Don't Panic Read online

  RICHARD VERNON

  “He’s so funny. He carved himself a niche playing all sorts of grandfatherly elderly types—Slartibartfast in Hitchhiker’s. He’s not actually as old as he appears. I originally wrote that part with John Le Mesurier in mind.”

  SUSAN SHERIDAN

  “It’s funny, Trillian was never that well-rounded a part. Susan never found anything major to do with the role, but that wasn’t her fault, it was my fault. A succession of different people have played Trillian in different ways. It’s a weak part and that’s the best I can say. She was a delight to work with.”

  ROY HUDD

  “He played the original Max Quordlepleen. He had to come into the studio and do his bit all by himself. To this day he still claims he doesn’t know what it was all about…”

  — Douglas Adams.

  * This may prove problematical as the Radio Scripts book is currently out of print.

  * In addition to its other awards, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was placed second in the 1979 Hugo Awards for best dramatic presentation, losing to Superman. The awards were made at the World Science Fiction Convention, held that year in Brighton, England. When the awards announcements were read, the crowd hissed the winner and cheered Hitchhiker’s. Christopher Reeve, collecting the trophy, suggested that the awards had been fixed, whereupon a roar of agreement went up in the hall. It is a safe bet that if a few more Americans had heard of the show then it would have won.

  ** “They talk a lot about ‘the wizardry of the Radiophonics Workshop’ but ninety-five per cent of the first series was natural sound. And I had no idea about sound… at the end of the fourth episode I had the most wonderful explosion—the whole episode built up to it. It sounded magnificent in the studio. Then when it was broadcast the compression hit it and cut most of it out.”— Geoffrey Perkins.

  7

  A SLIGHTLY UNRELIABLE PRODUCER

  ARTHUR: Ford, I don’t know if this sounds like a silly question, but what am I doing here?

  FORD: Well, you know that. I rescued you from the Earth.

  ARTHUR: And what has happened to the Earth?

  FORD: It’s been disintegrated.

  ARTHUR: Has it?

  FORD: Yes, it just boiled away into space.

  ARTHUR: Look. I’m a bit upset about that.

  FORD: Yes, I can understand. But there are plenty more Earths just like it.

  ARTHUR: Are you going to explain that? Or would it save time if I just went mad now?

  FORD: Keep looking at the book.

  ARTHUR: What?

  FORD: “Don’t Panic”.

  ARTHUR: I’m looking.

  FORD: Alright. The universe we exist in is just one of a multiplicity of parallel universes which co-exist in the same space but on different matter wavelengths, and in millions of them the Earth is still alive and throbbing much as you remember—or very similar at least—because every possible variation of the Earth also exists.

  ARTHUR: Variation? I don’t understand. You mean like a world where Hitler won the war?

  FORD: Yes. Or a world in which Shakespeare wrote pornography, made a lot more money and got a knighthood. They all exist. Some of course with only the minutest variations. For instance, one parallel universe must contain a world which is utterly identical to yours except that one small tree somewhere in the Amazon basin has an extra leaf.

  ARTHUR: So one could quite happily live on that world without knowing the difference?

  FORD: Yes, more or less. Of course it wouldn’t be quite like home with that extra leaf…

  ARTHUR: Well, it’s hardly going to notice.

  FORD: No, probably not for a while. It would be a few years before you really became strongly aware that something was off balance somewhere. Then you’d start looking for it and you’d probably end up going mad because you’d never be able to find it.

  ARTHUR: So what do I do?

  FORD: You come along with me and have a good time. You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.

  ARTHUR: I beg your pardon?

  — Pilot radio script.

  From mid-1977 to the end of 1980 it often becomes difficult to disentangle what Douglas Adams was doing when. But about the time that the first Hitchhiker’s radio series was broadcast, which was about the same time that The Pirate Planet was recorded, Douglas was offered a job as a radio producer in Radio 4’s Light Entertainment department. He took the job. As he explained, “I felt I had to do it, because I’d set out to be a freelance writer, had one disaster after another, ended up having to be supported by my parents and so on, and I thought, ‘Well, here is someone offering me a solid job with a regular paycheck, which may not be exactly what I want to do, but I’m not showing any success in doing what I want to do, and this is pretty close to what I want to do; I am in trouble and I will take this job.’ Also John Lloyd and Simon Brett had paved the way for me getting the job offer, and I owed it to them.

  “I started as a radio producer with Hitchhiker’s going out and Doctor Who shortly to go out. Everybody who starts as a radio producer has to start doing Week Ending, so I produced Week Ending for a few weeks. As the most junior member of the department I was getting all the bum jobs, like a programme on the history of practical jokes which involved going out and interviewing Max Bygraves and Des O’Connor. I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ But a lot of people had put themselves out to get me the job, and it was a staff job, not a contract job.”

  According to his contemporaries, Douglas tended to be a slightly unreliable producer (“He tended to think you could go on forever.”), but even so it came as a slight shock to the department when, after six months, he left to become script editor of Doctor Who. This, as Simon Brett commented, put quite a few noses out of joint.

  However, he returned to radio very soon after leaving it for one final production job: the Radio 4 Christmas Pantomime*. It turned out to be the project Douglas most enjoyed from that time. It was called Black Cinderella II Goes East, and was co-produced by John Lloyd. For no particular reason, it was written and cast entirely from ex-Footlights personnel.

  “It was an excuse for such an odd bunch of people—apart from the obvious ones, we had John Cleese playing the Fairy Godperson; Peter Cook playing Prince Disgusting and Rob Buckman playing his brother, Prince Charming; The Goodies—Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie—played the Ugly Sisters; Richard Baker, who used to play piano in Footlights, was the narrator; and John Pardoe MP, who was then Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, played the fairy-tale Liberal Prime Minister (on the grounds that you only get Liberal Prime Ministers in fairy-tales); Jo Kendall played the Wicked Stepmother… It was terrific, but for some reason the BBC and the Radio Times gave it no publicity at all, and it was buried without a trace.”

  After slightly less than six months, Douglas’s first proper job had come to an end.

  * Footnote for Americans, who may not understand how a pantomime can be performed on radio: this is one of those problems you’re just going to have to learn to live with.

  8

  HAVE TARDIS, WILL TRAVEL

  It has already been mentioned that, while Hitchhiker’s was still in the pilot stage, Douglas found himself with time on his hands, during which he needed money and work.

  “So once it looked like I had a finished script I thought ‘Where else can I generate some work?’ I sent the Hitchhiker’s script to the then Doctor Who script editor, Bob Holmes, who thought it was interesting and said, ‘Come in and see me.’ This was just as Bob, who’d been script editor there for a long time, was on the verge of leaving and handing over to Tony Reed. So I met the two of them and Graham Williams, the producer, and talked about ideas. The one I came up with that they thought was promising was The Pirate Planet, so I went away and did a bit of work on it, and they thought it was promising but there was something wrong. So I did more reworking and took it back, and they still thought it was promising but needed more work, and this was going on for weeks, an
d eventually the inevitable happened…”

  The plan had been to do some Doctor Who work as a fill-in until Hitchhiker’s was ready to go into production, and the rest of the Hitchhiker’s scripts needed to be written. As a plan, this was an abysmal failure.

  At the end of August 1977, the six scripts for Hitchhiker’s were commissioned. Within the week, four episodes of Doctor Who were also commissioned. This was the start of a period of non-stop work, confusion and panic that was to last for the next three years.

  The Pirate Planet was a less than successful story, which managed to mix such elements as a telepathic gestalt of yellow-robed psychics, a bionic pirate captain, a planet that ate planets, and a centuries-gone evil queen imprisoned in time stasis, into a bit of a mess. The plot elements had obviously been worked out carefully, then edited down to the point of incomprehensibility by the time they reached the screen. There were Hitchhiker’s in-jokes; there were some appalling performances; there was a murderous robotic parrot. It was teeming with ideas, and might have made a fairly decent six-parter.

  Douglas Adams always had a soft spot for it, as he explained, “In a way I preferred writing the Doctor Who scripts to Hitchhiker’s because I would be made to get the plot straight first. In The Pirate Planet, the plot was much more tightly worked out than was apparent in the final show because it had to be cut back so far in terms of time. But actually getting the mechanics to work at that time I really loved, and felt very frustrated that a lot of that didn’t show in the final thing.”

  The Doctor Who people were impressed enough to offer Douglas a job as script editor. He had only just been given a job as a radio producer. He did not know what to do: “I’d only just taken this job in radio, and it seemed a pretty awful thing to do to leave after six months and go to television. I got very mixed up about that—I didn’t know what to do. Various people gave me conflicting advice—some people said, ‘This is obviously what you must do because it’s much more along the line of what you claim as your strengths,’ and other people said, ‘You can’t desert radio immediately, just like that.’ David Hatch said the latter to me very strongly, because he was head of the department, and he had given me the job.

  “But I did take the job, and the next person to desert the department was David Hatch, which made me feel a little better.”

  Remembering his experiences with The Pirate Planet, Douglas assumed that the writing of the scripts and coming up with the ideas was the responsibility of the writer, and that the script editor’s job was chiefly that of making sure that the scripts arrived and were twenty-five minutes long.

  “Then I discovered that other writers assumed that getting the storyline together was the script editor’s job. So all that year I was continually working out storylines with writers, helping others with scripts, doing substantial rewrites on other scripts and putting yet other scripts into production. All simultaneously.

  “It was a nightmare year—for the four months that I was in control it was terrific: having all these storylines in your head simultaneously. But as soon as you stop actually coping, then it becomes a nightmare. At that time, I was writing the book, script-editing the next series of Doctor Who, there were the stage productions of Hitchhiker’s going on and the records were being made. I was writing the second series of Hitchhiker’s and I was very close to blowing a fuse at the time. I was also doing some radio production with John Lloyd. The work overload was absolutely phenomenal.”

  The overload was also reflected in Douglas’s dissatisfaction with Doctor Who at that time: “The crazy thing about Doctor Who, one of the things that led to my feelings of frustration, was doing twenty-six episodes a year with one producer and one script editor. It’s a workload unlike any other drama series; if you are doing a police series, say, you know what a police car looks like, what the streets look like, what criminals do. With Doctor Who, with every story you have to reinvent totally, but be entirely consistent with what’s gone before. Twenty-six shows, each of which has to be new in some extraordinary way, was a major problem. And there was no money to do it with: in real terms Doctor Who’s budget has been shrinking, but somehow or other you have to deliver the goods. Twenty-six a year is too many. I was going out of my tiny mind.”

  Douglas wrote three Doctor Who stories, although only two were actually screened*. The first was The Pirate Planet. The second was City of Death, co-written with Graham Williams, the producer. The third is the legendary ‘lost’ Doctor Who story, Shada.

  City of Death was broadcast under the departmental pseudonym of ‘David Agnew’, and was written in the following circumstances: “When I was script editor, one of our regular stalwart writers (who we’d left alone as he was a reliable guy) turned out to have been having terrible family problems—his wife had left him and he was in a real turmoil. He’d done his best, but he didn’t have a script that was going to work, and we were in deep trouble. This was Friday, and the producer came to me and said, ‘We’ve got a director coming on Monday, we have to have a new four-episode show by Monday!’ So he took me back to his place, locked me in his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a few days, and there was the script. Because of the peculiar circumstances and Writers’ Guild laws, it meant that it had to go out under the departmental name of David Agnew. It was set in Paris and had all sorts of bizarre things in it, including a guest appearance by John Cleese in the last episode.”

  City of Death, in contrast to Douglas’s first script, was an adult and intelligent script, in which little was redundant or unnecessary. The humour is never forced, and it is obviously being written by a Doctor Who veteran, not a newcomer. In addition to the cameo appearances of John Cleese and Eleanor Bron in the last episode, it contains no less than seven Mona Lisas (all of which are genuine, although six have ‘This is a fake’ written underneath the paint in felt pen), and life on Earth having been created by the explosion of an alien spaceship (something the Doctor must go back in time to prevent being prevented). It also contains a detective. That Douglas always had high regard for this story can be seen from the fact that certain plot elements were reused in Douglas’s first non-Hitchhiker’s novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, as were some elements of Shada, a six-part story that was abandoned half-way through the production because of industrial problems (strikes).

  “Once you get beyond a certain point it becomes more expensive to remount the thing than it is to do the whole production again from the word go. That’s because when you are casting, you’re doing it from who’s available—when you remount, you have to cast the people you’ve already got, and this becomes terribly difficult.”

  Shada was a return to Cambridge for Douglas and the Doctor, featuring a retired Time Lord whose TARDIS was his study, and a book that held the secrets to the Time Lord prison planet. The scripts for Shada (especially in early drafts) show an amusing and intelligent show—although Adams’s script is far more comfortable with the temporal confusion of Professor Chronotis than with the villains, or, indeed, the plot. (The character of Chronotis, the retired Time Lord, is something else that Douglas would resurrect for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.)

  Adams aroused resentment from many of the shows hardcore fans, who criticise his stint as script editor for resulting in a show that was too silly, self-indulgent, and more like a comedy than Doctor Who should be. Tom Baker’s Doctor, even more than Patrick Troughton’s, was a cosmic clown, always ready with a whimsical remark in the face of danger.

  Adams disagreed with this: “I think it’s slightly unfair. In the things I wrote for Doctor Who, there were absurd things that happened in it, and funny things. But I feel that Doctor Who is essentially a drama show, and only secondarily amusing. My aim was to create apparently bizarre situations and then pursue the logic so much that it became real. So on the one hand, someone behaves in an interesting, and apparently outrageous way, and you think at first that it’s funny. Then you realise that they mean it, and that, at least t
o my mind, begins to make it more gripping and terrifying.

  “The trouble is that as soon as you produce scripts with some humour in them, there is a temptation on the part of the people making the show to say, ‘This is a funny bit. Let’s pull out the stops, have fun, and be silly.’ One always knows as soon as someone says that that they are going to spoil it.

  “So those episodes of Doctor Who weren’t best served by that way of doing the shows. I can understand people saying, ‘They weren’t taking it seriously,’ but in writing it I was taking it terribly seriously. It’s just that the way you make something work is to do it for real… I hate the expression ‘tongue-in-cheek’; that means ‘It’s not really funny, but we aren’t going to do it properly.’”

  Douglas worked on Doctor Who for fifteen months. During the course of this time, he wrote the first Hitchhiker’s book, the second radio series, the theatrical adaptation, produced Black Cinderella II Goes East, and acted as script editor, writer and rewrite man for the Doctor. At the end of this time he had, much to his and no doubt everyone else’s surprise, not gone mad, become prone to fits or to throwing himself off tall buildings. By this time, Hitchhiker’s was enough of a success for Douglas to give up the only proper job he had held for more than a few months.

  So he did.

  * Four, if you count Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen. See the chapter on Life, the Universe and Everything for further details.

  9

  H2G2

  Shortly after the Hitchhiker’s radio series first went on the air, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd were approached by New English Library and Pan Books, both prominent English paperback publishers, about doing a book of the series. After lunching with both of them, a deal was agreed with Pan, chiefly because they liked Nick Webb, the editor who approached them*.