Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  And so, armed with only a BBC radio sound engineer, the pair set off for the far corners of the planet. Sometimes they were successful, sometimes not. Either way, the BBC managed to get themselves six wildlife programmes for next to nothing as the zoologist began to realise the benefits of recording for radio and the non-zoologist began to get wet.

  “We were trying to land on an island off the coast of Mauritius called Round Island which, they reckon, has more endangered species per square metre than anywhere else in the world. It’s a tiny little island, very hard to land on because of the swell and there’s no good landing points. We all had our gear wrapped up, but the soundman just had a microphone sticking out and was recording when Douglas fell out of the boat and was being smashed against the rock. There was blood everywhere and it was all quite dramatic. We got the whole thing on tape, but if we’d had a TV crew there we’d have had to dry Douglas off, mop up all the blood and then get him to do it again, and it just wouldn’t have been the same.

  “Initially we were thinking about radio as a second choice but in retrospect it worked much better than television. And they always say about radio you get better pictures. There was an occasion when we were just checking into the lodge on the island of Komodo in Indonesia. We had three chickens with us for food and a Komodo dragon came and grabbed the chickens and ran off. And the sounds of all this, the squawking of the chicken and the three of us chasing after the dragon and the shouting of the guards and scrabbling in the dust, comes across so well on radio. Maybe we’d have got some of it on telly if we’d have had the cameras ready by chance. But I think it’s more impressive when you sit back, eyes closed, and just listen to it and build up your own picture. So I think in retrospect radio worked better than television could have.”

  — Mark Carwardine.

  With Douglas dried off and mopped down, they returned to civilization and the south of France, where Douglas had been exiled for a year by his accountant for tax reasons. There the explorers were to write of their adventures.

  Instead, as the zoologist confesses, they became strenuously involved in, “Lots of sitting in French cafés discussing it. We just spent hours and hours and hours talking it through, listening to the tapes—they were really useful for sorting information. We kept notes about facts and figures and what happened and quotes from people and that kind of thing. But just listening to some of the sounds on the tapes brought back memories of our impressions and a feeling for places rather than the pure facts and figures. We spent hours listening to those, discussing it all, talking it through. Then we sat down and Douglas did most of the writing, with me feeding ideas and information and checking facts while he was sitting at the word processor with me looking over his shoulder.

  “That was basically how it was done. We did it in different ways, it was done in bits, basically, and then put together with a mad period of twenty-four-hour days at the end.”

  In fact, the south of France proved a less than productive environment for the pair—too many distractions, too many cafés to sit in. After four months they had produced a total of one page.

  But, one way or another, the book eventually got written.

  Heinemann published Last Chance to See, a bizarre combination of travelogue and conservation, in October 1990 to good reviews. The Times considered it “descriptive writing of a high order… this is an extremely intelligent book”. The Pan paperback followed thirteen months later.

  Last Chance to See was also made available on CD-ROM by The Voyager Company, providing hundreds of colour stills, interviews and audio essays by Mark Carwardine, and extracts from the radio series to accompany the text. Lazier readers could simply listen to Douglas reading the book. Voyager have also published The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (at least it was complete until Mostly Harmless put in an appearance) as an Expanded Book for use on a Macintosh computer.

  The BBC broadcast the Last Chance to See programmes weekly on Radio 4 between 4th October and 8th November 1989, with repeats later the same week.

  Curiously enough, four of the programmes were re-broadcast the following year, though what happened to the Kakapo and the fruitbat tapes can only be guessed*. Also lost, it seems, was a ten-minute programme called Natural Selection: In Search of the Aye-Aye, broadcast on 1st November 1985, recalling that first expedition.

  But the question remains, after all this, did they do any good? Mark Carwardine thinks so: “When we went to New Zealand to look for the Kakapo—which is this ground-living parrot which can’t fly, but it’s forgotten that it can’t fly; it jumps out of trees and just lands on the ground with a thud. It’s down to roughly the last forty to forty-five birds, that’s all that’s surviving and people had sort of half given up in New Zealand. There were a few dedicated scientists, but the powers-that-be weren’t really putting enough resources into it and the scientists were having a hard time getting what they needed to save the bird from extinction. When we went there, for some reason, our visit got a lot of interest and there was a lot of publicity. And one thing led to another over the weeks we were there and the bird was suddenly put as top priority and more resources were made available to help it. So that was good.

  “In other parts of the world where the book’s been published it’s really hard to say. My general view is that if you can aim a book like Last Chance to See at people who wouldn’t normally buy a wildlife book and get a radio series out to people who wouldn’t normally listen to one, then you’re reaching a completely different audience, and if you can capture just one per cent of them then it’s doing some good. The more people you can make aware of the problems the wildlife’s facing and what’s being done about it and what needs to be done, the better. From that point of view I think it probably has done some good.”

  The captured chickens on Komodo might have had other ideas.

  * Even more curiously, five further programmes, also called Last Chance to See, were broadcast on Radio 4 in May 1997, which proved to be simply Douglas reading extracts from the book.

  26

  ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS, HAPPENS

  It goes something like this: after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is completed it, well, isn’t, not really. There are too many loose ends left dangling out there in hyper-space that need tying together. So Douglas Adams is locked into a room and told not to come out until he has completed the fourth and absolutely final book in the trilogy. All those dangling plot threads have to be clipped and tied off, there has to be no going back, ever, at all, not even slightly.

  So, after So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, wherein God’s Final Message to His Creation is revealed and Marvin at last relieves the pain in all the diodes down his left side by finally dying, things were supposed to have been wrapped up neatly and conclusively.

  But then…

  Anything that happens, happens.

  Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

  Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

  It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

  — Preamble to Mostly Harmless.

  Then there was Mostly Harmless.

  After Douglas’s travels undertaken for Last Chance to See, his outlook on the world and its mercurial workings were altered irrevocably. This is hardly surprising given the staggering vista those expeditions had opened to the author. Adams took this new perspective, and naturally began writing it into his books.

  And there were also those tantalisingly unanswered questions lingering from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, such as:

  What was to become of Arthur Dent and his new-found love, Fenchurch?

  What had become of Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian, the other occupants of the Heart of Gold?

  What was to become of that most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
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  And, perhaps most importantly, could Marvin really be dead?

  There is a positive answer to at least one of these questions. But, in order that some sense of mystery remain to those who have not read Mostly Harmless, it won’t be revealed which question this answer relates to until the end of this chapter.

  1992 was bookended by Hitchhiker’s activity. At the beginning of the year the BBC finally issued the TV series on video, having previously been prevented by the uncertain contractual situation between Douglas and the movie moguls in Hollywood, to whom he had sold the film rights. To recoup these rights cost Douglas something in the region of £200,000, with a bunch of other catch-22 clauses thrown in for good—or bad—measure.

  The original series was released on video in a two-volume set, eleven years after its initial transmission. The second volume even contained ‘previously unseen material’, a few minutes that were cut to make the programmes fit their time-slot. The BBC also managed to re-master the mono soundtrack into stereo. And on radio the BBC re-broadcast the second Hitchhiker’s series.

  At the end of the year came Mostly Harmless, fifth in the “increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy”. While many fans may have been disturbed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish’s lack of science fiction—it was, after all, a love story, kind of—Mostly Harmless has a whole truck-load of SF. And there’s the occasional passage you just know could not have been written by Douglas prior to his ecological jaunt around the world.

  It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.

  The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was where they came from and where they went to, which appeared to be, simply, nowhere.

  — Mostly Harmless.

  There’s also some bizarre physics and temporal paradoxes that may, or may not, have come about since the Earth, or what we popularly believe to be the Earth, was destroyed by the Vogons way back when.

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well-established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.

  — Mostly Harmless.

  Mostly Harmless delves into that decidedly murky pool of parallel universes, so you’re never entirely sure whether the Arthur Dent featured here is in fact the same Arthur Dent as popped up elsewhere. After all, there’s an astro-physicist called Trillian in the stars and also a thrusting young TV reporter called Tricia McMillan, and they may be related, in some way or other. And the TV reporter, who once met an extra-terrestrial called Zaphod at a party in Islington but didn’t go with him, is apparently a TV reporter on Earth. At least an Earth, although which one is anybody’s guess. This Earth hasn’t been destroyed, or if it has it is showing a remarkable reluctance to disappear altogether.

  Meanwhile, aside from tackling such weighty SF/cosmological/scientific questions as parallel universes, there’s a little astrology, plus some aliens called Grebulons. The Grebulons are currently stationed on the recently discovered tenth planet in the Solar System named, after nothing much in particular, Rupert*. The Grebulons, who set out to wreak havoc or something, met with a slight accident courtesy of a meteor storm on the way and have since entirely forgotten what it was that they were supposed to do when they got wherever it was they were meant to be going. So they watch TV instead.

  In the meantime, Arthur, having singularly failed to find the Earth, or at least an Earth that remotely resembles the one we still presume the Vogons to have blown up, settles on a pleasant little planet after his ship crashlands and he is the only survivor. There he becomes the Sandwich Maker and is reasonably happy. Reasonably happy, that is, for a man who has managed to lose not only his planet but also, since then, the love of his life, Fenchurch, in an accident involving Improbability Drive, however improbable that may seem. But Arthur manages to remain stoical throughout since he knows he can’t die until he meets the hapless Agrajag on the anarchically named Stavromula Beta, as he discovered during the unfolding plot of Life, the Universe and Everything. And yes, if nothing else, this is a story that does manage to resolve itself.

  Elsewhere, Ford is having huge problems with the new owners of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, InfiniDim Enterprises. They are not only no fun to be with at parties, but are also, horror upon horror, in the process of replacing the Guide with the Guide Mark II, which comes in a box on which is printed, in large, unfriendly letters, the word PANIC. Ford, unable to go to a party, is understandably not at all happy. And the more he learns of InfiniDim Enterprises, the less happy he is. He engages the services of a mechanical friend called Colin and attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery—that is, why there are no parties or even drink at the Hitchhiker’s offices anymore—by leaping out of the building a lot and eventually going off in search of Arthur.

  While all that is happening, Arthur discovers, to his shock, that he has become a father. His daughter has the unlikely name of Random, and is generally surly and bad-tempered and has a mother called Trillian. And, if you’re wondering, no they didn’t, it was all down to DNA sampling and stuff like that. Anyway, Random is definitely not the sort of person you want to lend a watch to and Arthur is a little taken aback when his peaceful existence as Sandwich Maker is interrupted by the arrival of Trillian, who dumps their daughter on him and disappears into the stratosphere once again. Arthur loses happiness and gains responsibility. He isn’t happy.

  All this goes on between the covers of Mostly Harmless, which contains only mentions of Zaphod Beeblebrox and not a single appearance.

  Oh yes, and if you are still wondering, and haven’t bought Mostly Harmless yet—and shame on you if you haven’t—yes, Marvin really is dead and doesn’t appear in the book at all. Of such exclusions are great tragedies made.

  * In Germany the book was entitled Einmal Rupert und Zuruck—‘Round Trip to Rupert’.

  27

  GUIDES TO THE GUIDE

  In today’s world of electronic press kits, DVDs and CD-ROMs, every film and TV series produced seems to be accompanied by a ‘Making of’ documentary, whether anybody would actually be interested in how the thing was made or not. (Ironically, sometimes the ‘Making of’ is actually better than its subject.)

  When the TV series of Hitchhiker’s was in production in 1980, such an extravagance was unheard of, but fortunately Kevin Davies had the foresight to record much of the behind-the-scenes action on tape, just in case the BBC should consider producing a ‘Making of’ documentary at some point in the future.

  Thirteen years later, the BBC decided that the time was exactly right to produce a documentary entitled The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  Strictly speaking, Kevin Davies’s job on the TV series was as an animator, working under Rod Lord at Pearce Studios. But being a huge fan of science fiction in general and Hitchhiker’s in particular, he took every opportunity to visit the set, where he was allowed to wander around, laden down with a domestic video uni
t. This being 1980, long before the invention of the term ‘palmcorder’, Kevin’s equipment consisted of a bulky camera attached by a cable to a heavy recording unit, slung over his shoulder like Ford Prefect’s satchel. His ubiquity on set actually earned him a couple of spoof credits in the end titles—as ‘Mouse Trainer’ and ‘Bath Supervisor’.

  When the BBC planned the video release of the Hitchhiker’s TV series in 1992, Kevin suggested to them that some of his archive footage could be included as a little ten-minute ‘Making of’ piece. The corporation decided that a full-length documentary would be a better proposal, but only if the fans wanted it, so initial copies of the Hitchhiker’s videos carried a caption asking purchasers to write in if they would be interested in purchasing a Making of Hitchhiker’s video. Apparently enough did.

  Kevin was appointed director on the recommendation of John Lloyd* and, under the producer’s hand of Alan J. W. Bell, wrote and directed a documentary which not only celebrated Hitchhiker’s but also became—to some extent—part of the canon.

  The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins with Arthur Dent being dropped off back on Earth after hitching a lift on a passing spaceship (to the delight of SF fans, this was shown to be the Liberator from Blake’s 7, which was being chased by a familiar-looking police box!). He returns home, where he finds a pile of junk mail (as in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish) and a copy of that indispensable electronic companion, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is on the screen of the Guide that Arthur—and the viewers—see the documentary about how the TV series was made.