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Time and The Rani is the story that launches Sylvester McCoy’s tenure as The Doctor. On many levels it’s not a bad story. It has some great effects for its time in those deadly bubbles, and a villain you can love to hate in the Rani, but it also irritates in places. It could have been done better. 8/10
Commentary The Commentary is by Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor) Bonnie Langford (Mel) and Pip and Jane Baker, (Writers). Talk about a mixed bag! Sylvester and Bonnie are fantastic. They both love talking about their time on Doctor Who. Pip and Jane are a pair of old fogeys. They are the sort of people I try to avoid getting into long conversations with at church socials. They are BORING to listen to. So it is a commentary of two halves. As long as Sylvester and Bonnie keep talking its fine, but if Pip and Jane get a word in my enthusiasm fails. 7/10
Extras The Last Chance Saloon is NOT a ‘making of’ documentary. It is largely about the BBC politics surrounding the firing of Colin Baker and engaging of Sylvester McCoy to try to regenerate Doctor Who as a series. There is archive footage of John Nathan Turner explaining himself among other aspects of the whole debacle and Michael Grade as a spectre over the whole thing. Getting away from all of that, there is a lot about Sylvester’s screen tests and the people who might have had the job instead of him. They are an interesting insight into what might have been, but I have to agree that Sylvester was the best choice.
9/10 7D FX is a documentary about the visual effects of this story. There is a lot of model work – especially the Tetrap colony among other things. This sort of topic is dealt with nowadays on the Doctor Who Confidentials. Back in the day we didn’t have it. As a teenage fan with an interest in how TV was made, I would have loved these sort of documentaries. Now, I sometimes don’t even pay attention to Confidential. When you’ve seen one CGI effect, you’ve seen them all! But these retrospectives about what was done at the very beginning of the sort of technology we have now are interesting. 8/10 Helter Skelter is an interview with the makers of Doctor Who’s first CGI title sequences. CGI was very much in its infancy. This was very much a showcase for what the external company producing these titles could do. It is slightly surprising to realise that these titles, made in 1986, are the first not to be recorded on film using physical effects rather than computer generated ones. The only problem here is that it gets very technical. You really have to be either a computer graphic buff or a Doctor Who buff to care. 9/10
6/10 Hot Gossip has Kate O’Mara discussing the fun she had working on the story with friends she had acted with before. She comes across as a very nice person who enjoyed her Doctor Who tenure which is curiously at odds with her best known role as a Dynasty super-bitch. It is a short piece, but informative all the same. 9/10 On Location has Guy Michelmore from BBC Breakfast interviewing Sylvester, Bonnie and Kate on location in the Somerset quarry where much of Time and The Rani was filmed. I am slightly suspicious of the fact that Sly is wearing the Colin Baker costume. He never wore that in any location scene, only in studio sets. I think they were keeping The Doctor’s new outfit under wraps. 9/10 Blue Peter is always annoying, Janet Ellis doubly so, to utterly misquote Douglas Adams. The best thing about this sequence is how young, fresh and enthusiastic Sylvester is in this blessedly short interview! 5/10 Photo Gallery is mostly production stills and publicity photos of the main stars in costume on location. 8/10
4/10 Easter Eggs – the first is an extra piece of documentary about the attempt to hang Kate O’Mara upside down for the final scene with the Tetraps which made her very ill – she had suffered a burst blood vessel in her eye! Yikes. The second Easter egg is a bit of fun from Sylvester McCoy talking about the fact that he had been in theatre with Timothy Dalton just before he was cast as The Doctor and Timothy as James Bond, and speculating about what would have happened if it had gone the other way. Since Timothy is now immortalised in 5 inch action figure as Rassilon, President of Gallifrey, the idea is even more amusing. 9/10 There are a lot of extras packed onto this disc, some more useful than others. A mixed bag, rather like the episodes themselves. 8 out of 10
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The
problems Doctor Who has at this time in its history makes bitter listening
for a Doctor Who fan. The best thing anyone can do in these DVDs is
be up front and honest about what was happening. They have done so.
Lakertya
looks at the way the look of the planet changed from script to screen.
It was initially going to be a forest planet with rushing streams
and bridges across them. It became a desert one, mostly filmed in
a quarry. It is only just over two minutes long. I expected it to
be longer and thought the DVD was faulty when it finished suddenly
with Jane Baker declaring that is was ‘marvellous’.
Coming
Soon introduces the Revisitations set that includes the Talons of
Weng Chiang, Caves of Androzani and the 1996 Doctor Who Movie, a rather
odd combination and one unlikely to impress die hard fans who would
already have bought all of these. 
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