Dont Panic
Page 3
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
&n
bsp; 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 fu
nny
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