Doctor Who - The Sun Makers [DVD] [1977]

Good episode with sharp script. A dig at the tax system that is very poignant today too. Minimal BBC budget (cardboard guns), but well carried off...

This is my review as written for my blog: The Patient CenturionThe Sun Makers is brilliant. It might all be tower blocks, corridors & slightly over-large rooms with flashing lights but this is a work of Robert Holmes at his best.The script balances semi-regular peril for the main cast with adult cleverness, including sneaky references to P45's. (On the other hand you could argue it's a magnificent two fingers at HMRC written by a man facing a rather large tax bill)Basically The Doctor flexes his revolutionary muscles & brings down a rapacious corporate imperialist regime keeping the human race in tax slavery on Pluto in less time than it takes to cook a Christmas pudding. From the moment he & Leela prevent Cordo (Ray McReady) from throwing himself off the roof in despair at his inability to pay his father's death taxes the Doctor is rolling along in anarchist joy.Leela to, with her billigerent honour, gives heart to a people kept in slavery by a combination of ridiculous taxation, an atmosphere filled with a drug to keep people suppressed & the employees of the company desperate to drive profits.As usual a good script brings out some excellent performances but I think there are two highlights.Firstly, Richard Leech's pompous, obsequious & egotistical Gatherer Hade. Hade's a bastard child of all those Pertwee era bastions of smuggery that are the British Civil Service. It's a performance that borders on pantomimesque but stays mostly on the right side of ham. It is helped by his costume, which makes him look like a giant humbug.Secondly there is Henry Woolf's olegious Collector, who heads up the Company's operations. He's a nasty little squit. All chrome dome & gurgling. It's his voice, which reminds me a bit of Sil, that is the highlight. It's high-pitched & whiny. It's snide, nasty & when he needs to be pathetic. It's not naturalistic but pray how else would you play a sentient seaweed that's taken on human form.There's a lovely moment when he's confronting the Doctor where he reaches across a strokes Tom's voluminous curls that is beautifully timed.I should also note the appearance of Michael Keating as Goudry. Keating, of course, is better known as Villa in Blake's 7. Villa was always my favourite character in Blake's 7 so it's nice to see him here.What's great about a lot of the characters in this is the way their encounters with the Doctor & Leela seem to wake them up from their slumbers & get them ready for revolution. It helps of course when important parts of the infrastructure are looked after by two blokes. This being late 70s Doctor Who I'm afraid the baddies look shockingly understaffed.But the Doctor's a whirlwind of revolutionary leadership here interfering like it is going out of fashion.It's an eminently quotable script to, almost as witty as City of Death (but not quite & I must stop getting ahead of myself).This is also the first story that feels Graham Williamsy. There's less violence, less horror & more wit.I imagine at the time it was the sort of story fans whinged about for being 'silly', forgetting for that Doctor Who did virtually out & out comedy with The Romans or the Myth Makers.What it does do though is make one realise the importance of actors playing it straight. The Sun Makers works because everyone acts as if they are in something serious. The minute actors start playing silly buggers because the story seems silly is when things go to pieces.Anyway I could waffle on all day about this. I'm so looking forward to it coming out on DVD. I hope it is given the full treatment it deserves. It never really comes up high on the list of great Doctor Who stories this but it should do & it was even better this time round for me than the last time.In fact I could quite happily watch it again now.

One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bull pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us. He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business. Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc. But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits. Where do the profits come from? From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master. So, the state gathers and the Company collects. Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats. Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty.In 'The Sun Makers', the Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can. They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die. In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus. They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free...I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story and so I'm glad to finally see it on DVD. It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed. It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many. It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour. It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living. It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature.