by Neil Gaiman
“To give the effect of them walking through spaceships we got a couple of beer kegs from the BBC club and actually walked around on the beer kegs while watching the screen, so when they’re walking along you get these metallic footsteps instead of the rather unconvincing wooden ones you would have got. It took ages to do, but it paid off.
“I did all the effects for the computer graphics—the film would arrive with nothing except for Peter Jones’s voice. I had to go through it doing all the sound effects and the music tracks as well. All the little beeps and explosions and things, which took ages to do—quite time-consuming. The TV series was interesting to work on, although frankly I preferred the radio series.”
The necessity of getting the Hitchhiker’s scripts to the screen somewhere within the budget was responsible for a certain amount of technical innovation. Alan Bell is proudest of his development of a new special effects process of doing ‘glass shots’.
A glass shot, in cinematic tradition, consists of erecting a tower with a painting done on glass, high in the studio, then filming through it, thus giving the illusion that the glass painting is part of the picture. (The long shot of the Vogon hold in the first episode, for example, was done like this.) It’s a complicated, fiddly, and expensive process.
Bell’s solution was simple: scenes requiring matte shots were filmed or taped, then a photographic blow-up of one frame would be made. From the photos, paintings would be made. The paintings would be photographed as slides, and the previously filmed segment would be matched up and inlaid into the painted shot. This was quicker and easier than painting on glass, and is perhaps best displayed in the ‘pier at Southend’ sequence, when only a small section of the pier was built in the studio. The rest is a perfectly aligned matte painting.
The plot of the television series is nearest to the plot of the two records. From Magrathea the travellers are blown straight to Milliways, and, leaving there in a stolen stuntship, we follow Arthur and Ford to prehistoric Earth, where the series finishes.
The places where the TV Hitchhiker’s succeeded best and failed worst were places where Douglas had written something into the radio series that could not be done on television. The narration sequences are an excellent example: one does not need lengthy narrations on television; however, being stuck with them, Douglas needed to work out how to make them work, and came up with the graphics concept.
As Douglas explained: “What made it work was the fact that it is impossible to transfer radio to television. We had to find creative solutions to problems in a way you wouldn’t have had to if you were writing something similar for television immediately.
“The medium dictates the style of the show, and transferring from one to another means you’re going against the grain the whole time. It’s the point where you go against the grain that you come up with the best bits. The bits that were the easiest to transfer were the least interesting bits of the TV show.
“The idea of readouts from the book itself done in computer graphics form was that kind of thing. So you get little drawings, diagrams, all the words the narrator is saying, plus further expansion—footnotes and little details—all coming out at you from the screen. You can’t possibly take it all in.
“I like the idea of a programme where, when you get to the end of it, you feel you didn’t get it all. There are so many programmes that are half an hour long and at the end of it you’re half an hour further into your life with nothing to show for it. If you didn’t get it all, that’s much more stimulating.
“I wasn’t as pleased with the TV series as I was with the radio series, because I missed the intimacy of the radio work. Television pictures stifle the picturing facilities of the mind. I wanted to step over that problem by packing the screen with so much information that more thought, not less, was provoked by the readers. Sometimes what you see is less exciting than what you envisage.”
CUT TO MODEL SHOT OF THE SHIP.
THE MISSILES ARE ON THE POINT OF HITTING IT WHEN THE SKY EXPLODES WITH BEWILDERING COLOURS AND A MONTAGE OF TOTALLY INCONGRUOUS IMAGES. THESE SHOULD INCLUDE DISTORTED PICTURES OF THE PASSENGERS, STARS, MONKEYS, STAPLING MACHINES, TREES, CHEESE SOUFFLÉS… IN OTHER WORDS, A BRIEF VISION OF MADNESS. INCLUDED SHOULD ALSO BE A SPERM WHALE AND A BOWL OF PETUNIAS. WE GO BACK INSIDE THE BRIDGE.
EVERYTHING IS HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY. THERE ARE A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF MELONS LYING ABOUT.
THERE IS ALSO (THOUGH NO ONE CALLS ATTENTION TO IT) A GOAT WITH A SCALE MODEL OF THE EIFFEL TOWER STRAPPED TO ITS HEAD STANDING ABOUT. THIS GOAT IS NEVER EVER REFERRED TO, BUT IT WILL CONTINUE TO BE WITH THEM FOR MOST OF THE REST OF THE SERIES.
ZAPHOD: (DAZED.) What the photon happened?
— Unused draft for TV series script, Episode Three.
It was all too easy for Douglas to give Zaphod Beeblebrox an extra arm and an extra head during the radio series. No one ever saw him; it was a one-off throwaway line. But if one has the televisual task of transforming this into something that works on the screen one thanks one’s lucky stars that Douglas did not give Beeblebrox five heads, or fifty…
Unable to find a bicephalic actor (or at least, one who could learn his lines), the BBC resorted to Mark Wing-Davey, Zaphod on radio, and built him an animatronic head and an extra arm (mostly stuffed, but occasionally, when all hands needed to be seen to be working, the hand of someone behind him, sticking an extra arm out, as can be seen quite clearly in the Milliways sequence of Episode Five).
ASTONISHINGLY ENOUGH, ONE WALL OF THE BRIDGE APPEARS TO GIVE DIRECTLY OUT ONTO QUITE A LARGE SUNNY PATIO, WITH GRASS, A DECKCHAIR, A TABLE WITH A LARGE BRIGHTLY COLOURED SUNSHADE, EXOTIC FLOWERS AND SO ON. SEATED IN THE DECKCHAIR WITH A DRINK IS AN EXTRAORDINARY LOOKING MAN. HE HAS TWO HEADS. OBVIOUSLY ONE OF THESE IS GOING TO BE A FAKE UNLESS WE CAN FIND AN ACTOR PREPARED TO UNDERGO SOME VERY EXOTIC SURGERY. THE REAL HEAD AND THE FAKE HEAD SHOULD LOOK AS FAR AS POSSIBLE ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL: ANY SHORTCOMINGS IN THE REALISM OF THE FAKE HEAD SHOULD BE MATCHED BY THE MAKE-UP ON THE REAL ONE. THE FAKE SHOULD HAVE AN ARTICULATED MOUTH AND ARTICULATED EYES.
— Unused draft for TV series script, Episode Two.
There was a problem with Zaphod’s head. It looked false, and stuffed, and stuck there. This is not because it was a less than sterling piece of special effects work (although it wasn’t that good), but also because things went wrong, and even when they didn’t, the batteries tended to run down in rehearsals, so by the time a scene was filmed, the head just lolled around expressionlessly. As Douglas Adams said, “It was a very delicate mechanism, and it would work wonderfully for thirty seconds and then break down or get stuck and to get it working properly you’d have to spend an hour taking it apart and putting it back together again, and we never had that hour so we fudged as best we could.”
As Mark Wing-Davey remembers, “The difficulty with the television series for me was Alan Bell (who we all know and love). I don’t think he wanted the original members of the radio show at all, because he wanted the freedom to pick and choose a bit, but we were supposed to have first option so we came in and read for it. They didn’t want any input from me on the way the character would look (I’d visualised him as a blonde beach bum). I quite liked the final design, but I refused to wear the eyepatch—I said, ‘Give the other head the eyepatch, because I’m not having one! It’s hard enough acting with another head, but with one eye as well…*’
“The other head was heavvvvvy. Very heavy. I was wearing armour plating made of fibre glass, and because I wanted to be able to alternate the two right arms I had a special cut-out.
“There was a little switch hidden in the circuitry of my costume which switched the head on and off. We were under such pressure in the studio that occasionally I forgot to switch it on, so I’m acting away and it’s just there. It cost £3,000 by the way—more than me!”
Costume design for the series was primarily the responsibility of Dee Robson, a veteran BBC designer with a penchant for science fiction. It was she who designed Ford Prefect�
�s precisely clashing clothes—based on what could be found in the BBC’s wardrobes, and it was she who gave Zaphod Beeblebrox yet another additional organ: examining the costume worn by Mark Wing-Davey reveals two trouser flies (one zipped, one buttoned) and, Dee’s original costume notes explain, Zaphod has a “double crotch, padded to give effect of two organs”.
As Mark Wing-Davey explained, “I said to wardrobe, you’ve seen Mick Jagger in those tight trousers—make me a pair. So I had these nine inch tubes down the front of the trousers for filming. When we got into the studio Dee came up to me to say she was ‘worried about those… things. I thought they might be a bit obvious, so I’ve cut them down to six inches.’”
One of the most famous costumes, however, was Arthur Dent’s: a dressing gown, over a pair of pyjamas. The dressing gown first appeared in the books following the television series: there is no mention of what Arthur is wearing in the first two books. That Arthur remained in the dressing gown throughout the TV series was Alan Bell’s idea: Douglas had written a sequence on board the Heart of Gold in which the ship designed Arthur a silvery jump-suit. The whole sequence was scrapped, and Alan ensured that Arthur stayed in his dressing gown. As Bell explained, “What was special about Arthur was that he was in a dressing gown. Silver jump-suits are what they wore in Star Wars.”
Alan J. W. Bell is a BBC Light Entertainment director and producer; having worked on such shows as Maigret and Panorama as a film editor, he won a BAFTA award for Terry Jones’s and Michael Palin’s Ripping Yams, a BAFTA nomination for the long-running geriatric comedy Last of the Summer Wine, and a Royal Television Society award for Hitchhikers.
I met him initially in his office at the BBC, which still contains a number of items of Hitchhiker’s memorabilia. It’s a show he is proud of, and has many fond memories of. On his desk was a small plastic fruit machine which he urged me to try. I pulled the handle, but nothing happened; it should have squirted me with water. Alan pointed out to his secretary that it was her job to keep it filled, and we began the interview: this was BBC Light Entertainment.
“The first time I heard of Hitchhiker’s was in a bar somewhere—I was asked if I’d heard it on the radio. I hadn’t, so I listened to it, and I thought it was marvellous, inspired stuff, but there was no way it could be done on TV. It was all in the mind, all in the imagination.
“So about three months later I was asked to do it, and I said that I thought it couldn’t be done, but they said ‘We’re going to do it,’ so that was it. I had to do it.
“Now, I work for Light Entertainment, not Drama (who do Doctor Who and have experience of things like this), and we had no idea what the budgeting would be. All I could do was put down what I thought it would cost, and I was out by thousands of pounds. For the first episode, for example, we had to throw away £10,000 of model shots of spaceships, because they wobbled, and they looked like models. That first episode was about £40,000 over budget, which is vast in TV terms. But it had to be done right. Otherwise it would have been awful.”
The first episode of Hitchhiker’s was made very much as a pilot, and Alan Bell presented it to the heads of department at the BBC. Some of them didn’t like it. They didn’t understand it, nor for that matter did they realise it was meant to be funny. And the cost of the first episode—over £120,000—was about four times as much as an equivalent episode of Doctor Who.
In order to demonstrate the humour of the show, Alan Bell arranged for a laugh track. This was done by assembling about a hundred science fiction fans in the National Film Theatre, playing them the first episode, and taping their reaction. As a warm-up to this a ten minute video was played, featuring Peter Jones reading hastily felt-penned cue cards in a bewildered fashion, assuring the audience that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be in the next episode, and, with the ubiquitous Kevin Davies, demonstrating the use of the headphones.
This is Peter Jones’s only on-screen appearance in the Hitchhiker’s television series, and is included in full on the DVD.
The audience loved the show, laughed on cue and generally had a good time, and while the BBC hierarchy had agreed that the next five episodes should be made (although they were made for more like £40,000 a show—one reason why the sets begin to get a little rudimentary towards the end), it did not insist on a laugh track. This was undoubtedly a Good Thing.
As Bell remembers, “The first episode was only a pilot, but by the time we had got half-way through, they had already commissioned the series, but we still didn’t know the resources that would be required because all we had to go on were the radio scripts.
“When we’d finished it, the Powers That Be thought that the viewers wouldn’t know that it was comedy unless we added a laughter track. So we hired the National Film Theatre and showed it on a big screen and gave all the audience headphones so they could hear the soundtrack nice and clearly, and they laughed all the way through. It did help that that audience was composed of fans…”
While much of the casting was the same on television and radio, there were a few variations.
“I wanted to keep everyone from the radio series, but sometimes people’s voices don’t match their physical appearance.
“For example, I wanted someone for Ford Prefect who looked slightly different, and when I saw Geoffrey McGivern I thought he looked too ordinary. Ford should be human but slightly unnerving, so we looked around for someone else. My secretary* suggested David Dixon. He was great, but I thought we’d change the colour of his eyes and make them a vivid blue, so we got special tinted contact lenses which looked marvellous in real life, but when it came to television the cameras just weren’t sensitive enough to pick up on it—except in the pub scene at the beginning.
“Sandra Dickinson got the part of Trillian after we had interviewed about 200 young ladies for the role. None of them had performed it with the right feelings. The girl had to have a sense of humour. And then Sandra Dickinson came in and read it and made the lines more funny than any other actress who’d done an audition.”
Sandra Dickinson was a surprising choice for Trillian; the character was described in the book as a dark-haired, dark-complexioned English woman; Sandra played it (as indeed she is in real life) as a small blonde American with a squeaky husky voice. As Douglas Adams said of her, “She could have done a perfect ‘English Rose’ voice, and looking back I think perhaps we should have got her to do it. But it was such a relief to find someone who could actually read Trillian’s lines with some humour, and give the character some life, that we just had her do it as herself, and not change a thing.”
Another surprise casting came with Episode Five: Sandra’s husband, Peter Davison, the fifth and blandest Doctor Who. He played the Dish of the Day, a bovine creature which implores diners to eat it. As Alan Bell explains, “Sandra came to me and said that Peter wanted to play a guest part in Hitchhiker’s and she suggested the Dish of the Day. I said, ‘You cannot put Peter Davison in a cow skin!’ but she said, ‘No, really, he wants to do it!’ I said OK, and we booked him. We didn’t pay him star status; he just did it for the fun of it. And he played it very well.”
Early on in the press releases for Hitchhiker’s, great play was made of the fact that they would not be filming in the quarries and gravel pits in which Doctor Who has always travelled to distant planets. And they wouldn’t have any of the plastic rocks that made Star Trek’s alien worlds so strangely unconvincing.
Instead, they would go abroad. Iceland, perhaps. Or Morocco. The Magrathean sequences, one was assured, would be filmed somewhere exotic.
Alan Bell: “Douglas wanted us to film the Magrathean sequences in Iceland. So I looked up the holiday brochures, and it was very cold and there weren’t any hotels of any note, but I had been to Morocco years before and I remembered there was a part of Morocco that was very space-like. We went to look, but we had so much trouble getting through customs—without cameras—and we met a Japanese film crew who said, ‘Don’t come because they deliberately delay you so you’ll
spend more money!’—they’d had all their equipment impounded for three weeks.
“So we ended up in this rather nice clay pit in Cornwall, where we also did the beach scenes: Marvin playing beach ball and Douglas going into the sea.”
Most of the cast and crew have memories of the Cornish clay pit. Some of them have to do with the fact that there were no toilets down there. Others have to do with David Learner, the actor inside Marvin, who, due to the length of time it took to get in and out of the Marvin costume, was abandoned in the clay pit during the occasional rain showers during filming, protected from rust by an umbrella.
Prehistoric Britain was filmed in the Lake District, during a cold snap, which meant that Aubrey Morris (playing the Captain of the ‘B’ Ark, in his bath), and the extras clad in animal skins who played the pre-Golgafrincham humans, were all frozen to the bone, and spent all their time when not on camera bundled up in blankets and drinking tea.
The other interesting location was that of Arthur’s house—discovered by Alan Bell while driving, lost, around Leatherhead. (The gate, which is all one sees knocked down by a bulldozer, was built especially.)
It was while the pub scenes at the beginning were being filmed that the union troubles began for Hitchhiker’s—the precise nature of which no one seems clear on anymore, but which apparently involved a trip to the pub by some members of the cast and crew which might have been recreational, but which the union representatives assumed was professional, and as such they felt they should have been invited, or something.*
The computer room at the end of Episode Four (the Shooty and Bang Bang sequence) was actually filmed on Henley Golf Course. “We wanted somewhere near at hand which we could build and blow up,” Alan Bell remembered. “It was just sufficiently out of London that we could warn the locals that if they heard a bang at two in the morning, don’t pay any attention to it—it’s only us! You can’t see it on the show, but it’s actually raining into the set—it was open at the top.”