As the nation prepares to mourn the end of David Tennant's reign as the Doctor, it's important to remember that it was not always the biggest thing on television. Whoever you blame (Colin Baker unfairly tends to cop quite a lot of the flack), the mid-80s were a dodgy period for the long-running show, and Mark of the Rani is often held up as exhibit A for both the prosecution and defence of the era.


Enter the Rani
Mark of the Rani does not make a great deal of sense, from the title onwards. It is important to get that out of the way. The characters' motivation in this 1985 episode of Doctor Who seem to shift in the breeze. But all is not lost, as if Doctor Who is good at one thing, it's unintentional comedy...

"Hoist up your skirts, Peri, and let's go!"
"You don't get much, do you?"
"Push, unless you prefer a swifter end."
"If I was particularly nice to the Rani, perhaps she'd..."
"I want you to swallow this very special sweetmeat."
Also, the Master's gun looks like a willy.
Also, there's an unfortunate scene where the Doctor's being roughed up while the Master watches, peering round a corner, and frankly it looks like the evil Time Lord's enjoying it far too much. It'll make you blind, Master.

So now we have the smut out of the way... en route to Kew Gardens in the 19th Century, the TARDIS is hijacked and lands on a slag heap. The sixth Doctor and 'American' companion Peri wander around until they find Luddites attacking mining machinery, which Luddites never did. Meanwhile, old enemy and renegade Time Lord the Master is dressing up as a scarecrow for reasons which have never been explained even slightly, and new Time Lord baddy, the ice queen Rani, is dressing up as a crone running a bathhouse.

Over the course of two 45 minute episodes, the Doctor, Peri and the two evil Time Lords sneak around a Victorian mining village, occasionally being attacked by mad miners who sound like Monty Python's "Hell's Grannies". There's some sort of a plot, with some guff about brain fluid, and George Stephenson turns up around the halfway mark and contributes absolutely nothing to the story. There's supposed to be an imminent conference of industrial geniuses, but we never see it, and so we don't really care about it.

It really is bonkers. At one point the Rani tries to assassinate the Doctor with a minefield. Yes, a minefield, that popular precision weapon. Not just any old minefield though, these mines will turn you into a tree. Honestly.

Performances and characters
Meanwhile, Anthony Ainley's Master can't quite decide what he's up to. In the first episode he claims he's trying to seize control over the conference of geniuses, but in the second episode he seems surprised when he reads a list of the guests. He flounces around chuckling his bearded little heart out, but really he's playing second fiddle to the Rani, as played by Kate O'Mara.

The rest of the guest cast are entirely forgettable, with the solid exception of Terence Alexander (Charlie Hungerford from Bergerac, for those over a certain age...). All the villagers seem to be obsessed with Tobey Jugs, and speak in what the BBC probably once thought was a Geordie accent. It's real trouble at t'mill stuff.

Talking of accents, I didn't think Nicola Bryant's American accent for Peri was too bad in this one. I met her last Christmas and she seems to have forgotten to age. Peri's character was supposed to be a botany student, and this is used fairly effectively - she wants to go to Kew Gardens, she identifies herbs to try and make a sleeping draught and patronises Terence Alexander's character rigid as she does so.

Kate O'Mara is brilliant as the Rani, and her character is one of the serial's two redeeming qualities. Not actually evil as such, she is a completely amoral scientist with her own set of ethics to justify harvesting chemicals from human brains ("Do they think about the lesser species when they sink their teeth into a lamb chop?"). The Rani rises above the puerile plot of this adventure simply because she does her best to ignore it. Literally. She keeps telling the Master she can't be bothered with his schemes and his feud with the Doctor.

She's no pushover, though, she murders her two muscly brainwashed henchmen with a flick of a switch the moment she's finished with them. Every time she uses her magic killing button, the Master bends over the corpse and mutters 'The mark of the Rani' with relish, but this is hardly grounds for making it the serial's title.

Visuals
Of course, the big stick that Doctor Who tends to get thrashed with is its special effects. And this is where Mark of the Rani starts to make up a bit of ground. The exterior sequences are mostly filmed around the recreated Victorian mining village Blists Hill at Ironbridge, and look fab. There's room for a bit of 'heritage space' for film students who know what that means, but it has to be said that a lot of the outdoor scenes involve people... wandering around. The incidental music is pretty pleasant and sort of matches the location, but it's full of 80s synths which are really not welcome in this day and age.

The lack of need for exterior set dressing seems to have made a bit of cash available for the studio scenes, and the Rani's black TARDIS set is an absolute triumph of design, from the colour scheme to the groovy spinning concentric rings on the central console. Probably the best TARDIS set we've ever seen. Even the climax, with all its random dinosaurs, is more successfully realised than it could have been.

But then there's the bit with the tree. Always the bit with the tree. The bit with the tree really does have to be seen to be believed.

All in all
For the average viewer, Mark of the Rani is just not a good episode of Doctor Who. The Rani is a great character, but the story is all over the place and the Master is entirely pointless. The bickering Time Lord scenes reduce these powerful geniuses into squabbling children, and there are literally moments where the Master and the Rani are fighting over favourite toys. The big expository scene where the Rani's activities are explained is repeated as both the Master and then the Doctor deduce it.

For the fan, it's not much better. The Rani has hooked up a Stattenheim remote control to her TARDIS, and the story stops for five minutes while everyone talks about what an achievement this is (this refers to a plot point from a 1969 Patrick Troughton serial). The Master has become such a panto villain that he no longer ever bothers to explain his continued survival. The Rani says she thought he was dead and he literally just chuckles. The Master's vague scheme of harnessing the meeting of geniuses (genii?) is scorned by the Rani, but of course she actually does just that in her follow-up story, the even worse Time and the Rani. There's an interesting parallel between the Doctor's fractious relationship with Peri and the Rani's relationship with the Master (a scene in the Rani's TARDIS mirrors dialogue from the opening scene between the Doctor and Peri), but it's never developed.

In other words, it's good-looking, but rubbish.

Shiny DVD
The Doctor Who DVD range is full of shiny goodness, necessarily so as all fans will have these stories on VHS and need a slightly better reason than 'improved picture quality' to purchase the discs. Mark of the Rani's picture and sound have been cleaned up considerably, but there's also a bevy of special features for people who like that sort of thing.
Lords and Luddites
The basic 'making of' documentary is nice enough, a mixture of talking heads and behind the scenes photos, intercut with footage from the serial that you've just been watching. I was pleased that it was more about the personalities involved than the usual boring explanations about how they did the special effects.

Saturday Superstore
This clip from a phone-in session on the famous Saturday morning kids' show is brilliant. A dull question to Nicola Bryant is followed by the Master phoning the Doctor to challenge him to a battle to the death. It's unclear whether it was scripted or not, but Colin Baker rises to the challenge gamely, and it turns a dull little segment into a bit of a gem.

Deleted Scenes
Deleted scenes are always hit and miss, and these are definitely miss. There's only the odd snippet of actual extra material, and really this is just footage topped and tailed from various scenes. I kind of want those minutes of my life back, to be honest.

Playing With Time
The show's composer talks about his musical contribution, and it's all a bit tragic really, as he's clearly a talented and knowledgeable man, but then his recollections are juxtaposed with the synth nightmare that was actually used. He says it himself, mentioning that it always seemed like a travesty to use synth strings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra just down the corridor.

Commentary
Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Kate O'Mara provide the commentary track. Colin Baker is a lovely raconteur, Bryant has dropped her American accent (which she even used to use in appearances to promote the show, as the producer thought it would ingratiate the programme with US audiences to have an American character). I'm not big on commentaries, to be honest, and I struggled with this one, leaving it on while I was doing some cooking and that sort of thing. Perhaps if I liked the story more it would have been easier.

Now and Then
Oh dear. A very brief featurette showing how the locations used in the story have changed in the last 24 years. This is the sort of thing the Doctor Who releases do a lot, and it can be very interesting, but when the location involved is a MUSEUM, well, not a lot has changed and you know a feature is in trouble when the narrator starts yelling things like 'THE RANI'S BATHHOUSE HAS NEW WINDOWS!' Don't waste your time.

Doctor Who Annual 1985
Yay! PDF scans of the 1985 annual! Given that you can pay stupid money for the original annuals, this could be a good enough reason to buy the DVD on its own! And the stories are better. Harsh but fair.
HOW much?Assuming you've not been put off by all the above, the BBC put an RRP of £19.99 on their DVD releases. I've never paid this, it goes without saying. Expect to pay about £10 in HMV, or £6.58 on Amazon (correct at the time of writing).

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD