10 Doctor Who Moments You Didn't Get As A Kid (But Do As An Adult)

It's hard to imagine what the kids at home took from the 1977 Tom Baker serial The Sun Makers. Sure, it's a fairly traditional story of the Doctor and his companion liberating colonists from an oppressive regime, but what about all that stuff about death and taxes?

As a freelance writer, Robert Holmes was famously inspired by his own issues with the Inland Revenue, the agency which handled the collection of UK taxes at the time.

And so we get the villainous "Collector" with his "Inner Retinue" personal guards, and mention of a "P45 return route". The Collector himself is an alien from the planet Usurius, named after the term "usury", which relates to unusually high interest rates!

Doctor Who Magazine's Fact of Fiction feature on The Sun Makers also suggested that PCM, the anxiety-inducing drug used by the company to suppress the population, was a play on Per Calendar Month, another bit of tax-related punnage.

All the joys of dealing with taxes and the Inland Revenue would be far in the future for the kids plonked in front of the telly on a Saturday night, and so all of these puns and in-jokes wouldn't have been registered.

Meanwhile, their parents would've been utterly delighted by the image of the Collector being literally flushed down the pan at the serial's climax, all the while whinging about being bankrupt.