Inspirations - The Sun Makers

Since he took over as Script Editor, Robert Holmes has written half a dozen stories himself. Half are in his own name, and the other half bear pseudonyms. One is credited to someone else, whose original script was virtually rewritten by Holmes. Of the remainder, many will have been heavily revised by Holmes.
It is no wonder, then, that this led to problems with the Tax Man. During Season 14 Holmes had written two stories (one third of the series) himself, whilst drawing his Script Editor salary, and this double income led to the Inland Revenue looking into his accounts.
By the mid-point of Season 15, which is what we have now reached, Holmes was ready to leave Doctor Who. He had intended to leave with Philip Hinchcliffe, but had been persuaded by Graham Williams to stay on for 6 months to ease the transition. Anthony Read had been shadowing him for some time. Ironically, Holmes' final story as Script Editor is one that he also wrote - and it is inspired by the tax problems arising from this very set-up.
What Williams wanted Holmes to write was a story about colonialism, but the taxation satire took over. On the face of it, The Sun Makers should be a bleak, dystopian serial, but it is full of black humour. Holmes was in a bit of an end-of-term mood, and he was urged to add more satire by the director, Pennant Roberts.

Holmes decided to set his story on the planet (as it still was then) Pluto. This is because he envisaged the society as being a plutocracy - a society ruled by a wealthy elite. The inhabitants of Pluto are people who originally came from Earth. They dwell in vast cities called a Megropolis, of which there are six. Being so far from the Sun, artificial satellites are required, and each Megropolis maintains its own - hence the story title. Holmes had just read Adrian Berry's 1977 book The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe Through Black Holes, which was about artificial suns.
The planet is under the control of an individual called the Collector, who works for some faceless intergalactic corporation known only as The Company. The Collector derives his title from the fact that his chief function is to collect taxation, and to increase the Company's profits. Under the Collector is an official known as the Gatherer, because he is the one who actually gathers the tax. The Collector's personal guard is known as the Internal Retinue - a play on Inland Revenue. One of the corridors in Megropolis One is designated the P45 route. A P45 is a tax summary document people receive on leaving a job. Another corridor is called TP1. This is another UK government tax document, relating to transfer of property.
Everything on Pluto is taxed - even death. It is his inability to keep up with the tax increases which lead a lowly D-Grade work unit named Cordo to contemplate suicide when he can't afford his father's death duties - by throwing himself off the roof of the city. He is saved by the arrival of the Doctor and Leela.
Cordo takes them to the undercity, where they fall into the clutches of a criminal gang led by a man named Mandrel.

The naming of the Plutonian cities as Megropoleis, where a wealthy elite live in the upper levels and everyone else toils beneath them, naturally makes us think of that classic silent Sci-Fi movie Metropolis. Directed by Fritz lang, it was released in 1927. In the film, the rich live in skyscrapers, whilst the mass of the poor live in an undercity. The work they must undertake is repetitive and monotonous and soul-destroying. The son of the city's leader discovers this world which is kept hidden from the elite, and falls in love with a young woman named Maria who is campaigning for a better life for the workers. Her crusade is corrupted when a mad scientist named Rotwang creates a robot duplicate of her and uses it to foment rebellion. Star Wars' C-3PO was directly inspired by the Maria robot. The Sun Makers's plot has little to do with Metropolis - but some of the imagery certainly derives from it, as well as the basic set up of the Megropolis society.
Holmes originally intended the Collector's race to be called Usurers, but Williams objected that this was a little too blatant an inspiration - so they became Usurians instead. Usury is the practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. The Romans were the first to introduce limits on what could be charged for loans, and later the early Church banned it outright for clergymen - later extending this to everyone. Jews were unable to practice many occupations and so were forced into work which others shunned - and this included moneylending. In Medieval England there were massacres of Jews in York and London - mainly means by which those who owed money no longer had to pay it back. A number of monarchs got out of debt by borrowing money, then promptly launching pogroms against the lenders.

Gatherer Hade's language is based on the sort of terminology you get in letters from the Inland Revenue. His costume was based on a humbug - a striped sweet whose name is also synonymous with hypocrisy and sycophancy. The Collector was given a pin-striped kaftan - inspired jointly by City of London bankers and rich Arab oil sheikhs. The Collector's defeat sees him revert to his natural form and slide down the plug-hole in the base of his mobile throne - suggesting liquidation (the selling off of a company's assets to pay off debts when it goes out of business). I'm no economist, but someone else has written that the Doctor's growth tax would not have had the effect it has here.
The designer had originally intended to base the Megropolis on Aztec themes, but only the Sun symbol remains of these initial ideas.
Pennant Roberts decided to change the gender of two male characters - something he regularly did on his Doctor Who stories. The Gatherer's assistant Marn, and the rebel Veet were scripted as male.
Louise Jameson was desperate to leave the show by this point, and it was seriously contemplated that Leela would be killed off in this story - apparently in the scene where she walks into the booby-trap guarding the Collector's vault.

With scenes set on the roof of the Megropolis to film, Roberts looked at a number of locations in London - but the horizon was always difficult to obscure. Roberts then realised that it wasn't necessarily a high roof he needed, but a very large one. This is why they went to the Wills tobacco factory in Bristol. The building also had a massive, featureless corridor linking two halves of the site, which became the P45 route.
Other location work included the Camden deep shelter, where the crew got locked in one night.
As Holmes was one of the first to know that K9 was going to be retained after The Invisible Enemy, The Sun Makers is the first story where the character is fully integrated into the plot.
Next time: Anthony Read is well named, if his tenure on the programme is any indication. He starts with a story inspired by Greek myth. It's written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, so there's sure to be a catchphrase...