Don't Panic Page 4

  However, on the last day of August 1977, word came down from the BBC hierarchy that the series of six episodes had been commissioned. Simon Brett would not be producing it: he was leaving the BBC to go to London Weekend Television as a producer. He recommended that Geoffrey Perkins, the most junior of the department’s producers, be given the job. And luckily for everybody concerned, he was.

  * See Appendix I.

  6

  RADIO, RADIO

  NARRATOR: On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere miles above the surface of the planet. Only two people on the surface of the planet were aware of it. One was a deaf and dumb lunatic in the Amazon basin who now leapt off a fifty-foot cliff in horror, and the other was Ford Prefect.

  — Pilot radio script.

  One thing that everyone involved in the creation of Hitchhiker’s is clear on is how definite Douglas Adams was on what kind of show it was he wanted: how it would sound, what it would be. (Another thing they are clear on is that he had no idea where it was all going.) But he was sure that it would be full of ideas, full of detail, experimental—a ‘sound collage’, unlike anything done on radio before. Epoch-making. A milestone in radio comedy.

  But first he had to write it.

  This was not to prove as easy as it may sound.

  Douglas Adams’s introduction to the radio scripts book gives an impression of this time, a period that he described as “six months of baths and peanut-butter sandwiches”. Six months spent at his mother’s house in Dorset filling waste-paper baskets with sheets of half-typed paper, of relentless self-editing, of depression. He would leave notes around for himself to find with messages such as:

  If you ever get the chance to do a proper, regular job… take it. This is not an occupation for a healthy, growing lad.

  and underneath those notes, other notes, reminding him:

  This is not written after a bad day. This is written after an average day.

  After producing the pilot, Simon Brett had gone to London Weekend Television, leaving Geoffrey Perkins in control. Perkins, a twenty-five-year-old Oxford graduate, had been rescued from a life in the shipping industry by an invitation to come and work in radio, and was the most junior of the Light Entertainment producers. He knew Douglas vaguely, mainly as an “embarrassment to the BBC at the time”, but was interested enough in the show to make a pitch for it, and, slightly to his surprise, he got it. Possibly because no one else had much idea of what the show was about, nor how to do it.

  Geoffrey himself had no idea how to go about producing Hitchhiker’s, but was relieved to discover, over a meal with Douglas before the second show, that neither of them knew what they were doing. This made things much easier.

  Douglas, for his part, was nervous of changing producers so soon. But if on that second show (their first) they were wary of each other, they quickly discovered that, as far as putting the show together went, their minds worked very much on the same lines, complementing each other, and working well together. They also became good friends.

  Was there anything that Douglas had particularly wanted to say during the first series of Hitchhiker’s? “I just wanted to do stuff I thought was funny. But on the other hand, whatever I find funny is going to be conditioned by what I think about, what my concerns or preoccupations are. You may not set out to make a point, but points probably come across because they tend to be the things that preoccupy you, and therefore find a way into your writing.

  “I wanted to—I say this in the introduction to the script book—I felt you could do a great deal more with sound than I had heard being done of late. The people who were exploring and exploiting where you could go with sound were people in the rock world—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on.

  “I had the idea of scenes of sound. That there would never be a moment at which the alien world would let up, that you would be in it for half an hour. I’m not saying we necessarily achieved that, but I think that what we achieved came about as a result of striving after that.

  “We did spend an awfully long time getting the effects right, and the background atmosphere, and orchestrating all the little effects—the way Marvin spoke, and all that kind of stuff. It was taking so long we were continually having to steal studio time from other shows and pretending we were actually doing far less than we were: there was no way we could justify using that amount of time (time doesn’t actually equal money to the BBC, but it comes close—there’s a complicated but dependent relationship), so what we were doing was completely out of line with what normally happens.

  “As much as anything, we were actually having to invent the process by which we worked, because nobody was doing multi-track recording, electronic effects, and so on. We went about it the wrong way at the beginning, simply because we didn’t know, and then, as we began to understand it, we evolved a way to do it. It wasn’t simply doing it the wrong way and finding the right way, it was more dependent on when we were able to get bits of equipment—we didn’t have any 8-track recorders to begin with, and the final version didn’t come about until we had an 8-track tape recorder. After a while, I took more of a back seat, because everyone knew how to do it, but I was always there, just sticking my oar in and making trouble.”

  Geoffrey Perkins tells a slightly different story, explaining that, “Douglas was thrown out of the director’s cubicle from about halfway through the first series onwards, because he’d get quite excited about putting bits and pieces into scenes. You’d just finish a scene and he would say, ‘I’ve been thinking… we should go back and do it again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think we should have something going Bloobledooble-doobledooblebloobledoobleblob! in the background…’

  “We used to mix the programmes and cut them down, which wasn’t a great way to do it because everything had music and effects behind it. I started off in the early programmes asking what we should cut, and he’d come back with a list of odd words here and there (‘the’s and ‘and’s and ‘but’s and things) and we couldn’t do that. He’d say, ‘But there’s nothing else I want to cut!’ In the end I stopped asking him. So I can come across as the vandal of the programme.”

  Douglas Adams had found a natural foil in Geoffrey Perkins, and the ideal Hitchhiker’s producer. Perkins went on to be a writer-performer in Radio 4’s seminal comedy Radio Active and BBC 2’s KYTV, then became the BBC’s Head of Comedy and now works for the production company Tiger Aspect. He was probably the only Radio 4 producer who would spend two days simply getting a sound effect right, and one of the few people who could bully, exhort and cajole scripts out of Douglas, and get them almost on time.

  The show was something very different. In the past (and today, for that matter) as a rule a radio comedy show is rehearsed in an afternoon, recorded in front of an audience that evening, then edited the following day before being broadcast. Not only was Hitchhiker’s not recorded in front of an audience (as Geoffrey Perkins has pointed out, all they would have seen was an empty stage, a number of actors hiding in cupboards, and some microphone leads), it was put together with almost lapidary detail, using (albeit in a somewhat Heath Robinson fashion) the miracles of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, lots of tape, and scissors.

  Douglas Adams said of Perkins’s role, “As producer on a show of that kind, he was a very crucial and central part of it. When I was writing the script, he was the person I would go and argue with about what I was going to have in it and what I wasn’t. I’d do the script and he’d say, ‘This bit’s good and that bit’s tat.’ He’d come up with casting suggestions. And he’d come up with his own ideas about what to do with bits that weren’t working. Like throw them out. Or suggestions about how I could rewrite. I’d be guided by him, or by the outcome of the argument.

  “One of Geoffrey’s strengths is that he is very good at casting. In some cases, I had very specific ideas about casting, and in other cases I had none. Where I had ideas we’d follow them or argue, and I’d
win or he’d win. When we were in production I’d be there, but at that point it was very much a producer’s show.

  “The producer gives instructions to the actors, and generally if you have anything you want to say, or suggestions or disagreements or points you want to make, then you’d say it to Geoffrey, and he’d decide whether or not to ignore it. Very rarely do you as a writer actually start giving instructions to the actors; it’s protocol. To be honest, I’d sometimes step over it, but you can’t have more than one person in charge. When I wrote the script I was in charge, but when it was made, Geoffrey was in charge, and the final decisions were his, right or wrong. But we rapidly arrived at a working relationship there. Sometimes we’d get very annoyed at each other, and sometimes we’d have a really terrific time—it’s exactly the sort of working relationship you would expect.”

  Perkins says of his involvement with Hitchhiker’s, “It’s really impossible to say how much involvement I had in the story. We used to have meetings and talk grand designs—abortive plots which never quite worked out. It’s a blur of lunches. I changed gerbils to mice because Douglas’s ex-girlfriend kept gerbils…”

  The first episode casting had been done by Douglas with Simon Brett, crucial casting since it involved the roles of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and The Book.

  The making of the series is covered so well by Geoffrey Perkins’s notes in the Original Radio Scripts book that it seems redundant to cover the ground again. (Go out and buy a copy of the book if you want to know what happened*—you’ll get two introductions, lots of notes, and the complete texts of the first two radio series. Well, almost complete. There are bits in this book that aren’t in there. But you’ve already got this book.)

  The BBC were unsure what they had on their hands: a comedy, without a studio audience, to be broadcast in stereo; the first radio science fiction serial since Journey into Space in the 1950s; half an hour of semantic and philosophical jokes about the meaning of life and ear-inserted fish? They did the only decent thing and put it out at 10.30 on Wednesday evenings, when they hoped nobody would be listening, with no pre-publicity, and expected it to uphold Radio 4’s reputation for obscurity.

  They were undoubtedly surprised when it didn’t. After the first episode was broadcast, Douglas went into the BBC to look at the reviews. It was pointed out to him that radio almost never got reviews, and that an unpublicised science fiction comedy series was less likely to get reviews than the shipping forecast. That Sunday, two national newspapers carried favourable reviews of the first show, to the amazement of everybody except Douglas and the listeners.

  The series rapidly began to pick up a following, accumulating an enormous audience chiefly by word of mouth—people who liked it told their friends. Science fiction fans liked it because it was science fiction*; humour fans liked it because it was funny; radio fans got off on the quality of the stereo production; Radiophonics Workshop fans doubtless had a great time**; and most people liked it because it was accessible, fast, and funny.

  By the time the sixth episode had been broadcast, the show had become a cult.

  While the first four episodes were written by Douglas on his own, the last two were not. This came about in the following manner: Douglas had sent off the pilot script for Hitchhiker’s to the Doctor Who script editor earlier in the year, hoping to get a commission out of it to do some scripts. The commission came through; unfortunately, it came through at the same time that the six episodes of Hitchhiker’s were commissioned, which meant that as soon as Douglas Adams had finished the first four episodes of Hitchhiker’s he had to write the four episodes of a Doctor Who story, The Pirate Planet.

  As a result, he was facing deadline problems with the final two episodes of Hitchhiker’s; he knew how Episode Six ended, but he had “run out of words”. In addition, he had just been made a radio producer. He turned to his ex-flatmate, John Lloyd, for help.

  Lloyd remembers: “It’s odd, but Hitchhiker’s was always liked. That’s the funny thing about it. It never had to struggle at all. Douglas struggled to write it, though; it took him about nine months to write the first four episodes. But everyone, from the first day, thought it was great—and the department was very conservative at the time. Anyway, after nine months Douglas was getting desperate, as he’d caught up with the deadline (and passed it, as is his wont) and they’d already started broadcasting. They were already up to programme two or three, and finally Douglas despaired.

  “He rang me up and said, ‘Why don’t you do this with me?’ I think what Douglas had wanted was to prove he was a writer in his own right. In the past he had done all this stuff and people had said, ‘It’s Chapman (or whoever).’ But now he had proved it.

  “He’d just started on the fifth episode when I came in.

  “I’d been working for a couple of years on a silly science fiction book of my own, that had tons and tons of chapters, all unconnected, and I dumped it on his lap and said, ‘Is there anything here you think might make a scene or two?’

  “So we sat in the garage I was using for a study at that time, and wrote the fifth episode together more or less line by line. Things like the ‘three phases of civilisation’ and the Haggunenon Death Flotilla, who evolved into different creatures, we sat down and worked it out word by word. It was actually incredibly quick, although very painstaking. Then I was busy on production for Episode Six, so although he used stuff I wrote for it, he really put the whole thing together.

  “The pressure was fantastic. We were writing it hours before it was due to be recorded. (Later on, in the second series, things got really silly: he was writing during the recording.)

  “Having written the thing, that was more or less it, and it had been great fun. As Douglas said, it was a tremendous relief for him not to have to do it on his own, and we both enjoyed it, and I didn’t think that much about it. It was just a job, and we’d written together before.

  “By the broadcast of the first three or four episodes the place had gone absolutely mad. I think six publishing companies rang up, and four record companies (which is extraordinary with radio—usually by the time you’ve done six series of thirteen episodes, people have just about heard of it). Hitchhiker’s just went whoosh! And Douglas and I were getting on tremendously well, and were tremendously excited. When the first publisher called we went out and bought a bottle of champagne. It was so exciting. We were going to do the book together. And then Douglas had second thoughts.

  “He decided he had to do it on his own—he felt the first four episodes were different in kind, and that the last two, although enjoyable enough, didn’t have the same sense of loneliness and loss and desperation that characterises Hitchhiker’s in a funny way. Like Marvin, who Douglas says is Andrew Marshall, but there is a big chunk of Douglas as well. The thing about Hitchhiker’s is the wonderful bittersweet quality he gets in. The thing is terribly sad at certain points, it really means something. And I think that he felt that the other two episodes were light by comparison.”

  Douglas Adams’s version of these events is essentially the same. “After the Doctor Who episodes I was absolutely wiped out. I knew roughly what I wanted to do in the last two episodes so I asked John if he’d help and collaborate, and we wrote together a bit of the Milliways sequence and the Haggunenon section. And then after that I took over and did the ‘B’ Ark stuff and the prehistoric Earth stuff.”

  The Haggunenon sequence from Episodes Five and Six is omitted from all later versions of the story (replaced by Disaster Area’s stuntship), although it has been used in some of the theatrical adaptations of the show.

  THE CASTING FOR THE RADIO SERIES

  PETER JONES

  “That was very curious. We didn’t know who to cast. I remember saying that it should be a Peter Jonesey voice, and who could we get to do a Peter Jonesey voice? We thought of all sorts of people—Michael Palin, Michael Hordern, all kinds of people. Eventually Simon Brett’s secretary got very annoyed hearing us talking on and on like this an
d not spotting the obvious. She said, ‘What about Peter Jones?’ I thought, ‘Yes, that would be a way of achieving it, wouldn’t it?’ So we asked Peter, he was available, and he did it.

  “Peter was extraordinary. He always affected not to understand what was going on at all. And he managed to transmute his own sense of ‘I don’t know what this is about’ into ‘I don’t understand why this happened,’ which was the keynote of his performance. He’s great to work with, a very talented guy. He’s never had the recognition he should have had. He’s terribly good.

  “He rarely met the other actors at all, because he’d be doing his bits completely separately. It was like getting session musicians in on a multi-track rock album, sitting alone in a studio doing the bass part.”

  STEPHEN MOORE

  “He was Geoffrey Perkins’s suggestion. I had no idea who to suggest for Marvin. A wonderful actor, absolutely brilliant. Not only did he do Marvin so well, but whenever I had a character that I didn’t have enough clues about, or didn’t know how it should be played, we’d say, ‘Let’s give it to Stephen and see what happens.’

  “Stephen would find the character immediately and would make it really excellent. One of my favourite things that he did was the Man in the Shack—I knew what the character said, and why he said it, but I had not the faintest idea of how he would sound or what sort of a voice he would have.”

  MARK WING-DAVEY

  “The thing that made me think of him for Zaphod was a part he had in Glittering Prizes. He played a guy who was a film and television producer who always took advantage of people and was very trendy. He did that so well I thought he would be good for Zaphod.”

  DAVID TATE

  “He was one of the backbones of the series. He can do any voice: he could, if he wanted to, be a very successful actor. He’s deliberately chosen to be just a voice. He’s remarkable. In Hitchhiker’s he played a large number of parts and always got them spot on. He played Eddie, he played the disc jockey ‘broadcasting to intelligent life-forms everywhere’, he played one of the Mice, one of the characters in the ‘B’ Ark. We had him there every week.”