Albia Eruditorum: Time and the Rani

 (Because adding 'with apologies to Elizabeth Sandifer' at the end probably won't cut it: as regular readers of this blog will be aware, I am currently working on a book of poems set in an alternate Britain which developed in a way which makes it less disabled by nostalgia than our own. One key feature of this alternate timeline is that Jeremy Brett, rather than Colin Baker, replaces Peter Davison as the Doctor, and Andrew Cartmel takes over as Script Editor a couple of years early, resulting in Lungbarrow being made for television and the British as a whole becoming less hung up on reproductive futurism. It thus proved irresistible to write at least one entry about this alternate Britain [which I am calling 'Albia' as a working label] as a pastiche of a TARDIS Eruditorum entry [indeed the opening paragraph is a straight lift from Sandifer's essay on The Twin Dilemma, lightly edited to remove the reference to 'Doctor in Distress', as the Hiatus never occurs in the Albian timeline, and to tidy up the rhythm of the paragraph after cutting out a large chunk of it]. Needless to say it would be a pale imitation of the original even if it weren't about a version of a serial which never actually aired in the timeline we inhabit, and you should all go and read the original, and Last War in Albion and Neoreaction: a Basilisk too. All three works have been a massive influence on the current project.)

 

It is January 5th, 1985. Band Aid are at number one with "Do They Know It's Christmas". They remain at number one throughout this story, with Wham! at number two with another Christmas song. Foreigner, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Tears for Fears, and Ray Parker Jr. are also in the charts, the last, of course, with the theme from Ghostbusters.

In news, since we last looked at a story the Miners' Strike has reached a conclusion, rioting breaks out in Wolverhampton, David Jenkins is appointed Bishop of Durham, to the despair of conservative Christians, and the IRA succeed in bombing the Brighton hotel where many top Conservative politicians are staying for that party's annual conference: though they fail to kill anyone they succeed in injuring Margaret Thatcher so severely she has to spend the rest of her time as PM in a wheelchair. This has two consequences for her: the first is, once the initial wave of sympathy dies down and politics-as-usual reasserts itself, a rash of cartoons and tabloid front covers depicting her as Davros, which would never see print today. The second, much more sinister consequence is that Jimmy Savile starts spending a lot more time at 10 Downing Street, showing the Prime Minister the same 'care and attention' he lavished on disabled children at Stoke Mandeville. 

Incidentally, in the wake of the attack, the IRA taunt Thatcher with the statement 'you have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once', a statement which later becomes popular on the Internet as an inspirational quote misattributed to Thatcher herself. History is weird like that. 

And speaking of history being weird, on television: Time and the Rani. The main line of criticism of this episode is that the Rani doesn't get much of a backstory, and that introducing a new enemy in the same story where the Doctor regenerates is too much to expect that story to do. Which can be easily refuted by pointing at the Pertwee era, specifically of course the fact that the Autons get introduced in Pertwee's first outing, and the fact that we get laughably little backstory on the Master in 'Terror of the Autons' beyond the fact that he's a bad guy and the Timelords need the Doctor's help to stop him. But actually it can be refuted even more easily than that: it can be refuted by the fact that this episode does it. 

And it does it in a way that achieves both goals: the Doctor and the Rani's verbal sparring (once the Doctor recovers enough from his post-regeneration/post-TARDIS attack amnesia and realises the Rani is only pretending to be Peri) is used both to introduce the Rani and to establish the character of Jeremy Brett's Doctor. What's interesting is how sympathetic the Rani is in this exchange, with Brett's Doctor giving his lines a tone of sneering condescension towards his intellectual rival, and never allowing the audience to entirely take comfort in the idea that the Doctor is doing this only to get a reaction. Compared with the Fifth Doctor's almost pathological niceness this is a thrilling change, and one which helps establish the tone throughout Brett's tenure. From his earliest meetings with Cartmel and Nathan-Turner about taking the role, Brett had stressed that he wanted to play up the Doctor's nature as an alien disguising himself as a human, and he felt that, as he put it 'in an exchange with another creature of his kind the Doctor would naturally cast off the affectations he puts on in dealing with Earth people - the sight of the Doctor being so obviously de haut en bas towards his equal ought to leave audiences less sure if the way he treats, for example, Peri is true kindness or mere condescension.' 

And that gets at another strength of the episode, which is how it helps strengthen Peri as a character after two episodes in which she hasn't been much more than eye candy. Much of the credit for this has to go to Nicola Bryant, who finds a way of giving her scenes with Kate O'Mara's Rani a sexual tension which is nowhere in the script, but which makes those scenes one of the highlights of the episode, and makes the episode historically important in the subtext Bryant would bring to the character from then on (gleefully encouraged by Brett). But Peri is also shown as the Doctor's physical peer, as she is able to successfully restrain him when she thinks he is attacking her. This scene has its detractors, who feel that a human getting the better of the Doctor makes him look weak, but what do they expect Brett to do? Strangle Peri? Spin her on his shoulders as if he were the Mountain Mauler of Montana? No, it's absolutely the right decision to have the Doctor escape by persuading Peri to trust him. And Brett's patient, gentle explanation to Peri is just sufficiently too patient, too gentle that, again, he seems a little condescending. He may be the one in the armlock, but it seems as if he's trying to avoid further violence for Peri's benefit, and not his own. The resolution of this scene, with Brett inviting Bryant to feel for his pulses, is shockingly intimate for children's television, an intimacy heightened by the decision to shoot in close-up. You can see why French & Saunders would choose to parody the scene by drawing parallels with Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley in Edge of Darkness (even if this did lead to the bizarre 'Peri is a ghost' theory gaining traction in some sections of fandom). 

These are all great things, and foreshadow even better things to come, but the episode still has some telltale signs that we're going through a rough patch. The Tetraps are a vast improvement on the Nimon as far as monster costumes go, but after an impressive first appearance you start to notice the differences between the one good costume and the ones that are only going to be used in group shots (though at least everyone is believing in their bubble wrap, which helps a great deal). The Lakertyans are one of the wettest alien races we've met for a while, effectively being terrorised by the sci-fi-equivalent of a bully with a beehive and a stick, and their guns which shoot glitter seem more suited to the Movellans' disco armada than to 1985, and things aren't helped by the fact that Donald Pickering has very little chemistry with Brett, such that his Beyus, who should come across as heroic, instead feels pompous and self-important. 

Also, as you can probably tell from the fact so much of what I praise in this episode is based on the decisions made by performers, we are still dealing with a Pip 'n' Jane script. Definitely one of the better ones, but a Pip and Jane Baker joint nonetheless, with the usual attendant strengths and weaknesses in terms of ideas versus dialogue. Indeed, Brett performs a vital piece of alchemy on the latter, choosing to deliver the malformed proverbs with which Pip and Jane saddle the Doctor to indicate his post-regenerative amnesia less as mistakes than as Wildean paradoxes which ironically reveal their true meaning. 

Which is, on the whole, not a bad way to look at this episode: a pedestrian, programmatic affair enlivened by performances from O'Mara, Bryant and Brett which are, respectively, a camp pleasure, a surprising delight and a disturbing revelation. Though some people see this as one of 'the silly stories' before the Cartmel Masterplan kicks in and the Doctor gets serious (a reading which is also unfair on the other two serials usually classed as 'silly', but we'll get to them presently), the fact is that all the things that are going to be developed throughout this era of the show are already present. Peri is only going to get queerer (or at least as queer as children's television will allow her to be), and as the Sixth Doctor Brett is only going to get more intimidatingly alien. The difference will be that, as the seasons progress, Cartmel will bring on more and more new writers interested in writing for this new set-up, and as Brett's performance brings viewers back to the show during an unprecedentedly chaotic time for the BBC, they start getting the budget to match. The story everyone tells about Andrew Cartmel is of him being given the job of Script Editor after telling Nathan-Turner he wanted 'to bring down the government', but the fact is that by the end of his tenure this would seem, if anything, to have been setting his sights rather low.