Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  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 Wars 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 stuntship was done by Douglas himself. John Lloyd was the co-writer of some episodes of the radio series, when Douglas was script editor of Doctor 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 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 series, 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 involv
ed, 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.

  * Light Entertainment.

  * 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.

  * 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 scene) 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 sea, Douglas generally sat in a deckchair and did crosswords. Sometimes, according to a number of the actors and technicians, he fell off the chair, although none of them were quite sure why.

  * 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…

  * 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...

  * 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 Hitchhikers, or whether it is extant throughout the entertainment industry has not been adequately investigated, at least, not by me.

  * 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.

  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 radio series script, 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. Part 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 started it; it seemed unfair on the poor chap’s heart.”

  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 critic’s 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-earth, was the colonisation of Earth 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 forms. One. They’re so stupid…

  — Cut from TV series script.

  15

  INVASION USA

  “And now”, began the press release, “for something completely different…”

  As has been seen, Douglas Adams’s contribution to Monty Python was neither major nor earth-shattering, co
nsisting as it did of having had an old sketch rewritten by diverse hands for the soundtrack album of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and two walk-on parts (once in drag and once in a surgical mask) in the final series.

  This was not, however, the impression one got from the American PR for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which represented Douglas as a “former scriptwriter for Monty Python”. In addition to which, the initial press release for the hardback copy of Hitchhiker’s (published by Harmony/Crown in October 1980) contained the following praise for the book:

  Really entertaining and fun —John Cleese

  Much funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written —Terry Jones

  I know for a fact that John Cleese hasn’t read it —Graham Chapman

  Who is John Cleese? —Eric Idle

  Really entertaining and fun —Michael Palin

  An American fan might have been forgiven for supposing that Douglas Adams, not Terry Gilliam, was the sixth member of the Python team.

  MONTY PYTHON AND HITCHHIKER’S

  “It’s funny. When I was at university I was a great Python fan. I still am, but that was obviously when Python was at its most active. So I have very much an outsider’s view of Python; an audience’s view. As far as Hitchhiker’s goes I’m the only person who doesn’t have any outsider’s view whatsoever. I often wonder how I’d react to it if I wasn’t me, but I still was me, so to speak, and how much I’d like it, and how much I’d be a fan or whatever. The way I would perceive it in among everything else. Obviously I can’t answer that question. I have no idea, because I’m the one person who can’t look at it from outside.