Dont Panic

by Dont Panic [lit]

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