by Neil Gaiman
* Although at first glance this theory may seem flippant, a brief examination shows that the field of British comedy is littered with incredibly tall people. John Cleese, Peter Cook, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson and Adams himself are all six foot five inches, Frank Muir is six foot six inches, as is Dennis Norden. Douglas often mentioned that the late Graham Chapman, at only six foot three inches was thus four per cent less funny than the rest.
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 was always 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 later regarded 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 straitjacketed 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*).
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’s favourite sketches of this period were 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 said, “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 explained, “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 us
e 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 was always 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.
* Will Adams joined a knitwear company upon leaving university; Martin Smith went into advertising, and was later immortalised as “bloody Martin Smith from Croydon” in a book written by Douglas.
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 Week Ending—a radio show that satirised 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 remembered fondly the enormous sum of £100 he was paid for the television rights to his sketches), and later spun off into a short-lived radio series called Oh No It Isn’t. 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 twenty-two 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.*
“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 remembered 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 twenty-four-year-old washout. The collaboration’s collapse was due to many factors, including Chapman’s then troubles with alcoholism, Douglas’s increasing 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 beard 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 £2,000.
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 anythi
ng.”)
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 twenty-four-year-old flop.
* This sketch, rewritten into a short story, incorporated into the Hitchhiker’s canon and illustrated by Michael Foreman, appeared in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book.
** The full script of Our Show for Ringo Starr was later published in the book OJRIL: The Completely Incomplete Graham Chapman.
