Wish You Were Here (16 page)

John Lloyd’s account of working with Douglas on the last two episodes of the first series is not as cool as Douglas’s. He reckons that by the time Douglas had reached episode five of the radio series, he had proved to himself that he could create something completely original, and that he just wasn’t enjoying the process any more. John himself was in the throes of writing notes for a comic SF novel called
GiGax,
a term that meant the greatest area that could be encompassed by the human imagination (so everything from a nutshell to the cosmos). Douglas, says John, got completely stuck around the beginning of episode five, and was very distressed about it. John came to the rescue and plundered some of his own ideas from
GiGax:

The ghastly trauma for me with Douglas was that he got stuck, and said, “Look, we’ve got to write these last two and I’m under terrible time pressure now, but if you could help me out if there’s another series, we’ll go back to our old system of writing together.” I was living in Knightsbridge at the time, in the flat of a rather well-off friend.*
 
¹⁰¹
There was a kind of garage that had been converted into a rough and ready office where we worked. And although it had taken Douglas almost ten months to write the first four episodes, the last one and a half/two we wrote in three weeks.

Actually, though the chronology is hard to reconstruct, it looks as if Douglas was not quite as dilatory as John suggests. He did not get down to writing seriously until August when the series was commissioned. However, there’s no doubt about the deadlines. Time, tide and the BBC wait for no man. Bringing John in gave the whole process an enormous boost.

We laughed a lot. What happened was that I gave him hundreds of pages of my novel,
GiGax.
I can’t remember why I called it that, but I do remember that the guy who created Dungeons and Dragons was called something like it, and I thought I’d invented the name. Anyway, I gave him these hundreds of pages and said, take anything you want. Mine was a rather pretentious book, I suppose, but there were quite a lot of crucial ideas in it and Douglas had this wonderful way of taking the kernel of an idea and turning it around to make it much funnier. He always had a way of putting a gag on the end, whereas my natural inclination was to go forward with the basic idea to try to find a solution rather than a gag. It was in that garage that we jointly came up with the number forty-two and the Scrabble set, which even at the time seemed the most wonderful, striking, simple and hilarious idea.

Apropos of forty-two, by the way, Griff Rhys Jones, a friend since their schooldays, remarks that there was always a precision to Douglas’s writing. Griff is sure that Douglas would have first toyed with the comic potential of eigh-teen, and mulled over the possibilities of thirty-seven. Five always seems a perky little number, but is it funny?

By now forty-two has been the subject of a great deal of arcane speculation; Douglas was always amused and diverted by just how abstruse and inventive some of the explanations could be. It is appreciably more droll than forty-one—though perhaps not such a ribtickler as seventy-eight.

Bizarrely, once you become sensitized to forty-two, you see it everywhere. It seems to come up more often in the National Lottery than it should (no, no—that way, madness lies). There’s a giant office building in the City of London with an illuminated forty-two, lighting up the night sky, across its upper floors. Most appropriately there is a wonderful book called
Powers of Ten
*
 
¹⁰²
which explores the whole universe by starting with, roughly, the human scale (one metre) and working upwards and downwards in powers of ten, from the quark to the greatest known extent of the cosmos. The number of base ten exponents? Forty-two. It says a lot for the power of the idea that it can be invoked without any need for context in the confident expectation that people will get the reference.

Douglas’s background as a frustrated performer was a great help to him in writing the dialogue for
Hitchhiker’s.
Geoffrey Perkins says that it all read very fluently because Douglas would have heard it spoken in his mind before committing it to paper. On the other hand, Geoffrey sometimes had to remind him about consistency, for Douglas, understandably reluctant to abandon a hard-won good bit, would sometimes move lines from one character to another. The whole experience, says Geoffrey, was enjoyable, but not without
angst.

While all this was going on, there had been developments over in Arlington Avenue. Clare was pregnant, and sooner or later she and Jonny would need Jon’s room for the forthcoming child (a Sam, as it turned out). Douglas could not camp on their squashy sofa forever. So when Jon Canter, one of nature’s gentlemen, suggested that they share a flat together, it was timely. Jon had found a flat up a narrow flight of stairs redolent of departed cats in Kingsdown Road, N19, just off the Holloway Road.*
 
¹⁰³
Though this major thoroughfare leads directly into Upper Street in Douglas’s beloved Islington, in the late seventies it was pretty grim—a wasteland of garages, downmarket bargain stores, dodgy-looking minicab companies, unbelievable traffic, and curry houses where for peace of mind it was best not to ask exactly what creature went into the vindaloo. Near the junction with the Seven Sisters Road, another major traffic artery despite the lyrical name, pubs—warehouses full of huge men drinking with Celtic determination—offered detumescent strip shows. Jon recalls that there was nothing erotic within miles of the Holloway Road.

Jon and Douglas moved in to Kingsdown Road in January 1978, in the teeth of a miserably wet winter. The kitchen was so narrow that they could not both be in there simultaneously, and, if they were, they could not get past each other without the kind of compromise alien to both their natures. It was, says Jon, “a bit Desperate Dan-ish. In fact, the flat was a real shithole.”

It was in this unlikely environment that Douglas was to write the novel of
Hitchhiker’s,
but in the winter of 1977–78 that commission would have been inconceivable. Writing the radio scripts and the
Dr. Who
episodes was more than enough. Douglas had only tentatively emerged from the despond of failure and was still quite fragile inside, however much superficially he may sometimes have appeared to be a confident Cambridge graduate. Moreover nobody anticipated that
Hitchhiker’s
would explode in so many directions so quickly. Geoffrey, who has a sharp instinct for such things, reckons that he knew they had something very special by about episode four, but it’s fair to say that by and large the world was taken by surprise.

It’s worth pointing out here that the second radio series—scheduled to start pre-production in August 1979 for transmission beginning the end of January 1980—was if anything still more fraught than the first even though everybody knew by then that they had a mega-success on their hands. Once more the deadlines came excruciatingly close to the wire.

Geoffrey was again the producer. He is now Creative Director of Tiger Aspect, one of the best independent production companies. When interviewing him in his office in London’s Soho for this biography, there were moments when he sighed as he went into a trance of recollected pressure. Deep in his bones, Geoffrey understood that being the producer of any show written by Douglas was a bit like being a rat in a stress experiment of frightening subtlety.

This time Geoffrey allowed plenty of room for authorial dilatoriness by starting the whole process early, the very moment he returned from his summer holidays. It was just as well because things went very slowly, with false starts and scripts going back and forth. By mid-October they had only recorded one episode, but with transmission of six starting at the end of January, at the rate of one per week, Geoffrey thought that, though tight, the schedule was feasible. Surely they had until the middle of March to prepare the last one?

Then David Hatch, now Controller of Radio Four, fired a starshell. You can imagine the scene from one of those naval war movies with Kenneth More—klaxons going whoop, whoop all over Maida Vale, and stiff-upper-lipped chaps saying things like, “What a bore. The balloon has gone up.” David wanted to award
Hitchhiker’s
the ultimate accolade in terms of the BBC: the cover of the
Radio Times.
Despite the magazine’s title, the front cover was seldom devoted to radio; telly had the glamour. (Back in the seventies, before everybody was allowed to publish extended programme information, the
Radio Times
was easily the biggest selling magazine in the country. It’s still huge, with a print run that looks like the population of a country, and an even larger readership.) But as part of his negotiations with the
Radio Times
and the BBC hierarchy, David had agreed to make the second series more of an event by running the episodes consecutively in a single week, an arrangement known in the humid world of broadcast scheduling as “stripping.” This decision, though flattering, suddenly consumed all of Geoffrey’s carefully contrived Douglas fudge factor. The shows took months to write and a week to produce. The race was on.

It is remarkable how polished the final production sounded given its close shaves with disaster. Geoffrey recalls Douglas writing the script with actors actually in the studio:

I can remember being in a taxi going down to the Paris Studio. Douglas had given me the script and I’d read half the penultimate episode, and I’d brought the second half with me to read on the way down, which is only a five or ten minute journey. And I’m getting very excited as we got out of the cab when Douglas said, “Do you realize that this script is now actually too long, and this six or seven minute scene can come out and go into the start of the next episode—so you’ve now got seven minutes of the next episode.

So that was great. Hurrah. But when we got to the studio for the final recording, Douglas must only have written about half the script. We talked, very roughly, about what it was going to be—there was this ruler of the universe, the man in the shack, who was going to be dubbed in. So I booked Jonathan Pryce to be the ruler of the universe, and when he turned up in the studio I said, “I’m very sorry, but the ruler of the universe hasn’t been written yet,” because Douglas is now in the back room typing away on these things which gave you six carbon copies and which looked like toilet paper—sort of rather flimsy, slightly hard toilet paper. That led to the myth of people thinking the scripts had actually been written on toilet paper. Anyway, I said to Jonathan Pryce, “It’s not been written yet—do you mind being another character called Zarniwhoop?” And he said, “Who’s Zarniwhoop?” And I said, “I’m not sure, he seems to be sort of vague—a bit like you in fact.” So he did Zarniwhoop, and I said, “Well, while we’re waiting for the ruler of the universe, do you mind being a tannoy announcement?” This was right at the end of the series on this flight where they’d all been becalmed for hundreds of years waiting for the supply of lemon-scented paper napkins. Jonathan had to do this whole thing about “Return to your seat, return to your seat.” So he did that, and it was about five o’clock, and he said, “I’m really sorry, but I’m due in the theatre”—he was doing something rather major at the time—“and I’ve really got to go.” So I said, “Well, of course, that’s OK.” So by the time Douglas emerged with this bit of script, the only person left to do it was Stephen Moore. So he did it.

When we came to make the programme, we just about managed it. But Paddy Kingsland and I had been up for two nights at the radiophonic workshop. We started episode six and got most of the way through it, and then Paddy said: “I’m really sorry—I’m just hallucinating . . .” But we sort of just about finished it when Lisa [now Geoffrey’s wife] came round with some champagne to celebrate the end of the show. We hadn’t quite finished the editing, but we had no time to put anything behind that last five minutes—no time for music or effects. So I just put wind behind it because it sounded sort of eerie. And a cat. Wind and a cat.

Geoffrey winced as he described the mechanics of getting the last episode done and off to the BBC. His P.A.’s husband had been on standby for hours with his car, but had been obliged to leave. A messenger was waiting.

I just had to listen to the tape for a final check, so we played it. There was a retake that had been in the programme, so we cut it out—Lisa cut the retake out—but the tape wrapped round the capstan head, so the two of us were just cutting bits of tape and sticking them together. It left Maida Vale at about a quarter past ten, and had to get to Broadcasting House by half past ten. I got back to where I was living, only ten minutes away, and turned on the radio fully expecting to hear an announcement saying, we’re very sorry, we cannot bring you the advertised programme. But it got there with two minutes to go.

Douglas was out of all this. After the first two shows I remember he phoned up on the Wednesday night—we were in the studio—just saying, “I thought I’d phone and find out how things were going.” And I said: “It’s a bit frantic, but we sort of got there.” And he said: “Oh good. What did you think of the show last night? I didn’t hear it actually.” We were really, really angry with Douglas—after all that, he fucking didn’t listen to the fucking programme go out!

Meanwhile, however, back on 8 March 1978, at 10:30 in the evening on Radio Four, and with no publicity perceptible to human sense, the first episode of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was broadcast. The BBC’s monitoring service was not sensitive enough to detect an audience for it, so it recorded a listening figure of zero—none at all.

Then something unusual happened. Douglas had naïvely asked Simon Brett some months beforehand what the reviews would be like. Simon had chortled kindly in order to save Douglas the disappointment. “This is
radio,
Douglas. We’ll be lucky to get a mention anywhere.” But the programme
was
reviewed that very week in two of the quality broadsheet papers,
The Times
and the
Observer.
(In the latter, the shrewd Paul Ferris, who loved it and who was particularly taken with the Babel Fish, remarked: “This just might be the most original radio comedy for years . . .”) What’s more, the programme was promoted by the most powerful mechanism known to man, one which marketing people try hardest, and with least success, to manufacture: word of mouth. The first happy listeners were stunned; they told their mates who in turn told
their
mates. Like neutrons hitting nuclei and producing more neutrons, a great demographic chain reaction cascaded through the population. By the second week, most of the students in the country were tuning in. By week three word had got out to the world at large, even as far as publishers in London. Simon Brett says he knew something extraordinary had happened when his squash partner, an engineer, started talking about it. By week four, the production office was receiving an unprecedented twenty to thirty letters a day—one addressed simply to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Megadodo House, Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor. Someone in the Post Office had written “try BBC” on the corner of the letter. You would have had to be living up a pole on a small island not to have heard of the series by week five.