so original, and secondly because it makes you laugh."
Geoffrey Perkins:
"I know at the time we made the radio series I felt that it was the
logical successor to Monty Python, really. There's no doubt that
Hitchhiker's appeals to the same kind of audience and has the
same sort of comedy. That was an initial reason for the success.
The title plays an important part. Somebody once described it in
an article as `a programme somewhat clumsily entitled The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', which is a very erroneous
judgement. I knew it hit a nerve from the start, when the letters
started pouring in. The timing was obviously good. It was Star
Wars time, there was a lot of interest in space. Also, when people
think of space they tend to think of something very comic-strip
and here was something very erudite and witty. That surprised
people. But it appealed to everyone. The intellectuals compared it
to Swift, and the fourteen-year-olds enjoyed hearing depressed
robots clanking around."
**********************************************************
10
All the Galaxy's a Stage
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 th
e 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
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