Doctor Who - Time and the Rani by Pip and Jane Baker

Published: May 1988

Edition read: Target first, 1988

Coolest Cover: The photographic cover by necessity- it’s just a shame that the light falls in such a way as to show that the Tetraps’ claws are moulded into the rock.

Purple Prose: This is Pip and Jane- where would you like me to start? The language is as fruity and purple as a bagful of over-ripe plums.

The TARDIS materialises with..."the materialisation bellow". Quick, Mel, the materialisation bellows!

Childhood Recollections: I evidently read this at the time, which is strange because I had the hardback.

Ramblings: And so yet another landmark in the history of this little series is reached, as we hit the Seventh Doctor’s debut in print. ‘Time and the Rani’ is one of those stories which doesn’t so much divide fans as polarise them, and while some enjoy its camp credentials, to others it provokes a reaction not unlike Dracula suddenly stumbling across every crucifix in the Vatican. What a reading of the book shows, however, is that any reservations aren’t necessarily to be laid at the Bakers’ door, and that the script the Bakers turned in was rather darker than the episodes turned out.

To begin with, the book has many of the usual aspects of a Pip and Jane Baker script in terms of having all the right elements together, just not connected in the usual way. The Tetraps are a good concept- the idea of a vampire bat monster was new, as was the 360-degree vision, although both together is a bit odd and one idea could probably have been saved for another story, and in the Tetraps’ case, a darker one. The idea of gathering together a collection of geniuses had been used before in ‘The Mark of the Rani’, although it’s handled better here as the voices emanating from the giant brain are meant to be distinctly attributable to the individual scientists. I have a suspicion that the Bakers also expected the Lakertyans to turn out slightly more alien than they did- Ikona is a far colder and less sympathetic character in the book, while Beyus and Faroon suffer from having established character performers cast in fairly unrewarding roles when the Lakertyan parts call for actors to submerge themselves just that little bit more in the alienness rather than looking like middle-aged actors covered in yellow slap and feathers.

Key to the story is of course the Rani, and in her second story it’s not difficult to feel that the Bakers (and the production team) had a stronger sense of her individuality and what separates her from both the Doctor and the Master. Here, her goal is to create a time manipulator, destroying Lakertya in the process, and the lethal tricks and traps she devises to ensure the Lakertyans’ co-operation and obedience show a particularly callous streak to her character- she’s a personification of the idea that the ends justify the means- and although only one actress has ever played the role, it’d be interesting to see a more focused interpretation which emphasised the character’s darkest aspects. Then again, one of the advantages of the book is in not having some of the televised story’s more irritating aspects, casting and direction among them- having read the book, it’s clear just how much the story as shown on television was hamstrung by the general lack of direction in the production office at that point in time, and the extent to which it was tailored to the general perception of Sylvester McCoy as a clown from children’s television. To be fair to the Bakers, the script they initially wrote tried to achieve more than that, and the book corrects some of the flaws in the televised serial’s execution.