Wish You Were Here (14 page)

Dr. Who himself was a Time Lord from the galactically central planet of Galifrey. Despite the strictures of their non-interference code—and the deeply laid plotting from another powerful but more malign Time Lord called The Master—Dr. Who whizzed about space-time doing good and righting wrongs in the company of a resourceful and attractive female assistant who helped to keep the dads watching. One of these was played by the actress, Lalla Ward, who, introduced by Douglas to Richard Dawkins at one of Douglas’s wicked parties, subsequently became Mrs. Dawkins.

For transport, Dr. Who employed an old-fashioned British police telephone box called the Tardis (allegedly an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space). Though finite on the outside, this vehicle had as much space inside as the largest studio could accommodate, and its ability to roam through time and space provided a wonderfully flexible narrative device. The special effects were always a bit clunky, with wobbly sets and acres of Bacofoil; later Douglas grieved about the TV adaptation of
Hitchhiker’s
on the grounds that it reminded him of
Dr. Who.
But the good thing about a budget limited by time and money is that you have to fall back on old-fashioned virtues—in this case the wit, inventiveness and story-telling ability of the writers who, by and large, delivered the goods for over three decades. Among Dr. Who’s implacable foes were the Daleks, created by Terry Nation, creatures with totalitarian views whose nasty little bodies had mutated to the extent that they moved about in motorized containers. Conveniently these were about the size of a vacuum cleaner. On top they carried a rotatable dome fitted with an all-purpose sensor device, and projecting from their bodies a death ray and what looked suspiciously like a telescopic drain plunger.*
 
⁸⁹
Douglas had always been a fan of the Daleks, who were such a charismatic cross between Iago and a kitchen appliance that they had to be revived every few years by popular demand. He had even written an episode of
Dr. Who
while at Brentwood School, but could recall little of it beyond the fact that his Daleks were powered by Rice Krispies.*
 
⁹⁰

It was a risk commissioning an unknown writer to tackle
Dr. Who.
Even as a relatively out-of-sight freelance, writing for it was like being given a paintbrush and being told to nip into the Tate to touch up a Turner. There were also lots of rules designed to avoid inconsistency or boxing writers in for the future. Legions of knowledgeable and dedicated fans were poised to tell you if you made a botch of it. It is a tribute to Douglas that he always took
Dr. Who
seriously, devoting particular care to devising concepts that were at least theoretically workable (unlike magic, for example, which suspends the rules and is just a cop-out). As in writing a sketch, Douglas understood that SF must have an internal logic. In this context—though it was a principle to which he cleaved in general—he said that the expression “tongue-in-cheek” was often an excuse for laziness. “It means it’s not really funny, but we aren’t going to do it properly.”*
 
⁹¹

Dr. Who, the Time Lord, was able to regenerate his body after death a total of twelve times—and this was just as well as the actors playing him were prone to anxiety about typecasting.*
 
⁹²
By the time Douglas was writing for the series, the fourth Doctor was in place, Tom Baker: an engaging, larger than life, former monk with an extravagantly outgoing personality. He loved the part so much that he stayed with it for seven years. Douglas once told me that Tom was then the randiest man he had ever met—and he had encountered one or two in whom the balance of power had never moved even slightly northwards from the gonads to the cerebrum.

Douglas went on to write two more
Dr. Who
episodes: “The City of Death” (co-written with the producer, Graham Williams) and “Shada.” He also wrote
Dr. Who and the Krikkitmen
as a film treatment, featuring one of those sickening time loops. This never got very far, but the ideas were subsequently put to good use in
Life, the Universe and Everything.
“Shada” unfortunately got caught up in a strike at the BBC and was never transmitted, though I believe that for serious buffs it is available on video.*
 
⁹³
However, Douglas did recycle part of this when Dr. Chronotis, a retired Time Lord whose rooms in Cambridge so resembled Douglas’s own, appeared in the first Dirk Gently novel,
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

In this story Douglas once again scratches away at the time-travel paradox—on this occasion with literally cosmic ramifications—like some terrible intellectual itch. What happens if you go back in time and waylay your grandad with a quick beer, thus preventing him from meeting your grandma? (There are more Freudian expressions of this notion involving killing your mum, but the paradox is the same.) If you succeed, you no longer exist so could not have succeeded—in which case you do exist, so round you go again in a logically impregnable circle. This conundrum was something that clearly fascinated Douglas for he came back to it frequently. Remember Zaphod Beeblebrox summoning up his grandfather, Zaphod Beeblebrox the
Third
? An accident, Zaphod explains, with a contraceptive and a time machine.

“The City of Death” was a four-part script started by David Fisher, a regular and reliable scriptwriter who had been suddenly waylaid by family problems. Douglas and Graham Williams finished it off under immense time pressure, a director and a studio slot having been booked only days away from the realization that they had no script. Douglas was locked up in Graham’s study where he lived on black coffee and whisky. Because of Writers’ Guild regulations, the departmental name of David Agnew was used for the credits.

Despite the rush, or possibly because of it, “The City of Death” story is splendidly inventive. It prefigures that somewhat disturbing
Hitchhiker’s
idea that life is not only inadvertent, but possibly—thanks to time-travel—circular. Dr. Who has to ensure that an explosion on Earth actually happened because the resulting chemical chaos kickstarted the whole improbable business of evolution that ends up with sentience, chartered accountants, geraniums, ants, whales and all our planet’s astonishing biodiversity. This again is the horror of the time-travel paradox, but writ large. In
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
Douglas posits that the entire human race is a logical absurdity as it is descended from those who returned to the Earth and became their own ancestors. Teleologically speaking, it’s teeth-grindingly up itself.

The
Dr. Who
plot also embroils the viewer in the stealing of the Mona Lisa (there are multiple copies, some of which are marked “fake” in felt-tip pen). Eleanor Bron and John Cleese provide delicious cameos as art-lovers who believe that the Tardis is a gallery exhibit.

Meanwhile, Douglas, encouraged by Jon Canter, was commuting back and forth from Dorset to London, gradually relocating in the city as his morale improved and he had more work. Jon, who had studied law (“a mistake”), now had a job as an advertising copywriter and was sharing a house in Arlington Avenue with trainee barrister, Jonny Brock, and his wife, Clare Gorst. Jonny, you will remember, was the aspirant thespian from Douglas’s days of amateur dramatics, who eventually became a QC. The house boasted a large sofa on which Douglas was invited to crash, and he frequently did when in town. Jon, Jonny and Clare offered friendship, warmth, digestive biscuits and stability in addition to somewhere to sleep. Douglas was very fond of them, and dedicated the first
Hitchhiker’s
novel to Jonny Brock and Clare Gorst, and “all the other Arlingtonians for tea, sympathy and a sofa.”

Their house in this particularly leafy early Victorian part of Islington overlooks a section of the Grand Union Canal, now recreational rather than mercantile, which circles London to the east and west before joining the Thames. Where it runs through Islington, its tow-paths are compacted by massed joggers from the law, telly, advertising and journalism. During his intermittent spasms of physical self-improvement, Douglas too used to jog along the canal, and continued to do so when he had his own place in nearby Upper Street.*
 
⁹⁴

In 1977, things were distinctly looking up. Douglas had his
Dr. Who
episodes to write and supportive friends in town. Finally he even got a real job. He was delighted. It was the world’s lowliest job in radio, as a producer so junior that even the cleaners could boss him about, but it was still a
job,
one on the staff and not just a freelance contract—and at the BBC no less, a national treasure with correspondingly huge cachet. David Hatch, then the Head of the Light Entertainment Department, had given it to him. Like Simon Brett, he believed in Douglas, and Douglas may have felt under some obligation to show that their confidence was not misplaced.

Apparently though, Douglas was not much cop as a producer. John Lloyd had seconded him briefly to the
News Quiz
*
 
⁹⁵
when the usual co-producer, Danny Greenstone, was away. But it did not work out. John Lloyd:

Trouble was Douglas was
never
any good at all with anybody else’s formats. He could
only
do his own stuff. He really, really wanted to be able to write one-liners for
The Two Ronnies,
or sketches for
Week Ending
or whatever, but he just
could not do it.
You might as well have asked him to write thank you letters in Korean. None of it made the slightest sense to him. So I daresay we called it a day after getting nowhere.

Of course, John Lloyd—as later events are to make clear—has a complex view of Douglas. Writers may be pals, but there is always an element of rivalry.*
 
⁹⁶
Gore Vidal once memorably remarked that he could not hear of the success of a friend without dying a little. Affection, envy, irritation, admiration, hurt—all go into the rich stew stirred by Douglas and John. Douglas may not have been all that hopeless a producer, but there is little doubt that he could not resist endless fine-tuning of a work in progress—and that sits uneasily with schedules that, once published, march with no nonsense to a drill sergeant’s beat.

To do their job, producers need to get a lot of people together, charm them, organize them, and bully them with a judicious mixture of tact and steel, while simultaneously making them all feel good about themselves. The task is to turn a collection of disparate and sometimes highly strung individuals into a team. It’s a difficult trick, and one which did not serve Douglas’s strengths. He was too vulnerable to cope well with stress and, despite being a social animal with a need for company and stimulation, as a creator he preferred to be solitary.

Whatever his virtues as a radio producer in the Light Entertainment department, Douglas did not stay at it for very long. Early in 1978 he was offered, and he accepted, the job of script editor of
Dr. Who,
where Anthony Read was moving on. David Hatch was said to be a little narked as Douglas had not really paid his dues in the current job and his haste in transferring appeared unseemly. Simon Brett had left to go to London Weekend Television (leaving Geoffrey Perkins as
Hitchhiker’s
producer). But, as Douglas remarked, David himself moved on shortly afterwards so Douglas did not feel so badly about it. Radio people are always sensitive about the talent leaving them for the glamorous but blowsy tart called television. There is an inferiority complex at work that’s entirely unnecessary, especially as radio is often braver than the telly, more intelligent and less tyrannized by market expediency.

One collaboration with John Lloyd that did work out well was when the two of them, by then in adjacent offices in Langham Street behind Broadcasting House, wrote the script for a Dutch cartoon series called
Dr. Snuggles.
They were paid £500, a very generous fee when you consider that their annual salaries would have been between £2000 and £3000 at the time.
Dr. Snuggles
was designed to be one of the very few non-violent cartoons for children. John says it was huge fun to do: “With animation the only limit was our own imaginations. We also loved the fact that the Dutch producer was called Joop Visch, his assistant was a young man called Wim Oops, and his secretary was Veronica Plinck.”

Douglas’s life was threatening to go from torpid to flat-out faster than a Porsche 928S. The BBC approved
Hitchhiker’s
at the end of August 1977. He also had the
Dr. Who
commissions. Then he got a job. It seemed like a sensible time to find an agent.

He became a client of Jill Foster, to whom he had been recommended by Graham Chapman. Jill was small, quick, no-nonsense, good-hearted and rather sexy. She had recently declared independence from a larger agency and set up on her own with her husband, Malcolm Hamer, an agent specializing in sports. She looked after all the Pythons apart from John Cleese and Eric Idle, and she knows what’s what. Jill has always tried to do what is best for her clients as people. If this means they should not take on something unsuitable, despite cabbage-sized wads of cash waved under their noses, Jill will tell them.

She recalls that Douglas was hugely amusing and had a talent for lunch. He often rang her at ten in the morning and chatted, despite the fact that she was very busy. Jill always forgave him because he was so funny, “like a giant puppy with a sense of humour.” She recalls that he wrote a sketch about two lighthouse keepers who had fallen out. (They drew a diameter line through their lighthouse and could not infringe on each other’s territory.) “It was a brilliant sketch,” she says. “The market for sketches was very difficult and I could not find a buyer for it. But it was exceptional and I realized then that he had something very special.” Even after Douglas had left her for a new agent, Ed Victor, following publication of
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
they remained on good terms and would enjoy the occasional lunch. “I think he fancied me a bit,” says Jill, “but he gave up flirting after I gave birth to my daughter.”