by Nick Webb
Andrew Marshall possesses an acute if slightly lugubrious sense of humour. He and Douglas got on very well. Andrew remembers going all the way out to Roehampton on one occasion and finding Douglas in poor spirits. He sat up all night with him while Douglas cheered up and they talked about Ideas. Douglas enjoyed ideas; he liked to sneak up on them, like a mugger, from unexpected directions. But he had little small talk, something that was both endearing and rude, for sometimes the small change of human discourse is as important as the big stuff. Andrew thinks that what came across as rudeness was sometimes fear. For all Douglas’s Cambridge dazzle, he could find confident, clever people a bit daunting. Andrew recalls that they talked hugely until the sun came up. They had both recently read Robert Sheckley’s classic of stoned, witty SF, Dimension of Miracles, and they were exhilarated by it.
Douglas’s writing career, despite Brodie’s Close, was still wretched. The opportunity of working with one of his heroes from Monty Python had dissipated in a cloud of gin. The script-writing was going nowhere, the sketches were inconsequential, his love life was non-existent, he was broke. What’s more, he shared a flat with a golden boy whose life on the sunlit pastures was a mocking reminder of his own lack of achievement. Despite knowing he had talent, he felt pretty washed up.
That summer, 1976, had been the second of the worst drought in living memory—the upper reaches of the Thames dried up completely, and there was even an unfortunate Minister of Drought. The countryside was parched brown and gasping for a drink of water. Finally, as autumn crept into winter, it started raining again—and more or less did not stop for a year. For Douglas it was the pathetic fallacy writ large. His spirits had been falling month by month; he was later to describe that year as the worst of his life.
In 1991, looking back at his misery with the perspective of one who knows he moved on, he gave an interview to Danny Danziger of the Independent:
I totally lost confidence in my ability to write, or to perform, or to do anything at all . . . and went into a catatonic spiral of depression. I suppose because of my background, having grown up as the child of divorced parents, a typical sort of shuttlecock kid, when I get depressed I tend to feel superfluous, that the world is actually better off without me, and that the world is not interested in my welfare at any level. When I was in this state of depression, I kept trying to find activities that would stop my brain going round and round and round. One day I decided to learn German, and went and got myself a pile of Teach Yourself German books, and spent every single waking hour poring over those books. And by a strange coincidence, at the end of the month I happened to wander into the garden, and there was a woman looking for someone who used to be in the flat, and she was a German. So I sat and talked in German with her and discovered that I had done incredibly well. But since then I’ve never spoken German, and I don’t think I remember a word.* 81
Despite the morale-lifting effect of learning German, by November he was close to nervous collapse. In a spasm of impatience and general misery, he decided that he was never going to succeed as a writer. A complete existential upheaval would pick him up and put him down again somewhere else—somewhere happier. He applied for a job, “a proper job,” with Jardines, the well-known finance and trading house in Hong Kong, and he was accepted. Fortunately for his millions of readers, he must have reconsidered.
His subsequent retirement to the countryside was very much a retreat, and one in which he felt a failure. Churchill’s “black dog” of depression may not have been a constant companion, but it was certainly sniffing around and looking for a good time with his trouser leg.
Meanwhile in Stalbridge, Dorset, his old room was waiting for him, rent-free. At any time his mum was glad to see him and extend the comforts of home-cooking and family life. Ron, Janet’s second husband, the vet, was kindly and always took an interest, and Douglas was fond of Little Jane and James, his half-siblings, then aged ten and eight. (Once, many years before, during the school hols, Douglas had been in the house working while infant James had been upstairs, asleep. Leaving Douglas in charge, Janet nipped out on an errand. When she returned, young James was sitting on the sofa looking at Douglas with wide-eyed fascination. “Oh dear,” she said, “did he disturb you?” “Not at all, Mum,” replied Douglas. “I thought he might be a bit lonely up there and brought him down.” It is debatable who needed whose company the more . . .)
Douglas’s room was even rural enough to offer a view of a pigsty, though at the time this was being knocked down in order for the site to be redeveloped as an old people’s home. Young James Thrift was fascinated by the JCB which was knocking the stuffing out of the pigsty (though for once the more robust idiom would be literally accurate). The driver of this impressive machine apparently kept a load of porno mags under the seat. Douglas would have been staring out of his window at this while cudgelling his cerebrum for a really good idea. The “ah-ha!” critical response is to be distrusted, but one can’t help thinking of the opening scene of Hitchhiker’s when Arthur Dent’s house is flattened by the local council’s bulldozer.
Following his strategic withdrawal to Dorset, Douglas planned the odd raid on the metropolis to deliver work that would be irresistible to producers, and to network. In the media parish you have to remind people that you still exist. That was the plan—and that, amazingly given the success rate of most existential grand designs, was more or less how it worked out.
Mercifully, in the new year Douglas was indeed rescued. Jon Canter, his witty friend from Cambridge and a man of kindness and sensitivity, had visited him over Christmas and helped to cheer him up. Janet remembers Jon with affection. At first she was not sure if he could join in the festivities (Jon is Jewish), but Janet soon discovered that there is not much that will keep him from a party. Jon was sharing a house in Islington with another Cambridge pal, Jonathan Brock, who had played opposite Douglas in the ADC in Sheridan’s The Rivals. Why not, suggested Jon, come back to town, kip on their vast sofa, kick out the black dog, and lay siege to the BBC once again?
At this point there re-enters into Douglas’s life another figure of legend, Simon Brett, then a Light Entertainment Producer at the BBC, a bloke for whom the word “urbanity” could have been coined. Comedy at the BBC was in a state of change. It was only in 1967 that the programme designations had changed from the Home Service, the Third Programme and so on, to Radios One to Four. (Radio One, the pop station, had occasioned much soul-searching about whether it was really the kind of thing the BBC should be doing.)
In fact Simon remembers that the whole institution was poised between the generations. A whole stratum of producers who had joined the BBC after the war was in the process of retiring, and he spent a lot of time going to their parties and wishing them well. Perhaps they were a bit tweedy, but by and large they were a decent and humorous lot. “There were still a lot of chaps with cravats,” Geoffrey Perkins recalled, “and I had one producer who, with the arrival of stereo, turned the studio floor into a numbered grid and moved actors around from square to square as if they were on manoeuvres.”
Some brilliant comedy, particularly the Goon Show, had emerged from National Service and army life in general, and a generation of producers had shared the advantage of a similar background.* 82 (Mind you, not all of them were up to speed: one nice old chap asked Simon rather anxiously: “What is this ‘go on’ show that I keep reading about?”) Simon quotes John Peel, the DJ with taste and now a Radio Four presenter, as observing that BBC comedy was all run by ex-bomber pilots. By the mid-seventies the bomber pilots were hanging up their headphones and the BBC was pursuing a policy of recruiting clever young graduates, mainly from Oxbridge.
Simon had always liked Douglas’s work as well as Douglas, the man. “He was energetic and funny, and a delight to have lunch with.” Despite the desert of 1976, Douglas had written a couple of pieces for The Burkiss Way, a deliciously funny radio show that Simon produced. One of them, the Kamikaze Briefing, became a bit of a classic* 83 an
d was much enjoyed by John Simmonds, the Senior Producer, so Douglas now had two strategically placed managers (“heavy dudes” in movie speak) poised to support him.
In the course of interviewing Simon for this book, he and I had lunch at the Groucho Club in London’s Soho. At the corner table a tanned Norman Wisdom, hero of Albania, was being lionized by three fashionables. Douglas would have chortled to think of us discussing him in such a venue. Simon has been asked many times to tell the story of commissioning The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and must be weary of the repetition, but courteously he did it again:
Douglas was coming up from Dorset to have lunch with me [4 February 1977] and had promised me three ideas. He was very enthusiastic, curious and funny—very much a social animal. He hated being on his own. So what if he was sometimes depressed. When judging the work, it’s the quality that matters.
In some ways I felt he was a talent without a niche. He had struggled to find his voice, but at one level I don’t think he was that surprised by fame even though he felt the pressure of success very acutely. Douglas knew that he had something . . . We went out to a Japanese restaurant to discuss his three ideas. I can’t for the life of me remember what the other two were—and afterwards Douglas claimed that neither could he—but one of them was a comic SF idea. It had started life as The Ends of the Earth, but it became The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Everybody liked it, though I remember one of my senior colleagues, a lovely man called Con Mahoney [one of the bomber pilots], asking me: “Is this funny?”
I assured him it was.
Douglas was on his way.
FIVE
The Origin of the Species
“ ‘You’re very strange,’ she said.
‘No, I’m very ordinary,’ said Arthur, ‘but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I’m more differed from than differing.’ ”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
On 1 March 1977—three weeks after Douglas’s lunch with Simon Brett—the BBC approved the making of a pilot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then, before committing to the whole series, it sat on its hands for six months. In those days, before the icy fist of commerce had surprised the BBC with its grip, the decision-making process moved at a speed that reminds one that glass is said technically to be a liquid. Many of the individual producers had vision and energy, but further up the hierarchy a committee system reigned whereby all that was required for another month to pass was for one member to look judiciously into the middle distance, express uncertainty and suggest that more research and/or consideration might be wisely invested. That was always an irrefutable position. Then, each summer, much of the top echelons would depart en masse for warmer climes. Tuscany was awash with BBC executives.
On the other hand, the BBC—free from the immediate imperatives of budget, ratings, and advertising revenue that command other broadcasters—made programmes of undoubted excellence. Competition may keep industry “lean and mean”—often a euphemism for subjecting the workers to unimaginable stress or moving manufacture out to exploitative low labour-cost economies—but there’s no evidence that making programmes under that kind of pressure improves them. Besides, as anyone will tell you in an organization making something creative, going like the clappers is not always in the best interests of the project. Management books may employ a ghastly jargon drawn largely from American recreations like sport or hunting (“getting your ducks in a row,” “stepping up to the plate”), but they are unanimous on the virtues of taking the time to get all the machinery on your side.
In any event Hitchhiker’s was so different that nobody in the BBC could have been poised on one foot, breath held, waiting for it. Geoffrey Perkins says that if anyone had been asked what kind of programme they were looking for, nobody would have said:
“I’m looking for a sort of strange SF thing about when the world ends to make a by-pass—and it will take an age to make every programme.” I mean, it was just absolutely not on anybody’s radar at all. There were lots of discussions about whether to have an audience. [It was the received wisdom in the BBC at the time that an audience was needed to tell the listeners when to laugh.] I think I won this point when I said, “Look, they’ll have to sit there for a week because it will take us about a week to make these programmes.” Actually half the actors aren’t there at the same time anyway.
In any case Douglas was thrilled to get the commission and his morale shot up asymptotically to the cheerfulness axis. He was still hard up, of course, and living off his parents, for the BBC paid him £1000 for what turned into nearly six months’ work. (Mind you, if you run inflation backwards to 1977, £1,000 is worth five to six times more in today’s terms.) But at least he had a real project, and the promise of income and friendly faces in London—and not just anywhere in London, but Islington, which was to become the centre of Douglas’s metropolitan universe.
As the pigsty outside his window was demolished, his mum fed him and brought him cups of tea and peanut butter sandwiches for which he had a particular weakness. Young Jane (Little Jane) and James were quite entertained by their big brother groaning piteously, and then typing furiously before scrunching up sheets of paper and throwing them away. But although rejects filled the wastepaper basket, within a month the pilot was complete. Neil Gaiman says rightly that the first version owed a lot to Monty Python, and it certainly took a while for Douglas to find his voice; nevertheless the pilot contained much that was as sparky and brilliant as the final form. (Buffs should look to Don’t Panic, revised edition, for the definitive exegesis of the differences.)
His mum’s cups of tea inspired one of Douglas’s inventions—the Infinite Improbability Drive which uses tea as a Brownian motion generator. His hero, Arthur Dent, is saved by it, but “he no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company.”* 84
There follows a short digression on the subject of tea.
Douglas wrote an uncharacteristically finger-wagging essay* 85—aimed at improving the American quality of life, and thus forgivable—about how to make the perfect cup. Warm the tea-pot well; spoon in an adequate supply of tea (preferably loose, but bags will do); pour in roilingly boiling water; infuse properly; pour the milk into the cup first. OK? He points out that it is not considered socially correct to put the milk in first, but on the other hand in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know things or think about things.
As Arthur Dent is blown uncontrollably around the galaxy in the company of someone infinitely more hip than he is, he devotes much of his time to looking for a decent cup of tea, a drink often accorded miraculous powers of comfort by Brits in adversity. Leg amputated? Ship torpedoed? Nice cuppa will soon put you right. Indeed there is something pathetic about Arthur, a bewildered young/old man in his dressing gown, his entire world wiped out behind him in an unnecessary cock-up, whose ambition is limited to finding a hot, herbal infusion.
Once Arthur nearly causes his own death, and that of his companions, by rhetorically asking Eddie, the shipboard computer with the irritating faux bonhomme American primary personality, why Eddie thought that he, Arthur, wanted a cup of tea. The computer, grimly literal-minded as only a machine can be, devotes more and more processing power to the question—imperilling them all.* 86
Douglas’s most repeated anecdote was also set around a cup of tea and is believed to have started life as a real-life incident on Cambridge station. It has been repeated so often you will probably all know about the battle of silent British willpower when the stranger across the table in a station café started eating Douglas’s biscuits—or so it appeared. In fact, Douglas’s biccies emerged from beneath his newspaper after the other man had departed. In Douglas’s hands, this tiny incident was polished to a comic gem suffused with cringe-making English social containment. Shamelessly, he even used the anecdote in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, when Arthur is wooing Fenchurch. In The Salmon of Doubt the story is
reprinted in an American context, with tea changed to coffee. However, any other beverage would not be credible; railway coffee is an insipid hot brown liquid that only resembles the real thing inasmuch as they both take the shape of the vessel they’re in. (Incidentally, a railway guard of long standing tells me that the pork pies are also a thing of wonder. Every 50,000 miles a trained engineer gives them a tap with a special hammer.)
The biscuit story has since reappeared in many guises, and may in some off-beat viral way still be replicating in saloon bars and over dinner tables. Over time it has picked up accretions of plausible detail. The paper was the Guardian. The biccies were Rich Tea. It actually happened to somebody else, and involved the Daily Telegraph and a Kit-Kat. It stems from Jeffrey Archer’s short story with the same plot device, except that in his version the biscuits were cigarettes. (Bit of a long shot, that one, as an explanation of origins, given Jeffrey Archer’s eclecticism and the fact that his collection was published some years after Douglas started telling the story.) The BBC’s Home Truths programme (a radio magazine, hosted by the affably unshockable John Peel, about our oddities) has broadcast an honest-sounding account from a woman who also had a silent clash of wills with a stranger over a packet of Garibaldis. People have looked me in the eye and told me that this self-same amusing incident befell them.
Urban myth? Possibly, but no earlier telling than Douglas’s is to be found. Although this is circumstantial, there are stories, jokes and indeed nifty turns of phrase that seem to sweep through society like an epidemic. My theory is that many of them originate with creative users of the language, some of whom are unsung people who just happen to deploy their mother tongue with some pizazz, but a substantial proportion will emanate from professional wordsmiths—copywriters, authors, scriptwriters, Douglas Adams and so on.
