Wish You Were Here (46 page)

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The backlist sales of Douglas’s books bear witness to the fact that the next generation loves his work too. At the age of nine our daughter could recite chunks from memory. “Those kids will pay my pension,” Douglas once remarked.

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Ben Duncan in a review in
The Times Educational Supplement
said that she occupied that “borderline between beauty and oddity where great women comics occur, she steps forth confidently, a complete original.”

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Fit the Second,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Jubilate Agno
has also been set to music by Benjamin Britten. Religious music can be wonderful, even the exquisite sounds of monks in prickly underwear singing about death, but this piece by Britten is an acquired taste.

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Not an escapee from a Western, but Phil Buscombe, a musician who had been the drummer in Footlights and was then working in
Jesus Christ, Superstar.

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They were expensive until Clive Sinclair’s company made a cool black one. Despite Douglas being satirical about us ape-descendants who still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea, he did later get to know Sir Clive Sinclair who (let’s forget the risible C5 “car”) made some sophisticated electronics available for the first time at affordable prices.

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Not only was Simon an important telly and radio producer, but he has also written many enjoyable crime novels featuring Charles Paris, a so-so actor but a brilliant detective.

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Quoted by James Naughtie interviewing Douglas on BBC Radio Four’s
Book Club,
2 January 2000.

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John Lloyd recalls going to Graham’s house and being asked if he fancied a snog. He declined. John recounts that Graham, when very drunk, once emphasized some conversational point by brandishing his willy on the bar.

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Graham was always rather guilty about giving up medicine. He and his partner had informally adopted—in the sense that they looked after his interests—a young Greek Cypriot boy. Graham had a laboratory in the basement of his house where he tried to educate the boy about medicine. I believe the lad grew up to be a theatrical impresario.

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Once he was a surgeon and once one of those squeaky-voiced androgynous women that the Pythons called Pepperpot Ladies. Later Douglas’s American publishers—desperate for a credential that would mean something to the student market—described him as one of the Python team to the embarrassment of all.

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See
Monty Python Speaks
by David Morgan (Fourth Estate, 1999)—a must for the serious Python buff.

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Don’t Panic
by Neil Gaiman (Titan Books, revised edition 2002).

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“Mixed” is showbiz code for snotty.

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There were seven wardrobes, according to legend. It must have felt like the set of one of Beckett’s absurdist dramas.

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Andrew has affectionate memories of Douglas, but at the time felt that being identified with Marvin was a little over-personal. We are complex creatures, not cartoony caricatures, and—though he knew Douglas was entirely without malice—Andrew was just a bit cheesed off to be carrying this sandwich board advertising his identity around the media world.

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Douglas Adams talks to Danny Danziger, “The Worst of Times,” the
Independent,
11 March 1991.

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“Advantage” may seem an odd word for risking your life and the sacrificing of years of it for the common weal, but in the context of black comedy they do say there is nothing like the armed services for teaching you how to play the system.

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The sketch has been reproduced in
Don’t Panic.
It’s horribly funny. Somehow this particular Kamikaze pilot has been on
nineteen
missions, always finding some extraordinary rationale for not completing the mission. Missing the sea altogether figured at one point.

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The Narrator’s preamble at the very beginning of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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In
The Salmon of Doubt,
p. 67.

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Serious SF fans might recognise this idea from a Gordon Dickson short story, “Computers Don’t Argue” (a 1965 Nebula winner), in which, after a foolish bet, a computer is set the task of solving a logical paradox, and is thus disabled from maintaining the environmental systems in a Martian colony. The paradox is truly ancient, being a version of Epimenides’s old chestnut about all Cretans being liars. (Epimenides was a Cretan.)

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Published by Pocket Essentials, 2001.

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Kingsley Amis,
New Maps of Hell
(Ayer Co. Publishing, 1975).

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Even today if you waggle a hand in front of your face and croak “EX-TERM-IN-ATE! EX-TERM-IN-ATE!” with a voice full of grit, people (Brits anyway) will instantly recognize a bad Dalek impression.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide,
p. 8.

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Don’t Panic,
revised edition, p. 81.

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OK, for the buffs, in order, the Doctors were: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

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The
Daily Telegraph
(16 November 2002) reports that it will now be remade with Paul McGann as the Doctor.

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Sue and I met him on the canal once in 1979 looking very ragged and sweaty in jogging gear. “Every generation will have its characteristic ailments,” he gasped. “Ours will have great cardio-vascular systems, but terminally buggered knees and tendons.”

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A topical quiz in which some funny and fearless people are scurrilous about the preceding week’s events. It sounds a bit naff, but in fact is brilliant. The format makes for variety, and the personal chemistry between the team members is a hoot. They are selected not just for their personalities and quick wits but also for their willingness to elaborate one another’s fantasies. They get away with comments that in a more solemn context would have the libel lawyers reaching for their writs. The programme is still running, and is well worth a listen.

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OK. This is a generalization for which I can only offer “anecdotal evidence” (sociologists’ code for no grant), but it is based on thirty years of observation.

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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
Chapter 29 (Pan Books, 1980).

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Geoffrey Perkins tells a story of how Roy Hudd met Stephen Moore (Marvin) for an interview for the BBC World Service, and told him that he’d just been in this really strange thing with the universe ending in some kind of cabaret act, and that he had to do about five minutes of ad-libbing as well. He had no idea what it was about. Stephen said to him, hmm, that sounds like the thing that I’m in. It was Geoffrey who called the android Marvin by the way. Douglas’s original was Marshall, but it sounded too military somehow.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Radio Scripts,
footnotes to Fit the Fifth.

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Alex Catto in William Mews, Knightsbridge. Years later Alex, by then a venture capitalist, was one of the investors in The Digital Village.

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Powers of Ten
by Philip and Phylis Morrison and Charles and Ray Eames (Scientific American Library, 1982).

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Apropos incontinent moggies, Douglas once remarked that underground car parks all smell of the same thing: impatience.

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There is a story of Ralph being interviewed at the Frankfurt Book Fair by
Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
not a frivolous paper. “When were you last in Frankfurt, Mr. Vernon-Hunt?” asked the earnest young reporter. “Not
in
exactly, old boy,” said Ralph. “Over . . .”

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Publishing is a confidence game. The editor must believe in the author’s work, and transmit that confidence to the rest of the organization that in turn must convey it to the trade. It’s only after the trade has agreed to display the work that the public has a chance of buying it. It is possible to sit in a meeting and see the chain of confidence broken under one’s nose, in which case it must be repaired quickly or else the book will probably fail.

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These define the percentages of the income from the sale of rights that flow through to the author’s account.

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Don’t Panic.

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Despite working for many years in a feral American corporation which prided itself, for some perverse reason, on its killer corporate culture, I have never come across such competitiveness—usually unstated—as that which prevails among the clever Cambridge media set that graduated with Douglas.

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If you haven’t tried him, start at once.
Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions
and
Galapagos
are essential reading.

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Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, 1985.

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For the borderline obsessive fan, I can report that the platform was supported by 22" diameter blue disc-skates from Rolair Systems and that Motivair supplied the compressed air from a 152DS Hydrovane Compressor. Even the
Stage,
the professional thesps’ magazine, said it was technically brilliant, but added that the seating was insufficiently raked.

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This company has nothing to do with the present Original Records, a reggae music specialist.

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He’d been
The Man in Black
for a celebrated Home Service radio series.

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Don’t Panic.

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Critics’ Forum,
Radio Three, broadcast 26 January 1980, with Robert Cushman, Benedict Nightingale, Claire Tomalin and Richard Cork. They loved it.

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Douglas describes his love for Wodehouse in his introduction to the Penguin edition of
Sunset at Blandings.

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“Company for Gertrude” from
The Collected Blandings Short Stories
by P.G. Wodehouse (Penguin Books, 1992).

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Quoted by Frank Muir in his smashing introduction to
The Collected Blandings Short Stories
by P.G. Wodehouse.

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His interview for this book was the easiest to transcribe because he talks in well-rounded sentences without hesitation, an “um” or an “er,” or changes of direction. His band, Damn Right I Got the Blues, would strut their stuff in a subterranean bar at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The group consists of writers and publishers who deep down want to be rock’n’roll heroes, and not media fashionables. They are really quite loud and urgent, and they play with enormous attack. All in all, pretty good. Douglas would occasionally perform with them as a guest artist.

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They were the support band to the dangerously funky Rock-Bottom Remainders with stormin’ Steve King on lead guitar.

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It’s difficult to confirm the time and place via Ligeti. He was a professor at the College of Music in Stockholm at the time, but had been in Vienna (after leaving Budapest in 1956) before going to Darmstadt and he returned to Vienna quite often.

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The hugely influential Goons were the first to understand how much humour could be wrung from special effects. Remember the thunder of the artillery barrage? “What is happening?” asks Eccles. Reply: “They’re shelling peas in the kitchen . . .”

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See Douglas’s introduction to
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the Complete Radio Scripts
(Pan Books, 1985).

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Quoted by Charles Flowers in
Instability Rules
(Wiley, 2002). It is the same source for Einstein’s anonymous accompanist.

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Douglas and Charles Dickens had much in common. They both loved performance, they both made it big when they were only twenty-six, they both toured America getting knackered, they both wrote women characters who were deeply soppy. Dickens, with his prolixity and emotional manipulation, is better on telly than on the page, whereas Douglas is the complete opposite.

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So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
(Pan Books, 1984).

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Douglas’s note on Robbie McIntosh, written in Santa Barbara 1999, from the WholeNote website.

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There was one for Polly Adams’s birthday, a near Saturday anyway, on 24 June 1995, another on 30 March 1996, and 16 November 1996 and, of course, one for Douglas’s forty-second birthday on 12 March 1994. A truly amazing party also—a Farewell to Britain, off to Hollywood debauch—on 10 July 1999. This list, not exhaustive, courtesy of Sue Webb’s addiction to diaries.