Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  Back in Stalbridge, Douglas found it frustrating waiting for the gears to turn in the BBC, so he also sent his Hitchhiker’s pilot to Robert Holmes, the script editor and occasional writer of Dr. Who. He was hoping to get a commission to write a Dr. Who storyline that—if it followed the usual practice—would last for four half-hour episodes. He succeeded. Bob Holmes liked what Douglas had done a lot, and on that basis called him in for a meeting with Anthony Read (who was just taking over from Bob) and the producer, Graham Williams. They encouraged him to have a go. Douglas’s resulting Dr. Who script had great promise, but it needed a lot more work that he undertook with grace. It’s been suggested that Douglas’s original overdid the humour to the extent that it may have come across as forced or, even worse, frivolous. But then the story still needed a smidge more to tweak it further, and finally just a nuance here and there to get the tone absolutely spot on. Even after the refinement, some hardcore Dr. Who fans maintain that his episodes are too jokey.

  All this editorial tuning was educational for Douglas, and improved the script. But it consumed a great deal of time, with the result that when Douglas was commissioned to write a four-part Dr. Who story in August, it coincided within a week or two with his commitment to write the Hitchhiker’s radio series. Thus, between 1977 and 1978, Douglas was to undergo a metamorphosis, from listless aspiration to nerve-end-shredding overwork.

  Douglas had always enjoyed Dr. Who and, unlike some English Literature graduates, never looked down his nose at it on the grounds that it was genre. (Mike Simpson in his invaluable Hitchhiker’s Guide* 87 says that Douglas originally submitted a script for Dr. Who in 1974, but that it vanished beyond hope of retrieval somewhere in the BBC. Alas, there was no sign of it in Douglas’s papers.)

  “The Pirate Planet,” the first of the episodes written or co-written by Douglas, is rated as one of the best by the many Dr. Who enthusiasts who have analysed every episode and, thanks to the Internet, are keepers of the flame. It’s full of cortex-mangling concepts—transportable hollow planets, time dams, cybernetic control systems and even a high-tech bionic pirate complete with eye-patch and robotic parrot. (Douglas had played Long John Silver, don’t forget, and was keen on the comic potential of parrots; one features strategically in Starship Titanic.) The pirate—typical human being—uses all the breathtaking power and technology at his disposal for trivial self-aggrandisement, belting round the universe stealing other planets’ resources like some cosmic shoplifter.

  Tom Baker, the actor playing the Doctor, spouted the scientific arcana with total conviction. He and Mary Tamm, as his gorgeous assistant, Romana, breezed through Douglas’s adventure with panache, brilliantly supported by Andrew Robertson as Mr. Fibuli and Bruce Purchase as the waffling Captain. (There was no spite in Douglas, but he could sometimes be inadvertently cruel in his desire to be funny. One of the leading ladies in Dr. Who provoked him to say that “her idea of acting was to point her eyes in one direction while swivelling her hips in another.”)

  Even in this early work Douglas’s playful approach to science is apparent. He invents travel tubes in which the people are stationary and the tube races past them like there’s no tomorrow. Douglas had read his Relativity, and understood that in an inertial frame there would be no distinguishing between the moving and the static, so he was chortling knowingly in the direction of Einstein.

  SF fans have wondered about the provenance of Douglas’s ideas, and there is a minor scholarly industry in tracking them down as if we cannot credit him with being so startlingly inventive. But Douglas wasn’t steeped in the genre and he was always mildly put out if he learned that some original thought had occurred to an SF writer already. A hollow planet, for example, might be traced to Isaac Asimov who, decades earlier, had posited such a planet, Trantor, in his exhilarating Foundation trilogy (later, unwisely, racked into a tetralogy for a large advance). Making a planet—or at least cities—moveable at will had been suggested by James Blish many years before in his Spindizzy stories. But Douglas was not particularly well versed in SF (apart from Sheckley), unlike his wife, Jane Belson, who had read everything. Apart from the Eagle comic, he had—in my partisan view—misspent his youth reading Charles Dickens, when he could have been immersed in Ursula Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, John Wyndham, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Fred Pohl and, to pinch Kingsley Amis’s useful expression, many other dazzling cartographers of hell.* 88

  Dr. Who is—or rather was—a great national institution. “Cult” is a word people reach for too easily, but Dr. Who qualified. With the exception of the wretched Star Trek, whose longevity has been unnaturally prolonged by its transformation into an industry, Dr. Who was the longest-running SF series ever produced. It was first screened in 1963 and didn’t go off the air until 1996—and even then it continued for a while when the rights were sold to Fox for a one-off.

  Dr. Who himself was a Time Lord from the galactically central planet of Galifrey. Despite the strictures of their non-interference code—and the deeply laid plotting from another powerful but more malign Time Lord called The Master—Dr. Who whizzed about space-time doing good and righting wrongs in the company of a resourceful and attractive female assistant who helped to keep the dads watching. One of these was played by the actress, Lalla Ward, who, introduced by Douglas to Richard Dawkins at one of Douglas’s wicked parties, subsequently became Mrs. Dawkins.

  For transport, Dr. Who employed an old-fashioned British police telephone box called the Tardis (allegedly an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space). Though finite on the outside, this vehicle had as much space inside as the largest studio could accommodate, and its ability to roam through time and space provided a wonderfully flexible narrative device. The special effects were always a bit clunky, with wobbly sets and acres of Bacofoil; later Douglas grieved about the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker’s on the grounds that it reminded him of Dr. Who. But the good thing about a budget limited by time and money is that you have to fall back on old-fashioned virtues—in this case the wit, inventiveness and story-telling ability of the writers who, by and large, delivered the goods for over three decades. Among Dr. Who’s implacable foes were the Daleks, created by Terry Nation, creatures with totalitarian views whose nasty little bodies had mutated to the extent that they moved about in motorized containers. Conveniently these were about the size of a vacuum cleaner. On top they carried a rotatable dome fitted with an all-purpose sensor device, and projecting from their bodies a death ray and what looked suspiciously like a telescopic drain plunger.* 89 Douglas had always been a fan of the Daleks, who were such a charismatic cross between Iago and a kitchen appliance that they had to be revived every few years by popular demand. He had even written an episode of Dr. Who while at Brentwood School, but could recall little of it beyond the fact that his Daleks were powered by Rice Krispies.* 90

  It was a risk commissioning an unknown writer to tackle Dr. Who. Even as a relatively out-of-sight freelance, writing for it was like being given a paintbrush and being told to nip into the Tate to touch up a Turner. There were also lots of rules designed to avoid inconsistency or boxing writers in for the future. Legions of knowledgeable and dedicated fans were poised to tell you if you made a botch of it. It is a tribute to Douglas that he always took Dr. Who seriously, devoting particular care to devising concepts that were at least theoretically workable (unlike magic, for example, which suspends the rules and is just a cop-out). As in writing a sketch, Douglas understood that SF must have an internal logic. In this context—though it was a principle to which he cleaved in general—he said that the expression “tongue-in-cheek” was often an excuse for laziness. “It means it’s not really funny, but we aren’t going to do it properly.”* 91

  Dr. Who, the Time Lord, was able to regenerate his body after death a total of twelve times—and this was just as well as the actors playing him were prone to anxiety about typecasting.* 92 By the time Douglas was writing for the series, the fourth Doctor was in place, Tom Baker: an engag
ing, larger than life, former monk with an extravagantly outgoing personality. He loved the part so much that he stayed with it for seven years. Douglas once told me that Tom was then the randiest man he had ever met—and he had encountered one or two in whom the balance of power had never moved even slightly northwards from the gonads to the cerebrum.

  Douglas went on to write two more Dr. Who episodes: “The City of Death” (co-written with the producer, Graham Williams) and “Shada.” He also wrote Dr. Who and the Krikkitmen as a film treatment, featuring one of those sickening time loops. This never got very far, but the ideas were subsequently put to good use in Life, the Universe and Everything. “Shada” unfortunately got caught up in a strike at the BBC and was never transmitted, though I believe that for serious buffs it is available on video.* 93 However, Douglas did recycle part of this when Dr. Chronotis, a retired Time Lord whose rooms in Cambridge so resembled Douglas’s own, appeared in the first Dirk Gently novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  In this story Douglas once again scratches away at the time-travel paradox—on this occasion with literally cosmic ramifications—like some terrible intellectual itch. What happens if you go back in time and waylay your grandad with a quick beer, thus preventing him from meeting your grandma? (There are more Freudian expressions of this notion involving killing your mum, but the paradox is the same.) If you succeed, you no longer exist so could not have succeeded—in which case you do exist, so round you go again in a logically impregnable circle. This conundrum was something that clearly fascinated Douglas for he came back to it frequently. Remember Zaphod Beeblebrox summoning up his grandfather, Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third? An accident, Zaphod explains, with a contraceptive and a time machine.

  “The City of Death” was a four-part script started by David Fisher, a regular and reliable scriptwriter who had been suddenly waylaid by family problems. Douglas and Graham Williams finished it off under immense time pressure, a director and a studio slot having been booked only days away from the realization that they had no script. Douglas was locked up in Graham’s study where he lived on black coffee and whisky. Because of Writers’ Guild regulations, the departmental name of David Agnew was used for the credits.

  Despite the rush, or possibly because of it, “The City of Death” story is splendidly inventive. It prefigures that somewhat disturbing Hitchhiker’s idea that life is not only inadvertent, but possibly—thanks to time-travel—circular. Dr. Who has to ensure that an explosion on Earth actually happened because the resulting chemical chaos kickstarted the whole improbable business of evolution that ends up with sentience, chartered accountants, geraniums, ants, whales and all our planet’s astonishing biodiversity. This again is the horror of the time-travel paradox, but writ large. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas posits that the entire human race is a logical absurdity as it is descended from those who returned to the Earth and became their own ancestors. Teleologically speaking, it’s teeth-grindingly up itself.

  The Dr. Who plot also embroils the viewer in the stealing of the Mona Lisa (there are multiple copies, some of which are marked “fake” in felt-tip pen). Eleanor Bron and John Cleese provide delicious cameos as art-lovers who believe that the Tardis is a gallery exhibit.

  Meanwhile, Douglas, encouraged by Jon Canter, was commuting back and forth from Dorset to London, gradually relocating in the city as his morale improved and he had more work. Jon, who had studied law (“a mistake”), now had a job as an advertising copywriter and was sharing a house in Arlington Avenue with trainee barrister, Jonny Brock, and his wife, Clare Gorst. Jonny, you will remember, was the aspirant thespian from Douglas’s days of amateur dramatics, who eventually became a QC. The house boasted a large sofa on which Douglas was invited to crash, and he frequently did when in town. Jon, Jonny and Clare offered friendship, warmth, digestive biscuits and stability in addition to somewhere to sleep. Douglas was very fond of them, and dedicated the first Hitchhiker’s novel to Jonny Brock and Clare Gorst, and “all the other Arlingtonians for tea, sympathy and a sofa.”

  Their house in this particularly leafy early Victorian part of Islington overlooks a section of the Grand Union Canal, now recreational rather than mercantile, which circles London to the east and west before joining the Thames. Where it runs through Islington, its tow-paths are compacted by massed joggers from the law, telly, advertising and journalism. During his intermittent spasms of physical self-improvement, Douglas too used to jog along the canal, and continued to do so when he had his own place in nearby Upper Street.* 94

  In 1977, things were distinctly looking up. Douglas had his Dr. Who episodes to write and supportive friends in town. Finally he even got a real job. He was delighted. It was the world’s lowliest job in radio, as a producer so junior that even the cleaners could boss him about, but it was still a job, one on the staff and not just a freelance contract—and at the BBC no less, a national treasure with correspondingly huge cachet. David Hatch, then the Head of the Light Entertainment Department, had given it to him. Like Simon Brett, he believed in Douglas, and Douglas may have felt under some obligation to show that their confidence was not misplaced.

  Apparently though, Douglas was not much cop as a producer. John Lloyd had seconded him briefly to the News Quiz* 95 when the usual co-producer, Danny Greenstone, was away. But it did not work out. John Lloyd:

  Trouble was Douglas was never any good at all with anybody else’s formats. He could only do his own stuff. He really, really wanted to be able to write one-liners for The Two Ronnies, or sketches for Week Ending or whatever, but he just could not do it. You might as well have asked him to write thank you letters in Korean. None of it made the slightest sense to him. So I daresay we called it a day after getting nowhere.

  Of course, John Lloyd—as later events are to make clear—has a complex view of Douglas. Writers may be pals, but there is always an element of rivalry.* 96 Gore Vidal once memorably remarked that he could not hear of the success of a friend without dying a little. Affection, envy, irritation, admiration, hurt—all go into the rich stew stirred by Douglas and John. Douglas may not have been all that hopeless a producer, but there is little doubt that he could not resist endless fine-tuning of a work in progress—and that sits uneasily with schedules that, once published, march with no nonsense to a drill sergeant’s beat.

  To do their job, producers need to get a lot of people together, charm them, organize them, and bully them with a judicious mixture of tact and steel, while simultaneously making them all feel good about themselves. The task is to turn a collection of disparate and sometimes highly strung individuals into a team. It’s a difficult trick, and one which did not serve Douglas’s strengths. He was too vulnerable to cope well with stress and, despite being a social animal with a need for company and stimulation, as a creator he preferred to be solitary.

  Whatever his virtues as a radio producer in the Light Entertainment department, Douglas did not stay at it for very long. Early in 1978 he was offered, and he accepted, the job of script editor of Dr. Who, where Anthony Read was moving on. David Hatch was said to be a little narked as Douglas had not really paid his dues in the current job and his haste in transferring appeared unseemly. Simon Brett had left to go to London Weekend Television (leaving Geoffrey Perkins as Hitchhiker’s producer). But, as Douglas remarked, David himself moved on shortly afterwards so Douglas did not feel so badly about it. Radio people are always sensitive about the talent leaving them for the glamorous but blowsy tart called television. There is an inferiority complex at work that’s entirely unnecessary, especially as radio is often braver than the telly, more intelligent and less tyrannized by market expediency.

  One collaboration with John Lloyd that did work out well was when the two of them, by then in adjacent offices in Langham Street behind Broadcasting House, wrote the script for a Dutch cartoon series called Dr. Snuggles. They were paid £500, a very generous fee when you consider that their annual salaries would have been between £2000
and £3000 at the time. Dr. Snuggles was designed to be one of the very few non-violent cartoons for children. John says it was huge fun to do: “With animation the only limit was our own imaginations. We also loved the fact that the Dutch producer was called Joop Visch, his assistant was a young man called Wim Oops, and his secretary was Veronica Plinck.”

  Douglas’s life was threatening to go from torpid to flat-out faster than a Porsche 928S. The BBC approved Hitchhiker’s at the end of August 1977. He also had the Dr. Who commissions. Then he got a job. It seemed like a sensible time to find an agent.

  He became a client of Jill Foster, to whom he had been recommended by Graham Chapman. Jill was small, quick, no-nonsense, good-hearted and rather sexy. She had recently declared independence from a larger agency and set up on her own with her husband, Malcolm Hamer, an agent specializing in sports. She looked after all the Pythons apart from John Cleese and Eric Idle, and she knows what’s what. Jill has always tried to do what is best for her clients as people. If this means they should not take on something unsuitable, despite cabbage-sized wads of cash waved under their noses, Jill will tell them.

  She recalls that Douglas was hugely amusing and had a talent for lunch. He often rang her at ten in the morning and chatted, despite the fact that she was very busy. Jill always forgave him because he was so funny, “like a giant puppy with a sense of humour.” She recalls that he wrote a sketch about two lighthouse keepers who had fallen out. (They drew a diameter line through their lighthouse and could not infringe on each other’s territory.) “It was a brilliant sketch,” she says. “The market for sketches was very difficult and I could not find a buyer for it. But it was exceptional and I realized then that he had something very special.” Even after Douglas had left her for a new agent, Ed Victor, following publication of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they remained on good terms and would enjoy the occasional lunch. “I think he fancied me a bit,” says Jill, “but he gave up flirting after I gave birth to my daughter.”