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
VfJars 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 stunt ship
was done by Douglas himself. John Lloyd was the co-writer of
some episodes of the radio series, when Douglas was script editor
of Dr 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 very
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, 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 l
et 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
involved, 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.
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 script, radio 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. Pan 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 staned it; it seemed unfair on the poor chap's hean."
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 critics 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-eanh, was the
colonisation of Eanh 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 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, consisting 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 tbe 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 outsiders 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.
"You can see all the elements in Hitchhiker's in which it is a
Dont Panic Page 12
