The Sun Makers

The first time I saw this story was at the Doctor Who Society at university. It was my first meeting and we were promised a classic. I never went to another. Since then, I have been baffled at the acclaim accorded to this story. It has been lauded as a 'clever satire', presumably by the same people who call The Curse of Peladon an allegory.

Robert Holmes starts by introducing some intriguing concepts- Pluto being terraformed and six artificial suns orbiting it- and then doesn't deliver on them. There is, in fact, no reason for the story not to have been set on Earth and we don't even get to see these artificial suns- a bit of a problem in a story called The Sun Makers. The idea of PCM, the anxiety inducing gas that is pumped into the atmosphere is a nice one, but is nothing like as fully explored in the script as it should be. We are then left with the basic story which has, strangely, been trumpeted as being about the tax system but seems to me to be a story about a populace living under authoritarian rule- call me crazy, but I find subduing a population with psychoactive chemicals in the air and making people who ask too many questions 'disappear' a slightly more serious abuse of human rights than people being charged too much for goods and services. I will not talk about the morality of a successful television writer moaning about his tax return- if I can overlook Don Houghton's appallingly rose-tinted view of Mao Zedong, I can easily overlook this. However, the tax satire aspect of the story is very badly done. There is the obvious point that the oppressive regime is a corporation, not a government. The only parallel to taxation that can be drawn is that of taxation prior to the industrial revolution- hardly satirical. There are so many aspects of the modern system of taxation that could have been examined- the way that trying to tax the rich means that they invariably find ways of avoiding it; the accountability that the tax levying authority has to the taxpayer and so on. Apart from the line 'probably too many accountants in the government' none of this is really addressed. There are no departments that swallow up money like a black hole and the jabs at bureaucracy are feeble. There are some reasonably amusing one liners, but a guard called the Inner Retinue and a 'P45 Corridor' do not make up for the lack of thought behind the story. Holmes's usual gift for characterisation seems to be absent, with characters either being stock reactive types or gross caricatures. Mandrell has signs of being interesting, but he abruptly changes personality half-way through, showing that this must have been an accident. The ending of the story is rushed and unconvincing.

Visually, the story is utterly dull. The set design is tepid and Pennant Roberts has no aptitude for action scenes. He does try to make some scenes interesting, such as having conversations between characters occurring on different levels. The costuming is either dull or, in the case of Gatherer Hade, silly. The lighting design seems to have only one aim, to make objects visible- these floodlit sets would not have been tolerated by the likes of David Maloney and Douglas Camfield.

The actors do they best they can with the script. William Simons gives Mandrell a real presence (and is seemingly the only non-middle class person on the planet!) and Richard Leech makes Hade interesting to watch, if not particularly subtle. Henry Woolf's performance as the Collector, however, is too comedic and his nasal voice is highly irritating. Tom Baker seems to be improvising half the time in a highly erratic performance and it is left to Louise Jameson to provide the only truly outstanding contribution. This is also K9's first proper outing and he is interestingly used exactly like a real dog- to attack and follow 'scents'.

This is, in short, eminently skippable. I certainly will do so, in future.

NEXT: Underworld