Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  “You can see all the elements in Hitchhiker’s in which it is a bit this or a bit that. I mean, it’s an easy line for people wanting to categorise it in the press to say it is a cross between Monty Python and Doctor Who, and in a sense it is, there are all kinds of elements that go into making it what it is. But at the end of the mixing you have something which is different from anything else in its own peculiar way.

  “But then, everything is like that. Python was a mixture of all kinds of things thrown together to give you something different from anything else. Even the Beatles (let’s get really elevated here) were a mixture of all kinds of elements drawn from other things, mixed together and they created something which was extraordinarily different.

  “Although Hitchhiker’s does not have any real political significance, there is a theme there of the ubiquity of bureaucracy and paranoia rampant throughout the universe. And that is a direct debt to Python, along with the comparative style of ‘individual events, little worlds’. The difference comes with the narrative structure, so the world of Hitchhiker’s is based outside the ‘Real World’ while still co-existing with it. It’s like looking at events through the wrong end of a telescope.”

  — Douglas Adams.

  In 1980 a few American radio stations had already broadcast Hitchhiker’s and National Public Radio was just waiting for its new stereo system to begin operating before it started to broadcast the radio series nationally. Even so, the show was not going to have the same effect on the States that it had had in England through radio, and a new tack was needed.

  The book had done moderately well in hardcover on its release but did not reach the cult status it had in England and that, it was imagined, it had the potential of reaching in America. The radio series was finally broadcast by National Public Radio member stations in March 1981. (National response was so good that the twelve episodes were rebroadcast six months later.)

  (Douglas Adams had paid his first visit to America in January 1981, on completion of the BBC television series. He lived in New York, had a wonderful time (despite contracting an ear infection) and visited Mexico before returning to England where he was to begin working on Life, the Universe and Everything.)

  In many ways, the paperback release of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had a lot in common with the promotion of the cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In order to get people along to Rocky Horror the film company realised that the public had to ‘discover’ it for themselves, there had to be a word-of-mouth campaign among the right sort of people.

  It is peculiar that, even more than favourable reviews or national advertising (neither of which, admittedly, ever hurt sales), the factor that seems to sell most books is word-of-mouth promotion: people reading books and recommending them to friends. It was to be hoped that Hitchhiker’s could have the same kind of impact that some of the ‘campus classics’ of the 60s and 70s had had—books that had built up high sales, and then remained perennial bestsellers. Could it be the next Catcher in the Rye? The next Lord of the Rings, or Dune?

  Hitchhiker’s needed advance word-of-mouth among science fiction fans and—more importantly—among the college crowd and the kind of people who would appreciate its humour. The solution? An advertisement in the 20th August Rolling Stone, giving away 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (“FREE!”) to the first people to write to the “Hyperspace Hitchhiking Club—Earth Div. c/o Pocket Books” by 27th August. This was combined with many “advance reading copies” and “give-away promotions” which were distributed by Pocket in the months before publication to ensure that people would begin to read Hitchhiker’s and that they would, Pocket hoped, tell their friends how much they had enjoyed it.

  Pocket did not skimp on the promotion, however. “England”, they explained in their press release, “the country that gave America the Beatles and Monty Python’s Flying Circus has just exported another zany craze—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Doug Adams, a wild spoof available in October from Pocket Books”.

  The book was released in October, and did reasonably well.

  Douglas was again in America at this time, in Los Angeles, while ABC tried to put together the (“thank heaven, abortive”) American version of the television series.

  “It was like every horror story you have ever heard,” said Douglas. “They weren’t really interested in how good it was going to be, they just wanted to do lots of special effects, and they also wanted not to have to pay for them.”

  The show was to be one of the many British comedy shows that had been turned into American comedy shows.* (There is a long and noble tradition of this, that includes dragging such shows as Steptoe and Son, Fawlty Towers, and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin across the Atlantic, recasting them, rewriting them, and frequently removing whatever it was that happened to make the show funny in the first place.)

  Quite what ABC planned to do with Hitchhiker’s is unknown. The script was to be by other people than Douglas, and was being written and put together by various committees.

  “There were terrible stories coming back after meetings with executives, they’d make remarks like ‘Would an alien be green?’ Eventually everything got abandoned because the first episode’s budget came to $2,200,000. It would have been the most expensive twenty-two minute show ever made. The script was terrible.”

  Douglas’s sole contribution was to “come in and hang around the production office for a week”. As he later pointed out, “It gives you an idea of the crazy proportion of this thing, when you think that they paid me four times as much for that one week as I was paid to write the whole series for radio!”

  It was with the release of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, shortly afterwards, that Douglas first made it onto the US bestseller lists, and, with the American broadcast of the BBC television series, Hitchhiker’s popularity was assured.

  Many people were surprised that something as essentially British as Hitchhiker’s took off in America. Not Douglas Adams.

  “One is told at every level of the entertainment industry that the American audience does not like or understand English humour. We are told that at every level except that of the audience, who, as far as I can see, love it. It’s everybody else, the people whose job it is to tell you what the audiences like; but the people I meet here, and in the US, who are fans, are very much the same type of people.

  “The most commonly heard plea from American audiences is ‘Don’t let them Americanise it! We get all sorts of pabulum over here…!’

  “In terms of sales these days, it is more popular in America than England (it sells twice as many books to four times as many people, so it’s either twice as popular, or half as popular). I think too much is made of the difference between US and UK humour. I don’t think there’s a difference in the way those audiences are treated. Audiences in the US (through no fault of their own) are treated as complete idiots by the people who make programmes. And when you’ve been treated as an idiot for so long you tend to respond that way. But when given something with a bit more substance they tend to breathe a deep sigh of relief and say ‘Thank God for that!’

  “There are things that the British think are as English as roast beef that the Americans think are as American as apple pie. The trick is to write about people. If you write about situations that people recognise then people will respond to it. The humour that doesn’t travel is stuff like the Johnny Carson monologue, for which you needed to know precisely who said what about who that week and how it affected the performance of the LA Rams. If you don’t have the information then it isn’t funny.

  “But anything that relies on how a person works is universally accessible. (How it works in translation is another matter, as in that respect comedy is a fragile plant, and very often I suspect it might not stand up in translation. I don’t know. Hitchhiker’s has been translated into all kinds of languages, and I’ve no idea which ones work and which ones don’t.)”

  As it i
s, Life, the Universe and Everything and Douglas’s subsequent novels have sold amazingly well in the US. The computer game, which was a reasonable hit in the UK, was the number one game in the US for a year, selling over a quarter of a million copies. Throughout the 1990s much of Douglas’s mail, and the greater part of his income, came from America.

  * It is interesting to note that quiz shows tend to cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Such shows as The Price is Right and Hollywood (‘Celebrity’) Squares have all reached the UK from the US.†

  † It is equally interesting to note that, since the first edition of this book, several US sitcoms have been disastrously remade on this side of the Atlantic, while British quiz shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link have been successfully exported to the USA. This suggests that it is the quiz aspect, rather than the made-in-Britain aspect, which is vital for success. We now return you to your book.

  16

  LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING

  ZAPHOD: There’s nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight.

  — Cut from radio series script, Episode Three.

  The first two Hitchhiker’s books were based on material developed for the radio series. When Douglas Adams agreed to write the third book he had sworn he would never write, he took the plot from a storyline he had had “knocking around for ages”.

  He had once suggested it as a Doctor Who story, but Graham Williams thought it was just “too silly”. Later, when there was talk of a Doctor Who film to star Tom Baker, he had written the story as a film outline, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen (see Appendix V). The film never materialised, but later, when talk began of the second Hitchhiker’s television series, Douglas began to look at the Krikkitmen script as a Hitchhiker’s vehicle.

  As things turned out, for reasons explained at length elsewhere, there was not going to be a second television series. However, the process of turning Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen into Life, the Universe and Everything, had begun.

  As far as plots go, the storylines are essentially the same.

  Douglas divided the Doctor Who role between Slartibartfast, Trillian and (for the final sequence) Arthur Dent, although what would have been the last half of the Doctor Who format became the final thirty pages of Life, the Universe and Everything.

  (In the Doctor Who version, after having failed to prevent the Krikkitmen from taking the components of the Wicket Gate, the Doctor arrives with Sarah Jane on Krikkit and spends most of the rest of the story, in classic Doctor Who style, running around, getting captured, escaping, learning vital bits of plot, running around, getting captured, escaping, rescuing Sarah Jane, and so on.)

  Life, the Universe and Everything was different in kind from the other Hitchhiker’s books, in that it was not written serially. Douglas knew what was going to happen next, but this gave him a new problem, that of fitting the Hitchhiker’s characters into the Doctor Who plot. Hitchhiker’s characters are essentially feckless, and instead of, say, saving the universe they would tend instead towards going to a party (Ford), staying cool (Zaphod), looking bewildered (Arthur) or moaning (Marvin); this really left only Trillian, whose personality had never been fully explored (indeed, barely glanced at), as a substitute worldsaver.

  More so, perhaps, than any other part of Douglas’s oeuvre, the creation of Life, the Universe and Everything was fraught with difficulties: “As with everything, I put it off longer than I should have, and then I had a huge domestic crisis which knocked me for six; I couldn’t think of anything funny to save my life; I wanted to jump off cliffs and things like that. It was an emotional episode which I’m not going to go into in any detail…”

  (Although Adams later declined to discuss it, his then girlfriend had left him—as he said in an interview given about that time, “She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds that he was her husband.”)

  As a result of this, Adams wrote a “very bleak” first draft of Life, the Universe and Everything: “I had the first draft of it three-quarters finished and then I had to go and do a major book promotion tour in the US for a month. I was suddenly confronted by the fact that this book was not anything like right at that point. And I had to phone up my publisher and say ‘Look, it’s not finished yet, I’m going to have to rewrite it, but I have to go now’—it was terrible!

  “So I went away and did this tour, feeling terrible about the situation I’d left behind. Then I came back and sat down and wrote; and threw out practically every word of the first draft of Life, the Universe and Everything. Take, for example, in the first draft, the first twenty pages, which were Arthur waking up in his cave, two and a half million years ago. (I think it was just that was where I wanted to be at the time.) I rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote, and at the end of twenty rewrites those thirty pages were the first two lines of the book, and that was it.

  “What is amazing is that the third book ever got written at all, that it got into existence and was as good as it was. But it is patchy, simply because it was written in circumstances I wouldn’t want to build a bookcase under, let alone write a book.

  “But it’s true of each book I’ve written that I’ve hated it, and then written the next book, and was so busy hating the next book I discovered I rather liked the previous book. There are problems in the third book which have to do with the way I handled the plot: since it was actually a plotted story, occasionally you can hear the grinding gears where I had to do something which had to establish a plot point, and at the same time had to be funny, and I’d have to overstretch to make it funny. That’s the real problem: you can sort of hear the tyres screech around a few corners.

  “The struggle between substance and structure reached a pitch with the third book, as it was the one where I had a very detailed plan of the logical structure, and virtually none of that actually got into the book. I always go off at tangents, but whereas before I’d follow the tangents and go on from there, this time I was determined to go back to the plot each time. The tangents remained purely as tangents.

  “So there was a real fight going on between the way I felt I ought to be doing things and the way things naturally end up getting done. That’s why it has a slightly bitchy feeling—I keep yanking it back to where it’s going even though it hasn’t shown any inclination to go there: an awful lot of the explanations in my outline never got anywhere near the book, and every time you get yanked back to the plot you don’t get told what the plot is.

  “I think I must be a very weird person.

  “On the other hand, some of my favourite bits of actual writing are in that book: the Agrajag section, and the flying bit. I didn’t revise any of the flying bit—it was all done first draft (although I cheated slightly, as, being aware I had written the entire sequence straight off, I felt slightly superstitious about it, and left things I could have revised).

  “I wasn’t pleased with the resolution of the Agrajag episode, it was a bit perfunctory, and I should have got that right. Overall I think Life, the Universe and Everything has some of the best and some of the worst Hitchhiker’s writing in it.”

  Geoffrey Perkins suggested to me that Life, the Universe and Everything had a succession of endings (in Chapters 33 and 34) because Douglas had felt that the book wasn’t long enough.

  “No, that’s not true. Actually, it’s one of the longest of the books. It was almost the opposite—when I got the proofs back from Pan I read through and had the niggling feeling there was something wrong. If it had been a small thing wrong I would have spotted it immediately, but it was one of those things that was so big and wrong that it takes you a while to see exactly what it is.

  “What it was was this: there were two chapters missing.

  “Those two had disappeared and actually turned up later in America, by which time the number of pages in the final bound copy had actually been determined. And that is why, in the English edition, the text of the book carries on to the very last
page. There aren’t any ads or anything in the back of the book. But it’s actually quite a long book.

  “No, that stuff wasn’t put in because the book wasn’t long enough, but because there was a bit I wanted to put in that I hadn’t managed to get in anywhere else, which was the story of The Reason. That’s one of my favourite bits, that no one else seems to have responded to very well.

  “When you write you often feel a constant salvage from impending catastrophe. I mean, there’s a constant disastrous bit followed by disastrous bit, and just occasionally you come up with a bit of which you think, ‘Oh, I’ll pat myself on the back for that.’ That bit was one of those. I actually thought it was quite neat.

  “But the problem of the third book is that I have a plot which actually signifies something, and there are momentous events afoot, but I’d created such a feckless bunch of characters that before writing each scene I’d think, ‘Well, OK, who’s involved here?’ and I’d mentally go around each of the characters in my mind explaining to them what was going on, and they would all say, ‘Yeah? Well so what? I don’t want to get involved.’ Either they didn’t want to get involved or they didn’t understand.

  “In the end, Slartibartfast had to become the character who had to get them all to get a move on, and that really wasn’t in his nature either. You see, all the characters are essentially character parts. I had a lot of supporting roles and no main character.”

  ON WRITING HUMOUR

  “Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

  “I find it ludicrously difficult. I try and avoid it if at all possible. The business of buying new pencils assumes gigantic proportions. I have four word processors and spend a lot of time wondering which one to work on. All writers, or most, say they find writing difficult, but most writers I know are surprised at how difficult I find it.