The Sun Makers

“A Tax is the Best Form of Defence”, “Songs of Praise the Company”, “Men Beingthrownofftheroof Badly”

“The One with the British Accounting Satire” (USA), “Доктор Котор и игра обложения” (France)

Doctor Who rebels and makes lots of other people rebel with him. 

*** - It is a cutting pastiche of George W Bush's taxation policy thirty years ahead of its time.

Cordo: 'Praise the BBC.'

Mandrel: 'Stuff the BBC!' (changed in the final script because radical political satire is one thing but teasing the BBC is somewhere between treason and insanity)

The Gatherer employs many forms of address for the Collector's pants, including not only 'your excellent pants' but also such gems as 'your magnificent pants, 'your sagacious pants' and 'your enormous pants'.

Michael Keating - who played the rebel Goudry would go on to play Batman in the film "Batman" (based on the long running comic "Batman").

The set and costume design owes a lot to Aztec influences. Examples of this include the sun god symbol in the Gather's office, the crested hat worn by Hade and the statue of William Hartnell drinking cocoa in the steam room.

Throwing the tax collector off the roof briefly became a national obsession in the weeks after The Sun Makers was broadcast. The government was forced to bring in emergency legislation which redefined "murder" to now include the killing of Inland Revenue staff.

The DVD will contain a special feature exploring Megropolis 3 with special emphasis on the corridors. In particular we will see how corridor P45 is linked to corridor P60 via corridors P46 to P59. The Restoration Team has denied doing this in order to spoil Holmes' joke about tax forms but an unnamed member of the team was seen having a drink with an unnamed Chancellor of the Exchequer and pocketing an unnamed quantity of treasury cash.

Contrary to popular myths this story didn't bring down capitalism.

...is that living on Pluto won't be as much fun as it sounds.

Si Hunt

I recall attending a function with the actor Michael Keating at which he expressed the following idea.

'I've always thought that Goudry was the prototype for Vila because...'

At this point I had absolutely no choice but to interrupt him.

'With Your Majesty's permission I would like to inform the honourable gentleman that he is being pathetically stupid. There is literally no evidence that the two fictional constructs were in any way related and that drawing parallels between the two without documentary evidence is beneath contempt. It is far more likely that Keating was chosen to play both roles because of a serious defect in his personality which made him instantly recognisable as a coward and a fool. I would go further and say that offering such highly offensive opinions in front of a personage as majestic as yourself should be considered treason as you may well be ignorant and stupid enough to repeat them at a social occasion and humiliate both yourself and your country. I literally don't care if you are revealed for the empty headed, inbred cretin we all know you to be but I do not wish to be humiliated by proxy when you repeat these flatulent remarks.'

Luckily, Keating is a bleeding heart liberal and appealed for me to be freed from the Tower of London so the story had two happy endings - I wasn't executed and I technically won the argument because his actions proved what I had said about his serious personality defect.

"The neoclassical endogenous growth theory is never more apparent than the way this adventure progresses" wrote Edward Spheres in the fanzine 'Hade the Sausage'. Elsewhere in the issue, Roger Payne wrote "By plotting the serial on a classical microeconomic supply and demand diagram we can see that initially the market was saturated with a demanded to know what would happen while the supply of explanations was scarce. The result would be that a video cassette of episode one would retail at well over £25. Eventually the supply of knowledge satisfied our demand and the story reached its natural equilibrium and it is therefore fair that the video of all four episodes costs £12.99".