Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  This tradition was well understood by undergraduates with histrionic leanings. By the time Douglas arrived in Cambridge, Footlights was not only the place to have astonishing fun with likeminded young thesps—it was a career move.

  But Footlights was not a club open to everyone, and, besides, not everyone talented was attracted to it. Among Douglas’s contemporaries, John Lloyd was studying law—or, as he concedes, not studying law—next door at Trinity. He and Douglas struck up a complex and competitive friendship, and John later became a collaborator on—inter alia—the radio series of Hitchhiker’s (as well as evolving into the UK’s most successful TV comedy producer). He recalls that his nickname for Douglas was Vast Creature. John Lloyd was a good-looking young man whose floppy blond hair made him rather resemble Anthony Andrews, the actor, playing Sebastian Flyte in the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisted. His view of Footlights is less than awestruck:

  Footlights was going through a rather louche and decadent patch at the time when a lot of middle-aged or even elderly dons in velvet smoking jackets got young, handsome undergraduates to do song and dance routines with them . . . Footlights was a joke. None of us worth our salt would have gone near the place. People who ran the stall at the undergraduate fair—the Freshers’ Fair—we thought were a bunch of wankers. I’d honestly never heard of Footlights before I got to Cambridge, so it was a year or so before I got round to thinking about it. And in the meantime I got a part in the Trinity revue which had been famous the year before for Charlie [Prince Charles] being in a sketch about a man in a dustbin . . . In my second year, with my friend Richard Burrage, we ran the Trinity revue and this is when I got to know Douglas as we both had college revue backgrounds.

  Mind you, John Lloyd did eventually audition for Footlights at the prompting of a girl he was in love with at the time, the actress, Mary Allen. Naturally he was accepted and enjoyed a vintage year when Jon Canter was president of the club. Jon was at Gonville and Caius not really studying law, like John Lloyd. After graduation, Jon Canter,* 56 Mary Allen and John Lloyd were all important in Douglas’s life.

  Douglas auditioned for Footlights in his first term, but was rebuffed and a little hurt. Footlights was quite tightly controlled at the time by those who had risen up through the ranks; besides, Douglas’s writing talents had not yet been honed by performance. Long, haranguing monologues did not work for the languidly witty Footlights committee. Douglas told Neil Gaiman years later (see Don’t Panic) that he found them “aloof and rather pleased with themselves,” so he joined CULES (the Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society) instead. This organization literally had a captive audience when it took its shows out to prisons, and in hospitals its audience was usually too decrepit to do a runner; Douglas looked back on the experience with some embarrassment.

  Such was Douglas’s appetite for performance that he joined the ADC (Amateur Dramatic Club) where he played Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sue Limb’s production of Sheridan’s The Rivals. Opposite him was Jonathan Brock, another friend destined to play an important part in Douglas’s life a few years later. Jonathan (Jonny to his pals) went on to become a barrister, and then a QC.* 57 His recollection of their stage swordfight was that Douglas “had the coordination of a mastodon. We did five performances in which the result of the fight depended on whether Douglas could get his weapon out of his scabbard.” Jonny in fact had been at school with Jane Belson, later to become Douglas’s wife, but she went to Oxford so he met Douglas ten years before she did. At the memorial service he commented that it was “ten years of chaos before she sorted him out.”

  However, Douglas did eventually get into Footlights. It was a little hubristic of him to think that he would be welcomed in his first year; it was considered that to perform in Footlights one had at least to have acquired the jaded sophistication of the second year, and the attainment of earthly paradise (being on the committee) was more or less reserved for third-year students. As Footlights’ personnel changed with time, Douglas was encouraged by one committee member who was “friendly and helpful, all the things the others weren’t, a completely nice guy named Simon Jones” (later to play Arthur Dent so brilliantly).* 58 Douglas and his pal Keith Jeffrey were elected together—but not before a minor running skirmish and clash of egos within Footlights.

  But even if Footlights in 1971 was full of aesthetes exchanging wickedly inexplicit understandings, there was another path to messing about theatrically that in many ways was much more fun. This was the college revue, or “smoker,” a relatively informal affair in which histrionic undergraduates performed frivolous sketches for the amusement of themselves and their peers. The term derives from an earlier era’s “smoking concert,” one in which the chaps were allowed to smoke and from which women were excluded, probably on the daft grounds that many of the sketches featured relentless sexual double entendres. (“Your ejaculations fill me with surprise.”)* 59

  The smoker appealed enormously to Douglas. He got together with two friends, Martin Smith and Will Adams, to write sketches for a revue of their own. Martin and Will were at Fitzwilliam College studying Economics and English respectively. Martin is neat and clever, and Will is beardy and clever. Martin and Will had been writing together when they met Douglas, but they immediately clicked as a team. The three of them created some brilliant material. Will and Martin continued to write together, but Douglas wrote on his own—a lifelong preference, though rather perverse for a man who needed company as much as he did. On the other hand, his painstaking drafting and redrafting could only work with one creative intelligence in charge. Martin describes their method of working like this:

  The thing was, Douglas and Will and I write very differently. Will and I always wrote together. We were the classic Galton and Simpson, Clement and La Frenais type of combination. We were always stultified into inaction unless we were together. Douglas always wanted to write on his own. What he would do is write three sentences of brilliant introduction, and then he’d be so thrilled with them he’d run up Castle Hill, to where Fitzwilliam was, and he’d sit down with us and say, “Listen, listen, listen . . . ,” and he’d try not to laugh all the way through his reading. Will and I would then take it away and write a sketch beginning with those lines. It was like a game of consequences. Will and I would share the lines out, but I think our ability to self-edit wasn’t there. So we would turn out stuff that was quite funny, but wasn’t very different, so then Douglas would take it back again, and take what we’d done and make it funnier and better. And then we’d take it back off him and make it work, because if you left it to Douglas everybody would be delivering each sketch in Serbo-Croat while riding on roller skates . . .

  It’s interesting that even then Douglas had a compelling need for approval, and he found it almost impossible to wait before asking for it. Sue Freestone, the editor of many of his books, would later experience this to a degree unusual even among writers, a notoriously demanding lot when it comes to emotional neediness. Douglas was always innocent about finding his own jokes funny; they were funny and nobody had ever taught him that Brits should only allow themselves a self-deprecating little smile over their own achievements. Besides, he would hoot with merriment at other people’s jokes. Making Douglas laugh, all his friends agree, was one of the great delights of the world.

  With his naughty magpie instinct, Douglas later immortalized Martin when Ford Prefect says “this is Zaphod Beeblebrox—not bloody Martin Smith of Croydon.” (When Martin evolved into a senior manager in advertising he used to have clients ask him if by chance he came from Croydon.) Will went into publishing and became a book editor and quiz compiler. Martin and Will were—and are—engaging and funny men.

  Their first revue was staged on 14 June 1972 in the School of Pythagoras, the theatre in St. John’s. It started at 11 p.m., a moment not only past cocoa and pyjamas time but also—significantly—pub closing time. The Lady Margaret Players and Adams, Smith, Adams presented Several Poor Players Strutting and Fretting (30p, t
ickets from the Porters’ Lodge). Oddly the programme inside was called “Fruttin’ in Streatham,” though perhaps it’s just that after a few drinks “strutting and fretting” (a reference to Shakespeare’s unmentionable Scottish play, of course) started to transmogrify.

  The cast was Martin Smith, Stefanie Singer, Rachel Hood, Will Adams, and Douglas, and the scripts were written by Adams, Smith, Adams with additional material by John Parry, Jon Canter, Jerry Brown and John Cleese of Monty Python fame. Douglas’s roommate, Nick Burton, managed the house. “Look around for him,” the programme notes advised, “he’ll be the one who isn’t laughing.”

  Whether strutting or fruttin’, the revue was well received. Who did what in the writing is an enigma, but comic writing is often a team effort because it is so hard for one individual to know what is funny and how it will play. The three of them deserve equal credit. They had become good friends, but Will Adams says that their conversation was largely banter as they batted words and jokes back and forth, enjoying the occasional rally. “We liked to amuse each other,” he recalls, “by topping each other’s jokes or running with the fantasies. We very rarely talked about anything personal, and I rather regret that now.”

  The programme for Several Poor Players was replete with ads for Trinity’s A Big Hand on Your Opening and The Budgie by Tony Chekhov and various bits of spoof biography, but the sketches themselves are listed with minimalist detail. Mary Allen recalls that there was a wonderfully funny one about a structuralist analysis of a railway timetable. (Railway timetables meant more in those pre-privatized days.) Structuralism was fashionable at the time, but not as big as irony. Irony was enormous. Everybody wanted it in quantities that a roomful of French intellectuals could not deconstruct.* 60

  Douglas made friends easily in college, but at first he missed Helen. Although that relationship eventually faded away, in the meantime he visited her. She had also gone to university, to Warwick (which, despite the name, is not in Warwick but lies between Coventry and Kenilworth). Douglas, who loved anecdotes for their humour and cared not if they made him look daft, told the story of hitching there with that essential prop, his guitar, to see her. During his visit he met the long-haired bloke from along the corridor, also with guitar. They jammed together, with the other man trying to direct Douglas to lay down a good rhythm line around which he, the other bloke, could take flight. This was an affront to Douglas’s guitar hero ego and it goaded him into venturing the odd and, as he believed, dazzling improvisation. “No, no,” the hairy one said, “if you don’t mind, I’ll do the fiddly bits.” And he did. What’s more, he was dauntingly good. Only years later did Douglas find out that the other man was the young Mark Knopfler, later of Dire Straits.

  It was during his first summer holiday from university that something happened that retrospectively seems spooky, but isn’t. What happened was this: Douglas had a summer job in Dorset in a local warehouse. Shaftesbury and its environs boast some of the most beautiful countryside in Britain, but it is quite hilly. Douglas had to drive a tractor for this job. Until you get used to them, tractors are surprisingly difficult to master with their bewildering gear changes and high centre of gravity. These days, just to prove that the EU is not exclusively about the curvature of bananas and creative expenses, there are sensible regulations that enforce roll-over bars on such vehicles.

  That summer, at the bottom of a hill, Douglas had an accident. He was in an open tractor towing a trailer full of iron girders. He tried to change down as he started down the hill, but he just could not get the lower gear to engage. The tractor careered downwards in neutral, getting faster and faster. Seeing a log across the road, Douglas steered to avoid it, but the tractor turned over. Douglas, the tractor, the trailer and the girders tumbled down the hill, roughly in that order, with Douglas keeping just far enough ahead to avoid being killed. Instead he broke his pelvis and spent three weeks in Yeovil District Hospital while he mended, flat on his back staring at the ceiling, bored out of his mind, and, rather to his doctor’s surprise, recuperated enough to start the next term at Cambridge on time. Here’s the coincidence: exactly twenty years later, on the same spot, another man turned over a tractor—and died of his injuries. His name: Douglas Adams.

  It must have been partly Douglas’s accident that inspired Adams, Smith, Adams to run the following credits in the programme for their next revue, The Patter of Tiny Minds:

  Mr. Adams’s (D) pelvis by Yeovil District Hospital

  The shape of Mr. Smith’s feet by Start-Rite

  Mr. Adams’s (W) disposition by Yeastvite

  The Patter of Tiny Minds, staged from 15–17 November 1973 in the School of Pythagoras, was more ambitious than the trio’s first effort. They even did some marketing with a small flyer put in bicycle baskets, and a largish poster featuring Will in some very odd shorts, Martin all in black looking like a hit man, and Douglas wearing his chicken suit complete with real cockscomb. Douglas was always game to get into this preposterous garment; endearingly he never minded making an arse of himself for a good cause, and he liked being in disguise.

  The show boasted a director, Tony Root, sound and lighting engineers, John Fassnidge and Jim Besley, and a musician, Andy Thurston, whose violin added its own musical commentary. John Lloyd is credited with writing additional material, and there is script advice from “Otto.” It turns out that Otto was a reference to John “Otto” Cleese, who had given them one sketch, but whom they felt should be obscured—perhaps for fear of appearing precious. Even more importantly, the cast included a woman, Margaret Thomas, a talented thesp and singer whom they all apparently fancied something terrible. The spoof copy in the programme was not entirely a matter of invention:

  MARGARET THOMAS is getting fed up with the improper advances that are continually made to her by the other three [members of the cast], all of whom are deeply and tragically in love with her. They are often to be seen offering her tokens of affection—dried cockroaches tied up in ribbon, bits of paper smeared with gum and back copies of The Farmer and Stockbreeder. On a clear day it is just possible to discern which of the three she detests the most.

  The Patter of Tiny Minds was deliciously funny and regarded as a big success. The timing was deliberately designed to be one in the eye for the chaps in velvet jackets over at Footlights. Competitively scheduled just a few days before the Footlights revue, it started late so that if you were bent on an evening’s frivolity you could go to the pub and attend the Adams, Smith, Adams revue afterwards. Douglas, Will and Martin reckoned that people could not fail to make judicious comparisons between their revue and Footlights—and that their effort would be regarded as by far the funnier. And so it came to pass. Nearly all the reviewers enjoyed it, though there was one slightly superior review in the Eagle—not the great comic, but St. John’s subscription-only college magazine, a wonderfully eclectic mix of cricket news and analysis of foreign literature (read in the original, naturally). The reviewers, Keith Jeffery and Felix Hodcroft, praise the acting of Martin and Will (Martin’s “searing” Leonard Cohen parody sounds too good to be lost) and relish Margaret Thomas’s singing, but are sharp about Douglas himself (“he has the biggest pose”). Their principal criticism of the whole piece is that it contains stereotypical workers with stock prole accents—undergraduates impersonating Pete and Dud imitating the working classes.* 61

  This review was a typically polished Cambridge put-down, even though co-written by a mate, Keith Jeffery, and not intended to be read entirely seriously. Nevertheless, it reflected a preoccupation with class that was not only of its era but has never really gone away. The great John Cleese wrote and performed one of TV’s most enduring sketches around that time with his illustration of the class system in which the diminutive Ronnie Corbett played the token prole. Cleese’s Upper Class Twit of the Year has also lodged like a burr in the collective memory of the nation. Left-leaning public schoolboys are often guiltily hung-up about their privileged backgrounds, which may explain why there are
so many of them in the media who dissemble about their origins and dress like undercover policemen. All societies have a class system, but perhaps it is only in Britain that we are, as Orwell said, branded on the tongue so that a single vowel sound is enough for the educated ear to place a speaker’s origins. This is preposterous, and thus endlessly funny. Adams, Smith, Adams were using staple ingredients by way of shorthand (the upper-class buffoon, the tea-making builders and so on). Admittedly these are comic stereotypes, but not portraits of individuals to be sneered at. Certainly Douglas cared not a whit about social credentials; creativity and brains were what he rated most highly. Adams, Smith, Adams’s biggest crime here was not snobbery, but cliché.

  Adams, Smith, Adams had another outing with The Patter of Tiny Minds in January 1974, this time in the Bush Theatre, above a large pub in West London’s Shepherd’s Bush (an area well away from the bright lights of the West End). They added another Smith and another Adams, so the line up read Adams, Smith, Adams, Smith, Adams. In fact, the extra Adams was Mary Allen, who joined Equity (the actors’ union) as an Adams, and the additional Smith was John Lloyd. It was a hoot to do it in such an intimate and boozy venue. Martin remembers:

  We were on as a late night show—we came down from Cambridge to do it. The main performance of the evening was Lindsey Kemp’s pantomime to the work of Jean Genet. We were sharing a room with Lindsey Kemp, who of course is as camp as a row of tents, and it was quite a laugh. One evening we went to the cinema and watched—in the days when you’d see two main movies together—The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now. And in The Wicker Man, of course, Lindsey Kemp’s playing the publican. And so it was extraordinary, watching the film and seeing the man I’d been avoiding all week.