Wish You Were Here (13 page)

Douglas’s room was even rural enough to offer a view of a pigsty, though at the time this was being knocked down in order for the site to be redeveloped as an old people’s home. Young James Thrift was fascinated by the JCB which was knocking the stuffing out of the pigsty (though for once the more robust idiom would be literally accurate). The driver of this impressive machine apparently kept a load of porno mags under the seat. Douglas would have been staring out of his window at this while cudgelling his cerebrum for a really good idea. The “ah-ha!” critical response is to be distrusted, but one can’t help thinking of the opening scene of
Hitchhiker’s
when Arthur Dent’s house is flattened by the local council’s bulldozer.

Following his strategic withdrawal to Dorset, Douglas planned the odd raid on the metropolis to deliver work that would be irresistible to producers, and to network. In the media parish you have to remind people that you still exist. That was the plan—and that, amazingly given the success rate of most existential grand designs, was more or less how it worked out.

Mercifully, in the new year Douglas was indeed rescued. Jon Canter, his witty friend from Cambridge and a man of kindness and sensitivity, had visited him over Christmas and helped to cheer him up. Janet remembers Jon with affection. At first she was not sure if he could join in the festivities (Jon is Jewish), but Janet soon discovered that there is not much that will keep him from a party. Jon was sharing a house in Islington with another Cambridge pal, Jonathan Brock, who had played opposite Douglas in the ADC in Sheridan’s
The Rivals.
Why not, suggested Jon, come back to town, kip on their vast sofa, kick out the black dog, and lay siege to the BBC once again?

At this point there re-enters into Douglas’s life another figure of legend, Simon Brett, then a Light Entertainment Producer at the BBC, a bloke for whom the word “urbanity” could have been coined. Comedy at the BBC was in a state of change. It was only in 1967 that the programme designations had changed from the Home Service, the Third Programme and so on, to Radios One to Four. (Radio One, the pop station, had occasioned much soul-searching about whether it was
really
the kind of thing the BBC should be doing.)

In fact Simon remembers that the whole institution was poised between the generations. A whole stratum of producers who had joined the BBC after the war was in the process of retiring, and he spent a lot of time going to their parties and wishing them well. Perhaps they were a bit tweedy, but by and large they were a decent and humorous lot. “There were still a lot of chaps with cravats,” Geoffrey Perkins recalled, “and I had one producer who, with the arrival of stereo, turned the studio floor into a numbered grid and moved actors around from square to square as if they were on manoeuvres.”

Some brilliant comedy, particularly the
Goon Show,
had emerged from National Service and army life in general, and a generation of producers had shared the advantage of a similar background.*
 
⁸²
(Mind you, not all of them were up to speed: one nice old chap asked Simon rather anxiously: “What is this ‘go on’ show that I keep reading about?”) Simon quotes John Peel, the DJ with taste and now a Radio Four presenter, as observing that BBC comedy was all run by ex-bomber pilots. By the mid-seventies the bomber pilots were hanging up their headphones and the BBC was pursuing a policy of recruiting clever young graduates, mainly from Oxbridge.

Simon had always liked Douglas’s work as well as Douglas, the man. “He was energetic and funny, and a delight to have lunch with.” Despite the desert of 1976, Douglas had written a couple of pieces for
The Burkiss Way,
a deliciously funny radio show that Simon produced. One of them, the Kamikaze Briefing, became a bit of a classic*
 
⁸³
and was much enjoyed by John Simmonds, the Senior Producer, so Douglas now had two strategically placed managers (“heavy dudes” in movie speak) poised to support him.

In the course of interviewing Simon for this book, he and I had lunch at the Groucho Club in London’s Soho. At the corner table a tanned Norman Wisdom, hero of Albania, was being lionized by three fashionables. Douglas would have chortled to think of us discussing him in such a venue. Simon has been asked many times to tell the story of commissioning
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and must be weary of the repetition, but courteously he did it again:

Douglas was coming up from Dorset to have lunch with me [4 February 1977] and had promised me three ideas. He was very enthusiastic, curious and funny—very much a social animal. He hated being on his own. So what if he was sometimes depressed. When judging the work, it’s the quality that matters.

In some ways I felt he was a talent without a niche. He had struggled to find his voice, but at one level I don’t think he was that surprised by fame even though he felt the pressure of success very acutely. Douglas knew that he had something . . . We went out to a Japanese restaurant to discuss his three ideas. I can’t for the life of me remember what the other two were—and afterwards Douglas claimed that neither could he—but one of them was a comic SF idea. It had started life as
The Ends of the Earth,
but it became
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Everybody liked it, though I remember one of my senior colleagues, a lovely man called Con Mahoney [one of the bomber pilots], asking me: “Is this funny?”

I assured him it was.

Douglas was on his way.

FIVE

The Origin of the Species

“ ‘You’re very strange,’ she said.

‘No, I’m very ordinary,’ said Arthur, ‘but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I’m more differed from than differing.’ ”

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

O
n 1 March 1977—three weeks after Douglas’s lunch with Simon Brett—the BBC approved the making of a pilot of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Then, before committing to the whole series, it sat on its hands for six months. In those days, before the icy fist of commerce had surprised the BBC with its grip, the decision-making process moved at a speed that reminds one that glass is said technically to be a liquid. Many of the individual producers had vision and energy, but further up the hierarchy a committee system reigned whereby all that was required for another month to pass was for one member to look judiciously into the middle distance, express uncertainty and suggest that more research and/or consideration might be wisely invested. That was always an irrefutable position. Then, each summer, much of the top echelons would depart
en masse
for warmer climes. Tuscany was awash with BBC executives.

On the other hand, the BBC—free from the immediate imperatives of budget, ratings, and advertising revenue that command other broadcasters—made programmes of undoubted excellence. Competition may keep industry “lean and mean”—often a euphemism for subjecting the workers to unimaginable stress or moving manufacture out to exploitative low labour-cost economies—but there’s no evidence that making programmes under that kind of pressure improves them. Besides, as anyone will tell you in an organization making something creative, going like the clappers is not always in the best interests of the project. Management books may employ a ghastly jargon drawn largely from American recreations like sport or hunting (“getting your ducks in a row,” “stepping up to the plate”), but they are unanimous on the virtues of taking the time to get all the machinery on your side.

In any event
Hitchhiker’s
was so different that nobody in the BBC could have been poised on one foot, breath held, waiting for it. Geoffrey Perkins says that if anyone had been asked what kind of programme they were looking for, nobody would have said:

“I’m looking for a sort of strange SF thing about when the world ends to make a by-pass—and it will take an age to make every programme.” I mean, it was just absolutely not on anybody’s radar at all. There were lots of discussions about whether to have an audience. [It was the received wisdom in the BBC at the time that an audience was needed to tell the listeners when to laugh.] I think I won this point when I said, “Look, they’ll have to sit there for a week because it will take us about a week to make these programmes.” Actually half the actors aren’t there at the same time anyway.

In any case Douglas was thrilled to get the commission and his morale shot up asymptotically to the cheerfulness axis. He was still hard up, of course, and living off his parents, for the BBC paid him £1000 for what turned into nearly six months’ work. (Mind you, if you run inflation backwards to 1977, £1,000 is worth five to six times more in today’s terms.) But at least he had a real project, and the promise of income and friendly faces in London—and not just anywhere in London, but Islington, which was to become the centre of Douglas’s metropolitan universe.

As the pigsty outside his window was demolished, his mum fed him and brought him cups of tea and peanut butter sandwiches for which he had a particular weakness. Young Jane (Little Jane) and James were quite entertained by their big brother groaning piteously, and then typing furiously before scrunching up sheets of paper and throwing them away. But although rejects filled the wastepaper basket, within a month the pilot was complete. Neil Gaiman says rightly that the first version owed a lot to
Monty Python,
and it certainly took a while for Douglas to find his voice; nevertheless the pilot contained much that was as sparky and brilliant as the final form. (Buffs should look to
Don’t Panic,
revised edition, for the definitive exegesis of the differences.)

His mum’s cups of tea inspired one of Douglas’s inventions—the Infinite Improbability Drive which uses tea as a Brownian motion generator. His hero, Arthur Dent, is saved by it, but “he no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company.”*
 
⁸⁴

There follows a short digression on the subject of tea.

Douglas wrote an uncharacteristically finger-wagging essay*
 
⁸⁵
—aimed at improving the American quality of life, and thus forgivable—about how to make the perfect cup. Warm the tea-pot well; spoon in an adequate supply of tea (preferably loose, but bags will do); pour in roilingly boiling water; infuse properly; pour the milk into the cup first. OK? He points out that it is not considered socially correct to put the milk in first, but on the other hand in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know things or think about things.

As Arthur Dent is blown uncontrollably around the galaxy in the company of someone infinitely more hip than he is, he devotes much of his time to looking for a decent cup of tea, a drink often accorded miraculous powers of comfort by Brits in adversity. Leg amputated? Ship torpedoed? Nice cuppa will soon put you right. Indeed there is something pathetic about Arthur, a bewildered young/old man in his dressing gown, his entire world wiped out behind him in an unnecessary cock-up, whose ambition is limited to finding a hot, herbal infusion.

Once Arthur nearly causes his own death, and that of his companions, by rhetorically asking Eddie, the shipboard computer with the irritating
faux bonhomme
American primary personality, why Eddie thought that he, Arthur, wanted a cup of tea. The computer, grimly literal-minded as only a machine can be, devotes more and more processing power to the question—imperilling them all.*
 
⁸⁶

Douglas’s most repeated anecdote was also set around a cup of tea and is believed to have started life as a real-life incident on Cambridge station. It has been repeated so often you will probably all know about the battle of silent British willpower when the stranger across the table in a station café started eating Douglas’s biscuits—or so it appeared. In fact, Douglas’s biccies emerged from beneath his newspaper after the other man had departed. In Douglas’s hands, this tiny incident was polished to a comic gem suffused with cringe-making English social containment. Shamelessly, he even used the anecdote in
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,
when Arthur is wooing Fenchurch. In
The Salmon of Doubt
the story is reprinted in an American context, with tea changed to coffee. However, any other beverage would not be credible; railway coffee is an insipid hot brown liquid that only resembles the real thing inasmuch as they both take the shape of the vessel they’re in. (Incidentally, a railway guard of long standing tells me that the pork pies are also a thing of wonder. Every 50,000 miles a trained engineer gives them a tap with a special hammer.)

The biscuit story has since reappeared in many guises, and may in some off-beat viral way still be replicating in saloon bars and over dinner tables. Over time it has picked up accretions of plausible detail. The paper was the
Guardian.
The biccies were Rich Tea. It actually happened to somebody else, and involved the
Daily Telegraph
and a Kit-Kat. It stems from Jeffrey Archer’s short story with the same plot device, except that in his version the biscuits were cigarettes. (Bit of a long shot, that one, as an explanation of origins, given Jeffrey Archer’s eclecticism and the fact that his collection was published some years after Douglas started telling the story.) The BBC’s
Home Truths
programme (a radio magazine, hosted by the affably unshockable John Peel, about our oddities) has broadcast an honest-sounding account from a woman who also had a silent clash of wills with a stranger over a packet of Garibaldis. People have looked me in the eye and told me that this self-same amusing incident befell them.

Urban myth? Possibly, but no earlier telling than Douglas’s is to be found. Although this is circumstantial, there are stories, jokes and indeed nifty turns of phrase that seem to sweep through society like an epidemic. My theory is that many of them originate with creative users of the language, some of whom are unsung people who just happen to deploy their mother tongue with some pizazz, but a substantial proportion will emanate from professional wordsmiths—copywriters, authors, scriptwriters, Douglas Adams and so on.

Back in Stalbridge, Douglas found it frustrating waiting for the gears to turn in the BBC, so he also sent his
Hitchhiker’s
pilot to Robert Holmes, the script editor and occasional writer of
Dr. Who.
He was hoping to get a commission to write a
Dr. Who
storyline that—if it followed the usual practice—would last for four half-hour episodes. He succeeded. Bob Holmes liked what Douglas had done a lot, and on that basis called him in for a meeting with Anthony Read (who was just taking over from Bob) and the producer, Graham Williams. They encouraged him to have a go. Douglas’s resulting
Dr. Who
script had great promise, but it needed a lot more work that he undertook with grace. It’s been suggested that Douglas’s original overdid the humour to the extent that it may have come across as forced or, even worse, frivolous. But then the story still needed a smidge more to tweak it further, and finally just a nuance here and there to get the tone absolutely spot on. Even after the refinement, some hardcore
Dr. Who
fans maintain that his episodes are too jokey.

All this editorial tuning was educational for Douglas, and improved the script. But it consumed a great deal of time, with the result that when Douglas was commissioned to write a four-part
Dr. Who
story in August, it coincided within a week or two with his commitment to write the
Hitchhiker’s
radio series. Thus, between 1977 and 1978, Douglas was to undergo a metamorphosis, from listless aspiration to nerve-end-shredding overwork.

Douglas had always enjoyed
Dr. Who
and, unlike some English Literature graduates, never looked down his nose at it on the grounds that it was genre. (Mike Simpson in his invaluable
Hitchhiker’s Guide
*
 
⁸⁷
says that Douglas originally submitted a script for
Dr. Who
in 1974, but that it vanished beyond hope of retrieval somewhere in the BBC. Alas, there was no sign of it in Douglas’s papers.)

“The Pirate Planet,” the first of the episodes written or co-written by Douglas, is rated as one of the best by the many
Dr. Who
enthusiasts who have analysed every episode and, thanks to the Internet, are keepers of the flame. It’s full of cortex-mangling concepts—transportable hollow planets, time dams, cybernetic control systems and even a high-tech bionic pirate complete with eye-patch and robotic parrot. (Douglas had played Long John Silver, don’t forget, and was keen on the comic potential of parrots; one features strategically in
Starship Titanic.
) The pirate—typical human being—uses all the breathtaking power and technology at his disposal for trivial self-aggrandisement, belting round the universe stealing other planets’ resources like some cosmic shoplifter.

Tom Baker, the actor playing the Doctor, spouted the scientific arcana with total conviction. He and Mary Tamm, as his gorgeous assistant, Romana, breezed through Douglas’s adventure with panache, brilliantly supported by Andrew Robertson as Mr. Fibuli and Bruce Purchase as the waffling Captain. (There was no spite in Douglas, but he could sometimes be inadvertently cruel in his desire to be funny. One of the leading ladies in
Dr. Who
provoked him to say that “her idea of acting was to point her eyes in one direction while swivelling her hips in another.”)

Even in this early work Douglas’s playful approach to science is apparent. He invents travel tubes in which the people are stationary and the tube races past them like there’s no tomorrow. Douglas had read his Relativity, and understood that in an inertial frame there would be no distinguishing between the moving and the static, so he was chortling knowingly in the direction of Einstein.

SF fans have wondered about the provenance of Douglas’s ideas, and there is a minor scholarly industry in tracking them down as if we cannot credit him with being so startlingly inventive. But Douglas wasn’t steeped in the genre and he was always mildly put out if he learned that some original thought had occurred to an SF writer already. A hollow planet, for example, might be traced to Isaac Asimov who, decades earlier, had posited such a planet, Trantor, in his exhilarating
Foundation
trilogy (later, unwisely, racked into a tetralogy for a large advance). Making a planet—or at least cities—moveable at will had been suggested by James Blish many years before in his
Spindizzy
stories. But Douglas was not particularly well versed in SF (apart from Sheckley), unlike his wife, Jane Belson, who had read everything. Apart from the
Eagle
comic, he had—in my partisan view—misspent his youth reading Charles Dickens, when he could have been immersed in Ursula Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, John Wyndham, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Fred Pohl and, to pinch Kingsley Amis’s useful expression, many other dazzling cartographers of hell.*
 
⁸⁸

Dr. Who
is—or rather was—a great national institution. “Cult” is a word people reach for too easily, but
Dr. Who
qualified. With the exception of the wretched
Star Trek,
whose longevity has been unnaturally prolonged by its transformation into an industry,
Dr. Who
was the longest-running SF series ever produced. It was first screened in 1963 and didn’t go off the air until 1996—and even then it continued for a while when the rights were sold to Fox for a one-off.