by Nick Webb
These days we live in a post-Hitchhiker’s world in which references to forty-two, life, the universe and everything are greeted with a smile of recognition. It’s hard to think back to the time before our sensibilities were skewed forever by Douglas’s work. Of course there had been humorous SF by Bob Shaw, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon amongst others, though it was not widely read outside the parish. Even Isaac Asimov liked jokes, and a lot of his short stories were witty explorations not of who done it? but of what done it? and how was it done?
But before Douglas nobody had been cosmically funny. He loved philosophical ideas, and had a natural grasp of them, but he knew that plonking them unadorned into the text would induce instant tedium followed by the heterodyne squeal of a million radios being retuned. For instance, Douglas describes the creator of the universe as a curmudgeon with a disagreeable cat and a mucky shed.* 97 This decrepit old git has lost all confidence that the universe actually exists because his sense data could be doing the dirty on him. (“Contingent” is the word philosophers use in this context.) It’s a nightmarishly solipsistic idea. You cannot know for sure if anything is real. That’s why Descartes’s famous observation, cogito, ergo sum, is such an important test for existence because even if the “I” that seems to be experiencing the world is in the grip of some hallucination, at least it can be sure there is an entity that is conscious, even if cruelly deluded. The fact that the Supreme Being is prepared to deal administratively with the world on the assumption that it might really be there is an empirical accommodation with phenomenalism—and rather a bleak joke. Besides, philosophical notions described in this way would be pretty dull. Douglas’s genius was to sneak them into the reader’s brain camouflaged as a series of extremely good jokes. It is this serious underpinning of dazzling notions and intellect that made Hitchhiker’s so extraordinary.
Lest we forget, the work was quite amazingly innovative. He spoke to the reader directly, even—especially—to readers unfamiliar with the conventions of response that come from being a regular consumer of literature. When Douglas died, it was poignant to see so many heartbroken teenagers leaving their tributes on the website created for the purpose. Alienated youngsters in small towns in Alaska knew that he was talking to them personally.
The pilot for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was recorded in the BBC’s large West London Paris Studio in June 1977. Simon Brett was the producer of the pilot, almost his last task before sliding off into telly, and then for the rest of the series Geoffrey Perkins took over. Although he self-deprecatingly says that he had no idea what he was doing (“that’s all right,” said Douglas, “neither do I”), it was clear from the beginning that Geoffrey got it, as they say, perfectly. He was also confident enough about his own humour and sense of narrative construction to chivvy Douglas when things got too incoherent. It’s partly as a result of Geoffrey’s nagging that anything resembling a plot emerged at all.
Much has been written about the casting of the show, and for completists the full credits are included in an Appendix. The reality was that Douglas and Geoffrey were well served by the cast, many of whom were mates from the Footlights days. (This old-boy networking would be harder to accept were it not for the fact that the cast was brilliant.) The actors performed to perfection, even those who found the whole thing bewildering. Don’t forget that they did not all have to be present during the recording, so some of them had their parts spliced in later. The script tells a picaresque, strange and discontinuous story at the best of times—even if you listen to it all, and pay attention—so it is not surprising that some of the actors, like Roy Hudd for instance, who played the compère in the restaurant at the end of the universe, found it all a bit weird.* 98 All the actors liked playing their parts, which says something for the lilt of the writing and the huge grin that shines through the text. Similarly, all the engineers and studio managers relished making it all sound seamless. (See Chapter Seven.) The fun they had was communicated in every broadcast moment.
The story of Peter Jones as the Book has become part of the many-volume Chronicles of Adams that embrace the first broadcasts. Peter Jones was an experienced radio performer with exquisite comic timing from a lifetime behind the microphone and treading the boards. He’d starred in In All Directions (with Peter Ustinov) and was frequently on Just a Minute, a BBC radio show in which the panellists have to talk for sixty seconds without hesitation, deviation or repetition. (It’s not so easy.) His tone was just right for the Book. Like some autodidact in a bar telling you all the species of woodlouse to be found north of 50° latitude, he was terribly matter-of-fact, slightly sententious and utterly uninterruptible. Douglas and Simon Brett were casting about for someone with a Peter Jones-type voice. Mike Simpson reports that they had approached Michael Palin and one or two others, but were frustrated.* 99 The classic anecdote goes like this: they were having a meeting over BBC tea and digestive biscuits, but getting nowhere.
“We definitely need a Peter Jonesy sound,” opined Douglas. “Damn, damn, damn . . .”
There was much gnawing of knuckles and sudden starts of “How about . . . ? Oh, bugger, he’s dead” or “Thingy might do it, but is he too expensive now?”
Simon’s secretary, losing patience with the high-octane ratiocination of the chaps with their V8 brains, then came in and said: “Do you think it’s possible that Peter Jones himself might have a Peter Jones-type voice?”
Lights flickered in Broadcasting House, daffodils erupted from the earth in nearby Regent’s Park, suddenly the sun shone. Of course, why not get Peter Jones himself? Women, eh? Dauntingly pragmatic . . .
Douglas now set about writing the Hitchhiker’s radio series in a tremendous spasm of creativity. These days we are so used to computer technology that it takes some imaginative effort to understand the discipline of the typewriter. It was quicker than longhand and, God knows, in most cases more legible, but it was not more flexible. No copy and paste, no scrolling up the screen to add an afterthought or transpose a sentence so the rhythm was better. Every word had to be pounded onto paper where it sat as immovable as a pyramid. The whole page had to be jettisoned, and clean-typed after an amendment or two. And, of course, quite apart from the mechanical problems, comic writing is just astonishingly difficult.
The Paris Studio in Maida Vale was, despite the name, geared up for an audience. Without one, it was dark and empty. It wasn’t the easiest space to work in, but any gloom was quickly dispelled by the energy and enjoyment of the team making Hitchhiker’s. Relays of actors came in to do their bit, and left chortling. Geoffrey and his brilliant team of technicians had to invent effects on the spot, sometimes singing them themselves (creating a vast choir of off-key robots, for instance). It was all huge fun. In order to get proper voice separation, Geoffrey hid his actors all over the building, even stuffed into cupboards. He recalls:
Richard Goolden, a little guy who played Mole in Toad of Toad Hall, must have been about eighty then. He was a sweet little actor who was absolutely bent over double. [He was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth.] I’d put him in some cupboard to do his bit, and it must have been about half an hour after we’d finished that sequence when this little voice said, “Is it all right if I come out?” I said, “Oh, so sorry, Richard, I forgot about you . . .”
When Douglas had written four episodes, he had to break off to write four episodes of Dr. Who, “The Pirate Planet.” Geoffrey Perkins empathized:
It wasn’t that Douglas was too bloody lazy to get down and do it. He was sweating over every word. And he had this strange technique of writing backwards. He was actually typing the thing on a typewriter and would come in with about twelve pages of script the week before the show, and I’d say, OK, so this a third of the script—all right, we’ll keep the studio, and keep the actors because if he just keeps going at this rate he’ll finish it soon. But then he’d come in four days later and say: “I’ve got eight pages of script.” And you couldn’t quite work out how he’d gone down . . .
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The reduction of twelve pages of effervescent copy to eight was characteristic Douglas. All his life he would ruthlessly self-edit his work, pruning and pruning it down to its nerve ends. Just as poetry is more intense than prose, the result of all this compression was frequently brilliant, but it must have had the production team sighing and groaning. It’s not a handy technique when the clock is running and there is time to fill. “Dead air”—or silence—is anathema to radio producers; thirty seconds of broadcasting nothing is an eternity.
Hitchhiker’s and Dr. Who left Douglas exhausted.
I had simply run out of words. Since John Lloyd always beat me at Scrabble I reckoned he must know lots more words than me and asked him if he would collaborate with me on the last couple of scripts. “Prehensile,” “anaconda” and “ningi” are just three of the words I would never have thought of myself.* 100
Douglas was always the kindest of men, but sometimes he found it difficult to acknowledge creative debts. He was scrupulous about the attribution of particular lines to their authors and generous in his public praise of the work of other writers and thinkers whom he rated, but when it came to personal assistance he wanted to be the sole creator; Doctor Adams with the crash cart paddles would kick-start the heart of the beast. There is a kind of child-like “look what I’ve done! And all on my own!” in all authors, hence their hunger for admiration no matter how established they are. In Douglas’s case his desire for approval went beyond the familiar and forgivable promptings of ego; it was a desperate need for reassurance. Pragmatically too, his perfectionism and idiosyncratic voice would have been hard to impose upon a writing partner without Douglas coming across as capriciously difficult, if not incipiently bonkers. Besides, he knew he would be judged on the work. He well understood just how much he craved emotional support, encouragement, cups of tea and all-purpose round-the-clock unconditional love. But when it came to hearing the music within his own words he needed—as with his sketches with Will Smith and Martin Adams—to work on his own. Help with the actual text was something he couldn’t bear. This left some of his fellow scribes, such as John, and later Michael Bywater, feeling, as Wodehouse said, not exactly gruntled—an emotion doubtless exacerbated by the huge commercial success of the work. It’s one thing to help an anguished friend in the creative process if the result is one smart mention in the TLS and the sale of three copies (two to the author’s mother). In those circumstances you’re pleased to have been of use. But you might be more ambivalent when the work in question had sold over several million copies and made your pal famous.
In the end it is hard to assess the degree to which Douglas was helped. Having someone simpatico fizzing away creatively on the same wavelength is an invaluable service. On the other hand, Douglas had invented the context and the characters into which the remaining episodes had to fit. The voice and the template were already established. However, John Lloyd is a very talented man, and Geoffrey recalls that at least one long Narrator’s speech in episode six was entirely down to John, who also dreamed up the Haggunenons, the fast-evolving creatures with the undisciplined chromosomes. Without wanting to get too fruitlessly preoccupied with who did what—for a co-written script is like one of those irreversible chemical reactions which cannot be sorted back into its original components—Douglas appears to acknowledge John’s contribution with the Narrator and the Haggunenons as those passages include the aforementioned words, “Ningi,” a galactic currency unit, and “prehensile,” that he reckoned were essentially Lloydie. It is interesting, though in the light of later events hardly surprising, that when Douglas wrote the first novel of Hitchhiker’s based on the radio scripts, he did not rely on John Lloyd’s contributions at all.
In his introduction to the compendium of the trilogy (in four parts) published by Pan in 1992 and also in his preamble to the third volume of the Byron Preiss graphic novels of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1993), Douglas makes it clear that his first book was a substantially expanded novel version of episodes one to four of the radio series, i.e. he did not use any material from the co-written episodes. In the same introduction, Douglas explains that his second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, was based—with heavy revision and editing—on episodes seven through twelve, and then also five and six “in that order.” Douglas may have been concerned about copyright, although he never had a legalistic turn of mind (indeed, he could be quite innocent in such matters), but when he was writing the first novel there had been such a major falling out with John Lloyd that Douglas would have been alert to the dangers of using any of John’s ideas. By the second book, relations with John had settled down to a state that in hospital parlance might be described as critical but stable. Douglas felt able to return to episodes five and six, but even then he largely wrote John’s contributions out of the novel.
So Douglas’s assessment of John Lloyd’s contribution is misleadingly flippant, for he needed help urgently. What’s more, episodes two to four were recorded in the Paris Studio in November and December of 1977, so the schedule was rapidly catching up with his rate of production.
By the time the first episode was broadcast (8 March 1978), they were still recording the last episode, cutting things fine given post-production editing and the lead times for publishing the programmes. Later that year there was a “Christmas Special” broadcast in December that had nothing at all to do with Christmas, and which Geoffrey succeeded in prising out of Douglas by moving in with him and zapping him with pathos on an hourly basis.
John Lloyd’s account of working with Douglas on the last two episodes of the first series is not as cool as Douglas’s. He reckons that by the time Douglas had reached episode five of the radio series, he had proved to himself that he could create something completely original, and that he just wasn’t enjoying the process any more. John himself was in the throes of writing notes for a comic SF novel called GiGax, a term that meant the greatest area that could be encompassed by the human imagination (so everything from a nutshell to the cosmos). Douglas, says John, got completely stuck around the beginning of episode five, and was very distressed about it. John came to the rescue and plundered some of his own ideas from GiGax:
The ghastly trauma for me with Douglas was that he got stuck, and said, “Look, we’ve got to write these last two and I’m under terrible time pressure now, but if you could help me out if there’s another series, we’ll go back to our old system of writing together.” I was living in Knightsbridge at the time, in the flat of a rather well-off friend.* 101 There was a kind of garage that had been converted into a rough and ready office where we worked. And although it had taken Douglas almost ten months to write the first four episodes, the last one and a half/two we wrote in three weeks.
Actually, though the chronology is hard to reconstruct, it looks as if Douglas was not quite as dilatory as John suggests. He did not get down to writing seriously until August when the series was commissioned. However, there’s no doubt about the deadlines. Time, tide and the BBC wait for no man. Bringing John in gave the whole process an enormous boost.
We laughed a lot. What happened was that I gave him hundreds of pages of my novel, GiGax. I can’t remember why I called it that, but I do remember that the guy who created Dungeons and Dragons was called something like it, and I thought I’d invented the name. Anyway, I gave him these hundreds of pages and said, take anything you want. Mine was a rather pretentious book, I suppose, but there were quite a lot of crucial ideas in it and Douglas had this wonderful way of taking the kernel of an idea and turning it around to make it much funnier. He always had a way of putting a gag on the end, whereas my natural inclination was to go forward with the basic idea to try to find a solution rather than a gag. It was in that garage that we jointly came up with the number forty-two and the Scrabble set, which even at the time seemed the most wonderful, striking, simple and hilarious idea.
Apropos of forty-two, by the way, Griff Rhys Jones, a friend since their sch
ooldays, remarks that there was always a precision to Douglas’s writing. Griff is sure that Douglas would have first toyed with the comic potential of eigh-teen, and mulled over the possibilities of thirty-seven. Five always seems a perky little number, but is it funny?
By now forty-two has been the subject of a great deal of arcane speculation; Douglas was always amused and diverted by just how abstruse and inventive some of the explanations could be. It is appreciably more droll than forty-one—though perhaps not such a ribtickler as seventy-eight.
Bizarrely, once you become sensitized to forty-two, you see it everywhere. It seems to come up more often in the National Lottery than it should (no, no—that way, madness lies). There’s a giant office building in the City of London with an illuminated forty-two, lighting up the night sky, across its upper floors. Most appropriately there is a wonderful book called Powers of Ten* 102 which explores the whole universe by starting with, roughly, the human scale (one metre) and working upwards and downwards in powers of ten, from the quark to the greatest known extent of the cosmos. The number of base ten exponents? Forty-two. It says a lot for the power of the idea that it can be invoked without any need for context in the confident expectation that people will get the reference.
Douglas’s background as a frustrated performer was a great help to him in writing the dialogue for Hitchhiker’s. Geoffrey Perkins says that it all read very fluently because Douglas would have heard it spoken in his mind before committing it to paper. On the other hand, Geoffrey sometimes had to remind him about consistency, for Douglas, understandably reluctant to abandon a hard-won good bit, would sometimes move lines from one character to another. The whole experience, says Geoffrey, was enjoyable, but not without angst.
