Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  This was the background that predisposed the BBC to keep its goodies in-house. The huge, cultish success of the two radio series would surely translate to the TV. It was John Lloyd who started off the whole process with a memo back in September 1979 to the Head of Light Entertainment. In it, John persuasively listed all the credentials that Hitchhiker’s had acquired by then: radio series that were repeated over and over again by public demand, bestselling books, theatrical productions, even a nomination for a Hugo Award.* 143 John had by then moved over to television where he was riding high on the success of Not the Nine O’Clock News, and was looking for another project. Evidently he had forgiven Douglas for firing him off the book, or at least both parties tacitly conspired not to talk about it. In their complicated dance of advance and retreat, they were again best friends. Eventually, however, John did not produce the show. Having started as co-producer on the first episode, he then became—in that exquisitely precise code known only to the initiated—Associate Producer. Several suggestions from him about how to proceed were disregarded, but in fairness creative endeavours like this do often need a single, strong voice. Eventually the demands of John’s own extraordinarily successful career took him away from the series altogether.

  By this time Douglas had given up his job at the BBC. He had been doing it for fifteen months and was very tired. It was, as Neil Gaiman points out in Don’t Panic, the only proper job he ever had—and he’d worked at it like a man possessed. He had script-edited many episodes of Dr. Who, four of which he had also written (three of these, buffs will note, featured a disturbed Captain who, Vogon-like, destroyed worlds). Douglas had also written the entire second Hitchhiker’s radio series, and created and produced a pantomime, a characteristically odd and parodic work called Black Cinderella II Goes East. He had made enough money to declare independence; he was under contract to write more books; and his private life—of which there’s more in the next chapter—had acquired a shattering degree of intensity. The day job had to go.

  All through his creative life, Douglas liked to have if not total control then considerable influence on how the different forms of his work would appear. This desire was later to prove a handicap with Hollywood which regards its writers as krill, a species destined to remain a long way down the food chain. It wasn’t just the vanity that declares “nobody can do this as well as I can!” His wish for control over his own material was more a response to the quirkiness of what he produced. There’s an integrity to it that could easily have been lost if it were emulsified and then poured into the standard formats that the mavens of mass-market entertainment patronizingly misperceive as being what the public wants.

  To his credit, Douglas had, after some negotiation, turned down a TV offer from ABC in America, where The Restaurant at the End of the Universe had made the New York Times bestseller list. ABC had offered a tempting $50,000 for the rights with more to come. But following discussion with the men in suits, Douglas realized that just about everything that made Hitchhiker’s unusual would not survive the process of rendering it down for the US market. He was proud of his decision (“though I had to get drunk to make it,” he told Neil Gaiman): it showed a respect for the integrity of the work and a refusal not to follow the money slavishly. ABC was, according to Douglas, more interested in special effects than in the script, which was apparently dire.* 144 In any case, the cost of the first episode was estimated at an unacceptable $2 million plus. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted Douglas to say to his guitar-playing pal, Ken Follett: “The thing it took me some time to grasp, Ken, is that Hollywood is deeply shallow.”

  Ed Victor recalls:

  There was an American guy called Don Taffner who lived in England and made a very decent living by spotting shows in which he could buy format rights and then sell them in America. I think he did ’Til Death Do Us Part, and he may have done Steptoe and Son. He wanted to make The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a television series. He planned to pilot ninety minutes for ABC. I made a deal with him, but it never happened.

  One side-effect of the flirtation with ABC was that in late 1980 Douglas was flown out to Los Angeles where, on a colossal daily rate, earning him more in a week than he had been paid to write the series, he hung about the production office doing very little. This gave him an unfortunate appetite for doing very little in California, a place where the rewards from a deal are so mind-boggling that the investment of years of doing very little (camouflaged, of course, as networking or contractual foreplay) may seem perversely rational.

  But back in the real world, Douglas had a BBC television script to write. In his books, he had been sole master. There were no imaginative or budgetary constraints; if he wanted a scene with a million singing robots or to crash a starship into a sun, he could do so—several times if he fancied. Such freedom does not apply to a visual medium. So Douglas couldn’t just adapt the radio scripts; he had to re-imagine the whole adventure visually.

  There were some delicious bits of invention that were not in the radio series. For instance, the travellers’ final meal in Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe (and incidentally the biggest set ever made by the BBC at the time), features one of his most disconcerting comic flights of fancy, viz the Dish of the Day, a bovine, philosophical animal that actually wants to be eaten. Douglas had originally written this scene for Ken Campbell’s theatrical production, and it played so well that he kept it. The Dish, an off-beat creature, was acted by Peter Davison, the fifth Dr. Who and husband of Sandra Dickinson who played Trillian. He was keen to join in for less than his usual rate, performing any role, no matter how heavy the disguise (which was necessary for the Dr. Who office would not have been amused to see him in another SF role).

  During the production the cast had a lot of fun. Douglas was by then something of an expert on restaurants and he had just discovered the Good Food Guide. With characteristic extravagance, at the close of the day’s filming he was wont to take people out to some amusing restaurant he had found in the guide. In his convertible Golf Gti, with its front seats pushed back as far as they could go and the rear passengers squeezed like midget contortionists into a near-natal position, he would lead a convoy. If it was warm, Douglas would have the hood down and, his head almost above the roof line, he’d drive at full speed through the night to the sound of the car’s specially installed bowel-vibrating sound system.

  Incidentally, in the course of researching this book, I interviewed Professor Richard Dawkins, not only a great friend of Douglas’s but also a world authority on evolution. I asked him about the creature that yearned to be eaten, and whether such a thing could ever evolve. After all, I said, there are many plants that replicate by packaging their seeds in fertilizer collected on their journey through the digestive tract of something ingesting them. Could such a mechanism apply to an animal? “Hmm,” said the Prof, with the caution of a man who has been too often cornered by nutters with pet notions. “It is hard to see the reproductive advantages of such a strategy. On the other hand it might be theoretically possible to genetically engineer a creature that likes pain, though such a project would be perverse in the extreme . . .”* 145 The idea of a creature that wants to be eaten is not prescient in the same way as, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction of geosynchronous communication satellites. Rather it is another example of Douglas once again taking something so invisibly familiar to us that we just don’t think about it—in this case shoving heated lumps of dead animal down an orifice in our faces in order to absorb nutrition—and, by means of a comic trope, forcing us to do so.

  For the TV series, the BBC appointed as producer/director Alan J. W. Bell, already an experienced programme maker, trusted by the powers-that-be, who had directed the delightful Ripping Yarns and the hugely popular Last of the Summer Wine. After Hitchhiker’s, through the eighties and nineties he went on to produce and direct a dozen major projects in film and TV, winning an Emmy Award in 1999 for Lost for Words.

  Alan Bell h
ad been approached earlier about Hitchhiker’s. His first impulse was to say that it could never be televised because the special effects and the large sets would be prohibitively expensive. However, he was persuaded to take the job by John Howard Davis, the Head of Comedy, who described the TV script as one of the best he had ever seen.

  On paper, it could have been a good marriage between Douglas the visionary and Alan the pragmatist. Alas, right from the beginning they had poor personal chemistry. But given the investment, which was considerable, the BBC must have felt it was prudent to use someone with TV experience.

  To his credit, Alan Bell introduced a number of details that were bound to work better on television. For instance he put Simon Jones (Arthur Dent) into that comforting but passion-killing Marks & Spencer dressing gown and devised the air-car that carries Slartibartfast into the planet-making factory. Douglas himself made a couple of Hitchcockian cameo appearances, once as a drinker in the pub bar to which Arthur and Ford repair before the end of the world, and, when the original actor was taken ill, as the man who tears up those absurd bits of paper money and walks naked out to sea. This was a brave move for Douglas and it explains why so many of the crew were buying him drinks the night before. It says a lot for his willingness to perform. It was a closed set, something which instantly attracted the attention of everybody within a half mile radius. Many large men with a passion for food have arses like a white blancmange in a polythene bag.

  Douglas had thought hard about the technology of telly. He understood that it could be exploited to produce something so much more than the camera acting as an eye in front of a stage. Multiple images could be displayed, and merge into each other, or show separate narrative strands, and jump cut, and cooperate with or counterpoint the soundtrack. Telly could achieve what was later to be called in the computer world “parallel processing.” Douglas was only sorry that the human brain had not yet evolved to the point where such a rich mix could be inhaled in one go, but he believed that “there should be more going on than the viewer can take in.” Such plethora of detail gives a three-dimensional feel that makes the world thus created utterly believable. Just think how much processing power is devoted to the creatures—few of whom have any narrative function—in the space bar in Star Wars. In short, Douglas believed TV could offer unconventional techniques as new ways of telling a story.

  Alan Bell, by contrast, was a professional who excelled at delivering the product on time and to budget. Already the first pilot had been costed at £120,000—four times the price of a Dr. Who episode—an expenditure that John Howard Davis had authorized personally. It was not Alan’s role to provide an opportunity for clever young Oxbridge things to explore the possibilities of telly as an experimental medium. Besides, there was simply no time for Douglas to feel his way, with hesitations and reprises, towards some television first. Alan’s task was to get the job done, and beneath his urbane exterior lay a grimly tenacious grasp of the relevant. He succeeded despite a work-to-rule by the electrician’s union, the ETU, that meant that every day’s filming had to stop not one picosecond after 10 p.m.

  He and Douglas clashed immediately. Later Douglas, who rarely displayed personal animus, would describe Alan as “a bone-headed wanker,” a judgement that from the perspective of several decades on looks deeply unfair. A tough, albeit occasionally abrasive, pragmatist would be a better description. Alan himself has not gone public on the subject of Douglas. The quality of the TV series in any case undermines Douglas’s grievance about the producer. Having watched it again for this book, I found it still fresh, funny and joyous. Being essentially text-led, it was probably a little too wordy for television, but this was the nature of the beast. The sound, engineered by Mike McCarthy, was tight, the actors appeared to have fun, the script was witty, the effects were inventive. The graphics, as many have pointed out, were particularly seductive.

  Two kinds of culture clash were apparent from the outset: Alan was not of the bomber-pilot generation of producers, but in BBC terms he was the old guard—not part of the influx of Cambridge smarties. The traditional radio/TV schism ran deep too. Upstart radio people telling experienced telly people how to do their job was not appealing, and Alan could be a little regal.* 146 Douglas was in a fine young rapture of success. It was probably difficult to tell him anything.

  In the event, Douglas was never happy with the TV series which he felt lacked the magic of the radio. He persisted in regarding the radio series as the definitive version. There is a famous remark often quoted in publishing that the difference between a book and a film is that in a book the pictures are better. Douglas felt something analogous about the difference between radio and telly, though he conceded that there were some brilliant TV performances.

  Douglas and Alan had their first disagreement over casting. Douglas wanted the radio cast to be translated to telly, but Alan felt that TV had its own imperatives and that a judicious look around would be sensible. They compromised. Many of the original cast did cross the barrier and were just as brilliant on TV. Simon Jones was a shoe-in for Arthur Dent; after all, the role was written with him in mind. But Alan felt he wanted somebody unusual for Ford Prefect and went to audition. Much anxiety and many actors later, he found David Dixon, who understood the humour of the writing perfectly. This actor has an intelligent, elfin face that conceivably could have hailed from Betelgeuse and not Guildford; to make him stranger yet, he wore purple contact lenses. It’s hard to imagine Ford Prefect now as anybody else. Trillian was written as the archetypal English rose, but ended up being played by the fine American comic actress, Sandra Dickinson, in her own trilling transatlantic alto.* 147 David Learner, who had played Marvin on stage, took the part on again, though Stephen Moore continued to provide the voice. Slartibartfast, a part originally written with John Le Mesurier in mind, was played with exemplary, languid menace by Richard Vernon, reprising his original radio role.

  Money was another source of dissension. Douglas abhorred the papier-mâché boulders and endless recycling of the same corridor shot from different angles to be found in Star Trek almost as much as he hated the wobbly plastic sets in Dr. Who. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the grand-daddy of them all, Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, had shown how it was possible to visualize an alien world in which everything looked sharp-edged and real. Douglas, in the grip of his creative vision, knew that he did not have such resources, but within the limits he desperately wanted his work not to look tacky. The obstructions of accountants or corporate footwork artists were not his problem.* 148 Certainly of all the people on the set, Douglas himself was the hardest to please.

  In fact, the weird landscapes were remarkably good for the limited budget. Andrew Howe-Davis, the designer, made innovative use of glass painting (beautifully executed by a Frenchman, Jean Peyre) in order to squeeze infinity onto a sound stage at Ealing Studios in West London.

  The planet Magrathea, for instance (the site of the customized world manufacturers, you will recall), had to be somewhere alien and bleak. Douglas fancied Iceland. Morocco was also a possibility until, after a recce, Alan was warned off by a melancholy Japanese film crew who had had all their kit confiscated in order to keep them in the country—spending money—for longer. The BBC team ended up in the strange off-white china clay pits in St. Austell, Cornwall (now, incidentally, the site of the wondrous Eden Project with its graceful biomes).

  Similarly, the prehistoric Earth was filmed in the Lake District. It was bitterly cold and the extras in their animal skins were chilled to the marrow. Aubrey Morris, the captain of the B-Ark with the Douglas-sized appetite for baths, was freezing despite the constant topping-up of the bath with hot water. (Andrew Howe-Davis had found that the nearest source of water was a paper mill 200 metres away, so keeping the bath hot was not easy.) Conscious of his shoulders blotched with cold, he asked, in a voice fruitier than a bunch of grapes, if he couldn’t have some fake-suntan lotion. But none was handy. Beth Porter, a buxom actress playing one of t
he scantily-clad hairdressers destined to out-evolve the early hominids, told him not to worry as the audience would all be looking at her boobs.

  David Learner, the actor inside Marvin, also suffered for his art. It took him so long to get in and out of his android gear that when it was raining, and the crew took a break, they would leave him there with only an umbrella to stop him rusting solid on the spot. For obvious reasons the poor man had to be circumspect about accepting cups of tea or other drinks with diuretic properties.

  Nor were the actors paid a fortune. Mark Wing-Davey, who played Zaphod Beeblebrox with stylish cool, wore his second head with enormous panache. He thinks he may have been cast because of a hippy reputation lingering on from his university days, but Douglas said that it was because he had seen Mark in The Glittering Prizes, Frederic Raphael’s TV drama. The fake head was heavy, uncomfortable, and radio-controlled by the ingenious technician, Mike Kelt, who had made it. Later Mark Wing-Davey was to discover that it had cost twice as much to make as he was paid (£3,000 is the oft-quoted figure). Mark recalled that by contemporary standards “it wasn’t a great head,” though its electronic innards had appeared to some admiration on Tomorrow’s World, the gee-whizz BBC programme about new technology. Whatever the virtues or otherwise of the head, few of the fans minded—we all liked the effort enough that we were happy to suspend disbelief. Douglas, on the other hand, was mortified.