The Sun Makers: Ranking - 46

 

The Sun Makers

(Season 15, Dr 4 with Leela, 26/11/1977-17/12/1977, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Reed (uncredited), writer: Robert Holmes, director: Pennant Roberts)

Rank: 46

   'Dr Who is the best of scifi series. 'Revolver' is the best of Beatle albums. 'The Sun Makers' is the 'Taxman' of Beatle songs. Which made me wonder if there were more parallels with tracks from 'Revolver' and there are... 

'Eleanor Rigby: The Doctor's Wife ('Ah look at all the lonely people...like Uncle and Aunty' With a special mention for Eleanor Bron the inspiration for half the name, who has a cameo in 'City Of Death') 

'I'm Only Sleeping' ('Tomb Of The Cybermen' - cryogenically frozen giants) 

'Love You Too' ('The Parting Of The Ways' - the words the 10th Dr never quite says to Rose in Bad Wolf Bay) 

'Here, There and Everywhere' ('The Edge Of Destruction' where the Tardis' fast return switch causes havoc) 

'Yellow Submarine' ('Warriors Of The Deep' - technically its an underwater base but for all we know it's yellow) 

'He Said, She Said' (literally the name of the red button prequel for the story 'The Name Of The Doctor') 

'Good Day Sunshine' ('42'.Not that its a good day but there is lots of sunshine - and a Beatles reference!) 

'And Your Bird Can Sing' ('The Infinite Quest'. 'Caw' the metal bird does everything else!) 

'For No One' ('Logopolis'. A tricky one this but that story's all about entropy and decay and how the universe will devolve to end up with nothing) 

 'Dr Robert' (Dr Who? heck, maybe that's his real name 'hidden in plain sight?' It's no dafter than him being called Sigmus Alpha after all!) 

'I Want To Tell You' ('Under The Lake/Before The Flood' The plot hinges on what an underwater zombiefied 13th Dr mouths in the cliffhanger) 

'Nightmare Of Eden' ('Partners In Crime' Paul McCartney wrote this about drugs - maybe it was Vraxoin?) 

'Tomorrow Never Knows' (Every future-set DW story ever!)'

 By 1977 Robert Holmes was worn out by DW. He’d written eleven stories over a nine year period, been script editor across three difficult years and was impatient to move on and do other things. And then the arch-nemesis of all freelance writers came calling, as deadly as Davros, as unfeeling as any Cyber Controller and as mean as The Master. He had a visit from the taxman, with a bill that was bigger on the inside. Holmes had to pay it off quickly so swallowed his pride and went back to the production team asking for one last job, which they were only too pleased to give him given his high standing amongst both staff and fans, coming up with an idea that would allow him to make money and hit back at the system that had been hitting him. We were used to seeing Holmes using the Dr as his mouthpiece, writing wrongs against abstract bureaucrats and mechanical systems that had gone out of order, but for ‘The Sunmakers’ it was personal. Of all of DW’s long parallels with our real world this one is the most extended, the most barbed and somehow the most fun, with the usual format of turning the ordinary extraordinary stretched to something as mundane as bill-paying a, more than any other story, this is Dr Who sticking it to ‘the man’ (well, the Usasrian anyway).. On screen we’re on a human colony in Pluto in the future, a land that has been colonised by a race known as Usurians who have turned the local populace into slaves for a faceless corporation called simply ‘The Company’. Specifically, they’re an energy company demanding exorbitant amounts of money from the workers paying to run it the twist being that the energy they’re using comes from artificial suns on a colony that couldn’t be further away from Earth in our solar system (so why was it built there in the first place? That’s lost in the fog and confusing rules of capitalism and this is the kind of planet where the workers are too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads to ask) – a colony where everyone lives underground and only get to go outside to the natural world when planning to fling themselves off the roof. The Company are Star Trek’s Ferengi a decade early, tiny greedy ugly and bald, and in their true form are a type of fungus, a parasite that keeps the population starving and in debt as much out of sadistic pleasure as much as greed. Their business is full of grovelling humans at the top who are even more sadistic than they are in many ways, desperate to prove their worth as the only way to avoid paying such hefty bills themselves. There’s always the frisson of joy for fans when the Dr – particularly the 4^th Dr – strolls onto a corrupt alien world and destroys the system, freeing the population. Never more than on this one though, when the Dr effectively overthrows capitalism. In a so-called children’s programme. On a Saturday teatime (people really don’t talk about what a radical bit of telly it is – especially the ending). The rebels we see in the closing minutes aren’t just happy the way most mobs are at the end of DW stories but mad with glee, when (spoilers) the evil Gatherer is thrown from the roof of the bleak concrete monstrosity built to house the population (actually a tobacco company in Bristol) and the Collector is shrunk down to the insignificant speck of dust he is. If you didn’t know the background behind it then this story still works, as a jolly romp that does everything DW always did in the second half of the 1970s with gusto, an alien world as strongly drawn as any in the series and a collection of grotesque beings as memorable as Davros and twice as ugly. 

If you’re in on the concept behind it all, though, ‘The Sun Makers’ has some of DW’s funniest lines going. Even with half of them taken out (by worried producer Graham Williams, afraid of another backlash so soon after Mary Whitehouse’s attacks on DW for violence) it sparkles with inside-jokes and gags, from the tax collectors being called ‘The Inland Retinue’ to corridors that lead to freedom being named after the ‘P45’ forms you got at the jobcentre for signing on for unemployment back in 1977 to the ‘PCM’ gas that knocks everyone out being the payments taken ‘per calendar month’ as per the tax forms of the day, the ‘consum-cards’ everyone lives off look like giant credit cards and fact the only Usurian we meet looks remarkably like the chancellor of the exchequer in 1977, Denis Healey (complete with shaggy eyebrows), while the line ‘What have we got to lose?’ ‘Only our claims!’ is taken wholesale from the Communist manifesto. As for the state executions, carried out on workers who can no longer work or pay, they’re killed by basically a load of hot air (assassination of the unemployed and freelance workers by media coverage perhaps? The awful, unfair and manipulated fake-reality series ‘A Life On Benefits’ wasn’t on when Holmes wrote this, but if it was you bet it would be in the mix too). Even better than that, though, are the moments when the Dr does what he so often did in this era and tries to explain to Leela what’s going on but comes up short, because the whole capitalist system is such an alien concept it would make no sense to anyone who hasn’t lived through it (Leela picks up on the idea of the Taxman being a fellow savage ruthlessly chasing the population down and for once the Dr can’t think of anything to say to correct her). I love the joke, too, that the people who escape the system and live underground are effectively the people like Holmes making a living by writing in the arts and no more free than the people trapped in the system, a collection of brutish thugs living hand-to-mouth and scrapping over the same tiny slices because there isn’t enough resources to go round (he really had spent too long hanging round the DW production team by this time!) Notably the Dr overthrows this world by the power of television, broadcasting to the population what he’s doing to stir up revolution (for one story only everyone wins through ‘watching Dr Who’!) And very watchable he is too. Tom Baker is clearly in on the joke and spends most of the story with a big smile on his face, while this is the story from the second half of his run when it makes sense that he breezes past everyone as if he’s enjoying himself rather than taking the time to look scared – his confidence at being able to overthrow a system that’s made up of nincompoops and big headed twonks who can’t light a candle to his brilliance is well deserved (especially if he really is Holmes getting his own back, going freelance to escape the system and using it against itself, earning the money he needs by laughing at the system and symbolically overthrowing it). Louise Jameson is note-perfect as Leela too, the savage whose more human, compassionate and intelligent than anyone on this planet, who thinks this very strange alien culture is beneath her. And then there’s Henry Woolf and the aptly named Richard Leech, enjoying the break from their own day jobs (best known for appearing in Pinter stage plays and war films respectively) playing beings who are meant to be caricatures, impossibly cruel and heartless. Michael Keating is as excellent as ever as, almost word for word, the cowardly funny survivor ‘Vila’ two years before Blake’s 7 started (and don’t tell me that series’ writers Terry Nation and Chris Boucher weren’t still watching a series they’d both written for lots by 1977). 

Perhaps the best acting job of all though goes to Roy McCready as Cordo, who more than ever before in DW supporting casts is our representative, a decent likeable upstanding man driven to the brink of suicide by a system that’s brought the people he loves to their knees and then dares to charge them for it, utterly bamboozled by the Dr’s talk of a different way of living (something tells me Robert Holmes had the Beatle song ‘Taxman’ and the line ‘declare the pennies on your eyes’ playing when he wrote the opening scene of this story – a longstanding tradition being to leave pennies on the eyes of corpses so they would have something to pay the ferryman in the underworld on their way to the afterlife; I’ve often wondered if that means the ghosts who stay behind in our world are the people whose cheques bounced and couldn’t get in). ‘The Sun Makers’ is a mad story that in lesser hands would have been too arch and up itself to work, but Holmes knows how to write characters who feel ‘real’, even when they’re extended metaphors and this story is full of rich dialogue even over and above his usual high standard. If there’s a problem its with how these jokes come across on screen: this is a world that by definition is drab and grey, without any sense of humanity or nature, and seeing that on screen without change for four episodes is depressing even when you’re in on the joke. The sets, the costumes, the inside filming, the outside filming, its all bleak and static, even when the script is full of colour and life. More than that, its scuppered by the very thing its fighting against as ‘The Sun Makers’ looks cheap in a way that DW actually rarely did despite its reputation, as if everything her has been cobbled up for threepence.Too much of this story is just badly dressed people arguing, sometimes in a corridor (another in-joke: a lot of this story was filmed in Camden Town’s tube shelter, famous at the time for having one of the longest tunnels i.e. ‘corridors’ around to run up and down in), sometimes on the roof of a tobacco factory. It would be very in keeping for DW to take the joke a stage further and use the story laughing at capitalism to scrimp and save on the budget, except that all of season 15 looks like this to some extent or other (this was the era when, accounting for inflation, DW had less money than ever before: no wonder everyone working on this show was so heartily sick of the government in this era; next story ‘Underworld’ couldn’t even afford full-size sets). If you have to cost-save though then this is the way you do it, with a glorious script that’s matched by equally glorious performances and a plot that ends in a finale everyone whose ever been stuck in ‘the system,’ can find cathartic (and no, despite what some reviewers say, I don’t think it was over the head of the child audience watching at home – school is another by-product of the capitalist system after all, the place they send you to get used to working routines every day ahead of being old enough to work and which is effectively a big babysitting service for parents to enable them to go out to work; they’re called ‘preparation centres’ in this story just to ram the point home). Like DW’s other weirdest stories I wouldn’t want every story to turn out like this one, but as a one-off its a delight, witty and fun in a way that no other DW script quite matches. Would that all tax returns were as fun as this one.

+ My favourite of the many many gags in this story: ‘These taxes, they’re like sacrifices to tribal Gods?’ ‘Well roughly speaking, though paying taxes is far more painful!’

- Leela is nearly killed in this story in a quite horrific way by being ‘steamed alive’ and it takes longer for the Dr to rescue her than feels strictly comfortable. In the working script she actually died at this point (Leela only being intended to be in a handful of stories), before the production team had a change of heart and kept the character on. Even so it still feels an odd moment, a touch of brutal realism in a story that might be full of suicide attempts and existentialist dread but otherwise has a lightness of touch that makes you feel as if nothing bad is ever going to happen. The ‘steaming’ is also the one thing in the script that sounds like a metaphor that doesn’t seem to be, unless there’s a part of the tax form that passed me by. Usually Holmes is better at juggling the horror and comedy than this, but the scenes of Leela, of all people, looking as scared as we ever see her (give or take the cuddly giant rat in ‘Weng Chiang’) feel more than a tad uncomfortable.   

+ My favourite of the many many gags in this story: ‘These taxes, they’re like sacrifices to tribal Gods?’ ‘Well roughly speaking, though paying taxes is far more painful!’

- Leela is nearly killed in this story in a quite horrific way by being ‘steamed alive’ and it takes longer for the Dr to rescue her than feels strictly comfortable. In the working script she actually died at this point (Leela only being intended to be in a handful of stories), before the production team had a change of heart and kept the character on. Even so it still feels an odd moment, a touch of brutal realism in a story that might be full of suicide attempts and existentialist dread but otherwise has a lightness of touch that makes you feel as if nothing bad is ever going to happen. The ‘steaming’ is also the one thing in the script that sounds like a metaphor that doesn’t seem to be, unless there’s a part of the tax form that passed me by. Usually Holmes is better at juggling the horror and comedy than this, but the scenes of Leela, of all people, looking as scared as we ever see her (give or take the cuddly giant rat in ‘Weng Chiang’) feel more than a tad uncomfortable.