Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  The second was a sprawling but affordable house in Fordwych Road, Kilburn, or, as it is known to estate agents, West Hampstead. In addition to Martin and Douglas, it contained a randy collection of bright recent graduates, including Nigel Hess, a Man Called Phil,* 69 a floating population of bed-partners, and Mary Allen, who was appearing in The Rocky Horror Show in the West End.

  Douglas had come to London determined to make it as a sketch-writer, but soon found that the world was not poised waiting for him. A series of twit office jobs helped him cope with the tyranny of paying the rent. According to Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic, one of these was as a filing clerk. It is hard to imagine anyone less suited than Douglas to the chore of filing. He would have been tempted to redesign the whole system from scratch, side-tracked by the philosophical complexities of information storage and the arbitrary ways in which we organize the world into discrete categories. Putting bits of paper into files physically was foreign to his nature. It must have been a torment. He could have filed everything under “S” for stuff or “P” for paper; alternatively he might have plunged into minute subdivisions of semantic nuance accessible only to himself.

  When not running the gauntlet of those temporary jobs we all tend to do after leaving university but before settling in our packets like detergent, Douglas persisted in writing sketches. One target was Week Ending, a weekly radio programme on BBC Radio Four. It was probably the most subversive thing to be found on the airwaves, not excluding TV. The Light Entertainment department, as it was then, had an admirable record of producing wonderfully funny and anarchic programmes. The tradition continues to this day, possibly in part because the excellent David Hatch, then a performer and producer, is now Managing Director of BBC Network Radio.

  Back in the seventies there was a lot to be subversive about. The Yom Kippur War between Israel, Egypt and Syria was the latest of a series of bitter conflicts that continue even now. This particular one erupted in October 1973 with a surprise attack on Israel across the Golan Heights and Sinai. Much futile blood-letting ensued, and was followed swiftly by an energy crisis as the OPEC countries imposed an oil embargo. As the prices of just about everything shot up, they passed the economies of the West going the other way. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government was elected in March 1974, and wily old “Wislon,” as he was known to readers of Private Eye, ducked and dived, trimmed and fudged, to hold his party and the government together while the graph of the British economy plunged like Shirley Bassey’s cleavage. On the popular culture front, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin appeared at Earl’s Court in satin flairs large enough to house a family of refugees, fashion victims wore cork-soled shoes four inches high, digital watches had just appeared,* 70 and a certain gloom prevailed. Recent university graduates no longer enjoyed the heady sense that they could mess about and still land on their feet.

  With a pace almost too fast for the establishment powers at the BBC to clock the full extent of its satirical rudeness, Week Ending excoriated the topical follies in the news with all the inhibition of a hand grenade. It was extremely funny, and boasted terrific writers like David Renwick, Andrew Marshall and John Mason. Andrew Marshall recalls the pride this wildly talented bunch had in their ideas, and how they had to wind down at the end of a frantic day by comparing notes in the local pub near the studio, The Captain’s Cabin. The programme’s pace made great demands on the cast. This included David Jason, Nigel Rees and Bill Wallace—all of whom went on to become well known in other spheres—so Week Ending was also fertile ground for new acting talent. Its breathless speed was a fearsome consumer of material, a fact reflected in the writing credits. Even enunciated quickly by a professional with precise diction, they went on and on: everyone who contributed a snappy one-liner was entitled to a credit. But Douglas’s name rarely featured among them. The only piece accepted was the Adams, Smith, Adams Marilyn Monroe sketch that the three of them wrote in their last year at Cambridge and phoned down to John Lloyd—by then working as a producer on Week Ending—from a St. John’s phone box.

  The radio producer, Simon Brett,* 71 whose faith in Douglas was to be so strategic a couple of years later, said that Douglas and Week Ending was one of the worst marriages between writer and subject because the latter was specifically based on news, and Douglas’s mind just didn’t work like that.* 72 I can see why. In photography, in order to compose the image and get everyone with their feet and heads in the frame, you often have to take a step or two backwards. Douglas’s view was huge and odd; organizing a picture, he would have started a lot further back than that. It would be tricky for him to take topical politics seriously enough to find them ridiculous—for his perceptions had already expanded to the point where he found man’s place in the universe absurd. It would have been like finding your way across Birmingham using a globe. Besides, as a writer, Douglas was a slow, compulsive polisher. Keeping up with the output of Week Ending would have frazzled him to a crisp.

  Geoffrey Perkins, who as a talented young producer was destined to produce The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, says that at the time Douglas was “a particularly strangely shaped peg trying to fit into a variety of round holes”:

  He was one of many honourable examples of people who were actually very good writers who couldn’t get their stuff onto Week Ending. Some very good writers like Andy Hamilton and Alistair Beaton came through it, but there are others, like Douglas, who did not have a great deal of topical or satirical interest and whose natural style was far from a pointed piece that played for a minute and a half. He didn’t have that sort of mind. He’d write five-minute sketches which meandered off on some amusing tack.

  However, Douglas did get a break. Chox, the Footlights revue, had transferred, heavily revised, to London’s West End. Dennis Main Wilson, a senior producer from the BBC, was sent to look at it, and as a result the show was televised. Douglas was paid £100 for TV rights to his contributions, a sum not to be sneered at in 1974; it might be a fifteenth of a young graduate’s annual wage. The TV version was not a great success. But the BBC’s David Hatch and Simon Brett had also seen the live show, and quickly commissioned a radio version of it which fared much better. “It was a good deal crisper,” John Lloyd recalls, “and very well received—and this despite being called Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning. It had nothing to do with Chox except for the fact that Jon Canter and Griff [Rhys Jones], who were still up at university, were both in it.”

  A number of the Footlights aristocracy from a previous age went to see Chox in its West End incarnation, among them Graham Chapman from the Monty Python team. Graham was enormously taken with Douglas’s work, and invited him over to his place in Highgate, North London, for a drink. One sketch, by Adams, Smith, Adams, about the Annual Meeting of the Crawley Paranoid Society, was one which Graham always said he would have liked to have written himself. Douglas and Graham both enjoyed a sense of the surreal, and despite Chapman being outrageously camp,* 73 and Douglas being joyously heterosexual, they got on well and decided to enter an informal writing partnership.

  In 1974, Monty Python was at a crossroads. It had entranced the public for half a decade, but the last and fourth series of only six half-hours, broadcast from 31 October 1974, was a bit patchy. The links between the sketches—in the past so often witty or deliberately undermining of telly conventions—were getting perfunctory, and the sketches themselves sometimes trailed away without any attempt at a conclusion. Not even another violently funny giant foot or weird visual pun from Terry Gilliam could quite come to the rescue. The Pythons had changed TV forever, but the format, once so liberating, was becoming restrictive. The individual team members were looking to branch out on their own, and as a team they yearned to make more movies (and did).

  Graham Chapman had trained to be a doctor* 74 before being led astray at Cambridge by Footlights. At 6’3", he wasn’t as tall as John Cleese or Douglas Adams, but he towered over the other Pythons, with a persona that came across as a decent Englishman at bay—
really awfully reasonable, but indignant and bewildered that the world could be so strange and cruel. He and John Cleese shared a strong sense of the ridiculous. Graham was the eponymous antihero in The Life of Brian (1978), a thoughtful film in a polemical kind of way that is also achingly funny. He died far too young (at about the age when Douglas himself was to die) of cancer of the spine, but at the time he was an established aristocrat of comedy. Monty Python’s Flying Circus had recaptured a generation of viewers for the BBC; it had achieved international fame, won several awards (including the Silver Rose of Montreux for a compilation programme), and transformed the Beeb’s image of slightly censorious aunty to something more like an inventive harlot, the sort that beckons from doorways and asks if you’d like to try something unusual. It would not be a grossly daft exaggeration to say that at the time Graham could have done whatever he wanted.

  Another Python, Terry Jones, had seen Douglas in revue and he too particularly remembers the Crawley sketch that had so struck Graham. At first he had been impressed more by Douglas’s size than his comedy, but he soon recognized an authentic talent. He recalls that Douglas, as Graham’s collaborator, attended some Python script meetings:

  He started working with Graham, because Graham had stopped writing with John at that stage. And so Douglas started coming to script meetings for the fourth series . . . Douglas was full of ideas—I remember he had lots of ideas—and was keen to get writing. We just got on very well. We had the same sort of mindset; we enjoyed chatting and having drinks. We were both interested in real ale, so became ale chums, if you like. And, of course, he appeared in that fourth series as well, in a couple of cameos.* 75

  So the portents looked good for Douglas, finding himself conjoined with a star at only twenty-two. Unfortunately, the collaboration with Graham Chapman produced little, and even less was actually screened.

  Graham was not an easy person to work with. Terry Jones says that his contributions were intangible; he was a man who could come in with very odd ideas which were great fun, but for a lot of the time he was an “off the wall reactor.” Of course, feedback—even of the vehement “Good grief, that sucks” variety—is invaluable for any writer, especially one trying to be funny. It is a good service to refine somebody else’s ideas by pushing them to the breaking point. Douglas said that Graham would sit there, puffing on his pipe and looking tweedy, but thinking very, very naughty thoughts—occasionally interjecting one that would turn everything around.* 76 But Graham was also boozing very heavily, and that made life much more difficult for all those around him.

  Terry, who is one of nature’s generous spirits, is not sure that Graham hadn’t stopped drinking by then. “Certainly he sort of tried to stop drinking when we were doing Holy Grail, and was firmly on the wagon well before we made The Life Of Brian.” Everybody else, however, says that during this period Graham was struggling with potentially severe alcoholism. Andrew Marshall recalls Graham as a man of great sensitivity, and this may in part be why he drank. Sometimes alcohol serves a function like the control rods in a nuclear reactor; they damp everything down and keep the system from going critical. Graham had a particular taste for gin; his large house in Highgate featured a cavernous cellar lined on one side with an enormous wine rack—except that instead of wine it held bottles of gin with strategic reserves of tonic. It was a wall of gin.

  The collaboration between Douglas and Graham entailed a great deal of going to the pub, amusing each other and drinking a lot. Some of their colleagues at the BBC were a bit miffed about this, and it was not a life that Douglas could afford to sustain for long, if only financially. Besides, Douglas was not a heavy boozer.

  Martin Smith remembers that Graham was very generous. Sundays (rather like Thursdays which Douglas never got the hang of) were dull in London in the 1970s. The dank shadow of the Lord’s Day Observance Society still lay across the land. “Six days shalt thou labour, and on the seventh thou shalt have no fun at all” was the effect it wrought. Nothing much was open apart from the pubs, and the licensing laws gave you a narrow window, as they say now, for drinking and at ten minutes before closing time you were chivvied to stop by a publican with a voice like a KGB interrogator. Graham, knowing that Douglas and Martin were broke, would often phone them on Sunday and ask if they fancied dinner. They always did, and would either go up to Highgate to Graham’s house or out to a restaurant where they would eat and drink too much. Graham liked Helepi, a jolly Greek restaurant in Bayswater, a lot.

  Graham Chapman wasn’t their only Python contact. Martin recalls how Eric Idle also tried to help them onto the screen:

  Sometime in 1975, when Douglas and I were living in Fordwych Road, Eric Idle suggested that he would be able to get us into Rutland Weekend TV (which was about to go into production) as extras . . . Sadly, this was the time when Equity [the actors’ union] was run by Corin Redgrave and there were strict rules of entry into the profession. You almost had more chance of getting an equity card by contributing to the freedom fighters of Mozambique than you did by flashing a BBC contract. But for a leftist thespian regime, Douglas might have made it as a performer, after all!

  One of Douglas and Graham’s collaborations was an SF comedy intended to be an American TV special and a vehicle for Ringo Starr, though it never crept as far as the pilot stage. It is a pity as Ringo the space-going chauffeur sounds a nifty idea. A programme that did appear—if that is not too positive a word for an unannounced late-night screening on BBC2—was a miscellany called Out of the Trees. One very funny sketch, which Douglas wrote with Graham and Bernard Mackenna, started off with a romantic man (Simon Jones) picking a peony for his girlfriend and advanced, inexorably, to thermonuclear war. Another, that became quite famous, focused on the domestic life of Genghis Khan. Genghis has been so successful that bit by bit he has been transformed into a harassed business executive juggling his diary to see if there is a window for his financial advisor. All that pillaging, sweeping across the steppes with golden hordes and whatnot, was just too fatiguing. One has one’s people for that kind of thing. It appeared again in a slightly different form in a Comic Relief anthology, and years later the idea was recycled and expanded in a short story in The Salmon of Doubt. Neil Gaiman quotes Douglas as saying that it was inspired by Graham’s mutterings about the other members of the Python team.* 77

  A sketch that did get made (the producer was Bernard Thompson) showed that exhilarating zoom-lens lurch from the cosmic to the local that was one of Douglas’s favourite tropes. It started like this:

  STOCK FILM OF GALAXIES ETC. FOLLOWED BY PLANETS FOLLOWED BY THE EARTH

  Voice Over

  The universe, a multitude of mighty galaxies, within each galaxy a myriad mighty star systems, within each star system a multiplicity of mighty planets—and in just one of these mighty planets the mighty British Rail electric train . . .

  Of course, the Pythons’ smashing (and perversely cheering) Galaxy song does show that they too had a sense of the ridiculously oppressive scale of the universe, so that vertiginous drop from the cosmic to the particular was just as Pythonesque as Adamsy.

  After graduation, two Adams, Smith, Adams revues were produced. So You Think You Feel Haddocky was staged with Gail Renard, the Canadian comedy writer and performer, in the Little Theatre (now, alas, Stringfellows) in St. Martin’s Lane in London’s West End in the autumn of 1975. Cerberus was put on a year earlier at the ADC in Cambridge. The title could have been a self-deprecating reference to the show being a dog looking in all directions at once, but in fact it was because Douglas, Will and Martin were photographed in a clump with their three heads, like some ghastly recombinant DNA experiment, projecting from an improbable tangle of body. The profits were almost imperceptible, and Douglas still had to pay his share of the rent.

  Another Adams, Smith, Adams sketch bought by the Monty Python team was the infamous one about Dead Marilyn Monroe that had enjoyed a brief outing for Week Ending. The Marilyn cult was going strong at the time (and hasn’
t abated) and the writers thought it was time that the relentless recycling was given a bad taste Swiftian spin. The basic idea was to get her in everything. A director wanted her in his next movie even if it meant digging her up. Cremation was a problem here, of course. Martin recalls that they each got £25 for the rights. It was satisfying to be appreciated, but hardly lucrative.

  Douglas also worked with Graham Chapman on an episode of the established TV comedy series based on the Doctor books by Richard and Mary Gordon. The novels used to sell in considerable volume and there was quite a reservoir of affection for them. There were fifteen—Doctor in the House, Doctor in Clover, Doctor in the Nude . . . —on which a series of engaging British comedy films had been based with Dirk Bogarde starring as an ingénu medico. These were fun, though by modern standards quite old-fashioned, and charmingly innocent: having a flutter on the horses and sliding off to play golf were considered deeply wicked.

  Graham and Douglas mapped out the Doctor narrative in some detail, devising the cliffhangers, playing with the deadly hospital rivalries, inventing the cringe-making surprises and working out how many sets would be needed. For causal antecedent buffs (wherefore the derogatory use of the word “anorak”?—it is a perfectly useful garment), the elaborate clockwork of the plot features a bookie’s runner who has to pretend to be a medical student in front of a particularly frightening Senior Consultant—a James Robertson Justice figure greatly resembling Douglas’s father. Unluckily the bookmaker’s runner is asked a medical question. The script states that the answer is a number which the real student has to communicate from behind the Consultant’s back using tic-tac (the hand signals that bookmakers use to convey odds across a race track). History does not record if the number was forty-two.