Wish You Were Here (10 page)

But, you must be wondering, was Cambridge all fun? Didn’t the damn students ever do any work? Where did he live when he wasn’t in the pub or on stage? Well, in his first year he had a room in college (the less glamorous “new” bit of St. John’s). In his second year he was in digs in Sydney Street in a house for which Douglas could not muster an atom of sentiment. But in his third year he shared palatial rooms back in college with Nick Burton and a chap called Johnny Simpson, handily located near the student bar. This accommodation subsequently became the model for the rooms of Dr. Chronotis of
Dr. Who
and
Dirk Gently
fame. They were book-lined and comfortable, with a distinct ambience of erudition and naughtiness, a film set in which you could practise feeling very grown-up indeed—especially if you were asking someone back for a drink, or even tea, with or without an option on your body. Perhaps there is no such thing as true adulthood, only better and better impersonations of it. On second thoughts, that may only apply to men.

As for academic work, Douglas ended up with a BA degree, class 2.2. His tutor, Mr. K.J. Pascoe, wrote to inform him that his compulsory dissertation earned him a high 2.1, his other essays were of 2.2 standard and that he had actually failed his tragedy paper. Douglas seems to have done just enough work to wing it, but nevertheless seemed to have got on well with his tutors if the amiable tone of their correspondence is a guide.

With his true passion always lying in non-fiction science, it is interesting to see what he made of the traditional liberal arts syllabus. In
Don’t Panic
he told Neil Gaiman that he was proud of the work he’d done on Christopher Smart, the subject of his Part 1 Tripos English Dissertation. Having unearthed this document, I suspect that Douglas’s gift for parody didn’t stop short of literary criticism. He could do scholarship, but he was jolly well going to make sure that that’s how it sounded. Try reading the chunk below as if you were Alan Bennett doing his steeple-fingered academic (“Very few people who knew Kafka as I did, that is to say, scarcely at all . . .”), and you will see what I mean:

It was only after W.H. Bond’s discovery of its antiphonal structure [of Smart’s
Jubilate Agno
] that it began to be recognized as something more important—a fragment of a failed literary experiment, gigantic, perhaps bizarre, eventually out of control, but nevertheless the product of a rational and coherent idea—the transplantation of the rhythms and structure of Hebrew poetry into an English religious poem.

Does this remind you of anything? Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect bullshitting to the Vogon captain about his execrable poetry perhaps? “Oh, yes, I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective . . .”*
 
⁶⁷

Christopher Smart was an eighteenth-century poet who had also been educated at Cambridge. From the student’s point of view he had two virtues: he only produced two poems of significance and he was sufficiently obscure for there to be no body of knowledge with which one’s opinions could be easily challenged. He was the perfect choice for the clever student keener on the pub than the library. There is a legend that Douglas only wrote three essays in his entire time at St. John’s. Cambridge is good at accommodating eccentrics as long as they are talented, and St. John’s (which is rich from investments and makes no call on the public purse) clearly recognized something of value in Douglas. However, one essay a year would have tried the patience of even the most detached academic. It is difficult to track down the actual output, but the most likely explanation is that Douglas was delinquent about getting his work in on time but he was forgiven on the grounds that when it finally arrived, it sparkled.

Despite simulating the voice of scholarship, Douglas was nevertheless genuinely intrigued by Smart. Most of Smart’s life had been spent drunk and debauched until, quite suddenly, in 1756 he suffered an extreme attack of religious ecstasy that left him under a compulsion to pray in the streets. This led to his eventual confinement in a loony bin in Bethnal Green. (How much did Douglas know about his father’s experience on Iona?) On leaving the asylum Smart wrote a long poem,
A Song of David,
but he is better known for
Jubilate Agno
(“Rejoice in the Lamb”), an immense manuscript of which only a fragment survives, that was rediscovered in 1939. The poem consists of an interminable call and response pattern, like a parallel text in which many hundreds of lines beginning with the word “Let . . .” are matched by an equal number that relate to them beginning with the word “For . . .”*
 
⁶⁸
Only thirty-two pages of this remain, but for all its oddness and the rigour of its construction, it feels positively Homeric in length. Fortunately some of it, though celebrating the mystery of God, is about Smart’s cat, Jeoffrey (
sic
), and it is quite droll to learn about this beast’s fleas in such a feverishly spiritual context. Those keen to trace the provenance of the answer (forty-two) might be interested to know that line nineteen of
Jubilate Agno
reads: “For there is a mystery in numbers.”

Douglas would have grinned at this over-egged connection. Nevertheless, Smart liked his cat (“For the English cats are the best in Europe”) and his line forty-two—quite by chance the antiphon to another overexcited observation about the moggy—reads: “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.”

This is an apposite comment on Douglas himself, for the time was upon him when a young man—albeit one fortified by a network of the brightest mates—is flushed down the plughole of the educational system into the world of possibilities.

In the summer of 1974, he left Cambridge and set out upon three rather bleak years.

FOUR

The Seedy Flats

“Was this really the Earth? Was there the slightest possibility that he had made some extraordinary mistake?”

S
O
L
ONG, AND
T
HANKS FOR
A
LL THE
F
ISH

“What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.”

P.G. W
ODEHOUSE
,
The Adventures of Sally

A
fter Cambridge, so far from reaching the “commanding heights” of the economy, Douglas embarked upon an era of seedy flats. The first was in a classic location for transitory accommodation. Every city must have such a place where no names are ever put on doorbells because the turnover would make the task tiresome. In London it is Earl’s Court, an area of cliff-like red-brick Edwardian terraces known then as Kangaroo Valley because of the favour it found with itinerant Aussies. (The Aussies have moved on to colonize the whole city, but the extraordinary density of flats remains.) Douglas and Martin Smith shared a large room in a flat in Redcliffe Gardens that was owned by two upmarket and grimly constipated Sloaney women who needed help with the rent but who hated Martin and Douglas being there (and possibly also Martin and Douglas as people).

The second was a sprawling but affordable house in Fordwych Road, Kilburn, or, as it is known to estate agents, West Hampstead. In addition to Martin and Douglas, it contained a randy collection of bright recent graduates, including Nigel Hess, a Man Called Phil,*
 
⁶⁹
a floating population of bed-partners, and Mary Allen, who was appearing in
The Rocky Horror Show
in the West End.

Douglas had come to London determined to make it as a sketch-writer, but soon found that the world was not poised waiting for him. A series of twit office jobs helped him cope with the tyranny of paying the rent. According to Neil Gaiman’s
Don’t Panic,
one of these was as a filing clerk. It is hard to imagine anyone less suited than Douglas to the chore of filing. He would have been tempted to redesign the whole system from scratch, side-tracked by the philosophical complexities of information storage and the arbitrary ways in which we organize the world into discrete categories. Putting bits of paper into files
physically
was foreign to his nature. It must have been a torment. He could have filed everything under “S” for stuff or “P” for paper; alternatively he might have plunged into minute subdivisions of semantic nuance accessible only to himself.

When not running the gauntlet of those temporary jobs we all tend to do after leaving university but before settling in our packets like detergent, Douglas persisted in writing sketches. One target was
Week Ending,
a weekly radio programme on BBC Radio Four. It was probably the most subversive thing to be found on the airwaves, not excluding TV. The Light Entertainment department, as it was then, had an admirable record of producing wonderfully funny and anarchic programmes. The tradition continues to this day, possibly in part because the excellent David Hatch, then a performer and producer, is now Managing Director of BBC Network Radio.

Back in the seventies there was a lot to be subversive about. The Yom Kippur War between Israel, Egypt and Syria was the latest of a series of bitter conflicts that continue even now. This particular one erupted in October 1973 with a surprise attack on Israel across the Golan Heights and Sinai. Much futile blood-letting ensued, and was followed swiftly by an energy crisis as the OPEC countries imposed an oil embargo. As the prices of just about everything shot up, they passed the economies of the West going the other way. Harold Wilson’s Labour Government was elected in March 1974, and wily old “Wislon,” as he was known to readers of
Private Eye,
ducked and dived, trimmed and fudged, to hold his party and the government together while the graph of the British economy plunged like Shirley Bassey’s cleavage. On the popular culture front, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin appeared at Earl’s Court in satin flairs large enough to house a family of refugees, fashion victims wore cork-soled shoes four inches high, digital watches had just appeared,*
 
⁷⁰
and a certain gloom prevailed. Recent university graduates no longer enjoyed the heady sense that they could mess about and still land on their feet.

With a pace almost too fast for the establishment powers at the BBC to clock the full extent of its satirical rudeness,
Week Ending
excoriated the topical follies in the news with all the inhibition of a hand grenade. It was extremely funny, and boasted terrific writers like David Renwick, Andrew Marshall and John Mason. Andrew Marshall recalls the pride this wildly talented bunch had in their ideas, and how they had to wind down at the end of a frantic day by comparing notes in the local pub near the studio, The Captain’s Cabin. The programme’s pace made great demands on the cast. This included David Jason, Nigel Rees and Bill Wallace—all of whom went on to become well known in other spheres—so
Week Ending
was also fertile ground for new acting talent. Its breathless speed was a fearsome consumer of material, a fact reflected in the writing credits. Even enunciated quickly by a professional with precise diction, they went on and on: everyone who contributed a snappy one-liner was entitled to a credit. But Douglas’s name rarely featured among them. The only piece accepted was the Adams, Smith, Adams Marilyn Monroe sketch that the three of them wrote in their last year at Cambridge and phoned down to John Lloyd—by then working as a producer on
Week Ending—
from a St. John’s phone box.

The radio producer, Simon Brett,*
 
⁷¹
whose faith in Douglas was to be so strategic a couple of years later, said that Douglas and
Week Ending
was one of the worst marriages between writer and subject because the latter was specifically based on news, and Douglas’s mind just didn’t work like that.*
 
⁷²
I can see why. In photography, in order to compose the image and get everyone with their feet and heads in the frame, you often have to take a step or two backwards. Douglas’s view was huge and odd; organizing a picture, he would have started a lot further back than that. It would be tricky for him to take topical politics seriously enough to find them ridiculous—for his perceptions had already expanded to the point where he found man’s place in the universe absurd. It would have been like finding your way across Birmingham using a globe. Besides, as a writer, Douglas was a slow, compulsive polisher. Keeping up with the output of
Week Ending
would have frazzled him to a crisp.

Geoffrey Perkins, who as a talented young producer was destined to produce
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
says that at the time Douglas was “a particularly strangely shaped peg trying to fit into a variety of round holes”:

He was one of many honourable examples of people who were actually very good writers who couldn’t get their stuff onto
Week Ending.
Some very good writers like Andy Hamilton and Alistair Beaton came through it, but there are others, like Douglas, who did not have a great deal of topical or satirical interest and whose natural style was far from a pointed piece that played for a minute and a half. He didn’t have that sort of mind. He’d write five-minute sketches which meandered off on some amusing tack.

However, Douglas did get a break.
Chox,
the Footlights revue, had transferred, heavily revised, to London’s West End. Dennis Main Wilson, a senior producer from the BBC, was sent to look at it, and as a result the show was televised. Douglas was paid £100 for TV rights to his contributions, a sum not to be sneered at in 1974; it might be a fifteenth of a young graduate’s annual wage. The TV version was not a great success. But the BBC’s David Hatch and Simon Brett had also seen the live show, and quickly commissioned a radio version of it which fared much better. “It was a good deal crisper,” John Lloyd recalls, “and very well received—and this despite being called
Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning.
It had nothing to do with
Chox
except for the fact that Jon Canter and Griff [Rhys Jones], who were still up at university, were both in it.”

A number of the Footlights aristocracy from a previous age went to see
Chox
in its West End incarnation, among them Graham Chapman from the
Monty Python
team. Graham was enormously taken with Douglas’s work, and invited him over to his place in Highgate, North London, for a drink. One sketch, by Adams, Smith, Adams, about the Annual Meeting of the Crawley Paranoid Society, was one which Graham always said he would have liked to have written himself. Douglas and Graham both enjoyed a sense of the surreal, and despite Chapman being outrageously camp,*
 
⁷³
and Douglas being joyously heterosexual, they got on well and decided to enter an informal writing partnership.

In 1974,
Monty Python
was at a crossroads. It had entranced the public for half a decade, but the last and fourth series of only six half-hours, broadcast from 31 October 1974, was a bit patchy. The links between the sketches—in the past so often witty or deliberately undermining of telly conventions—were getting perfunctory, and the sketches themselves sometimes trailed away without any attempt at a conclusion. Not even another violently funny giant foot or weird visual pun from Terry Gilliam could quite come to the rescue. The Pythons had changed TV forever, but the format, once so liberating, was becoming restrictive. The individual team members were looking to branch out on their own, and as a team they yearned to make more movies (and did).

Graham Chapman had trained to be a doctor*
 
⁷⁴
before being led astray at Cambridge by Footlights. At 6’3", he wasn’t as tall as John Cleese or Douglas Adams, but he towered over the other Pythons, with a persona that came across as a decent Englishman at bay—really
awfully
reasonable, but indignant and bewildered that the world could be so strange and cruel. He and John Cleese shared a strong sense of the ridiculous. Graham was the eponymous antihero in
The Life of Brian
(1978), a thoughtful film in a polemical kind of way that is also achingly funny. He died far too young (at about the age when Douglas himself was to die) of cancer of the spine, but at the time he was an established aristocrat of comedy.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
had recaptured a generation of viewers for the BBC; it had achieved international fame, won several awards (including the Silver Rose of Montreux for a compilation programme), and transformed the Beeb’s image of slightly censorious aunty to something more like an inventive harlot, the sort that beckons from doorways and asks if you’d like to try something unusual. It would not be a grossly daft exaggeration to say that at the time Graham could have done whatever he wanted.

Another Python, Terry Jones, had seen Douglas in revue and he too particularly remembers the Crawley sketch that had so struck Graham. At first he had been impressed more by Douglas’s size than his comedy, but he soon recognized an authentic talent. He recalls that Douglas, as Graham’s collaborator, attended some Python script meetings:

He started working with Graham, because Graham had stopped writing with John at that stage. And so Douglas started coming to script meetings for the fourth series . . . Douglas was full of ideas—I remember he had lots of ideas—and was keen to get writing. We just got on very well. We had the same sort of mindset; we enjoyed chatting and having drinks. We were both interested in real ale, so became ale chums, if you like. And, of course, he appeared in that fourth series as well, in a couple of cameos.*
 
⁷⁵

So the portents looked good for Douglas, finding himself conjoined with a star at only twenty-two. Unfortunately, the collaboration with Graham Chapman produced little, and even less was actually screened.

Graham was not an easy person to work with. Terry Jones says that his contributions were intangible; he was a man who could come in with very odd ideas which were great fun, but for a lot of the time he was an “off the wall reactor.” Of course, feedback—even of the vehement “Good grief, that sucks” variety—is invaluable for any writer, especially one trying to be funny. It is a good service to refine somebody else’s ideas by pushing them to the breaking point. Douglas said that Graham would sit there, puffing on his pipe and looking tweedy, but thinking very, very naughty thoughts—occasionally interjecting one that would turn everything around.*
 
⁷⁶
But Graham was also boozing very heavily, and that made life much more difficult for all those around him.

Terry, who is one of nature’s generous spirits, is not sure that Graham hadn’t stopped drinking by then. “Certainly he sort of tried to stop drinking when we were doing
Holy Grail,
and was firmly on the wagon well before we made
The Life Of Brian.
” Everybody else, however, says that during this period Graham was struggling with potentially severe alcoholism. Andrew Marshall recalls Graham as a man of great sensitivity, and this may in part be why he drank. Sometimes alcohol serves a function like the control rods in a nuclear reactor; they damp everything down and keep the system from going critical. Graham had a particular taste for gin; his large house in Highgate featured a cavernous cellar lined on one side with an enormous wine rack—except that instead of wine it held bottles of gin with strategic reserves of tonic. It was a wall of gin.

The collaboration between Douglas and Graham entailed a great deal of going to the pub, amusing each other and drinking a lot. Some of their colleagues at the BBC were a bit miffed about this, and it was not a life that Douglas could afford to sustain for long, if only financially. Besides, Douglas was not a heavy boozer.

Martin Smith remembers that Graham was very generous. Sundays (rather like Thursdays which Douglas never got the hang of) were dull in London in the 1970s. The dank shadow of the Lord’s Day Observance Society still lay across the land. “Six days shalt thou labour, and on the seventh thou shalt have no fun at all” was the effect it wrought. Nothing much was open apart from the pubs, and the licensing laws gave you a narrow window, as they say now, for drinking and at ten minutes before closing time you were chivvied to stop by a publican with a voice like a KGB interrogator. Graham, knowing that Douglas and Martin were broke, would often phone them on Sunday and ask if they fancied dinner. They always did, and would either go up to Highgate to Graham’s house or out to a restaurant where they would eat and drink too much. Graham liked Helepi, a jolly Greek restaurant in Bayswater, a lot.