Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Eight

In case you hadn't realised where this terrifyingly overlong series of articles got its name from, it's the final misquoted proverb in the final scene of Time And The Rani. To the accompaniment of one last flourish of banjo, The Doctor and Mel bid a jaunty farewell to the Lakertyans and head into the Tardis on - it has to be said - a rather uncertain note. "You're certainly going to take a bit of getting used to", muses the normally perma-chirpy companion. "Oh I'll grow on you, Mel", replies her newly regenerated fellow traveller. "I'll grow on you".

Whether you like it or not, Sylvester McCoy - and the last couple of series of Doctor Who in general - did grow on people. There were, as has already been pointed out at considerable length, a large number of fans who actually enjoyed it for what it was, without recourse to hair-splitting about the 'legacy' of the Diamond Logo or the 'classic' status of wiped sixties stories they could not possibly have seen. There was a tangible sense that while the BBC 'suits' were most definitely not behind the show, the departments involved with promotion and commercial exploitation and the actual business of what average viewers want to watch very much were. And, for better or for worse, it seemed that the general public at the very least had some idea of who the latest Doctor was and what he looked like; something that hadn't really happened since Peter Davison very first took on the role. And then, of course, 1989 rolled around and Doctor Who wandered off into a hedge muttering something about how the tea's getting cold aye unless it isn't.

After that, this momentum just seemed to evaporate as if it had stepped on a spinning globe thing. Time And The Rani immediately slunk to the very bottom of every Best Story Ever!!!4 poll, with the majority of the other Seventh Doctor stories not far behind. Or ahead. However that works exactly. Even the most battle-hardened McCoy defender would happily admit that fresh converts to the cause have been decidedly thin on the ground. Lengthy and considered ruminations on the strengths of those last couple of series - and this is in no way the lengthiest; I cannot recommend the fantastic Wallowing In Our Own Weltschmerz highly enough - are met with indignant cries of "rubbesh!!" that make that ancient huffing and puffing about 'pantomime embarrassment' seem erudite and original. In short, set out to defend the McCoy era, and you've got an almighty task on your hands.

Around the time that Time And The Rani went out, John Nathan-Turner was fond of responding to harrumphy claims that Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be by insisting that 'the memory cheats'. If fans could see all those cherished early stories again now, he implied, they'd find that it had always suffered from budgetary restrictions, waffly scripts, cramped studio space, limited rehearsal time and ropey effects. Back then, with about two and a half stories having been released on video at a cost of roughly eighty seven thousand pounds per tape, this was a fairly safe defence to mount. Within a couple of years, though, this argument would unravel in spectacular fashion as story after story after story came out at an affordable price and fans could judge the extent to which their memories had hoodwinked them for themselves.

In some ways, in absolute fairness, he was right - Doctor Who old and new has always suffered from all of the above and more, with far too many fans far too obsessed with concentrating on an agreed pantheon of 'classics' and 'turkeys' to bother too much about problematic questions like that. Objective and rational analysis was never actually on the agenda, though - the late eighties episodes were being attacked from a perspective of personal preference, and defended from a perspective of personal preference. And those same harrumphing fans - and, let's not forget, the general public, who couldn't care less but they liked it when it was Tom Pertwee and the maggots or something - found that yes, they did prefer those older episodes, Anti-Matter Monster and all.

So no, if taken in that specific sense, the memory had not cheated. But has it 'cheated' in entirely the opposite direction? Has - and you'll need to take a deep breath before reading this sentence - the story that they were most determined to delineate their preference for older Doctor Who against now itself come to be negatively defined by that exact same nostalgic process? Or, in short, do people now - whether through a misguided sense of nostalgia or simply a popular perception that they have subsequently picked up on - enjoy hating Time And The Rani more than they do actually having to have an actual opinion on it? Well, gauging that would require large numbers of fans to actually watch it again, which most of them seem curiously reluctant to do. And given how many of them will tell you without being asked that they 'stopped watching' after the first episode, it's questionable how many of them have actually seen enough of it to make a proper judgement in the first place.

In his excellent KLF biography Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds, John Higgs spends a good deal of time discussing Doctor Who. Not simply because the band scored a number one hit with a House Music-styled cover of the theme tune - itself much more of an act of artistic subversion than the 'novelty hit' it gets tediously written off as - but because of its strange correlation with The KLF's own story. Approaching it from the perspective of Alan Moore's intriguing theory about the 'Idea Space', he focuses in on the moment when a once-loved television show falling from favour landed right in the path of two musical pranksters looking for a reference point to prove their theory that treasured pop culture references welded to familiar riffs and modish musical trappings could bag you a chart-topping single. This was the point, argues Higgs at far greater length and with far greater detail than it might appear here, when the slow reversal of Doctor Who's fortunes began; from the moment Gareth Roberts reached for the lemon disinfectant, through the brief but pivotal interlude when the future of the show was actually in the hands of a handful of fans with genuine talent and imagination, through the crossbar-hitting mid-nineties revival (which, lest we forget, featured Sylvester McCoy for a whole quarter of its running time), on into the general public finally starting to look back on it with affection and interest, and right up to its triumphant ratings-conquering return. It was a long and gradual increment, and one that this book argues starts right with the 1987 production team's flawed but defiant refusal to bow out quietly. You might not quite agree with this, of course, but it's worth pondering on the next time that Davina McCall and Pappy's Fun Club snicker at The Kandyman on some dribbling clip show.

You probably won't be too surprised to hear, however, that I do largely agree with it. And here's why. Paul Cornell once described Doctor Who in the late eighties as a 'bullied' programme, and in amongst the acres and acres of reams of nonsense that have been written about 'black-clad' villains and 'bohemian' lead actors, there's seldom been a truer or more perceptive word spoken. Doctor Who spent the final years of its original incarnation dodging a hail of metaphorical and possibly even literal dustbins, attracting more and more sustained abuse than such actual deserving targets as Benefits Street, Days Like These or Adrian Mole - The Cappuccino Years as even its own fans seemed bafflingly determined to drive it into the ground. Even that rancid late eighties revival of The Saint somehow got off lightly in comparison.

But note the use of the word 'dodged'. Like or hate what they did with the programme, the production team were not prepared to go without a fight, and they put up a good one against so many batterings from so many directions; as indeed did the fans who actually did like what they did with it. Maybe it didn't always quite hit the mark, but without that small but substantial display of defiance there might have been no fan-driven attempts at official continuations of the series in other media, and given that one of these fans was a certain Russell T. Davies - who included plenty of stylistic nods to the McCoy era in his own interpretation of Doctor Who (as I wrote about at some length in my book Well At Least It's Free) - you can pretty much finish that line of thought yourself. Also I think Time And The Rani is quite good. You might not have picked up on that.

Right at the end of that closing scene, as Keff McCulloch weighs in with a deliberately jarring and ponderous chord change, Sylvester McCoy leans back out through the Tardis door and doffs his hat to the Lakertyans, sporting a confident and mischevious grin that is pretty much the polar opposite of the nervous and knowingly sarcastic smile to camera that had ended his first official appearance as 'The Doctor'. He'd arrived, and it certainly gave a good feeling to at least one viewer who just wouldn't get on board with this idea that you weren't 'supposed' to like Doctor Who any more. And sometimes this kind of brash, upbeat confidence is all you want from a television show. Not drama, not menace, not 'emotion', not slick sophistication, just a good-natured ending to a good-natured bit of unashamedly cheap and cheerful in-your-face entertainment with boisterous acting, restraint-free music, and ridiculously over-the-top colours. Even if you were watching on the black and white portable.

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Seven

Those of you who are familiar with the works of the comedian Richard Herring will probably be aware of Me1 vs. Me2 Snooker, the notorious podcast in which he relentlessly plays against himself on the celebrated Snooker Board of the Shepherd's Bush Dodecahedron. It has been the subject of alarm, derision, and jittery spectating from Smithers The Cat, but still it ploughs on, ceaselessly, with Herring stating consistently that he intends to keep playing until absolutely no-one is left listening.

In a sense, this series of articles about Time And The Rani has become much like Me1 vs. Me2 Snooker; not simply because the declining reader stats and increasing volume of increasingly pleading calls for me to stop with immediate effect are only making me more determined to see it through to the banjo-accompanied conclusion, but because trying to explain to people that you think that Time And The Rani is actually quite good is a bit like trying to explain to them why you find Commentator1 (or occasionally Commentator2) remarking on how a shot jingled and jangled like some topical reference so amusing. The inadvertent running gags, the wilful misunderstanding of non-Self-Playing Snooker terminology and the determination of various third parties to disrupt or even prevent the frames from being played are funny enough, but it's the sheer ridiculous repetition that really gives rise to the humour, a bit like Stewart Lee does, only better.

Yet there's so much understandable pre-judgement, and so much effort required to get into it - not least because the rules state that you have to start at the beginning and listen to each frame in order - that there's really no point trying to forcibly win converts to the cause. And multiply that by nine hundred and fifty three and you've got Time And The Rani.

Well, get your Ready Reckoners ready, because I'm forcibly converting you to this cause, and there's nothing you can do about it. I've already offered extended defences of the opening titles, the theme music, the incidental music, the costume and set design, the production values, the special effects, and pretty much everything else notorious about the story apart from Ikona. Now it's time to look past such surface level elements and tackle the much more problematic question of why I think that Time And The Rani actually works as a story. Apart from Ikona.

Towards the end of Episode One, in amongst all of the stuff that didn't quite work, there's a really rather impressive scene in which Ikona's fellow Lakertyan Faroon ventures into a dingy underground cave. The Tetraps are seen and indeed heard hanging upside down as she pulls a lever, and some authentically gunky looking gunk splurges down a chute for, presumably, their culinary delectation. Whatever this goo is, that's what it's for. There's no real need as such for this scene - it plays absolutely no part in plot advancement whatsoever - but it lends some much-needed depth and atmosphere to an episode otherwise overrun by overlit pratfalls and Beyus doing his 'concerned' face. And, frankly, it's all uphill from there.

In fact, what's most immediately obvious about Episodes Two to Four of Time And The Rani is just how effectively the problems that were all too evident in Episode One are addressed and overcome. Well, most of them. Everything suddenly gets just that bit more confident and energetic, finally catching up with the confident and energetic visuals, and this is largely driven by the efforts of one individual in particular.

Seemingly having got over his initial unease, underpreparedness and overenthusiasm, Sylvester McCoy very quickly settles into the role and gives a more than creditable performance. Not quite as good as he would later get, perhaps, but definitely hurtling towards it at a noticeable pace. His main obstacle continues to be those awful misquoted proverbs - although "it's a lottery, and I've drawn the short plank" is actually quite effective in a presumably unintended sense - but when he gets something slightly weightier to work with, the difference is dramatic. If you want proof of this, have a look at his downcast and introspective - something he always did well - delivery of the really rather arresting line "the more I know me, the less I like me". The fact that this also does in one sentence what they tried and failed to do in two whole years of positing Colin Baker as a more abrasive Doctor should not be overlooked either.

Yet as much as he might ponder on whether "perhaps this is my new persona - sulky, bad tempered", it's the lightness of touch that McCoy brings to the role that really makes a difference after the misfires and meanderings of previous years. It's hard to counter the accusations that he sometimes let the temptation to zany things up get the better of him, but better that than simply shouting everything three times, and in any case, it's not like the previous Doctors weren't without their similar problems. Again, if you want to argue, you'll be wanting to sit through a couple of the less effort-intensive Second and Fourth Doctor stories first. In tandem with this, the physical comedy becomes more restrained and better handled, and there's also a decent quota of much better verbal gags; "Your powers are truly wondrous Mistress Ran-[Click]", "I'll find him without you" - "You can't miss him in that outfit", although needless to say Ikona's "Centre Of Indolence!" snarking doesn't come across quite so well.

Speaking of things that don't come across so well, it's time to finally address the one aspect of Time And The Rani that has been studiously and conspicuously avoided thus far - Bonnie Langford. There's no getting away from the fact that - as Bonnie herself has since good-humouredly conceded - her casting was a gamble that just didn't come off. What the production team were hoping for was a new energy and pace to the onscreen action, and a new influx of curious mainstream viewers who knew her as an all-singing all-dancing force of nature (and if you think that's a bit daft, just think about how many similar figures - including one John Barrowman - have shown up in the revived series). What they got, unfortunately, was an actress unused to limiting her performances for the small screen, and writers, directors and even fellow cast members seemingly unable to work out how to best harness and channel her undeniable remarkable stage presence and sheer upbeat weight of force. It was all downhill from the thoroughly ill-advised moment that Bonnie and Colin Baker were 'introduced' to the press zooming about on panto wires. But it didn't need to be.

While it's true to say that her brash and boisterous approach to the role tended to look a bit much even next to the erstwhile ferret-juggling leading man's less restrained moments, not to mention guest stars like Richard Briers doing their inexcusable "theyyyy buried me awayy"-level scene-ruining, there were also moments, albeit few and far between, where Bonnie Langford actually managed to play it just right. When required to take part in a more downbeat scene, or one in which she's called on to reason with another character, she usually handles it quite well, and there are even occasions on which she manages to play her over-the-top theatrics successfully off against another judiciously caricatured guest star; have a look at the grotesquely chilling scenes with Tabby and Tilda in Paradise Towers if you want evidence of that. With a bit more effort and indeed collaboration from all concerned, and of course an actual proper backstory and some defined characteristics, Mel could actually have worked out as a halfway decent companion, but everyone's immediate concerns were elsewhere and it would have needed a good deal more production time and indeed screen time than was ever available. Not to mention a good deal more goodwill from fans, who were too busy fuming over not being personally consulted about major production decisions and snickering on a loop that Violet Elizabeth would thcweam and thcweam until she was thick because that was the only counterargument that their amusingly blinkered frame of reference would actually allow them to come up with.

On the whole, it has to be admitted that Time And The Rani is not one of these better moments, and the ridiculous ear-assaulting quantity of screaming and yelping gets so much that Ikona actually asks her to 'stop squawking'. In fairness, the script does call for her to match a ludicrously hammy Kate O'Mara's impersonation of her characteristic for characteristic, and she may also have been unconsciously if ill-advisedly over-compensating for her new co-star's nervousness, and for Ikona's general inertness. In equal fairness, there are some scenes in which she gives a decent performance, notably the one in which Faroon learns about Sarn stepping on the spinny globe thing; a scene which it's worth noting also features an impressively and suitably restrained contribution from Keff McCulloch. Overall, however, the exaggerated stagey running and alarmingly expansive smile don't quite sit easily with the show's much-vaunted new direction, and as unfair as it is to do too much finger-pointing in one direction, those shrieky interludes have probably played a large part in securing the reputation that Time And The Rani currently 'enjoys'.

There are, of course, plenty of other decent scenes scattered throughout the story, from that over-enunciated 'Nine-Five-Three!' amusingness, to any in which The Tetraps get to indulge their comical boneheadedness. There are impressive effects that haven't even been touched on yet, not least the amazing scene in which Mel and Ikona act AROUND one of the spinning globes in close-up. There are convincing full-size location sets shot from unusual angles, explanations shorn of technobabble (even if they don't make scientific sense), enjoyable blasts of incidental music, and a priceless moment of viewer exasperation as Ikona pours away the endlessly recycled flying insect effect antidote for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. Even the spoon-playing just about works in context. Just.

In fact, we could keep coming up with more and more similar examples until the number of articles in this series spirals on out into infinity, but you have to draw a line somewhere. Even when it comes to defending Time And The Rani. So in the forthcoming final part, it's time to review the findings and deliver the ultimate pro-Time And The Rani argument. Unless, of course, anyone tweets 'OMG are you still doing this? pls stop', in which case it's straight back onto the Snooker Board and you only have yourselves to blame...

Top Of The Box is a complete guide to every single released by BBC Records And Tapes, including the unreleased Sylvester McCoy-era version of the Doctor Who theme. You can find out more about it here.

Time And Tide Melts The Snowman: Part Three

When you get past the pre-credits sequence and the new opening titles and actually start watching Time And The Rani, the first thing you notice is that it looks good. And this is no mean feat when you consider where, when and how it was made.

Some time around the mid-eighties, the BBC had switched from using 2" videotape to 1", which may not sound like much of a major lifestyle choice in this jetsetting digital age, but in all seriousness, there is a massive technical difference between the two. While 1" tape was cheaper, more cost-efficient and easier to edit, and the associated equipment took up a good deal less space, the regrettable trade-off to this convenience was that - putting it as simply and non-technically as possible - it just didn't look as good. Compared to 2", the resultant recordings were flat, lifeless and colourless, and this is the primary reason why pretty much every studio-based BBC show from the late eighties, be it Wogan, Open Air, What's That Noise?, Ever Decreasing Circles or Billy's Christmas Angels, looks and sounds more or less exactly the same as each other.

And that wasn't all. Mindful of the fact that the brand spanking not-all-that-shiny-really new 1" VT equipment was cheaper and more portable, and required a much smaller crew than film did, the BBC had also begun to 'encourage' producers to cut costs and balance books by using videotape for their location work as well. Doctor Who had notoriously switched over to 1" VT for its studio sessions with Warriors Of The Deep, a story that as a direct consequence showcased exactly the wrong kind of cheapness, and as of Episode One of Time And The Rani, they were using it for location sequences too. And bear in mind that this was at the exact same time that the exact same executives who were forcing these kinds of production and budgetary decisions were also publically berating Doctor Who for not looking as good as Star Wars; a complaint roughly equivalent to frowning over the fact that Panda Pops Green Cola doesn't taste as good as a Raymond Massey made with Macallan 55 Single Malt.

So by a simple process of technical elimination, you'd be forgiven for expecting Time And The Rani to look flat, dull, lifeless, colourless, and more or less indistinguishable from any given episode of Laura And Disorder. Yet it actually looks bright, vibrant, and colourful to the point of garishness, ironically resembling nothing so much as it does Panda Pops Green Cola, and giving off whatever the visual equivalent is of the now quite possibly illegal level of sugar rush too. This involved more than just throwing a couple of tins of primary coloured paint around, though; it was an attempt to work with a difficult and restrictive technological format and engage the ordinary everyday viewers again, with costumes, designs, effects and digital retouchings carefully designed to add a dash of liveliness and colour to this drearily Five To Eleven-esque world. Whether individual viewers or fans felt that it was 'for them' or not, it's an approach that would dominate the original series for the remainder of its time on air, and runs right through this particular story like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock.

Even in this opening episode, you'll find an overwhelming barrage of impressive - or at the very least vivid - visuals that present a substantial challenge to the widely held belief that latterday Doctor Who looked cheap, nasty and unconvincing. The computer-aided video effects are meticulously rendered and way ahead of their time, especially the spinning globe traps; the 'Tetrap's Eye View' camera effect adds a nice bit of variety to what would otherwise be rather staid and repetitive scenes, the model work is of a consistently high standard (have a look at the exterior shots of the Rani's lab cut into a cliff face if you want evidence of this), the Lakertyans' make-up is far better than the average alien 'prosthetics' of the day - well, at least by BBC sci-fi standards - and even the clearly budget-conscious costumes manage to come across as eyecatching. Where it falls down, unfortunately, is in the sheer cheapness of the studio sets, though at least they're cheap as in sparse rather than the painted backdrops and wobble-prone cardboard walls of legend. Even the quarry standing in for alien planet Lakertya - in lieu of Pip and Jane Baker's favoured tree-strewn vista - somehow manages to avoid looking quite as boring and unconvincing as usual, though a subtle amount of digital tweaking probably had some bearing on this.

Unfortunately, the second thing that you notice about the episode is just how nervous Sylvester McCoy is. When he'd shown up on Blue Peter a couple of months earlier to announce his casting, more or less in his own regular clothes and with little available detail to reveal about the forthcoming new series, he'd appeared uncharacteristically uneasy and racked with self-doubt; something that was reinforced by an alarming interview-closing comment about how he was 'looking forward' to the autumn, accompanied by a fretful gurn to camera. Without wishing to venture too far into the realms of sub-Big Brother's Little Brother mock-psychoanalysis, it does seem as though the sheer weight of expectation that came with taking on that part at that time was playing very heavily on his mind indeed. Seemingly very little had changed by the time that McCoy actually stepped in front of the camera, as his entire performance in this first episode is jumpy, reticent and noticeably short on comic timing. As we shall see, this would right itself soon enough, but perhaps the presence of a seemingly shaky leading man was part of the reason why so many people took so strongly against Time And The Rani from the outset.

Admittedly McCoy is hardly helped by the fact that his first lines as The Doctor come in the middle of a hamfisted and clunkily exposition-strewn scene, which would be an ideal starting point for launching into an extended takedown of Pip and Jane Baker if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't really write it. The Bakers had in fact wanted to open the episode with a scene showing King Solomon being abducted mid-wisdom dispensal, which would have been a much more effective and engaging way of kicking off the story and indeed the new-look new series, but were prevailed upon to replace it with The Rani shoving Einstein into a fish tank at comparatively short notice, and it's not unreasonable to assume that their original curtain-raising scene might have been slightly better than what ended up on screen. If you're scoffing at that, incidentally, then it's worth bearing in mind that this is more or less exactly how every third episode since Steven Moffatt took over has started. There's some debate as to how far The Bakers were even actually involved with the near-total rewrite, and even then if they were in fact particularly willing participants, so if this scene doesn't exactly help to hit the ground running, then for once it's not really their fault.

There can be less doubt, sadly, about the authorship of the impenetrable and scientifically unsound technobabble spouted by The Doctor when he comes to in The Rani's laboratory, still sporting his previous incarnation's horrendous costume; though, in fairness, it had been written with that coat's rightful wearer in mind and would have suited him much... well, not better, but that's another argument for another time. Naturally, the new Doctor is keen to know exactly what he's been brought to Lakertya for, but unfortunately seems more interested in reeling off endless streams of nonsense with no gaps between words - and indulging in some very un-McCoy-like badly-staged pratfalls - than doing anything constructive about it. The Rani doesn't seem very interested in doing anything constructive about his not doing anything constructive about it, though, and gives him enough time to mess about with her electronically-stored plans and discover something about a 'strange matter asteroid' and witter "What monstrous experiment are you dabbling in now? Your past is littered with the diabolical results of your unethical experiments!" before she finally sees fit to call in Urak The Tetrap - an extremely well-realised part-animatronic species of bat-like bipeds, who all the same would have worked much better in the original intended woodland setting - to put him out of action with a flashy spangly web-firing gun. Presumably he was not a fan of the dialogue.

This, really, is the problem with Episode One - it looks and sounds tremendous, but has the rug pulled from under it by just about every scene having one weak link so weak that everything else collapses sideways onto it. Whether it's the high-speed spurious pseudo-scientific gibberish, McCoy getting cold feet whenever someone shouted 'ACTION', the time-filling spoon-playing, The Rani's impersonation of Mel (which could have worked if it had been written with a bit more verve and properly played for laughs by all parties, but it wasn't, they didn't and it didn't), and those sodding misquoted proverbs, clearly somebody's idea of a good 'gimmick' for the new Doctor but which mercifully disappeared shortly afterwards. And then there's Ikona.

The Lakertyans ("rather unusual species, can't say I recognise it... human with a rrrrrrrrrrrreptilian influence") are by and large a sappy and ineffective bunch, persuaded into docile servitude towards The Rani by their useless leader Beyus. Dashing young Ikona, however, has rejected all of their values, including those concerning not being an irritating character. As we shall see, he gets progressively worse throughout the story, and what's all the more surprising about this is that actor Mark Greenstreet was something of an up and coming next big thing at the time, having recently turned in a widely-applauded dual-role turn in the BBC's 'Sunday Classics' adaptation of Brat Farrar, which coincidentally enough was produced by former Doctor Who showrunner Terrance Dicks (and if you want a detailed history of the 'Sunday Classics' slot, you'll find one in my book Not On Your Telly). He was also something of a favourite with teenage girls' magazines at the time - Mark Greenstreet, not Terrance Dicks - but his memorable for the wrong reasons stint as Ikona seems to have thrown a brick wall right in the path of his promising career. A few scattered appearances in high profile dramas and a failed attempt to become the next James Bond later, he retired from acting to forge a new career as a writer and director. Meanwhile co-star Karen Clegg, who plays fellow eye-candy Rogue Lakertyan with a weird run Sarn until she steps on one of the spinning globe traps, opted instead to concentrate on a busy theatre career, later developing a successful one-woman show reviving forties musical turns. You can bet she's pestered at the stage door by people wielding Dapol Tetraps to this day, though.

Meanwhile, if we're owning up to all of the less-than-good bits in Episode One of Time And The Rani, then we may as well come clean about that wince-inducingly unfunny scene with The Doctor picking out his new costume. By this time it was apparently a 'tradition' for the incoming Doctor's first episode to feature a scene set in the Tardis Wardrobe Room - after all, it had happened a staggering total of once before then* - and, so the story goes, when John Nathan Turner noticed that Pip and Jane had neglected to include one, he hastily scribbled one in himself. And good lord, can you tell. Thus it was that we got to enjoy Sylvester McCoy wandering around making weak puns about sweaters whilst Keff McCulloch indulged in a preposterous medley of musical motifs; a burst of accordion for some Napoleon-styled getup, a fanfare for a busby, school bells playing a flat approximation of the Big Ben chimes for a mortar board, some of Tom Baker's outfit accompanied by a bit of that xylophone that was always in every single scene of all of his stories, frilly-shirted Pertwee-esque harpsichord jangling, a comedy smashing window for the full Peter Davison ensemble, and finally a quick flourish of banjo as he steps out with a Troughtonesque coat, his new Bud Flanagan-inflected costume, and that bloody Question Mark Jumper, which surely nobody can ever have thought was a good idea. Even the fans who bought and wore their own. Incidentally, keep an ear out for that banjo, as you'll be hearing a lot more of it. More than you would ever conceivably want to, in fact.

So, one whole quarter into Time And The Rani, we find ourselves very much on the back foot. Everything that's even halfway impressive about this opening episode is undermined by problems that even the saner and more even-handed critics of the story could make a powerful case against it out of. How can it even be possible to prove that it's not that bad after all, or even to excuse the frankly ridiculous amount of words that have been written about it already? Well, there's still three more episodes to go. And some of them might not even have any banjo in...

*Before you start scoffing with loads of emoticons, it's true - the Second Doctor rummaged in a chest for his clothes, the Third stole Doctor Beavis' clobber from the hospital, the Fourth walked in and out of the Tardis door sporting different costumes, and the fifth took his from what appeared to be the Tardis Games Room...