The Sun Makers is one of the most radical Doctor Who stories. After three-and-a-half years of classic horror fiction with science-fiction trappings, suddenly Doctor Who does a comedy. A satirical comedy about the British tax system. Watching it, Who fans must have felt like Beatles fans placing the needle on Revolver, expecting more mop-toppy love songs and instead getting George Harrison whinging sardonically about paying too much tax. The Sun Makers is Doctor Who’s Taxman. It still follows the formula of reworking something as science-fiction, but this time the starting point isn’t an old novel on writer Robert Holmes’ bookshelf; it’s a brown envelope from the Inland Revenue on his doormat.
Interviewed in 1981, Holmes nominated The Sun Makers as one of his favourite Doctor Who scripts, because it gave him an opportunity to be satirical and include a larger-than-usual amount of humour. It has all his trademarks – florid dialogue, detailed worldbuilding and larger-than-life villains. Hade and the Collector are Dickensian grotesques – living versions of James Gillray caricatures – and the story’s large amount of ‘intertextuality’ [see Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983)] sometimes makes it seem more like Monty Python than science-fiction. But it demonstrated that social satire was another genre that Doctor Who could appropriate, paving the way for stories such as Vengeance on Varos (1985), Paradise Towers (1987), The Happiness Patrol (1988), The Long Game and Bad Wolf (both 2005) and The Beast Below (2010).