usual ways), have echo-location (a great metaphor in an episode about working out the ‘truth’ and seeing through words) and hang upside down, a perfect metaphor for a monster that do things ‘a bit different’. The Bakers don’t just make them complete bats though (that would be ‘bats’) they combine features from ‘rats’ too to become something unique. They look pretty darn great too apart from the close-ups where they stick out their silly long tongues (another thing that makes this story like children’s telly), the costumes by outside contractors Susan Moore and Stephen Mansfield less obviously men in suits and far more impressive than similar era creations like Terileptils or Vervoids. They were apparently popular enough to be the first non Dalek/Cybermen/Ice warrior monster toy you could buy too (yet another sign that everyone considered Dr Who for children suddenly), though then again Dapol released them alongside two separate Bonnie Langfords in two separate costumes against all common sense so maybe not (it was an age before we got a Doctor doll post Tom Baker). The only thing that doesn’t quite work is the fact that they speak English backwards, something so evolutionary unlikely as to be impossible even for a science fiction series. The Lacherytans, too, are a nice idea that almost comes off, a sympathetic race of conned aliens of a sort we used to have all the time but haven’t had in ages now (‘Snakedance’? Though the Manussans seemed like Humans) with their scales ‘n’ tails a combination we haven’t had before. Only the silly hairdoes prevents them being better regarded.

Everyone who isn’t in a rush and is taking the usual time about things also give their all. Full praise to the set designers who not cobble together a second, superior Rani Tardis interior at short notice (JNT had asked for the original for ‘Mark’ to be preserved – another reason to do this story – and lost his temper in a big way when he found it had been scrapped by accident) but also a ‘leisure centre’ that’s anything but leisurely and the entrance etched into the quarry surface in an effect that Dr Who had been trying to pull off ever since Omega’s antimatter world in ‘The Three Doctor’s but had always fumbled till now There’s even a moat with stepping stones. There doesn’t need to be one in the script but someone went the extra mile because they wanted this story to work – in the context of everything else that’s the single most amazing thing here! The costume designers nail the aliens. The biggest praise of all though should go to CAL, the third party of computer boffins hired to make this story’s pink skies and special effects. Unused to working in TV either they came in way under budget (unique in 80s Who) and were so enthusiastic about working on the show they not only threw in the computer graphics and teletext style print for free but gave the show recycle footage they’d made for their last job, space shots in a documentary about Halley’s Comet. For the first time in Dr Who history you can’t see the join between what’s real and what’s fake (well, not unless you check thoroughly frame by frame perhaps) and the fact that they do this in a story that’s entirely about truths and lies and whether to believe in your eyes means it matters more than it usually would. ‘Time and The Rani’ is unique then, in that it’s a story hated not because the effects go wrong and it looks so bad but because all the usual reliable things go wrong (the acting, the writing, the directing) and it’s such a waste of the one time Dr Who actually looks not just adequate but the equal of the best things on television at the time. I’m not the first fan to suggest that watching this story on mute is a far more rewarding experience than watching it with the sound on. ‘Time and The Rani’ looks magnificent, if only you can ignore what everyone’s saying and doing and thinking and, well, pretty much everything else about it.

Even so I have a soft spot for this story. I mean I don’t like it or anything – that’s going too far – but it’s one of those hated stories like ‘Underworld’ ‘Terminus’ ‘Timelash’ and ‘The Time Monster’ where I can at least see what they were trying to do and how good it could have been, before one wrong thing too many tipped it on the balance scale from passable to unwatchable. ‘Time’ isn’t one of those stories that should never have been attempted ever under any circumstance (the usual suspects like ‘The Dominators’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ and ‘Orphan 55’) but one that got seriously unlucky timing-wise. With more weeks I suspect Pip n Jane Baker would have worked out the holes in the plots (one of the biggest not mentioned yet: how come The Rani happens to have a costume just like Mel’s hanging round given she’s never met her? It would make more sense if she’d dressed as Peri. Another is that The Rani’s plan seems to rely on The Doctor being groggy and unstable, but as no timelord ever regenerated in such a dub way before she can’t have been relying on this just by shaking the Tardis up a bit. While I’ll never get over the irony that one of the series’ dumbest ever scripts is about genius). With Andrew Cartmel there from the start rather than the end I suspect he could have made a tighter, more sensible story out of the same ideas (despite hating the Bakers even more than the average fan did, given his autobiography ‘Script Doctor’). Had this not been his regeneration story a later, more confident Sylvester McCoy would have known when to put his foot down and say ‘no!’ With another director who treated Dr Who seriously at face value it might yet have worked. Had this story been for Peri or a companion who felt as if they belonged to the ‘real’ world more then this story would have fared better too. Most of all had JNT gone as he wanted to and a new producer had come into this story and not been blinded to the problems it could yet have been rescued and/or binned. But no: it’s the one with an unstable Doctor fighting an unstable Rani so different to before and her unstable plan, which involves the single worst disguise in the show’s history, in between failing falling over and playing the spoons. This is one of those stories where it was always going to go wrong because nobody felt fully in charge: not the actor just hired, the new script editor who arrived after it was commissioned nor the producer who thought he'd left the show only to be brought back at the last moment. It's the sort of story where nothing goes right and everything goes slightly wrong, the one that more than any other fans watch to make fun of and then hide from the general public in shame.  It’s no one person’s fault though (except perhaps Michael Grade’s): this is the inevitable side effect when you mess around with a programme so much that nobody knows what to do with it anymore and the one person nominally in charge of the asylum already had his heart set elsewhere.  Given all the things working against it, I’m actually amazed  that the last three episodes aren’t worse.  

POSITIVES + CAL’s ‘bubble trap’ is a special effect tour de force. Though it’s fake computer image drawn on top of the action you can’t tell – it really does look as if the actors are trapped inside it and the shot of it being launched in the air is so good I would have sworn it was the only part done for real the whole story, not the only part done solely on computer. They’re a great idea too – I mean, they’re overkill for what The Rani needs, but in TV terms it’s such a wonderfully visual image, unlike anything the series had done before. Whisper it quietly but I’ve long gone against fandom in quite admiring their new opening title sequence of the Tardis in a ‘bubble’ too – assuming you watch it on mute or overdub it with Delia Derbyshire’s original arrangement, of course, not the Cacophonous version here. I never understood why these guys weren’t invited back every story for the rest of the 1980s after this.

NEGATIVES - It's a longstanding complaint that people in Drip 'n' pain Baker's scripts don't talk the way people do. Any people. This really shows in this story's big emotional scenes  where people are trapped or scared or - God help us - impersonated by a renegade timelord in a girly squeaky voice and yet sounds more like the ‘real’ Einstein than this story’s ‘fake’ Einstein. I mean, I know what all those words mean separately but together? That’s a different matter. All together now: ‘it is a fundamental postulate that all motion is relative…’

BEST QUOTE: ‘You don't understand regeneration, Mel. It's a lottery, and I've drawn the short plank’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘A Business Proposal For Mel’ aka ’24 Carat’ (2021) is the official title for the trailer of the surprise release of season twenty-four on blu-ray (the ‘twenty-four carat gold’ promised by the trailer seems a bit optimistic given that it’s one of the most divisive years amongst fans, along with season twenty-three, but I appreciate the pun was too good to miss!) The trailer also works as a sort of prequel to ‘Power Of The Doctor’ and Mel’s eventual return in ‘The Giggle’ and ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’ by filling us in on her ‘missing years’ for the first time, a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style voiceover telling us that she’s now ‘a business leader, philanthropist, galactic entrepreneur’ with her inevitable carrot juice business now a ‘business empire stretching across the galaxy’. Mel’s given a pitch for the re-developed ‘Paradise Towers’ hotel by the Blue Kang Drinking Fountain (‘All our cleaning robots undergo rigorous safety checks, most of them aren’t homicidal killers anymore’, with just two deadly two incidents lately ‘way down on figures from last year), Dragonfire’s Ice Colony (‘Mr Melty’ and a range of lifelike ice sculptures) and Derek the Tetrap’s bubble trap bath (‘If you don’t invest you will be liquefied and fed to the hatchlings!’) Her only investment: a hooded monk that plays the spoons and a ‘holographic’ collection of their adventures together – something they call blu-rays on Earth. Though the silliest of all Pete McTighe’s blu-ray trailers so far, it’s still great to see the 7^th Doctor and Mel reunited and it’s all good fun, while seeing Mel as a proactive character in charge of her life for a change is very welcome and clearly paid the way for her comeback.
 ‘The Rani Reaps The Whirlwind’ (2000) is one of the BBV spin-off productions that can’t legally use the Doctor Who name anywhere but does feature lots of characters from the series. In case you hadn’t guessed from the name, this one features Kate O’Mara reprising her role and unusually for BBV this is an audio-only adventure. The story follows on directly from ‘Time and The Rani’, with the tables turned and the timelord now the prisoner held by the Tetraps (painful!) She’s put on trial and condemned to death but, always a good talker, offers to help the Tetraps cure a plague that’s blighted them for centuries, Tetraprybius, in return for her life. But does the ends justify the means, given that it leads The Rani to start up her evil experiments on Humans again, accelerating their lifespan so they last just a couple of weeks? No in short, especially as The Rani’s obviously just trying to save her own skin and be in a position of power again. Though it’s great to hear Kate clearly having the time of her life again, in a role that’s a far more fitting farewell than ‘Dimensions In Time’ ever was, this story is still dogged by Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker’s worst excesses as writers and without a script editor to contain them they go off the deep end at times here, with characters who all talk weirdly and scifi clichés most fan fiction writers would dismiss as too ‘obvious’. The result is arguably the weakest BBV story, although a lot of Rani fans I know consider it better than any story she ever got on TV! There was a spin-off novelisation too, in the style of the Target ones for proper TV episodes, and a ‘making of’ audio documentary very much in the style of the later Big Finish ones (only longer).  If The Rani is your favourite thing to happen to The Whoniverse ever then you need this story as it’s a good one for her; for the rest of us maybe not so much.   

‘Spiral Scratch’ (2005) by Gary Russell is the ‘Past Adventures Novels’ attempt to tell the end of the 6^th Doctor’s life properly and while it was a lot better than the opening to ‘Time and the Rani’ it’s still less than satisfying. The 6^th Doctor has taken Mel to the reference library planet Carsus where he looks up an old friend, Professor Rummus. Only he’s been murdered, or at any rate he has in this multiverse. Suddenly everywhere the Dr and Mel visit is a parallel universe and one of them even has The Valeyard as The Doctor. Remember how all time happened at once in ‘The Wedding Of River Song’? This messy book is a bit like that. Only even more confusing, with lots of Doctors and Mels around too. In the end The Doctor triggers his own regeneration himself in order to prevent himself turning into the Valeyard. A nice idea, with The Doctor sacrificing himself to save the universe, but a bit too muddled to work. Gary himself considers this his weakest Who book, written when he was at his lowest personal ebb and Dr Who folklore was the last thing on his mind – often writers are wrong about their own work but in this case he might be right.

Big Finish had a bash at being all Sixes and Sevens too, with a very similar plot actually - yet their ‘The Last Adventure’ (2015) is a masterpiece. The first three stories in the set are pretty forgettable, standard Big Finish fair really, but Nicholas Briggs’ finale ‘The Brink Of Death’ is one of the few bits of Dr Who to ever make me properly cry, giving old Sixie the finale he deserved and never got on TV. It’s quite a complex story but it fits with the start of ‘Time and The Rani’ well so bear with me for this!…The Doctor and Mel are debating where to go next: Lakertya, peaceful and friendly home of the Tetraps, sounds nice. However their flight is hijacked when The Valeyard physically replaces The Doctor, the transformation happening when he is under the Tardis console fixing a typical problem – suddenly the ship is taking them to a quite different planet. Suddenly Mel can’t remember ‘her’ Doctor and has a headache; has she just glitched through to another future where the Valeyard won? The Doctor, meanwhile, wakes up in a void without even white robots to keep him company. Eventually he’s discovered by Genesta, a member of the Celestial Intervention Agency, who’s a bit like the Doctor (curious and a bit of a rebel, who doesn’t follow rules and is where she’s not supposed to be – she even ran away to Earth for a while), who reveals that he’s not just on Gallifrey but physically inside the matrix. She also assumes he’s dead, because that’s where all dead timelords are uploaded and his identity is due to be wiped in a few minutes. The Doctor has to convince her of his rightful place as a timelord, at the same time the Valeyard is intent on wiping out The Doctor’s memory across the universe, but Genesta is having a hard time believing it (she matches him for scepticism too!) For this regeneration in particular, being erased from existence and being forgotten is the worst thing that could possibly happened to him and Colin Baker turns in the performance of his life as his Doctor faces almost certain death while slowly coming to terms with the fact that the Valeyard really is the darker side of him, all the parts of himself he keeps hidden. For all his bombast this has always been the Doctor most likely to face an existential crisis about his impact on the universe and The Doctor’s slow move from absolute denial to melancholy acceptance is brilliantly handled. Mel, meanwhile, is exploring an alien planet with the Valeyard-Doctor when she bumps into fortune-teller Lorelas, who explains that everything she thought was true is a lie. Mel also bumps into Genesta whose got so fed up of the Doctor claiming Mel will vouch for him that she’s tracked her down – only Mel can’t remember him at all. The Doctor has one last final confrontation with The Valeyard who tells him he only has six minutes to live and should stop wasting them. Back in the matrix Genesta frantically researches The Valeyard in the matrix’s ‘forbidden files’ looking for clues on how to stop him and discovers that The Valeyard isn’t an actual person at all but…a weapon. Genesta takes all this to her superior Storin, but (spoilers) he turns out to be The Valeyard in disguise!

Genesta travels with The Doctor back in time in her Tardis to the exact second when The Valeyard took him over and distorted his timeline – with the help of microscopic telepathic creatures from a volcano planet as it turns out. Only this is all part of The Valeyard’s backup plan as he knows what The Doctor plans to do and he transports Sixie and Genesta to these being’s home planet, fulfilling his promise of giving them an ‘interesting mind’ to feed off. Only (spoilers) it’s all another lie: The Doctor’s actually still in the matrix and Genesta never existed, she was just ‘a shadow’, an invention based on The Doctor himself and the exact sort of person he would trust, invented purely to distract him. Confronting The Valeyard again once he knows the truth, The Doctor finds that his ultimate foe has replaced every timelord with his own identity (much like The Master in ‘The End Of Time’) and plans to replace all the ones in the past too, including Rassilon which would give him infinite power to shape Gallifrey and the universe in his own image. The Doctor travels back in time again, sending himself a telepathic message to go to Lakyerta as planned because the radiation in the planetary system would kill the telepathic creatures inside him, as well as destroy his mind with The Valeyard in it too (luckily it’s not lethal to Humans so Mel is safe). The Valeyard hasn’t counted on this: he’s seen The Doctor’s mind and knows how strong his survival instincts are and how egotistical this version is but Sixie is unrepentant, yelling ‘a future as you is no future at all!’ The 6^th Doctor gives one final glorious impassioned speech, saying that if he goes he wants to be remembered for the best of him not the worst and saying goodbye to all his companions over the years, be they on TV, audio or in books, thanking them all for shaping the person he was. The Tardis is then pulled to Lakertya, just as in the beginning of ‘Time and The Rani’ and The Doctor gives his last, typically wordy words: ‘I’ve had a good innings, all those lives I have lived. I hope the footprint I leave will be light but…apposite’. However this is not the end; he’s comforted by a Scottish burr, an unlisted cameo from Sylvester McCoy urging him on with the familiar words that ‘it’s far from being all over’, Dr 6 smiling up at Dr 7 and accepting his fate now that ‘the future is in safe hands’. Then the Doctor wakes up as Sylvester McCoy, the Valeyard in him vanquished forever.  A far better ending than simply bumping his head on the Tardis console and regenerating! This story is also clever in that Mel has been unconscious the whole of that last journey, her memory of The Valeyard’s return wiped and she’s a bit delirious herself from the radiation which explains perhaps why The Rani fools her so easily. Mostly, though, it’s the perfect finale to a regeneration who never got the time he deserved on television, his reputation now rehabilitated thanks to Big Finish who prove just how great Colin Baker could have been. Probably my favourite of all the (thousand?) Big Finish audios out there. The fact that it exists, canon-wise, between two of the all-time worst stories, only shows up how lacking in ideas and Dr Whoyness ‘The Ultimate Foe’ and ‘Time and The Rani’ are: this here, this is why we love this series and this character so much. Utterly superb, from first second to last. It certainly beats ‘tumultuous buffeting’!

Amazingly, in this distinctly dismal year for Dr Who, Greenlight aka Coast To Coast aka Daltenrays (they went through more regenerations than The Doctor in their short life!), an independent production company run by producers Peter Litten and George Dugdale, pitched to make an independent Dr Who film and unlike some others (Tom Baker and Ian Marter amongst them) they actually got quite far. ‘The Return Of Varnax’ by Mark Ezra beat many others by actually getting the money together from celebrity pals (including Dire Straits bassist John Illsley), but took so long doing it that they missed the BBC deadline for handing over the film rights (the TV rights, of course, would have remained with the Beeb). It’s a messy, ambitious, sprawling script, closer to ‘Space:1999’ than Who, with ruthless baddy Zargon enslaving the planet Trufador. They’re about to execute a criminal hidden in robes – it’s the Doctor! (Which one? Not a clue – presumably not McCoy as he’d have been busy on the TV series and might not even have been cast during the first draft. It does read very much like his later, more manipulative character though).The Doctor breaks multiple Gallifreyan laws by creating a time warp that ‘eats’ a missile heading towards him and leaves him to escape in the Tardis. And that’s just the pre-titles sequence! The Doctor is put on trial (again!) for his work, exiled this time to Gallifrey so the timelords can keep an eye on him.  Meanwhile Varnax, a wicked alien cyborg, has discovered Earth’s voyager spacecraft and declare war, whilst in the most Dr Who-ish sequence of the lot two rather wet young rebels try to take over his kingdom and fail. They send a distress call to the timelords which The Doctor, desperate for contact with the outside universe, receives. Only it’s all part of a trap set by Varnax. It turns out that he’s a timelord too, on his last regeneration (based on The Valeyard?) and he needs a time rotor like the one in The Doctor’s Tardis to escape his own exile. There’s a lot of capturing and escaping, ending in a big epic chase sequence where The Tardis is pulled into the sun (how the heck would that have looked on screen in 1987?!), something that gives The Doctor enough power to go back in time and put things right. We then get another big finale on a desert planet with The Doctor escaping from ‘Sandroids’, robots built to withstand the desert storms and built like preying mantises, perhaps the most original bit of the whole script. There’s a neat bit using Stonehenge as a transmitter (just like in ‘The Pandorica Opens’), The Doctor hiding out in The Smithsonian Museum and cameos from K9 (who is hiding in his kennel in the Tardis) and The Brigadier (whose troops are in charge of guarding Stonehenge for some reason). It all sounds a bit too much doesn’t it? This is one of those ideas that could have been either brilliant or terrible, depending on how it was made and what the dialogue (which sadly has never been made public) might have been like, with just enough Dr Whoy ideas in there to work but a lot of other stuff that might not have worked at all. Read the full twelve page synopses for yourself in Jean-Marc L’officer’s book ‘The Nth Doctor’ (1997).

The same production company had a second bash with a proven Who writer, Johnny Byrne, who had something of a chequered past (‘The Keeper Of Traken’ is a true masterpiece, but few fans rate ‘Arc Of Infinity’ or ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ that highly). ‘The Time Lord’ was revised multiple times between 1988 and 1990, at the request of the different Hollywood companies who liked the script but insisted on tweaking it, so it’s hard to get a fix on what the story would have looked like with so many changes going on. L’officer has four separate versions: ‘Varnax The Creator’ is basically the first quarter of the previous script, only with the difference that Varnax is The Doctor’s friend from his academy days, the script spending time discussing how two actually quite similar people, bright and rebellious, could have ended up living very different lives. There’s a lot more fighting in this version and a lot less talking, with armies known as Mordreads chasing The Doctor across time and space. Morgana, an incidental character in the first draft, is now a full blown love interest who broke The Doctor’s heart(s) at the academy by choosing Varnax over him, only to realise she chose the wrong one when The Doctor rescues her from certain death. Version two ‘The Crystals Of Power’ is more of a ‘Keys Of Marinus’ style quest story, The Doctor chasing crystals needed to power a huge timeship and Varnax standing in his way. Varnax captures The Doctor and the crystals and planets start exploding, The Doctor put on trial for his part in proceedings and sent to a penal colony for his sins. He escapes, ends up hiding out in Victorian London (where he discovers the true identity of Jack The Ripper – again), buys a time rotor on an illegal market stall and ends up on the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’ ship destined for the new world, before meeting the president of the USA (a fictional one from the future) and finally turning up to defeat ‘dark Varnax’ who has been driven insane by his power.

Version Three ‘The Immortality Bullet’ adds the idea that Varnax and The Doctor together created an object that would grant the timelords immortality but they clashed over whether to use it, The Doctor unsure if the timelords are ready for such power when they’re so corrupt. He has a kid sister in this version, Lyria and an ex, Zilla, who ran off to be with Varnax but now lives a miserable life amongst his abominable experiments deep in his dungeons. There’s far more material set on Gallifrey and a lot less in space (presumably for budget reasons) but there’s still time for a stopoff in Idaho, where The Doctor ends up losing his memory only to be saved by local cowboy Billy, and a 19^th century American Indian villager. The Doctor’s life is saved and in return he becomes the tribe’s ‘medicine man’ (they’re really pushing the USA audience in this version!) There’s a definite move away in this variation from things happening to consequences of stuff happening off screen, with an older Doctor meeting all the people he used to know when young and discovering that he’s kept his innocence while the timelords’ great age has corrupted theirs. You have to say, though, this sounds like the weakest version of the four, too Earthbound and without the scope of the others.  The final version ‘The Genetic Duplicate’ has The Doctor a lonely wandering exiled traveller, much like The 1^st Doctor when he first met him. Billy, now in the present day, turns out to be the exact duplicate of twisted tyrant Varnax, with The Doctor taking him into hiding to keep him safe from his enemy’s experiments extracting his energy and turning him old. It doesn’t work: Billy is attacked and The Doctor feels guilty. There’s a chase through the time vortex that makes The Tardis explode, the tiny fragments still powerful enough to swallow Varnax’s spaceship.  Billy and Varnax both collapse, with Billy taken back to Earth by The Doctor where he finally recovers. How funny, that a story that started off so epic, should end up another simple Dr Who story about doppelgangers! Though it’s hard to tell without seeing a finished script I reckon the idea peaked with versions one and two, though version four could have worked. Certainly all four sound more entertaining and make (slightly) more sense than The TV Movie we got!

By now it was becoming clear that the producers weren’t going to get the full financial backing they wanted for the script as it stood, but they weren’t ready to give up entirely so they got a third producer on board, Felice Arden, and hired Johnny Byrne to write an entirely different script. ‘Last Of The Timelords’ took the best of the old ideas and threw in some more including a new idea, so influential on Russell T Davies’ ‘comeback’ series, that Gallifrey has been destroyed in some awful war and that The Doctor was now (altogether) ‘the last of the timelords’. Only he isn’t quite: in this version it’s Varnax who destroyed Gallifrey, the former friend turned bitter enemy. He’s the kind of evil genius who’s not good at small details though and all the Tardises perished alongside the timelords leaving him trapped on a dying planet, all except the Doctor’s – the one timelord who managed to escape his home world in time. The rulers of Gallifrey pleaded with The Doctor to destroy his time rotor so that Varnax cannot find it and destroy other worlds, but to do that would mean to lose the secret of time travel forever and The Doctor can’t bring himself to do it, so instead he lives out his days out on Earth in hiding. At first he’s living in Ancient Rome just before the decline, with many a parallel between the way it falls apart and Gallifrey, then London in 1903. Varnax meanwhile is near the end of his last regeneration and still has ideas about immortality but needs a ‘raw source of energy’ that can only be found in other timelords. Varnax sends his Mordread army to locate him (they’re more like cyborgs in this version, created out of Varnax’s experiments) but The Doctor has programmed a timeloop ‘booby trap’ which means that the Tardis dematerialises for thirty years, by which time Varnax should be dead. Oddly it never seems to occur to The Doctor to go back in time and take Varnax out before he can carry out his wicked plan! Instead The Doctor has wiped his memory of all knowledge of Varnax and Gallifrey, in a move not unlike ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’ (complete with a ‘memories coming back in the form of drawings’ scene). These scattered memories so confuse The Doctor that he ends up in an asylum (which is not a nice place to be in 1903) where he befriends one of his helpers, a teenage girl named Lotte, the only person who believes him. She helps him escape an experiment designed to rid him of his ‘hallucinations’ and flees with him, only to find out the scientist behind them is yet another timelord (so that’s three of them still alive now – they really should have changed this title!)

The Doctor escapes just in time for the timeloop to end (in an atmospheric scene under Big Ben) when the Tardis is times to re-appear, only to find he was betrayed and that Varnax is waiting for him after all. A tense action scene sees The Doctor and Lotte flee to The Tardis at which point The Doctor’s memories return. The Tardis then flies to the oddly-named planet Raquets where everyone makes a racket (no, sorry, I made that bit up) where The Doctor teams up with two more exiled Gallifreyans, Menon and Ganji (so that’s five now…) Menon is captured by Varnax and dies under torture rather than give The Doctor’s secrets away (in an oddly sadistic and gruesome scene that seems out of place with the rest). The Doctor feels guilty, Ganji is in mourning and Lotte is totally lost on an alien world. The trio are captured where The Doctor meets his ex Zilla, the woman who chose Varnax over him, but who is now having doubts about her hubby’s megalomania. She chooses to side with The Doctor and release them. An insanely angry Varnax tries to get revenge by ramming The Tardis, which causes the dimensional circuits to come unstitched, leading to a very surreal nightmarish sequence. Then, as Zilla reverses his time experiments to try and wipe him from existence, Varnax uses his final trump card and activates Lotte, a ‘sleeper’ agent whose really been passing information back to Varnax all this time. Gonjii, who’s quite fallen for her by this time, is forced to kill her to save The Doctor, as Zilla and Varnax kill each other. A really downbeat ending has The Doctor and Ganjii mourning all the people they’ve lost and trying to rebuild Gallifrey from scratch. Bit of a downer that one – goodness knows what viewers watching it somewhere around season twenty four (the ‘comedy’ one) would have made of it!
There was a second version too, with some further tweaks made to keep costs down and sub-plots taken out (such as the really long pre-credits sequence setting the main plot up). Instead of London in 1906 the date is moved forward to 1934 and features a fascist rally, The Professor plays a much larger role in events with Lotte not turning up till later in the script where she’s joined by a young lad named Marcus, while ‘Rackets’ has become ‘Raquetz’. The biggest twist is that Lotte is no longer a sleeper agent but Varnax’s daughter, sent into exile with her memory wiped for refusing to take part in his experiments and it’s her, not Zilla, that chooses to save The Doctor by killing her own father. Both versions are a bit messy and a bit too epic while full of too much Gallifreyan lore for a casual audience but they could have worked, even in an era when Dr Who was off the telly and at its lowest ebb. They certainly tried hard to make it and got very close – closer than anyone before The TV Movie came along -  to making the series in a last minute rush with French company Lumiere as co-partners. Sadly they just ran out of time, with a promise with the BBC to start filming before a set deadline of the end of the tax year 1993-1994 that they just missed. Chances are the BBC would have been happy to extend their deadline ere it not for the fact that they’d just been made a better offer by a company, Amblin, waiting for the deadline to lapse so they could have a bash. And you can read about how that story goes under ‘The TV Movie’.    

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