by Neil Gaiman
4
GHERKIN-SWALLOWING, WALKING BACKWARDS AND ALL THAT
John Lloyd is probably the most influential producer in British comedy today. His successes include Not the Nine O’Clock News, Black Adder, and Spitting Image. He was also associate producer of the Hitchhiker’s television series, and co-wrote Episodes Five and Six of the first radio series with Douglas Adams. He also co-wrote The Meaning of Liff with Douglas Adams, of which more later.
Lloyd was a member of Footlights in 1973. He had intended to become a barrister, but was infected by show business, and on graduating worked as a freelance writer, and as a producer in BBC Radio Light Entertainment.
He is a phenomenally busy man. I wound up interviewing him for this book at nine o’clock one Monday morning at the Spitting Image studios in London’s Limehouse Docks, squeezed into a crowded schedule while people with urgent problems gestured at him from outside the glass partitions of his office.
“I knew Douglas, although not very well, at university. I was at Trinity, Cambridge, while he was at St John’s, which is the next college along. Douglas did some of the unfunniest sketches ever seen on the Footlights stage—according to the people in Footlights. He’d do very long sketches… there was one about a tree, I remember, and another about a postbox. He’d stand up at these Footlights smokers and harangue the audience with these long, rather wearisome sketches, which didn’t go down at all well in Footlights at that time, which was almost all singing and dancing.
“And so he went off with Martin Smith and Will Adams and they did two absolutely brilliant college revues, packed out, at the same time I was doing the Trinity revues. (Footlights at that time was a bunch of nancy boys—they had this awful club where they’d all go and pretend to be Noel Coward; but when that got knocked down to build a car park, Footlights became more peripatetic, and it began to attract a broader spectrum of people.)
“It was thought—especially by Douglas—that the Adams-Smith-Adams’s revues were much better than Footlights’—and indeed they were. There was one amazingly funny bit in the interval where they told jokes very slowly to drive people out of the audience into the bar.
“I’d met Douglas a few times at parties, but it was only when I’d left university that I used to go and have lots of hamburgers with Douglas in a hamburger bar called Tootsies in Notting Hill, and we got to know each other extraordinarily well. We eventually wound up sharing a flat.
“I was working as a radio producer and Douglas was doing things like writing with Graham Chapman—an absolutely bizarre experience, as they used to get phenomenally drunk. Graham had a room in his house entirely devoted to gin: it was just gin bottles (he later went on the wagon) that lined the walls, and occasionally when I was working in BBC Radio I’d go up there at lunchtime. They’d have a few gins before lunch, then they’d go to the pub and do all the crosswords in every paper. Then they’d get roaring drunk, and usually Graham would take his willy out and put it on the bar… it was quite entertaining.
“After work, I’d come back from the office, and usually Douglas had had a very large number of baths and cups of tea and eaten all the food, and we’d sit around and write in the evenings. There were three of us sharing a house: my girlfriend, Douglas, and me. I was fully employed, but Douglas was struggling rather; he was very poor, and getting broker and broker, and his overdraft was going up and up, and he was getting more and more desperate. We had all these projects: Douglas and Graham had written a treatment for a film of the Guinness Book of Records, which fell through, so Douglas and I started doing it. We did rather well—the Stigwood Organisation liked it, and they invited us to come to Bermuda and discuss it, and we were incredibly excited. It was dreadfully disappointing. We never heard anything more from them, and we never even got paid for it.
“It would have been a science fiction thing, about a race of aliens who were the most aggressive aliens in the whole universe, who somehow got hold of a copy of the Guinness Book of Records and who immediately came down to challenge the world at wrestling and boxing and stamping on people’s knuckles, that kind of thing. And the United Nations (John Cleese was going to be general secretary of the UN, I remember) agreed to compete, but they wanted to do all the silly events, like gherkin-swallowing, walking backwards and all that. So they had a Guinness Book of Records Olympics, and the aliens won all the sensible events, but lost at all the silly things.
“Then we decided to go and live in Roehampton. We were very happy, until we started advertising for a fourth person to share the house, and we had a succession of weird people. There was one very bizarre person—one day we got back from work to find he’d ripped up every carpet in the house (the house was rented from a little old lady) and he’d thrown them out of the window, as he said they were ‘smelly’. The last straw came when we came home to find he’d chain-sawed the front hedge down, because, he said, it was untidy.
“At that time I was producing Week Ending, and I was always trying to get Douglas to produce stuff. At that time, I’d write lots of quickies for all sorts of comedy shows, while Douglas wouldn’t. At the time, I thought he was wrong, I thought you had to be able to do everything which I could, and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I fitted in quite easily, and I got Douglas to write for Week Ending. He wrote a very funny sketch about John Stonehouse, the idea being that he was pretending to be dead all the time, but it just wasn’t right for the show. It was very funny, but wrong.
“Then we went our separate ways. I was a radio producer. He was an unsuccessful writer. Anyway, we remained good friends. But Douglas was at the edge of despair at that time, he was absolutely broke (if he wanted a drink I’d have to buy it for him). He had started applying for jobs in shipping in Hong Kong and so on, as he’d totally given up on being a writer.
“And then Simon Brett came along…”
5
WHEN YOU HITCH UPON A STAR
“1976 was my worst year. I’d decided I was hopeless at writing and I’d never earn any money at it. I felt hopeless and helpless and beached. I was overdrawn and in a bad way.
“In Hitchhiker’s there’s an element of writing myself back up out of that. I was surprised and delighted to find a lot of letters from people in the early days would say, ‘I was terribly depressed and upset until I sat down and read your book. It’s really shown me the way up again.’ I wrote it to do this for myself, and it’s seemed to have the same effect on a lot of other people. I can’t explain it. Perhaps I’ve inadvertently written a self-help book.”
There are a number of people without whom Hitchhiker’s, at least in the form we know it, would never have appeared.
John Lloyd is one; Geoffrey Perkins another. But without doubt, the most important is Simon Brett, who was, in 1976, producer of a Radio 4 comedy programme, The Burkiss Way. Simon Brett deserves more space than can conveniently be given here. He’s been a producer and director on radio and television. He has written for radio and television shows as diverse as Frank Muir Goes Into… and the cult show After Henry. As an author, he is best known for his excellent mysteries, including the series of murder mysteries starring Charles Paris (a lousy actor but a great detective) which, with their accurate and incisive scrutiny of life inside television, radio and theatre in Britain today, should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the environments that Hitchhiker’s comes out of; he has written a number of humour books, and some notable pastiches, including his sequel to Geoffrey Willan’s and Ronald Searles’s Molesworth books.
Brett had met Adams through John Lloyd, at that time a junior radio producer himself, and felt, as he explained to me, that, “Douglas was a talent without a niche. I’d encouraged him to write for Week Ending as he really didn’t have any outlets for his humour, but it wasn’t his thing, it can be a restricting market. Then I started The Burkiss Way for which he did a few sketches—one was the ‘Kamikaze Briefing’, another was a parody of Von Daniken, about the world being created by fluffy kittens in bow ties singing �
�Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’.”
Brett had the wit to see that Douglas needed a show of his own, rather than to try to cram his own strange talent into someone else’s format, and on 4th February 1977 Douglas travelled up from Dorset to see Simon, who wanted to know if he had any ideas for a comedy show.
While Douglas had promoted the idea of a comedy science fiction series to all manner of unimpressed television producers, he had not even thought about it as a radio possibility, feeling that radio was too conservative a medium ever to be interested in science fiction. So, initially, the ideas he suggested to Simon were very conservative. And then…
And then history differs. As far as Douglas remembered, Simon Brett said, “Yes, those ideas are all very well, but what I always wanted to do was a science fiction comedy.” According to Brett it was Douglas who suggested it, and he who agreed. It doesn’t much matter, really. The subject was broached, both were enthusiastic, and Douglas went off to come up with an idea.
The initial idea was one that Douglas had had lying around for a while: “It was about this guy’s house being demolished and then the Earth being demolished for the same reason. I decided to do a series of six shows, each of which would deal with the destruction of the Earth for a completely different reason.
“It was going to be called The Ends of the Earth. It’s still not a bad idea.
“But it was while I was tinkering with the story idea for the first one that I thought, to give the story perspective there really ought to be somebody on Earth who is an alien who knows what’s going on.
“Then I remembered this title I’d thought of while lying in a field in Innsbruck in 1971 and thought, ‘OK, he’s a roving researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ And the more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be a promising idea for a continuing story, as opposed to The Ends of the Earth, which would have been a series of different stories.”
Adams did a three-page outline for the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with an additional page of future plans for the show (as can be seen, almost nothing remains the same from the arrival in the Vogon hold onwards)*. The outline, with the name ‘Aleric B’ crossed out and the last-minute replacement, ‘Arthur Dent’, written in above it, went to the BBC programme development group. Douglas was lucky in having two allies in the group: Simon Brett; and producer John Simmonds, the chief producer, who was, although fairly conservative, a big fan of Douglas’s ‘Kamikaze Briefing’ sketch for The Burkiss Way.
KAMIKAZE
FX WILD FLURRY OF FLAMENCO MUSIC WHICH CONTINUES FOR SOME TIME.
VOICE: Japan 1945
FLAMENCO RESUMES.
Japan!
FLAMENCO MUSIC CONTINUES. WE VAGUELY SEE THE NARRATOR GOING INTO THE BAND AND, FOR INSTANCE, ATTACKING THE PIANO. JAPANESE MUSIC STARTS RELUCTANTLY AND STOPS VERY SOON.
VOICE: Thank you. Japan 1945. The war was moving into its final stage. The Japanese nation was in a desperate situation… I didn’t say stop the music. (HE GOES BACK TO THE BAND AGAIN.) Now look, what is it? Is it the money, come on. (FLAMENCO STARTS AGAIN.) No, flamenco won’t do! What do you mean the chords are easier? Look, we’ve got all these Japanese instruments for you, why don’t you play something on this lot? (QUICK FLAMENCO RIFF ON JAPANESE INSTRUMENTS.) Alright, we’re going to have a chat about this. You lot (characters now on stage) carry on.
SET CONSISTS OF A BENCH IN A BRIEFING ROOM ON WHICH SITS ONE KAMIKAZE PILOT WITH HIS GEAR AND HEADBAND ON. ON THE BENCH ARE LAID OUT THE HEADBANDS OF MANY OTHER PRESUMABLY DECEASED KAMIKAZE PILOTS. A COMMANDER STANDS TO ADDRESS THE ‘MEETING’.
COMM: Now, you all know the purpose of this mission. It is a kamikaze mission. Your sacred task is to destroy the ships of the American fleet in the Pacific. This will involve the deaths of each and every one of you. Including you.
PILOT: Me sir?
COMM: Yes you. You are a kamikaze pilot?
PILOT: Yes sir.
COMM: What are you?
PILOT: A kamikaze pilot sir.
COMM: And what is your function as a kamikaze pilot?
PILOT: To lay down my life for the Emperor sir!
COMM: How many missions have you flown on?
PILOT: Nineteen sir.
COMM: Yes, I have the reports on your previous missions here. (FLIPS THROUGH EACH ONE.) Let’s see. Couldn’t find target, couldn’t find target, got lost, couldn’t find target, forgot to take headband, couldn’t find target, couldn’t find target, headband slipped over eyes, couldn’t find target, came back with headache…
PILOT: Headband too tight sir.
COMM: Vertigo, couldn’t find target, all the rest, couldn’t find target. Now I don’t think you’ve been looking very hard.
PILOT: Yes I have sir, I’ve looked all over the place!
COMM: You see, It’s not actually that difficult bearing in mind that we do have a highly sophisticated reconnaissance unit whose job it is to tell you where to find the targets.
PILOT: Well, it’s not always accurate sir, sometimes one can search for hours and not see a single aircraft carrier.
COMM: Well where exactly have you been looking, for these aircraft carriers?
PILOT: Er, well sir…
COMM: (FLIPPING THROUGH NOTES.)… I mean, I notice for instance that you seem to have more or less ignored the sea. I would have thought that the sea was quite a promising area.
PILOT: Yes sir…
COMM: And that the airspace directly above Tokyo was not. And another thing…
PILOT: Yes sir?
COMM: Skip the victory rolls.
PILOT: Sir, you’re being unfair, I have flown over the sea lots of times. I actually attacked an aircraft carrier once.
COMM: Ah yes, I have the details of your ‘attack’ here. Mission nineteen. Let’s see. Take off 0500 hours, proceeded to target area, nice start. Target spotted 0520 hours, good, climbed to a height of 6000ft, prepared for attack, went into a power dive, and successfully… landed on target.
PILOT: I had to go wee wees sir. Caught short. But I took off again immediately sir. Good job too—one of our lads crashed straight into it. Poor devil didn’t stand a chance.
COMM: What?
PILOT: No sir—and that really got me upset, and I was going to let ‘em really have it—I was going to whip it straight out, fly in low and lob it straight through the dining room porthole—that would have sorted them out.
COMM: You were going to do what?
PILOT: Cut it straight out and let ‘em have it, whee splat right in the middle of their breakfast. They’d have known we meant business then alright sir.
COMM: What were you going to cut straight out and throw into their breakfast?
PILOT: My stomach sir. Oh yes, I’d like to see the expressions on their faces when the great squelchy mass plummeted right into…
COMM: Wait… wait a moment, let me just get this clear in my mind. You were going to cut out…
PILOT: My stomach, yes sir, kamikaze… (DOES HARA-KIRI GESTURE.)
COMM: You were going to cut out your stomach and… throw it at the enemy?
PILOT: Yes sir, straight at them.
COMM: Any particular reason?
PILOT: Die for the Emperor sir.
COMM: And what purpose would that serve?
PILOT: Make the enemy feel guilty sir.
— ‘Kamikaze Briefing’ radio script.
The BBC approved the making of the pilot on 1st March 1977, and by 4th April Douglas had finished the first script: it was essentially the Hitchhiker’s script that we know now—with, a couple of exceptions, the longest and most striking of which is the ‘parallel universes’ speech of Ford’s (see pages 41-43), which gives the gradually eroded rationale for Ford rescuing Arthur in the first place. (Originally, it should be noted, he liked Arthur and wanted to enlist him as a fellow reporter for the Guide; by the time Douglas came to write the computer game, all Ford wanted to do was return Arthur’s towel and get out bef
ore the planet was demolished.) There was also a much longer dialogue between Arthur and Prosser, the Council representative, which was wisely cut, as the style of humour owed more to Monty Python than to Adams himself.
PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn’t you?
ARTHUR: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. Ever thought of going into advertising?
PROSSER: It’s not as if it’s a particularly nice house anyway.
ARTHUR: I happen rather to like it.
PROSSER: Mr Dent, you may choose to scoff at Local Government.
ARTHUR: Me? I wasn’t scoffing.
PROSSER: I said you may choose to scoff at Local Government.
ARTHUR: Alright, maybe I was a bit.
PROSSER: May I continue?
ARTHUR: Yes alright.
PROSSER: You may choose to scoff at Local Government…
ARTHUR: Is this you continuing?
PROSSER: Yes! I said…
ARTHUR: Ah, I’m sorry, it’s just that it sounded more like you saying the same thing again.
PROSSER: Mr Dent!
ARTHUR: Hello? Yes?
PROSSER: Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?
ARTHUR: How much?
PROSSER: None at all.
— Hitchhiker’s pilot radio script.
From April to August there were a number of delays. The pilot episode was made, but after that it was mainly a waiting game—the waiting in question being caused by the upper echelons of the BBC taking Summer holidays, which meant that the committees, bodies and groups who were to give the go-ahead to Hitchhiker’s were unavailable. This had the effect of driving Douglas half-mad, and not paying him any money; it also had the effect of making him send the pilot script to the script editor of Doctor Who, to see if any money might be forthcoming from that direction.