Dont Panic

by Dont Panic [lit]

  FOR MOST OF THE REST OF THE SERIES.

  ZAPHOD: (DAZED.) What the photon happened?

  - Draft script for Episode Three (unused).

  ******************************************************

  It was all too easy for Douglas to give Zaphod Beeblebrox an

  extra arm and an extra head during the radio series. No one ever

  saw him; it was a one-off throwaway line. But if one has the

  televisual task of transforming this into something that works on

  the screen one thanks one's lucky stars that Douglas did not give

  Beeblebrox five heads, or fifty...

  Unable to find a bicephalic actor (or at least, one who could

  learn his lines), the BBC resorted to Mark Wing-Davey, Zaphod

  on radio, and built him an animatronic head and an extra arm

  (mostly stuffed, but occasionally, when all hands needed to be

  seen to be working, the hand of someone behind him, sticking an

  extra arm out, as can be seen quite clearly in the Milliways

  sequence of Episode Five).

  ********************************************************

  ASTONISHINGLY ENOUGH, ONE WALL OF

  THE BRIDGE APPEARS TO GIVE DIRECTLY

  OUT ONTO QUITE A LARGE SUNNY

  PATIO, WITH GRASS, A DECKCHAIR, A

  TABLE WITH A LARGE BRIGHTLY

  COLOURED SUNSHADE, EXOTIC

  FLOWERS AND SO ON. SEATED IN THE

  DECKCHAIR WITH A DRINK IS AN

  EXTRAORDINARY LOOKING MAN. HE

  HAS TWO HEADS. OBVIOUSLY ONE OF

  THESE IS GOING TO BE A FAKE UNLESS WE

  CAN FIND AN ACTOR PREPARED TO

  UNDERGO SOME VERY EXOTlC SURGERY.

  THE REAL HEAD AND THE FAKE HEAD

  SHOULD LOOK AS FAR AS POSSIBLE

  ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL: ANY

  SHORTCOMINGS IN THE REALISM OF THE

  FAKE HEAD SHOULD BE MATCHED BY

  THE MAKE-UP ON THE REAL ONE. THE

  FAKE SHOULD HAVE AN ARTICULATED

  MOUTH AND ARTICULATED EYES.

  - Draft TV script for Episode Two.

  ****************************************************

  There was a problem with Zaphod's head. It looked false, and

  stuffed, and stuck there. This is not because it was a less than

  sterling piece of special effects work (although it wasn't that good),

  but also because things went wrong, and even when they didn't

  the batteries tended to run down in rehearsals, so by the time a

  scene was filmed, the head just lolled around expressionlessly. As

  Douglas Adams says, "It was a very delicate mechanism, and it

  would work wonderfully for 30 seconds and then break down or

  get stuck and to get it working properly you'd have to spend an

  hour taking it apart and putting it back together again, and we

  never had that hour so we fudged as best we could."

  As Mark Wing-Davey remembers, "The difficulty with the

  television series for me was Alan Bell (who we all know and

  love). I don't think he wanted the original members of the radio

  show at all, because he wanted the freedom to pick and choose a

  bit, but we were supposed to have first option so we came in and

  read for it. They didn't want any input from me on the way the

  character would look (I'd visualised him as a blonde beach bum).

  I quite liked the final design, but I refused to wear the eyepatch

  - I said, `Give the other head the eyepatch, because I'm not

  having one! It's hard enough acting with another head, but with

  one eye as well...' (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...)

  "The other head was heavvvvvy. Very heavy. I was wearing

  armour plating made of fibre glass, and because I wanted to be

  able to alternate the two right arms I had a special cut-out.

  "There was a little switch hidden in the circuitry of my

  costume which switched the head on and off. We were under

  such pressure in the studio that occasionally I forgot to switch it

  on, so I'm acting away and it's just there. It cost f3,000 by the

  way - more than me!"

  Costume design for the series was primarily the responsibility

  of Dee Robson, a veteran BBC designer with a penchant for

  science fiction. It was she who designed Ford Prefect's precisely

  clashing clothes - based on what could be found in the BBC's

  wardrobes, and it was she who gave Zaphod Beeblebrox yet

  another additional organ: examining the costume worn by Mark

  Wing-Davey reveals two trouser flies (one zipped, one buttoned)

  and, Dee's original costume notes explain, Zaphod has a "double

  crotch, padded to give effect of two organs. "

  As Mark Wing-Davey explained, "I said to wardrobe, you've

  seen Mick Jagger in those tight trousers - make me a pair. So I

  had these nine inch tubes down the front of the trousers for

  filming. When we got into the studio Dee came up to me to say

  she was `worried about those... things. I thought they might be

  a bit obvious, so I've cut them down to six inches.'"

  One of the most famous costumes, however, was Arthur

  Dent's: a dressing gown, over a pair of pajamas. The dressing gown

  first appeared in the books following the television series: there is

  no mention of what Arthur is wearing in the first two books. That

  Arthur remained in the dressing gown throughout the TV series

  was Alan Bell's idea: Douglas had written a sequence on board the

  Heart of Gold in which the ship designed Arthur a silvery jump-

  suit. The whole sequence was scrapped, and Alan ensured that

  Arthur stayed in his dressing gown. As Bell explained, "What was

  special about Arthur was that he was in a dressing gown. Silver

  jump-suits are what they wore in Star Wars."

  Alan J.W. Bell is a BBC Light Entertainment director and

  producer; having worked on such shows as Maigret and

  Panorama as a film editor, he won a BAFTA award for Terry

  Jones's and Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns, a BAFTA nomination

  for the long-running geriatric comedy Last of the Summer Wine,

  and a Royal Television Society Award for Hitchhiiker's.

  I met him initially in his office at the BBC, which still

  contains a number of items of Hitchhiker's memorabilia. It's a

  show he is proud of, and has many fond memories of. On his

  desk was a small plastic fruit machine which he urged me to try. I

  pulled the handle, but nothing happened; it should have squirted

  me with water. Alan pointed out to his secretary that it was her

  job to keep it filled, and we began the interview: this was BBC

  Light Entertainment.

  "The first time I heard of Hitchhiker's was in a bar

  somewhere - I was asked if I'd heard it on the radio. I hadn't, so

  I listened to it, and I thought it was marvellous, inspired stuff, but

  there was no way it could be done on TV. It was all in the mind,

  all in the imagination.

  "So about three months later I was asked to do it, and I said

  that I thought it couldn't be done, but they said `We're going to

  do it!', so that was it. I had to do it.

  "Now, I work for Light Entertainment, not Drama (who do

  Dr Who and have experience of things like this), and w
e had no

  idea what the budgeting would be. All I could do was put down

  what I thought it would cost, and I was out by thousands of

  pounds. For the first episode, for example, we had to throw away

  $10,000 of model shots of spaceships, because they wobble, and

  they looked like models. That first episode was about $40,000

  over budget, which is vast in TV terms. But it had to be done

  right. Otherwise it would have been awful."

  The first episode of Hitchhiker's was made very much as a

  pilot, and Alan Bell presented it to the heads of department at the

  BBC. Some of them didn't like it. They didn't understand it, nor

  for that matter did they realise it was meant to be funny. And the

  cost of the first episode = over $120,000 - was about four times

  as much as an equivalent episode of Dr Who.

  In order to demonstrate the humour of the show, Alan Bell

  arranged for a laugh track. This was done by assembling about a

  hundred science fiction fans in the National Film Theatre, playing

  them the first episode, and taping their reaction. As a warm-up to

  this a ten minute video was played, featuring Peter Jones reading

  hastily felt-penned cue cards in a bewildered fashion, assuring the

  audience that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be in the next episode,

  and, with the ubiquitous Kevin Davies, demonstrating the use of

  the headphones.

  This is Peter Jones's only on-screen appearance in the

  Hitchhiker's television series.

  The audience loved the show, laughed on cue and generally

  had a good time, and while the BBC hierarchy had agreed that the

  next five episodes should be made (although they were made for

  more like $40,000 a show - one reason why the sets begin to get

  a little rudimentary towards the end), it did not insist on a laugh

  track. This was undoubtedly a good thing.

  As Bell remembers, "The first episode was only a pilot, but

  by the time we had got half-way through, they had already

  commissioned the series, but we still didn't know the resources

  that would be required because all we had to go on were the radio

  scripts.

  "When we'd finished it, the Powers That Be thought that the

  viewers wouldn't know that it was comedy unless we added a

  laughter track. So we hired the National Film Theatre and

  showed it on a big screen and gave all the audience headphones so

  they could hear the soundtrack nice and clearly, and they laughed

  all the way through. It did help that that audience was composed

  of fans..."

  While much of the casting was the same on television and

  radio, there were a few variations.

  "I wanted to keep everyone from the radio series, but

  sometimes people's voices don't match their physical appearance.

  "For example, I wanted someone for Ford Prefect who

  looked slightly different, and when I saw Geoffrey McGivern I

  thought he looked too ordinary. Ford should be human but

  slightly unnerving, so we looked around for someone else. My

  secretary (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 Hitchhiker's, or whether it is extant throughout the entertainment industry has not been adequately investigated, at least, not by me.) suggested David Dixon. He was great, but I thought

  we'd change the colour of his eyes and make them a vivid blue, so

  we got special tinted contact lenses which looked marvellous in

  real life, but when it came to television the cameras just weren't

  sensitive enough to pick up on it - except in the pub scene at the

  beginning.

  "Sandra Dickinson got the part of Trillian after we had

  interviewed about 200 young ladies for the role. None of them

  had performed it with the right feelings. The girl had to have a

  sense of humour. And then Sandra Dickinson came in and read it

  and made the lines more funny than any other actress who'd done

  an audition. "

  Sandra Dickinson was a surprising choice for Trillian; the

  character was described in the book as a dark-haired,

  dark-complexioned English woman; Sandra played it (as indeed

  she is in real life) as a small blonde American with a squeaky

  husky voice. As Douglas Adams said of her, "She could have

  done a perfect `English Rose' voice, and looking back I think

  perhaps we should have got her to do it. But it was such a relief to

  find someone who could actually read Trillian's lines with some

  humour, and give the character some life, that we just had her do

  it as herself, and not change a thing."

  Another surprise casting came with Episode Five: Sandra's

  husband, Peter Davison, the fifth and blandest Dr Who. He

  played the Dish of the Day, a bovine creature which implores

  diners to eat it. As Alan Bell explains, "Sandra came to me and

  said that Peter wanted to play a guest part in Hitchhiker's and she

  suggested the Dish of the Day. I said, `You cannot put Peter

  Davison in a cow skin', but she said, No, really he wants to do

  it!'. I said OK, and we booked him. We didn't pay him star

  status; he just did it for the fun of it. And he played it very well."

  Early on in the press releases for Hitchhiker's, great play was

  made of the fact that they would not be filming in the quarries

  and gravel pits in which Dr Who has always travelled to distant

  planets. And they wouldn't have any of the plastic rocks that

  made Star Trek's alien worlds so strangely unconvincing.

  Instead, they would go abroad. Iceland, perhaps. Or Morocco.

  The Magrathean sequences, one was assured, would be filmed

  somewhere exotic.

  Alan Bell: "Douglas wanted us to film the Magrathean

  sequences in Iceland. So I looked up the holiday brochures, and it

  was very cold and there weren't any hotels of any note, but I had

  been to Morocco years before and I remembered there was a part

  of Morocco that was very space-like. We went to look, but we

  had so much trouble getting through customs - without cameras

  - and we met a Japanese film crew who said, `Don't come

  because they deliberately delay you so you'll spend more money!'

  - they'd had all their equipment impounded for three weeks.

  "So we ended up in this rather nice clay pit in Cornwall,

  where we also did the beach scenes: Marvin playing beach ball

  and Douglas going into the sea."

  Most of the cast and crew have memories of the Cornish clay

  pit. Some of them have to do with the fact that there were no

  toilets down there. Others have to do with David Learner, the

  actor inside Marvin, who, due to the length of time it took to get

  in and out of the Marvin costume, was abandoned in the clay pit

  during the occasional rain showers during filming, protected from

  rust by an umbrella.

  Prehistoric Britain was filmed in the Lake District, during a

  cold snap, which meant that Aubrey Morris (playing the Captain

  of the B - Ark, in his bath), and the extras clad in animal skins

  who played the pre-Golgafrincham humans, were all frozen to

  the bone, and spent all their time when not on camera bundled u
p

  in blankets and drinking tea.

  The other interesting location was that of Arthur's house-

  discovered by Alan Bell while driving, lost, around Leatherhead.

  (The gate, which is all one sees knocked down by a bulldozer,

  was built especially).

  It was while the pub scenes at the beginning were being

  filmed that the union troubles began for Hitchhiker's - the

  precise nature of which no one seems clear on anymore, but

  which apparently involved a trip to the pub by some members of

  the cast and crew which might have been recreational, but which

  the union representatives assumed was professional, and as such

  they felt they should have been invited, or something.(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.)

  The computer room at the end of Episode Four (the Shooty

  and Bang Bang sequence) was actually filmed on Henley Golf

  Course. "We wanted somewhere near at hand which we could

  build and blow up", Alan Bell remembered. "It was just

  sufficiently out of London that we could warn the locals that if

  they heard a bang at two in the morning, don't pay any attention

  to it - it's only us! You can't see it on the show, but it's actually

  raining into the set - it was open at the top."

  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