Scanned and corrected by Dirk Gently- as usual. If you have some interesting books to be scanned (Finnish and Estonian preferred!), and they'd interest me as well, you can contact me. Don't forget the three letters: i-R-C! Sorry, no Email addy is possible. I had lots of probs scanning/editing this text, so it'd be great (if you are a DNA fan) if you sent me some greets in demoz/diskmags of yours, if you appreciate my effort to make this book available for you.
I recommend you keeping the file's Word format coz I've edited the text with Bold and Italic characters as well.
There were some TIFFs as well in the archive. COVER.TIF was the TrueColor TIFF of the cover. The other TIFFs were:
6.tif: the name (and the text) speaks for itself :) (600 dpi, BW 256, 20%)
DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID, commonly known as DNA, is the
fundamental genetic building block for all living creatures. The
structure of DNA was discovered and unravelled, along with its
significance, in Cambridge, England, in 1952, and announced to
the world in March 1953.
This was not the first DNA to appear in Cambridge,
however. A year earlier, on the 11 th March 1952, Douglas Noel
Adams was born in a former Victorian workhouse in Cambridge.
His mother was a nurse, his father a postgraduate theology
student who was training for holy orders, but gave it up when his
friends managed to persuade him it was a terrible idea.
His parents moved from Cambridge when he was six months
old, and divorced when he was five. At that time, Douglas was
considered a little strange, possibly even retarded. He had only
just learned to talk and, "I was the only kid who anybody I knew
has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide
open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on
inside, because there sure as hell didn't seem to be anything going
on on the outside!"
Douglas was a solitary child; he had few close friends, and
one sister, Susan, three years younger than he was.
In September 1959 he started at Brentwood School in Essex,
where he stayed until 1970. He says of the school, "We tended to
produce a lot of media trendies. Me, Griff Rhys Jones, Noel
Edmunds, Simon Bell (who wrote the novelisation for Griff and
Mel Smith's famous non-award winning movie, Morons from
Outer Space; he's not a megastar yet, but he gives great parties). A
lot of the people who designed the Amstrad Computer were at
Brentwood, as well. But we had a very major lack of archbishops,
prime ministers and generals."
He was not particularly happy at school, most of his
memories having to do with "basically trying to get off games".
Although he was quite good at cricket and swimming he was
terrible at football and "diabolically bad at rugby - the first time
I ever played it, I broke my own nose on my knee. It's quite a
trick, especially standing up.
"They could never work out at school whether I was terribly
clever or terribly stupid. I always had to understand everything
fully before I was prepared to say anything."
He was a tall and gawky child, self-conscious of his height:
"My last year at prep school we had to wear short trousers, and I
was so absurdly lanky, and looked so ridiculous, that my mother
applied for special permission for me to wear long trousers. And
they said no, pointing out I was just about to go into the main
school. I went to the main school and was allowed to wear long
trousers, at which point we discovered they didn't have any long
enough for me. So for the first term I still had to go to school in
short trousers."
His ambitions at that time had more to do with the sciences
than the arts: "At the age when most kids wanted to be firemen, I
wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I never made it because my
arithmetic was too bad - I was good at maths conceptually, but
lousy at arithmetic, so I didn't specialise in the sciences. If I had known what they were, I would have liked to be a software
engineer... but they didn't have them then."
His hobbies revolved around making model aeroplanes ("I had
a big display on top of a chest of drawers at home. There was a large
old mirror that stood behind them, and one day the mirror fell
forward and crushed the lot of them. I never made a model plane
after that, I was upset, distraught for days. It was this mindless blow
that fate had dealt me..."), playing the guitar, and reading.
"I didn't read as much as, looking back, I wish I had done.
And not the right things, either. (When I have children I'll do as
much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit
them if they don't.) I read Biggles, and Captain W. E. Johns's
famous science fiction series -I particularly remember a book
called Quest for the Perfect Planet, a major influence, that was.
There was an author called Eric Leyland, who nobody else ever
seems to have heard of: he had a hero called David Flame, who
was the James Bond of the ten-year-olds. But when I should have
been packing in the old Dickens, I was reading Eric Leyland
instead. But there you go - you can' tell kids, can you?"
Douglas was also an avid reader of Eagle, at that time
Britain's top children's comic, and home of Dan Dare. `Dan
Dare', drawn by artist Frank Hampson, was a science fiction strip
detailing the banle between jut-jawed space pilot Dare, his comic
sidekick Digby, and the evil green Mekon. It was in Eagle that
Douglas first saw print. He had two letters published there at the
age of eleven, and was paid the (then) enormous sum of ten
shillings each for them. The short story shows a certain
precocious talent (see page 6).
Of Alice in Wonderland, often cited as an influence, he says I
read - or rather, had read to me - Alice in Wonderland as a child
and I hated it. It really frightened me. Some months ago, I tried to
go back to it and read a few pages, and I thought, `This is jolly
good stuff, but still...' If it wasn't for that slightly nightmarish
quality that I remember as a kid I'd've enjoyed it, but I couldn't
shake that feeling. So although people like to suggest that Carroll
was a big influence - using the number 42 and all that - he really
was not. "
The first time that Douglas ever thought seriously about
writing was at the age of ten: "There was a master at school called
Halford. Every Thursday after break we had an hour's class called
composition. We had to write a story. And I was the only person
**************** Dirk: look at 6.tif! *************
EAGLE merry-go-round
EAGLE AND BOYS' WORLD 27 FEBRUARY 1965
SHORT STORY
"' London Transporrt Lost Property Office'- this is it," said Mr. Smith, looking in at the window. As he went in, he tripped over the little step and almost crashed through the glass door.
"That could be dangerous - I must remember it when I go out," he muttered.
"Can I help you?" asked the lost-property officer.
"Yes, I lost something on the 86 bus yesterday."
"Well, what was it you lost?" asked the officer.
"I'm afraid I can't remember," said Mr. Smith.
"Well, I can't help you, then," said the exasperated officer.
"Was anything found on the bus?" asked Mr Smith.
"I'm afraid not, but can you remember anything about this thing?" said the officer, desperately tryting to be helpful.
"Yes, I can remember that it was a very bad - whatever-it-was."
"Anything else?"
"Ah, yes, now I come to think of it, it was something like a sieve," said Mr. Smith, and he put his elbow on the highly polished counter and rested his chin oon his hands. Suddenly, his chin met the counter with a resounding crack. But before the officer could assist him up, Mr Smith jumped triumphantly into the air.
"Thank you very much," he said.
"What for?" said the officer.
"I've found it," said Mr. Smith
"Found what?"
"My memory!" said Mr Smith, and he turned round, tripped over the step and smashed through the glass door!
D.N.Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex.
who ever got ten out of ten for a story. I've never forgotten that.
And the odd thing is, I was talking to someone who has a kid in
the same class, and apparently they were all grumbling about how
Mr Halford never gave out decent marks for stories. And he told
them, `I did once. The only person I ever gave ten out of ten to
was Douglas Adams.' He remembers as well.
"I was pleased by that. Whenever I'm stuck on a writer's block
(which is most of the time) and 1 just sit there, and 1 can't think of
anything,I think, `Ah! But I once did get ten out of ten!' In a way
it gives me more of a boost than having sold a million copies of this
or a million of that. I think, `I got ten out of ten once. . ."'
His writing career was not always that successful.
"I don't know when the first thoughts of writing came, but it
was actually quite early on. Rather silly thoughts, really, as there
was nothing to suggest that I could actually do it. All of my life
I've been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all
writers I don't so much like writing as having written. I came
across some old school literary magazines a couple of years ago,
and I went through them to go back and find the stuff 1 was
writing then. But I couldn't find anything I'd written, which
puzzled me until 1 remembered that each time I meant to try to
write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
He appeared in school plays, and discovered a love of
performing ("I was a slightly strange actor. There tended to be
things I could do well and other things I couldn't begin to do. . .I
couldn't do dwarves for example; I had a lot of trouble with dwarf
parts."). Then, while watching The Frost Report one evening, his
ambitions of a life well-spent as a nuclear physicist, eminent
surgeon, or professor of English began to evaporate. Douglas's
attention was caught by six-foot five-inch future Python John
Cleese, performing in sketches that were mostly self-written. "I
can do that!" thought Douglas, "I'm as tall as he is!" [Although at first glance this theory may seem flippant, a brief examination shows that thc field of British comedy is littered with incredibly tall people. John Cleese, Peter Cook, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Adams himself arc all 6'5", Frank Muir is 6'6", as is Dennis Norden.. Douglas has often mentioned that the late Graham Chapman, at only 6'3', was thus four per cent less funny than the rest. .]
In order to become a writer-performer, he had to write. This
caused problems: "I used to spend a lot of time in front of a
typewriter wondering what to write, tearing up pieces of paper
and never actually writing anything." This not-writing quality
was to become a hallmark of Douglas's later work.
But the die had been cast. Adams abandoned all his
daydreams, even those of being a rock star (he was, and indeed is;
a creditable guitarist), and set out to be a writer-performer.
He left school in December 1970, and, on the strength of an
essay on the revival of religious poetry (which brought together
on one sheet of foolscap Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley
Hopkins and John Lennon), he won an exhibition to study
English at Cambridge.
And it was important to Douglas that it was Cambridge.
Not just because his father had been to Cambridge, or simply
because he had been born there. He wanted to go to Cambridge
because it was from a Cambridge University society that the
writers and performers of such shows as Beyond the Fringe, That
Was The Week That Was, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and, of
course, many of the Monty Python's Flying Circus team had come.
Douglas Adams wanted to join Footlights.
2
Cambridge and Other
Recurrent Phenomena
BEFORE GOING UP TO CAMBRIDGE, Douglas Adams had
begun the series of jobs that would serve him on book jackets
ever after. He had decided to hitchhike to Istanbul, and in order
to make the money to travel he worked first as a chicken-shed
cleaner, then as a porter in the X-ray department of Yeovil
General Hospital (while at school he had worked as a porter in a
mental hospital).
The hitchhike itself was not spectacularly successful:
although he reached Istanbul, he contracted food poisoning there,
and was forced to return to England by train. He slept in the
corridors, felt extremely sorry for himself, and was hospitalised
on his return to England. Perhaps it was a combination of his
illness with the hospital work he had been doing, but on his
arrival home he began to feel guilty for not going on to study
medicine.
"I come from a somewhat medical family. My mother was a
nurse, my stepfather was a vet, and my father's father (whom I
never actually met) was a very eminent ear nose and throat
specialist in Glasgow. I kept working in hospitals as well. And I
had the feeling that, if there is Anyone Up There, He kept tapping
me on the shoulder and saying, `Oy! Oy! Get your stethoscope
out! This is what you should be doing!' But I never did."
Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a
writer-performer (although at least four top British writer-
performers have been doctors - Jonathan Miller, Graham
Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman) and in part
because it would have meant going off for another two years to
get a new set of A-levels. Douglas went on to study English
literature at St John's College, Cambridge.
Academically, Douglas's career was covered in less than
glory, although he is still proud of the work he did on
Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet.
"For years Smart stayed at Cambridge as the most drunken
and lecherous student they'd ever had. He used to do drag revues
drank in the same pub that I did. He went from Cambridge to
Grub Street, where he was the most debauched journalist they
had ever had, when suddenly he underwent an extreme religious
conversion and did things like falling on his knees in the middle
of the street and praying to God aloud. It was for that that he was
thrust into a loony bin, in which he wrote his only work, the
Jubilate Agno, which was as long as Paradise Lost, and was an
attempt to write the first Hebraic verse in English."
Even as an undergraduate, Douglas was perpetually missing
deadlines: in three years he only managed to complete three
essays. This however may have had less to do with his fabled
lateness than with the fact that his studies came in a poor third to
his other interests - performing and pubs.
Although Douglas had gone to Cambridge with the intention
of joining Footlights, he was never happy with them, nor they
with him. His first term attempt to join Footlights was a failure
- he found them "aloof and rather pleased with themselves"
and, being made to feel rather a `new boy', he wound up joining
CULES (Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society)
and doing jolly little shows in hospitals, prisons, and the like.
These shows were not particularly popular (especially not in the
prisons), and Douglas now regards the whole thing with no little
embarrassment.
In his second term, feeling slightly more confident, he
auditioned with a friend called Keith Jeffrey at one of the
Footlights `smokers' - informal evenings at which anybody could
get up and perform. "It was there that I discovered that there was
one guy, totally unlike the rest of the Footlights Committee, who
was actually friendly and helpful, all the things the others weren't,
a completely nice guy named Simon Jones. He encouraged me, and
from then on I got on increasingly well in Footlights.
"But Footlights had a very traditional role to fulfil: it had to
produce a pantomime at Christmas, a late-night revue in the
middle term, and a spectacular commercial show at the end of
every year, as a result of which it couldn't afford to take any risks.
"I think it was Henry Porter, a history don who was
treasurer of Footlights, who said that the shows that had gone on
to become famous were not the Cambridge shows but subsequent
reworkings. Beyond the Fringe wasn't a Footlights show, neither
was Cambridge Circus (the show that launched John Cleese et
al), it wasn't the Cambridge show but a reworking done after
they'd all left Cambridge. Footlights shows themselves had to
fight against the constraints of what Footlights had to produce
every year. "
Douglas rapidly earned a reputation for suggesting ideas that
struck everyone else as hopelessly implausible. He felt strait-
jacketed by Footlights (and by the fact that nobody in Footlights
seemed to feel his ideas were particularly funny) and, with two
friends, he formed a `guerilla' revue group called Adams-Smith-
Adams (because two members of the group were called Adams,
and the third, as you might already have guessed, was called
Smith)". (Will Adams joined a knitwear company upon leaving university; Martin Smith
went into advertising, and was later immortalised as `bloody Martin Smith of
Croydon' in a book written by Douglas.)
As Douglas explained, "We invested all our money - $40, or
whatever it was - in hiring a theatre for a week, and then we knew
we had to do it. So we wrote it, performed it, and had a
considerable hit with it. It was a great moment. I really loved that."
It was then that Douglas made an irrevocable decision to become a writer. This was to cause him no little anguish and
aggravation in the years to come.
The show was called Several Poor Players Strutting and
Fretting, and this extract from the programme notes has the
flavour of early Douglas Adams:
By the time you've read the opposite page (cast and credits)
you'll probably be feeling restive and wondering when the
show will start. Well, it should start at the exact moment that
you read the first word of the next sentence. If it hasn't started
yet, you're reading too fast. If it still hasn't started, you're
reading much too fast, and we can recommend our own book
`How To Impair Your Reading Ability', written and published
by Adams-Smith-Adams. With the aid of this slim volume, you
will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing
within a very short space of time. The more you read, the
slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end,
which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought!
The following year Adams-Smith-Adams (aided in performance
by the female presence of Margaret Thomas, who, the programme
booklet declared, was `getting quite fed up with the improper
advances that are continually being made to her by the other
three, all of whom are deeply and tragically in love with her')
took to the stage again in their second revue, The Patter of Tiny
Minds. These shows were popular, packed out, and generally
considered to be somewhat better than the orthodox Footlights'
offerings.
Douglas considers his favourite sketches of this period to be
one about a railway signalman who caused havoc over the entire
Southern Region by attempting to demonstrate the principles of
existentialism using the points system, and another of which he
says, "It's hard to describe what it was about - there was a lot of
stuff about cat-shaving, which was very bizarre but seemed quite
funny at the time."
It was shortly after this that Douglas Adams gave up
performing permanently to concentrate on writing; this was due
to his continuing upset with Footlights, and specifically with the
1974 Footlights Show. As he explains, "It is something that
happened with Footlights that I still get upset about, because I
think that Footlights should be a writer-performer show. But, in
my day, Footlights became a producer's show. The producer says
who's going to be in it, and who he wants to write it, they are
appointed and the producer calls the tune. I think that's wrong,
that it's too artificial. My year in Footlights was full of immensely
talented people who never actually got the chance to work
together properly.
"In my case, Footlights came to us - Adams-Smith-Adams
- and said, `Can we use all this material that the three of you
have written?' and we said, `Fine, okay', whereupon they said,
`But we don't want you to be in it'."
As things turned out, Martin Smith did appear in the show,
(alongside Griff Rhys Jones and future Ford Prefect, Geoffrey
McGivern) but neither of the Adamses appeared, something that
Douglas Adams is still slightly bitter about.
Douglas was still hitchhiking over Europe, and taking
strange jobs to pay for incidentals. In another bid to get to
Istanbul, he took a job building barns, during the course of which
he crashed a tractor, which broke his pelvis, ripped up his arm,
and damaged the road so badly it needed to be repaired. He
wound up in hospital once more, but knew that it was far too late
for him to become a doctor.
In Summer 1974, Douglas Adams left Cambridge: young,
confident, and certain that the world would beat a path to his
door, that he was destined to change the face of comedy across
the globe.
Of course it would, and he did. But it did not seem that way
at the time.
3
The Wilderness Years
FOLLOWING HIS GRADUATION from Cambridge, Douglas
Adams began doing the occasional office job, working as a filing
clerk while trying to work out what to do with the rest of his life.
He wrote a number of sketches for Weekending - a radio show
that satirises the events, chiefly political, of the past week. Due to
his inability to write to order, and the fact that, although many of
his sketches were funny, they were unlike anything ever
broadcast on the show before, almost none of these sketches ever
went out on the air.
The Footlights show of that year, Chox, not only got to the
West End - the first Footlights show in a long time to do so-
but it was also televised (Adams remembers fondly the enormous
sum of $100 he was paid for the television rights to his sketches).
The show was, in Adams's words, "a dreadful flop", but a
number of former Footlights personnel came to see it.
Among them was Graham Chapman. Chapman was a six
foot three inch-tall doctor who, instead of practising medicine,
found himself part of the Monty Python team (he was Arthur in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Brian in Monty Python's
Life of Brian). At that time the future of Monty Python was
uncertain, and the members of the team were diversifying and
experimenting with projects of their own. Chapman liked
Adams's work, and invited him over for a drink. Douglas came
for the drink, got chatting, and began a writing partnership that
was to last for the next eighteen months. It looked like it was
Adams's big break - at 22 he was working with one of the top
people in British comedy.
Unfortunately, very few of the projects that Douglas and
Graham worked on were to see the light of day.
One that did - or nearly did - was Out of the Trees, a
television sketch show that starred Chapman and Simon Jones. It
was shown once, late at night on BBC 2, with no publicity,
garnered no reviews, and went no further.
"My favourite bit from that show was a lovely sketch about
Genghis Khan; who had become so powerful and important and
successful as a conqueror he really didn't have any time for
conquering anymore, because he was constantly off seeing his
financial advisors and so on - it was partly a reflection of what
one heard Graham muttering about the other members of Monty
Python. I was very fond of that sketch.(This sketch, rewritten into a short story, incorporatcd into the Hitchhiker's
canon and illustrated by Michael Foreman, appeared in The Utterly Utterly
Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book.)
"The second episode of Out of the Trees was never even
made, although there was some nice stuff in it. My favourite
sketch was called `A Haddock at Eton', about a haddock given a
place at Eton to show the place was becoming more egalitarian. It
got terribly bullied. Only it gets a rich guardian anyway, so the
whole exercise is rather futile."
While Out of the Trees was not exactly a success, The Ringo
Starr Show was even less noteworthy. It didn't even get to the
pilot stage. The show was to be an SF comedy, starring Ringo as a
chauffeur who carried his boss around on his back, until one day
a flying saucer landed and mistakenly gave Ringo the powers of
his ancestral race - the power to travel through space, to do
flower arranging, and to destroy the universe by waving his hand.
It would have been an hour-long American television special,
but the project fell through. Douglas remembers the show with
affection, and later salvaged one of his ideas from it in
Hitchhiker's: this was the Golgafrincham B - Ark sequence.
Other Chapman-connected projects of this time include some
work on the Holy Grail record, for which a sketch of Douglas's
was highly rewritten by various hands: in its original form it
concerned the digging up of Marilyn Monroe s corpse to star in a
movie...
Douglas also helped write ("nearly came to blows over")
parts of Chapman's autobiography, A Liar's Autobiography. He
co-wrote an episode of Doctor on the Go. It was doubtless his
(not particularly major) contribution to the record, and his two
walk-on parts in the last series of Monty Python's Flying Circus
that caused the original American promotion of Hitchhiker's, five
years later, to bill him as a member of the Python team. (For
completists, or people who are interested, Douglas played a
surgeon in a sketch that never gets started, and later, in a scene
where a rag-and-bone man is hawking nuclear missiles from a
horse and cart, Douglas was one of the squeaky-voiced little
`pepperpot' ladies, as the Pythons call them.)
It is worth noting at this point that Douglas had not really
earned much money. His $17-a-week rent was being paid from
his overdraft. He was not happy. The collaboration with Graham
Chapman, far from being the break it had seemed, was a failure
that left Douglas convinced that he was a 24-year-old washout.
The collaboration's collapse was due to many factors, including
Chapman's then troubles with alcoholism, Douglas's increaslng
lack of money, the uncertainties about the future of Monty
Python's Flying Circus, and just plain bad luck.
At about the time that Douglas Adams and Chapman finally
split up, Douglas was invited to Cambridge to direct the 1976
Footlights revue. In the past, the director s job had been to go to
Cambridge every weekend for two or three months, take
whatever show Footlights had roughly worked out so far, pull it
into shape and stage it professionally.
Unfortunately for Douglas, in the two years since he had left
Cambridge, the Footlights clubroom, which was the hub of the
society, had closed down and been redeveloped into a shopping
centre. Footlights had become homeless and dispossessed, and
had almost ceased to exist.
"Whereas in my year,1974, there were tremendous battles
and competition to get in, I wound up in 1976 knocking on
people's doors, saying, `Have you heard of Footlights and would
you like to be in the May Week Revue?' It was terrible. I got
some people - Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath from Who
Dares Wins, Charles Shaughnessy, who's now a daytime soap
heart-throb in America on a show called Days of Our Lives-
and the final show had some good bits, but they were few and far
between, and the whole experience was pain and agony. I had to
conjure something out of nothing. At the end of the show I was
completely demoralised and exhausted."
At this point, Douglas went to the Edinburgh Festival, with
John Lloyd, David Renwick and others, with a fringe show called
The Unpleasantness of Something Close, for which Andrew
Marshall was to write some sketches. The show made no money,
and Douglas's income for the year was now approaching $200.
His overdraft was nearing $2000.
With his flatmate, John Lloyd, he worked on a film
treatment for the Stigwood Organisation - an SF comedy based
on The Guinness Book of Records - which never got off the
ground, the attitude being, "Who was John Lloyd, and who was
Douglas Adams?" Together they also wrote pilots for a television
situation comedy to be called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs,
about two astronomers living in isolation together in a fictitious
observatory situated on top of Mt. Everest. ("The idea for that
was minimum casting, minimum set, minimum number of sets,
and we'd just try to sell the series on cheapness. That failed to
come to anything.")
While demoralised and very broke, Douglas answered a
classified ad in the Evening Standard and found himself a
bodyguard to an oil-rich Arabian family - a job which involved
sitting outside hotel rooms for twelve hours a night, wearing a
suit, and running away if anybody turned up waving a gun or
grenade. (So far as it can be established, nobody ever did.) The
family had an income of $20,000,000 a day, which cannot have
done much for Douglas's morale, although it provided him with
numerous anecdotes and another profession for the book jacket
biographies.
"I remember one group of family members had gone down
to the restaurant in the Dorchester. The waiter had brought the
menu and they said, `We'll have it.' It took a while for the penny
to drop that they actually meant the whole lot, the a la carte,
which is over a thousand pounds' worth of food. So the waiters
brought it, the family tried a little bit of all of it, then went back
up to their room. Then they sent out one of their servants to
bring back a sackful of hamburgers, which is what their real
obsession was. "
All of Douglas's attempts to persuade television producers
that a comedy science fiction series might not be a bad idea had
come to nothing. His overdraft was enormous. He couldn't pay
the rent. He had almost convinced himself that he was not and
never would be a writer, and that he needed a "proper job". It
was coming on towards Christmas 1976, and a highly depressed
Douglas Adams went to his mother's house in Dorset, where he
did not have to pay any rent, to live for the next six months,
coming into London as necessary.
He was a 24-year-old flop.
4
Gherkin Swallowing, Walking Backwards
and All That
JOHN LLOYD IS PROBABLY the most influential producer in British
comedy today. His successes include Not the Nine O'Clock
News, Black Adder, and Spitting Image. He was also associate
producer of the Hitchhiker's television series, and co-wrote
Episodes Five and Six of the first radio series with Douglas
Adams. He also co-wrote The Meaning of Liff with Douglas
Adams, of which more later.
Lloyd was a member of Footlights in 1973. He had intended
to become a barrister, but was infected by show business, and on
graduating worked as a freelance writer, and as a producer in
BBC Radio Light Entertainment.
He is a phenomenally busy man. I wound up interviewing
him for this book at nine o'clock one Monday morning at the
Spitting Image studios in London's Limehouse Docks, squeezed
into a crowded schedule while people with urgent problems
gestured at him from outside the glass partitions of his office.
"I knew Douglas, although not very well, at university. I was
at Trinity, Cambridge, while he was at St John's, which is the
next college along. Douglas did some of the unfunniest sketches
ever seen on the Footlights stage - according to the people in
Footlights. He'd do very long sketches. . . there was one about a
tree, I remember, and another about a postbox. He'd stand up at
these Footlights smokers and harangue the audience with these
long, rather wearisome sketches, which didn't go down at all well
in Footlights at that time, which was almost all singing and
dancing. "
And so he went off with Martin Smith and Will Adams and
they did two absolutely brilliant college revues, packed out, at the
same time I was doing the Trinity revues. (Footlights at that time
was a bunch of nancy boys - they had this awful club where
they'd all go and pretend to be Noel Coward; but when that got
knocked down to build a car park, Footlights became more
peripatetic, and it began to attract a broader spectrum of people.)
"It was thought - especially by Douglas - that the Adams-
Smith-Adams's revues were much better than Footlights' - and
indeed they were. There was one amazingly funny bit in the
interval where they told jokes very slowly to drive people out of
the audience into the bar.
"I'd met Douglas a few times at parties, but it was only when
I'd left university that I used to go and have lots of hamburgers
with Douglas in a hamburger bar called Tootsies in Notting Hill,
and we got to know each other extraordinarily well. We
eventually wound up sharing a flat.
"I was working as a radio producer and Douglas was doing
things like writing with Graham Chapman - an absolutely
bizarre experience, as they used to get phenomenally drunk.
Graham had a room in his house entirely devoted to gin: it was
just gin bottles (he later went on the wagon) that lined the walls,
and occasionally when I was working in BBC Radio I'd go up
there at lunchtime. They'd have a few gins before lunch, then
they'd go to the pub and do all the crosswords in every paper.
Then they'd, get roaring drunk, and usually Graham would take
his willy out and put it on the bar... it was quite entertaining.
"After work, I'd come back from the office, and usually
Douglas had had a very large number of baths and cups of tea and
eaten all the food, and we'd sit around and write in the evenings.
There were three of us sharing a house: my girlfriend, Douglas,
and me. I was fully employed, but Douglas was struggling rather;
he was very poor, and getting broker and broker, and his
overdraft was going up and up, and he was getting more and
more desperate. We had all these projects: Douglas and Graham
had written a treatment for a film of the Guinness Book of
Records, which fell through, so Douglas and I started doing it.
We did rather well - the Stigwood Organisation liked it, and
they invited us to come to Bermuda and discuss it, and we were
incredibly excited. It was dreadfully disappointing. We never
heard anything more from them, and we never even got paid for it.
"It would have been a science fiction thing, about a race of
aliens who were the most aggressive aliens in the whole universe,
who somehow got hold of a copy of the Guinness Book of
Records and who immediately came down to challenge the world
at wrestling and boxing and stamping on people's knuckles, that
kind of thing. And the United Nations (John Cleese was going to
be general secretary of the UN, I remember) agreed to compete,
but they wanted to do all the silly events, like gherkin-
swallowing, walking backwards and all that. So they had a
Guinness Book of Records Olympics, and the aliens won all the
sensible events, but lost at all the silly things.
"Then we decided to go and live in Roehampton. We were
very happy, until we started advertising for a fourth person to
share the house, and we had a succession of weird people.There
was one very bizarre person - one day we got back from work
to find he'd ripped up every carpet in the house (the house was
rented from a little old lady) and he'd thrown them out of the
window, as he said they were `smelly'. The last straw came when
we came home to find he'd chain-sawed the front hedge down
because, he said, it was untidy.
"At that time I was producing Weekending, and I was always
trying to get Douglas to produce stuff. At that time, I'd write lots
of quickies for all sorts of comedy shows, while Douglas
wouldn't. At the time, I thought he was wrong, I thought you
had to be able to do everything which I could, and he couldn't, or
wouldn't. I fitted in quite easily, and I got Douglas to write for
Weekending. He wrote a very funny sketch about John
Stonehouse, the idea being that he was pretending to be dead all
the time, but it just wasn't right for the show. It was very funny
but wrong.
"Then we went our separate ways.1 was a radio producer.
He was an unsuccessful writer. Anyway, we remained good
friends. But Douglas was at the edge of despair at that time, he
was absolutely broke (if he wanted a drink I'd have to buy it for
him). He had started applying for jobs in shipping in Hong Kong
and so on, as he'd totally given up on being a writer.
"And then Simon Brett came along..."
5
When You Hitch Upon a Star
"1976 WAS MY WORST YEAR. I'd decided I was hopeless at writing
and I'd never earn any money at it. I felt hopeless and helpless
and beached. I was overdrawn and in a bad way.
"In Hitchhiker's there's an element of writing myself back up
out of that. I was surprised and delighted to find a lot of letters
from people in the early days would say, `I was terribly depressed
and upset until I sat down and read your book. It's really shown
me the way up again'. I wrote it to do this for myself, and it's
seemed to have the same effect on a lot of other people. I can't
explain it. Perhaps I've inadvertently written a self-help book."
There are a number of people without whom Hitchhiker's,
at least in the form we know it, would never have appeared.
John Lloyd is one; Geoffrey Perkins another. But without
doubt, the most important is Simon Brett, who was, in 1976,
producer of a Radio 4 comedy programme, The Burkiss Way.
Simon Brett deserves more space than can conveniently be given
here: He's been a producer and director on radio and television.
He has written for radio and television shows as diverse as Frank
Muir Goes Into... and the cult show After Henry. As an author,
he is best known for his excellent mysteries, including the series
of murder mysteries starring Charles Paris (a lousy actor but a
great detective) which, with their accurate and incisive scrutiny of
life inside television, radio and theatre in Britain today, should be
compulsory reading for anyone interested in the environments
that Hitchhiker's comes out of; he has written a number of
humour books, and some notable pastiches, including his sequel
to Geoffrey Willan's and Ronald Searles's Molesworth books.
Brett had met Adams through John Lloyd, at that time a
junior radio producer himself, and felt, as he explained to me,
that, "Douglas was a talent without a niche. I'd encouraged him
to write for Weekending as he really didn't have any outlets for
his humour, but it wasn't his thing, it can be a restricting market.
Then I started The Burkiss Way for which he did a few sketches
- one was the Kamikaze Briefing, another was a parody of Von
Daniken, about the world being created by fluffy kittens in bow
ties singing `Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head'."
Brett had the wit to see that Douglas needed a show of his
own, rather than to try to cram his own strange talent into
someone else's format and on 4th February 1977 Douglas
travelled up from Dorset to see Simon, who wanted to know if he
had any ideas for a comedy show.
While Douglas had promoted the idea of a comedy science
fiction series to all manner of unimpressed television producers,
he had not even thought about it as a radio possibility, feeling
that radio was too conservative a medium ever to be interested in
science fiction. So, initially, the ideas he suggested to Simon were
very conservative. And then...
And then history differs. As far as Douglas remembers,
Simon Brett said, "Yes, those ideas are all very well, but what I
always wanted to do was a science fiction comedy." According to
Brett it was Douglas who suggested it, and he who agreed. It
doesn't much matter, really. The subject was broached, both were
enthusiastic, and Douglas went off to come up with an idea.
The initial idea was one that Douglas had had lying around
for a while: "It was about this guy's house being demolished and
then the Earth being demolished for the same reason. I decided to
do a series of six shows, each of which would deal with the
destruction of the Earth for a completely different reason.
"It was going to be called The Ends ofthe Earth. It's still not
a bad idea.
"But it was while I was tinkering with the story idea for the
first one that I thought, to give the story perspective there really
ought to be somebody on Earth who is an alien who knows
what's going on.
"Then I remembered this title I'd thought of while lying in a
field in Innsbruck in 1971 and thought, `OK, he's a roving
researcher for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. And the
more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be a promising
idea for a continuing story, as opposed to The Ends of the Earth,
which would have been a series of different stories."
Adams did a three-page outline for the first episode of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with an additional page of
future plans for the show (as can be seen, almost nothing remains
the same from the arrival in the Vogon hold onwards) (see Appendix 1). The
outline, with the name `Aleric B' crossed out and the last-minute
replacement. `Arthur Dent', written in above it went to the BBC
programme development group. Douglas was lucky in having
two allies in the group: Simon Brett; and producer John
Simmonds, the chief producer, who was, although fairly
conservative, a big fan of Douglas's Kamikaze Briefing sketch for
The Burkiss Way.
****************************************
KAMIKAZE
FX WILD FLURRY OF FLAMENCO MUSIC
WHICH CONTINUES FOR SOME TIME.
VOICE: Japan 1945
FLAMENCO RESUMES.
Japan!
FLAMENCO MUSIC CONTINUES. WE
VAGUELY SEE THE NARRATOR GOING
INTO THE BAND AND, FOR INSTANCE,
ATTACKING THE PIANO. JAPANESE MUSIC
STARTS RELUCTANTLY AND STOPS VERY
SOON.
VOICE: Thank you. Japan 1945. The war was moving into
its final stage. The Japanese nation was in a desperate
situation... I didn't say stop the music. (HE GOES
BACK TO THE BAND AGAIN.) Now look, what
is it? Is it the money, come on. (FLAMENCO
STARTS AGAIN.) No, flamenco won't do! What
do you mean the chords are easier? Look, we've got
all these Japanese instruments for you, why don't
you play something on this lot? (QUICK
FLAMENCO RIFF ON JAPANESE
INSTRUMENTS.) Alright, we're going to have a
chat about this. You lot (characters now on stage)
carry on.
SET CONSISTS OF A BENCH IN A BRIEFING
ROOM ON WHICH SITS ONE KAMIKAZE
PILOT WITH HIS GEAR AND HEADBAND
ON. ON THE BENCH ARE LAID OUT THE
HEADBANDS OF MANY OTHER
PRESUMABLY DECEASED KAMIKAZE
PILOTS. A COMMANDER STANDS TO
ADDRESS THE `MEETING ON WHICH SITS
ONE KAMIKAZE PILOT WITH HIS GEAR
AND HEADBAND ON. ON THE BENCH
ARE LAID OUT THE HEADBANDS OF
MANY OTHER PRESUMABLY DECEASED
KAMIKAZE PILOTS. A COMMANDER
STANDS TO ADDRESS THE `MEETING'.
COMM: Now, you all know the purpose of this mission. It is
a kamikaze mission. Your sacred task is to destroy
the ships of the American fleet in the Pacific. This
will involve the deaths of each and everyone of you.
Including you.
PILOT: Me sir?
CoMM: Yes you. You are a kamikaze pilot?
PILOT: Yes sir.
COMM: What are you?
PILOT: A kamikaze pilot sir.
COMM: And what is your function as a kamikaze pilot?
PILoT: To lay down my life for the Emperor sir!
COMM: How many missions have you flown on?
PILOT: Nineteen sir.
COMM: Yes, I have the reports on your previous missions
One thing that everyone involved in the creation of Hitchhiker's
is clear on is how definite Douglas Adams was on what kind of
show it was he wanted: how it would sound, what it would be.
(Another thing they are clear on is that he had no idea where it
was all going). But he was sure that it would be full of ideas, full
of detail, experimental - a `sound collage', unlike anything done
on radio before. Epoch-making. A milestone in radio comedy.
But first he had to write it.
This was not to prove as easy as it may sound.
Douglas Adams's introduction to the radio scripts book
gives an impression of this time, a period that he described as "six
months of baths and peanut-butter sandwiches". Six months
spent at his mother's house in Dorset filling waste-paper baskets
with sheets of half-typed paper, of relentless self-editing, of
depression. He would leave notes around for himself to find with
messages such as:
"If you ever get the chance to do a proper, regular job... take
it."
"This is not an occupation for a healthy, growing lad" and
underneath those notes, other notes, reminding him:
"This is not written after a bad day. This is written after an
average day."
After producing the pilot, Simon Brett had gone to London
Weekend Television, leaving Geoffrey Perkins in control.
Perkins, a 25-year-old Oxford graduate, had been rescued from a
life in the shipping industry by an invitation to come and work in
radio, and was the most junior of the Light Entertainment
producers. He knew Douglas vaguely, mainly as an
"embarrassment to the BBC at the time", but was interested
enough in the show to make a pitch for it, and, slightly to his
surprise, he got it. Possibly because no one else had much idea of
what the show was about, nor how to do it.
Geoffrey himself had no idea how to go about producing
Hitchhiker's, but was relieved to discover, over a meal with
Douglas before the second show, that neither of them knew what
they were doing. This made things much easier.
Douglas, for his part, was nervous of changing producers so
soon. But if on that second show (their first) they were wary of
each other, they quickly discovered that, as far as putting the
show together went, their minds worked very much on the same
lines, complementing each other, and working well together.
They also became good friends.
Was there anything that Douglas had panicularly wanted to
say during the first series of Hitchhiker's? "I just wanted to do
stuff I thought was funny. But on the other hand, whatever I find
funny is going to be conditioned by what I think about, what my
concerns or preoccupations are. You may not set out to make a
point, but points probably come across because they tend to be
the things that preoccupy you, and therefore find a way into your
writing.
"I wanted to - I say this in the introduction to the script
book - I felt you could do a great deal more with sound than I
had heard being done of late. The people who were exploring and
exploiting where you could go with sound were people in the
rock world - The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on.
"I had the idea of scenes of sound. That there would never be
a moment at which the alien world would let up, that you would
be in it for half an hour. I'm not saying we necessarily achieved
that, but I think that what we achieved came about as a result of
striving after that.
"We did spend an awfully long time getting the effects right,
and the background atmosphere, and morchestrating all the little
effects - the way Marvin spoke, and all that kind of stuff. It was
taking so long we were continually having to steal studio time
from other shows and pretending we were actually doing far less
than we were: there was no way we could justify using that
amount of time (time doesn't actually equal money to the BBC,
but it comes close - there's a complicated but dependent
relationship), so what we were doing was completely out of line
with what normally happens.
"As much as anything, we were actually having to invent the
process by which we worked, because nobody was doing multi-
track recording, electronic effects, and so on. We went about it
the wrong way at the beginning, simply because we didn't know,
and then, as we began to understand it, we evolved a way to do it.
It wasn't simply doing it the wrong way and finding the right
way, it was more dependent on when we were able to get bits of
equipment - we didn't have any 8-track recorders to begin with,
and the final version didn't come about until we had an 8-track
tape recorder. After a while, I took more of a back seat, because
everyone knew how to do it, but I was always there, just sticking
my oar in and making trouble."
Geoffrey Perkins tells a slightly different story, explaining
that, "Douglas was thrown out of the director's cubicle from
about halfway through the first series onwards, because he'd get
quite excited about putting bits and pieces into scenes. You'd just
finish a scene and he would say, `I've been thinking. . . we should
go back and do it again.'
"`Why?'
"`Because I think we should have something going Bloobledoo-
bledoobledooblebloobledoobleblob! in the background. . .'
"We used to mix the programmes and cut them down, which
wasn't a great way to do it because everything had music and
effects behind it. I started off in the early programmes asking
what we should cut, and he'd come back with a list of odd words
here and there (`the's and `and's and `but's and things) and we
couldn't do that. He'd say, `But there's nothing else I want to
cut!' In the end I stopped asking him. So I can come across as the
vandal of the programme."
Douglas Adams had found a natural foil in Geoffrey Perkins,
and the ideal Hitchhiker's producer. Perkins is currently nowhere
near as well known as he should be for his work as a writer-
peformer in Radio 4's seminal comedy RadioActive and BBC2's
KYTV. He is smaller than Douglas Adams, wears spectacles with
brightly coloured frames, and is a perfectionist. He was probably
the only Radio 4 producer who would spend two days simply
getting a sound effect right, and one of the few people who could
bully, exhort and cajole scripts out of Douglas, and get them
almost on time.
The show was something very different. In the past (and
today, for that matter) as a rule a radio comedy show is rehearsed
in an afternoon, recorded in front of an audience that evening,
then edited the following day before being broadcast. Not only
was Hitchhiker's not recorded in front of an audience (as
Geoffrey Perkins has pointed out, all they would have seen was
an empty stage, a number of actors hiding in cupboards, and
some microphone leads), it was put together with almost lapidary
detail, using (albeit in a somewhat Heath Robinson fashion) the
miracles of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, lots of tape, and
scissors.
Douglas Adams says of Perkins's role, "As producer on a
show of that kind, he was a very crucial and central part of it.
When I was writing the script, he was the person I would go and
argue with about what I was going to have in it and what I
wasn't. I'd do the script and he'd say, `This bit's good and that
bit's tat.' He'd come up with casting suggestiorls. And he'd come
up with his own ideas about what to do with bits that weren't
working. Like throw them out. Or suggestions about how I
could rewrite. I'd be guided by him, or by the outcome of the
argument.
"One of Geoffrey's strengths is that he is very good at
casting. In some cases, I had very specific ideas about casting, and
in other cases I had none. Where I had ideas we'd follow them or
argue, and I'd win or he'd win. When we were in production I'd
be there, but at that point it was very much a producer's show.
"The producer gives instructions to the actors, and generally
if you have anything you want to say, or suggestions or
disagreements or points you want to make, then you'd say it to
Geoffrey, and he'd decide whether or not to ignore it. Vary rarely
do you as a writer actually start giving instructions to the actors;
it's protocol. To be honest, I'd sometimes step over it, but you
can't have more than one person in charge. When I wrote the
script I was in charge, but when it was made, Geoffrey was in
charge, and the final decisions were his, right or wrong. But we
rapidly arrived at a working relationship there. Sometimes we'd
get very annoyed at each other, and sometimes we'd have a really
terrific time - it's exactly the sort of working relationship you
would expect."
Perkins says of his involvement with Hitchhiker's, " It's
really impossible to say how much involvement I had in the
story. We used to have meetings and talk grand designs - abortive
plots which never quite worked out. It's a blur of lunches. I
changed gerbils to mice because Douglas's ex-girlfriend kept
gerbils..."
The first episode casting had been done by Douglas with
Simon Brett, crucial casting since it involved the roles of Arthur
Dent, Ford Prefect and The Book.
The making of the series is covered so well by Geoffrey
Perkins's notes in the Original Radio Scirpts book that it seems
redundant to cover the ground again. (Go out and buy a copy of '
the book if you want to know what happened - you'll get two
introductions, lots of notes, and the complete texts of the first
two radio series. Well, almost complete. There are bits in this
book that aren't in there. But you've already got this book.) (This may prove problematical as the Radio Srripts book is currently out of print.)
The BBC were unsure what they had on their hands: a
comedy, without a studio audience, to be broadcast in stereo; the
first radio science fiction since Journey into Space in the 1950s;
half an hour of semantic and philosophical jokes about the
meaning of life and ear-inserted fish? They did the only decent
thing and put it out at 10.30 on Wednesday evenings, when they
hoped nobody would be listening, with no pre-publicity, and
expected it to uphold Radio 4's reputation for obscurity.
They were undoubtedly surprised when it didn't. After the
first episode was broadcast, Douglas went into the BBC to look
at the reviews. It was pointed out to him that radio almost never
got reviews, and that an unpublicised science fiction comedy
series was less likely to get reviews than the shipping forecast.
That Sunday, two national newspapers carried favourable reviews
of the first show, to the amazement of everybody except Douglas
and the listeners.
The series rapidly began to pick up a following, accumulating
an enormous audience chiefly by word of mouth - people who
liked it told their friends. Science fiction fans liked it because it
was science fiction(In addition to its other awards, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was placed second in the 1979 Hugo Awards for best dramatic presentation, losing to Superman 1. The awards were made at thc World SF Convention, held that year in Brighton, England. When the awards announcements were made, the crowd hissed thc winner and cheered Hitchhiker's. Christophcr Reeve, collecting the trophy, suggested that the awards had been fixed, whereupon a roar of agreement went up in the hall. It is a safe bet that if a few more Americans had heard of the show then it would have won); humour fans liked it because it was funny, radio fans got off on the quality of the stereo production;
Radiophonics Workshop fans doubtless had a great time ("They talk a lot about the `wizardry of the Radiophonies Workshop' but ninety-five pereent of the first series was natural sound. And I had no idea about sound... at the end of the fourth episode I had the most wonderful explosion- the whole episode built up to it. It sounded magnificent in the studio. Then when it was broadexst the compression hit it and cut most of it out" - Geoffrey Perkins.); and
most people liked it because it was accessible, fast, and funny.
By the time the sixth episode had been broadcast, the show
had become a cult.
While the first four episodes were written by Douglas on his
own, the last two were not. This came about in the following
manner: Douglas had sent off the pilot script for Hitchhiker's to
the Dr Who script editor earlier in the year, hoping to get a
commission out of it to do some scripts. The commission came
through; unfortunately, it came through at the same time that the
six episodes of Hitchhiker's were commissioned, which meant that
as soon as Douglas Adams had finished the first four episodes of
Hitchhiker's he had to write the four episodes of a Dr Who story,
The Pirate Planet.
As a result, he was facing deadline problems with the final
two episodes of Hitchhiker's; he knew how Episode Six ended,
but he had "run out of words". In addition, he had just been made
a radio producer. He turned to his ex-flatmate, John Lloyd, for
help.
Lloyd remembers: "It's odd, but Hitchhiker's was always
liked. That's the funny thing about it. It never had to struggle at
all. Douglas struggled to write it, though; it took him about nine
months to write the first four episodes. But everyone, from the
first day, thought it was great - and the department was very
conservative at the time. Anyway, after nine months Douglas was
getting desperate, as he'd caught up with the deadline (and passed
it, as is his wont) and they'd already started broadcasting. They
were already up to programme two or three, and finally Douglas
despaired.
"He rang me up and said, `Why don't you do this with me?
I think what Douglas had wanted was to prove he was a writer in
his own right. In the past he had done all this stuff and people had
said, `It's Chapman (or whoever)'. But now he had proved it.
"He'd just started on the fifth episode when I came in.
"I'd been working for a couple of years on a silly science
fiction book of my own, that had tons and tons of chapters, all
unconnected, and I dumped it on his lap and said, `Is there
anything here you think might make a scene or two?'
"So we sat in the garage I was using for a study at that time
and wrote the fifth episode together more or less line by line.
Things like the `three phases of civilisation' and the Haggunenon
Death Flotilla, who evolved into different creatures, we sat down
and worked it out word by word. It was actually incredibly
quick, although very painstaking. Then I was busy on production
for Episode Six, so although he used stuff I wrote for it, he really
put the whole thing together.
"The pressure was fantastic. We were writing it hours before
it was due to be recorded. (Later on, in the second series, things
got really silly: he was writing during the recording.)
"Having written the thing, that was more or less it, and it had
been great fun. As Douglas said, it was a tremendous relief for
him not to have to do it on his own, and we both enjoyed it, and I
didn't think that much about it. It was just a job, and we'd
written together before.
"By the broadcast of the first three or four episodes the place
had gone absolutely mad. I think six publishing companies rang
up, and four record companies (which is extraordinary with radio
- usually by the time you've done six series of thirteen episodes
people have just about heard of it). Hitchhiker's just went
whoosh! And Douglas and I were getting on tremendously well,
and were tremendously excited. When the first publisher called
we went out and bought a bottle of champagne. It was so
exciting. We were going to do the book together. And then
Douglas had second thoughts.
"He decided he had to do it on his own - he felt the first
four episodes were different in kind, and that the last two,
although enjoyable enough, didn't have the same sense of
loneliness and loss and desperation that characterises Hitchhiker's
in a funny way. Like Marvin, who Douglas says is Andrew
Marshall, but there is a big chunk of Douglas as well. The thing
about Hitchhiker's is the wonderful bittersweet quality he gets in.
The thing is terribly sad at certain points, it really means
something. And I think that he felt that the other two episodes
were light by comparison."
Douglas Adams's version of these events is essentially the
same: "After the Dr Who episodes I was absolutely wiped out.I
knew roughly what I wanted to do in the last two episodes so I
asked John if he'd help and collaborate, and we wrote together a
bit of the Milliways sequence and the Haggunenon section. And
then after that I took over and did the B - Ark stuff and the
prehistoric Earth stuff."
The Haggunenon sequence from Episodes Five and Six is
omitted from all later versions of the story (replaced by Disaster
Area's stunt ship), although it has been used in some of the
theatrical adaptations of the show.
Douglas Adams on the casting for the radio series:
PETER JONES
That was very curious. We didn't know who to cast. I
remember saying that it should be a Peter Jonesey voice, and
who could we get to do a Peter Jonesey voice? We thought of
all sons of people - Michael Palin, Michael Hordern, all kinds
of people. Eventually Simon Brett's secretary got very annoyed
hearing us talking on and on like this and not spotting the
obvious. She said, "What about Peter Jones?" I thought, "Yes,
that would be a way of achieving it, wouldn't it?" So we asked
Peter, he was available, and he did it.
Peter was extraordinary. He always affected not to
understand what was going on at all. And he managed to
transmute his own sense of "I don't know what this is about"
into "I don't understand why this happened", which was the
keynote of his performance. He's great to work with, a very
talented guy. He's never had the recognition he should have had.
He's terribly good.
He rarely met the other actors at all, because he'd be doing
his bits completely separately. It was like getting session
musicians in on a multi-track rock album, sitting alone in a
studio doing the bass pan.
STEPHEN MOORE
He was Geoffrey Perkins's suggestion. I had no idea who to
suggest for Marvin. A wonderful actor, absolutely brilliant. Not
only did he do Marvin so well, but whenever I had a character
that I didn't have enough clues about, or didn't know how it
should be played, we'd say, "Let's give it to Stephen and see
what happens."
Stephen would find the character immediately and would
make it really excellent. One of my favourite things that he did
was the Man in the Shack - I knew what the character said,
and why he said it, but I had not the faintest idea of how he
would sound or what son of a voice he would have.
MARK WING-DAVEY
The thing that made me think of him for Zaphod was a pan he
had in Glittering Prizes. He played a guy who was a film and
television producer who always took advantage of people and
was very trendy. He did that so well I thought he would be
good for Zaphod.
DAVID TATE
He was one of the backbones of the series. He can do any voice:
he could, if he wanted to, be a very successful actor. He's
deliberately chosen to be just a voice. He's remarkable. In
Hitchhiker's he played a large number of pans and always got
them spot on. He played Eddie, he played the disc jockey
`broadcasting to intelligent life-forms everywhere', he played
one of the mice, one of the characters in the B - Ark. We had
him there every week.
RICHARD VERNON
He's so funny. He carved himself a niche playing all sons of
grandfatherly elderly types - Slartibartfast in Hitchhiker's.
He's not actually as old as he appears. I originally wrote that
pan with John Le Mesurier in mind.
SUSAN SHERIDAN
It's funny, Trillian was never that well-rounded a pan. Susan
never found anything major to do with the role, but that wasn't
her fault, it was my fault. A succession of different people have
played Trillian in different ways. It's a weak pan and that's the
best I can say. She was a delight to work with.
ROY HUDD
He played the original Max Quordlepleen. He had to come into
the studio and do his bit all by himself. To this day he still
From mid-1977 to the end of 1980 it often becomes difficult to
disentangle what Douglas Adams was doing when. Even he is no
longer sure. But about the time that the first Hitchhiker's radio
series was broadcast, which was about the same time that The
Pirate Planet was recorded, Douglas was offered a job as a radio
producer in Radio 4's Light Entertainment department. He took
the job. As he explains, "I felt I had to do it, because I'd set out to
be a freelance writer, had one disaster after another, ended up
having to be supported by my parents and so on, and I thought,
`Well, here is someone offering me a solid job with a regular
paycheck, which may not be exactly what I want to do, but I'm
not showing any success in doing what I want to do, and this is
pretty close to what I want to do; I am in trouble and I will take
this job.' Also John Lloyd and Simon Brett had paved the way for
me getting the job offer, and I owed it to them.
"I started as a radio producer with Hitchhiker's going out
and Dr Who shortly to go out. Everybody who starts as a radio
producer has to start doing Weekending, so I produced
Weekending for a few weeks. As the most junior member of the
department I was getting all the bum jobs, like a programme on
the history of practical jokes which involved going out and
interviewing Max Bygraves and Des O'Connor. I thought, `What
am I doing here?' But a lot of people had put themselves out to
get me the job, and it was a staff job, not a contract job."
According to his contemporaries, Douglas tended to be a
slightly unreliable producer ("He tended to think you could go
on forever."), but even so it came as a slight shock to the
department when, after six months, he left to become script
editor of Dr Who. This, as Simon Brett commented, put quite a
few noses out of joint.
However, he returned to radio very soon after leaving it for
one final production job: the Radio 4 Christmas Pantomime (Footnote for Americans, who may not undersund how a pantomime can be performed on radio: this is one of those problems you're just going to have to learn to live with.). It turned out to be the project Douglas most enjoyed from that
time. It was called Black Cinderella II Goes East, and was co-
produced by John Lloyd. For no particular reason, it was written
and cast entirely from ex-Footlights personnel.
"It was an excuse for such an odd bunch of people - apart
from the obvious ones, we had John Cleese playing the Fairy
Godperson; Peter Cook playing Prince Disgusting and Rob
Buckman playing his brother, Prince Charming; The Goodies-
Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie - played
the Ugly Sisters; Richard Baker, who used to play piano in
Footlights, was the narrator; and John Pardoe MP, who was then
Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, played the fairy-tale Liberal
Prime Minister (on the grounds that you only get Liberal Prime
Ministers in fairy-tales); Jo Kendall played the Wicked
Stepmother. . . It was terrific, but for some reason the BBC and
the Radio Times gave it no publicity at all, and it was buried
without a trace."
After slightly less than six months, Douglas's first proper job
had come to an end.
8
Have Tardis, Will Travel
IT HAS ALREADY BEEN MENTIONED THAT, while Hitchhiker's was
still in the pilot stage, Douglas found himself with time on his
hands, during which he needed money and work.
"So once it looked like I had a finished script I thought
Where else can I generate some work? I sent the Hitchhiker's
script to the then Dr Who script editor, Bob Holmes, who
thought it was interesting and said, `Come in and see me'. This
was just as Bob, who'd been script editor there for a long time,
was on the verge of leaving and handing over to Tony Reed. So I
met the two of them and Graham Williams, the producer, and
talked about ideas. The one I came up with that they thought was
promising was The Pirate Planet, so I went away and did a bit of
work on it, and they thought it was promising but there was
something wrong. So I did more reworking and took it back, and
they still thought it was promising but needed more work, and
this was going on for weeks, and eventually the inevitable
happened..."
The plan had been to do some Dr Who work as a fill-in until
Hitchhiker's was ready to go into production, and the rest of the
Hitchhiker's scripts needed to be written. As a plan, this was an
abysmal failure.
At the end of August 1977, the six scripts for Hitchhiker's
were commissioned. Within the week, four episodes of Dr Who
were also commissioned. This was the start of a period of non-
stop work, confusion and panic that was to last for the next three
years.
The Pirate Planet was a less than successful story, which
managed to mix such elements as a telepathic gestalt of yellow-
robed psychics, a bionic pirate captain, a planet that ate planets,
and a centuries-gone evil queen imprisoned in time stasis, into a
bit of a mess. The plot elements had obviously been worked out
carefully, then edited down to the point of incomprehensibility
by the time they reached the screen. There were Hitchhiker's in-
jokes; there were some appalling performances; there was a
murderous robotic parrot. It was teeming with ideas, and might
have made a fairly decent six-parter.
Douglas Adams still has a soft spot for it, as he explains, "In
a way I preferred writing the Dr Who scripts to Hitchhiker's
because I would be made to get the plot straight first. In The
Pirate Planet, the plot was much more tightly worked out than
was apparent in the final show because it had to be cut back so far
in terms of time. But actually getting the mechanics to work at
that time I really loved, and felt very frustrated that a lot of that
didn't show in the final thing." Doubtless, if he ever did the
novelisation, he would put back those elements lost in the
television screening.
The Dr Who people were impressed enough to offer Douglas
a job as script editor. He had only just been given a job as a radio
producer. He did not know what to do: "I'd only just taken this
job in radio, and it seemed a pretty awful thing to do to leave
after six months and go to television. I got very mixed up about
that - I didn't know what to do. Various people gave me
conflicting advice - some people said, `This is obviously what
you must do because it's much more along the line of what you
claim as your strengths', and other people said, `You can't desert
radio immediately, just like that'. David Hatch said the latter to
me very strongly, because he was head of the department, and he
had given me the job.
"But I did take the job, and the next person to desert the
department was David Hatch, which made me feel a little better."
Remembering his experiences with The Pirate Planet,
Douglas assumed that the writing of the scripts and coming up
with the ideas was the responsibility of the writer, and that the
script editor's job was chiefly that of making sure that the scripts
arrived and were twenty-five minutes long.
"Then I discovered that other writers assumed that getting
the storyline together was the script editor's job. So all that year I
was continually working out storylines with writers, helping
others with scripts, doing substantial rewrites on other scripts
and putting yet other scripts into production. All simultaneously.
"It was a nightmare year - for the four months that I was in
control it was terrific: having all these storylines in your head
simultaneously. But as soon as you stop actually coping, then it
becomes a nightmare. At that time, I was writing the book,
script-editing the next series of Dr Who, there were the stage
productions of Hitchhiker's going on and the records were being
made. I was writing the second series of Hitchhiker's and I was
very close to blowing a fuse at the time. I was also doing some
radio production with John Lloyd. The work overload was
absolutely phenomenal."
The overload was also reflected in Douglas's dissatisfaction
with Dr Who at that time: "The crazy thing about Dr Who, one
of the things that led to my feelings of frustration, was doing
twenty-six episodes a year with one producer and one script
editor. It's a workload unlike any other drama series; if you are
doing a police series, say, you know what a police car looks like,
what the streets look like, what criminals do. With Dr Who, with
every story you have to reinvent totally, but be entirely
consistent with what's gone before. Twenty-six shows, each of
which has to be new in some extraordinary way, was a major
problem. And there was no money to do it with: in real terms Dr
Who's budget has been shrinking, but somehow or other you
have to deliver the goods. Twenty-six a year is too many. I was
going out of my tiny mind."
Douglas wrote three Dr Who stories, although only two
were actually screened (Four, if you count Dr Who and the Krikkitmen. See the chapter on Life, the Universe and Everything for further details.). The first was The Pirate Planet. The
second was The City of Death, co-written with Graham
Williams, the producer. The third is the legendary `lost' Dr Who
story, Shada (BBC Enterprises finally released all available material on video in 1992, accompanicd by the original script.).
The City of Death was broadcast under the departmental
pseudonym of `David Agnew', and was writcen in the following
circumstances:
"When I was script editor, one of our regular stalwart writers
(who we'd left alone as he was a reliable guy) turned out to have
been having terrible family problems - his wife had left him, and
he was in a real turmoil. He'd done his best, but he didn't have a
script that was going to work, and we were in deep trouble. This
was Friday, and the producer came to me and said, `We've got a
director coming on Monday, we have to have a new four-episode
show by Monday!' So he took me back to his place, locked me in
his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a
few days, and there was the script. Because of the peculiar
circumstances and Writers' Guild laws, it meant that it had to go
out under the departmental name of David Agnew. It was set in
Paris and had all sorts of bizarre things in it, including a guest
appearance by John Cleese in the last episode."
The City of Death, in contrast to Douglas's first script, was
an adult and intelligent script, in which little was redundant or
unnecessary. The humour is never forced, and it is obviously
being written by a Dr Who veteran, not a newcomer. In addition
to the cameo appearances of John Cleese and Eleanor Bron in the
last episode, it contains no less than seven Mona Lisas (all of
which are genuine, although six have `This is a fake' written
underneath the paint in felt pen), and life on Earth having been
created by the explosion of an alien space-ship (something the
Doctor must go back in time to prevent being prevented). It also
contains a detective. That Douglas still has high regard for this
story can be seen from the fact that certain plot elements were
reused in Douglas's first non-Hitchhiker's novel, Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency, as were some elements of Shada, a six-
part story that was abandoned half-way through the production
because of industrial problems (strikes).
"Once you get beyond a certain point it becomes more
expensive to remount the thing than it is to do the whole
production again from the word go. That's because when you are
casting, you're doing it from who's available - when you
remount, you have to cast the people you've already got, and this
becomes terribly difflcult."
Shada was a return to Cambridge for Douglas and the
Doctor, featuring a retired Time Lord whose TARDIS was his
study, and a book that held the secrets to the Time Lord prison
planet. The scripts for Shada (especially in early drafts) show an
amusing and intelligent show - although Adams's script is far
more comfortable with the temporal confusion of Professor
Chronotis than with the villains, or, indeed, the plot. (The
character of Chronotis, the retired Time Lord, is something else
that Douglas would resurrect for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency.)
Adams aroused resentment from many of the shows hard-
core fans, who criticise his stint as script editor for resulting in a
show that was too silly, self-indulgent, and more like a comedy
than Dr Who should be. Tom Baker's Doctor, even more than
Patrick Troughton's, was a cosmic clown, always ready with a
whimsical remark in the face of danger.
Adams disagrees with this: "I think it's slightly unfair. In the
things I wrote for Dr Who, there were absurd things that
happened in it, and funny things. But I feel that Dr Who is
essentially a drama show, and only secondarily amusing. My aim
was to create apparently bizarre situations and then pursue the
logic so much that it became real. So on the one hand, someone
behaves in an interesting, and apparently outrageous way, and
you think at first that it's funny. Then you realise that they mean
it, and that, at least to my mind, begins to make it more gripping
and terrifying.
"The trouble is that as soon as you produce scripts with
some humour in them, there is a temptation on the part of the
people making the show to say, `This is a funny bit. Let's pull out
the stops, have fun, and be silly.' One always knows as soon as
someone says that that they are going to spoil it.
"So those episodes of Dr Who weren't best served by that
way of doing the shows. I can understand people saying, `They
weren't taking it seriously', but in writing it I was taking it
terribly seriously. It's just that the way you make something
work is to do it for real. . . I hate the expression `tongue-in-
cheek'; that means `It's not really funny, but we aren't going to
do it properly'."
Douglas worked on Dr Who for fifteen months. During the
course of this time, he wrote the first Hitchhiker's book, the
second radio series, the theatrical adaptation, produced Black
Cinderella II Goes East, and acted as script editor, writer and
rewrite man for the Doctor. At the end of this time he had, much
to his and no doubt everyone else's surprise, not gone mad,
become prone to fits or to throwing himself off tall buildings. By
this time, Hitchhiker's was enough of a success for Douglas to
give up the only proper job he had held for more than a few
months.
So he did.
9
H2G2
SHORTLY AFTER THE HITCHHIKER'S RADIO SERIES first went on the
air, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd were approached by New
English Library and Pan Books, both prominent English
paperback publishers, about doing a book of the series. After
lunching with both of them, a deal was agreed with Pan; chiefly
because they liked Nick Webb, the editor who approached them.(Nick Webb left Pan almost immediately, embarking on a game of musical publishers that would take him, in traditional publishing fashion, around most major British paperback publishers.)
The book was to start out on an unhappy note. Douglas had
never written a book before, and, feeling nervous about it, had
asked John Lloyd to collaborate on it.
John had agreed. As he tells it: "I'd been working in radio
very hard for five years, and had gotten bored with it - I could
see myself a crusty old radio producer at ninety - so l was very
excited about the prospect of doing this book together. Then one
night we had rather a strange conversation. Douglas said to me,
Why don t you write your own novel?' I said, `But we're writing
this Hitchhiker's book together...', and he said, `I think you
should write your own.'
"The next day I got his letter saying, `I've thought about it
very hard and I want to do the thing on my own. It's a struggle
but I want to do it my own, lonely way.' It was the most fantastic
shock - as if the bottom had dropped out of my whole life.
We'd been trying to write together for so long that when this
letter came I simply could not believe it. Even the fact that he'd
written the letter at all seemed amazing, seeing that we went
down the pub every night, and, as Douglas was at that time a
radio producer in the office next door to me, we worked six
inches away from each other.
"Looking back, I can't see why I reacted like that. It seems
the most natural thing in the world for Douglas to have done it
alone and 1 don't think Hitchhiker's would have been the success
it was if we had written it together. I genuinely feel that.
"But at the time, I was shocked. I didn't speak to Douglas for
two days, and I seriously considered getting a solicitor, and suing
him for breach of contract. Then I met him in town a few days
later. He said, `How's it going?' I said, `You'll be hearing from
my legal representative'.
"Douglas was appalled! He thought I was over-reacting; I
thought he was insensitive. These are the kinds of things that start
wars. . .
"I saw an agent, and explained to him that we had agreed to
the contract, and on the strength of that I'd drunk a lot of
champagne, spent the money, and now wanted redress. My agent
phoned Douglas's and made some fantastic demand: he said he
wanted $2000 now, and 10% of Hitchhiker's in perpetuity, so
whenever the name The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was
used I'd get 10%. When he told me about this I was shocked - I
hadn't wanted anything like that!
"At the time everyone, even Douglas's agent, thought that he
was in the wrong. Even his mum. Then I ran into Douglas, and he.
said, `What are you doing?' I said, `You told me to get an agent!'
He said, `Yes, I told you to get an agent to write your own
bloody book - not to sue me for mine!'
"Eventually we did a deal, whereby I took half of the
advance, and that was the end of it.
"But we had booked a holiday in Greece that September to
write the book together, and I had nowhere else to go. So, despite
all that had happened, I went on holiday with Douglas. He stayed
in his room and wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and
I went down to the bar and the beach and had a good time.
Douglas showed me the first version of his first chapter, and I
read it, and it was a Vonnegut novel.I told him that, and he tore
it up and started again, and after that it started to come good. I
have always thought the books were the best bits of Hitchhiker's
by miles: you could see that they are so original, and so different
that it was obvious that he had made the right decision.
(A number of other things occurred on this holiday, the most
notable of which was the creation of what was to become The
meaning of Liff. But that will be told in its place.)
As Douglas explains, "It was very silly. On the one hand I
thought, `It might be a nice idea to collaborate', and on sober
reflection I thought, `No, I can do it myself'. It was my own
project, and I had every right to say, "No, I'll do it myself'. John
had helped me out, and been very well rewarded for the work. I
rashly talked about collaborating, and changed my mind. I was
within my rights, but I should have handled it better.
"You see, on the one hand, Johnny and I are incredibly good
friends, and have been for ages. But on the other hand, we are
incredibly good at rubbing each other up the wrong way. We
have these ridiculous fights when I'm determined to have a go at
him, and he is determined to have a go at me. So... I think it was
an over-reaction on his part, but on the other hand the entire
history of our relationship has been one or the other over-
reacting to something the other has done."
So Douglas wound up receiving a $1500 advance for his first
book. (He would get over five hundred times that amount as an
advance for his fifth novel.)
When the series had started, BBC Publications were offered
the idea of doing the book, and quite sensibly turned it down.
After the contracts were signed with Pan, BBC Publications
asked to see the scripts, since it had occurred to them that they
might possibly do a book of Hitchhiker s. On being told that Pan
had already bought the book rights BBC Publications asked
bitterly why the book had not been offered to them.
THERE HAVE BEEN THREE major productions of Hitchhiker's in the
theatrical world. Two of these have been successful. The other was
a disaster of epic proportions. It is somewhat unfortunate, in this
case, that the disaster is the one that got noticed. The first
production was put on at the ICA [Institute for Contemporary
Arts] in London on 1st-9th May 1979; presented by Ken
Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool.
`Staged' might be the wrong word for this production. The actors
performed on little ledges and platforms, while the audience, seated
on a scaffolded auditorium that floated around the ICA on air
skates, filled with compressed air, was pushed around the hall at
the height of 1/2000th of an inch by hardworking stage hands.
The 90-minute-long show was a great success.
Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters were on sale in the bar, and, for
the 80 people who fitted into Mike Hust's airborne seating
system, it was a great evening. Unfortunately, every hour brought
150 phone calls for tickets, all doomed to failure as the 640 tickets
for the show's run had been sold out long before it opened.
(Apparently an organisation with the same initials as the ICA, the
International Communications Association, got so fed up with
misrouted calls for tickets that they wound up closing their
switchboard for a week, and stopped Communicating.)
The reviews were unanimous in their praise. A typical review
from The Guardian having praised the costumes and hovercraft,
stated, "Chris Langham is an utterly ordinary Arthur... and is
thus a beautiful counterpart to the cunning Ford (Richard Hope),
the two-headed schizophrenic Beeblebrox (Mitch Davies and
Stephen Williams, as a space-age version of a pantomime horse
with two heads, two legs, and three hands) and the pyrotechnics
of Campbell's production." At the time it was announced that
they were hoping to revive the show "as soon as they could find a
hall large enough to accommodate a 500 seater hovercraft".
This was, it should be borne in mind, before the publication
of the book or the release of the first record, when nobody knew
how much of a cult success Hitchhiker's was or was going to be.
The next performance began life some 300 miles due west in
the Theatr Clwyd, a Welsh theatre company. Director Jonathan
Petherbridge had taken the scripts of the first radio series and
transformed them into a play, performed around Wales from 15th
January until 23rd February 1980.
Announced as the `First Staged Production of Douglas
Adams's Original Radio Scripts' the company would either
perform two episodes an evening, or, on certain long evenings, the
entire three hours of script in `blockbuster' performances, during
which `essential space rations' were handed out to the audience at
half-hourly intervals. (Not only did the bar sell Pan Galactic
Gargle Blasters, but the Coffee Lounge sold Algolian
Zylbatburgers.) The Theatr Clwyd performance was so successful
that they were offered the opportunity to take their production to
London's prestigious Old Vic Theatre. Unfortunately, by this
time Douglas had offered the stage rights to Ken Campbell, who
had decided to stage another production at the Rainbow Theatre
in London, a rock venue that seated 3,000 people, in August.
Douglas Adams, displaying perfect hindsight, says, "I should
have known better, but I had so many problems to contend with
at that time I really wasn't thinking clearly. The thing at the
Rainbow was a fiasco."
Douglas wrote additional material for the play (including the
Dish of the Day sequence in Milliways, which subsequently
found its way into the literary and televisual version of the show).
An article appeared in The Stage, the theatrical newspaper,
about the Rainbow production, in July 1980:
"A five-piece band backs the twenty-strong cast of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a musical (No, it wasn't a musical, although there was a backing group) based on the radio
series that opens at the Rainbow for an e week run on July 16th
1980. Production has a $300,000 budget, and the front of the
Rainbow will be redesigned as an intergalactic spaceport. Tickets
$5, $4 and $3.
"The foyer of the theatre is being converted into the control
deck of a spaceship, with banks of video screens, flying saucers
hanging from the ceiling, and possibly a talking computer to
advise passengers when the trip is going to begin. There will be
usherettes dressed like aliens - `Probably coloured green', says
co-producer Richard Dunkley - and a `space bar' selling
galactic-sized burgers and the now famous Pan Galactic Gargle
Blaster.
"One of the diversions will be rock musician Rick Wakeman
soaring down from the roof on a flying saucer and dressed like
the legendary Mekon, SF's most endearing little green man.
"This week workmen installed a vast revolving stage while
others completed a backdrop for the day the Earth gets
demolished.
"In California, the people who brought the Laserium to the
London Planetarium were devising a spectacular new bag of
tricks. Co-producer Philip Tinsley said, `This will be the first
show since Rocky Horror to appeal directly to young people'."
As the publicity for the show gained momentum a 25-foot
inflatable whale was thrown off Tower Bridge into the Thames,
and made almost no splash in terms of news. ("'The police were
very, very cross", said The Standard in the 3/4 of an inch they
devoted to it.)
Then the show opened.
In retrospect this may have been a mistake. Such descriptions
as "I cannot imagine a more tedious way to spend an evening
(Daily Mail), "clumsy without ever being cheerful" (Time Out),
"embarrassing" (Observrer), "never-ending and extremely boring"
(Standard) melt into insignificance when placed beside the actual
reviews, most of which dissected the show with fine and sharp
scalpels and left nothing wholesome behind. A fairly average
example of the put-downs was Michael Billington's in The
Guardian, which stated that, "What happens on the Rainbow
stage is certainly inchoate and barely comprehensible... Ken
Campbell has directed this junk-opera and I can only say he gave
us infinitely more fun in the days of his Roadshow when the
highlight used to be a man stuffing a ferret down his trousers."(The man who stuffed the ferrets down his trousers was Sylvester McCoy, later the seventh televisual Dr Who.)
What went wrong? A number of things. The length, for one.
The laser beams, sound effects and backing band for another.
What was almost universally acknowledged as appalling acting
for a third.
Douglas Adams explained it as, "The size of the Rainbow - a
3,000 seater theatre - and, because Hitchhiker s tends to be rather
slow-moving and what is important is all the detail on the way. . .
you put it in something that size and the first thing that goes out
the window is all the detail. So you then fill it up with earthquake
effects and lasers and things. That further swamps the detail and so
everything was constantly being pushed in the wrong direction
and all the poor actors were stuck on the stage trying desperately
to get noticed by the audience across this vast distance. If you'd
put the numbers we were getting into a West End theatre they
would have been terrific audiences - 700 a night, or whatever.
But 700 people isn't much when the producers are paying for
3,000 seats. So the whole thing was a financial disaster."
Ken Campbell, a man almost impossible to get hold of,
claimed the reason for the success of the ICA and failure of the
Rainbow was simpler than that. "In the ICA we put everybody
on a hovercraft. We just never found a hovercraft big enough for
the Rainbow", he told me in the shortest interview I did for this
book.(That was it.)
Four weeks into the run the show was in financial difficulties.
On 20th August The Standard reported co-producer
Dunkley as saying, "I think we should struggle on. The cast and
crew agree with me, and a certain number of them agreed to wait
for their money. We had a very negative press, and it wasn t
known at the beginning how many Hitchhiker's fans there were."
The next day, however, The Standard reported that, "Last night
the big musical (It wasn't a musical, honestly.) version of the cult radio show did not go on
and after playing at times to twenty percent capacity [ie. 600
people] its season has been ended three weeks prematurely.
Richard Dunkley reported that everybody concerned had lost a
lot of money, but it was impossible to say how much."
It is easy to be wise after the event, but it would appear that
the biggest mistake was that of trying to create a Cult Success.
You don't gain a cult following for something big and bold and
heavily hyped: a smaller, less flashy, less expensive production
might well have succeeded where the galumphing Rainbow
production failed.
As indeed, it has. Helping the fans and public to get over the
Rainbow disaster was the Theatr Clwyd production. It surfaced
again quietly a year later, and has been regularly and successfully
staged since. This production, which, alone of all post `79
versions includes the Haggunenon sequence, and indeed actually
has an inflatable Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, is uniformly
popular with critics and public alike, and will, one hopes, still be
revived and performed when the Rainbow fiasco has completely
been forgotten.
************************************************
FORD AND ZAPHOD: Zaglabor astragard!
Hootrimansion Bambriar!
Bangliatur Poosbladoooo!
ARTHUR: What the hell are you doing?
FORD: It's an ancient Betelgeuse death anthem. It
means, after this, things can only get better.
THEY START TO SING AGAIN.
THE COMPUTER BANK EXPLODES.
END CREDITS.
- alternative version.
************************************************
11
"Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping
Drivel..."
ON MONDAY, 21ST JANUARY 1980, at 10.30 pm, the second series
of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy went on the air. It was
heralded by a cover feature in the BBC television and radio
listings magazine, Radio Times - it is almost unheard of for a
radio programme to get such exposure, despite the name of the
magazine - and the five episodes were broadcast at the same
time every evening through the week.
This caused problems.
To begin with, as already detailed at length, in 1979 Douglas
was under a great deal of pressure as far as other work
commitments were concerned, and his normal tendency to put
off writing until the last deadline had safely passed was displayed
in full when it came to getting the scripts written. However, when
he had agreed to produce the second radio series, Geoffrey
Perkins had taken this into account.
Perkins went on holiday in September 1979, and before
leaving spoke to David Hatch, controller of Radio 4, about the
new series. Hatch wanted to know if they could have the second
series of Hitchhiker's ready to be broadcast in January.
There had already been a seventh episode of Hitchhiker's, the
`Christmas Special', recorded on 20th November 1978, and
broadcast on Christmas Eve. It had been recorded as a one-off,
but had basically taken the plot strands from the end of Episode
Six (ie. everybody was either stranded back in time with no hope
of ever returning, or had been eaten by a carbon-copy of the
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal), and had started them off in
a different direction, which involved Zaphod's mysterious quest
to find the guy who was running the universe. ("This Christmas
Programme was basically done by my moving into Douglas's flat.
He scribbled upstairs, and I was downstairs typing. That's how
we got that together" - Geoffrey Perkins.)
Fit the Eighth, the first episode of the second series, reunited
Zaphod, Ford and Arthur. Recording of the second series had
begun in May 1979, so Hatch's request for the show to begin in
January 1980 was not really that unreasonable. Geoffrey Perkins
thought it was a good idea: "We were working on them at a fairly
leisurely pace, and I said, `Yes'. We needed a deadline, or we
could have gone on till the crack of doom. I thought, `We'll have
made three episodes by then, and we'll do the rest of them over
the next five weeks.'
"Then I went on holiday. I came back to find David had done
a deal with the Radio Times - they would put us on the front
cover if all the shows went out in a week. It was madness, really."
The second radio series was onerous for everybody. For
Douglas Adams it was especially difficult: "I was terrified of
doing the second series, because the first time it was just me in
my own private little world writing this thing. Nobody expected
it to be any good. The second series, the eyes of the world were
upon me. It was like running down the street naked, because it
had suddenly become everyone else's property as well."
Due to the deadlines there was another problem: much of the
second series was a first draft. For the first series, Douglas had
written and rewritten, self-editing mercilessly. On the second
series, there simply wasn't the time. While Fit the Eighth had been
started on 19th May 1979, Fit the Twelfth was still being mixed
shortly before it was due to be broadcast, on 25th January 1980.
The recordings soon reached the point at which the cast had
caught up with the author: "They were recording part of the show
in one part of the studio, while I was in another part of the studio
actually writing the next scene. And this escalated to the point
where the last show was being mixed in Maida Vale about half an
hour before it was due to be broadcast from Broadcasting House.
At which point the tape got wound round the capstan, and they
had to take the tape recorder apart to unwind it, then get it onto a
motorbike to be taken to Broadcasting House. At one point, we
nearly sent them the first half of the tape, then we were going to
unwind the second half and get it down to Broadcasting House
before they had finished playing the first half. Geoffrey Perkins,
Paddy Kingsland and Lisa Braun all deserved medals for that!"
The reviews for the series were almost all excellent, despite the
fact that many of the reviewers had only heard extracts from the six
episodes (due to the fact that the bits they didn't hear hadn't yet
been mixed but no-one was going to tell the reviewers that...).
The only voice raised against the series came from Mr Arthur
Butterworth, who wrote to the Radio Times, saying, "In just
about 50 years of radio and latterly TV listening and watching,
this strikes me as the most fatuous, inane, childish, pointless,
codswallopping drivel... It is not even remotely funny."
The Radio Times cover feature was a source of satisfaction to
the cast and crew, but an irritant to Geoffrey Perkins, who felt
the article was abysmal and overwritten, and requested that
certain changes be made in it before it was printed "to prevent us
all from looking like idiots."
A discussion on Radio 3's Critics' Forum programme found
the panel of critics ranged between enthusiasm and bafflement.
Perhaps the most perceptive comment was that of Robert
Cushman, the chairman, who said "[Hitchhiker's has...] the sort
of effect that a Monty Python programme actually has, of making
everything that appears immediately after it on radio or television
or whatever, seem absolutely ludicrous. It does have that
marvellous cleansing thing about it."
The second radio series contained some excellent sequences,
some of which, like the body debit cards and the robot disco,
have not been repeated elsewhere. Other sections were unwieldy
and overly strung out: the shoe material, for example, which
correctly merited about half a page when it appeared in book
form. Overall, though, it was less successful than the first series;
something Douglas planned to sort out when he wrote the second
book.
12
Level 42
WHEN THE PAPERBACK OF The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
appeared, the last page, instead of carrying the usual
advertisements for other titles by the same publisher, carried an
advert that read:-
"DON'T PANIC!
"Megadodo publications, in association with Original
Records, brought (sic) you the Double L.P. of the radio series.
Fill out the form and send it off, with your cheque or postal order
attached..."
Despite the fact that it might well have meant the loss of
Chapter 35 (on the back of which the advert was printed), a large
number of people sent off for their mail-order copies of a record
called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
A number of record companies had expressed interest in
making the vinyl version of the show, following the radio
broadcasts. One company had already got an option on it, but,
since they were not doing anything with it, Original Records
stepped in and got the recording rights.
Geoffrey Perkins says of the first record, "It was very
difficult. We knew it was going to be a double album, but we
could not very well put half an hour on each side. So we sat down
and worked out - reluctantly - which bits to cut. I was very
happy with it. There were a number of things that were
improvements, like the voice treatments. And when Trillian says,
`Please relax...', and we put this lovely little tune behind it. The
infinite improbability sequence itself had only a fraction of the
elements that went into the same scene on the radio series, but it's
actually far more telling because they're clear. On radio we had
thought that if we threw absolutely everything in, it would come
out fascinating. Instead it came out a complete jumble - there
were bits of everything in it; people had left records around in the
studio from a previous show and we put a bit of that on, anything
lying around. But when we mixed it all together it was a jumble
and a lot of it was completely dropped. It was a definite
wankoff." The cast of the radio show was almost the same as that
of the record, although the late Valentine Dyall, radio's `Man In
Black', replaced Geoffrey McGivern as Deep Thought. (He was
also to play Gargravarr, with a similar voice treatment, in the
second series.)
Considering the record was only available by mail order, at
least initially, it sold amazingly well. Over 120,000 units were
sold in the first year, and it made a number of the music charts.
The cover was an expanded version of the Hipgnosis book cover,
including some entries from the Guide that have never appeared
elsewhere. The record essentially covered the first four episodes
of the radio series, edited down somewhat.
The second record, The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe, was slightly less successful. Geoffrey Perkins again:
"We all found the first record a very interesting experience. By
the time we got to the second record, it was less so (partially
because none of us had been paid for the first record).
"Now a lot of people like the second record, because it's
more definitive and much more complete than the first.
"Unfortunately that is because it is far too long on each side.
It's just a rough cut. We had decided to leave it a few days, and
come back and edit it with a fresh mind - I went up to
Edinburgh for the Festival, and when I came back, three days
later, they had rushed through the record and cut it! I felt it was
flabby, and I wanted to speed it up."
(Adams agrees: "The second record is (a) very long on both
sides, and (b) full of blah.")
Perkins is still a fan of the first record: "The nice thing about
doing the record was you stuck in bits that you knew people
could only pick up on the second or third time through. Whereas
the radio transmission had to be clear the first time."
In terms of plot, the second record is most similar to the last
two episodes of the TV series: the Haggunenon material is
missing, replaced by Disaster Area's stuntship.
The cover of the second record showed a yellow rubber
duck, presumably in deference to the B - Ark Captain's immortal
comment that one is "never alone with a rubber duck". As a
publicity stunt related to the duck theme, on the release of the
second record, the window of the HMV record shop in London's
Oxford Street was filled by a display that involved a bathtub
filled with twelve live week-old ducklings. The stunt, brainchild
of Original Records' director Don Mousseau, finished rather
earlier than expected when complaints were received from animal
welfare groups.
When released in the US the records carried the text of a
version of `How to Leave the Planet' (see Appendix IV).
The two albums were not the only Hitchhiker-connected
records, though. There were also two singles released by `Marvin
the Paranoid Android', Stephen Moore. These were:
`Marvin' ("Ten million logic functions, maybe more. They
make me pick up paper off the floor... You know what really
makes me mad? They clean me with a Brillo pad. A car wash
wouldn't be so bad... Solitary solenoid, terminally paranoid
Marvin...") c/w `Metal Man', about a spaceship out of control
trapped in a black hole, trying to persuade Marvin to rescue it. It
got a limited amount of airplay, and made it into the lower
reaches of the British charts.
`Reasons to Be Miserable' ("... give my brain a pain, very
little turns me on, Marvin is my name..."), a titular parody of the
lan Dury `Reasons to Be Cheerful', c/w `Marvin I Love You', the
story of Marvin's cleanout of old data tapes, discovering a love
message ("Marvin I love you, remember I'm programmed for
you..."), a weird combination of narrative over electropop and
fifties love song. This got a very limited airplay and didn't do
very much at all.
Douglas Adams acted as consultant on the songs, and when
asked about them plays a sweet lullaby on one of his many
guitars (Marvin's song from Life, the Universe and Everything,
with a tune by Douglas) maintaining that he always thought they
should have released that as a single. If the Life, the Universe and
Everything radio series ever gets made listeners may finally get to
hear it.
(A fairly complete listing of all the songs used in Hitchhiker's
can be found in the radio scripts book.)
13
Of Mice, and Men,
and Tired TV Producers
"AT PIRST, I WASN'T THAT INTERESTED in doing a visual version
of Hitchhiker's. But while I was working on Dr Who I began to
realise that we have an enormous amount of special effects stuff
which is simply not being used as it might be. If it turns out the
way I'm beginning to visualise it, I think it could actually look
very extraordinary."
- Douglas Adams,1979.
"The Hitchhiker television series was not a happy production.
There was a personality clash between myself and the director.
And between the cast and the director. And between the tea
EDDIE: Just trying to help. A little soothing music tuned to
your personal Delta rhythms?
MUSIC FLOODS THROUGH THE ROOM.
SOMETHING VERY NAUSEATING AND
SACCHARINE.
TRILLIAN: No thank you.
THE MUSIC STOPS.
EDDIE: A story? Once upon a time there were three
computers - an analogue computer, a digital
computer and a sub-meson computer. They all lived
happily in a complex three-way interface...
TRILLIAN LEAVES THE ROOM IN
IRRITATION.
EDDIE: Wait a minute... I haven't got to the really tiring
bit yet.
CUT TO TRILLIAN WALKING DOWN THE
DARKENED CORRIDOR. SHE IS GOING
TOWARDS THE BRIDGE. SHE PASSES
ANOTHER COMPUTER CONSOLE. IT
LIGHTS UP.
EDDIE: I can skip right on to the section where they try and
find a binary model for the ineluctable modality of
the visible. That's very, very soporific.
TRlLLlAN IGNORES THIS AND ENTERS
THE DOOR OF THE BRIDGE.
CUT TO THE INTERIOR OF THE BRIDGE.
THIS TOO IS IN SEMI-DARKNESS. A
COMPUTER CONSOLE LIGHTS UP.
EDDIE: Especially if I tell it in my slow... deep... voice...
(HE MATCHES HIS VOICE TO THE
DESCRIPTION, AND HIS CONSOLE LIGHTS
DIM APPROPRIATELY.)
TRILLIAN: Computer!
EDDIE: (BRIGHTLY AGAIN.) Hi there!
ALL THE LIGHTS ON THE BRIDGE LIGHT
UP SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THIS.
TRILLIAN WINCES.
TRILLIAN: Just tell me where we are, will you?
CUT TO MODEL SHOT, AS BEFORE, OF THE
HEART OF GOLD IN MOTION THROUGH
THE DIM SKY.
THIS TIME WE HEAR SNORING. NOT L.E. (Light Entertainment.)
SNORING, BUT DRAMA SNORING.
CUT TO ANOTHER SLEEPING CUBICLE.
THIS IS ARTHUR'S.
HE IS FAST ASLEEP.
HANGING UP ON ONE WALL OF HIS
ROOM ARE HIS CLOTHES, I.E. HIS
TROUSERS AND DRESSING GOWN.
THE PANEL AGAINST WHICH THEY ARE
HANGING LIGHTS UP VERY DIMLY. LINES
CRISS-CROSS IT. THEY ARE MEASURING
HIS CLOTHES. AFTER A FEW MOMENTS,
ANOTHER SUIT OF CLOTHES
MATERIALISES NEXT TO THEM. TH15 IS
FAIRLY CONVENTIONAL SCIENCE
FICTION GEAR, PROBABLY SILVERY.
CUT TO THE NEXT CUBICLE. FORD
PREFECT IS HAVING DIFFICULTY
SLEEPING BECAUSE OF ARTHUR SNORING
NEXT DOOR.
HE TURNS OVER. BECAUSE THE BED
COVERING IS VERY THIN SPACE BLANKET
HE IS FRUSTRATED IN HIS ATTEMiT TO
WRAP IT ROUND HIS HEAD TO KEEP OUT
THE NOISE.
HE PICKS UP HIS TOWEL FROM BESIDE HIS
BED AND PRESSES THAT AROUND HIS
EARS.
CUT TO THE NEXT CUBICLE CABIN.
THERE IS SNORING EMANATING FROM
HERE TOO.
WE GO CLOSE UP ON ONE OF 2APHOD'S
HEADS. IT IS FAST ASLEEP AND SNORING.
THE CAMERA PASSES OVER TO HIS OTHER
HEAD WHICH OBVIOUSLY CANNOT
SLEEP ON ACCOUNT OF THE SNORING OF
THE FIRST HEAD.
QUIETLY, THE DOOR TO HIS CUBICLE
SLIDES OPEN. TRILLIAN IS OUTLINED IN
THE DOORWAY.
TRILLIAN: Hey, Zaphod ?
ZAPHOD: Er, yeah ?
TRILLIAN: You know what you came to look for?
ZAPHOD: Yeah?
TRILLIAN: I think we just found it.
ZAPHOD SITS UP.
ZAPHOD: Hey, what?
TRILLIAN: You called it "the most improbable planet that ever
existed".
INTO OPENING CREDITS.
- Draft opening to Episode Three of TV series (never used).
*********************************************
The television version of Hitchhiker's begins with a computer
read-out of time remaining until the end of the world, while the
sun rises over a quiet English landscape.
The computer printout was faked; so was the English
landscape. What the audience saw was imitation computer
readout while a light bulb was lifted over a model of a landscape.
The ingenuity and the casual faking of something that seems so
natural exemplify the six television episodes of Hitchhiker's.
For many people the first, perhaps the only, exposure to
Hitchhiker's came from the BBC television series. Certainly it
was responsible, from its first airing in 1981 on BBC 2, for
millions of extra sales of the books.
The idea was first mooted in late 1979, by john Lloyd,
Associate Producer of the television series. He explains:
"I was in TV at the time of the TV show, and I had done one
series of Not the Nine O'Clock News, and I was looking around
for something new to do - I didn't know at that time that
NTNOCN was going to be the absurd success that it became, so I
was wondering what to do next, and Hitchhiker's was the
obvious thing - it had been a great success on radio, and would
obviously be great fun to do visually.
"Douglas and I had always been fascinated by science fiction.
Now this was before Star Wars and all that, we're still back in the
time when people said that science fiction would never get
anywhere commercially.
"Anyway, I wrote to my head of department saying, `There's
this great radio series, it would make great TV, it's just what I
want to do.' He told me he didn't know anything about it, so I
wrote him a memo saying what Hitchhiker's had done, and how
it had been nominated for a Hugo award, and how it had been
repeated more times than any other programme in history, that it
had been a stage show and a bestselling book... this huge long
list of credits. He said, `All right, let's give it a go', and he
commissioned the first script, which Douglas wrote.
"It was an extraordinarily good script. Douglas had done
what he did earlier with the books, which was to turn the radio
series into something which you would never know had been
based on a radio show. lt used the medium to the fullest. My boss
said that it was the best Light Entertainment script he had ever
read - he was that excited!
"As I remember, Alan Bell started off as director and I was
producer for the first episode, although it shaded into a co-
production as I didn't have much experience with TV budgeting.
But then the BBC went and scheduled the second series of Not
the Nine O'Clock News on top of the recording of Hitchhiker's.
NTNOCN was a real seven days a week job, and I couldn't do
both.
"I was really angry about it. I felt at the time like the BBC
felt that (as NTNOCN was beginning to get successful) they
didn't want the junior producer in the department (me) to have
two successes at once. So they used Hitchhiker's to give someone
else some work. I was really furious as I became perforce
`Associate Producer'. Which meant nothing. I didn't have any
clout at the BBC, being just a junior producer on attachment-
theoretically they could have sent me back to radio. I said I'd try
to keep an eye on the occasional recording and rehearsal, but
frankly I didn't have the time, and basically I had nothing to do
with the TV show.
"Alan Bell made a big point of this in the TV show, as when
my credit comes up in the titles it explodes and shoots off into
space...(It is true that John Lloyd's Associate Producer credit does explode during the end titles. However, according to Alan Bell, this is pure coincidence.)
"Really, the only thing I did on the TV series was writing the
original memo, and being in on a few early discussions to get things
moving, and the BBC corporate machinations booted me out."
Lloyd has mixed feelings about the director and producer of
the series, Alan J.W. Bell, and on how the television shows
eventually turned out.
"I didn't like working with Alan. He's one of this breed of
TV producers who... I'm not saying he isn't hardworking,
because he is, but he wouldn't ever run over time, or overspend.
He just wanted to get the job done. He's less interested in the
script or the performance than he is in the logistics of how the
programme gets made.
"In some of the rehearsals I attended actors were saying the
words in the wrong order, and mispronouncing them, and Alan
wouldn't correct them. He was much more interested in the
technical side - and technically he knew an awful lot. He was
very bold and brave on the technical side. Some of the actual
shots in Hitchhiker's are wonderful.
"But it didn't work for me as a comic performance, because
it wasn't being directed. They hadn't got old Perkins there; he's a
real nitty-gritty man, the sort who would spend hours getting one
sound effect right, worrying about the script and the attitude and
all that, things which Alan would see as trivial and irritating.
"I remember going to the editing of the pilot, and there were
some terrible edits, and I told Alan he had to go back and do it
again, because it just didn't work. His attitude was, `We haven't
got any time - we've got to go on.'
"Personally, I think Hitchhiker's on TV was not all it could
have been. If it had been done properly it would have won all the
awards. And the only evidence there is that it was a really original
show are the computer graphics. Reading the scripts you'd think
`Suddenly television has gone into the 1990s. This is unbelievable!'
But then, most of the performances and filming were nowhere
near as good as, say, Dr Who.
"Alan is not a great original mind. Douglas is.
"To give Alan Bell credit, it was a difficult job to do
logistically, and you can't Belgium with TV the way you can with
radio - the way Geoffrey would keep going till the last minute
and keep actors hanging around while stuff was written. You
can't do that with TV - there's a limit. There does have to be a
grip on things which Douglas, well... I've co-produced things
with him on radio, and he does tend to be a bit daffy. He tends to
think you can go on forever. I suppose he's been a bit spoiled.
"Alan did get the thing onto the air, which probably Douglas
would never have done - and I can't say that I would have done,
either!"
It was the first time that Douglas had worked with someone
on Hitchhiker's who he felt was less than sympathetic to his ideas
and work. He wanted John Lloyd as producer, and he wanted
Geoffrey Perkins around: the radio people he knew understood
Hitchhiker's.
This was not to be. Alan Bell was a television person, and
had, as he admits, little time for people from radio who attempted
to tell him his job.
Geoffrey Perkins explains, "Television people tend to think
that radio people don't know anything, which has an element of
truth in it, but they tend to know more about scripts than people
in TV ever do. And the TV people tended to think that Douglas
didn't know what he was talking about.
"Now, on radio, when Douglas burbled, one could say,
`Okay, might try that,' or, `No, shut up'. But the TV attitude was
that he didn't know what he was talking about. I read the first TV
script and I thought it was one of the best scripts I'd ever seen.
He'd thought up all that graphics stuff. It was absolutely brilliant."
Ask people what they remember best of the Hitchhiker's TV
series, and the answer is usually `the computer graphics'. The
graphics - sequences apparently from the screen of the actual
Hitchhiker's Guide - were incredibly detailed, apparently
computer-created animated graphics, full of sight gags and in-
jokes, and presumably designed for people with freeze-frame and
slow-motion videos, since there was no way one could pick up on
the complexities of the graphics sequences in a single watching at
normal speed.
Would one have noticed, for example, the cartoons of
Douglas Adams himself, posing as a Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation Advertising Executive, writing hard in the dolphin
sequence, and in drag as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings?(Douglas also made a couple of real-life appearances in the TV series. In Episode One he can be seen at the back of the pub, awaiting the end of the world with equanimity; in Episode Two he is the gentleman who withdraws large quantities of money from a bank, then takes off all his clothes and wades into the sea. Rumours of an out-takes tape (in which more of Douglas than is seemly is seen in this seene) abound. Douglas played this part because the actor who was meant to be doing it was moving house that day, and, an hour away from filming, Douglas stepped into the breach. As it were. During the filming of the series, and while he wasn't running naked into the sex, Douglas generally sat in a deckchair and did crosswords. Sometimes, according to a number of the netors and technicians, he fell off the chair, although none of them were quite sure why.)
Could one have picked up on all the names and phone numbers
of some of the best places in the universe to purchase, or dry out
from, a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?
One of the phone numbers in the graphics of Episode Six
was that of a leading computer magazine who phoned Pearce
Studios, responsible for the graphics, to ask which computer it
was done on, and whether a flat-screen television was built into
the book prop used on the show. The comment beside the phone
number was not flattering.
The computer graphics were all done by hand.
In January 1980, animator and science fiction fan Kevin
Davies was working for Pearce Studios in Hanwell, West
London, when he heard the blipping and bleeping of Star Wars
droid R2D2 from the BBC cutting rooms down the corridor. He
wandered down to the cutting rooms and met Alan J.W. Bell, at
that point engaged in cutting a sequence of Jim'll Fix It in which a
child got to visit the Star Wars set.
Bell discovered in Davies not only a Hitchbiker's fan with
communicable enthusiasm, but also through Davies, he discovered
Pearce Studios, led by Rod Lord, who were commissioned to do
the graphics for the TV show (their quote for Episode One was
half that of the BBC's own animation department, while the trial
section produced by the BBC's own animators was so appalling it
was unusable).
Pearce Studios, under animator Rod Lord, did not possess a
graphics computer. What they did have was animators, who
worked in a very computerish style.
WARNING! TECHNICAL BIT - HOW IT WAS DONE:
The sound track of Peter Jones's voice was broken down for
timing, and notes of frame numbers per line of dialogue were
taken. Pencil drawings were made, then punched acetate cels were
laid on top, and the pictures were traced with pens. The lettering
was a combination of dry transfer and set on an IBM typewriter.
The artwork (black drawings and lettering on a clear cel) would
then be photographically reversed out, to clear letters and drawings
on black backgrounds.
These were back lit under an ordinary 16mm film rostrum
camera, the colour being added with filter gels. Each line of lettering
and each colour required a separate exposure and a separate piece of
artwork (the babel fish sequence, for example, needed about a
dozen passes under the camera). The main difference between this
animation and the more usual version was that instead of animating
a single frame per drawing, several frames at a time were taken to
give any moving objects the slightly jerky, staggered feel that people
expect from computer graphics. [The television series was entered
into the innovation category at the Golden Rose of Montreux TV
Festival. It won absolutely nothing (the Golden Rose went to the
US-made Baryshnikov on Broadzaray, in case anyone is interested)
and apparently left foreign audiences confused and reeling. At home
it did rather better. In the BAFTA Awards for 1981, Hitchhiker's
received two of the ten awards. Rod Lord gained a BAFTA award
for the graphics(Rod Lord received his second graphics BAFTA for the `computer graphics' in the Max Headroom TV movie, four years later. Now I bet you thought those were computer generated...), and Michael McCarthy received one for being
Sound Supervisor of Hitchhiker s.]
END OF TECHNICAL BIT
I asked Paddy Kingsland, responsible for most of the music and
sound effects in the TV series (and the pilot for the radio series, as
well as the second radio series) what was so special about the
Hitchhiker's sound effects, and what the differences were between
radio sound and TV sound. "I suppose the difference between
doing TV and radio was that for radio they'd say, `We need The
End of the World as a sound effect - go away and do it.'
"On TV The End of the World is composed of hundreds of
shots with a close-up of the Vogon ship, then a close-up of
screaming crowds, a shot of a laser in space, and so on. You don't
just have one sound effect, you have a bit of this and a bit of that
ending with a bang which actually then cuts off because you're
back inside the spaceship again very quickly. The shape is all
finished and all you can do is do stuff to fit the pictures that have
been done.
"I thought the TV show was good in parts. I thought the
computer graphic stuff was very good, very well thought out.
And some of the performances were marvellous.
"But inevitably there were things that didn't hang together
too well. It's a problem you get when you mix together film and
TV studios and doing it all to a deadline - there's no time to sit
back and look at the thing and say, `Is that all right?' And if it
isn't, to do it again.
"I don't think it had the magic of the radio series, because
you could see everybody. Like Zaphod's extra head - that was
one of the more spectacular failures of the T'V show. A tatty prop
can be amusing, but if you don't have the money to do it right it's
sometimes better not to do it at all.
"I was pleased with the sound effects of the TV series
however. It was the detail that did it. Alan Bell had everybody
miked up with radio mikes to start with so that they only got the
voices of the people and none of the exterior effects. So we did
things like overdubbing all the footsteps in the spaceships-
which is never done for British TV.
"To give the effect of them walking through spaceships we
got a couple of beer kegs from the BBC club and actually walked
around on the beer kegs while watching the screen, so when
they're walking along you get these metallic footsteps instead of
the rather unconvincing wooden ones you would have got. It
took ages to do, but it paid off.
"I did all the effects for the computer graphics - the film
would arrive with nothing except for Peter Jones's voice. I had to
go through it doing all the sound effects and the music tracks as
well. All the little beeps and explosions and things, which took
ages to do - quite time-consuming. The TV series was interesting
to work on, although frankly I preferred the radio series."
The necessity of getting the Hitchhiker's scripts to the screen
somewhere within the budget was responsible for a certain
amount of technical innovation. Alan Bell is proudest of his
development of a new special effects process of doing `glass shots'.
A glass shot, in cinematic tradition, consists of erecting a
tower with a painting done on glass, high in the studio, then
filming through it, thus giving the illusion that the glass painting
is part of the picture. (The long shot of the Vogon hold in the first
episode, for example, was done like this.) It's a complicated,
fiddly, and expensive process.
Bell's solution was simple: scenes requiring matte shots were
filmed or taped, then a photographic blow-up of one frame
would be made. From the photos, paintings would be made. The
paintings would be photographed as slides, and the previously
filmed segment would be matched up and inlaid into the painted
shot. This was quicker and easier than painting on glass, and is
perhaps best displayed in the `pier at Southend' sequence, when
only a small section of the pier was built in the studio. The rest is
a perfectly aligned matte painting.
The plot of the television series is nearest to the plot of the
two records. From Magrathea the travellers are blown straight to
Milliways, and, leaving there in a stolen stunt ship, we follow
Arthur and Ford to prehistoric Earth, where the series finishes.
The places where the Hitchhiker's TV succeeded best and
failed worst were places where Douglas had written something
into the radio series that could not be done on television. The
narration sequences are an excellent example: one does not need
lengthy narrations on television; however, being stuck with them,
Douglas needed to work out how to make them work, and came
up with the graphics concept.
As Douglas explained: "What made it work was the fact that
it is impossible to transfer radio to television. We had to find
creative solutions to problems in a way you wouldn't have had to
if you were writing something similar for television immediately.
"The medium dictates the style of the show, and transferring
from one to another means you're going against the grain the
whole time. It's the point where you go against the grain that you
come up with the best bits. The bits that were the easiest to
transfer were the least interesting bits of the TV show.
"The idea of readouts from the book itself done in computer
graphics form was that kind of thing. So you get little drawings,
diagrams, all the words the narrator is saying, plus further
expansion - footnotes and little details - all coming out at you
from the screen. You can't possibly take it all in.
"I like the idea of a programme where, when you get to the
end of it, you feel you didn't get it all. There are so many
programmes that are half an hour long and at the end of it you're
half an hour further into your life with nothing to show for it. If
you didn't get it all, that's much more stimulating.
"I wasn't as pleased with the TV series as I was with the
radio series, because I missed the intimacy of the radio work.
Television pictures stifle the picturing facilities of the mind. I
wanted to step over that problem by packing the screen with so
much information that more thought, not less, was provoked by
the readers. Sometimes what you see is less exciting than what
There was a problem with Zaphod's head. It looked false, and
stuffed, and stuck there. This is not because it was a less than
sterling piece of special effects work (although it wasn't that good),
but also because things went wrong, and even when they didn't
the batteries tended to run down in rehearsals, so by the time a
scene was filmed, the head just lolled around expressionlessly. As
Douglas Adams says, "It was a very delicate mechanism, and it
would work wonderfully for 30 seconds and then break down or
get stuck and to get it working properly you'd have to spend an
hour taking it apart and putting it back together again, and we
never had that hour so we fudged as best we could."
As Mark Wing-Davey remembers, "The difficulty with the
television series for me was Alan Bell (who we all know and
love). I don't think he wanted the original members of the radio
show at all, because he wanted the freedom to pick and choose a
bit, but we were supposed to have first option so we came in and
read for it. They didn't want any input from me on the way the
character would look (I'd visualised him as a blonde beach bum).
I quite liked the final design, but I refused to wear the eyepatch
- I said, `Give the other head the eyepatch, because I'm not
having one! It's hard enough acting with another head, but with
one eye as well...' (This was decided after the initial animation had been done, so the Zaphod graphics in Episode One sport two eyepatches. Come to that, in the graphics of Episode One Arthur Dent doesn't have a dressing gown...)
"The other head was heavvvvvy. Very heavy. I was wearing
armour plating made of fibre glass, and because I wanted to be
able to alternate the two right arms I had a special cut-out.
"There was a little switch hidden in the circuitry of my
costume which switched the head on and off. We were under
such pressure in the studio that occasionally I forgot to switch it
on, so I'm acting away and it's just there. It cost f3,000 by the
way - more than me!"
Costume design for the series was primarily the responsibility
of Dee Robson, a veteran BBC designer with a penchant for
science fiction. It was she who designed Ford Prefect's precisely
clashing clothes - based on what could be found in the BBC's
wardrobes, and it was she who gave Zaphod Beeblebrox yet
another additional organ: examining the costume worn by Mark
Wing-Davey reveals two trouser flies (one zipped, one buttoned)
and, Dee's original costume notes explain, Zaphod has a "double
crotch, padded to give effect of two organs. "
As Mark Wing-Davey explained, "I said to wardrobe, you've
seen Mick Jagger in those tight trousers - make me a pair. So I
had these nine inch tubes down the front of the trousers for
filming. When we got into the studio Dee came up to me to say
she was `worried about those... things. I thought they might be
a bit obvious, so I've cut them down to six inches.'"
One of the most famous costumes, however, was Arthur
Dent's: a dressing gown, over a pair of pajamas. The dressing gown
first appeared in the books following the television series: there is
no mention of what Arthur is wearing in the first two books. That
Arthur remained in the dressing gown throughout the TV series
was Alan Bell's idea: Douglas had written a sequence on board the
Heart of Gold in which the ship designed Arthur a silvery jump-
suit. The whole sequence was scrapped, and Alan ensured that
Arthur stayed in his dressing gown. As Bell explained, "What was
special about Arthur was that he was in a dressing gown. Silver
jump-suits are what they wore in Star Wars."
Alan J.W. Bell is a BBC Light Entertainment director and
producer; having worked on such shows as Maigret and
Panorama as a film editor, he won a BAFTA award for Terry
Jones's and Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns, a BAFTA nomination
for the long-running geriatric comedy Last of the Summer Wine,
and a Royal Television Society Award for Hitchhiiker's.
I met him initially in his office at the BBC, which still
contains a number of items of Hitchhiker's memorabilia. It's a
show he is proud of, and has many fond memories of. On his
desk was a small plastic fruit machine which he urged me to try. I
pulled the handle, but nothing happened; it should have squirted
me with water. Alan pointed out to his secretary that it was her
job to keep it filled, and we began the interview: this was BBC
Light Entertainment.
"The first time I heard of Hitchhiker's was in a bar
somewhere - I was asked if I'd heard it on the radio. I hadn't, so
I listened to it, and I thought it was marvellous, inspired stuff, but
there was no way it could be done on TV. It was all in the mind,
all in the imagination.
"So about three months later I was asked to do it, and I said
that I thought it couldn't be done, but they said `We're going to
do it!', so that was it. I had to do it.
"Now, I work for Light Entertainment, not Drama (who do
Dr Who and have experience of things like this), and we had no
idea what the budgeting would be. All I could do was put down
what I thought it would cost, and I was out by thousands of
pounds. For the first episode, for example, we had to throw away
$10,000 of model shots of spaceships, because they wobble, and
they looked like models. That first episode was about $40,000
over budget, which is vast in TV terms. But it had to be done
right. Otherwise it would have been awful."
The first episode of Hitchhiker's was made very much as a
pilot, and Alan Bell presented it to the heads of department at the
BBC. Some of them didn't like it. They didn't understand it, nor
for that matter did they realise it was meant to be funny. And the
cost of the first episode = over $120,000 - was about four times
as much as an equivalent episode of Dr Who.
In order to demonstrate the humour of the show, Alan Bell
arranged for a laugh track. This was done by assembling about a
hundred science fiction fans in the National Film Theatre, playing
them the first episode, and taping their reaction. As a warm-up to
this a ten minute video was played, featuring Peter Jones reading
hastily felt-penned cue cards in a bewildered fashion, assuring the
audience that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be in the next episode,
and, with the ubiquitous Kevin Davies, demonstrating the use of
the headphones.
This is Peter Jones's only on-screen appearance in the
Hitchhiker's television series.
The audience loved the show, laughed on cue and generally
had a good time, and while the BBC hierarchy had agreed that the
next five episodes should be made (although they were made for
more like $40,000 a show - one reason why the sets begin to get
a little rudimentary towards the end), it did not insist on a laugh
track. This was undoubtedly a good thing.
As Bell remembers, "The first episode was only a pilot, but
by the time we had got half-way through, they had already
commissioned the series, but we still didn't know the resources
that would be required because all we had to go on were the radio
scripts.
"When we'd finished it, the Powers That Be thought that the
viewers wouldn't know that it was comedy unless we added a
laughter track. So we hired the National Film Theatre and
showed it on a big screen and gave all the audience headphones so
they could hear the soundtrack nice and clearly, and they laughed
all the way through. It did help that that audience was composed
of fans..."
While much of the casting was the same on television and
radio, there were a few variations.
"I wanted to keep everyone from the radio series, but
sometimes people's voices don't match their physical appearance.
"For example, I wanted someone for Ford Prefect who
looked slightly different, and when I saw Geoffrey McGivern I
thought he looked too ordinary. Ford should be human but
slightly unnerving, so we looked around for someone else. My
secretary (It should be noted that most of the really important pieces of casting in Hitchhiker's seem to have been done by secretaries. Whether this phenomenon is unique to Hitchhiker's, or whether it is extant throughout the entertainment industry has not been adequately investigated, at least, not by me.) suggested David Dixon. He was great, but I thought
we'd change the colour of his eyes and make them a vivid blue, so
we got special tinted contact lenses which looked marvellous in
real life, but when it came to television the cameras just weren't
sensitive enough to pick up on it - except in the pub scene at the
beginning.
"Sandra Dickinson got the part of Trillian after we had
interviewed about 200 young ladies for the role. None of them
had performed it with the right feelings. The girl had to have a
sense of humour. And then Sandra Dickinson came in and read it
and made the lines more funny than any other actress who'd done
an audition. "
Sandra Dickinson was a surprising choice for Trillian; the
character was described in the book as a dark-haired,
dark-complexioned English woman; Sandra played it (as indeed
she is in real life) as a small blonde American with a squeaky
husky voice. As Douglas Adams said of her, "She could have
done a perfect `English Rose' voice, and looking back I think
perhaps we should have got her to do it. But it was such a relief to
find someone who could actually read Trillian's lines with some
humour, and give the character some life, that we just had her do
it as herself, and not change a thing."
Another surprise casting came with Episode Five: Sandra's
husband, Peter Davison, the fifth and blandest Dr Who. He
played the Dish of the Day, a bovine creature which implores
diners to eat it. As Alan Bell explains, "Sandra came to me and
said that Peter wanted to play a guest part in Hitchhiker's and she
suggested the Dish of the Day. I said, `You cannot put Peter
Davison in a cow skin', but she said, No, really he wants to do
it!'. I said OK, and we booked him. We didn't pay him star
status; he just did it for the fun of it. And he played it very well."
Early on in the press releases for Hitchhiker's, great play was
made of the fact that they would not be filming in the quarries
and gravel pits in which Dr Who has always travelled to distant
planets. And they wouldn't have any of the plastic rocks that
made Star Trek's alien worlds so strangely unconvincing.
Instead, they would go abroad. Iceland, perhaps. Or Morocco.
The Magrathean sequences, one was assured, would be filmed
somewhere exotic.
Alan Bell: "Douglas wanted us to film the Magrathean
sequences in Iceland. So I looked up the holiday brochures, and it
was very cold and there weren't any hotels of any note, but I had
been to Morocco years before and I remembered there was a part
of Morocco that was very space-like. We went to look, but we
had so much trouble getting through customs - without cameras
- and we met a Japanese film crew who said, `Don't come
because they deliberately delay you so you'll spend more money!'
- they'd had all their equipment impounded for three weeks.
"So we ended up in this rather nice clay pit in Cornwall,
where we also did the beach scenes: Marvin playing beach ball
and Douglas going into the sea."
Most of the cast and crew have memories of the Cornish clay
pit. Some of them have to do with the fact that there were no
toilets down there. Others have to do with David Learner, the
actor inside Marvin, who, due to the length of time it took to get
in and out of the Marvin costume, was abandoned in the clay pit
during the occasional rain showers during filming, protected from
rust by an umbrella.
Prehistoric Britain was filmed in the Lake District, during a
cold snap, which meant that Aubrey Morris (playing the Captain
of the B - Ark, in his bath), and the extras clad in animal skins
who played the pre-Golgafrincham humans, were all frozen to
the bone, and spent all their time when not on camera bundled up
in blankets and drinking tea.
The other interesting location was that of Arthur's house-
discovered by Alan Bell while driving, lost, around Leatherhead.
(The gate, which is all one sees knocked down by a bulldozer,
was built especially).
It was while the pub scenes at the beginning were being
filmed that the union troubles began for Hitchhiker's - the
precise nature of which no one seems clear on anymore, but
which apparently involved a trip to the pub by some members of
the cast and crew which might have been recreational, but which
the union representatives assumed was professional, and as such
they felt they should have been invited, or something.(The story changes according to who you talk to and I never really understood any of the versions. I also had the impression that nobody telling me quite understood their version either. This is one of the few examples of woolly reporting in an otherwise excellent book, and should not be counted against it.)
The computer room at the end of Episode Four (the Shooty
and Bang Bang sequence) was actually filmed on Henley Golf
Course. "We wanted somewhere near at hand which we could
build and blow up", Alan Bell remembered. "It was just
sufficiently out of London that we could warn the locals that if
they heard a bang at two in the morning, don't pay any attention
to it - it's only us! You can't see it on the show, but it's actually
raining into the set - it was open at the top."
Union problems continued when the filming returned to the
studios: "The Milliways set was actually the biggest set they've ever
put into the BBC's biggest studio. The unions said they wouldn't
put the set in, and we had to cut bits out, which was a pity.
"But the way we filmed it you never saw it all at once
anyway, just parts at a time. My reason for that was that. . . well,
if you've ever watched a variety show, they'll spend all their
money on a set, the singer sings, the camera pulls back, and you
see the set. And song after song you see the set, and you get
bored with it.
"So I said, when we do Hitchhiker's we'll leave things to
people's imaginations, so even though we had this huge set there
isn't one shot where you see it all. Only parts of it, because then
you think it's even bigger than it is. You never see the edges of it.
"Things got very rushed toward the end. The series was
structured to be made on a daily basis, so that, once all the
graphics work and location work for each episode was done, the
studio filming could be done in one day in the studio. It should
really have been five days at the studio, so there was an enormous
panic to get everything done in time. And the Electricians' Union
were in dispute, so at 10.00 pm every night the lights went out,
the plugs were pulled, and that was it. There's a scene where you
see Arthur Dent running to hide behind a girder - we actually
used a shot of Simon Jones, the actor, running across the studio
to get to his mark."
The show was a success. The fans loved it, it garnered
excellent reviews, most people were pleasantly surprised and
befuddled by the computer graphics, and it won the BBC a few
awards in a year otherwise dominated by ITV's Brideshead
Revisited.
Everybody waited expectantly for the second series. And
waited. And waited. There are conflicting stories of why the
second series never came to be made...
John Lloyd: "They asked Douglas to do a second series. As
far as I know, he went to the BBC and said, `I'd be delighted, but
I never want to work with Alan Bell again.' And the BBC most
untypically supported Alan - they said he was the only person
to do it. That was the end of it. (I say untypically because if, say, a
comedy star didn't get on with a producer he'd go to the head of
department and they'd give him a new one. They'd do it for a
star, but not for a writer.)"
Geoffrey Perkins: "Douglas wanted me to produce it. I heard
that Alan Bell refused to direct if I were producer, and instead
said how would I like to be script editor? This seemed to me the
most thankless task imaginable - for the first TV series they
didn't know how lucky they were - they already had the script
from the radio series and records, they were in clover. They
hadn't been through the whole thing of getting scripts out of
Douglas. Now I knew that getting those scripts for the second
series without any say in the way they were done would be an
appalling, heartbreaking thing, possibly the most thankless task I
could ever think up.
"I said no.
"My own impression is that the second series really got to
brinkmanship. Douglas gave the BBC an ultimatum. They said
no, fully expecting him to back down. And of course he didn't
and neither did they."
Alan Bell: "There was going to be a second series. It was all
commissioned, we had fifty per cent more money, the actors were
told the dates, and during that time Douglas went past his script
deadline, and time was running out, we needed to have the
information because otherwise, six weeks before production,
what can you do? We needed sets built - there's no way you can
build them in that time. The deadlines to deliver the scripts came
and went, we gave him another three weeks and meetings were
going on - and that was it, it had to be cancelled.
"It was going to begin with a test match in Australia, but we
checked it out and the timing wasn't right, so we were looking at
Headingly or somewhere. That was all I knew about the second
TV series - it wasn't going to be the second radio series at all.
"Douglas is very strange. He believed that radio was the
ultimate series and that TV let him down. I don't know. Maybe it
did. I had to change a lot of things in production to make it
stronger, like Slartibartfast's aircar: anyone who had seen Star
VfJars would think we'd stolen it from there, so I changed it to a
bubble, and he was upset about that.
"We started making lists of his wild ideas. He wanted to
make Marvin a chap in a leotard painted gold - if you see it on
TV you'd know it was an actor. The fun of the script is that
Marvin is a tin box that's depressed. If you see a man in a leotard
you know it's an actor straightaway, and what's so unusual about
an actor being depressed? And anyway there was that gold robot
in Star Wars. That impasse went straight to the Head of
Department.
"He wanted the Mice to be played by men in mouse skins. It
wouldn't have worked. It would have looked like pantomime. He
wanted it to be faithful to the radio, but you couldn't be faithful
to the radio as it's visual, people have to walk from one side of the
set to the other.
"So Douglas and I were fighting, not that that matters,
because that's what life's all about. If you're on a production and
everybody's enjoying themselves it's generally a load of rubbish,
because people feel passionately about things. It was my job to
throw out the bad ideas and keep the good.
"The change in role for the black Disaster Area stunt ship
was done by Douglas himself. John Lloyd was the co-writer of
some episodes of the radio series, when Douglas was script editor
of Dr Who and also writing Hitchhiker's, and he was quite happy
to farm out to John to write the bits he couldn't write, and the
Black Ship bit was one of them. When it became a big success,
Douglas very much regretted having shared the credit with John
on those episodes so when it came to the TV series he wouldn't at
any cost do anything that John Lloyd had written because he
wanted it to be all Douglas Adams. I think if I was Douglas
Adams I'd do exactly the same thing.
"We got on quite well, but I thought he was a hindrance. We
used to tell him that the dubbing dates were in three weeks' time
when we'd done it the day before, because if he came along he
interfered all the time, and, I have to say, not necessarily for the
better."
***************************************
PRODUCTION SUGGESTION: Mice.
I've suggested using the eidophor images in case we can manage
to do some very convincing puppetry to give us the appearance of
talking mice, like the Muppets, or indeed Yoda in the otherwise
terribly boring Empire Strikes Back. If we do that, then of course
the mice must look as real as we can possibly make them, and not
simply joke mice. That means that on the actual set, in the glass
transports, we either use little life-size models, or indeed real
mice, which would be preferable.
Obviously, if we can make them appear to be speaking very
convincingly, then it obviates the need for the very extreme voice
treatments we had to use on radio, which were detrimental to the
actual sense of the lines.
- Douglas Adams's production notes for TV, Episode Five.
********************************************
Douglas Adams: "A lot of what Alan says is simply not the case.
Whether his memory is at fault or not I don't know. All I would
say is that as he cheerfully admits he will say what suits him
rather than what happens to be the case. And therefore there's no
point in arguing.
"I wouldn't start seriously moving on the second TV series
until we'd sorted out various crucial aspects of how we were
going to go about it. I felt very let down by the fact that though
John Lloyd was meant to be producer he was rapidly moved
aside, much to the detriment of the show. I'd always made it clear
that I wanted Geoffrey Perkins, at the very least as a consultant.
"Neither of these things transpired in the first series. It was
perfectly clear to myself and the cast that Alan had very little
sympathy with the script. So I didn't want to go into the second
series without that situation being remedied in some way, and the
BBC was not prepared to come up with a remedy. That was the
argument going on in the background, that was why I was not
producing the scripts. I wasn't going to do the scripts until I
knew we were going to do the series."
In 1984, when John Lloyd and Geoffrey Perkins were both
involved, as producer and script editor respectively, in Central
Television's Spitting Image, there were noises made that the
Spitting Image company would have been interested in making a
version of Life, the Universe and Everything. It would have been
interesting - one feels that they would probably have been able
to get Zaphod's head right - but the television rights were tied
up with the film rights and nothing ever came of it.
14
The Restaurant at the
End of the Universe
**********************************************
MARVIN: It's the people you meet that really get you down in
this job. They're so boring. The best conversation I
had was over thirty-four million years ago.
TRILLIAN: Oh dear.
MARVIN: And that was with a coffee machine.
ZAPHOD: Yeah, well, we're really cut up about that, Marvin.
Now, where's our old ship?
MARVIN: It's in the restaurant.
ZAPHOD: What?
MARVIN: They had it made into teaspoons. I enjoyed that bit.
Not very much though.
ZAPHOD: You mean they're stirring their coffee with my ship?
The Heart of Gold? Hey, that was one of the
creamiest space strutters ever stacked together.
- Cut from script, radio Episode Five.
**********************************************
"Each time I come to a different version, I always think I could
do it better; I'm very aware of what I feel I got wrong, what was
thin or bad in the first version of it. Pan of it is that I wrote it
serially, so I was never sure where it was going. And no matter
how frantically I'd plot it out, it would never adhere to the plot I
had mapped out for it.
"You map out a plot, and you write the first scene, and
inevitably the first scene isn't funny and you have to do
something else, and you finally get the scene to be funny but it's
no longer about what it was meant to be about, so you have to
jack in the plot you had in mind and do a new one...
"After a while, it became pointless plotting too far in advance,
because it never worked, since the vast body of the material arrived
serially. I'd often reach a point where I'd go, `If I knew I was going
to wind up here I would have done something else there.' So
writing the books is usually an attempt to make sense of what I've
already done, which usually involves rather major surgery.
"Especially with the second book, I was trying with
hindsight to make a bit of sense out of it all. I knew how it would
end, with the prehistoric Earth stuff, and I found myself plotting
the book backwards from there..."
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is Douglas
Adams's favourite of the Hitchhiker's books, although the
circumstances under which it was written were somewhat less
than ideal and they were to be far from unique.
"I had put it off and put it off and got extension after
extension (all sorts of other things were going on at the time, like
the stage show and the TV series), but eventually the managing
director of Pan said, `We've given you all these extensions and we
have got to have it: sudden death or else, we have to have it in four
weeks. Now, how far have you got with it?' I didn't like to tell
him I hadn't staned it; it seemed unfair on the poor chap's hean."
Jacqueline Graham, who was working for Pan, explains the
predicament: "After the first book, our attitude was a mixture of
resignation and exasperation with Douglas's lateness. By the
second book, we expected him to be late, it was built into our
planning, but at the same time we thought, `Well, he can't do it
again, surely! This time he'll start on time, or he'll have a schedule
and stick to it...'
"But he didn't. The whole thing was tremendously late, and
Douglas was getting into a bit of a state about it because it was
getting later and later. He was sharing a flat at the time with a
friend called Jon Canter, and Douglas found it impossible to work
as the phone kept ringing and Jon was always there. In the end I
said to him, `Why don't you just move out?' as he had written the
first book at his mother's. He thought that was a very good idea
so I rented him a flat, and moved him in that afternoon."
Douglas found the experience more than slightly weird: "I
was locked away so nobody could possibly reach me or find me. I
led a completely monastic existence for that month, and at the
end of four weeks it was done.
"It was extraordinary. One of those times you really go
mad... I can remember the moment I thought, `I can do it! I'll
actually get it finished in time!' And the Paul Simon album had
just come out, One Trick Pony, and it was the only album I had.
I'd listen to it on my Walkman every second I wasn't actually
sitting at the typewriter - it contributed to the sense of insanity
and hypnotism that allowed me to write a book in that time."
When the manuscript for The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe was turned in, Douglas stated that that would be the
final Hitchhiker's book. "It's the last of all that, I hope," he
announced to one daily paper, " I want to try another field, now,
like performing."
The book, again a paperback original from Pan, was a critical
success. While most critics had been a little wary of the first book
initially, mostly not reviewing it at all, its sales had made it a
major book. Oddly enough, the only part that British critics
found too highly Monty Python, and too down-to-eanh, was the
colonisation of Eanh by the Golgafrincham detritus; the `oddly'
because this is the section most American critics picked up on
most easily and singled out for praise.
****************************************
MARVIN TURNS FROM THE TELEPORT
AND TRUDGES AWAY.
MARVIN: I suppose some people might have expected better
treatment after having waited for five hundred and
seventy-six thousand million years in a car park. But
not me. I may just be a menial robot but I'm far too
intelligent to expect anyone to think of me for a
moment. Far too intelligent. In fact, I'm so
intelligent I've probably got time to go through the
five million things I hate most about organic life
In 1980 a few American radio stations had already broadcast
Hitchhiker's and National Public Radio was just waiting for its new
stereo system to begin operating before it started to broadcast the
radio series nationally. Even so, the show was not going to have the
same effect on the States that it had had in England through radio,
and a new tack was needed.
The book had done moderately well in hardcover on its
release but did not reach the cult status it had in England and
that, it was imagined, it had the potential of reaching in America.
The radio series was finally broadcast by National Public Radio
member stations in March 1981. (National response was so good
that the twelve episodes were rebroadcast six months later.)
[Douglas Adams had paid his first visit to America in
January 1981, on completion of the BBC television series. He
lived in New York, had a wonderful time (despite contracting an
ear infection) and visited Mexico before returning to England
where he was to begin working on Life, tbe Universe and
Everything.)
In many ways, the paperback release of The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy had a lot in common with the promotion of
the cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In order to get
people along to Rocky Horror the film company realised that the
public had to `discover' it for themselves, there had to be a word-
of-mouth campaign among the right sort of people.
It is peculiar that, even more than favourable reviews or
national advertising (neither of which, admittedly, ever hurt
sales), the factor that seems to sell most books is word-of-mouth
promotion: people reading books and recommending them to
friends. It was to be hoped that Hitchhiker's could have the same
kind of impact that some of the `campus classics' of the sixties
and seventies had had - books that had built up high sales, and
then remained perennial bestsellers. Could it be the next Catcher
in the Rye? The next Lord of the Rings, or Dune?
Hitchhiker's needed advance word-of-mouth among science
fiction fans and - more importantly - among the college crowd
and the kind of people who would appreciate its humour. The
solution? An advertisement in the 20th August Rolling Stone,
giving away three thousand copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy ("FREE!") to the first people to write to the
"Hyperspace Hitchhiking Club - Earth Div. c/o Pocket Books"
by 27th August. This was combined with many "advance reading
copies" and "give-away promotions" which were distributed by
Pocket in the months before publication to ensure that people
would begin to read Hitchhiker's and that they would, Pocket
hoped, tell their friends how much they had enjoyed it.
Pocket did not skimp on the promotion, however. "England"
they explained in their press release, "the country that gave
America the Beatles and Monty Python's Flying Circus has just
exported another zany craze - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy by Doug Adams, a wild spoof available in October from
Pocket Books."
The book was released in October, and did reasonably well.
Douglas was again in America at this time, in Los Angeles,
while ABC tried to put together the ("thank heaven, abortive")
American version of the television series.
"It was like every horror story you have ever heard," says
Douglas. "They weren't really interested in how good it was
going to be, they just wanted to do lots of special effects, and they
also wanted not to have to pay for them."
The show was to be one of the many British comedy shows
that had been turned into American comedy shows. (There is a
long and noble tradition of this, that includes dragging such
shows as Steptoe and Son, Fawlty Towers, and The Fall and Rise
of Reginald Perrin across the Atlantic, recasting them, rewriting
them, and frequently removing whatever it was that happened to
make the show funny in the first place (It is interesting to note that quiz shows tend to cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Such shows as The Price is Right and Hollywood (`Celebrity') Squares have all reached the UK from the US.).)
Quite what ABC planned to do with Hitchhiker's is unknown.
The script was to be by other people than Douglas, and was being
written and put together by various committees:
"There were terrible stories coming back after meetings with
executives, they'd make remarks like `Would an alien be green?'
Eventually everything got abandoned because the first episode's
budget came to $2.2 million. It would have been the most expensive
twenty-two minute show ever made. The script was terrible."
Douglas's sole contribution was to "come in and hang around
the production office for a week". As he later pointed out, "It
gives you an idea of the crazy proportion of this thing, when you
think that they paid me four times as much for that one week as I
was paid to write the whole series for radio!"
It was with the release of The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe, shortly afterwards, that Douglas first made it onto the
US bestseller lists, and, with the American broadcast of the BBC
television series, Hitchhiker's popularity was assured.
Many people were surprised that something as essentially
British as Hitchhiker's took off in America. Not Douglas Adams.
"One is told at every level of the entertainment industry that
the American audience does not like or understand English
humour. We are told that at every level except that of the audience,
who, as far as I can see, love it. It's everybody else, the people
whose job it is to tell you what the audiences like; but the people I
meet here, and in the US, who are fans, are very much the same
type of people.
"The most commonly heard plea from American audiences is
`Don't let them Americanise it! We get all sorts of pabulum over
here...!'
"In terms of sales these days, it is more popular in America
than England (it sells twice as many books to four times as many
people, so it's either twice as popular, or half as popular). I think
too much is made of the difference between US and UK humour.
I don't think there's a difference in the way those audiences are
treated. Audiences in the US (through no fault of their own) are
treated as complete idiots by the people who make programmes.
And when you've been treated as an idiot for so long you tend to
respond that way. But when given something with a bit more
substance the tend to breathe a deep sigh of relief and say
`Thank God for that!'
"There are things that the British think are as English as roast
beef that the Americans think are as American as apple pie. The
trick is to write about people. If you write about situations that
people recognise then people will respond to it. The humour that
doesn't travel is stuff like the Johnny Carson monologue, for
which you needed to know precisely who said what about who
that week and how it affected the performance of the LA Rams. If
you don't have the information then it isn't funny.
"But anything that relies on how a person works is
universally accessible. (How it works in translation is another
matter, as in that respect comedy is a fragile plant, and very often
I suspect it might not stand up in translation. I don't know.
Hitchhiker's has been translated into all kinds of languages, and
I've no idea which ones work and which ones don't.)"
As it is, Life, the Universe, and Everything and, more
especially, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish have sold
amazingly well in the US, the latter riding high on the US bestseller
lists for over eighteen months. The computer game, which was not
a big hit in the UK, was the number one game in the US for a year,
selling over a quarter of a million copies. Much of Douglas's mail
and the greater part of his income, now comes from America.
16
Life, the Universe, and Everything
************************************************
ZAPHOD: There's nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I
have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight.
- Cut from radio script, Episode Three.
************************************************
The first two Hitchhiker's books were based on material developed
for the radio series. When Douglas Adams agreed to write the third
book he had sworn he would never write, he took the plot from a
storyline he had had "knocking around for ages".
He had once suggested it as a Dr Who story, but Graham
Williams thought it was just "too silly". Later, when there was
talk of a Dr Who film to star Tom Baker, he had written the story
as a film outline, Dr Who and the Krikkitmen (see Appendix V).
The film never materialised, but later, when talk began of the
second Hitchhiker's television series, Douglas began to look at
the Krikkitmen script as a Hitchhiker's vehicle.
As things turned out, for reasons explained at length
elsewhere, there was not going to be a second television series.
However, the process of turning Dr Who and the Krikkitmen
into Life, the Universe, and Everything, had begun.
As far as plots go, the storylines are essentially the same.
Douglas divided the Dr Who role between Slartibartfast,
Trillian and (for the final sequence) Arthur Dent, although what
would have been the last half of the Dr Who format became the
final thirty pages of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
(In the Dr Who version, after having failed to prevent the
Krikkitmen from taking the components of the Wicket Gate, the
Doctor arrives with Sarah Jane on Krikkit and spends most of the
rest of the story, in classic Dr Who style, running around, getting
captured, escaping, learning vital bits of plot, running around,
getting captured, escaping, rescuing Sarah Jane, and so on.)
Life, the Universe, and Everything was different in kind
from the other Hitchhiker's books, in that it was not written
serially. Douglas knew what was going to happen next, but this
gave him a new problem, that of fitting the Hitchhiker's
characters into the Dr Who plot. Hitchhiker's characters are
essentially feckless, and instead of, say, saving the universe they
would tend instead towards going to a party (Ford), staying cool
(Zaphod), looking bewildered (Arthur) or moaning (Marvin); this
really left only Trillian, whose personality had never been fully
explored (indeed, barely glanced at), as a substitute worldsaver.
More so, perhaps, than any other part of Douglas's oeuvre,
the creation of Life, the Universe, and Everything was fraught
with difficulties:
"As with everything, I put it off longer than I should have,
and then I had a huge domestic crisis which knocked me for six; I
couldn't think of anything funny to save my life; I wanted to
jump off cliffs and things like that. It was an emotional episode
which I'm not going to go into in any detail..."
(Although Adams will no longer discuss it, his then girlfriend
had left him - as he said in an interview given about that time,
"She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds
that he was her husband.")
As a result of this, Adams wrote a "very bleak" first draft of
Life, the Universe, and Everything: "I had the first draft of it
three-quarters finished and then I had to go and do a major book
promotion tour in the US for a month. I was suddenly confronted
by the fact that this book was not anything like right at that point.
And I had to phone up my publisher and say `Look, it's not
finished yet, I'm going to have to rewrite it, but I have to go now'
- it was terrible!
"So I went away and did this tour, feeling terrible about the
situation I'd left behind. Then I came back and sat down and
wrote; and threw out practically every word of the first draft of
Life, the Universe, and Everything. Take, for example, in the first
draft, the first twenty pages, which were Arthur waking up in his
cave, two and a half million years ago (I think it was just that was
where I wanted to be at the time). I rewrote it and rewrote it and
rewrote, and at the end of twenty rewrites those thirty pages were
the first two lines of the book, and that was it.
"What is amazing is that the third book ever got written at
all, that it got into existence and was as good as it was. But it is
patchy, simply because it was written in circumstances I wouldn't
want to build a bookcase under, let alone write a book.
"But it's true of each book I've written that I've hated it, and
then written the next book, and was so busy hating the next book
I discovered I rather liked the previous book. There are problems
in the third book which have to do with the way I handled the
plot: since it was actually a plotted story, occasionally you can
hear the grinding gears where I had to do something which had to
establish a plot point, and at the same time had to be funny, and
I'd have to overstretch to make it funny. That's the real problem:
you can sort of hear the tyres screech around a few corners.
"The struggle between substance and structure reached a
pitch with the third book, as it was the one where I had a very
detailed plan of the logical structure, and virtually none of that
actually got into the book. I always go off at tangents, but
whereas before I'd follow the tangents and go on from there, this
time I was determined to go back to the plot each time. The
tangents remained purely as tangents.
"So there was a real fight going on between the way I felt I
ought to be doing things and the way things naturally end up
getting done. That's why it has a slightly bitchy feeling - I keep
yanking it back to where it's going even though it hasn't shown
any inclination to go there: an awful lot of the explanations in my
outline never got anywhere near the book, and every time you get
yanked back to the plot you don't get told what the plot is.
"I think I must be a very weird person.
"On the other hand, some of my favourite bits of actual
writing are in that book: the Agrajag section, and the flying bit. I
didn't revise any of the flying bit - it was all done first draft
(although I cheated slightly, as, being aware I had written the
entire sequence straight off, I felt slightly superstitious about it,
and left things I could have revised).
"I wasn't pleased with the resolution of the Agrajag episode
it was a bit perfunctory, and I should have got that right. Overall
I think Life, the Universe, and Everything has some of the best
and some of the worst Hitchhiker's writing in it."
Geoffrey Perkins suggested to me that Life, the Universe,
and Everything had a succession of endings (in chapters 33 and
34) because Douglas had felt that the book wasn't long enough.
"No, that's not true. Actually, it's one of the longest of the
books. It was almost the opposite - when I got the proofs back
from Pan I read through and had the niggling feeling there was
something wrong. If it had been a small thing wrong I would have
spotted it immediately, but it was one of those things that was so
big and wrong that it takes you a while to see exactly what it is.
"What it was was this: there were two chapters missing.
"Those two had disappeared and actually turned up later in
America, by which time the number of pages in the final bound
copy had actually been determined. And that is why, in the
English edition, the text of the book carries on to the very last
page. There aren't any ads or anything in the back of the book.
But it's actually quite a long book.
"No, that stuff wasn't put in because the book wasn't long
enough, but because there was a bit I wanted to put in that I
hadn't managed to get in anywhere else, which was the story of
The Reason. That's one of my favourite bits, that no one else
seems to have responded to very well.
"When you write you often feel a constant salvage from
impending catastrophe. I mean, there's a constant disastrous bit
followed by disastrous bit, and just occasionally you come up with
a bit of which you think, `Oh, I'll pat myself on the back for that.'
That bit was one of those. I actually thought it was quite neat.
"But the problem of the third book is that I have a plot
which actually signifies something, and there are momentous
events afoot, but I'd created such a feckless bunch of characters
that before writing each scene I'd think, `Well, OK, who's
involved here?' and I'd mentalIy go around each of the characters
in my mind explaining to them what was going on, and they
would all say, `Yeah? Well so what? I don't want to get involved.'
Either they didn't want to get involved or they didn't understand.
"In the end, Slartibartfast had to become the character who
had to get them all to get a move on, and that really wasn't in his
nature either. You see, all the characters are essentially character
parts. I had a lot of supporting roles and no main character."
*********************************************
ON WRITING HUMOUR
"Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece
of paper until your forehead bleeds.
"I find it ludicrously difficult. I try and avoid it if at all
possible. The business of buying new pencils assumes gigantic
proportions. I have four word processors and spend a lot of time
wondering which one to work on. All writers, or most, say they
find writing difficult, but most writers I know are surprised at
how difficult I find it.
"I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems
to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my
life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being
able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it's
the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot
of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It's usually
below the surface. It doesn't appear to tackle problems at a
personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.
"I'm not a wit. A wit says something funny on the spot. A
comedy writer says something very funny two minutes later. Or
in my case, two weeks later.
"I don't think I could do a serious book anyway. I'm sure
that jokes would start to creep in. I actually do think that comedy
is a serious business: when you are working on something you
have to take it absolutely seriously; you have to be passionately
committed to it. But you can't maintain that if you are going to
stay sane. So when I talk about it to other people I tend to be
flippant about it. I'm always so glad to have got through it, I say,
`It's just jokes'. It's a relief.
"What I do now on many occasions is have, say, an
inconsequential idea for a throwaway line that seems quite neat,
then I go to huge lengths to create the context in which to throw
that line away and make it appear that it was just a throwaway
line, when in fact you've constructed this huge edifice off which
to chuck this line. It's a really exhausting way of writing but.
when it works...
"Often the things that seem frivolous and whimsical are the
hardest to get right. Take the opening section of Life, the
Universe, and Everything, which is something I'm quite pleased
with. They are stuck on prehistoric Earth, and then suddenly
they find themselves on Lord's Cricket Ground, which comes
about because they chased a sofa across a field. It all sounds
inconsequential or ilIogical or whatever, but completely belies the
fact that I tried over and over again, and rewrote that bit over and
over, going absolutely crazy with it until I eventually found the
right elements to create the air of whimsical inconsequence, if you
like. So I could come right-up at the end of that long section with,
`They suddenly found themselves in the middle of the pitch at
Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood, London, with Australia
leading and England needing so many runs to win' (I forget the
exact quote). Now, in order to chuck away a line like that at the
end of the chapter, you needed all that stuff about Ford coming
back and explaining what he has been doing in Africa, which was
obviously very unpleasant, and then him trying to explain about
the flotsam and jetsam, and eddies in the space-time continuum
(which was really a very silly joke, but you are allowed the odd
silly joke) and the sofa, and so on.
"lt required all that just to be able to suddenly say Bang!
Here they were somewhere else, because if you do just say that
without getting all the rhythm right, then it doesn't work. It
wouldn't have been enough for them to just be magically
transported without it suddenly being a tremendous surprise
coming at that moment.
KIt's those kind of effects that take an awful lot of
engineering, when you don't necessarily know what the answer is
going to be, you are just thrashing around in the dark trying to
find something somewhere that's going to help you get to that
point. And when you are operating within a convention which
says (or seems to say) `anything goes', you have to be extremely
careful how you use that. I think if I have a strength as a writer it
is in recognising that and trying to deal with it, and if I have a
weakness it's that I don't always deal with it as well as I would
like to be able to.
KAnyway, the reason I liked that bit where they appeared at
Lord's so much was that I knew what a huge problem I had
solved and the fact that it wouldn't appear to the reader to be a
transition from one bit to another. And the reader would feel,
`Well, that was easy, wasn't it? You say Here they are in one
place, then Here they are in another?' But for that to be easy you
When Life, the Universe, and Everything was released the critical
response was far less favourable than that for the first two books
- and most of the critics said similar things:
"The third time around I found Arthur Dent and his
ridiculous dressing gown - why hasn't he found a change of
clothes somewhere along the line? - increasingly tedious (As noted, Life, the Universe, and Everything is the first place it is seen in print that Arthur is still wearing a dressing gown, something Douglas only discovered in the television series when the sequence that reclothed him on the Heart of Gold was cut.); never
a very substantial hero, he is in danger of being shrivelled in the
heat of his author's imagination. Perhaps Adams should now look
beyond SF; I feel that his cynicism and detachment are too strong
for a genre which depends so much on naivety and trust. . ."
(Kelvin Johnston, The Observer)
"... the humour depends on a limited repertoire of
gimmicks, and this third volume, though by no means lacking in
enthusiastic drive, does little to suggest that the idea could or
should be taken much further from here..." (Richard Brown,
Times Literary Supplement)
"Fans will relish the mixture as before... but signs of
padding and self-parody suggest that Adams would be wise to
avoid a fourth." (Martin Hillman, Tribune)
Even the interviewers, most of them obviously fans, were
complaining to Douglas that Life, the Universe, and Everything
was less funny than the earlier books. And Douglas, hating the
book, couldn't have agreed with them more. In his defence, he
pointed out how depressed he had been during the writing, how
he felt he was no longer writing in his own voice, how writing a
third Hitchhiker's book had been a major mistake, and one he
would not repeat.
"After I wrote the second Hitchhiker's book, I swore on the
souls of my ancestors that I would not write a third. Having
written the third, I can swear on the souls of the souls of my
ancestors there will not be another," was a typical quote, and, "I
utterly intend not to write another sequel," was another.
What he wanted to do next, he told all the interviewers,
would have nothing to do with the Hitchhiker's characters.
He'd write a stage play, perhaps. Or a film on something else.
Definitely, indubitably, unarguably, nothing else with
Hitchhiker's connections in any shape, colour or form. But it was
not long before the souls of the souls of Douglas's ancestors were
ZAPHOD: Well, it's partly the curiosity, partly a sense of
adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the
money.
FORD: Money?
2APHOD: Yes, money in mind-mangling amounts.
FORD: Zaphod, last time I knew you, you were one of the
richest men in the Galaxy. What do you want
money for?
ZAPHOD: Oh, I lost it all.
FORD: All of it? What did you do, gamble it away?
ZAPHOD: No, I left it in a taxi.
FORD: Stylish.
- Unused dialogue, first radio series.
*******************************************
A couple of years later, Terry Jones (of Monty Python, and a
scriptwriter and director in his own right) decided that he would
like to make a Hitchhiker's film. The concept was to do a story
that was based solidly in the first radio series, but pretty soon
Douglas began to have second thoughts. He had done it four
times (radio, theatre, book, record) and had recently done it for a
fifth time (television), so decided that, in order to avoid the
problems of repetition that would occur if he wrote the same
script again ("I didn't want to drag it through another medium-
I was in danger of becoming my own word processor"), they
would create a new story that would be "totally consistent with
what had gone before, for the sake of those people who were
familiar with Hitchhiker's, and totally self-contained for the sake
of those who weren't. And that began to be a terrible conundrum
and in the end Terry and I said, `It would be nice to do a film
together... but let's start from scratch, and not make it
Hitchhiker's.' Also, Terry and I have been great friends for a long
time, but have had no professional links. And there's a slight risk
you take, when you go and do a professional job with a friend,
that it might spoil things. So we didn't do it."
In 1982 Douglas went to California with John Lloyd to write
The Meaning of Liff, and it was then that he was approached by
two people with whom he got on extremely well, Michael Gross (Gross was originally an artist and designer for Natwnal Lampoon, and was the man responsible for the famous cover showing a dog with a pistol to its head, captioned `Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog!') and Joe Medjuck, about a Hitchhiker's film.
At the time Douglas was excited by the possibilities of what
could be done with computers, having seen some amazing special
effects and technical work (imagine real computer graphics, done
with computers!), and decided that he would write the film. He
moved to Los Angeles, taking his girlfriend Jane Belson with him,
bought a Rainbow word processor, and began to write.
Mike and Joe were producers working for Ivan Reitman,
then known only for Animal House, now better known for
1984's smash-hit Ghostbusters, and unfortunately there was not
the same rapport between Adams and Reitman as there had been
Life, the Universe, and Everything had given Douglas the problem
of trying to force jokes onto a carefully worked-out plot. This time
he would just follow the story wherever it led him. For the first
time, the book was to be released in the UK in a hardback edition
first (rather than a later library and book-club hardback). The
presses were booked. The deadlines were agreed. The final-final
deadlines were agreed. The extensions-beyond-which-one-could-
not-extend were agreed.
Douglas was late.
Although he had made a number of notes on the book, had
toyed with various ideas, including pulling in some of the weirder
stuff from the second radio series, and getting a computer
spreadsheet programme to organise his ideas for him, he had not
written it in his Islington home (incidentally, Life, the Universe,
and Everything is the only Hitchhiker's book Douglas has ever
written at home, as opposed to somewhere else. It has been
suggested that this was because he had only just moved in there,
and it seemed like somewhere else).
He had gone down to the West Country, where earlier books
had been written, but did not write it there.
Which was why the sales kit that went out to Pan Books'
sales representatives in late Summer 1984 began as follows:
The great test of a promotion person is to devise a promotion
for a book about which one knows absolutely zilch.
The same goes for a representative selling such a book. At the
time of writing Douglas Adams is holed up somewhere, I
believe, in the West Country, incommunicado, as they say.
Prayers are held every morning in the editorial department
along the lines of, "Please God grant to Douglas Adams the gift
of inspiration along with his daily bread so that he can deliver
the manuscript in time for us to make publication date." We
just hope we have a fund of goodwill up there! But of course
you know that all the Hitch Hiker promotions have been
devised without sight of a book. That's what makes working on
them such fun...
In the sales pack were such assorted goodies as badges, and
posters showing birds under glass bowls. Also there was
Douglas's promo piece for the book, a plot description that
began:
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE
FIRST THREE BOOKS BUT NEVER THOUGHT TO ASK.
It deals with that most terrible and harrowing experience in life
- trying to remember an address which somebody told you
but you didn't write down.
At the end of Life, the Universe, and Everything Arthur
Dent was told where to find God's Final Message to His
Creation, only he can't remember where it was. He tries
everything he can to jog his memory, meditation, mind reading,
hitting himself about the head with blunt objects - he even
tries to combine them all by playing mixed doubles tennis-
but none of it works.
Still it plagues him - God's Final Message to His
Creation. He can't help feel[ing] it must be important.
In desperation he decides to throw himself off a cliff in the
hope that his life will then flash before his eyes on the way
down. As to what will happen when he reaches the bottom-
he decides he'll meet that challenge when he gets to it. He lost
all faith in the straight forward operation of cause and effect the
day he got up intending to catch up on some reading and brush
the dog and ended up on prehistoric Earth with a man from
Betelgeuse and a spaceship-load of alien telephone sanitisers.
He picks a nice day, a nice cliff, and does it. . . he falls. . .
he remembers. . .
He remembers an awful lot of other things besides, which
throws him into such a state of shock that he misses the ground
completely and ends up in the top of a tree with scratches,
bruises, and a lot to think about. All his past life on Earth takes
on a completely new meaning. . .
Now he really wants to find God's Final Message to His
Creation, and knows where to look.
Arthur Dent is going home.
Although a fascinating book outline, this is light-years away from
the book that eventually came out.
Before starting the book, Douglas had received a lecture
from Sonn Mehta, Pan s Editorial Director, and Ed Victor, his
agent, on getting the book in on time.
"To begin with, I had been slightly unwilling to write
another Hitchhiker's book. Then I went off to do long
promotional tours, and got very involved in the writing of the
computer game, which took a lot of time. And then I had to write
another version of the screenplay.
"So I kept putting off the book over and over, taking on all
these other things I would do, and then ended up having to write
the book in a terribly short space of time, still not absolutely
certain that I wanted to do it."
In order to make the deadline (remember, the presses had
been booked to print the book, the quantities - even the reprint
times - had been worked out in advance) the book had to be
written in less than three weeks.
The last time a situation like this had occurred was with The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when Douglas had wound
up in monastic seclusion, hidden away from the world and doing
nothing but writing for a month.
Once more the job of finding Douglas somewhere to write
fell to Jacqueline Graham of Pan, who recalls, "I'd just got back
from maternity leave and I was asked by Sonny Mehta to find a
suite in a central London hotel - near to Hyde Park, so Douglas
could go jogging - with air conditioning, and a Betamax video
for Sonny. I rang around, and Sonny chose the Berkeley. They
had a very posh suite, with a small bedroom and a big bedroom
- Sonny gave Douglas the small bedroom, as, he said, Douglas
wouldn't be needing it very much."
Sweating over his typewriter, Douglas sat and wrote. He was
allowed out twice a day for exercise. Sonny Mehta sat next door,
watching videos and acting as on-the-spot editor.
At this time, Douglas sent another synopsis of So Long, and
Thanks for All the Fish to Pan and his American publishers.
While this bore rather more relation to the book that eventually
came out than the original synopsis, it concluded:
Along the way they meet some new people and some old,
including:
Wonko the Sane and his remarkable Asylum.
Noslenda Bivenda, the Galaxy's greatest Clam opener.
An Ultra-Walrus with an embarrassing past.
A lorry driver who has the most extraordinary reason for
complaining about the weather.
Marvin the Paranoid Android, for whom even the good times
are bad,
Zaphod Beeblebrox, ex-Galactic President with two heads,
at least one of which is saner than an emu on acid. And
introducing...
A Leg.
It may be observed that not all of these characters made it into the
book as it eventually came out.
Douglas explained: "The Leg was something I rather liked
actually, and it came curiously enough, out of the film script. But
as soon as I took it out of context it fell apart, and I couldn't get it
to work elsewhere.
"Do you remember the robot who had the fight with
Marvin? I never had any clear visual description of the battletank,
but it was going to appear in the movie at one point, and I wanted
to give it lots of mechanical legs. The idea was that it was like a
dinosaur - a dinosaur has one subsidiary brain to control its tail,
and I thought this machine would have lots of subsidiary brains
to deal with different bits of it. After the thing smashed itself to
bits, the one thing that would be left with some kind of
independent existence would be one of its legs.
"It was actually one of my favourite new things that I came
up with in the film script. Of course, we don't know what will
happen with the film script, but that bit will almost certainly
never make it into the completed version, not because it's not
good, but because it's completely detachable from the rest and
because the script's too long.
"The Galaxy's Greatest Clam Opener. . . I don't remember
very much about that. It had something to do with a seafood
restaurant in Paris. There was someone I had in mind for the
character: he was the only person who could open this particular
type of clam, which was one of the great gαstronomic experiences.
I'm not sure why it was one of the great gastronomic experiences
but I think it was because whenever you ate it you got a flicker of
memory all the way back to the primeval ooze. It might have had
some plot function, but I can't remember what, and anyway, it
didn't make it beyond the very early version.
"The Ultra-Walrus with the embarrassing past... well, this is
very self-indulgent, I'm afraid. I got the idea after watching Let it
Be and feeling very sorry for this obviously very embarrassed
policeman having to go and make the Beatles stop playing. I mean
knowing this is actually an extraordinary moment: the Beatles are
playing live on a rooftop in London. And this poor policeman's
job was to go and tell them to stop it. I thought that somebody
would be so mortified that they would do anything not to be in
this embarrassing position.
"So I thought of someone who was placed in such an
embarrassing position, one he hated so much, that he would just
want not to be there. The thought goes through his mind, `I
would do anything rather than do what I now have to do',
whereupon someone appears and says to him, `Look, you have
the option to either go and do this thing you don't want to do...
or I can offer you a life on a completely different planet.' So he
opts to go and be this strange sort of walrus creature. And it's a
rather dull life as a walrus, but on the other hand he's perpetually
grateful for the fact that he wasn't in this incredibly embarrassing
position, and had ended up a walrus.
"The reason I made it a walrus, was... well, first of all I
didn't know what the alternative life would be, and then when
Gary Day Ellison, who designed the cover, showed me that
lenticular picture I thought, `I might as well make him a walrus'.
It's because Gary always designs a cover that can clearly not have
any function in relation to the book, and if I still had a chance I'd
always try and work it in somehow. Not that it ever actually
happened that way."
In November the book was released in England and
America. The English cover was all black, with a lenticular
picture of a dinosaur that changed into a walrus (and vice versa)
stuck on the front. (There are no dinosaurs or walruses in So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) The American cover,
marginally more logically, showed some leaping dolphins. (There
are no dolphins in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, but there
are more dolphins than there are walruses or dinosaurs.)
It was in October that the world's most expensive
Hitchhiker's book was sold. At a dinner-party at Douglas's
British inventorial entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair spotted a pre-
publication copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and
asked if he could have it. Douglas refused, pointing out it was the
only copy he had, whereupon Sir Clive whipped out his cheque
book, and offered Douglas $1,000 for the charity of his choice,
providing he could have the book.
Douglas had him make the cheque out to Greenpeace.
However, Douglas's hesitation to give the book away may
have less to do with the fact it was his only copy, and more to do
with the fact that it was not a book with which he was altogether
happy.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is very different from
the other Hitchhiker's books, and the critical reaction to it was
mixed. For many of the fans it was a disappointment: they
wanted more Zaphod, more Marvin, more space; they wanted
Arthur to make it with Trillian; they wanted to find out how the
Agrajag problem resolved: why Arthur Dent was the most
important being in the universe (and even funnier than the frogs),
they wanted towel jokes and extracts from The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. What they got was a love story. So Long, and Thanksfor All
the Fish is no longer science fiction, and, for much of the book, it
is no longer humour (although it is often funny, and has certain
science fiction elements in it). It was not the book the fans were
expecting, and many of them were disappointed.
Many of the mainstream critics, however, preferred it, finding
the gentler pace and the relatively down-to-earth tone easier to
cope with, and coming up with such quotes as "Fish is the best
evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a
bomb-heaving satirist" (Time); others commented that it read as if
it had been written in a hotel room in two weeks, with such
comments as "a work in which bits and pieces of different
sketches orbit around a non-existent plot" (The Times). So Long,
and Thanks for All the Fish went on to sell as well as any of the
other books, and won the City Limits `best book' award for 1985
(voted on by the readership of the London listings magazine).
Talking to Adams about the book, one finds a mix of
emotions: relief and slight embarrassment that it sold as well as it
did, added to the feeling that he had `used up a life' with the book.
Why weren't the expected characters in the book? "Panly
because they didn't fit, and partly because I didn't want to do
them. It was like a chore - people were saying, `Let's have a
Zaphod bit', and I didn't feel like doing a Zaphod bit!"
This attitude of `I am not going to buckle down to the wishes
of the fans' comes across in the book, to its detriment, most
obviously in Chapter 25, where, having asked, somewhat
rhetorically, whether or not Arthur Dent ever indulges the
pleasures of the senses other than flying and drinking tea,
Douglas comments, `Those who wish to know should read on.
Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit
and has Marvin in it.' It is patronising and unfair. And
undoubtedly would have been cut from a later draft of the
manuscript had there been one. (Occasionally Douglas threatens that at some future date he will rewrite all four
Hitchhiker's books into one massive, self-consistent tome.)
Douglas continued, "You see, I didn't even want to do
Marvin, but then what happened was that I finally had an idea of
something I wanted to do that would have to involve Marvin,
which is the way it should be. I didn't have that with Zaphod, or
I couldn't. But when I needed the extra element for that scene it
looked like a job for Marvin.
"It's very strange, that walking across the desert scene, when
they find the message. I felt very haunted by that when I wrote it
- it's not panicularly funny or anything, but curiously enough I
was very proud of it. I actually felt very sorry for, and sympathetic
with Marvin in that I felt close to the character in a way that
sometimes I hadn't because I was just doing it out of duty.
"But yes, the book is lighter weight than the others. In a
sense I came close to owning up to that on the last page."
It was hard not to see parallels between Arthur Dent's return
from space (which involves telling everybody he's just returned
from California) and Douglas Adams's return from a not
altogether happy year in Los Angeles to the safer environs of
Islington; and while he maintains that Fenchurch is no relation to
Jane, his fianceé (Fenchurch being based more on his memories of
adolescent love), he admits there is an element of this in the book.
"It wouldn't be fanciful to say that there is an echo of my
return from LA in there. But I do think that one problem with
the book, and there are many, is that up to that point I had been
writing pure fantasy, which I'd had to do as I'd destroyed the
Earth in the first reel, so to speak. So my job was to make the
fantastical and dreamlike appear to be as real and solid as
possible, that was always the crux of Hitchhiker's.
"Whereas in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish a curious
kind of thing happened.I got back to the everyday and somehow
for the first time it seemed to be unreal and dreamlike. It was
rather in reverse. I think it's largely because I thought I'd get rid
of this problem of not having the Earth there to relate to by just
bringing it back, and I suppose a part of me knew, a part of me
said that you can't really do that. So therefore it wasn't the real
Earth, and therefore it was bound to become unreal and
dreamlike, and that was really a problem with the book.
"Also, you see, the character of Arthur Dent has undergone a
fundamental change by then, because up to that point he has been
our representative in a fantastical world, he has been Everyman,
the person we can relate to, and through whose eyes we have seen
the strange things that have happened. Now suddenly it's been
turned around, and we have a real everyday Earth, and this
character who, far from being our representative, has just spent
the last eight years of his life alternately living in a cave on
prehistoric Earth or being flung around the galaxy.
"So he is no longer someone through whose eyes we can see
things. The whole thing has turned upside down, and I don't
think I had got to grips with that until I was too far committed.
"That's why I am staning afresh now, because I feel all the
lines have gotten rather too tangled."
Whatever happened to the `jumping off a cliff' plot? "It was a
structural idea I came up with which I still think is neat as a
structure, but doesn't work as a book. The book would start with
him leaping off a cliff, with the idea that just before you die your
life flashes before you. There was something he wanted to
remember, and he'd deal with what happened when he got to the
bottom when he got there. So the entire book would be a
flashback which would come from what he thought and he
remembered as he fell down the cliff. I decided after hacking
away at that for a while that it's a short story structure, but not a
novel structure. Some people might argue (and with, I think, a
certain amount of justice) that I didn't achieve a novel structure in
the end, so what was I making a fuss about?
"But I suppose one reason why a lot of that stuff went, why
it never materialised, was I had the feeling during that period of
the whole world looking over my shoulder while I was writing.
Every time someone would write to me and say, `What are you
going to do with this character?' or, `Why don't you do this to
resolve this situation?', then you instantly shy away from it and
think it's no longer yours to control.
"It seemed to me like there was too much to tie up and mop
up in Hitchhiker's, so that trying to write it like that would just
be a continual task of knotting up the loose ends, when in fact it
might be better just to think of something completely different to
do.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was to be the last word
on Hitchhiker's. At least in novel form; there were still to be the
computer games, the film, the towel, possibly more television and
more radio - even this book. But in novel form the story had
gone as far as it was going to go.
At least for then.
Douglas said so.
20
Do You Know Where Your Towel Is?
A TOWEL, AS EXPLAINED AT LENGTH in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, is a jolly useful thing.
A towel is also a fairly obvious piece of merchandising.
While the merchandising properties of a number of anifacts
mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have obvious
commercial potential - Joo Janta sunglasses, for example, which
turn black when danger threatens, or Disaster Area records, or even
the Guide itself - technology has not yet reached the point where
these things could be manufactured in bulk, nor, indeed, at all.
Not so with towels.
At one point Marks and Spencer (A British chain store whose underwear can be found on two out of three British people.) considered marketing the
towel of the book; however, nothing came of this.
In 1984 Douglas had lunch with Eugene Beer, of Birmingham
publicists Beer-Davies. (Eugene was handling the publicity for the
Hitchhiker's computer game.) During the course of this lunch
Douglas mentioned the abonive Marks and Spencer towel project.
Eugene immediately saw the potential in real, authorised, money-
making towels, with the relevant page of Hitchhiker's emblazoned
on it. He began marketing them, taking out an advert in Private
Eye, and sending complimentary towels all over the place.
The complimentary towels were intended to cause the writers
who received them to recommend them in print, something which
happened almost without exception.
The towels were originally available in a son of purple and a
son of blue. They were large, strong, good value, and did all the
things that hitchhikery towels are well known for doing, in
addition to which they gave you something to- read on long
journeys, something that even Douglas Adams, in his initial
treatise on towels, failed to think of. The second edition of towels
were available in `Squornshellous Silver' and `Beeblebrox Brown',
and were 60" by 40" (A wide variety of merchandise, such as T-shirts, pens, badges, stickers, etc, is available from ZZ9 Plural 2 Alpha (37 Keen's Road, Croydon, Surrey, CRO 1AH). But no towels.).
21
Games with Computers
DOUGLAS ADAMS HAS ALWAYS been fascinated by gadgets of every
kind. His home, and indeed his life, is awash with all those little
devices designed to reduce the complications of the workaday
world. Televisions and amplifiers, computers and cameras, tape
players of all descriptions, electronic objects of every colour and
size. "The tendency for me to take the piss out of technology is
me taking the piss out of myself. Digital watches and a kitchen full
of juice extractors - I'm a sucker for it!"
While the initial success of Hitchhiker's allowed him to
indulge his passion for tape players, Walkmans and the like, he
remained for a long time on a battered manual typewriter, neither
Douglas Adams's collaborator on the computer game was an
American, Steve Meretzky. They began by corresponding via
electronic bulletin board, and then met in February 1984 for
initial discussions. Adams wrote chunks of material, sent them via
computer to Meretzky, who programmed them and sent them
back. Douglas Adams actually designed and wrote more than half
the game; the rest was a joint effort, using Douglas's ideas and
material, and Meretzky's computer experience. The game itself
was released in late `84, and proved an immediate success. The
packaging was imaginative, containing an illustrated booklet with
pictures of the Guide and sundry alien phenomena, together with
a `Don't Panic' badge, Joo Janta sunglasses, fluff, a microscopic
space fleet, demolition orders (real eager-beavers should take a
very careful look at the signatures on them), and no tea.
The computer game, which Adams describes as "bearing as
much relationship to the books as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are Dead does to Hamlet", opens much as the other versions of
Hitchhiker's. You are Arthur Dent, waking with a hangover on
the morning that your house is demolished, but you rapidly find
yourself in a fiendish and phantasmagoric nightmare, in which
the object seems to be as much to find out what the purpose of
the game is as it is to play it.
As Adams explains, "It gets the player going and lulled into a
false sense of security. And then all hell breaks loose and it goes
through the most extraordinary number of directions. The game
just glances at events which were a major part of the books, while
things I used as one line throw-aways are those that I used for the
game's set pieces. The reason was to keep me interested in doing
it, and I wanted to make it fair for the people who haven't read
the books. So readers and non-readers were, as much as possible,
on an equal footing... the game is equally difficult for both."
The response to the game was extraordinary. Described by
the LondonTimes as "without doubt the best adventure ever seen
on computer", it became the bestselling adventure game in
America on its release, selling over a quarter of a million copies.
A major part of the game's success must have been due to the fact
that a real-life author was, for the first time, actively involving
himself in, indeed writing, a computer game based on his work;
and also to Adams's own love of messing around with computers,
and devising problems, doing crosswords and the like - not to
mention his need to keep himself interested and amused by that
game, which communicates itself to participants.
The game contains much that is new (and doubtless
apocryphal); obscure, brain-baffling problems; and much new
Adams text, including another opportunity to examine and
rewrite the events of the first half of the first book. Doors, Babel
fish, peanuts and tea (or lack therefore) take on a whole new lease
of life.
Some sample passages include:
Of a pub cheese sandwich...
"The barman gives you a cheese sandwich. The bread is like the
stuff that stereos come packed in, the cheese would be great for
rubbing out spelling mistakes, and margarine and pickle have
combined to produce something that shouldn't be, but is,
turquoise. Since it is clearly unfit for human consumption you
are grateful to be charged only a pound for it."
Of one of the many deaths of Arthur Dent. . .
"Your serious allergic reaction to protein loss from matter
transference beams becomes a cause cél[e`]bre among various
holistic pressure groups in the Galaxy and leads to a total ban
on dematerialisation. Within fifty years, space travel is replaced
by a keen interest in old furniture restoration and market
gardening. In this new, quieter Galaxy, the art of telepathy
flourishes as never before, creating a new universal harmony
which brings all life together, converts all matter into thought
and brings about the rebirth of the entire Universe on a higher
and better plane of existence. However, none of this affects you,
because you are dead."
Later in the game, when one obtains a copy of the Guide, it can
be consulted on a number of subjects. Fluff, for example...
"Fluff is interesting stuff: a deadly poison on Bodega Minor, the
diet staple of Frazelon V, the unit of currency on the moons of
the Blurfoid System, and the major crop of the laundry supplies
planet, Blastus 111. One ancient legend claims that four pieces
of fluff lie scattered around the Galaxy: each forming one
quarter of the seedling of a tree with amazing properties, the
sole survivor of the tropical planet Fuzzbol (Footnote 8). The
ultimate source of fluff is still a mystery, with the scientific
community divided between the Big Lint Bang theory and the
White Lint Hole theory." (Footnote 8, should you care to
check, informs you that "it's not much of a legend really.)"
The game is bizarre and improbable. It has the text of a short novel
in its memory, and means that a good part of Douglas Adams's
mail now consists of heartfelt cries from people trapped on the
bridge of the Heart of Gold or unable to obtain a Babel fish.
A second game was planned at the same time as the first, this
to take place on the planet of Magrathea.
Whether or not the game is a valid part of the Hitchhiker's
canon (for which the only requisite for joining would seem to be
that it is completely different from any other versions) could be
debated. But comparison is not really needed. As Douglas Adams
explained, when interviewed about Interactive Literature, "You
can't compare IL with literature. If you do, you can very easily
make a fool of yourself. When Leo Fender first invented an
electric guitar one could have said: `But to what extent is this real
music?' To which the answer is: `All right, we're not going to
play Beethoven on it, but at least let's see what we can do.' What
matters is whether it's interesting and exciting.
"The thing I like about this is that I can sit down and know
that I am the first person to be working in this specific field. When
you are writing a novel, you are aware that you are manipulating
your readers. Here you know you are going to have to make them
think how you want them to reason. I don't regard it as being an
abdication of creative art. Yes, at first I was horrified: in fact, there
is a sense in which now the author is even more in control,
because the `reader' has more problems to solve. All the devices of
the novel are still at your disposal, because a novel is simply a
string of words, and words can mean whatever you want them to.
It just offers the opportunity to have a lot of fun."
Adams enjoyed putting together and writing the computer
game more than any other aspect of Hitchhiker's. Following the
computer game, Adams's interest in computers, computer games
and programming has remained high, although at one point he
found that he was spending so much time playing with his Apple
Macintosh that he switched back to a manual typewriter, in order
to get some work done and as a form of penance. Computer-
related projects for the future include Bureaucracy (The object of Bureaucracy being to persuade your bank to acknowledge a change-of-address card.) planned for a
mid-1985 release (but delayed until 1987). Projects that were
slated to happen but probably won't include Reagan, God,
Hitchhiker's II and The Muppet Institute of Technology.
The Muppet Institute of Technology was to have been a one-
hour special for television, using the Muppets to promote the idea
of computer literacy. The late Jim Henson, the Muppets' creator,
flew Adams and twenty other people to New York for
discussions, and while Douglas was enthused about the project,
and found Henson Associates "extraordinarily nice people to
work with", the project did not happen.
The idea for the Reagan program occurred to Douglas after
watching one of the Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984: "It occurred
to me that people who have to brief Reagan for a debate such as
that have to provide him with the minimum number of facts and
the maximum number of ways of getting to those facts, and the
most all-embracing fallback positions - lines to come up with
when he doesn't really know the answer to the question and maybe
doesn't even understand the question, but has recognised some key
phrase, and can come up with a phrase or line that will cover it.
"And I thought, `This is exactly the way you program a
computer to appear to be taking part in a conversation.' So, with
a friend in New York, I was going to do a program to emulate
Reagan, so you could sit down and talk to a computer and it
would respond as Reagan would. And then we could do a
Thatcher one, and after a while you could do all the world
leaders, and get all the various modules to talk to each other.
"After that we were going to do a program called God, and
program all God's attributes into it, and you'd have all the
different denominations of God on it... you know, a Methodist
God, a Jewish God, and so on. . . I wanted to be the first person
to have computer software burned in the Bible Belt, which I felt
was a rite of passage that any young medium had to pass through.
"However, with the recession in the American computer
industry, all that came to nothing, largely because the people who
wanted to do it with me discovered they didn't have cars or
money or jobs."
THE GAME ITSELF:-
It is difficult to say too much about the computer game without
giving information away that could spoil it for somebody playing
it. Essentially, it is based on the events in the first two-thirds of
the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One starts out as
Arthur Dent, in bed one morning in Tiverton in Devon, with an
awful hangover. Initial problems include how to pick something
up without it slipping through your fingers and how not to be
killed when a large yellow bulldozer knocks down your house.
Things remain fairly faithful to the book until you reach the
Heart of Gold, at which point Ford, Zaphod and Trillian go off
to have a sauna and you are left to your own devices in a ship full
of uncooperative GPP machines. After that things get very
bizarre indeed: events are experienced from a multitude of
viewpoints; problems to be solved occur in places as disparate as
Damogran, a party in Islington, and the interior of a whale.
To get you through the game are your copy of The
Hitchhiker's Guide, your Sub-Etha Sensomatic Thumb, and your
towel - not to mention your native wit, luck, and a sense of
humour. And a thing your aunt gave you that you don't know
what it is.
The game is addictive: fiendishly hard, yet impossible to
leave alone until every last problem is solved, which can only be
done by paying attention to every piece of information that
comes your way, and often by thinking extremely laterally. The
game can be played by novices, who might in some ways have
less difficulty than experienced computer gamers, who would not
necessarily find it easy to tune in to the game's peculiar mind-set.
It is easy to see why Douglas Adams found this the most
enjoyable part of Hitchhiker's; almost all aspects of it, from the
adventure, to the Guide entries, to the footnotes, even to the
Invisiclues Hints book, display a relaxed attitude missing from
the books and radio series. Adams has a tendency to have ideas
that don't always fit into the framework of what he is doing at the
time. The enjoyable thing about the computer game is that the
most bizarre ideas can be incorporated into it with ease. Also
Adams's love of problem-solving (crosswords and such) is given
full rein.
The weakest part of the game is the opening section of the
packaging and manual: an eight-page advertisement for the Guide
("Yes! The Universe Can Be Yours For Less Than 30 Altairian
Dollars Per Day!") which comes across as sophomoric - more
like Mad magazine than Douglas Adams.
The game, however, is a major achievement, one that even
the least computer literate Hitchhiker's fan should enjoy.
Mostly Harmless delves into that decidedly murky pool of
parallel universes, so you're never entirely sure whether the
Arthur Dent featured here is in fact the same Arthur Dent as
popped up elsewhere. After all, there's an astro-physicist called
Trillian in the stars and also a thrusting young TV reporter called
Tricia McMillan, and they may be related, in some way or other.
And the TV reporter, who once met an extra-terrestrial called
Zaphod at a party in Islington but didn't go with him, is
apparently a TV reporter on Earth. At least an Earth, although
which one is anybody's guess. This Earth hasn't been destroyed
or if it has it is showing a remarkable reluctance to disappear
altogether.
Meanwhile, aside from tackling such weighty
SF/cosmological/scientific questions as parallel universes, there's
a little astrology, plus some aliens called Grebulons. The
Grebulons are currently stationed on the recently discovered
tenth planet in the Solar System named, after nothing much in
particular, Rupert. The Grebulons, who set out to wreak havoc or
something, met with a slight accident counesy of a meteor storm
on the way and have since entirely forgotten what it was that they
were supposed to do when they got wherever it was they were
meant to be going. So they watch TV instead.
In the meantime, Arthur, having singularly failed to find the
Earth, or at least an Earth that remotely resembles the one we still
presume the Vogons to have blown up, settles on a pleasant little
planet after his ship crashlands and he is the only survivor. There
he becomes the Sandwich Maker and is reasonably happy.
Reasonably happy, that is, for a man who has managed to lose
not only his planet but also, since then, the love of his life,
Fenchurch, in an accident involving Improbability Drive,
however improbable that may seem. But Arthur manages to
remain stoical throughout since he knows he can't die until he
meets the hapless Agrajag on the anarchically named Stavromula
Beta, as he discovered during the unfolding plot of Life, the
Universe, and Everything. And yes, if nothing else, this is a story
that does manage to resolve itself.
Elsewhere, Ford is having huge problems with the new
owners of The Hitchhiker's GHide to the Galaxy, InfiniDim
Enterprises. They are not only no fun to be with at panies, but
are also, horror upon horror, in the process of replacing the
Guide with the Guide Mark II, which comes in a box on which is
printed, in large, unfriendly letters, the word PANIC. Ford,
unable to go to a party, is understandably not at all happy. And
the more he learns of InfiniDim Enterprises, the less happy he is.
He engages the services of a mechanical friend called Colin and
attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery - that is, why there
are no panies or even drink at the Hitchhiker's offices anymore
- by leaping out of the building a lot and eventually going off in
search of Anhur.
While all that is happening, Anhur discovers, to his shock,
that he has become a father. His daughter has the unlikely name
of Random, and is generally surly and bad-tempered and has a
mother called Trillian. And, if you're wondering, no they didn't,
it was all down to DNA sampling and stuff like that. Anyway,
Random is definitely not the sort of person you want to lend a
watch to and Arthur is a little taken aback when his peaceful
existence as Sandwich Maker is interrupted. by the arrival of
Trillian, who dumps their daughter on him and disappears into
the stratosphere once again. Arthur loses happiness and gains
responsibility. He isn't happy.
All this goes on between the covers of Mostly Harmless,
which contains only mentions of Zaphod Bebblebrox and not a
single appearance.
Meanwhile, Douglas Adams's time becomes more and more
crowded and before long he may well wish to escape to a parallel
universe himself. His every waking hour for the foreseeable
future is swallowed up by a world tour to promote the book in
all the far flung corners of the planet. He is about to be enveloped
by the media circuit in this country, and appearances on radio
and TV chat shows are promised, or even threatened. Douglas
Adams, once again, is about to become a multi-media personality.
In 1993, Hitchhiker's fan Kevin Davies is releasing his The
Making of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy video, which
has been approved by Douglas. And over in New York, DC
Comics are publishing the official Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy comic book adaptation. The comic will run over three
issues and is scripted by John Carnell and drawn by Steve
Leilohah. It will be published by Pan in the UK. But as to any
more books, well, there definitely, categorically, absolutely and
unequivocally won't be any more Hitchhiker's books. Although
only Zarquon knows for sure.
Mostly Harmless is the last book Douglas will publish
through Heinemann. He is following his editor Sue Freestone to
Jonathan Cape. He would have done so already were it not for
Heinemann, not unnaturally, being none too willing to let one of
their leading authors go without a struggle. Douglas and his
agent, Ed Victor, became entangled in a wrangle which has now
been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. But it managed to delay
the publication of Mostly Harmless since, while it was going on,
Douglas couldn't put pen to paper, or more accurately, finger to
word processor.
Oh yes, and if you are still wondering, and haven't bought
Mostly Harmless yet - and shame on you if you haven't - yes
Marvin really is dead and doesn't appear in the book at all. Of
such exclusions are great tragedies made.
*********** Dirk: Appendix 1: Hitchhiker's - the Original Synopsis: 4 TIFFs. The text itself: *********
THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.
Douglas Adams.
The show is a science fiction comedy adventure in time and space, which weaves in and out of fantasy, jokes, satire, parallel universe and time warps, in the wake of two men who are researching the New Revised Edition of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an electronic 'boook' designed to help the footlose wanderer find his way round the marvels of the Universe for les than thirty Altarian dollars a day.
One of the men is an extraterrestrial who has spent some years living incognito on the Earth. When he first arrrived the minimal research he had done suggested to his that the name Ford Perfect would be nicely incoonspicous. The other is an Earthma, Arthur Dent (Dirk: originally Aleric was here, but it has been crossed out. From now on, all the references to Arthur Dent was meant to Aleric at first) who was a friend of Ford's for years without feeling that he wasn't a perfectly ordinary human being.
The first episode tells of how Ford reveals the truth about himself to an incredulous Arthur, and how they both escape from a doomed Earth to begin their wanderings.
The story starts as Arthur is lying on the ground in the path of a buldoser which is about to demolish his house to make away (Dirk: sic!) for a new by-pass. Having fought the plane at every level, this is his last ditch effort. He is arguing with a man from the council who is pointing out to him in a Godfatherly way that the bulldozer driver is is (Dirk: sic!) a rather careless gentleman who isn't too fussy about what he drives over. In the middle of this confrontation Ford arrives in a rather anxious state and asks Arthur is (Dirk: sic!) he is busy at al, and if there's somewhere they can go and chat. Arthur, astonished, refuses to move. Ford is very insistenty and eventually Arthur calls the man from the council and asks him if they could declare a truce for half an hour. The councilman very charmingly agrees and says that if he likes to slip away for half an hour he'll make sure they don't try and knock his house till he gets back, word of honour. Ford and Arthur repair to a nearby pub, where Ford asks Arthur how he woud react if he told him that he wasn't from Guilford at all but from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.
As soon as they're out of the way the councilman oorders the demolition ceremony to start. A local lady dignitary makes a very movin speech about how wonderful life will suddenly become as soon as the bypass is built, and swings a bottle of champagne against the bolldozer, which moves in for the kill.
The sound of the crashingf building reaches Arthur who is in the middle of not believing a woord that Frd is telling him, and he chardes back to his ex-house shouting about what a naughty world we live in.
At the moment the sky is suddenly torn apart by the scream of jets, an a fleet of flying saucers streak towards the Earth. As everyone fless in panic an unearthly voice rings through the air announcing that due to redevelopment of this sector of the galaxy they are building a new hyperspace bypass and the Earth will unfortunately have to be demolished. In answer to appaled cries of protest the voice says thta the plane have been on public display in the planning office in Alpha Centauri for ten years, so it's far too late to start making a fuss now. He orders the demolition to start. A low rumble slowly builds into an earshattering explosion, folowed by silence.
"A"
Arthur wakes, not knowing where he is. Ford tells him they've managed to get a lift aboard one of the ships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. Not to worry about the Earth, he says, there are an infinite multiplicity of parallel universes in which the Earth is still alive and well. He explains how they got on the ship by producing a copy oof an electronic book called the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Under the entry marked 'Vogoon Constructors' it gives detailed instructioons as to get best way of hitching a ride from oone of their ships - you have to play on Vogon psychology, which it describes. Ford explains thta it's his job to research a new edition of the book, which is now a lttle out of date. Would Arthur like to accompany his in the task? Arthur only wants to get back to Earth, or at least, it's (Dirk: sic!) nearest equivalent. However, he is fascinated to browse through this strange book. He is suddenly appalled when he discovers Earth's entry. Thoough the book is over a miion pafge long, the inhabitants oof the Earth only warrant a one word entry - 'Harmless'. Ford, rather embarrassed, explains that the reason he had been on Earth was to gather a bit more material. He'd had a bit of an argument with the editor oover it, but finlally he'd been allowed to expand the entry to 'Mostly HAmrless'. Theyare (Dirk: sic!) very short of space.
Arthur is stung to the quick. He agrees to go with Ford.
END OF EPISODE ONE.
THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY.
Some suggestions for future development.
Each episode should be more or less self contained, but lead on quite naturally to thenext one, perhaps with a 'cliff henger'.
A narrative structure can be achievend by having short extracts read from the Guide itself, since much of its information woould naturally be presented in the form of anecdote.
Foord ands Alric frequently have to subsidise their travels by taking ofdd jobs along the way; as well as strange new worlds they can visit parallel alternatives of Earth which are more or less the same, but not quite... they find that many of the eccentric alien races they encounter epitomise some human folly such as greed, pretentiouenses etc., rather in the manner of Gulliver's Tarvels.
IN one episode they was hired by a fabolously wealthy but rather nervous man to act as 'internal body guards'. For this they are reduced to microscopic size in order to escort meals through his digestive system.
In another the encounter a race of dentists, exiled from their home planet for having pronounced that everything you can possibly eat or breathe, up to and including toothpaste, is bad for your teeth. They have been told not to return till they have evolved an entirely new way of life that is both hygienic and fun.
In another episode they finfd themselves on an 'alternative' Earth which is receiving its first visitatioon from alien beings who announce that they have come to pay court at the home of the most intelligent life form of the Galaxy. After a lot of self satisfied parading by the humans it turns out that it was the olphins the aliens actually had in mind.
The 'Guide' structure should allow for the almost unlimited development of freewheeling ideas whilst at the same time retaining a fairly simple and cherent shape and purpose.
Appendix II
The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker's:
What Happens Where and Why
The First Radio Series
1) Arthur Dent wakes up to find his house is about to be
knocked down. Ford Prefect takes him to the pub. Just before the
Earth is destroyed, they hitchhike their way onto one of the
spaceships of the Vogon Destructor Fleet. The Vogon Captain
throws them out of the airlock, having read them some poetry.
2) They are rescued by the starship Heart of Gold, piloted by
Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian, inhabited by Marvin the paranoid
android, Eddie the ship's computer and a number of Doors.
3) Arriving in orbit around the legendary planet of
Magrathea, they are fired on by an automatic defence system,
resulting in the bruising of someone's upper arm and the creation
and demise of a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale. Exploring
Magrathea reveals Slanibanfast, a planetary designer who is very
keen on fjords, and is about to design the Eanh Mark Il.
4) Anhur discovers that white mice really ran the Eanh as
an experiment in behavioural psychology set up by the computer
Deep Thought to find the Question to the Great Answer of Life,
the Universe, and Everything (the Answer being 42). Shooty and
Bang Bang, two enlightened and liberal cops, interrupt a meeting
with the Mice, who want Trillian and Arthur to find the
Question for them. The cops blow up a computer bank behind
which our heroes are hiding.
5) The fearless four find themselves in the Restaurant at the
End of the Universe... actually a far-future Magrathea. Marvin
has been parking cars there. Abandoning Arthur's Pears
Gallumbit they steal a small black spaceship, which turns out to
belong to an Admiral of the Fleet and drops them in the vanguard
of a major intergalactic war.
6) In which it is revealed that Arthur Dent's only brother
was nibbled to death by an okapi. The chair in the ship they are in
is actually one of the Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three, a shape-
shifting race who evolve several times over lunch. Arthur and
Ford escape in a hyperspace capsule, while the others are eaten by
the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (aka the Haggunenon
Admiral). Arthur and Ford, having materialised inside the hold of
the Golgafrincham B - Ark, crash land on Earth two million
years before the Vogons destroy it. An experiment with Scrabble
shows that the Question is, or might be, `What do you get if you
multiply six by nine?'
Christmas Special Episode
7) Zaphod Beeblebrox is picked up by a freighter taking
copies of Playbeing to Ursa Minor Beta (the Haggunenon having
evolved into an escape capsule). Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect get
drunk on Old Earth and start seeing a spaceship. Zaphod tries to
see Zarniwoop, editor of the Guide. He meets Roosta as the
building is attacked by Frogstar fighters: while Marvin saves the
day, the building is kidnapped and taken to the Frogstar. . .
The Second Radio Series
8) Zaphod discovers that he is going to be fed to the Total
Perspective Vortex. Zaphod, despite two hangovers, rescues Ford
and Arthur, having discovered their fossilised towel. Zaphod (still
on board the Frogstar-snatched building) goes to a robot disco,
lands on the Frogstar, is fed to the Total Perspective Vortex, and
eats some fairy cake.
9) On board the Heart of Gold, Zaphod, Ford and Arthur
find themselves under attack from the Vogon Fleet, under orders
from Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod's psychiatrist. Arthur flings away a
cup of Nutrimatic drink, and the computer's circuits occupy
themselves with the problem of why Arthur likes tea. A seance
summons Zaphod's great-grandfather, who tells him to find the
person really running the universe, and rescues them.
10) Finding themselves in a cave on the planet Brontitall,
they soon find themselves falling through the air thirteen miles
above the ground. Arthur is rescued by a bird, and discovers that
he has fallen from the cup in the Statue of Arthur Dent Flinging
the Nutrimatic Cup. Taken to the bird colony which lives in his
ear, he is told by a Wise Old Bird the significance of the statue.
Belgium is discovered to be a very rude word indeed. Ford and
Zaphod land on a passing bird. Arthur discovers the planet to be
the property of the Dolmansaxlil Corporation, and is attacked by
limping footwarriors, then rescued by a Lintilla, a bright and sexy
girl archaeologist.
11) Ford and Zaphod reach the ground relatively safely.
Arthur discovers that the Lintilla he met is one of three identical
Lintillas, or rather one of 578,000,000,000 Lintillas, due to
problems with a cloning machine. Hig Hurtenflurst of the
Dolmansaxlil Corporation threatens Arthur and the Lintillas with
revocation, then shows them what happened to Brontitall; a Shoe
Shop Intensifier Ray caused the planet's inhabitants to build shoe
shops and sell shoes. Marvin, who was not rescued by a bird, falls
to the ground creating a hole, but gets out and rescues Arthur and
a Lintilla. Meanwhile, Zaphod and Ford find a derelict space port
and a curious ship. . .
12) Poodoo shows up with a priest and three Allitnils, while
Arthur and the Lintillas are under attack. The Allitnils and two
Lintillas fall in love, are married, kiss and explode. Zaphod and
Ford discover a spaceship full of people going nowhere, and also
Zarniwoop. Arthur kills the third Allitnil (an anticlone) and sets
off with Marvin and a Lintilla. Zarniwoop explains some of the
plot to Zaphod (Ford is getting drunk and isn't listening). They
all go and visit the Man in the Shack, who runs the universe. He
reveals that Zaphod was in collusion with the consortium of
psychiatrists who ordered the Earth destroyed in order to prevent
the Question from coming out. In a huff, Arthur takes the Heart
of Gold, and leaves with a Lintilla and Marvin, abandoning
Zaphod, Ford and Zarniwoop on the Man in the Shack's planet....
The TV Series/Records
Essentially the plot of the first six episodes; only instead of
all the Haggunenon stuff, they have escaped in a stunt ship
belonging to the rock group Disaster Area (whose lead Ajuitarist
Hotblack Desiato is no longer talking to his old friend Ford
Prefect, because he is dead), which is going to be fired into the
sun. They escape through a wonky transporter unit, operated by
Marvin, sending Zaphod and Trillian heaven knows where and
Ford and Arthur to the B - Ark. It was also established that the
Mice were quite keen on slice-and-dicing Arthur's brain to
extract the Answer from it.
The Books
i) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In terms of plot, this resembles the first four radio episodes.
At the end, however, Marvin depresses Shooty and Bang Bang's
ship to death, blowing up each of the cop's life support units, and
they leave Magrathea.
ii) The Restaurant at the End ofthe Universe
This starts off with Arthur trying to get a cup of tea from the
Heart of Gold, tying up all its circuits as the Vogons attack (a bit
like Episode Nine of the radio series). Zaphod's great-grandfather
transpons Zaphod and Marvin to Ursa Minor Beta where events
similar to Episode Seven of the radio series occur. Once more
Zaphod is taken to Frogstar B, and fed into the Total Perspective
Vortex. Once more he eats the cake. Then he discovers
Zarniwoop and the spaceship (as in Episode Twelve). Then they
visit the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, steal Hotblack
Desiato's ship (as in records/TV) and wind up in a predicament.
From there, Ford and Arthur go to prehistoric Earth, while
Trillian and Zaphod go to the Man in the Shack, this time
abandoning Zarniwoop there. (Shoes and the Shoe Event Horizon,
which merited rather more than an episode of the second radio
series, get a paragraph in this book.)
iii) Life, the Universe, and Everything
Ford and Arthur are rescued from two million years ago by a
sofa which dumps them at Lord's Cricket Ground a few days
before the Earth was/is/will be destroyed. Trillian and Zaphod,
on the Heart of Gold, sort of split up. Marvin has spent a long
time in a swamp. There's a plot about the robots of Krikkit, but
I'm not giving anything away. There's also a statue of Arthur
Dent, but for a different reason from the radio series.
Variations between the British and American editions include
a certain amount of translation (lolly becomes popsicle), the
respelling of a sound effect (`wop!' becomes `whop!' throughout)
and an extra 400 words are added to chapter 21, adapted from
radio Episode Ten, concerning `Belgium' as term of profanity.
(The British edition just goes right ahead and uses the word
`fuck', thus avoiding the problem entirely.)
iv) So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The Dolphins restore the Earth. Anhur Dent falls in love and
discovers God's final message to His Creation.
v) Mostly Harmless
Athur Dent loses both his planet and the woman he loves,
and unexpectedly gains a daughter. And a new version of The
Guide, which behaves in an altogether more mysterious and
sinister manner, puts in an appearance.
vi) The Hitchhiker's Trilogy
American collection of the first three books (American
editions). Contains `Introduction - a Guide to the Guide'
Douglas's essay on Hitchhiker's origins, and the first few
paragraphs of `How to Leave the Planet'.
vii) The Compleat Hitchhiker
1,his was what Pan called the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts when they were publishing it.
Seeing they never published it, or even came close, because the
book went instead to Heinemann, Douglas's new hardback
publishers, this is positively the rarest Hitchhiker's book
available. If you have a copy, hold onto it, and auction it before
returning to whichever parallel universe you bought it in.
viii) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four
Parts
The same as the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, only in English
editions, and with an extra three lines of introduction and So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish added.
The Expanded Books
The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A collection of the first four books, for use on a Macintosh
computer.
Appendix III
Who's Who in the Galaxy:
Some Comments by Douglas Adams
ARTHUR DENT
Arthur wasn't based on Simon Jones. Simon is convinced I've
said this at some point, whereas what I've said was very similar
which was that I wrote the part with him in mind. Which is a
very different thing to say about an actor. I wrote the part for
him, and I wrote the part with his voice in mind and with an idea
of what he was strong on playing and so on. But there's only the
slightest echo of Simon himself in it. He isn't based on Simon, but
he is based on what I thought Simon's strengths as an actor were,
which is a very different thing. Nor, by the same token, is it
autobiographical; having said that, Arthur Dent is not so remote
from myself that it's impossible to use things which have
happened to me in writing about him.
DEEP THOUGHT
The name is a very obvious joke.
FENCHURCH
She isn't based on any particular person, but on a number of
different thoughts or observations of people or incidents. It was a
bit of a parody of the Oscar Wilde thing in The Importance of
Being Earnest - being found in a bag at the left luggage office at
Victoria. When in fact it's Paddington Station, where the ticket
queues are always insane and you can't understand why it
happens like that every single day, why it isn't sorted out.
Paddington was the station I had in mind, but I couldn't call her
that, because there's already a bear named Paddington after the
station, so I just went through the various names of the London
termini, and Fenchurch seemed a nice name. I just selected the
one that seemed the most fun as a name. I don't think it's even a
station I've ever been to. That was where that came from, it was
just an idea I'd had floating around for a character, whereas I was
also looking for a character who was going to be the girl who'd
been in the café in Rickmansworth. I put the two things together.
Then the whole thing of Anhur falling in love with her was sort
of going very much into adolescent memories really.
FORD PREFECT
I remember the idea I had when I created Ford, which was that he
is a reaction against Dr Who, because Dr Who is always rushing
about saving people and planets and generally doing good works,
so to speak; and I thought the keynote of the character of Ford
Prefect was that given the choice between getting involved and
saving the world from some disaster on the one hand, and on the
other hand going to a party, he'd go to the party every time,
assuming that the world, if it were worth anything, would take care
of itself. So that was the departure point for Ford. He wasn't based
on any particular character but come to think of it, aspects of
Ford's later behaviour became more and more based on memories
of Geoffrey McGivern's more extreme behaviour in pubs.
HOTBLACK DESIATO
I had this appalling overblown rockstar character, and I couldn't
come up with a name for him. Then I saw an estate agent's board
up outside a house. Well, I nearly crashed my car with delight! I
couldn't get the name out of my mind. Eventually I phoned them
up and said, `Can I use your name? I can't come up with anything
nearly as good !' They said fine. It hasn't done them any harm,
except it's terribly unfair, as people keep phoning them up and
saying, `Come on, it's a bit cheeky, nicking a name from
Hitchhiker's to call your estate agents by, isn't it?' And they were
a bit upset, when I moved back to England, that I didn't buy my
house from them.
THE MAN IN THE SHACK
I suppose he came from a discussion I had with someone about
this not entirely original observation that everyone's experience of
the world, on which we build this enormous edifice of what we
consider the world is, of what we think the universe is, and our
place in it, and how matter behaves, and everything, is actually a
construct which we put on little electrical signals that we get.
When you think of what we know about the universe, and the
data we have to go on, it's a pretty huge gap. Even the information
we have is not only just what we happen to have been told but the
interpretation that we have put on the little electrical signals which
tell us that somebody's told us this.
We really have nothing to go on at all. So that character was
someone who took that observation to the ultimate extreme,
which is that he would take absolutely nothing on trust at all. He
wouldn't accept anything as being proved or assumed, and
therefore responds absolutely intuitively, if you like,
thoughtlessly, to whatever happens. He makes everything up as
he goes along. Because he makes no assumptions about anything
he really is the best qualified person to rule, to exercise power,
because he's completely disinterested. On the other hand, that
level of disinterest makes him completely unable to produce any
rational or useful decisions whatsoever. As I say in the passage
that introduces him, who can possibly rule if no one who wants
to do it can be allowed to?
MARVIN
Marvin came from Andrew Marshall. He's another comedy
writer, and he is exactly like that. When I set out to write the
character, I wanted to write a robot who was Andrew Marshall,
and in the first draft I actually called the robot Marshall. It only
got changed on the way to the studio because Geoffrey Perkins
thought that the word Marshall suggested other things. Andrew
was the sort of guy you are afraid to introduce to people in pubs
because you know he's going to be rude to them. His wife
recognised him first time. He's cheered up a lot recently.
But I said that on the radio once - that Marvin was
Marshall, and my mother heard it. Next time I spoke to her she
said, `Marvin isn't Andrew Marshall - he's Eeyore!' I said
`What?' She said, `Marvin is just like Eeyore, go and look.' So I
did, and blow me! But literature is full of depressives. Marvin is
simply the latest and most metal.
The other place that a lot of Marvin comes from is from me. I
get awfully gloomy, and a lot of that comes out in Marvin. But I
haven't been that depressed in a year or so: I haven't had one of
these terrible depressions.
Curiously enough, I never had a very clear idea of what
Marvin looked like, and I still don't have one. I don't think the
TV one quite got it. I described him differently for the film script
- he's not silver any more, he's the colour of a black Saab Turbo.
He isn't so square, either, he needs a kind of stooping quality: on
the one hand, he's been designed to be dynamic and streamlined
and beautiful. But he holds himself the wrong way, so the design
has gone completely to naught because he looks pathetic. Utterly
pathetic. The patheticness comes from his attitude to himself
rather than any inherent design. As far as his design is concerned
he looks very sleek. A hi-tech robot.
People ask me what my favourite character is, to which the
answer has usually been, after a long umm and a pause, `probably
