Wish You Were Here (28 page)

On paper, it could have been a good marriage between Douglas the visionary and Alan the pragmatist. Alas, right from the beginning they had poor personal chemistry. But given the investment, which was considerable, the BBC must have felt it was prudent to use someone with TV experience.

To his credit, Alan Bell introduced a number of details that were bound to work better on television. For instance he put Simon Jones (Arthur Dent) into that comforting but passion-killing Marks & Spencer dressing gown and devised the air-car that carries Slartibartfast into the planet-making factory. Douglas himself made a couple of Hitchcockian cameo appearances, once as a drinker in the pub bar to which Arthur and Ford repair before the end of the world, and, when the original actor was taken ill, as the man who tears up those absurd bits of paper money and walks naked out to sea. This was a brave move for Douglas and it explains why so many of the crew were buying him drinks the night before. It says a lot for his willingness to perform. It was a closed set, something which instantly attracted the attention of everybody within a half mile radius. Many large men with a passion for food have arses like a white blancmange in a polythene bag.

Douglas had thought hard about the technology of telly. He understood that it could be exploited to produce something so much more than the camera acting as an eye in front of a stage. Multiple images could be displayed, and merge into each other, or show separate narrative strands, and jump cut, and cooperate with or counterpoint the soundtrack. Telly could achieve what was later to be called in the computer world “parallel processing.” Douglas was only sorry that the human brain had not yet evolved to the point where such a rich mix could be inhaled in one go, but he believed that “there should be more going on than the viewer can take in.” Such plethora of detail gives a three-dimensional feel that makes the world thus created utterly believable. Just think how much processing power is devoted to the creatures—few of whom have any narrative function—in the space bar in
Star Wars.
In short, Douglas believed TV could offer unconventional techniques as new ways of telling a story.

Alan Bell, by contrast, was a professional who excelled at delivering the product on time and to budget. Already the first pilot had been costed at £120,000—four times the price of a
Dr. Who
episode—an expenditure that John Howard Davis had authorized personally. It was not Alan’s role to provide an opportunity for clever young Oxbridge things to explore the possibilities of telly as an experimental medium. Besides, there was simply no time for Douglas to feel his way, with hesitations and reprises, towards some television first. Alan’s task was to get the job done, and beneath his urbane exterior lay a grimly tenacious grasp of the relevant. He succeeded despite a work-to-rule by the electrician’s union, the ETU, that meant that every day’s filming had to stop not one picosecond after 10 p.m.

He and Douglas clashed immediately. Later Douglas, who rarely displayed personal animus, would describe Alan as “a bone-headed wanker,” a judgement that from the perspective of several decades on looks deeply unfair. A tough, albeit occasionally abrasive, pragmatist would be a better description. Alan himself has not gone public on the subject of Douglas. The quality of the TV series in any case undermines Douglas’s grievance about the producer. Having watched it again for this book, I found it still fresh, funny and joyous. Being essentially text-led, it was probably a little too wordy for television, but this was the nature of the beast. The sound, engineered by Mike McCarthy, was tight, the actors appeared to have fun, the script was witty, the effects were inventive. The graphics, as many have pointed out, were particularly seductive.

Two kinds of culture clash were apparent from the outset: Alan was not of the bomber-pilot generation of producers, but in BBC terms he was the old guard—not part of the influx of Cambridge smarties. The traditional radio/TV schism ran deep too. Upstart radio people telling experienced telly people how to do their job was not appealing, and Alan could be a little regal.*
 
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Douglas was in a fine young rapture of success. It was probably difficult to tell him anything.

In the event, Douglas was never happy with the TV series which he felt lacked the magic of the radio. He persisted in regarding the radio series as the definitive version. There is a famous remark often quoted in publishing that the difference between a book and a film is that in a book the pictures are better. Douglas felt something analogous about the difference between radio and telly, though he conceded that there were some brilliant TV performances.

Douglas and Alan had their first disagreement over casting. Douglas wanted the radio cast to be translated to telly, but Alan felt that TV had its own imperatives and that a judicious look around would be sensible. They compromised. Many of the original cast did cross the barrier and were just as brilliant on TV. Simon Jones was a shoe-in for Arthur Dent; after all, the role was written with him in mind. But Alan felt he wanted somebody unusual for Ford Prefect and went to audition. Much anxiety and many actors later, he found David Dixon, who understood the humour of the writing perfectly. This actor has an intelligent, elfin face that conceivably could have hailed from Betelgeuse and not Guildford; to make him stranger yet, he wore purple contact lenses. It’s hard to imagine Ford Prefect now as anybody else. Trillian was written as the archetypal English rose, but ended up being played by the fine American comic actress, Sandra Dickinson, in her own trilling transatlantic alto.*
 
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David Learner, who had played Marvin on stage, took the part on again, though Stephen Moore continued to provide the voice. Slartibartfast, a part originally written with John Le Mesurier in mind, was played with exemplary, languid menace by Richard Vernon, reprising his original radio role.

Money was another source of dissension. Douglas abhorred the papier-mâché boulders and endless recycling of the same corridor shot from different angles to be found in
Star Trek
almost as much as he hated the wobbly plastic sets in
Dr. Who.
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the grand-daddy of them all, Stanley Kubrick in
2001: A Space Odyssey,
had shown how it was possible to visualize an alien world in which everything looked sharp-edged and real. Douglas, in the grip of his creative vision, knew that he did not have such resources, but within the limits he desperately wanted his work not to look tacky. The obstructions of accountants or corporate footwork artists were not his problem.*
 
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Certainly of all the people on the set, Douglas himself was the hardest to please.

In fact, the weird landscapes were remarkably good for the limited budget. Andrew Howe-Davis, the designer, made innovative use of glass painting (beautifully executed by a Frenchman, Jean Peyre) in order to squeeze infinity onto a sound stage at Ealing Studios in West London.

The planet Magrathea, for instance (the site of the customized world manufacturers, you will recall), had to be somewhere alien and bleak. Douglas fancied Iceland. Morocco was also a possibility until, after a recce, Alan was warned off by a melancholy Japanese film crew who had had all their kit confiscated in order to keep them in the country—spending money—for longer. The BBC team ended up in the strange off-white china clay pits in St. Austell, Cornwall (now, incidentally, the site of the wondrous Eden Project with its graceful biomes).

Similarly, the prehistoric Earth was filmed in the Lake District. It was bitterly cold and the extras in their animal skins were chilled to the marrow. Aubrey Morris, the captain of the B-Ark with the Douglas-sized appetite for baths, was freezing despite the constant topping-up of the bath with hot water. (Andrew Howe-Davis had found that the nearest source of water was a paper mill 200 metres away, so keeping the bath hot was not easy.) Conscious of his shoulders blotched with cold, he asked, in a voice fruitier than a bunch of grapes, if he couldn’t have some fake-suntan lotion. But none was handy. Beth Porter, a buxom actress playing one of the scantily-clad hairdressers destined to out-evolve the early hominids, told him not to worry as the audience would all be looking at her boobs.

David Learner, the actor inside Marvin, also suffered for his art. It took him so long to get in and out of his android gear that when it was raining, and the crew took a break, they would leave him there with only an umbrella to stop him rusting solid on the spot. For obvious reasons the poor man had to be circumspect about accepting cups of tea or other drinks with diuretic properties.

Nor were the actors paid a fortune. Mark Wing-Davey, who played Zaphod Beeblebrox with stylish cool, wore his second head with enormous panache. He thinks he may have been cast because of a hippy reputation lingering on from his university days, but Douglas said that it was because he had seen Mark in
The Glittering Prizes,
Frederic Raphael’s TV drama. The fake head was heavy, uncomfortable, and radio-controlled by the ingenious technician, Mike Kelt, who had made it. Later Mark Wing-Davey was to discover that it had cost twice as much to make as he was paid (£3,000 is the oft-quoted figure). Mark recalled that by contemporary standards “it wasn’t a great head,” though its electronic innards had appeared to some admiration on
Tomorrow’s World,
the gee-whizz BBC programme about new technology. Whatever the virtues or otherwise of the head, few of the fans minded—we all liked the effort enough that we were happy to suspend disbelief. Douglas, on the other hand, was mortified.

Fortunately, he loved the graphics. These were the ingenious solution to the problem of converting the narrator to television. Peter Jones as the Book worked deliciously on the radio, but what would he have become on TV? An awkwardly protracted voice-over perhaps. But instead, a new dimension was added to the narrator’s delivery that, as on the radio, contrived to be all the more matter-of-fact as the content grew increasingly surreal. As Peter spoke, the words appeared—glowing with hectic radioactive colour—one by one on the screen. At the same time, elsewhere on the screen, a graphic image illustrated and amplified the words with tremendous visual flair and three-dimensional movement.*
 
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The result was an integrated feast for both eye and ear.

The story of the graphics is one of those serendipitous accidents. Kevin Davies, one of the graphics team, was then a passionate young fan of
Hitchhiker’s.
*
 
¹⁵⁰
By chance he overheard the sound of R2D2, the
Star Wars
robot, emerging from an editing suite in the Ealing Studios. It must have been an odd moment. Unable to resist, he went in and discovered Alan Bell trying out different effects for
Hitchhiker’s.
Kevin worked for Pearce Studios, an animation house in the same building, and his enthusiasm was such that he persuaded Alan to meet the boss, Rod Lord, who in turn convinced Alan to allow them to tender for the job. This they won on price as well as quality. As many people have pointed out, with heroically suppressed irritation, no computers were harmed in the making of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
What Pearce Studios did had nothing to do with computers. It was cartoon animation of extraordinary sophistication: movement was created frame by frame, using a rostrum camera and images drawn on transparent acetates. Rod Lord and his team well deserved the 1981 BAFTA Award they won for the
Hitchhiker’s
graphics.

Another source of argument between Douglas and Alan was the laughter track. This battle had been fought and won already in connection with the radio, but nevertheless for TV it had to be put to the test again. The BBC believed that without laughter a comedy show lacked warmth; it couldn’t be funny. The viewers at home might laugh along with a studio audience, but they would not laugh on their own in the solitude of their front rooms. Douglas resisted this artifice, but, despite his views, an audience track was added using the laughter from a specially organized showing to committed SF fans at the National Film Theatre. But
Hitchhiker’s
was not a sitcom. The audible merriment sounded false. Crudely cueing the audience at home to jokes which apparently need that much help is a bit like throwing both ends of a rope to a drowning man. Fortunately, Alan dropped the laughter track after an early showing at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

It is an irony that Douglas and Alan did not get on better. There was so much for the viewer to like in the TV series. It broke new ground creatively. The fans were ecstatic and the series created many more of them who had missed the radio broadcasts. The appearance of the characters on screen was often not as the listener, or the reader, had imagined—but that problem is insuperable with any transfer from a non-visual medium to a visual one. Douglas himself told Jim Francis, the fx (special effects) designer, that he did not see Marvin the way he was on TV.

By and large, the critics liked it too, though some were unkind about the fx. But this is to miss the point. If the fx look a bit clunky now it is because we have been spoiled by computer-generated imagery. That technology was just not available in the era of the BBC micro and the Sinclair ZX81—hamster-powered by today’s standards. Domestic computers came with all of 4k of ram, though for a fancy price an enthusiast could buy another 16k. Mainframes were for business use, and lived in air-conditioned splendour being serviced by white-coated acolytes. Now we have enough processing power to move millions of pixels smoothly with software that calculates the effect of changing light on every one of them. Back in 1980 Jim Francis worked wonders with what he had to hand. As it was, the series consumed so much of the fx budget that this may have been partly responsible for the defection of
The Goodies
from the BBC to ITV later in the year.*
 
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Besides,
Hitchhiker’s
was never about verisimilitude.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
needed the mother ship to be about the size of Pittsburgh as it loomed over the Devil’s Tower because the director was trying visually to bludgeon us into awe.
Star Wars
needed teams of ace designers using the world’s largest network of Sun RISC-chip workstations to create a sense of reality because the scripts themselves are as subtle as a car crash. But
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was different. It was about wit, philosophical jokes and an underpinning of intellect. You don’t care about Zaphod’s palsied second head; Douglas should not have tormented himself.