Published: June 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter’s cover emphatically doesn’t feature any resemblance to Kate O’Mara- OK, at least not to the way she looked in 1985. And I’m fairly sure that the pulley on the cover would collapse if you tried to lift any weight with it.

Crimes Against Literature: Edwin Green is killed on page 54 but is in fine fettle on page 68 as part of the group which attempts to shove the Doctor down the mine shaft.

The TARDIS materialises with... "a final tremendous shudder"

...and dematerialises with..."odd sounds"

Childhood Recollections: I can remember where I bought this, namely a small bookshop in Buxton on a school trip to the National Tramway Museum.

Ramblings: Given that Pip and Jane Baker don’t exactly enjoy the greatest reputation as Doctor Who writers, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from their own adaptation of their first scripts for the series. ‘The Mark of the Rani’ is one of those stories where the basic concepts are fairly sound, but something falls down between script and final production to leave a mediocre end result; whereas with ‘Timelash’ the flaws were pretty much concentrated in the later stages of the process, i.e. direction, casting and trying to make an exceedingly cheap piece of television look as if it was only very cheap, with ‘The Mark of the Rani’ a lot of the boxes of "good Doctor Who" can be ticked with ease, it’s as if somebody forgot to tell Pip and Jane that they were supposed to be writing an actual script for actors to perform. This leads to a curious effect when it comes to translating the script into prose; the chapters are short and to the point, but the ludicrously contrived dialogue means that you end up reading the prose, then a line or two of dialogue, then slowing down and reading the dialogue again to be able to understand what the characters are actually trying to say.

The problem is worst with the three Time Lord characters, as if the Bakers had deliberately attempted to devise a style of dialogue for supremely intelligent characters from an advanced civilisation but found themselves unable to do it in any other way than with a strained and slightly inaccurate verbosity. The Sixth Doctor’s character can survive this as florid language was part of the character’s make-up, and there’s an effort to suggest that the Rani’s unnatural speech patterns are at least in part down to her scientific outlook, rationalism and lack of compassion- and so it’s the Master who gets the short straw, reduced to blustering like Dick Dastardly as one scheme after another falls flat on its face. There could have been a good transitional story here, given the Master’s predominance as the recurring villain of the Davison era and the Rani’s emergence, commenting disparagingly on the Master’s ongoing squabble with the Doctor like the playground rivalry of two schoolboys- but the opportunity went begging.

That said, some of the minor characters are fleshed out slightly from the television story- Lord Ravensworth is something of an enlightened industrialist with an interest in reason, science and the welfare of his employees, and there’s the occasional insight into the living conditions of the ordinary people of the time- not least how Jack Ward’s family will manage without a breadwinner. There’s also a slight correction of historical detail, as Stephenson is here building the Blucher rather than Rocket (dating the story to 1814); as every schoolboy knows, the Rocket was preceded by some five years by Locomotion, so the televised story was wrong to show Rocket as Stephenson’s first effort. It’s a solid enough adaptation and enjoyable in its own way, but ultimately the flaws were in there from the beginning and Pip and Jane have nobody but themselves to blame for that.