by Nick Webb
Fortunately, he loved the graphics. These were the ingenious solution to the problem of converting the narrator to television. Peter Jones as the Book worked deliciously on the radio, but what would he have become on TV? An awkwardly protracted voice-over perhaps. But instead, a new dimension was added to the narrator’s delivery that, as on the radio, contrived to be all the more matter-of-fact as the content grew increasingly surreal. As Peter spoke, the words appeared—glowing with hectic radioactive colour—one by one on the screen. At the same time, elsewhere on the screen, a graphic image illustrated and amplified the words with tremendous visual flair and three-dimensional movement.* 149 The result was an integrated feast for both eye and ear.
The story of the graphics is one of those serendipitous accidents. Kevin Davies, one of the graphics team, was then a passionate young fan of Hitchhiker’s.* 150 By chance he overheard the sound of R2D2, the Star Wars robot, emerging from an editing suite in the Ealing Studios. It must have been an odd moment. Unable to resist, he went in and discovered Alan Bell trying out different effects for Hitchhiker’s. Kevin worked for Pearce Studios, an animation house in the same building, and his enthusiasm was such that he persuaded Alan to meet the boss, Rod Lord, who in turn convinced Alan to allow them to tender for the job. This they won on price as well as quality. As many people have pointed out, with heroically suppressed irritation, no computers were harmed in the making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What Pearce Studios did had nothing to do with computers. It was cartoon animation of extraordinary sophistication: movement was created frame by frame, using a rostrum camera and images drawn on transparent acetates. Rod Lord and his team well deserved the 1981 BAFTA Award they won for the Hitchhiker’s graphics.
Another source of argument between Douglas and Alan was the laughter track. This battle had been fought and won already in connection with the radio, but nevertheless for TV it had to be put to the test again. The BBC believed that without laughter a comedy show lacked warmth; it couldn’t be funny. The viewers at home might laugh along with a studio audience, but they would not laugh on their own in the solitude of their front rooms. Douglas resisted this artifice, but, despite his views, an audience track was added using the laughter from a specially organized showing to committed SF fans at the National Film Theatre. But Hitchhiker’s was not a sitcom. The audible merriment sounded false. Crudely cueing the audience at home to jokes which apparently need that much help is a bit like throwing both ends of a rope to a drowning man. Fortunately, Alan dropped the laughter track after an early showing at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
It is an irony that Douglas and Alan did not get on better. There was so much for the viewer to like in the TV series. It broke new ground creatively. The fans were ecstatic and the series created many more of them who had missed the radio broadcasts. The appearance of the characters on screen was often not as the listener, or the reader, had imagined—but that problem is insuperable with any transfer from a non-visual medium to a visual one. Douglas himself told Jim Francis, the fx (special effects) designer, that he did not see Marvin the way he was on TV.
By and large, the critics liked it too, though some were unkind about the fx. But this is to miss the point. If the fx look a bit clunky now it is because we have been spoiled by computer-generated imagery. That technology was just not available in the era of the BBC micro and the Sinclair ZX81—hamster-powered by today’s standards. Domestic computers came with all of 4k of ram, though for a fancy price an enthusiast could buy another 16k. Mainframes were for business use, and lived in air-conditioned splendour being serviced by white-coated acolytes. Now we have enough processing power to move millions of pixels smoothly with software that calculates the effect of changing light on every one of them. Back in 1980 Jim Francis worked wonders with what he had to hand. As it was, the series consumed so much of the fx budget that this may have been partly responsible for the defection of The Goodies from the BBC to ITV later in the year.* 151
Besides, Hitchhiker’s was never about verisimilitude. Close Encounters of the Third Kind needed the mother ship to be about the size of Pittsburgh as it loomed over the Devil’s Tower because the director was trying visually to bludgeon us into awe. Star Wars needed teams of ace designers using the world’s largest network of Sun RISC-chip workstations to create a sense of reality because the scripts themselves are as subtle as a car crash. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was different. It was about wit, philosophical jokes and an underpinning of intellect. You don’t care about Zaphod’s palsied second head; Douglas should not have tormented himself.
The TV series pulled in excellent ratings and heightened Douglas’s already considerable profile. Nor did it do any harm to his book sales. Only a year after publication, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had sold half a million copies. In 1980, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe had gone straight into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and in August 1982, Life, the Universe and Everything did likewise, sitting at number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list for seven weeks and featuring in the charts for fifteen weeks altogether. The original Hitchhiker’s had sold a million copies by the end of 1983 and won Douglas a Golden Pan from his publishers. This was the fastest attainment of that accolade in the history of the company, and in January 1984, by way of celebration, Pan threw a stylish party for Douglas in the Roof Garden of the former Biba store in Kensington High Street.
Despite the impressive TV ratings, though, a second series was not commissioned. Douglas’s feuding with Alan may well have contributed to the BBC’s hesitation. The cost and complexity were also compelling factors; you can imagine them being judiciously invoked at meetings in airless rooms in Television Centre. Given that Alan Bell was one of the BBC’s trusted producer/directors, the aura of vexation around the project cannot have helped. Usually if there is a dispute between the talent and a producer the solution is to change the producer in the hope that someone new might have a better personal rapport. It is rare for the BBC to back the producer in such wrangles.
In this case the BBC stuck by Alan Bell. Douglas had wanted Geoffrey Perkins to produce the second series, but the two of them together—with Geoffrey producing and Alan directing—was considered, probably for good reason, an unworkable combination. By way of compensation Geoffrey was offered the job of script editor. He was in New Zealand at the time, touring with the wonderful RadioActive comedy show, and he remembers being somewhat drunk very late one night and having a crackly international telephone call about this job offer with John Howard Davis, who was enjoying his early afternoon cup of BBC tea. Not surprisingly—for he is no dope—Geoffrey declined (though it took a few years for the TV people to forgive him). It would have been a classic case of responsibility without power. “I thought it was the most thankless task imaginable,” he said. He had experienced the agony of getting material out of Douglas already. As it was pretty obvious that Douglas did not want to work with Alan again, the prospects for another series were effectively terminated. In the end, says Ed Victor, the final decision not to make a second series was Douglas’s.
The first series was eventually sold to the States and broadcast in November 1982. It was regarded as a dud. American TV does not use the same line standard as British TV (NTSC is 525 lines whereas European PAL is 625) so the resolution was not quite as clear; consequently the American critics complained that the complex graphics were not always legible. It is tempting, though probably facile, to see a cultural difference here. Douglas liked the fact that there was more happening on the screen than could be taken in at once. But some Americans may have found that irritating. Theirs is a society in which entertainment is slick and digestible, consumed wholesale, in giant bites, like a cheeseburger slavered in relish. (A few years later, however, America produced some of the most compelling multi-stranded “tapestry” TV ever made in the form of shows like ER and West Wing. Douglas was a major fan of both.) Certainly Simon Jones, who went over to help promote the
series in the US, was soon put on the defensive, though he was quick-witted enough to turn apparent vices into virtues. The American scorn about the tackiness of the fx was particularly embarrassing given how these had impoverished the BBC, but, as Simon pointed out, the sophisticated viewer would understand that these were meant to be artfully artless.
It wasn’t until the BBC had definitely decided against the second series in November 1981 that the selling of the film rights began in earnest.
Terry Jones, who had co-written and co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian so he knew whereof he spoke, was the first in the frame to suggest that he and Douglas make the film together. They had always got on tremendously well and Terry’s peculiar imagination would definitely have been right for the job. But Douglas was reluctant. He had seen Hitchhiker’s through almost every incarnation known to man (including the towel) and he was just a bit overdosed with rewriting it for different media. Initially it would have been fun as they found excuses for getting dangerously twisted on real ale (script conferences, naturally). However, Douglas knew that few relationships survive making a movie together, a process more potent in its ability to induce discord than unwanted sexual advances or stealing your pal’s last fiver. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Terry and Douglas agreed that they would like to make a film together one day, but that it would be better to start from scratch with an idea innocent of history.* 152
Meanwhile Douglas had finally moved to Islington, the district he thought of as home. Jon Canter, his former flatmate, and Douglas remained good friends although, following his pattern, Douglas somewhat disengaged from what had been a very close friendship while he invested new enthusiasm in other people. Jon is too civilized to say whether he found this hurtful.
Through the good offices of Hotblack Desiato (not the rock star from Disaster Area but the respectable Islington estate agent), Douglas bought a wonderfully louche duplex flat near the Royal Agricultural Hall in a tiny sidestreet, more of an alley, called St. Alban’s Place. The first floor (the second if you’re American), reached by a narrow flight of stairs, was mostly one large L-shaped room given over to parties and pleasure. There was a bar well stocked with the sticky ingredients of exotic cocktails and, always, champagne in the fridge. Bedrooms, bathrooms with giant antique fixtures (from the previous trendy owners), loos and so on were upstairs. At the very top there was a roof garden.
The whole place was distinctly flash. Douglas liked to show off the TV mounted on a wall bracket so that he could watch it from his bed. He was a big kid in so many ways. For an evocative description, you can do no better than to read his own in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Fenchurch’s place (minus the TV) was lifted from reality.
Although access was from St. Alban’s Place, the apartment beetled out over an antique shop in Upper Street, a thoroughfare so preposterously fashionable—in an arty Bohemian sort of way—that it includes roughly eighty restaurants, two theatres, seventeen estate agencies, ten purveyors of stripped pine furniture (some distressed), a mall of antiques emporia, several designer clothes shops, two shops apparently selling Italian wastepaper baskets, a dozen pubs and almost nowhere to buy a tin of beans or a bottle of milk.
It was here that Douglas conducted an intense love affair (of which more in the next chapter) which lasted about a year before breaking up. This left him living with the Black Dog, deeply depressed. Mary Allen, his thespian friend from Cambridge, imagining him rattling around his huge apartment trying despairingly to write and, knowing how badly he coped on his own, thought he needed a flatmate. She introduced him to Jane Belson, a tall, good-looking barrister.
Jane is an articulate woman (St. Pauls, Oxford, the Treasury and the Law) whose intelligence is of the rigorous, legalistic, linear kind (“if A implies B, and B implies C, then surely the court must agree that A implies C”). She was a useful foil to Douglas’s lateral way of thinking. At the bar she specialized in matters matrimonial. All aspects of the law (apart from the existence of the law itself) strike me as not likely to improve your view of humankind, but fighting divorces must be especially destructive of sentimental illusion. Jane is a strong character, though her superficial toughness is belied by a certain look of vulnerability around the eyes. After a while she and Douglas fell for each other and got together—of which again more later—but in the context of the film saga, the important thing is that in the summer of 1982 they went on holiday together to California, the heartland of the film industry and the spiritual home of the slacker. There they rented a house in Malibu. This was the first of many visits for them both. Douglas loved it. He had lots of fans there—especially in the growing techie community—who were always ready to make a gratifying fuss of him. He was becoming fascinated by computers and the extraordinary fever pitch of technological innovation that was centred on Silicon Valley, a description just coming into currency.
His affection for everything American was reciprocated. The Americans were amused by his extravagant manner and his repertoire of excellent anecdotes. Here was a whole continent that hadn’t heard his stories already. Douglas’s passion for new ideas struck a sympathetic chord with them, and his vast range of interests was seen as admirable. In more rigid societies like Britain, excelling outside your appointed compartment sometimes excites envy. Being a polymath is bad form.
There’s an openness about American society that Douglas relished. All societies, they say, have a class structure because of the universality of human nature burdened with all its evolutionary baggage. Put two humans together and they will sort themselves into a hierarchy. Add a third, and there’s room for schisms and factions. But at least in the USA the system is based more upon money and success than on antecedents. Maybe Douglas’s milieu of clever North London fashionables, eternally competing over their achievements, reminded him of some painfully overdue contractual obligation (there always was one), so there was an element of flight. Whatever the reasons he loved the USA in general, New York a lot, and California hugely.
There is a legend that I have been unable to verify that Douglas even got to meet the president of the USA. In the mid-eighties, when most of Douglas’s income came from the States and he was at the height of his fame, the story goes that a group of famous authors were invited to lunch with Ronald Reagan. It is possible that Douglas heard this from one of the actual participants—for he met many fellow writers on the promo circuit—and enjoyed the anecdote. Of course it is dodgy practice to include a yarn of such uncertain provenance, but this one (hedged with a health warning) is hard to resist and has a ghastly ring of verisimilitude.
Apparently this collection of writers (which may or may not have included Douglas) went to the White House for a really long lunch. They did their best to entertain the president who was twinkly and affable. After lunch they moved to the pool room and had coffee and talked some more. Then they had afternoon tea. President Reagan showed no sign of wanting to throw them out. Surely, they thought, he must be busy as ruler of the western world? But it went on and on. From time to time, men and women would appear with important-looking pieces of paper which the president would sign. It got to be a little embarrassing. Some of them had commitments later that day. How do you tell the most powerful man in the world that you have another appointment?
But America wasn’t all just about having fun. On this particular holiday to California in 1982 John Lloyd came out to join them. He and Douglas were working on The Meaning of Liff, the collection of place names for which they invented alternative meanings. Jane recalls that although Lloydie sulked a lot, they did do a lot of work on the book. They had sensibly taken a gazetteer with them, and they went through it looking out likely place names and writing down possible meanings on cards. The result is enduringly brilliant.
It was also during this visit to California that Douglas met Michael Gross and Joe Medjuck, former members of National Lampoon. This irreverent organ featured some trenchant journalism, a lot of stereo and sports car ad
s, and a surfeit of sophomoric anatomy jokes. It is often described as the US Private Eye though in feel and production values it is quite different. The old Cambridge network might have played a part here, for one of Douglas’s pals at university had been Jim Siegelman,* 153 former member of Footlights and also president of the Harvard Lampoon, from which in 1969 National Lampoon had derived.
Michael Gross and Joe Medjuck were then working for Ivan Reitman, a producer/director with Columbia Studios who had made some successful comedies (Animal House, for instance, with John Belushi).* 154 It was through these intermediaries that Ivan Reitman became interested in the film rights. Douglas was hot. His books were in the charts and selling in huge numbers, especially to the all-important college market. (The demographics of the US film market are skewed towards the younger end of the population. There has to be some reason why all those Police Academy films get made.)
Ed Victor likes to sell film rights for the sort of money that motivates the purchaser to actually make the movie. This means that the sale is lucrative but permanent, unlike an option sale that typically only brings in a fraction of the money.* 155 Ed is too experienced to discuss the details of a client’s deal unless they are already in the public domain. However, in his fascinating book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made (Titan Books, 2001), David Hughes describes the sum paid for the film rights as too large for even Zaphod Beeblebrox to leave in a taxi. At the time, with royalties also rolling in from book sales, Douglas could easily afford to relocate to California to write the screenplay—so he did. Of course, you don’t actually have to be in movie land to write a screenplay, but Douglas always liked being on the set, as it were, and he thought that easy access to the right people would be advantageous.
