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)
'She Said, She Said' (One letter way from being 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)
'Got To Get You Into My Life' ('Nightmare Of Eden' 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 Dr Who. He’d written eleven stories over a nine year period, been script editor across three very 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. What was worse, in order to pay it he had to put himself through the sort of scrutiny and red-tape that was Holmes’ biggest bugbear, as he handed his finances over to strangers to be lectured on what did and didn’t count as expenses. It felt as if he was being mercilessly interrogated and still left him with a hefty bill to pay. So Holmes did what any writer would do in that situation: he went back to the production team asking for one last writing 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 attacking him. It’s the perfect Holmesian revenge, paying your way out of the system that’s been grinding you down by writing a story encouraging others to take up arms and revolt against it. We were used to seeing Holmes using the Doctor as his mouthpiece, writing wrongs against abstract bureaucrats and mechanical systems that had gone out of order, but there’s an extra level of disdain and cynicism in ‘The Sunmakers’ because this time it’s personal. Of all of Dr Who’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. More than any other story, this is Dr Who sticking it to ‘the man’ (well, the Usasrian anyway) and you’re right there with The Doctor cheering when he’s ordered to ‘praise the company and responds ‘stuff the company!!!’
It’s done with cleverness and joy as well as spite though. It’s such a clever idea setting a plutocracy on Pluto, the wealthy few in control of the poverty-stricken majority, used by the Usarians (a usurer, of course, being someone who lends money at an extortionate rate). We never find out why we’re so far from Earth (Gatherer Hade talks about ‘expansion policy’) but it somehow makes perfect illogical bureaucratic sense that we’re on a planet as far away from the sun as possible, where the workers for the faceless corporation known as ‘The Company’ have to pay for its upkeep through artificial suns out of their wages, for no particular reason (this planet is a rock). Why was it built there in the first place? That’s lost in the fog and confusing rules of a financial system too big and convoluted to stop and this is the kind of planet where the workers are too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads to ask. Nobody gets to see the sun they work so hard to maintain either: this is 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 taxes go up all the time until the only way to pay them off is to work until you’re dead – and they’ve just been raised again to the point where you know you’ll die before that happens. We don’t even find out what work everyone does, to make all of us at home feel that it could be ‘our’ jobs’, an equally pointless exchange of hard work for mere survival. The Usarians are Star Trek’s Ferengi a decade early, tiny greedy ugly and bald, and in their true form are a type of poisonous 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. Like the best Dr Who scenarios it’s not that much of a twist from reality: we already live in a society that taxes people even in death and sends debtors to prison where they can’t make money to pay off their bills, so having people be gassed for not being penniless and then broadcasting those deaths as a form of entertainment is sadly all too believable. There’s always the frisson of joy for fans when the Doctor – particularly the free-wheeling fourth Doctor – strolls onto a corrupt alien world and destroys the system, freeing the population. Never more than on this story though, when the Doctor 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 most Dr Who 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. The Doctor has always been a ‘Robin Hood’ figure helping maintain a sense of balance (making his rivalry in ‘Robot Of Sherwood’ when they could have been working together so strange) but he’s never more of a hero than here.
Some people say this
story isn’t very likely because the workers never question the system or point
out the contradictions in it, but where ‘The Sun Makers’ really works is how
scared everyone is, all the time, in each and every scene. They don’t talk
about it because they don’t trust the people around them: this is a society
where everyone is jumpy and for good reason. These people daren’t do anything
that might rock the system because they might not survive the punishments. Not
fulfilling your work shift, beginning to question society, it could all end up
in death but on this planet death isn’t a release, it’s a painful experience.
It speaks volumes that all the profits that could have gone to make life better
for the workers or give them some time off have instead been pumped into an
expensive machine that amplifies their pain receptors. The Gatherer, so scary
and fearsome when we see him overseeing the workers, is so terrified of his
boss The Collector that he uses a long range of grovelling titles for him
(Holmes getting out Roget’s thesaurus to look up variants of ‘sagacity’. Back
before the casting the Collector was huge and greedy rather than small and
weedy with lots of puns about his enormous size for good measure). The
Collector is so sadistic his office is built above the torture chamber so he
can hear the screams (in quadrasonic too, using four speakers!) Holmes, always
one for borrowing from sources, creates the Dr Who equivalent of George Orwell
here, with a Dr Whoified version of ‘1984’, with steaming a one-size fits-all
Room 101’ (particularly the scene where Bisham reveals that he was caught
stealing, not because he’d been seen but because people noticed he was happy at
cheating the system and figured that meant he must have done something wrong!)
Oddly few Dr Who stories have ever tacked anything similar – ‘The Macra Terror’ tried it but with
brainwashing; what Holmes does so well is show that it’s fear keeping people
trapped. Once The Doctor inspires them at the end they all eagerly join in
without a second’s thought, throwing the Gatherer off the roof to his death
(Holmes’ old friend Terrance Dicks, who’s politics were quite different,
changes this ending quite a lot if you only know this story though the Target novelisation).
Overthrowing capitalism?
Company bosses as sadistic murderers? The destruction of society? To say that
the production team were a bit alarmed by this story is an under-statement.
Holmes sold it to them as a rebellion story, of overthrowing a wicked regime,
but had neglected to tell anyone how closely the regime mirrored our own.
Panicked producer Graham Williams, worried he’d never work again, toned down a
lot of the excess jokes and the moments when Holmes’ cynicism had maybe gone
too far (the baddies originally had far more gruesome deaths!) He also changed
this from a story that attacked a government to a specific business (even if we
never find out what that is, because Holmes isn’t thinking that way), something
that causes a few problems in how this society is run (where are this company’s
rivals? Can’t these workers just work for the one that’s kindest?) Even so,
with director Pennant Roberts a willing participant, it’s impressive just how
far ‘The Sun Makers’ goes with its in-jokes if your eyes are open enough to
spot them. The tax collectors are from ‘The Inland Retinue’, the corridors that
lead to freedom are named after the ‘P45’ forms you got at the jobcentre for
signing on for unemployment back in 1977 (but the tunnels are such a maze you
get lost first, naturally), the ‘PCM’ gas that knocks everyone out are the
payments taken ‘per calendar month’ for tax purposes at the time, the ‘Consum-Card’
everyone lives off but where they never have enough is a giant Barclay’s credit
card, ‘Morton’s Fork’ refers to chancellor John Morton who once claimed that
everyone could afford to pay taxes even those with nothing and the fact The
Doctor doesn’t offer his usual jelly babies but ‘humbugs’ (i.e. a sham), while
the only Usurian we meet looks remarkably like the chancellor of the exchequer
in 1977, Denis Healey (complete with shaggy eyebrows), while the state
executions, carried out on workers who can no longer work or pay, see them
killed basically by a lot 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). There are lines that sparkle
with wit and rage, from the Doctor’s urge of revolt line ‘What have we got to
lose? Only our claims!’ taken wholesale from the Communist manifesto to the
Gatherer issuing not a warrant for arrest or an order to kill his enemy but ‘an
invoice for their erasure’. Even better are the moments when the Doctor 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 comparison of taxes to sacrifices to tribal Gods (the Doctor agrees but
adds taxes are ‘more painful’).
One of the things that
Williams did tone down were the original sets, intended by designer Tony
Snoaden to reflect Mexican propaganda and the sort of totalitarian regime that
didn’t allow the public who lived under them to speak. However I think the sets
are smarter than that: Snoaden picks up on that line about tribal sacrifices
and sun worship (even if they’re artificial power plants) and comes up with a
society of capitalist Aztecs, giving up their lives for the Gods who should be
looking after them. Most designers wouldn’t have been mart enough to make the
leap from Aztecs to capitalism but it workers really well. The Collector’s
office is stunningly opulent, full of Aztec art and exotic chairs of the sort
found in temples, while everyone else lives in corridors that are deliberately
drab and empty. The story was filmed for the most part in a tobacco company,
Wills Cigarettes in Bristol, chosen for its big flat wide roof. The production
team had been growing desperate to find one that didn’t also have a skyline
that would have given away that we were in the present day (ironically the only
one that looked right was the roof of their rivals at ATV, as used in Sapphire
and Steel’s third assignment); by chance production Leon Arnold spotted the
building on the front cover of a magazine, ‘The Architectural Review’. A lot of
fans complain at how drab it is, but that’s the whole point: it’s exactly the
sort of empty functional aesthetic-free building a posh architect knows full
well they’ll never have to live in themselves. The company did well out of the
arrangement too: they gave their workers an extended holiday complete with
annual sport’s day where Tom Baker was guest of honour where he wasn’t filming,
with a bigger attendance than usual, while several workers got to work as
extras. In fact the location filming this story is one of the best things about
it, with more filming taking place in Camden Subway, with the longest corridors
ever seen in Dr Who (so long we get buggy chases rather than running).
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 Dr
Who production team by this time!) A lesser writer might have turned the
drop-outs into the heroes compared to the unthinking sheep, but the unemployed
and unemployable are no happier. They bicker between themselves over the few
scraps they can get and spend far too much time fighting each other over small
fry to see the bigger picture of a revolution for everyone. At least the
workers have friends and a sense of power: these rebels live in the dark,
literally and metaphorically, while their harsh way of living means they don’t
even live as long as the workers do. They’re always living off their nerves,
assuming that everyone around them is after the little they have and that it
can be taken away from them at any time. You maybe have to be a writer to
realise how accurate this portrayal is!
Notably the Doctor
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’!) Holmes does this a few times in his stories
(notably the miniscope in ‘Carnival Of
Monsters’) but even more than his other Who stories this is meant to be for
the audience at home, to puncture a hole in the wall of what’s really going on
and encourage us to jump through it and join him. It’s Holmes at his most meta,
using his job designed as a form of control (television is a great way of controlling
how a population thinks, with shades of 1984 and ‘Big Brother’ again) to be a
form of freedom, of showing the way to those paying enough attention. Even The
Doctor can’t make this revolt on his own: he needs the people to see that they’re
free, to use the source of their oppression to deliver their freedom. This
revolution is for us as well as ‘them’ and very cathartic it is too if you’re
in on the jokes. However even if you aren’t, even if you’re too small to pay
tax and haven’t yet had enough growth spurts to understand growth and profits
then it’s all ambiguous enough to work as just another Dr Who story of greed
and corruption. A lot of fans complain this script is too ‘clever’ but it isn’t
just clever, it has heart too. Whatever your age or financial circumstances you
feel sorry for these poor people, anger at what they do to Leela and try to do
to The Doctor, outraged at the heartlessness of this regime and cheer on
as The Doctor takes on a foe that’s his size for once (metaphorically if not
physically).
Tom Baker is clearly in
on the joke and spends most of the story with a big smile on his face, enjoying
himself more than he has since Elisabeth Sladen left. While in other stories
his nonchalance can get in the way of the stories, as he breezes past baddies
as if they’re no threat at all, here it makes sense that 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). He’s at his best here, shouting down baddies
and breaking rules that have been in existence for centuries. Louise Jameson is
note-perfect as Leela too, the savage who’s more human, compassionate and
intelligent than anyone on this so-called civilised and advanced planet, who
thinks this very strange alien culture is beneath her. There’s a joke from
Holmes about her origins when the company name her a ‘terrorist’ (she was
partly named for Palestinian Leila Khaled). Holmes, having heard of the on-set
difficulties between the two actors, keeps them apart for the vast majority of
the story and yet the funniest might just be when they’re together (and The
Doctor accidentally hypnotises Leela). 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 recommended by director
Pennant after working with him on this, while 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 the most thankless part, Roy McCready as Cordo, who more than ever
before in Dr Who 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 Doctor’s talk of a different way of living.
Especially as he was
prepared to die, but has just been given
a new lease of life by The Doctor. Few stories are brave enough to show that
their systems have pushed people to suicide, but poor Cordo is torn because he
knows after death his debts will just get passed down. It’s a twist on the joke
of people spending money ‘because you can’t take it with you’ – these people
stay alive because to die means the suffering gets passed down to someone else.
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 who’s cheques bounced and couldn’t get
in to the next life). Leech’s Gatherer, meanwhile, is clearly based on Gilbert
and Sullivan (specifically The Mikado and Pooh-Bah the executioner, they even
have the same tailor by the looks of things!) and this is in many ways Holmes’
most Gilbertesque script, pricking the pomposity of upper class society,
showing the pointlessness of rules and regulations (so many Gilbert characters
do the thing they accuse others of or break it when it’s an obstacle to their
own happiness) and holding up a mirror to laugh at a society that’s lost sight
of what it’s doing and who it’s doing it for. Like many a Gilbert and Sullivan
work it’s so absurd we should be laughing, but instead we cry because there’s
no easy fix to change things bigger than we are. There are a lot of Gilbert
librettos where death isn’t the end of suffering too (see the ghosts of
Ruddigore especially, while The Mikado, for all its high comedy, has a plot
about execution). That’s terrifying: even in a series that gives us monster
after monster, that’s given us immortal Gods and powerful scifi technology, the
thought that of people being trapped in a situation where even death isn’t
release is powerful. There’s a really stern, desperate voice pleading for utopia
in many a Holmes script but ‘The Sunmakers’ is that voice at its rawest and
most vulnerable. People often miss it by spotting all the jokes but it’s there
alright: few Who stories are as bleak as this one until The Doctor comes along
and even he has more trouble than he usually does.
‘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 it’s 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, it’s all bleak and static, even when
the script is full of colour and life. Even that kind of works though: you’re
meant to feel oppressed, resentful of these poor people in their faded uniforms
who have clearly never seen the sunlight. By the end of four episodes though
it’s all just a shade too bleak though. I wish the story had made more of the
moment when the workers smash their way out of their prison to the real sky,
seeing the sunlight for perhaps the first time in their lives. It ought to feel
like a release, a return to nature, that never quite comes across. Indeed the
ending is the weakest part overall, as The Doctor’s solution, to fiddle about
with some computers and swap some currency around, makes sense in the context
of the story but isn’t the most action-filled finale we’ve ever had. There’s a
rather odd effect of The Collector shrinking in his chair, recorded at the last
minute on the last day, which is a little too obviously the camera panning out
while Henry Woolf whimpers on a chair.
There are a few other
problems. There are the usual scenes of capturing and escaping, with Leela
trying to release The Doctor but getting captured instead and going through
much the same setup that’s been explained to us once already. Usually Holmes
offers some humanity, some hope, but there’s little to be found until the
closing minutes of episode four and The Doctor leaves having just destroyed one
company: there are said to be several more. Won’t they fight back? Having two
baddies works in the sense that you almost feel sorry for The Gatherer when you
learn that he’s as trapped as anyone, but it means we effectively have the same
scenes twice over. It would have been nice to get to know the rebels ore:
Holmes is clearly having more fun writing for the baddies and in just four
episodes somebody has to get short shrift. More than that, this story is
scuppered by the very thing its fighting against as ‘The Sun Makers’ looks
cheap in a way that Dr Who actually rarely did despite its reputation, as if
everything her has been cobbled up for threepence. Despite the brilliance of
the ideas behind it, too much of this story is just badly dressed people arguing,
sometimes in a corridor, sometimes on the roof of a tobacco factory. There’s no
variety here – which is after all the point, but doesn’t make it the most
exciting story to watch. It would be
very in keeping for Dr Who 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, Dr Who 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 to finish the 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 who’s
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, as if the only thing that matters is
work and output. And we know from ‘The Krotons’
how passionate Holmes was about education, of learning things the ‘system’
doesn’t want you to know. Some reviewers see this story as a cheap joke, a
barbed attack on the hand that fed him, but Holmes is much smarter than that:
this is a story where people are so scared and brow-beaten that they’ve lost
their imagination and the thought that life could be any different. Writing an
imaginative story to solve a very Earthly problem isn’t silly, it’s brilliant
and exactly what this series is ‘for’, offering up an alternative to the tout
hod the day and telling them that their lives can be better than this. Equally other reviewers say this story is too
far down the road to comedy but it isn’t: no writer knew better than Holmes
that tragedy is just comedy without the jokes and there are enough serious
moments in this story that linger long after you’ve forgotten how the jokes
went, from Cordo’s very real despair (you don’t get to see many attempted
suicides on Dr Who) to Leela’s fright (you don’t see in this much distress
usually). This isn’t a silly story, it’s a serious one with lots of serious
points to make that just happens to have lots of cever jokes on top. Like Dr Who’s
other weirdest stories I wouldn’t want every story to turn out like this one,
but as a one-off it’s a delight, witty and fun in a way that no other Dr Who
script quite matches. I know some fans don’t get it and see this story
as being about as exciting as a tax return, but for me it’s Holmes at his
sharpest and most imaginative. Would that all tax returns were as much of a joy
to spend time with as this one.
POSITIVES + That they
were brave enough to make this story. I can’t stress this enough: no series, anywhere,
including those made entirely for adults was doing anything as cheeky or
subversive as this. I mean, they actually come out and say it, with the line
that ‘the grinding oppression of the masses is the only policy that pays
dividends’. Yes it gets diluted, with panic over some of the more out-there
moments, but even watered down this story packs one hell of a punch. It would
have been so easy to have turned this script down, or forced so many changes it
would have been toothless. Instead everyone is brave enough to go ahead with
what must surely be Dr Who’s most anarchic script.
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