Wish You Were Here (11 page)

Graham Chapman wasn’t their only
Python
contact. Martin recalls how Eric Idle also tried to help them onto the screen:

Sometime in 1975, when Douglas and I were living in Fordwych Road, Eric Idle suggested that he would be able to get us into
Rutland Weekend TV
(which was about to go into production) as extras . . . Sadly, this was the time when Equity [the actors’ union] was run by Corin Redgrave and there were strict rules of entry into the profession. You almost had more chance of getting an equity card by contributing to the freedom fighters of Mozambique than you did by flashing a BBC contract. But for a leftist thespian regime, Douglas might have made it as a performer, after all!

One of Douglas and Graham’s collaborations was an SF comedy intended to be an American TV special and a vehicle for Ringo Starr, though it never crept as far as the pilot stage. It is a pity as Ringo the space-going chauffeur sounds a nifty idea. A programme that did appear—if that is not too positive a word for an unannounced late-night screening on BBC2—was a miscellany called
Out of the Trees.
One very funny sketch, which Douglas wrote with Graham and Bernard Mackenna, started off with a romantic man (Simon Jones) picking a peony for his girlfriend and advanced, inexorably, to thermonuclear war. Another, that became quite famous, focused on the domestic life of Genghis Khan. Genghis has been so successful that bit by bit he has been transformed into a harassed business executive juggling his diary to see if there is a window for his financial advisor. All that pillaging, sweeping across the steppes with golden hordes and whatnot, was just too fatiguing. One has one’s people for that kind of thing. It appeared again in a slightly different form in a Comic Relief anthology, and years later the idea was recycled and expanded in a short story in
The Salmon of Doubt.
Neil Gaiman quotes Douglas as saying that it was inspired by Graham’s mutterings about the other members of the Python team.*
 
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A sketch that did get made (the producer was Bernard Thompson) showed that exhilarating zoom-lens lurch from the cosmic to the local that was one of Douglas’s favourite tropes. It started like this:

STOCK FILM OF GALAXIES ETC. FOLLOWED BY PLANETS FOLLOWED BY THE EARTH

Voice Over

The universe, a multitude of mighty galaxies, within each galaxy a myriad mighty star systems, within each star system a multiplicity of mighty planets—and in just one of these mighty planets the mighty British Rail electric train . . .

Of course, the Pythons’ smashing (and perversely cheering) Galaxy song does show that they too had a sense of the ridiculously oppressive scale of the universe, so that vertiginous drop from the cosmic to the particular was just as Pythonesque as Adamsy.

After graduation, two Adams, Smith, Adams revues were produced.
So You Think You Feel Haddocky
was staged with Gail Renard, the Canadian comedy writer and performer, in the Little Theatre (now, alas, Stringfellows) in St. Martin’s Lane in London’s West End in the autumn of 1975.
Cerberus
was put on a year earlier at the ADC in Cambridge. The title could have been a self-deprecating reference to the show being a dog looking in all directions at once, but in fact it was because Douglas, Will and Martin were photographed in a clump with their three heads, like some ghastly recombinant DNA experiment, projecting from an improbable tangle of body. The profits were almost imperceptible, and Douglas still had to pay his share of the rent.

Another Adams, Smith, Adams sketch bought by the
Monty Python
team was the infamous one about Dead Marilyn Monroe that had enjoyed a brief outing for
Week Ending.
The Marilyn cult was going strong at the time (and hasn’t abated) and the writers thought it was time that the relentless recycling was given a bad taste Swiftian spin. The basic idea was to get her in everything. A director wanted her in his next movie even if it meant digging her up. Cremation was a problem here, of course. Martin recalls that they each got £25 for the rights. It was satisfying to be appreciated, but hardly lucrative.

Douglas also worked with Graham Chapman on an episode of the established TV comedy series based on the
Doctor
books by Richard and Mary Gordon. The novels used to sell in considerable volume and there was quite a reservoir of affection for them. There were fifteen
—Doctor in the House, Doctor in Clover, Doctor in the Nude . . . —
on which a series of engaging British comedy films had been based with Dirk Bogarde starring as an ingénu medico. These were fun, though by modern standards quite old-fashioned, and charmingly innocent: having a flutter on the horses and sliding off to play golf were considered deeply wicked.

Graham and Douglas mapped out the
Doctor
narrative in some detail, devising the cliffhangers, playing with the deadly hospital rivalries, inventing the cringe-making surprises and working out how many sets would be needed. For causal antecedent buffs (wherefore the derogatory use of the word “anorak”?—it is a perfectly useful garment), the elaborate clockwork of the plot features a bookie’s runner who has to pretend to be a medical student in front of a particularly frightening Senior Consultant—a James Robertson Justice figure greatly resembling Douglas’s father. Unluckily the bookmaker’s runner is asked a medical question. The script states that the answer is a number which the real student has to communicate from behind the Consultant’s back using tic-tac (the hand signals that bookmakers use to convey odds across a race track). History does not record if the number was forty-two.

When John Lloyd had come down from Cambridge, he had been promptly snapped up by the BBC which scouted the universities, especially Oxbridge, for graduate trainees. Nobody is as engaging as John Lloyd when he’s trying to exercise charm. John Hardress-Lloyd hails from a rather grand Anglo-Irish family, though he says that his branch was the poor one. He went to Kings School, Canterbury, dropping the hyphenated bit from his name—as was fashionable at the time.

John’s career took off like an ICBM. (After his glittering start in radio, he went on to become the most significant TV comedy producer of his generation with
Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News
and
Blackadder
to his credit.) Soon he was producing
Week Ending,
and was involved with a host of other radio programmes, becoming frantically busy. A friend of John says that at the time, whenever two or more of his contemporaries were gathered together, they tended to practise a nice line in Lloydie parodies. They went along these lines: “I’m so, so jealous that you have time to offer me a beer. If only I could. Such an enviable quality of life—a moment to oneself to think. Oh God. I have
at least
a hundred programmes to produce, and three attractive women to juggle. Shit. Is that the time?” Somehow John was also able to direct the 1975 Footlights revue
Paradise Mislaid.

John and Douglas had been fairly close pals in Cambridge, but once established back in the big city, they became what John calls “utterly best friends.” Indeed, Douglas had a number of extraordinarily close friendships in which he often invested more than they could bear. Jane Belson reckons this was a recurring pattern in his life: intense friendships that sometimes died away or ended in hurtful schism. His friendship with John was like one of those deep best friend relationships that one has at school, founded not just on personal sympathy but as an alliance against the world, and thus in a sense it depended on the world treating them both equally. It was also made more complex by a needling bone-deep competitiveness, the suppressed premise of their friendship, and the mirror image of their great personal warmth. The tension of things left unsaid was to erupt eighteen months later over the writing of the first
Hitchhiker’s
novel.

Douglas and John used to hang out together, particularly in Tootsie’s, a hamburger joint in Notting Hill Gate, witness to numerous long conversations about just about everything. Eventually too, Douglas moved from Kilburn, and shared with John a rather pokey flat owned by Bernard Mackenna, the actor and writer (whose name he almost appropriated in
So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish
), not far away in Greencroft Gardens—a location which in Real Estate Speak also purports, just about, to be in West Hampstead. This was the first of their various shared lodgings; Douglas would often squat in John’s tiny office at the BBC, and John would sometimes go up to Highgate to drink with Douglas and Graham Chapman in the pub. These marathon drinking sessions tended to begin the same way, with the three of them doing the crossword in every national paper within half an hour. This could have been just fun, a kind of intellectual limbering up, or a more self-conscious advertisement of cleverness.

Sharing a flat with the awesomely successful John Lloyd must have induced moments of tristesse, especially when Douglas was trying to write and the fickle muse refused even to flirt. Consider this useful definition from
The Deeper Meaning of Liff:

Boinka
(n)

The noise through the wall which tells you that the people next door enjoy a better sex life than you do.

Mary Allen describes an episode, in Corfu, of what she calls an all-time terrible holiday. Douglas and John planned to go out there and write, all on their own with no friends, visitors or other accretions. Nothing would distract them from the Zen purity of the beach and the discipline of the typewriter. But somehow, this was not to be. The rented villa filled up with mates. Douglas, far gone in love, made elaborate plans for a female friend to come and join them—and, without consulting her, to sleep with him. The trouble was, he set about it with the subtlety of a brick. There was much anticipatory juggling of the bedrooms.

In time, blokes attain sufficient sophistication (please God) to know that women hate being taken for granted, but at twenty-three you are blinded by hormones. You are quite sure that if you don’t have sex soon, you will die. What’s more, many women—though they want chaps to care and try hard—find it unappealing if men come across as desperate. Their anxiety puts too much freight on a relationship too soon. The woman in question, who by all accounts was sensitive and quite lovely, ended up getting off not with Douglas, but with John Lloyd. Later she and Douglas did get together, but it ended unhappily. Thereafter Douglas was never entirely on an even keel on the subject of John Lloyd and women.

In 1976, the collaboration with Graham Chapman was drawing to a close after eighteen months. He and Douglas had enjoyed themselves, and drunk prodigious quantities of alcohol, but their partnership had produced little of a concrete nature. Their relationship became strained when Douglas was drafted in to help with Graham’s autobiography, called, with disarming frankness,
A Liar’s Autobiography
(1980). There is no evidence that Douglas’s rôle was as big or as formal as that of a ghostwriter—indeed there were several co-writers on this book, so Douglas’s involvement seems to have been small. However, as any publisher can confirm, the relationship between biographical subject and ghostwriter is often horribly vexed. If there is one thing over which people are entitled to feel proprietorial, it’s their own life, and they hate describing it in somebody else’s words. The ghost wants the book to be a good book, but the subject wants to present a good life, however that may be construed. The two ambitions are not always compatible.

Absurdly, both Graham and Douglas are now dead, so we may never know why their cooperation was not more fruitful. Dorothy Parker said that the world is stacked against comic writers because the rest of us—not excluding those who would rather be dipped in sump oil than risk literary judgement—exercise the right to say “that’s not funny.” By the time a writer has looked at a joke sixteen times, rotated it through ninety degrees, changed the context twice and tweaked the punchline, it is genuinely difficult to tell if it
is
funny. There are many reasons why so much comedy is written by teams (company, personal chemistry, complementary skills, live dialogue practice . . .), but certainly one of them is having somebody around to confirm that the gag actually works. However much Douglas and Graham must have felt they needed each other, with the clarity of retrospect two such distinct talents were never likely to be compatible.

Later that year, Douglas was invited back to Cambridge to direct the annual Footlights revue,
A Kick in the Stalls.
But Footlights had changed, starting with the sale of the clubroom for redevelopment as a shopping centre. Instead of a queue of the brainiest young extroverts, poised on one foot, breath held, yearning to strut their stuff upon the stage, there was a feeling abroad that perhaps the club was a bit up itself, to use that useful idiom, and not entirely the thing to do in the grim mid-seventies. Douglas had to beat the bushes looking for talent. The show itself had a generally mixed reception*
 
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until it was overhauled by Griff Rhys Jones, who took it to the Edinburgh Festival and made it work. John Lloyd remembers it as overly complicated and thinks it was a mistake to get Douglas to direct. “He didn’t have a single director or producer gene in his whole gigantic genome. Griff, on the other hand, is a born director.”

John and Douglas also worked on another idea,
Sno 7 and the White Dwarves.
(A white dwarf is an astronomical term for a smallish star with a high surface temperature but low intrinsic brightness.) A superior intelligence was planning to use supernovae for advertising purposes, and mankind was doomed because our sun was destined to be the full stop under the exclamation mark of the slogan. John Lloyd was told by the BBC that SF was “very fifties” (this was the year before
Star Wars
) and that there was no market for it. It sounds as if it would have been a blast.

Later that year Douglas had another rebuff when he and John prepared a film treatment based on
The Guinness Book of Records.
Mark Forstater had acquired the rights, and John and Douglas invented a race of maniacally competitive aliens (“not unlike the Vogons,” John points out) who threaten to destroy the Earth unless humanity could beat them in a kind of inter-galactic Olympics. The aliens were unassailable at anything that needed a talent for violence, but were not so hot at walking backwards and eating pickled eggs. John and Douglas were promised a trip to the West Indies to meet the mighty Robert Stigwood, he of the eponymous organization, to discuss this further, but at the last moment it all fell through.