Written
by Robert Holmes
There can be little
doubt that Robert Holmes was one of the great writers of the Classic era of
Doctor Who. Some people would even argue that he was the great writer of the Classic era. When Holmes got a bee in his
bonnet, it would almost invariably result in satire, liberally soaked with
lemon juice and not a little vitriol.
The Sun Makers is a
thing of satirical beauty, inspired by Holmes’s running foul of the Inland
Revenue and that most invidious of social necessities – the system of taxation.
Beauty, wit, deliciously waspish humour, but never let it be said that The Sun
Makers is a thing in which subtlety or multiplicity of viewpoint ever raise their
grubby storytelling heads. No, right from the outset, the world in which the
story will unfold is laid before the viewer in primary colours and broad
strokes. In the future, on Pluto, the workforce is held down by an oppressive,
ever-changing, ever-increasing tax regime, with local tax gatherers living like
kings off the sweat of the labouring classes, and the Collector at the heart of
the system, rigging it towards profits for his ‘company’ at the expense of
every human decency. The first scene paints the whole world for us – Citizen
Cordo, a D-grade worker, has been working double-shifts to raise the death
taxes to allow his father a decent funeral, only to find when he presents the
money that an unexpected tax hike means he will be trapped in a debt-spiral for
the rest of his increasingly miserable life. There is no way out of the spiral,
so he determines to kill himself and let the taxes be someone else’s problem.
The Doctor, Leela and K9
arrive just in time to stop him jumping off something high. In case the lack of
subtlety hasn’t sunk in by this point, the Doctor explains taxes to Leela, who
asks if it’s ‘like making sacrifices to tribal gods?’ ‘Similar,’ says the
Doctor, ‘only paying taxes is more painful.’ Using Leela’s savage background to
mercilessly drive home the point, Holmes has her declare that in that case, the
oppressed should rise up and slaughter their oppressors – very Citizen Smith,
‘Come the day of the Revolution’ stuff. But of course in Doctor Who, the
revolution is usually only four episodes away, and with the Doctor’s usual
conviction that some things in the universe ‘must be fought,’ it’s not long
before he, Leela and Cordo are meeting the underclass who have opted out of
society. Sadly, this is no Robin Hood and his Merry Men – rather it’s
Misanthopic Mandrel and his Cut-Throat Killers, planning a kind of less
sophisticated Ocean’s 11 operation to swindle ‘the Company’ out of millions of
credits. Holmes is, to be fair to him, just as savage in his appraisal of the
outsiders as he is in his spearing of the people happy to operate the
mechanisms by which the noses of the citizens are ground into the dirt. More by
virtue of being a stranger, and a potentially untraceable criminal – and even
more because the Merry Men threaten to kill Leela if he doesn’t agree – the
Doctor is roped into trying to obtain the fraudulent credits through the fairly
simple mechanism of asking for them with an ATM card (Bear in mind, this was
futuristic technology when The Sun Makers aired in 1977. Yes, really, my young
padawan). The attempt fails and far from simply swallowing his card, the ATM
envelops the Doctor in nerve gas, knocking him unconscious. (Don’t tell me the
Royal bank of Scotland wouldn’t try that if it thought it could get away with
it…)
From the moment of the
failed fraud, the Doctor is a figure of opposition to the Gatherers and the
Collector – in fact to the whole operation of the sun makers (Rather oddly, the
name of the story comes from the barely significant but still satirical fact
that ‘the Company’ are the firm who have installed miniature suns in orbit
around Pluto, allowing it to sustain life after the original sun goes supernova.
The idea of being taxed for sunlight is Holmes going just about as far as can
be imagined in the satirical vein, but as a concept, it’s barely mentioned
enough to be significant throughout the story). There’s a good deal of running
about – Leela, having defended herself against imminent throat-cutting, goes to
rescue the Doctor from a detention centre where he has been taken,
post-gassing. He’s already escaped, naturally, but she frees his detention-mate
Bisham, and the two, reuniting with Cordo and the gang, begin the revolution
almost by accident as they try to escape. Bisham is useful in that he knows how
order is maintained on Pluto – by means of a gas in the ventilation system
(Holmes perhaps inspiring Terry Nation there, with a pacified populace going on
to feature strongly in the control methods of the Federation in Blake’s 7).
Knocking that out allows the oppressed to wake up (as if from a fog of X-Factor
complacency and iPhone serenity) and realise they’re mad as hell and they’re
not going to take it anymore, and the revolution gathers pace to its
inevitable, bloody conclusion, with Gatherer Hade – the scumbag du jour played
with relish by Richard Leech as an example of all that’s wrong with a system
where taxes are more important than liberties and where mediocrity rises to
prominence and power (think George Osborne or Ed Miliband, depending on your
political preference, and then add a stupid hat) – eventually being thrown, in
a delicious moment of full circle ‘natural’ justice – off something very high
by a band of revolting citizens. Then all that’s left is for the Doctor to Do
Something Clever – which he does, introducing a hyperinflation loop into the
Collector’s computer projections. The shock of spiralling, uncontrollable,
inflation forces the Usurian (Yes, really. He’s a Usurian, from the planet Usurius,
running a planet based on usury – I did say
it wasn’t the most subtle of satires) to revert to his natural fungal form,
where the Doctor traps him, allowing Pluto to break free of the grip of the sun
makers. How it will fare in the grip of rampaging mobs of anarchists is a
question Holmes refrains from answering, as the Doctor and Leela slip away
quietly during the looting.
The Sun Makers, as we’ve
said, is not a subtle thing. It’s a sledgehammer satire on what happens when,
to quote the Doctor, there are ‘too many economists in the government’ – it
should be noted that for all the inferences that the sun makers are a private
enterprise, the Usurian Collector had bushy eyebrows that have been notably
compared to those of the Labour then-Chancellor, Dennis Healey, and certainly
it is by no means a privilege of the left, or the poor, to complain about high
taxation, so while being at the time a distinctly political rant in four
episodes, The Sun Makers is broad enough to be enjoyed at any time, by any
viewer. What’s more, it’s Holmes on fire, with director Pennant Roberts
matching the vision of oppression with a kind of almost stale, life-drained
look to the piece. Roberts and Holmes were also Louise Jameson’s dream team and
both Leela and K9 get plenty of chances to shine in The Sun Makers, adding life
and spark and comedy to a story that could easily have become a tedious lecture.
Both Richard Leech as Gatherer Hade and more remarkably Henry Woolf as the
despicable Collector, turn in performances that help make an essentially
hilarious idea seem more grittily serious than you might imagine, and guest
stars including Michael Keating before he was Vila (again, evidence of a thread
between The Sun Makers and Blake’s 7) help bring the piece to life in a way
that would for instance have been sorely needed after the downbeat scare-fest
of the previous story, Image of the Fendahl, and which would be rather lacking
in The Underworld, the week after The Sun Makers finished.
No comments:
Post a Comment