The Fun Makers

Ninety-Seventh Entry in the Charles Daniels Unauthorized Programme Guide
O' Crackers
Special Thanks to Robert Smith? for suggesting I not hurt everyone's eyes

Serial 4W - The Fun Makers -

 The TARDIS lands on Pluto.  The Doctor is suprised to find a
colony of humans there because the place absolutely sucks!
Why in the hell would humans choose to live on a dusty ice ball?
In his time he's seen people live in the most horrid environments,
even Milton Keynes hadn't prepared him for this possibility however.
The humans here are living under the light of several small artifical
suns cleverly crafted out of old coca-cola cans.

 The time-travellers prevent Cordo from committing suicide because
of his inability to pay the heavy unjust taxes requested by the
Happy Fun Time Whizzo Novelty Corporation.  The HFTWNC is rather
annoyed that this suicide was averted because they'd planned to
use the body in their special Halloween Creepy window display.
Cordo flees the arrival of The Bank Manager, and leads the Doctor
to an underground city.  In the city they meet members of a resistance
movement who spend their time making hilarious novelties which don't
kill people.  To convince it's hostile leader, Mandrel The Loony,
that he is not a spy the Doctor asks Mandrel to smell the flower
on his lapel and squirts water in Mandrel's face through the novelty
flower of his own design.

 The Doctor is sent on a mission to put a whoppee cushion on
the Bank Manager's office chair but is captured.  The powers
that be show themselves to be of almost no intelligence as
they immediately release him after a sentence of three pies to
the face.

 Joining forces with the rebels, after a mighty thorough towel off,
the Doctor leads them to capture the Silly Putty production complex.
A complex where not only silly putty, but comical glasses with
large noses and ridiculous moustaches, exploding cigars, and countless
cream pies, are manufactured.

 Leela is capture and condemned to be tickled to death by a strange
comic relief device.  Sadly the Doctor rescues her before they can
even turn it on.

 With cream pies in the hands of the masses at last, the citizens
rebel and kill the Bank Manager with repeated peltings.

 The Doctor confronts The Great Novelty Collector and learns that
he is a member of the incredibly silly Usurian race.  Unable to
repair the puncture the Doctor has created in his inflatable sheep,
the Usurian shrinks back to it's original form and is bottled as
"New Coke" by the Doctor.

Book(s)/Other Related - Doctor Who - Embrace The Cream (Canada Only)
                        Doctor Mysterio El Pie Crema' Planeterro!
     The Anarchist Home Repair Book - Because After You Use The Cook
                                      Book You'll Need This

Fluffs - Tom Baker seemed brassed off for most of this story
         The rather obvious line cover "I always did hate commuters!"
         "Don't you mean computers Doctor?"
         "Oh..yes..still, ever see a Computerised Commuter?
          They're worse!"

Fashion Victims - The Doctor chooses to wear comical glasses
                  for several scenes and looks just plain
                  weird for several scenes as he walks about
                  the city covered in pie gloop

Goofs - If the Happy Fun Time Whizzo Novelty Corporation only
        cares about money and customers buying things, why
        do they make their products so lethal?
        The Great Novelty Collector says that he is very proud
        to own a machine that goes "ping!"  In fact the machine
        goes "ping" constantly and pings over vital dialogue.
        You can also see a Car Park insignia and a Little Chef
        on the roof-top of the space city.

Technobabble - "Oh my god!  They're using pentocyleinicmethylhydrane!"
               "What's that?"
               "Does it matter?  The name alone is enough to scare
                the fuck out of me!"

Links and References -
The Doctor finds a comical paste on beard and drops mention
of the events of "The Beard of Evil" for no apparent reason.

Untelevised Misadventures -
The Doctor admits he used to abuse pentocyleinicmethylhydrane
during his academy days with The Bastard.

Dialogue Disasters -

Hade: Citizen Doc-tor. What an unusual name!
Doctor: Yes, especially for a jackass.
Hade: Indeed. There are so many Wurgs and Geeks in Megropolis Three
      that I sometimes wonder how my colleague, Bank Manager, manages
      to keep track of them all.

Cordo: Praise the novelty dead cat!
Mandrel: Stuff the novelty dead cat!

Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Who can I trust?
Mandrel: Skip and Johnson, they used to do the fake vomit and
         dog crap, our best men.

Novelty Collector: [As Leela is about to be tickled to death, with
microphones set up to broadcast her screams] 'This is the moment when
I get a real feeling of sexual satisfaction!'

Hade: To err is computer.
Doctor: My mind is the greatest computer ever devised.
Hade: What leads you to that conclusion?
Doctor: It errs constantly.

Dialogue Oddities -

(ORIGINAL SCRIPT)
The Doctor: Pentocyleinicmethylhydrane is one of the most dangerous
            and evil by-products of industrialized society!

(ON SCREEN)
Tom Baker: Man!  This is some good shit!

Viewers' Quotes -

"The story was so refreshing because it dealt with civil war and
in the end those alien bastards were ultimately responsible."
                        - Xenophobe Monthly, July 1980

"Fun?  FUN?!  I'll tell you what my son!  There's no fun for
you in the hot burning fires of hell!  Of course heaven is full
of pathetic religious saintly bastards, so it ain't no place for
you either.  In simple terms, it's damned if you do, and damned
if you don't.  So I do, and often!"  - Father James O' Maley (1977)

"Sherlock Holmes used a fairly cliched science-fiction backdrop - that
of a group of oppressed humans struggling to free themselves from the
tyranny of their alien masters - in this case the aliens were in
fact the UK tax system as administered by the Inland Revenue.
What this means is that ultimately we are ruled by alien overlords
who care nothing for the people they supposedly represent and
that any day now our brains will be sucked out of our heads by
straws.  I, for one, suffer from constant headaches while trying
to obey the UK tax system, so this will be a welcomed change."
                  - John Meldon, Xenophile Magazine, June 1981

"I hated this story, but then I hate most things."
                      - BBC Head of Drama (1978)

"This story does well to acknowledge cream pies, fake vomit and
feces, even a whoppee cushion gets an excellent showing - but
WHAT about the joy buzzer?  How the hell did they fail to mention
the JOY BUZZER?!  It's the very sort of oversight that makes us
question the quality of the loonies at the BBC these days!"
                      - The Loony Viewers Association (1978)

Psychotic Nostalgia -
"This stories' one big joke!  I usually don't like any jokes
but my own.  However most of my jokes involve auto-erotic
asphyxiation, I don't know why - it's just funny."

Tom Baker Speaks!
"AH!  This one was called Whizzo Novelty Incorporated!  Look at
K-9 in that scene there.  He's nothing more than an animated
shoe box!  HA!  Nothing at all like a children's hero at this point.
Still, as I would go on, and make friends with John Leeson, what
ever happened to poor John?  Yes, that's right, he was run over
by a big rig eighteen wheeler, smashed to death, poor bastard.
John and I, we were friends.  He was the force behind the children's
hero that was K-9.  The Doctor needed a pet, it made him more like
the children, which they loved, and so did I, very much so.
You see, he was my Tonto, my Robin, my sidekick, K-9 could
do things the Doctor could never do, like operate his nose as
a laser.  The writers didn't understand K-9 very often, they
never realised his full potential.  Only, I, and John, had a
real concept of how amazing K-9 could really be.  I wish I had
a K-9 around the house.  It would be so fun to have it stun
the postman."

Rumors & Facts -

 For much of his time as Doctor Who's script editor, Sherlock Holmes
had enjoyed unusual contract provisions which allowed him to freely
plagiarise other BBC programmes, randomly murder those whom he felt
had wronged him, and have the first choice at BBC orgies.
 Before leaving his post, Holmes elected to take advantage of these
clauses as often as possible!  Somehow in the meantime he also
finished a script for the season.  Holmes decided to write this
story for two ulterior motives: not only would it give Holmes
the opportunity to define the role of K-9 and work in some last
minute abuse of the annoying prop, but it would also allow him
to give his successor more stress than he could possibly imagine.
Holmes wrote the script especially to be difficult to film and
edit.  He felt anyone trying to actually make this script would
gain some quick experience on how hellish it was to work for the BBC.

 This successor was Marc Antony, a former BBC staff writer and
core member of a triumvirate that once ruled the Western world.
Antony, though married to Fluvia, lived in Alexandria, Egypt with
his mistress Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt. Fueled by a disgust at
his lifestyle in Egypt and anger over the wars caused by Antony's
relatives, Caesar called Antony home to Rome. Antony agreed, but
only after Fluvia died of an illness. Once in Rome, Caesar and
Antony tried to make amends through the marriage of Antony to Caesar's
sister Octavia.  Antony soon deserted Octavia, however, and returned
to live with Cleopatra.  Caesar, enraged, vowed to attack and regain
control of Egypt from Antony and Cleopatra.  Marc Antony, not even
trusting his own soldiers, decided to flee Egypt and relocate to a
flat in Reading.  Once established in Britain Marc Antony became a
producer who worked on shows like Troubleshooters and The Professionals,
and had once been a candidate for the script editor post on The Avengers.
Antony, a longtime acquaintance of both Sherlock Holmes and producer
Graham Williams, had indicated his interest in writing a Doctor Who
serial about past adventures in the Sumerian empire.  This lead to
his eventually becoming the programme's tenth script editor and part of
the triumvirate which ruled over Doctor Who at the time and several
small areas of asia minor.

 Holmes' story, The Fun Makers, was commissioned on April 30th, 1977.
This must have been a damned easy commission though!  Holmes largely
intended it to be an attack of the Inland Revenue service, with whom
he had some rather unpleasant experiences, mostly involving him not
filing since the reign of Queen Victoria.  This was much to the liking
of the director, Pedantic Roberts, but Williams ultimately forced Holmes
and Roberts to edit out several scenes in which various high ranking
members of government were decapitated by Mongols who happily sang
"Jerusalem" as they bore down on the political villains, sliced into
their chest cavities, and then ate of their blackened hearts.
Williams feared reprisals from viewers, politicians, and the Golden
Horde itself. Roberts, meanwhile, decided to fight back against what
he saw as Doctor Who's misogynistic tendencies, in a somewhat misguided
way, by casting female actors to play two of the main supporting
characters.  Unfortunately these were also the main supporting characters
who were constantly getting captured, tickled, and played practical jokes
on by the villains.  This casting method was a tactic Roberts would
continue to use in his later Doctor Who work with varying degrees of
failure.

 The Fun Makers was the first serial of Season Fifteen to be allocated
film. This was a great relief to all as before they had been trying to
record the stories on duct tape, audio casette tape, mouldy cheese, and
whatever other items they could shove into the recording equipment.
Originally, all material in the script was to have been enacted. However,
one of the script requirements were for a talking roof beyond which no
skyline would be visible. After visiting several tall buildings without
finding any of them suitable, that is to say none of them were very
chatty, production assistant Leon Arnold finally suggested they instead
make use of a roof which was large, if not particularly sociable.
The Imperial Tobacco Factory in Bristol was found to be ideal as they
were all given plenty of free fags whenever they filmed there, but this
meant that Williams had to sanction additional film to be used. Given
that he was under orders not to spend a single penny of the BBC's money
on Doctor Who, as some people had dared to in the past, Williams was
reluctant to allow this, suggesting that the scenes might instead by
achieved just by shoving some more slices of Tesco's own brand cheddar
into the camera.  In the end, a compromise was reached by which Roberts
agreed to complete all his studio material in just three days or else
forfeit his liver.

 The location shoot was the first time the K-9 prop had been in one
piece since it's introduction to the production.  Fortunately,
visual effects designer Peter Day took advantage of the extra repair
time to upgrade the machinery, most notably making the robot dog a
lot more sturdy and therefore not only able to take more brutal
kicking from the cast and crew but also to be slightly more
maneuverable to avoid the beatings in the first place.
Studio work finally commenced on Monday July 4th, and continued on
Tuesday the 5th and Monday the 18th. Unfortunately, some
overtime was required to finish up all the required scenes
so the BBC called in the agreement and viciously removed
the various internal organs which it had been promised.

 It was during production on The Fun Makers that Louise Jameson
started to beg Williams to let her leave Doctor Who.  She
insisted that she didn't want to still be working with Tom Baker
the following year, and in fact would like to leave the programme
as soon as possible. She suggested that Leela might be killed off in
an incredibly brutal and final fashion within the opening first
few frames of The Fun Makers.  During stunt scenes Louise Jameson
would break from the script and use opportunities to jump directly
in front of gun fire hoping that one of the cuts of this would be
used in the story.  In classic BBC tradition, Williams was able to
blackmail her into finishing out her contract and stay until the
end of the season.

  Most notably it is from this serial where at last we learn the
TRUE story of New Coke.