42

by Peter Gill

  Life on the Road in 1971

  Chapter One of Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe is called On the Road. The same name as Jack Kerouac’s milestone of roadlit. The point being that the road itself was a destination. It was where you could experience ‘pure chance’ and see ‘infinite miles of tarmac’ which were the ‘magic ribbon…to a thousand other worlds’. Hitching was ‘an attitude’. The idealism of hitching was grounded by the need for bread or cash, and especially so in countries where work permits were tricky, which was most, and a major theme is the supply of essentials such as cigarettes, alcohol, dope, and maybe a little food if there should be anything over that day.

  The sub-title was ‘Seeing Europe by skin of your teeth’ and you had reached enamel when your living expenses including smokes were a dollar a day. This is about ten dollars (£6.50) today which will cover you for twenty Rothmans in the UK but not a lot else. Richer hitchers could live in style, even kipping in cheap hotels and generally living the life of a total Sybarite, for $5 a day. Spain was ideal, the book noted cigarettes at six cents a pack, wine at four cents a glass and tapas for six cents apiece. And the tone was nothing if not liberal. Should hitchers feel the Hemingway thing (Ernest, not Wayne) the wise way to enjoy cattle undergoing cruel and unusual deaths was to invest two or even three dollars on having a seat in the shade and so see suffering in comfort.

  Hitching in Europe 1971

  A high spot for the over 40s Seeing the Little Mermaid, Copenhagen

  Antwerp, Belgium Not madly exciting

  Athens Keep away from the cops

  Danish pornography Worth half an hour of anyone’s time

  Earning money in Paris Chalk a huge abstract on the pavement

  Essen, West Germany Hell for hitch-hikers

  Fez, Morocco Don’t miss Fez

  Free beer, food, cigs Amstel Brewery, Amsterdam

  Geneva, Switzerland No place for $2-a-day hitch-hikers

  Greek A language you don’t conquer overnight. Or at all

  Ouzo A drink just right for setting you on your ear

  Price to sell your blood for At least $3/half-litre (Watch they don’t take more)

  Scandinavian women Unbelievable. In the spectrum of legend

  Free sleeps in central Paris Montparnasse cemetery. Convenient for everything

  Spanish wine A pleasant way to kill yourself

  Spetses, Greece Not as messed up as Hydra

  Stedelijk, Amsterdam A mind-bender

  Taverna to Perivoli, Athens Great if you’re with a bird

  Torremolinos, Spain Nothing to distinguish it from Miami

  Vatican City, Rome Imports food, and exports a nebulous hope

  Based on: Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe, Ken Welsh, 1971

  Interested in sex? Torremolinos was one place amongst several you should head, it being ‘inundated with people looking for someone to hook up with for a couple of weeks’. If you wouldn’t or couldn’t commit to that kind of long-term relationship Amsterdam at night was described as one of the great free sights in Europe and where fifteen minutes of ‘mostly indifference’ could be had for four dollars. For another form of recreation the cheapest marijuana was in Ketama in the Rif Mountains where the dope was that Moroccan grass should be haggled down to $50 a kilo. This knowledge was accompanied with sage advice to bulk-buying herbalists that near Hercules’ other pillar hitchers were—and how unfair could life get—being targetted by Spanish border officials for ‘random’ searches.

  Other than advising women not to hitch alone dangers were almost not worthy of much consideration. The greatest risk was of being in a car smash caused by a generous but dangerously nifty lift-donor. Hitch-hikers were not carrying a mountain of mp3 players, phones, cameras, notebook computers, money, plastic or towels (a towel was not included in the guide’s what-to-take list), and so were of quite limited interest to any larcenously-minded locals. But the police in Greece were certainly to be feared, and later editions reported also on just how simple it was to find six years free accommodation in a Turkish prison. As na Trioblóidi (the Troubles) escalated in Northern Ireland a warning was added to the guide counselling hitchers to think twice before going there as travelling could be ‘dangerous’.

  The Best Lunch in the Universe

  The best lunch in the universe happened on Friday. Twenty-four year old Douglas Adams’ attempts at comic writing had been quite comprehensively failing for the worst part of three years and increasingly an unacceptable idea had to be faced—maybe he wasn’t going to make it as a writer; and an unpleasant number—his overdraft—had forced a retreat home to darkest Dorset which, as everyone he really needed to impress knew, was just over a million parsecs away from London. Fortunately someone was interested. His name was Simon Brett, a radio producer who had used and liked a Douglas Adams’ sketch in a zanywackyandpythonesqueinstyle radio show called The Burkiss Way. The Brett Insight, which we need to be thankful for, was that the tyro’s potential lay in writing longer rather than shorter. And so Simon Brett invited Douglas Adams to come up to London on Friday February 4th 1977 for lunch in a Japanese restaurant bringing three radio show ideas.

  One of the ideas sitting at the table, and quite frankly struggling a little with the chop-sticks, was a science fiction comedy series. The original idea had been six stand-alone programs each of which ended the world in an amusing way, for example, being demolished to make space for a new bypass. This idea, Simon Brett liked. Which was quite a surprise to Douglas Adams—for almost three years he had been trying to engage with a brain in BBC TV, and any brain in BBC TV would have been good, regarding his ideas for a science fiction comedy.

  Working on how a first episode might work on radio included choosing a means of feeding the plot, one line of thinking being to have an alien already on earth, and a logical reason for extra-terrestrials to drop by would be when publishers of galactic hitch-hiker’s guides sent their researchers out periodically. From here it was one more leap to begin thinking that this might work rather well as a developing story over six episodes rather than six separate stories.

  And so, in Dorset Douglas Adams produced four sheets* of paper which were to be the first of many millions bearing the words: The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. The document was presented at a meeting with a commissioning group at BBC Radio, a group that, heigh-ho, included Simon Brett, and it came to pass that on March 1st 1977 Douglas Adams received news that his pilot show would be commissioned, and with which tidings of great joy a manual typewriter in darkest Dorset aided by Douglas Adams aided by tea and sandwiches from his mum wrote the first episode of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. It can be examined in the BBC’s Original Radio Scripts and is polished writing that zings along with all the character, humour, style, ideas, voice, humour, special effects, music and much else of what was to come. The pilot script was delivered to Simon Brett on the 4th April. Eight weeks had passed since the best lunch in the universe.

  Picture This

  After completing the pilot script the weeks that followed were to be almost the last when Douglas Adams wasn’t under a deadline to write something. Three months were spent waiting for the pilot show to be made after which a further month passed and then on the first day of August 1977 the life-changing commission arrived asking for five more like this, please, adding that recordings would be starting in October. Picture a happy and relaxed Douglas Adams with the thought bubble above his head thinking ‘plenty of time’. Now picture, if it is possible, a Tardis-shaped bluebottle buzzing straight down into a bowl of delicious Dorset Cream.

  Suddenly, Douglas Adams had acquired a surfeit of success. It happened because during the long wait for news of possible radio work he had approached, most wisely you might think, the BBC’s Doctor Who team with a view to parlaying the triumph of getting a pilot radio script commissioned into further work writing for the venerable television sci-fi medical drama. Nothing succeeding like success this succeeded in spades. Just ahead of the commission for
the five radio scripts a potentially even more important commission had arrived—to write an outline with a view to writing a whole Doctor Who television series. There was no thought of delaying either project. The TV outline needed to be completed by the end of August which Douglas Adams achieved by sacrificing a month of his anticipated schedule on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. The amazing news then arrived that he was now a TV writer and he briefly stepped away from his typewriter to place four new deadlines for the Doctor Who episodes onto the mantelpiece alongside the clock and the five deadlines for radio scripts that he could hear quietly a-ticking—Douglas Adams had gone from no deadlines to ten deadlines in a time that would impress a particularly pacy particle accelerator.

  Forwarding-fast: Douglas Adams’ plan to write Doctor Who and The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and keep to deadlines now ticking loudly enough to bring the council round was more than improbable. Schedules got re-arranged; two of the radio scripts just made it under the wire; and the final Doctor Who scripts were a month over schedule, being finished at the end of January. By then there was no longer the kind of time left that Douglas Adams knew he needed to write the two remaining radio scripts for the already revised recording schedule. His solution was to call in a close friend, the producer John Lloyd (who would later make Spitting Image, Blackadder, QI, and Barclaycard ads). The two had shared accommodation since Cambridge days and had also recently written two episodes of a children’s TV series. Through February the partnership of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd created episodes five and six of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and recording of the final episode went ahead on the last day of February 1978.

  Science Fiction Comedy

  While growing up, the young Douglas Adams had experienced vintage years of science fiction. During the sixties and early seventies British television had made Doctor Who a sci-fi medical series revolving around the transfer of a Casanova meme gene expressed in middle-aged Englishmen able to travel through time and space hoovering up attractive but often strangely breathless women at will for temporary employ as improbably feckless ‘companions’. In the late sixties a major Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey shrank the achievements of the new brave world of manned space travel into the context of an alien universe full of infinite mystery, including the problem of how best to deal with a lip-reading homebrew psycho known as Hal. In books a teenage read-of-passage was Tolkien’s mindworld The Lord of the Rings, where human moralities were explored by an everyman with hairy toes and a hectic life jeopardised at every turn in a longish hunt for mislaid jewellery. And back to television, Star Trek was the way to really go when you needed to intelligently join an argument about whether infinitives could ever be too boldly split.

  Comic writing as precious as even a Douglas Adams’ sketch would commonly have been wiped or lost in an archive. The lightning-fast success of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy has meant that five Douglas Adams’ sketches were kept and are now available within a 3-CD compilation called Douglas Adams at the BBC. These include a brief excerpt of Douglas Adams on Desert Island Discs and some of his Doctor Who work. The sketches are transfused with comedy blood straight from the absurdist artery. This vessel had first been nicked on radio by The Goon Show before being arteriotomised one-handed by Spike Milligan in Q5, and then radically dissected by The Pythons—who reached an absurdist extreme point of some kind with the cheerful blood-bath they called Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Salad Days’.

  The sketch by Douglas Adams called Eric von Contrick is the most remarkable. It is very close to being the progenitor of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Commissioned in 1976 for The Burkiss Way by Simon Brett it may also have been the first professional writing commission for Douglas Adams whose embryonic professional credentials must have been stretched when it was apparently delivered late by…forty two days. Light-bulbs would prove easier to change than spots on this leopard.

  An irony of ironies in Douglas Adams’ legendary specialist career in deadlines (the missing of) is that the acme of the arc of his talents was timing his comedy. Star Wars—the international prototype kilogram of heavyweight blockbuster science fiction—was released in the UK at the end of 1977 with enormous publicity just as The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy was being recorded and produced. A few weeks later at the UK première of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind the lady at the titular head of the queue in the London Odeon for having her ticket torn—and with the royal command of ‘Phil, shotgun front’ getting first dibs on seats proximate to the screen—was also the head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. This was only five days after the monarch and consort had clustered around the Buckingham Palace radio—most likely—to listen to the first episode of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. The new rock and roll was science fiction and, thanks to his incredibly good timing, Douglas Adams was in the band.

  The Eric von Contrick sketch parodies an interview with best-selling-books-about-aliens author, Eric von Daniken. It starts by establishing von Contrick’s cynicism before being ‘interrupted’ by the landing of an alien craft right beside the BBC which is reported live in a parody of the approach of the aliens in Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. The alien leader, Ulom B (heard as a sound effect of repeated ‘B’s) of the Race of your Forefathers from the Galaxy of Smegma demands that Eric von Contrick returns a fluffy kitten from which the human race had descended. Cut into the reportage on Earth’s first visitors is the radio interviewer’s personal agenda as he bitches about the perceived airs and graces acquired when ex-radio colleagues ascend to the sunlit uplands of television. This first Douglas Adams’ comedy science fiction script could have time-warped back from somewhere in any of the first episodes of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.

  And introducing…42

  Numbers are distinctively a part of Douglas Adams’ comedy. Four of the five preserved BBC sketches make use of numbers for humorous effect. One of these is a sketch called The Kamikaze Pilot which was also commissioned at the lunch with Simon Brett which lead to The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. The sketch, co-written with Chris Keightley originally for a 1976 Cambridge revue, features the debriefing of serially unsuccessful Kamikaze pilot, Simpkins (sounding not completely unlike Peter Sellers), on the ‘abominable’ details of each of his nineteen failed suicide missions.

  The first time that Douglas Adams and forty two got it together seems to be in an earlier sketch with the title of Hole in The Wall Club. This had been written in 1974 for a Cambridge revue by Douglas Adams with two other Cambridge students in a team calling themselves Adams-Smith-Adams. The show and the sketch were well-received, making it onto the London stage and TV. These performances were by a portion of the Cambridge Footlights cast, a portion that did not include Douglas Adams, who for a while had been beyond bitter about not having been chosen as a performer. His great and burning ambition at the time had been to become a writer-performer in the exact mould of John Cleese and this was a major blow. Those on stage included Clive Anderson and Griff Rhys Jones, a Welsh schoolmate of Douglas Adams—having together performed in the Scottish Play called Macbeth—and it was to be Griff Rhys Jones who delivered a line of more than usual significance (in the sketch, not the Scottish Play called Macbeth). In 1974 he announced, in a Douglas Adams co-written line that he was about to read: ‘…the minutes of the 42nd meeting of the Crawley and District Paranoid Society’.

  Douglas Adams used forty two for a second time in a sketch called 23 Gunga Din Crescent which is six pints of hyperoxygenated type-A rhesus-positive EPO-elevated Monty Python. A film crew set up at the eponymous address of the title in unremarkable Sawbridgeworth believing ‘a sketch may happen today’. Forced to report on minutiae they are eventually told by the occupier, Mrs Thomas, that their mark, a Mrs Bus-Stop Bass-Peekee-Noin-Kyne Cuttlefish is round at 42 Logical Positivism Avenue. Enthusiasts planning a trip for the weekend need to know that unremarkable Sawbridgeworth has neither a Gunga Din Crescent n
or a Logical Positivism Avenue. The sketch aired on The Burkiss Way two days prior to the lunch with Simon Brett.

  Douglas Adams planned numbers carefully. The numbers he chose for the first six radio episodes are remarkably diverse and are shown in Appendix Z. Some of the world’s funniest integers are meeting for the first time. 53 from the book title 53 More Things to Do In Zero Gravity; 2267,209 in the odds of 2267,209 to one against being picked up in space and of course the phone number of the Islington flat; and the 573 of the 573 committee meetings that had yet failed to invent fire. But, Douglas Adams didn’t use four as either a first or last interesting digit (zero not being interesting) in any of his double-digit or greater numbers deployed prior to forty-two. The probability of this being chance is 3851 to 1. Flukey, maybe—but it looks most improbable given the Adams’ propensity for carefully selecting numbers and taste for forty two. The finger of suspicion must point to the eventual use of the forty two joke being planned around the time that either the pilot episode or possibly the second episode were being written and that the pitch was kept clear of any similar sounding number to heighten the drama for the ultimate moment when Deep Thought said: ‘Forty two.’ Multiple appearances of forty two within the carefully chosen words of Douglas Adams—plum character roles in two sketches prior to playing the lead in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy—looks, I’m switching Oscar Wilde about here, a lot like carefulness.