by Neil Gaiman
Douglas Adams acted as consultant on the songs, and when asked about them would play a sweet lullaby on one of his many guitars (Marvin’s song from Life, the Universe and Everything, with a tune by Douglas) maintaining that he always thought they should have released that as a single. If the Life, the Universe and Everything radio series ever gets made listeners may finally get to hear it.
(A fairly complete listing of all the songs used in Hitchhiker’s can be found in the radio scripts book.)
13
OF MICE, AND MEN, AND TIRED TV PRODUCERS
“At first, I wasn’t that interested in doing a visual version of Hitchhiker’s. But while I was working on Doctor Who I began to realise that we have an enormous amount of special effects stuff which is simply not being used as it might be. If it turns out the way I’m beginning to visualise it, I think it could actually look very extraordinary.”
— Douglas Adams, 1979.
“The Hitchhiker’s television series was not a happy production. There was a personality clash between myself and the director. And between the cast and the director. And between the tea lady and the director…”
— Douglas Adams, 1983.
TELEVISION: EPISODE THREE.
MODEL SHOT:
THE HEART OF GOLD SPEEDING THROUGH A MURKY SKY. VERY FEW STARS, AND WHAT STARS THERE ARE ARE DARK AND VAGUE.
WE HEAR WHAT SOUNDS LIKE KISSING, AND THEN A LITTLE RATTLING NOISE. JUST AS WE ARE BEGINNING TO WONDER WHAT IS GOING ON, WE CUT TO TRILLIAN’S CABIN. IT, AND THE OTHERS WE SHALL SEE IN A MOMENT (REDRESSES) IS SMALL AND CRAMPED. IT INCLUDES A BED WHICH APPEARS TO FLOAT IN POSITION.
TRILLIAN IS GIVING HER ATTENTION TO A SMALL MOUSE CAGE WITH A COUPLE OF WHITE MICE IN IT. ONE OF THEM IS RUNNING IN A TREADWHEEL (HENCE THE RATTLING NOISE) AND TRILLIAN IS MAKING SOPPY SUCKING NOISES AT THEM (HENCE THE KISSING NOISE). AFTER A MOMENT OR SO SHE TURNS AWAY FROM THE CAGE. THE BED MOVES TOWARDS HER INVITINGLY.
TRILLIAN: No thanks, I can’t sleep.
SILENTLY A TV SCREEN ABOVE THE BED LIGHTS UP WITH A PICTURE OF A FLOCK OF SHEEP MOVING PAST CAMERA. SHE PUSHES A PANEL NEXT TO IT AND THE PICTURE WINKS OUT AGAIN.
ONE OF THE UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER CONSOLES NEXT TO HER BED LIGHTS UP.
EDDIE: Just trying to help. A little soothing music tuned to your personal Delta rhythms?
MUSIC FLOODS THROUGH THE ROOM. SOMETHING VERY NAUSEATING AND SACCHARINE.
TRILLIAN: No thank you.
THE MUSIC STOPS.
EDDIE: A story? Once upon a time there were three computers—an analogue computer, a digital computer and a sub-meson computer. They all lived happily in a complex three-way interface…
TRILLIAN LEAVES THE ROOM IN IRRITATION.
EDDIE: Wait a minute… I haven’t got to the really tiring bit yet. CUT TO TRILLIAN WALKING DOWN THE DARKENED CORRIDOR. SHE IS GOING TOWARDS THE BRIDGE. SHE PASSES ANOTHER COMPUTER CONSOLE. IT LIGHTS UP.
EDDIE: I can skip right on to the section where they try and find a binary model for the ineluctable modality of the visible. That’s very, very soporific.
TRILLIAN IGNORES THIS AND ENTERS THE DOOR OF THE BRIDGE.
CUT TO THE INTERIOR OF THE BRIDGE. THIS TOO IS IN SEMI-DARKNESS. A COMPUTER CONSOLE LIGHTS UP.
EDDIE: Especially if I tell it in my slow… deep… voice… (HE MATCHES HIS VOICE TO THE DESCRIPTION, AND HIS CONSOLE LIGHTS DIM APPROPRIATELY.)
TRILLIAN: Computer!
EDDIE: (BRIGHTLY AGAIN.) Hi there!
ALL THE LIGHTS ON THE BRIDGE LIGHT UP SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THIS. TRILLIAN WINCES.
TRILLIAN: Just tell me where we are, will you?
CUT TO MODEL SHOT, AS BEFORE, OF THE HEART OF GOLD IN MOTION THROUGH THE DIM SKY.
THIS TIME WE HEAR SNORING. NOT L.E.* SNORING, BUT DRAMA SNORING.
CUT TO ANOTHER SLEEPING CUBICLE.
THIS IS ARTHUR’S.
HE IS FAST ASLEEP. HANGING UP ON ONE WALL OF HIS ROOM ARE HIS CLOTHES, I.E. HIS TROUSERS AND DRESSING GOWN. THE PANEL AGAINST WHICH THEY ARE HANGING LIGHTS UP VERY DIMLY. LINES CRISSCROSS IT. THEY ARE MEASURING HIS CLOTHES. AFTER A FEW MOMENTS, ANOTHER SUIT OF CLOTHES MATERIALISES NEXT TO THEM. THIS IS FAIRLY CONVENTIONAL SCIENCE FICTION GEAR, PROBABLY SILVERY.
CUT TO THE NEXT CUBICLE. FORD PREFECT IS HAVING DIFFICULTY SLEEPING BECAUSE OF ARTHUR SNORING NEXT DOOR.
HE TURNS OVER. BECAUSE THE BED COVERING IS VERY THIN SPACE BLANKET HE IS FRUSTRATED IN HIS ATTEMPT TO WRAP IT ROUND HIS HEAD TO KEEP OUT THE NOISE. HE PICKS UP HIS TOWEL FROM BESIDE HIS BED AND PRESSES THAT AROUND HIS EARS.
CUT TO THE NEXT CUBICLE CABIN. THERE IS SNORING EMANATING FROM HERE TOO.
WE GO CLOSE UP ON ONE OF ZAPHOD’S HEADS. IT IS FAST ASLEEP AND SNORING. THE CAMERA PASSES OVER TO HIS OTHER HEAD WHICH OBVIOUSLY CANNOT SLEEP ON ACCOUNT OF THE SNORING OF THE FIRST HEAD.
QUIETLY, THE DOOR TO HIS CUBICLE SLIDES OPEN. TRILLIAN IS OUTLINED IN THE DOORWAY.
TRILLIAN: Hey, Zaphod?
ZAPHOD: Er, yeah?
TRILLIAN: You know what you came to look for?
ZAPHOD: Yeah?
TRILLIAN: I think we just found it
ZAPHOD SITS UP.
ZAPHOD Hey, what?
TRILLIAN: You called it “the most improbable planet that ever existed”.
INTO OPENING CREDITS.
— Unused draft opening for TV series, Episode Three.
The television version of Hitchhiker’s begins with a computer readout of time remaining until the end of the world, while the sun rises over a quiet English landscape.
The computer printout was faked; so was the English landscape. What the audience saw was imitation computer readout while a light bulb was lifted over a model of a landscape. The ingenuity and the casual faking of something that seems so natural exemplify the six television episodes of Hitchhiker’s.
For many people the first, perhaps the only, exposure to Hitchhiker’s came from the BBC television series. Certainly it was responsible, from its first airing in 1981 on BBC 2, for millions of extra sales of the books.
The idea was first mooted in late 1979, by John Lloyd, Associate Producer of the television series. He explains: “I was in TV at the time of the TV show, and I had done one series of Not the Nine O’Clock News, and I was looking around for something new to do—I didn’t know at that time that NTNOCN was going to be the absurd success that it became, so I was wondering what to do next, and Hitchhiker’s was the obvious thing—it had been a great success on radio, and would obviously be great fun to do visually.
“Douglas and I had always been fascinated by science fiction. Now this was before Star Wars and all that, we’re still back in the time when people said that science fiction would never get anywhere commercially.
“Anyway, I wrote to my head of department saying, ‘There’s this great radio series, it would make great TV, it’s just what I want to do.’ He told me he didn’t know anything about it, so I wrote him a memo saying what Hitchhiker’s had done, and how it had been nominated for a Hugo award, and how it had been repeated more times than any other programme in history, that it had been a stage show and a bestselling book… this huge long list of credits. He said, ‘All right, let’s give it a go,’ and he commissioned the first script, which Douglas wrote.
“It was an extraordinarily good script. Douglas had done what he did earlier with the books, which was to turn the radio series into something which you would never know had been based on a radio show. It used the medium to the fullest. My boss said that it was the best Light Entertainment script he had ever read—he was that excited!
“As I remember, Alan Bell started off as director and I was producer for the first episode, although it shaded into a co-production as I didn’t have much experience with TV budgeting. But then the BBC went and scheduled the second series of Not the Nine O’Clock News on top of the recording of Hitchhiker’s. NTNOCN was a real seven days a week job, and I couldn’t do both.
“I was really angry about it. I felt at the time like the BBC felt that (as NTNOCN was beginni
ng to get successful) they didn’t want the junior producer in the department (me) to have two successes at once. So they used Hitchhiker’s to give someone else some work. I was really furious as I became perforce ‘Associate Producer’. Which meant nothing. I didn’t have any clout at the BBC, being just a junior producer on attachment—theoretically they could have sent me back to radio. I said I’d try to keep an eye on the occasional recording and rehearsal, but frankly I didn’t have the time, and basically I had nothing to do with the TV show.
“Alan Bell made a big point of this in the TV show, as when my credit comes up in the titles it explodes and shoots off into space…*
“Really, the only thing I did on the TV series was writing the original memo, and being in on a few early discussions to get things moving, and the BBC corporate machinations booted me out.”
Lloyd has mixed feelings about the director and producer of the series, Alan J. W. Bell, and on how the television shows eventually turned out.
“I didn’t like working with Alan. He’s one of this breed of TV producers who… I’m not saying he isn’t hardworking, because he is, but he wouldn’t ever run over time, or overspend. He just wanted to get the job done. He’s less interested in the script or the performance than he is in the logistics of how the programme gets made.
“In some of the rehearsals I attended actors were saying the words in the wrong order, and mispronouncing them, and Alan wouldn’t correct them. He was much more interested in the technical side—and technically he knew an awful lot. He was very bold and brave on the technical side. Some of the actual shots in Hitchhiker’s are wonderful.
“But it didn’t work for me as a comic performance, because it wasn’t being directed. They hadn’t got old Perkins there; he’s a real nitty-gritty man, the sort who would spend hours getting one sound effect right, worrying about the script and the attitude and all that, things which Alan would see as trivial and irritating.
“I remember going to the editing of the pilot, and there were some terrible edits, and I told Alan he had to go back and do it again, because it just didn’t work. His attitude was, ‘We haven’t got any time—we’ve got to go on.’
“Personally, I think Hitchhiker’s on TV was not all it could have been. If it had been done properly it would have won all the awards. And the only evidence there is that it was a really original show are the computer graphics. Reading the scripts you’d think, ‘Suddenly television has gone into the 1990s. This is unbelievable!’ But then, most of the performances and filming were nowhere near as good as, say, Doctor Who.
“Alan is not a great original mind. Douglas is.
“To give Alan Bell credit, it was a difficult job to do logistically, and you can’t Belgium with TV the way you can with radio—the way Geoffrey would keep going till the last minute and keep actors hanging around while stuff was written. You can’t do that with TV—there’s a limit. There does have to be a grip on things which Douglas, well… I’ve co-produced things with him on radio, and he does tend to be a bit daffy. He tends to think you can go on forever. I suppose he’s been a bit spoiled.
“Alan did get the thing onto the air, which probably Douglas would never have done—and I can’t say that I would have done, either!”
It was the first time that Douglas had worked with someone on Hitchhiker’s who he felt was less than sympathetic to his ideas and work. He wanted John Lloyd as producer, and he wanted Geoffrey Perkins around: the radio people he knew understood Hitchhiker’s.
This was not to be. Alan Bell was a television person, and had, as he admits, little time for people from radio who attempted to tell him his job.
Geoffrey Perkins explains, “Television people tend to think that radio people don’t know anything, which has an element of truth in it, but they tend to know more about scripts than people in TV ever do. And the TV people tended to think that Douglas didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Now, on radio, when Douglas burbled, one could say, ‘Okay, might try that,’ or, ‘No, shut up.’ But the TV attitude was that he didn’t know what he was talking about. I read the first TV script and I thought it was one of the best scripts I’d ever seen. He’d thought up all that graphics stuff. It was absolutely brilliant.”
Ask people what they remember best of the Hitchhiker’s TV series, and the answer is usually “the computer graphics”. The graphics—sequences apparently from the screen of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide—were incredibly detailed, apparently computer-created animated graphics, full of sight gags and in-jokes, and presumably designed for people with freeze-frame and slow-motion videos, since there was no way one could pick up on the complexities of the graphics sequences in a single watching at normal speed.
Would one have noticed, for example, the cartoons of Douglas Adams himself, posing as a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Advertising Executive, writing hard in the dolphin sequence, and in drag as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings*? Could one have picked up on all the names and phone numbers of some of the best places in the universe to purchase, or dry out from, a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?
One of the phone numbers in the graphics of Episode Six was that of a leading computer magazine who phoned Pearce Studios, responsible for the graphics, to ask which computer it was done on, and whether a flat-screen television was built into the book prop used on the show. The comment beside the phone number was not flattering.
The computer graphics were all done by hand.
In January 1980, animator and science fiction fan Kevin Davies was working for Pearce Studios in Hanwell, West London, when he heard the blipping and bleeping of Star Wars droid R2D2 from the BBC cutting rooms down the corridor. He wandered down to the cutting rooms and met Alan J. W. Bell, at that point engaged in cutting a sequence of Jim’ll Fix It in which a child got to visit the Empire Strikes Back set.
Bell discovered in Davies not only a Hitchhiker’s fan with communicable enthusiasm, but also through Davies, he discovered Pearce Studios, led by Rod Lord, who were commissioned to do the graphics for the TV show (their quote for Episode One was half that of the BBC’s own animation department, while the trial section produced by the BBC’s own animators was so appalling it was unusable).
Pearce Studios, under animator Rod Lord, did not possess a graphics computer. What they did have was animators, who worked in a very computerish style.
WARNING! TECHNICAL BIT.
HOW IT WAS DONE
The sound track of Peter Jones’s voice was broken down for timing, and notes of frame numbers per line of dialogue were taken. Pencil drawings were made, then punched acetate cels were laid on top, and the pictures were traced with pens. The lettering was a combination of dry transfer and set on an IBM typewriter. The artwork (black drawings and lettering on a clear cel) would then be photographically reversed out, to clear letters and drawings on black backgrounds.
These were back lit under an ordinary 16mm film rostrum camera, the colour being added with filter gels. Each line of lettering and each colour required a separate exposure and a separate piece of artwork (the Babel fish sequence, for example, needed about a dozen passes under the camera). The main difference between this animation and the more usual version was that instead of animating a single frame per drawing, several frames at a time were taken to give any moving objects the slightly jerky, staggered feel that people expect from computer graphics.
END OF TECHNICAL BIT.
(The television series was entered into the innovation category at the Golden Rose of Montreux TV Festival. It won absolutely nothing (the Golden Rose went to the US-made Baryshnikov on Broadway, in case anyone is interested) and apparently left foreign audiences confused and reeling. At home it did rather better. In the BAFTA Awards for 1981, Hitchhiker’s received two of the ten awards. Rod Lord gained a BAFTA award for the graphics*, and Michael McCarthy received one for being Sound Supervisor of Hitchhiker’s.)
I asked Paddy Kingsland, responsible for most of the music and sound effects in the T
V series (and the pilot for the radio series, as well as the second radio series) what was so special about the Hitchhiker’s sound effects, and what the differences were between radio sound and TV sound. “I suppose the difference between doing TV and radio was that for radio they’d say, ‘We need The End of the World as a sound effect—go away and do it.’
“On TV The End of the World is composed of hundreds of shots with a close-up of the Vogon ship, then a close-up of screaming crowds, a shot of a laser in space, and so on. You don’t just have one sound effect, you have a bit of this and a bit of that ending with a bang which actually then cuts off because you’re back inside the spaceship again very quickly. The shape is all finished and all you can do is do stuff to fit the pictures that have been done.
“I thought the TV show was good in parts. I thought the computer graphic stuff was very good, very well thought out. And some of the performances were marvellous.
“But inevitably there were things that didn’t hang together too well. It’s a problem you get when you mix together film and TV studios and doing it all to a deadline—there’s no time to sit back and look at the thing and say, ‘Is that all right?’ And if it isn’t, to do it again.
“I don’t think it had the magic of the radio series, because you could see everybody. Like Zaphod’s extra head—that was one of the more spectacular failures of the TV show. A tatty prop can be amusing, but if you don’t have the money to do it right it’s sometimes better not to do it at all.
“I was pleased with the sound effects of the TV series, however. It was the detail that did it. Alan Bell had everybody miked up with radio mikes to start with so that they only got the voices of the people and none of the exterior effects. So we did things like overdubbing all the footsteps in the spaceships—which is never done for British TV.