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 t
he 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 medi
um 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
you envisage.
*************************************************
CUT TO MODEL SHOT OF THE SHIP.
THE MISSILES ARE ON THE POINT OF
HITTING IT WHEN THE SKY EXPLODES
WITH BEWILDERING COLOURS AND A
MONTAGE OF TOTALLY INCONGRUOUS
IMAGES. THESE SHOULD INCLUDE
DISTORTED PICTURES OF THE
PASSENGERS, STARS, MONKEYS, STAPLING
MACHINES, TREES, CHEESE SOUFFLES... IN
OTHER WORDS, A BRIEF VISION OF
MADNESS. INCLUDED SHOULD ALSO BE A
SPERM WHALE AND A BOWL OF
PETUNIAS. WE GO BACK INSIDE THE
BRIDGE.
EVERYTHING IS HIGGLEDY-PIGGELDY.
THERE ARE A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF
MELONS LYING ABOUT.
THERE IS ALSO (THOUGH NO ONE CALLS
ATTENTION TO IT) A GOAT WITH A SCALE
MODEL OF THE EIFFEL TOWER STRAPPED
TO ITS HEAD STANDING ABOUT. THIS
GOAT IS NEVER EVER REFERRED TO, BUT
IT WILL CONTINUE TO BE WITH THEM
Dont Panic Page 10
