**************************************************************
ARTHUR: You know, I can't quite get used to the feeling that
just because I've spent all my life on the Earth I am
therefore an ignorant country bumpkin.
TRILLIAN: Don't worry Arthur, it's just a question of
perspective.
ARTHUR: But if I suddenly accosted a spider I found crawling
under my bed, and tried to explain to this innocent
spider in its spider world all about the Common
Market, or New York, or the history of Indo
China....
TRILLIAN: What?
ARTHUR: It would think I'd gone mad.
TRILLIAN: Well?
ARTHUR: It's not just perspective, you see.I'm trying to make
a point about the basic assumptions of life.
TRILLIAN: Oh.
ARTHUR: You see?
TRILLIAN: I prefer mice to spiders anyway.
ARTHUR: Is there any tea on this spaceship?
- Dialogue cut from the first series
***************************************************************
The funniest book I have ever read, today. Terry Jones
Space age comedy for everone... except for (insert the name of
the man who writes worse poetry than the Vogons and whose
name I can't remember). Terry Jones
One of the funniest books ever to have quoted what I said
about it on the cover. Terry Jones.
Really entenaining and fun. John Cleese
It changed my whole life. It's literally out of this world. Tom
Baker
"I can only assume that you have all been giving away pound
notes with every copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
or possibly even sending press gangs out into the streets,
because I have just been officially notified that the sales have
now passed the point of being merely absurd and have now
moved into the realms of the ludicrous. Whatever you have
been doing to get rid of them, thank you very much."
*************************************************************
WHY WAS HITCHHIKER'S SO SUCCESSFUL?
Jacqueline Graham (Press officer, Pan Books):
"Because it was such a wholly original idea, and you don't get too
many of those. And because it was funny, but intelligently funny.
And because it started as a sort of cult thing. Mostly because it's
so original, and secondly because it makes you laugh."
All the Galaxy's a Stage
************************************************
FORD AND ZAPHOD: Zaglabor astragard!
Hootrimansion Bambriar!
Bangliatur Poosbladoooo!
ARTHUR: What the hell are you doing?
FORD: It's an ancient Betelgeuse death anthem. It
means, after this, things can only get better.
THEY START TO SING AGAIN.
THE COMPUTER BANK EXPLODES.
END CREDITS.
- alternative version.
************************************************
11
ON MONDAY, 21ST JANUARY 1980, at 10.30 pm, the second series
of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy went on the air. It was
heralded by a cover feature in the BBC television and radio
listings magazine, Radio Times - it is almost unheard of for a
radio programme to get such exposure, despite the name of the
magazine - and the five episodes were broadcast at the same
time every evening through the week.
This caused problems.
To begin with, as already detailed at length, in 1979 Douglas
was under a great deal of pressure as far as other work
commitments were concerned, and his normal tendency to put
off writing until the last deadline had safely passed was displayed
in full when it came to getting the scripts written. However, when
he had agreed to produce the second radio series, Geoffrey
Perkins had taken this into account.
Perkins went on holiday in September 1979, and before
leaving spoke to David Hatch, controller of Radio 4, about the
new series. Hatch wanted to know if they could have the second
series of Hitchhiker's ready to be broadcast in January.
There had already been a seventh episode of Hitchhiker's, the
`Christmas Special', recorded on 20th November 1978, and
broadcast on Christmas Eve. It had been recorded as a one-off,
but had basically taken the plot strands from the end of Episode
Six (ie. everybody was either stranded back in time with no hope
of ever returning, or had been eaten by a carbon-copy of the
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal), and had started them off in
a different direction, which involved Zaphod's mysterious quest
to find the guy who was running the universe. ("This Christmas
Programme was basically done by my moving into Douglas's flat.
He scribbled upstairs, and I was downstairs typing. That's how
we got that together" - Geoffrey Perkins.)
Fit the Eighth, the first episode of the second series, reunited
Zaphod, Ford and Arthur. Recording of the second series had
begun in May 1979, so Hatch's request for the show to begin in
January 1980 was not really that unreasonable. Geoffrey Perkins
thought it was a good idea: "We were working on them at a fairly
leisurely pace, and I said, `Yes'. We needed a deadline, or we
could have gone on till the crack of doom. I thought, `We'll have
made three episodes by then, and we'll do the rest of them over
the next five weeks.'
"Then I went on holiday. I came back to find David had done
a deal with the Radio Times - they would put us on the front
cover if all the shows went out in a week. It was madness, really."
The second radio series was onerous for everybody. For
Douglas Adams it was especially difficult: "I was terrified of
doing the second series, because the first time it was just me in
my own private little world writing this thing. Nobody expected
it to be any good. The second series, the eyes of the world were
upon me. It was like running down the street naked, because it
had suddenly become everyone else's property as well."
Due to the deadlines there was another problem: much of the
second series was a first draft. For the first series, Douglas had
written and rewritten, self-editing mercilessly. On the second
series, there simply wasn't the time. While Fit the Eighth had been
started on 19th May 1979, Fit the Twelfth was still being mixed
shortly before it was due to be broadcast, on 25th January 1980.
The recordings soon reached the point at which the cast had
caught up with the author: "They were recording part of the show
in one part of the studio, while I was in another part of the studio
actually writing the next scene. And this escalated to the point
where the last show was being mixed in Maida Vale about half an
hour before it was due to be broadcast from Broadcasting House.
At which point the tape got wound round the capstan, and they
had to take the tape recorder apart to unwind it, then get it onto a
motorbike to be taken to Broadcasting House. At one point, we
nearly sent them the first half of the tape, then we were going to
unwind the second half and get it down to Broadcasting House
before they had finished playing the first half. Geoffrey Perkins,
Paddy Kingsland and Lisa Braun all deserved medals for that!"
The reviews for the series were almost all excellent, despite the
fact that many of the reviewers had only heard extracts from the six
episodes (due to the fact that the bits they didn't hear hadn't yet
been mixed but no-one was going to tell the reviewers that...).
The only voice raised against the series came from Mr Arthur
Butterworth, who wrote to the Radio Times, saying, "In just
about 50 years of radio and latterly TV listening and watching,
this strikes me as the most fatuous, inane, childish, pointless,
codswallopping drivel... It is not even remotely funny."
The Radio Times cover feature was a source of satisfaction to
the cast and crew, but an irritant to Geoffrey Perkins, who felt
the article was abysmal and overwritten, and requested that
certain changes be made in it before it was printed "to prevent us
all from looking like idiots."
A discussion on Radio 3's Critics' Forum programme found
the panel of critics ranged between enthusiasm and bafflement.
Perhaps the most perceptive comment was that of Robert
Cushman, the chairman, who said "[Hitchhiker's has...] the sort
of effect that a Monty Python programme actually has, of making
everything that appears immediately after it on radio or television
or whatever, seem absolutely ludicrous. It does have that
marvellous cleansing thing about it."
The second radio series contained some excellent sequences,
some of which, like the body debit cards and the robot disco,
have not been repeated elsewhere. Other sections were unwieldy
and overly strung out: the shoe material, for example, which
correctly merited about half a page when it appeared in book
form. Overall, though, it was less successful than the first series;
something Douglas planned to sort out when he wrote the second
book.
12
WHEN THE PAPERBACK OF The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
appeared, the last page, instead of carrying the usual
advertisements for other titles by the same publisher, carried an
advert that read: "DON'T PANIC!
"Megadodo publications, in association with Original
Records, brought (sic) you the Double L.P. of the radio series.
Fill out the form and send it off, with your cheque or postal order
attached..."
Despite the fact that it might well have meant the loss of
Chapter 35 (on the back of which the advert was printed), a large
number of people sent off for their mail-order copies of a record
called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
A number of record companies had expressed interest in
making the vinyl version of the show, following the radio
broadcasts. One company had already got an option on it, but,
since they were not doing anything with it, Original Records
stepped in and got the recording rights.
Geoffrey Perkins says of the first record, "It was very
difficult. We knew it was going to be a double album, but we
could not very well put half an hour on each side. So we sat down
and worked out - reluctantly - which bits to cut. I was very
happy with it. There were a number of things that were
improvements, like the voice treatments. And when Trillian says,
`Please relax...', and we put this lovely little tune behind it. The
infinite improbability sequence itself had only a fraction of the
elements that went into the same scene on the radio series, but it's
actually far more telling because they're clear. On radio we had
thought that if we threw absolutely everything in, it would come
out fascinating. Instead it came out a complete jumble - there
were bits of everything in it; people had left records around in the
studio from a previous show and we put a bit of that on, anything
lying around. But when we mixed it all together it was a jumble
and a lot of it was completely dropped. It was a definite
wankoff." The cast of the radio show was almost the same as that
of the record, although the late Valentine Dyall, radio's `Man In
Black', replaced Geoffrey McGivern as Deep Thought. (He was
also to play Gargravarr, with a similar voice treatment, in the
second series.)
Considering the record was only available by mail order, at
least initially, it sold amazingly well. Over 120,000 units were
sold in the first year, and it made a number of the music charts.
The cover was an expanded version of the Hipgnosis book cover,
including some entries from the Guide that have never appeared
elsewhere. The record essentially covered the first four episodes
of the radio series, edited down somewhat.
The second record, The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe, was slightly less successful. Geoffrey Perkins again:
"We all found the first record a very interesting experience. By
the time we got to the second record, it was less so (partially
because none of us had been paid for the first record).
"Now a lot of people like the second record, because it's
more definitive and much more complete than the first.
"Unfortunately that is because it is far too long on each side.
It's just a rough cut. We had decided to leave it a few days, and
come back and edit it with a fresh mind - I went up to
Edinburgh for the Festival, and when I came back, three days
later, they had rushed through the record and cut it! I felt it was
flabby, and I wanted to speed it up."
(Adams agrees: "The second record is (a) very long on both
sides, and (b) full of blah.")
Perkins is still a fan of the first record: "The nice thing about
doing the record was you stuck in bits that you knew people
could only pick up on the second or third time through. Whereas
the radio transmission had to be clear the first time."
In terms of plot, the second record is most similar to the last
two episodes of the TV series: the Haggunenon material is
missing, replaced by Disaster Area's stuntship.
The cover of the second record showed a yellow rubber
duck, presumably in deference to the B - Ark Captain's immortal
comment that one is "never alone with a rubber duck". As a
publicity stunt related to the duck theme, on the release of the
second record, the window of the HMV record shop in London's
Oxford Street was filled by a display that involved a bathtub
filled with twelve live week-old ducklings. The stunt, brainchild
of Original Records' director Don Mousseau, finished rather
earlier than expected when complaints were received from animal
welfare groups.
When released in the US the records carried the text of a
version of `How to Leave the Planet' (see Appendix IV).
The two albums were not the only Hitchhiker-connected
records, though. There were also two singles released by `Marvin
the Paranoid Android', Stephen Moore. These were:
`Marvin' ("Ten million logic functions, maybe more. They
make me pick up paper off the floor... You know what really
makes me mad? They clean me with a Brillo pad. A car wash
wouldn't be so bad... Solitary solenoid, terminally paranoid
Marvin...") c/w `Metal Man', about a spaceship out of control
trapped in a black hole, trying to persuade Marvin to rescue it. It
got a limited amount of airplay, and made it into the lower
reaches of the British charts.
`Reasons to Be Miserable' ("... give my brain a pain, very
little turns me on, Marvin is my name..."), a titular parody of the
lan Dury `Reasons to Be Cheerful', c/w `Marvin I Love You', the
story of Marvin's cleanout of old data tapes, discovering a love
message ("Marvin I love you, remember I'm programmed for
you..."), a weird combination of narrative over electropop and
fifties love song. This got a very limited airplay and didn't do
very much at all.
Douglas Adams acted as consultant on the songs, and when
asked about them plays a sweet lullaby on one of his many
guitars (Marvin's song from Life, the Universe and Everything,
with a tune by Douglas) maintaining that he always thought they
should have released that as a single. If the Life, the Universe and
Everything radio series ever gets made listeners may finally get to
hear it.
(A fairly complete listing of all the songs used in Hitchhiker's
can be found in the radio scripts book.)
13
"AT PIRST, I WASN'T THAT INTERESTED in doing a visual version
of Hitchhiker's. But while I was working on Dr Who I began to
realise that we have an enormous amount of special effects stuff
which is simply not being used as it might be. If it turns out the
way I'm beginning to visualise it, I think it could actually look
very extraordinary."
- Douglas Adams,1979.
*********************************************************
TELEVISION: EPISODE THREE.
The television version of Hitchhiker's begins with a computer
read-out of time remaining until the end of the world, while the
sun rises over a quiet English landscape.
The computer printout was faked; so was the English
landscape. What the audience saw was imitation computer
readout while a light bulb was lifted over a model of a landscape.
The ingenuity and the casual faking of something that seems so
natural exemplify the six television episodes of Hitchhiker's.
For many people the first, perhaps the only, exposure to
Hitchhiker's came from the BBC television series. Certainly it
was responsible, from its first airing in 1981 on BBC 2, for
millions of extra sales of the books.
The idea was first mooted in late 1979, by john Lloyd,
Associate Producer of the television series. He explains:
"I was in TV at the time of the TV show, and I had done one
series of Not the Nine O'Clock News, and I was looking around
for something new to do - I didn't know at that time that
NTNOCN was going to be the absurd success that it became, so I
was wondering what to do next, and Hitchhiker's was the
obvious thing - it had been a great success on radio, and would
obviously be great fun to do visually.
"Douglas and I had always been fascinated by science fiction.
Now this was before Star Wars and all that, we're still back in the
time when people said that science fiction would never get
anywhere commercially.
"Anyway, I wrote to my head of department saying, `There's
this great radio series, it would make great TV, it's just what I
want to do.' He told me he didn't know anything about it, so I
wrote him a memo saying what Hitchhiker's had done, and how
it had been nominated for a Hugo award, and how it had been
repeated more times than any other programme in history, that it
had been a stage show and a bestselling book... this huge long
list of credits. He said, `All right, let's give it a go', and he
commissioned the first script, which Douglas wrote.
"It was an extraordinarily good script. Douglas had done
what he did earlier with the books, which was to turn the radio
series into something which you would never know had been
based on a radio show. lt used the medium to the fullest. My boss
said that it was the best Light Entertainment script he had ever
read - he was that excited!
"As I remember, Alan Bell started off as director and I was
producer for the first episode, although it shaded into a coproduction as I didn't have much experience with TV budgeting.
But then the BBC went and scheduled the second series of Not
the Nine O'Clock News on top of the recording of Hitchhiker's.
NTNOCN was a real seven days a week job, and I couldn't do
both.
"I was really angry about it. I felt at the time like the BBC
felt that (as NTNOCN was beginning to get successful) they
didn't want the junior producer in the department (me) to have
two successes at once. So they used Hitchhiker's to give someone
else some work. I was really furious as I became perforce
`Associate Producer'. Which meant nothing. I didn't have any
clout at the BBC, being just a junior producer on attachmenttheoretically they could have sent me back to radio. I said I'd try
to keep an eye on the occasional recording and rehearsal, but
frankly I didn't have the time, and basically I had nothing to do
with the TV show.
"Alan Bell made a big point of this in the TV show, as when
my credit comes up in the titles it explodes and shoots off into
space...(It is true that John Lloyd's Associate Producer credit does explode during the end titles. However, according to Alan Bell, this is pure coincidence.)
"Really, the only thing I did on the TV series was writing the
original memo, and being in on a few early discussions to get things
moving, and the BBC corporate machinations booted me out."
Lloyd has mixed feelings about the director and producer of
the series, Alan J.W. Bell, and on how the television shows
eventually turned out.
"I didn't like working with Alan. He's one of this breed of
TV producers who... I'm not saying he isn't hardworking,
because he is, but he wouldn't ever run over time, or overspend.
He just wanted to get the job done. He's less interested in the
script or the performance than he is in the logistics of how the
programme gets made.
"In some of the rehearsals I attended actors were saying the
words in the wrong order, and mispronouncing them, and Alan
wouldn't correct them. He was much more interested in the
technical side - and technically he knew an awful lot. He was
very bold and brave on the technical side. Some of the actual
shots in Hitchhiker's are wonderful.
"But it didn't work for me as a comic performance, because
it wasn't being directed. They hadn't got old Perkins there; he's a
real nitty-gritty man, the sort who would spend hours getting one
sound effect right, worrying about the script and the attitude and
all that, things which Alan would see as trivial and irritating.
"I remember going to the editing of the pilot, and there were
some terrible edits, and I told Alan he had to go back and do it
again, because it just didn't work. His attitude was, `We haven't
got any time - we've got to go on.'
"Personally, I think Hitchhiker's on TV was not all it could
have been. If it had been done properly it would have won all the
awards. And the only evidence there is that it was a really original
show are the computer graphics. Reading the scripts you'd think
`Suddenly television has gone into the 1990s. This is unbelievable!'
But then, most of the performances and filming were nowhere
near as good as, say, Dr Who.
"Alan is not a great original mind. Douglas is.
"To give Alan Bell credit, it was a difficult job to do
logistically, and you can't Belgium with TV the way you can with
radio - the way Geoffrey would keep going till the last minute
and keep actors hanging around while stuff was written. You
can't do that with TV - there's a limit. There does have to be a
grip on things which Douglas, well... I've co-produced things
with him on radio, and he does tend to be a bit daffy. He tends to
think you can go on forever. I suppose he's been a bit spoiled.
"Alan did get the thing onto the air, which probably Douglas
would never have done - and I can't say that I would have done,
either!"
It was the first time that Douglas had worked with someone
on Hitchhiker's who he felt was less than sympathetic to his ideas
and work. He wanted John Lloyd as producer, and he wanted
Geoffrey Perkins around: the radio people he knew understood
Hitchhiker's.
This was not to be. Alan Bell was a television person, and
had, as he admits, little time for people from radio who attempted
to tell him his job.
Geoffrey Perkins explains, "Television people tend to think
that radio people don't know anything, which has an element of
truth in it, but they tend to know more about scripts than people
in TV ever do. And the TV people tended to think that Douglas
didn't know what he was talking about.
"Now, on radio, when Douglas burbled, one could say,
`Okay, might try that,' or, `No, shut up'. But the TV attitude was
that he didn't know what he was talking about. I read the first TV
script and I thought it was one of the best scripts I'd ever seen.
He'd thought up all that graphics stuff. It was absolutely brilliant."
Ask people what they remember best of the Hitchhiker's TV
series, and the answer is usually `the computer graphics'. The
graphics - sequences apparently from the screen of the actual
Hitchhiker's Guide - were incredibly detailed, apparently
computer-created animated graphics, full of sight gags and injokes, and presumably designed for people with freeze-frame and
slow-motion videos, since there was no way one could pick up on
the complexities of the graphics sequences in a single watching at
normal speed.
Would one have noticed, for example, the cartoons of
Douglas Adams himself, posing as a Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation Advertising Executive, writing hard in the dolphin
sequence, and in drag as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings?(Douglas also made a couple of real-life appearances in the TV series. In Episode One he can be seen at the back of the pub, awaiting the end of the world with equanimity; in Episode Two he is the gentleman who withdraws large quantities of money from a bank, then takes off all his clothes and wades into the sea. Rumours of an out-takes tape (in which more of Douglas than is seemly is seen in this seene) abound. Douglas played this part because the actor who was meant to be doing it was moving house that day, and, an hour away from filming, Douglas stepped into the breach. As it were. During the filming of the series, and while he wasn't running naked into the sex, Douglas generally sat in a deckchair and did crosswords. Sometimes, according to a number of the netors and technicians, he fell off the chair, although none of them were quite sure why.)
Could one have picked up on all the names and phone numbers
of some of the best places in the universe to purchase, or dry out
from, a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?
One of the phone numbers in the graphics of Episode Six
was that of a leading computer magazine who phoned Pearce
Studios, responsible for the graphics, to ask which computer it
was done on, and whether a flat-screen television was built into
the book prop used on the show. The comment beside the phone
number was not flattering.
The computer graphics were all done by hand.
In January 1980, animator and science fiction fan Kevin
Davies was working for Pearce Studios in Hanwell, West
London, when he heard the blipping and bleeping of Star Wars
droid R2D2 from the BBC cutting rooms down the corridor. He
wandered down to the cutting rooms and met Alan J.W. Bell, at
that point engaged in cutting a sequence of Jim'll Fix It in which a
child got to visit the Star Wars set.
Bell discovered in Davies not only a Hitchbiker's fan with
communicable enthusiasm, but also through Davies, he discovered
Pearce Studios, led by Rod Lord, who were commissioned to do
the graphics for the TV show (their quote for Episode One was
half that of the BBC's own animation department, while the trial
section produced by the BBC's own animators was so appalling it
was unusable).
Pearce Studios, under animator Rod Lord, did not possess a
graphics computer. What they did have was animators, who
worked in a very computerish style.
I asked Paddy Kingsland, responsible for most of the music and
sound effects in the TV series (and the pilot for the radio series, as
well as the second radio series) what was so special about the
Hitchhiker's sound effects, and what the differences were between
radio sound and TV sound. "I suppose the difference between
doing TV and radio was that for radio they'd say, `We need The
End of the World as a sound effect - go away and do it.'
"On TV The End of the World is composed of hundreds of
shots with a close-up of the Vogon ship, then a close-up of
screaming crowds, a shot of a laser in space, and so on. You don't
just have one sound effect, you have a bit of this and a bit of that
ending with a bang which actually then cuts off because you're
back inside the spaceship again very quickly. The shape is all
finished and all you can do is do stuff to fit the pictures that have
been done.
"I thought the TV show was good in parts. I thought the
computer graphic stuff was very good, very well thought out.
And some of the performances were marvellous.
"But inevitably there were things that didn't hang together
too well. It's a problem you get when you mix together film and
TV studios and doing it all to a deadline - there's no time to sit
back and look at the thing and say, `Is that all right?' And if it
isn't, to do it again.
"I don't think it had the magic of the radio series, because
you could see everybody. Like Zaphod's extra head - that was
one of the more spectacular failures of the T'V show. A tatty prop
can be amusing, but if you don't have the money to do it right it's
sometimes better not to do it at all.
"I was pleased with the sound effects of the TV series
however. It was the detail that did it. Alan Bell had everybody
miked up with radio mikes to start with so that they only got the
voices of the people and none of the exterior effects. So we did
things like overdubbing all the footsteps in the spaceshipswhich is never done for British TV.
"To give the effect of them walking through spaceships we
got a couple of beer kegs from the BBC club and actually walked
around on the beer kegs while watching the screen, so when
they're walking along you get these metallic footsteps instead of
the rather unconvincing wooden ones you would have got. It
took ages to do, but it paid off.
"I did all the effects for the computer graphics - the film
would arrive with nothing except for Peter Jones's voice. I had to
go through it doing all the sound effects and the music tracks as
well. All the little beeps and explosions and things, which took
ages to do - quite time-consuming. The TV series was interesting
to work on, although frankly I preferred the radio series."
The necessity of getting the Hitchhiker's scripts to the screen
somewhere within the budget was responsible for a certain
amount of technical innovation. Alan Bell is proudest of his
development of a new special effects process of doing `glass shots'.
A glass shot, in cinematic tradition, consists of erecting a
tower with a painting done on glass, high in the studio, then
filming through it, thus giving the illusion that the glass painting
is part of the picture. (The long shot of the Vogon hold in the first
episode, for example, was done like this.) It's a complicated,
fiddly, and expensive process.
Bell's solution was simple: scenes requiring matte shots were
filmed or taped, then a photographic blow-up of one frame
would be made. From the photos, paintings would be made. The
paintings would be photographed as slides, and the previously
filmed segment would be matched up and inlaid into the painted
shot. This was quicker and easier than painting on glass, and is
perhaps best displayed in the `pier at Southend' sequence, when
only a small section of the pier was built in the studio. The rest is
a perfectly aligned matte painting.
The plot of the television series is nearest to the plot of the
two records. From Magrathea the travellers are blown straight to
Milliways, and, leaving there in a stolen stunt ship, we follow
Arthur and Ford to prehistoric Earth, where the series finishes.
The places where the Hitchhiker's TV succeeded best and
failed worst were places where Douglas had written something
into the radio series that could not be done on television. The
narration sequences are an excellent example: one does not need
lengthy narrations on television; however, being stuck with them,
Douglas needed to work out how to make them work, and came
up with the graphics concept.
As Douglas explained: "What made it work was the fact that
it is impossible to transfer radio to television. We had to find
creative solutions to problems in a way you wouldn't have had to
if you were writing something similar for television immediately.
"The medium dictates the style of the show, and transferring
from one to another means you're going against the grain the
whole time. It's the point where you go against the grain that you
come up with the best bits. The bits that were the easiest to
transfer were the least interesting bits of the TV show.
"The idea of readouts from the book itself done in computer
graphics form was that kind of thing. So you get little drawings,
diagrams, all the words the narrator is saying, plus further
expansion - footnotes and little details - all coming out at you
from the screen. You can't possibly take it all in.
"I like the idea of a programme where, when you get to the
end of it, you feel you didn't get it all. There are so many
programmes that are half an hour long and at the end of it you're
half an hour further into your life with nothing to show for it. If
you didn't get it all, that's much more stimulating.
"I wasn't as pleased with the TV series as I was with the
radio series, because I missed the intimacy of the radio work.
Television pictures stifle the picturing facilities of the mind. I
wanted to step over that problem by packing the screen with so
much information that more thought, not less, was provoked by
the readers. Sometimes what you see is less exciting than what
you envisage.
It was all too easy for Douglas to give Zaphod Beeblebrox an
extra arm and an extra head during the radio series. No one ever
saw him; it was a one-off throwaway line. But if one has the
televisual task of transforming this into something that works on
the screen one thanks one's lucky stars that Douglas did not give
Beeblebrox five heads, or fifty...
Unable to find a bicephalic actor (or at least, one who could
learn his lines), the BBC resorted to Mark Wing-Davey, Zaphod
on radio, and built him an animatronic head and an extra arm
(mostly stuffed, but occasionally, when all hands needed to be
seen to be working, the hand of someone behind him, sticking an
extra arm out, as can be seen quite clearly in the Milliways
sequence of Episode Five).
There was a problem with Zaphod's head. It looked false, and
stuffed, and stuck there. This is not because it was a less than
sterling piece of special effects work (although it wasn't that good),
but also because things went wrong, and even when they didn't
the batteries tended to run down in rehearsals, so by the time a
scene was filmed, the head just lolled around expressionlessly. As
Douglas Adams says, "It was a very delicate mechanism, and it
would work wonderfully for 30 seconds and then break down or
get stuck and to get it working properly you'd have to spend an
hour taking it apart and putting it back together again, and we
never had that hour so we fudged as best we could."
As Mark Wing-Davey remembers, "The difficulty with the
television series for me was Alan Bell (who we all know and
love). I don't think he wanted the original members of the radio
show at all, because he wanted the freedom to pick and choose a
bit, but we were supposed to have first option so we came in and
read for it. They didn't want any input from me on the way the
character would look (I'd visualised him as a blonde beach bum).
I quite liked the final design, but I refused to wear the eyepatch
- I said, `Give the other head the eyepatch, because I'm not
having one! It's hard enough acting with another head, but with
one eye as well...' (This was decided after the initial animation had been done, so the Zaphod graphics in Episode One sport two eyepatches. Come to that, in the graphics of Episode One Arthur Dent doesn't have a dressing gown...)
"The other head was heavvvvvy. Very heavy. I was wearing
armour plating made of fibre glass, and because I wanted to be
able to alternate the two right arms I had a special cut-out.
"There was a little switch hidden in the circuitry of my
costume which switched the head on and off. We were under
such pressure in the studio that occasionally I forgot to switch it
on, so I'm acting away and it's just there. It cost f3,000 by the
way - more than me!"
Costume design for the series was primarily the responsibility
of Dee Robson, a veteran BBC designer with a penchant for
science fiction. It was she who designed Ford Prefect's precisely
clashing clothes - based on what could be found in the BBC's
wardrobes, and it was she who gave Zaphod Beeblebrox yet
another additional organ: examining the costume worn by Mark
Wing-Davey reveals two trouser flies (one zipped, one buttoned)
and, Dee's original costume notes explain, Zaphod has a "double
crotch, padded to give effect of two organs. "
As Mark Wing-Davey explained, "I said to wardrobe, you've
seen Mick Jagger in those tight trousers - make me a pair. So I
had these nine inch tubes down the front of the trousers for
filming. When we got into the studio Dee came up to me to say
she was `worried about those... things. I thought they might be
a bit obvious, so I've cut them down to six inches.'"
One of the most famous costumes, however, was Arthur
Dent's: a dressing gown, over a pair of pajamas. The dressing gown
first appeared in the books following the television series: there is
no mention of what Arthur is wearing in the first two books. That
Arthur remained in the dressing gown throughout the TV series
was Alan Bell's idea: Douglas had written a sequence on board the
Heart of Gold in which the ship designed Arthur a silvery jumpsuit. The whole sequence was scrapped, and Alan ensured that
Arthur stayed in his dressing gown. As Bell explained, "What was
special about Arthur was that he was in a dressing gown. Silver
jump-suits are what they wore in Star Wars."
Alan J.W. Bell is a BBC Light Entertainment director and
producer; having worked on such shows as Maigret and
Panorama as a film editor, he won a BAFTA award for Terry
Jones's and Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns, a BAFTA nomination
for the long-running geriatric comedy Last of the Summer Wine,
and a Royal Television Society Award for Hitchhiiker's.
I met him initially in his office at the BBC, which still
contains a number of items of Hitchhiker's memorabilia. It's a
show he is proud of, and has many fond memories of. On his
desk was a small plastic fruit machine which he urged me to try. I
pulled the handle, but nothing happened; it should have squirted
me with water. Alan pointed out to his secretary that it was her
job to keep it filled, and we began the interview: this was BBC
Light Entertainment.
"The first time I heard of Hitchhiker's was in a bar
somewhere - I was asked if I'd heard it on the radio. I hadn't, so
I listened to it, and I thought it was marvellous, inspired stuff, but
there was no way it could be done on TV. It was all in the mind,
all in the imagination.
"So about three months later I was asked to do it, and I said
that I thought it couldn't be done, but they said `We're going to
do it!', so that was it. I had to do it.
"Now, I work for Light Entertainment, not Drama (who do
Dr Who and have experience of things like this), and we had no
idea what the budgeting would be. All I could do was put down
what I thought it would cost, and I was out by thousands of
pounds. For the first episode, for example, we had to throw away
$10,000 of model shots of spaceships, because they wobble, and
they looked like models. That first episode was about $40,000
over budget, which is vast in TV terms. But it had to be done
right. Otherwise it would have been awful."
The first episode of Hitchhiker's was made very much as a
pilot, and Alan Bell presented it to the heads of department at the
BBC. Some of them didn't like it. They didn't understand it, nor
for that matter did they realise it was meant to be funny. And the
cost of the first episode = over $120,000 - was about four times
as much as an equivalent episode of Dr Who.
In order to demonstrate the humour of the show, Alan Bell
arranged for a laugh track. This was done by assembling about a
hundred science fiction fans in the National Film Theatre, playing
them the first episode, and taping their reaction. As a warm-up to
this a ten minute video was played, featuring Peter Jones reading
hastily felt-penned cue cards in a bewildered fashion, assuring the
audience that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be in the next episode,
and, with the ubiquitous Kevin Davies, demonstrating the use of
the headphones.
This is Peter Jones's only on-screen appearance in the
Hitchhiker's television series.
The audience loved the show, laughed on cue and generally
had a good time, and while the BBC hierarchy had agreed that the
next five episodes should be made (although they were made for
more like $40,000 a show - one reason why the sets begin to get
a little rudimentary towards the end), it did not insist on a laugh
track. This was undoubtedly a good thing.
As Bell remembers, "The first episode was only a pilot, but
by the time we had got half-way through, they had already
commissioned the series, but we still didn't know the resources
that would be required because all we had to go on were the radio
scripts.
"When we'd finished it, the Powers That Be thought that the
viewers wouldn't know that it was comedy unless we added a
laughter track. So we hired the National Film Theatre and
showed it on a big screen and gave all the audience headphones so
they could hear the soundtrack nice and clearly, and they laughed
all the way through. It did help that that audience was composed
of fans..."
While much of the casting was the same on television and
radio, there were a few variations.
"I wanted to keep everyone from the radio series, but
sometimes people's voices don't match their physical appearance.
"For example, I wanted someone for Ford Prefect who
looked slightly different, and when I saw Geoffrey McGivern I
thought he looked too ordinary. Ford should be human but
slightly unnerving, so we looked around for someone else. My
secretary (It should be noted that most of the really important pieces of casting in Hitchhiker's seem to have been done by secretaries. Whether this phenomenon is unique to Hitchhiker's, or whether it is extant throughout the entertainment industry has not been adequately investigated, at least, not by me.) suggested David Dixon. He was great, but I thought
we'd change the colour of his eyes and make them a vivid blue, so
we got special tinted contact lenses which looked marvellous in
real life, but when it came to television the cameras just weren't
sensitive enough to pick up on it - except in the pub scene at the
beginning.
"Sandra Dickinson got the part of Trillian after we had
interviewed about 200 young ladies for the role. None of them
had performed it with the right feelings. The girl had to have a
sense of humour. And then Sandra Dickinson came in and read it
and made the lines more funny than any other actress who'd done
an audition. "
Sandra Dickinson was a surprising choice for Trillian; the
character was described in the book as a dark-haired,
dark-complexioned English woman; Sandra played it (as indeed
she is in real life) as a small blonde American with a squeaky
husky voice. As Douglas Adams said of her, "She could have
done a perfect `English Rose' voice, and looking back I think
perhaps we should have got her to do it. But it was such a relief to
find someone who could actually read Trillian's lines with some
humour, and give the character some life, that we just had her do
it as herself, and not change a thing."
Another surprise casting came with Episode Five: Sandra's
husband, Peter Davison, the fifth and blandest Dr Who. He
played the Dish of the Day, a bovine creature which implores
diners to eat it. As Alan Bell explains, "Sandra came to me and
said that Peter wanted to play a guest part in Hitchhiker's and she
suggested the Dish of the Day. I said, `You cannot put Peter
Davison in a cow skin', but she said, No, really he wants to do
it!'. I said OK, and we booked him. We didn't pay him star
status; he just did it for the fun of it. And he played it very well."
Early on in the press releases for Hitchhiker's, great play was
made of the fact that they would not be filming in the quarries
and gravel pits in which Dr Who has always travelled to distant
planets. And they wouldn't have any of the plastic rocks that
made Star Trek's alien worlds so strangely unconvincing.
Instead, they would go abroad. Iceland, perhaps. Or Morocco.
The Magrathean sequences, one was assured, would be filmed
somewhere exotic.
Alan Bell: "Douglas wanted us to film the Magrathean
sequences in Iceland. So I looked up the holiday brochures, and it
was very cold and there weren't any hotels of any note, but I had
been to Morocco years before and I remembered there was a part
of Morocco that was very space-like. We went to look, but we
had so much trouble getting through customs - without cameras
- and we met a Japanese film crew who said, `Don't come
because they deliberately delay you so you'll spend more money!'
- they'd had all their equipment impounded for three weeks.
"So we ended up in this rather nice clay pit in Cornwall,
where we also did the beach scenes: Marvin playing beach ball
and Douglas going into the sea."
Most of the cast and crew have memories of the Cornish clay
pit. Some of them have to do with the fact that there were no
toilets down there. Others have to do with David Learner, the
actor inside Marvin, who, due to the length of time it took to get
in and out of the Marvin costume, was abandoned in the clay pit
during the occasional rain showers during filming, protected from
rust by an umbrella.
Prehistoric Britain was filmed in the Lake District, during a
cold snap, which meant that Aubrey Morris (playing the Captain
of the B - Ark, in his bath), and the extras clad in animal skins
who played the pre-Golgafrincham humans, were all frozen to
the bone, and spent all their time when not on camera bundled up
in blankets and drinking tea.
The other interesting location was that of Arthur's housediscovered by Alan Bell while driving, lost, around Leatherhead.
(The gate, which is all one sees knocked down by a bulldozer,
was built especially).
It was while the pub scenes at the beginning were being
filmed that the union troubles began for Hitchhiker's - the
precise nature of which no one seems clear on anymore, but
which apparently involved a trip to the pub by some members of
the cast and crew which might have been recreational, but which
the union representatives assumed was professional, and as such
they felt they should have been invited, or something.(The story changes according to who you talk to and I never really understood any of the versions. I also had the impression that nobody telling me quite understood their version either. This is one of the few examples of woolly reporting in an otherwise excellent book, and should not be counted against it.)
The computer room at the end of Episode Four (the Shooty
and Bang Bang sequence) was actually filmed on Henley Golf
Course. "We wanted somewhere near at hand which we could
build and blow up", Alan Bell remembered. "It was just
sufficiently out of London that we could warn the locals that if
they heard a bang at two in the morning, don't pay any attention
to it - it's only us! You can't see it on the show, but it's actually
raining into the set - it was open at the top."
Union problems continued when the filming returned to the
studios: "The Milliways set was actually the biggest set they've ever
put into the BBC's biggest studio. The unions said they wouldn't
put the set in, and we had to cut bits out, which was a pity.
"But the way we filmed it you never saw it all at once
anyway, just parts at a time. My reason for that was that. . . well,
if you've ever watched a variety show, they'll spend all their
money on a set, the singer sings, the camera pulls back, and you
see the set. And song after song you see the set, and you get
bored with it.
"So I said, when we do Hitchhiker's we'll leave things to
people's imaginations, so even though we had this huge set there
isn't one shot where you see it all. Only parts of it, because then
you think it's even bigger than it is. You never see the edges of it.
"Things got very rushed toward the end. The series was
structured to be made on a daily basis, so that, once all the
graphics work and location work for each episode was done, the
studio filming could be done in one day in the studio. It should
really have been five days at the studio, so there was an enormous
panic to get everything done in time. And the Electricians' Union
were in dispute, so at 10.00 pm every night the lights went out,
the plugs were pulled, and that was it. There's a scene where you
see Arthur Dent running to hide behind a girder - we actually
used a shot of Simon Jones, the actor, running across the studio
to get to his mark."
The show was a success. The fans loved it, it garnered
excellent reviews, most people were pleasantly surprised and
befuddled by the computer graphics, and it won the BBC a few
awards in a year otherwise dominated by ITV's Brideshead
Revisited.
Everybody waited expectantly for the second series. And
waited. And waited. There are conflicting stories of why the
second series never came to be made...
John Lloyd: "They asked Douglas to do a second series. As
far as I know, he went to the BBC and said, `I'd be delighted, but
I never want to work with Alan Bell again.' And the BBC most
untypically supported Alan - they said he was the only person
to do it. That was the end of it. (I say untypically because if, say, a
comedy star didn't get on with a producer he'd go to the head of
department and they'd give him a new one. They'd do it for a
star, but not for a writer.)"
Geoffrey Perkins: "Douglas wanted me to produce it. I heard
that Alan Bell refused to direct if I were producer, and instead
said how would I like to be script editor? This seemed to me the
most thankless task imaginable - for the first TV series they
didn't know how lucky they were - they already had the script
from the radio series and records, they were in clover. They
hadn't been through the whole thing of getting scripts out of
Douglas. Now I knew that getting those scripts for the second
series without any say in the way they were done would be an
appalling, heartbreaking thing, possibly the most thankless task I
could ever think up.
"I said no.
"My own impression is that the second series really got to
brinkmanship. Douglas gave the BBC an ultimatum. They said
no, fully expecting him to back down. And of course he didn't
and neither did they."
Alan Bell: "There was going to be a second series. It was all
commissioned, we had fifty per cent more money, the actors were
told the dates, and during that time Douglas went past his script
deadline, and time was running out, we needed to have the
information because otherwise, six weeks before production,
what can you do? We needed sets built - there's no way you can
build them in that time. The deadlines to deliver the scripts came
and went, we gave him another three weeks and meetings were
going on - and that was it, it had to be cancelled.
"It was going to begin with a test match in Australia, but we
checked it out and the timing wasn't right, so we were looking at
Headingly or somewhere. That was all I knew about the second
TV series - it wasn't going to be the second radio series at all.
"Douglas is very strange. He believed that radio was the
ultimate series and that TV let him down. I don't know. Maybe it
did. I had to change a lot of things in production to make it
stronger, like Slartibartfast's aircar: anyone who had seen Star
VfJars would think we'd stolen it from there, so I changed it to a
bubble, and he was upset about that.
"We started making lists of his wild ideas. He wanted to
make Marvin a chap in a leotard painted gold - if you see it on
TV you'd know it was an actor. The fun of the script is that
Marvin is a tin box that's depressed. If you see a man in a leotard
you know it's an actor straightaway, and what's so unusual about
an actor being depressed? And anyway there was that gold robot
in Star Wars. That impasse went straight to the Head of
Department.
"He wanted the Mice to be played by men in mouse skins. It
wouldn't have worked. It would have looked like pantomime. He
wanted it to be faithful to the radio, but you couldn't be faithful
to the radio as it's visual, people have to walk from one side of the
set to the other.
"So Douglas and I were fighting, not that that matters,
because that's what life's all about. If you're on a production and
everybody's enjoying themselves it's generally a load of rubbish,
because people feel passionately about things. It was my job to
throw out the bad ideas and keep the good.
"The change in role for the black Disaster Area stunt ship
was done by Douglas himself. John Lloyd was the co-writer of
some episodes of the radio series, when Douglas was script editor
of Dr Who and also writing Hitchhiker's, and he was quite happy
to farm out to John to write the bits he couldn't write, and the
Black Ship bit was one of them. When it became a big success,
Douglas very much regretted having shared the credit with John
on those episodes so when it came to the TV series he wouldn't at
any cost do anything that John Lloyd had written because he
wanted it to be all Douglas Adams. I think if I was Douglas
Adams I'd do exactly the same thing.
"We got on quite well, but I thought he was a hindrance. We
used to tell him that the dubbing dates were in three weeks' time
when we'd done it the day before, because if he came along he
interfered all the time, and, I have to say, not necessarily for the
better."
Douglas Adams: "A lot of what Alan says is simply not the case.
Whether his memory is at fault or not I don't know. All I would
say is that as he cheerfully admits he will say what suits him
rather than what happens to be the case. And therefore there's no
point in arguing.
"I wouldn't start seriously moving on the second TV series
until we'd sorted out various crucial aspects of how we were
going to go about it. I felt very let down by the fact that though
John Lloyd was meant to be producer he was rapidly moved
aside, much to the detriment of the show. I'd always made it clear
that I wanted Geoffrey Perkins, at the very least as a consultant.
"Neither of these things transpired in the first series. It was
perfectly clear to myself and the cast that Alan had very little
sympathy with the script. So I didn't want to go into the second
series without that situation being remedied in some way, and the
BBC was not prepared to come up with a remedy. That was the
argument going on in the background, that was why I was not
producing the scripts. I wasn't going to do the scripts until I
knew we were going to do the series."
In 1984, when John Lloyd and Geoffrey Perkins were both
involved, as producer and script editor respectively, in Central
Television's Spitting Image, there were noises made that the
Spitting Image company would have been interested in making a
version of Life, the Universe and Everything. It would have been
interesting - one feels that they would probably have been able
to get Zaphod's head right - but the television rights were tied
up with the film rights and nothing ever came of it.
14
"Each time I come to a different version, I always think I could
do it better; I'm very aware of what I feel I got wrong, what was
thin or bad in the first version of it. Pan of it is that I wrote it
serially, so I was never sure where it was going. And no matter
how frantically I'd plot it out, it would never adhere to the plot I
had mapped out for it.
"You map out a plot, and you write the first scene, and
inevitably the first scene isn't funny and you have to do
something else, and you finally get the scene to be funny but it's
no longer about what it was meant to be about, so you have to
jack in the plot you had in mind and do a new one...
"After a while, it became pointless plotting too far in advance,
because it never worked, since the vast body of the material arrived
serially. I'd often reach a point where I'd go, `If I knew I was going
to wind up here I would have done something else there.' So
writing the books is usually an attempt to make sense of what I've
already done, which usually involves rather major surgery.
"Especially with the second book, I was trying with
hindsight to make a bit of sense out of it all. I knew how it would
end, with the prehistoric Earth stuff, and I found myself plotting
the book backwards from there..."
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is Douglas
Adams's favourite of the Hitchhiker's books, although the
circumstances under which it was written were somewhat less
than ideal and they were to be far from unique.
"I had put it off and put it off and got extension after
extension (all sorts of other things were going on at the time, like
the stage show and the TV series), but eventually the managing
director of Pan said, `We've given you all these extensions and we
have got to have it: sudden death or else, we have to have it in four
weeks. Now, how far have you got with it?' I didn't like to tell
him I hadn't staned it; it seemed unfair on the poor chap's hean."
Jacqueline Graham, who was working for Pan, explains the
predicament: "After the first book, our attitude was a mixture of
resignation and exasperation with Douglas's lateness. By the
second book, we expected him to be late, it was built into our
planning, but at the same time we thought, `Well, he can't do it
again, surely! This time he'll start on time, or he'll have a schedule
and stick to it...'
"But he didn't. The whole thing was tremendously late, and
Douglas was getting into a bit of a state about it because it was
getting later and later. He was sharing a flat at the time with a
friend called Jon Canter, and Douglas found it impossible to work
as the phone kept ringing and Jon was always there. In the end I
said to him, `Why don't you just move out?' as he had written the
first book at his mother's. He thought that was a very good idea
so I rented him a flat, and moved him in that afternoon."
Douglas found the experience more than slightly weird: "I
was locked away so nobody could possibly reach me or find me. I
led a completely monastic existence for that month, and at the
end of four weeks it was done.
"It was extraordinary. One of those times you really go
mad... I can remember the moment I thought, `I can do it! I'll
actually get it finished in time!' And the Paul Simon album had
just come out, One Trick Pony, and it was the only album I had.
I'd listen to it on my Walkman every second I wasn't actually
sitting at the typewriter - it contributed to the sense of insanity
and hypnotism that allowed me to write a book in that time."
When the manuscript for The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe was turned in, Douglas stated that that would be the
final Hitchhiker's book. "It's the last of all that, I hope," he
announced to one daily paper, " I want to try another field, now,
like performing."
The book, again a paperback original from Pan, was a critical
success. While most critics had been a little wary of the first book
initially, mostly not reviewing it at all, its sales had made it a
major book. Oddly enough, the only part that British critics
found too highly Monty Python, and too down-to-eanh, was the
colonisation of Eanh by the Golgafrincham detritus; the `oddly'
because this is the section most American critics picked up on
most easily and singled out for praise.
Invasion USA
"Really entertaining and fun" -John Cleese
"Much funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written" Terry Jones
"I know for a fact that John Cleese hasn't read it" - Graham
Chapman
"Who is John Cleese?" - Eric Idle
"Really entertaining and fun" - Michael Palin
*************************************************
MONTY PYTHON AND HITCHHIKER'S
"It's funny. When I was at university I was a great Python fan. I
still am, but that was obviously when Python was at its most
active. So I have very much an outsiders view of Python; an
audience's view. As far as Hitchhiker's goes I'm the only person
who doesn't have any outsider's view whatsoever. I often wonder
how I'd react to it if I wasn t me, but I still was me, so to speak,
and how much I'd like it, and how much I'd be a fan or whatever.
The way I would perceive it in among everything else. Obviously
I can't answer that question. I have no idea, because I'm the one
person who can't look at it from outside.
"You can see all the elements in Hitchhiker's in which it is a
bit this or a bit that. I mean, it's an easy line for people wanting to
categorise it in the press to say it is a cross between Monty Python
and Dr Who, and in a sense it is, there are all kinds of elements
that go into making it what it is. But at the end of the mixing you
have something which is different from anything else in its own
peculiar way.
"But then, everything is like that. Python was a mixture of all
kinds of things thrown together to give you something different
from anything else. Even the Beatles (let's get really elevated here)
were a mixture of all kinds of elements drawn from other things,
mixed together and they created something which was
extraordinarily different.
"Although Hitchhiker's does not have any real political
significance, there is a theme there of the ubïquity of bureaucracy
and paranoia rampant throughout the universe. And that is a
direct debt to Python, along with the comparative style of
`individual events, little worlds'. The difference comes with the
narrative structure, so the world of Hitchhiker's is based outside
the `Real World' while still co-existing with it. It's like looking at
events through the wrong end of a telescope."
********************************************************
Life, the Universe, and Everything
************************************************
ZAPHOD: There's nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I
have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight.
- Cut from radio script, Episode Three.
************************************************