Seasons in the Sun
The Sun Makers on DVD
Weren’t the 1970s great? British society was in ferment; the trade unions brought down the government; there were elections every couple of weeks; the political map was redrawn; and, perhaps most importantly of all, two television writers got very grumpy about their tax bill. Everyone got snippy about tax in those days; if you worked for the Inland Revenue and appeared on The Generation Game then you knew Bruce would stick the boot in and get cheers from a gleeful audience. Sean Connery didn’t even get to see his mate Bruce on the box in those days because he had to go into tax exile to avoid being relegated to the ranks of the merely mega-rich. Most of the well-off people of Britain grumbled about being squeezed until their pips squeaked. The television writers did that as well, but they also wanted to use the fruits of their trade to stick it to the man. In this case the tax man.
The first writer was Wilfred Greatorex, a vastly experienced dramatist with many programmes to his name such as The Plane Makers, The Power Game and Hine. His experience with the Inland Revenue, and particularly his frustration with the faceless bureaucracy he encountered led to the creation of his series 1990, a dystopian drama featuring a United Kingdom ruled over by a bureaucratic, statist and union-friendly government. It’s an interesting series, mainly because it’s coming from such a right-wing perspective that it was once described as “a Daily Mail reader’s rape fantasy”.
Clearly Greatorex had taken his brush with the tax office very seriously, but he was also just as concerned with the existing political situation (Labour in government amidst an uneasy backdrop of Trade Union power) and that informs the very specific politics of 1990. At almost exactly the same time, Robert Holmes had his oft-referenced scrape with the tax authorities, but his response was characteristic, and the programme that emerged, The Sun Makers, is a much more politically slippery, and most importantly, a much wittier response than Greatorex’s “Why oh why?” lament.
I won’t go through all of Holmes’ famous jokes that feature in The Sun Makers (P45, etc, etc) because, while effective, they are really just the obvious gags in a script that contains some of his most effective material. An example is the early scene featuring Gatherer Hade and Cordo; Holmes tells us all we need to know about the setting with Hades line “Compassion is a noble thing citizen…also costly”. In fact all of the scenes involving various permutations of Gatherer Hade, the Collector, Leela and the Doctor are so well-written and performed that the only problem is that they make the scenes involving the rebels (or Others), which are already a bit lacklustre, even more irritating as you wait for the action to swing back around to the stars.
As generally good as the story is, it’s certainly possible to see the seeds of the later Williams era in The Sun Makers. The Others are uninspiring, the sets and the guns are noticeably cheap, and there’s a corridor so long that it seems to be goading us into getting bored with it. The story sets a template for the future, the problem being that not many writers are as good as Robert Holmes, and have the wit to distract us enough so we don’t notice that not very much is going on.
Another irony of the story is that the stagflation hitting the economy at the time (plus the after-effects of Hinchcliffe’s Season 14 largesse) was crippling the programme’s budget leaving Graham Williams looking for change down the back of the sofa in the BBC Club for most of 1977. He was so desperate to avoid the expense of building sets that he readily agreed to let director Pennant Roberts do some exterior filming for the Pluto scenes on top of the Wills tobacco building in Bristol. Suffice it to say, the top of a fag factory on a grey day in Bristol does not resemble the surface of Pluto illuminated by the power of six suns. Aside from the fact it looks rubbish, I can think of wiser moves than taking Tom Baker to the main source of one of his then many vices. I’m only grateful that they didn’t film it on top of a brewery, although as it’s Pennant Roberts he probably couldn’t have organised that.
If you’re so inclined, you can have a lot of fun reading things into The Sun Makers. At the end of 1976, not all that long before Holmes wrote the story, the British government had to borrow a large amount of money from the International Monetary Fund. The condition of the loan was that the government abandoned their own economic policy, cut back massively on public spending and clamped down on pay settlements in order to bring inflation under control. Economic policy was no longer in the hands of the elected government, but instead the population’s pay packets, taxes and services were controlled by a powerful organization that lurked in the background.
But although it’s fun to draw the analogy, I think that The Sun Makers is a bit simpler in its political outlook. Some have reasonably argued that the story can be seen as coming from the right just as much as the left, but when the Doctor confronts the Collector at the climax of the story, and asks him straightforwardly: “Don’t you think that commercial imperialism is as bad as military conquest?” there’s not much room for doubt about Holmes’ message. He’s concerned with those powerful forces, particularly of commercialism (the Usurians are the baddies after all) that impact on the individuals in society. And in a typically wry touch by Holmes, at the climax of the story, the individuals are finally liberated only when the revolution is televised. He wasn’t entirely averse to the odd message himself.
Extras:
Running from the Tax Man is Thomas Guerrier’s film about the making of The Sun Makers, and it admirably covers everything you need to know about the story. Louise Jameson is the star of the feature, deservedly so as it’s her favourite story and she’s rightly proud of her performance. She reveals some of the conversations she had about the story with Robert Holmes which certainly indicate bureaucracy was more of a target than tax. The general background is covered very well indeed by the noted writer and historian Dominic Sandbrook, and to get him on the feature is quite a coup, especially as the political context for the story is so important. Michael Keating and the late Pennant Roberts make thoughtful contributions, and of course, Blake’s 7 makes its inevitable appearance. The only negative is that Henry Woolf is missing, although as he now lives in Canada, it clearly would have been difficult to include him. Overall though it’s yet another excellent feature from Thomas Guerrier.
Running from the tax man is one thing, but some of us have been running away from Brendan Sheppard’s work for what seems like decades. But thankfully his latest (last?) piece The Doctor’s Composer is just the lovely Dudley Simpson talking about the music he composed for Doctor Who. No-one could muck that up. The feature is the concluding part of the documentary that started way back on The War Games. Dudley takes us through his golden era from the dawn of the Pertwee era through to penultimate Baker season, and I could have listened to him all day. Two things stood out: his comment about his music being “atmosphere rather than tunes” (it’s certainly less dated than some later incidental music), and his reaction to being sacked by John Nathan-Turner. I won’t spoil the latter (it’s nothing earth-shattering) but it demonstrates how dedicated he was to the programme, and I’m particularly pleased that Sheppard gave some space for Dudley to talk about the large amount of work he continued to do after he left Doctor Who. I hope Dudley, like Kirk Douglas, ends up living forever.
Alongside these two main features is a solitary outtake, and the usual production notes and commentary. Jim Smith’s notes are as formidably comprehensive as we’ve rather blithely come to expect, and he is particularly entertaining (and mildly obsessive) on the confectionery used in the programme. The commentary features an exceptionally well-prepared Louise Jameson (less than five minutes in and she’s already chatting about Adrian Berry’s The Iron Sun), a completely-as-you’d-expect Tom Baker, and Michael Keating and Pennant Roberts drift in and out depending on the episode. It’s entertaining enough, and despite having heard so many of Tom’s commentaries it’s still hard not to laugh as Episode Three ends to the strains of him yelling “I’m coming darling! I’m coming, I’m coming!”. Unsurprisingly he’s very knowledgeable about cigarette factories. At times the whole experience becomes slightly odd what with Keating bantering along with Baker, while the scarily informed Jameson tries to steer them back on course. It’s like she’s swapped brains temporarily with Toby Hadoke. Good luck swapping back Louise.
The Sun Makers is released on Monday 1st August in the UK.
