Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  * 81 Douglas Adams talks to Danny Danziger, “The Worst of Times,” the Independent, 11 March 1991.

  * 82 “Advantage” may seem an odd word for risking your life and the sacrificing of years of it for the common weal, but in the context of black comedy they do say there is nothing like the armed services for teaching you how to play the system.

  * 83 The sketch has been reproduced in Don’t Panic. It’s horribly funny. Somehow this particular Kamikaze pilot has been on nineteen missions, always finding some extraordinary rationale for not completing the mission. Missing the sea altogether figured at one point.

  * 84 The Narrator’s preamble at the very beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  * 85 In The Salmon of Doubt, p. 67.

  * 86 Serious SF fans might recognise this idea from a Gordon Dickson short story, “Computers Don’t Argue” (a 1965 Nebula winner), in which, after a foolish bet, a computer is set the task of solving a logical paradox, and is thus disabled from maintaining the environmental systems in a Martian colony. The paradox is truly ancient, being a version of Epimenides’s old chestnut about all Cretans being liars. (Epimenides was a Cretan.)

  * 87 Published by Pocket Essentials, 2001.

  * 88 Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (Ayer Co. Publishing, 1975).

  * 89 Even today if you waggle a hand in front of your face and croak “EX-TERM-IN-ATE! EX-TERM-IN-ATE!” with a voice full of grit, people (Brits anyway) will instantly recognize a bad Dalek impression.

  * 90Hitchhiker’s Guide, p. 8.

  * 91Don’t Panic, revised edition, p. 81.

  * 92 OK, for the buffs, in order, the Doctors were: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

  * 93 The Daily Telegraph (16 November 2002) reports that it will now be remade with Paul McGann as the Doctor.

  * 94 Sue and I met him on the canal once in 1979 looking very ragged and sweaty in jogging gear. “Every generation will have its characteristic ailments,” he gasped. “Ours will have great cardio-vascular systems, but terminally buggered knees and tendons.”

  * 95 A topical quiz in which some funny and fearless people are scurrilous about the preceding week’s events. It sounds a bit naff, but in fact is brilliant. The format makes for variety, and the personal chemistry between the team members is a hoot. They are selected not just for their personalities and quick wits but also for their willingness to elaborate one another’s fantasies. They get away with comments that in a more solemn context would have the libel lawyers reaching for their writs. The programme is still running, and is well worth a listen.

  * 96 OK. This is a generalization for which I can only offer “anecdotal evidence” (sociologists’ code for no grant), but it is based on thirty years of observation.

  * 97The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Chapter 29 (Pan Books, 1980).

  * 98 Geoffrey Perkins tells a story of how Roy Hudd met Stephen Moore (Marvin) for an interview for the BBC World Service, and told him that he’d just been in this really strange thing with the universe ending in some kind of cabaret act, and that he had to do about five minutes of ad-libbing as well. He had no idea what it was about. Stephen said to him, hmm, that sounds like the thing that I’m in. It was Geoffrey who called the android Marvin by the way. Douglas’s original was Marshall, but it sounded too military somehow.

  * 99Hitchhiker’s Guide.

  * 100The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Radio Scripts, footnotes to Fit the Fifth.

  * 101 Alex Catto in William Mews, Knightsbridge. Years later Alex, by then a venture capitalist, was one of the investors in The Digital Village.

  * 102Powers of Ten by Philip and Phylis Morrison and Charles and Ray Eames (Scientific American Library, 1982).

  * 103 Apropos incontinent moggies, Douglas once remarked that underground car parks all smell of the same thing: impatience.

  * 104 There is a story of Ralph being interviewed at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, not a frivolous paper. “When were you last in Frankfurt, Mr. Vernon-Hunt?” asked the earnest young reporter. “Not in exactly, old boy,” said Ralph. “Over . . .”

  * 105 Publishing is a confidence game. The editor must believe in the author’s work, and transmit that confidence to the rest of the organization that in turn must convey it to the trade. It’s only after the trade has agreed to display the work that the public has a chance of buying it. It is possible to sit in a meeting and see the chain of confidence broken under one’s nose, in which case it must be repaired quickly or else the book will probably fail.

  * 106 These define the percentages of the income from the sale of rights that flow through to the author’s account.

  * 107Don’t Panic.

  * 108 Despite working for many years in a feral American corporation which prided itself, for some perverse reason, on its killer corporate culture, I have never come across such competitiveness—usually unstated—as that which prevails among the clever Cambridge media set that graduated with Douglas.

  * 109 If you haven’t tried him, start at once. Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos are essential reading.

  * 110 Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, 1985.

  * 111 For the borderline obsessive fan, I can report that the platform was supported by 22" diameter blue disc-skates from Rolair Systems and that Motivair supplied the compressed air from a 152DS Hydrovane Compressor. Even the Stage, the professional thesps’ magazine, said it was technically brilliant, but added that the seating was insufficiently raked.

  * 112 This company has nothing to do with the present Original Records, a reggae music specialist.

  * 113 He’d been The Man in Black for a celebrated Home Service radio series.

  * 114Don’t Panic.

  * 115Critics’ Forum, Radio Three, broadcast 26 January 1980, with Robert Cushman, Benedict Nightingale, Claire Tomalin and Richard Cork. They loved it.

  * 116 Douglas describes his love for Wodehouse in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Sunset at Blandings.

  * 117 “Company for Gertrude” from The Collected Blandings Short Stories by P.G. Wodehouse (Penguin Books, 1992).

  * 118 Quoted by Frank Muir in his smashing introduction to The Collected Blandings Short Stories by P.G. Wodehouse.

  * 119 His interview for this book was the easiest to transcribe because he talks in well-rounded sentences without hesitation, an “um” or an “er,” or changes of direction. His band, Damn Right I Got the Blues, would strut their stuff in a subterranean bar at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The group consists of writers and publishers who deep down want to be rock’n’roll heroes, and not media fashionables. They are really quite loud and urgent, and they play with enormous attack. All in all, pretty good. Douglas would occasionally perform with them as a guest artist.

  * 120 They were the support band to the dangerously funky Rock-Bottom Remainders with stormin’ Steve King on lead guitar.

  * 121 It’s difficult to confirm the time and place via Ligeti. He was a professor at the College of Music in Stockholm at the time, but had been in Vienna (after leaving Budapest in 1956) before going to Darmstadt and he returned to Vienna quite often.

  * 122 The hugely influential Goons were the first to understand how much humour could be wrung from special effects. Remember the thunder of the artillery barrage? “What is happening?” asks Eccles. Reply: “They’re shelling peas in the kitchen . . .”

  * 123 See Douglas’s introduction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the Complete Radio Scripts (Pan Books, 1985).

  * 124 Quoted by Charles Flowers in Instability Rules (Wiley, 2002). It is the same source for Einstein’s anonymous accompanist.

  * 125 Douglas and Charles Dickens had much in common. They both loved performance, they both made it big when they were only twenty-six, they both toured America getting knackered, they both wrote women charact
ers who were deeply soppy. Dickens, with his prolixity and emotional manipulation, is better on telly than on the page, whereas Douglas is the complete opposite.

  * 126So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (Pan Books, 1984).

  * 127 Douglas’s note on Robbie McIntosh, written in Santa Barbara 1999, from the WholeNote website.

  * 128 There was one for Polly Adams’s birthday, a near Saturday anyway, on 24 June 1995, another on 30 March 1996, and 16 November 1996 and, of course, one for Douglas’s forty-second birthday on 12 March 1994. A truly amazing party also—a Farewell to Britain, off to Hollywood debauch—on 10 July 1999. This list, not exhaustive, courtesy of Sue Webb’s addiction to diaries.

  * 129 Interview with Duncan Fallowell, 1995.

  * 130 Oddly much the same applies to books. Bestselling authors, whose names on their books are huge and embossed (and whose titles are mere footnotes), still twitch in case they come up with something so doggy that it inhibits potential buyers at the point of sale.

  * 131 In many ways this is the most satisfying of the Hitchhiker’s books.

  * 132 Douglas was always huge in Germany which, despite the stereotype, seems to have a weakness for surreal British humour. They even made a German version of Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus once, with all the Pythons learning their lines phonetically.

  * 133 Jonny Brock tells a story of being a house guest with a large party when Douglas had his place in Provence. Towards the end of the holiday, Douglas suggested that they all go to one of the world’s most famous and expensive restaurants on the Swiss border. There was much gulping and surreptitious wincing, until Jonny took Douglas aside and explained that most of them could not afford it and would feel uncomfortable about being feasted so extravagantly. The solution was for everybody to buy their own food, but Douglas would treat the party to the fearsomely costly component—the wine.

  * 134 Sonny is a supremely civilized man, but he is not a person in whom the blood reaches the higher cognitive functions before around 10:30 a.m.

  * 135 These trips are fun. You charge around the industry seeing old mates and usually being treated to a great deal of lunch, but after a week of three or four meetings in the morning, lunch in the line of duty, four meetings in the afternoon, early evening drinks and sometimes dinner, your hotel room is ankle deep in manuscripts and you’re in such a state of fugue that you would not recognize a bestseller if it bit you on the bum.

  * 136 Much later, when she had turned into a fine writer herself, she wrote for GQ magazine one of the most insightful pieces about Douglas ever published.

  * 137 The critics were harsh about this one. For instance, Tom Shippey, the academic SF expert and reviewer, found it “too cool, as Adams is now edging down from Vogon poetry to mere satire of British Rail sandwiches . . .”

  * 138So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was Pan’s first hardcover edition. They had been licensing library editions to Arthur Barker, but they realized they were missing a trick. It was a very elegant book, all black, designed by Gary Day Ellison with an odd lenticular image on the front that alternated between a walrus and a plesiosaur depending on the angle. David Bleasdale, their Production Director, had picked up a job lot of these images in Hong Kong. It didn’t have much to do with the text, but somehow it worked and the book is now a collector’s item.

  * 139 Would make a two-hander play?

  * 140 Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, translated by Philip Gabriel (Vintage Books, 1999).

  * 141 For those of you too young to remember, in March 1982 the Argentine military dictator, Colonel Leopoldo Galtieri, facing economic crisis and unrest at home, invaded the Falkland Islands, some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, to which the Argentines had long laid claim. By the end of June, after a bitter 72-day campaign, Britain had retaken the islands by force. Nearly a thousand men from both sides had died. Galtieri was deposed; Margaret Thatcher lasted until the end of the decade.

  * 142 Politicians often invoke this philosophically hazy concept when they are arguing some spiteful spasm of policy is a necessity.

  * 143 Named after the legendary editor, Hugo Gernsback, this is SF’s highest annual accolade.

  * 144 See his interview with Neil Gaiman in Don’t Panic.

  * 145 However, there is now research underway on growing animal tissue in tanks on a collagen substrate in suitable growth medium, perhaps for consumption on long space journeys. Chicken in a pot? See “Raising the Steaks” by Wendy Wolfson, New Scientist, 21–28 December 2002.

  * 146 When the series was completed, Alan made a speech congratulating all concerned. In one of those mock jocular asides indicating some deep feeling that etiquette obliges you to disguise, he said that everybody was happy except the radio producer—and that didn’t count.

  * 147 Serious buffs are referred to the excellent The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, available as part of a double DVD (and also on video) from the BBC. Douglas, with a stupendous effort at tact writ large on his guileless features, remarks on this DVD that he might not have done Sandra a favour when he declined her offer to do an English accent. She has an excellent range of accents. He was, on the other hand, thrilled with her comic timing.

  * 148 Some say that the ennobling nature of great art means that it is likely to be executed by decent human beings, but there are many counter-examples that suggest the opposite may be true. You need a certain self-regarding single-mindedness and indifference to others to pursue an idea to the death. Douglas proved an honourable exception as he was—most of the time—a sweetiepie.

  * 149 I have a soft spot for the creature representing the editor at Megadodo House for, despite looking like a hairy alien polyp, it is called Web Nixo.

  * 150 Kevin Davies was in fact more than a fan. Not only did his timely intrusion on Alan Bell help get Pearce Studios the graphics contract, but Kevin produced the props for the ill-fated Rainbow Theatre show and he was closely involved in the creation of The Illustrated Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He also produced and directed The Making of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  * 151The Hitchhiker’s Guide.

  * 152 The nearest Douglas and Terry got to a major film undertaking was when Douglas bought some tickets for Abel Gance’s Napoleon and persuaded Terry to accompany him. Over five hours of silent movie struck them as such an awful prospect that they simply had to see it.

  * 153 Jim is an author and communications scholar. Because of Jim’s research interests, Douglas once called him a “massacre expert.”

  * 154 A popular legend has it that Belushi’s character in the movie was modelled on the early days of George W. Bush.

  * 155 An option is a short-term arrangement whereby the option holder buys certain rights in the author’s intellectual property—in this case, film—for a sum that is an advance against a larger fee. This more serious money only becomes payable if the option is exercised by putting the work into production. Within the agreed time the purchaser has an exclusive lien on the rights, and after the expiry of that term the rights granted revert to the author again. Options are frequently renewed and can evolve into a decent source of income, but it’s ultimately frustrating if the work is not filmed. Producers often have a portfolio of options, but they change their minds as often as their socks.

  * 156 Though he believed that American cars are only for going in straight lines and not around corners. In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Pan Books, 1984) he has a fantasy about this in which he concludes that it’s better to hire a car that’s already headed in the right direction than attempt to negotiate an American one around a bend.

  * 157 Max Headroom—a wonderful cyberspace character who appeared in his own bizarre and anarchic TV series in the mid-eighties.

  * 158 The cartoon was by a Brit whose nom de plume was Paul Crum. His real name was Roger Pettiward. He was 6’51⁄2", and he died with lots of brave Canadians during the disastrous commando raid on Dieppe in World War Two. The cartoon was first publis
hed in Punch and then republished in the New Yorker. In the history of the genre, Crum is important as he prefigures by decades the kind of humour found in the Goon Show or Monty Python. I am indebted for this information to Dr. Mark Bryant whose encyclopaedic knowledge of cartoons is second to none.

  * 159 One honourable exception is the hilarious Dark Star, an early John Carpenter movie (1974), made on a budget of sixpence with a terrific screenplay by Dan O’Bannon. Like Starship Titanic, it also features a talking bomb.

  * 160 Douglas had earlier enjoyed some success with an email to the studio in which he had listed every conceivable number on which he could be reached, not excluding his daughter’s nanny’s mobile and the local supermarket where he might be shopping. He said if they did not call, they were trying very hard not to. It was funny, angry and powerfully written. There is probably nobody else in the world who could have sent an email like that and got away with it. It is republished in The Salmon of Doubt.

  * 161Life, the Universe and Everything (Pan Books, 1982).

  * 162 I’m sorry, readers, there is no list of romantic attachments. Pepys made diary notes about his sexual activities using a primitive code deciphered by scholars for the amusement of later generations, but that was in the seventeenth century . . .

  * 163 Pan hardback edition (1984), p. 108–9.

  * 164Games People Play, Eric Berne (Penguin Books 1978).

  * 165 Sue and I went to dinner there on Friday 18 June 1982, shortly after they had got together. “Guess what Jane does,” a grinning Douglas challenged us after some articulate and well-sustained riff from Jane on a subject long forgotten. “Hmm,” I said, “doctor, journo, academic philosopher . . . ?” Sue twigged it at once because she noticed the formal clothes as well as the orderly marshalling of ideas. [Info courtesy of Sue Webb’s addiction to diaries.] It was slow of me not to get it, though Jane managed to keep her professional reflexes contained in the courtroom, unlike one barrister of our acquaintance. If you say “good morning” to him, he counterattacks: “I put it to you that it is Not a good morning . . .”