by Neil Gaiman
32
SHADA REDUX
“Douglas Adams brought to Doctor Who something completely useless, he brought the revelation of what Doctor Who would look like if it was written by a genius… Well, there just aren’t that many geniuses about…”
— Stephen Moffat.
One might assume that Douglas’s contributions to Doctor Who would fade away as a footnote, part of his early period of frantic work before Hitchhiker’s took off. Indeed this book has very helpfully talked about them already.*
However, good ideas are rarely left unused for long and just as Douglas had folded several plot elements from his unfinished Doctor Who story Shada into Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the BBC were also looking for ways to utilize the existing footage.
In 1983 the corporation came unstuck during pre-production of their 20th anniversary special of Doctor Who, The Five Doctors (prosaically labeled so as to advertize that the story would feature all five “regenerations” of the character). Actor Tom Baker, having initially agreed to appear, later backed out of the project. Faced with the prospect of having to change the name to The Four Doctors, Sorry, the producer realized that they had some unused footage of Baker in the vaults and promptly spliced a small portion of Shada into the new show, trapping the Fourth Doctor and Romana in a special effect wrapped up in techno-babble. With the additional use of a waxwork dummy at the publicity photo-shoot the anniversary awkwardness was successfully avoided.
Nine years later, the commercial arm of the BBC had more success bringing Baker back to the show, albeit not in character. They edited together all the existing Shada footage with new material of the actor wandering around the Museum of the Moving Image, putting the willies up the exhibits and explaining all the tricky holes in the narrative left by the unfilmed sections. This was released on video alongside—in the UK at least—a copy of Douglas’s script.
Which should have seen Shada finally put to bed as a story. But it didn’t.
Big Finish is a company set up in 1996 by Jason Haigh-Ellery to produce audio dramas, selling them on CD or via download. Their most successful product range is a monthly series of officially licensed Doctor Who plays. Haigh-Ellery had made plans for an audio adaptation of Shada from very early on in the company’s formation, but it was when BBCi (as the website of the BBC was known at that time) announced plans to produce new, streamed media for the Doctor Who site that the two companies ended up joining forces and a new version of Shada was commissioned. Again, it was hoped that Tom Baker may appear, but the part of the Doctor eventually went to Paul McGann, at that time the actor most recently associated with the role on TV.
Gary Russell, a Big Finish producer and writer, was charged with the task of developing a script. What he produced was based heavily on the original scripts but with a few time edits, alterations to make the story more suited to the audio medium and a brand new prologue that sold the idea of a change of Doctor.
A splendid cast was gathered. Lalla Ward returned from the original production as Romana, the Doctor’s companion, and John Leeson once more found himself inhabiting the cramped confines of K-9, the Doctor’s pedantic robot dog. The supporting cast featured such luminaries as James Fox (star of The Remains of the Day and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance) as the somewhat dotty Professor Chronotis, lauded voice actor (and onetime Spanish waiter) Andrew Sachs as the villainous Skagra, Sean Biggerstaff (Oliver Wood in the first Harry Potter film) made a youthful Chris Parsons and Susannah Harker became Claire Keightley. Nicholas Pegg, director of the production, commented on the BBC website that “a bad director will fritter away the rehearsal process trying to coax miscast actors into doing things they aren’t comfortable with, whereas a good director takes a bit of time to cast the right people in the first place. That, at least, is what I try to do!”
The adaptation was recorded over four days at the Christchurch Studios in Bristol, miles away from the punts and spires of Cambridge. Two versions were created, one for streaming on the BBC website with additional, limited, animation by artist Lee Sullivan and one expanded version to be released by Big Finish on a double CD.
The first episode was launched on 2nd May 2003 as part of the fortieth anniversary celebrations for Doctor Who, with each subsequent episode being released weekly thereafter. The CD went on sale in December of that year, giving listeners a chance to hear the expanded version without all of the incessant buffering hiccups that went hand in hand with web streaming for those without high-speed connections.
Despite the change in cast and the alterations demanded by an audio production the finished drama was thoroughly successful and stuck closely to Douglas’s intentions throughout.
It is an accepted fact that technology supersedes itself at a rate capable of bankrupting all but the wealthiest of consumers. In accordance with this rule the new millennium saw collectors all over the world binning their VHS tapes and replacing them with the same films but on nice, shiny discs. The BBC’s comprehensive collection of Doctor Who titles have steadily been re-released in the DVD format, bringing a handful of features of interest to fans of Douglas Adams. Douglas’s most celebrated story, City of Death, received double-disc treatment in 2005.
The City of Death DVD was bolstered by a commentary from actors Julian Glover and Tom Chadbon alongside the production’s director Michael Hayes, a selection of unused footage (including two and a half minutes of visual effects designer Ian Scoones trying to get a chicken to behave… Perhaps a special feature too far unless you’re having a very boring evening) and a specially commissioned, thirteen-minute comedy piece, Eye on… Blatchford, telling the sad tale of Sardoth, Second-to-Last of the Jagaroth. Writing a comedy piece to be viewed just after you’ve watched the work of Douglas Adams is brave—rather like offering to make pudding for your wife after you’ve both dined at one of Marco Pierre White’s restaurants. To extend the analogy, this piece has a whiff of Angel Delight* about it, albeit with the odd bit of scrumptiousness poked in.
The special feature that certainly earns the upgrade however is a forty-five minute documentary shot especially for the release. Paris in the Springtime covers the making of the story with special emphasis on Douglas Adams’ work as writer and script editor. Featuring archive footage of Adams alongside newly-filmed interviews with Julian Glover, Catherine Schell, Tom Chadbon, Michael Hayes, David Fisher (original writer of the story before Douglas rewrote it), Pennant Roberts (who directed Adams’ other work on the show) and writers Steven Moffatt and Rob Shearman. It’s good stuff and certainly worth a watch.
As is the BBC’s disc of The Pirate Planet. If you can get hold of a copy. Which you probably can’t.
Released as part of a limited edition boxed set containing all six of that year’s linked stories, it swiftly went out of print and started swapping hands on eBay for the sort of sums that would make any right-thinking person rather cross. It has been announced that a non-limited release is forthcoming. At some point. Hopefully.
The Pirate Planet features a pair of commentaries, several outtakes and Parrot Fashion, a documentary shot by Kevin Davies who—as mentioned earlier—worked on the animations for the Hitchhiker’s TV series and wrote and directed 1993’s The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As well as the expected cast and crew interviews the documentary features James Thrift, Douglas’s half-brother, talking to Nick Webb, Douglas’s friend and biographer. So… quite a lot of pandering to the Douglas Adams fan then, though I imagine not many will need Thrift to point out that Douglas found writing hard work and would frequently lose his temper at the typewriter. To the well-read Hitchhiker’s fan this is rather like saying he was fond of using words in his novels. Nonetheless, it is a worthy addition to the main feature.
* Back in Chapter 8. And, no, you don’t have to go back and read it again, we’ll assume you were paying attention earlier.
* “This tasty and convenient powdered pudding is quick and easy to make—just add milk and whip!”
&nbs
p; 33
SO, THAT WOULD SEEM TO HAVE BEEN THAT AS FAR AS THE RADIO WAS CONCERNED
“Radio should be proud of Hitchhiker’s, it’s probably the biggest thing that happened since the Goon Show and that was the biggest thing since station 2LO and Savoy Hill.”
— Dirk Maggs, 2009.
One might be inclined to call radio the unsung medium were it not for the fact that passing fans of radio might stone you to death with transistors for doing so. Radio might not have the glitzy reputation of its more visual rivals but it has a very dedicated fan-base and they are only too happy to ‘sing’ about it given the opportunity.
There is no doubt that radio is an extraordinarily potent medium for pretty much anything you chose to throw at it: drama, comedy, documentary… dear lord, it even had a popular ventriloquist on it once.* Yet, since the rise of television it’s a rare ‘water-cooler’ conversation that will start with, “Hey! Did you hear the Saturday Afternoon Play this week? That Philip Jackson’s* voice—gravy for the ears isn’t it?”
In fact those not up on their Douglas Adams are often inclined to assume that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a series of books before it became a radio show. Which is nonsense. That didn’t happen until 2005.
Since the early nineties Douglas had been in talks with the BBC about producing a new Hitchhiker’s series. The question was: who to trust with the project?
Dirk Maggs had joined the BBC as a trainee studio manager in 1978. At the time he had viewed his start in radio as nothing more than a springboard into television and then film. Later, having worked in both, he realized that they were really nothing to aspire to and that radio gave you far more creative freedom. Working as a writer and director for the BBC’s Light Entertainment department he developed a heavily-layered style of audio production with tight scripts, explosive sound effects and cinematic grandeur. He directed plays based on comic characters Batman and Superman, was commissioned to create a tie-in to the summer blockbuster Independence Day**, adapted John Landis’s classic horror comedy An American Werewolf in London for radio and generally made something of a name for himself.
Douglas called Jonathan James Moore, Dirk’s boss at the BBC, and asked if Dirk might be interested in taking on the role of producer for a new Hitchhiker’s series. Once he had stopped being so dreadfully gob-smacked Dirk admitted that he would be incredibly interested indeed.
“I was in a taxi with my boss, heading towards my second visit with Douglas,” Dirk recalls. “The first visit had really just been me walking into Douglas’s office so that he could look me up and down and announce ‘You’ll do.’ The second visit was to actually work out how we were going to do it. In the taxi I said to Jonathan, ‘Look, you know I can write. The reason Douglas has asked us to do this is because of the adaptations I’ve done, so he knows I can write… So, doesn’t it make sense for me to, well, write it?’ But Jonathan said, ‘BBC rules: we can’t have a producer doing the writing as well.’ There was a tradition of that at the BBC. So when we got there, Douglas’s agent suggested a writer and the job went to them. I just shut up because I was happy enough to be involved.”
As it happened though that first draft did not meet with Douglas’s approval.
“That initial script opened with a talking dinosaur befriending Arthur. Douglas went completely spare,” Dirk continues. “I could hear the explosion in Islington from my office at Langham Place. The phone rang and there was this ranting monster typing his own version of the script while on the line. ‘I’m doing it now!’ he shouted. ‘But I can’t rewrite the whole fucking book!’ So that’s when I said I’d do it and he could go through it and correct whatever he wanted. Though I suspect that if we’d done that we’d still be writing the adaptation today, we’d never have got to the studio.”
In fact they didn’t get to the studio, at least not then. Contractual difficulties kept the project in development until, eventually, it ground to a halt. Dirk tried to bring it back to life four years later but complications over the planned movie deal stopped it in its tracks once more. In fact it took something quite terrible to make the project happen. A chance meeting at a memorial service. Douglas’s memorial service.
Dirk bumped into Bruce Hyman (of the independent radio production company Above the Title) and the conversation inevitably turned to Hitchhiker’s. In no time at all they were both agreed it just had to be done, though it would end up taking another couple of years of negotiations, approvals and, most importantly, being commissioned.
“When we first offered the sequels to the BBC they turned us down,” explains Dirk. “We ended up getting them on appeal.”
With some sad exceptions—most notably Peter Jones as the Voice of the Book and Richard Vernon as Slartibartfast, both of whom had passed away since the original series had aired—the original cast was gathered and Dirk began the task of adapting Life, the Universe and Everything from a book into a radio play.
“It was an interesting act of reverse engineering,” says Dirk, “trying to take the story back to where it might have been as a radio series had Douglas written one. After the problems years before when Douglas had disapproved of that initial script, I made the promise that, wherever it was in my power, the third series would stick closely to the book. Ultimately, we adhered to it almost to the letter. Far too slavishly I think in hindsight. As a result I think that of our three adaptations that first one was the least radio-friendly and, in a strange way, the least comic. There was an awful lot of expository speech taken straight from the book, bits of history—the Cathedral of Hate, the Campaign for Real Time—wonderful and very Douglas-y, but it probably needed a lighter touch in the adaptation to make it work in a different medium, a lighter touch I didn’t feel free to give it.”
One issue was that Life, the Universe and Everything carried on pretty much directly from the end of the first radio series, effectively ignoring events in the second. This was not unusual. Douglas was not dreadfully concerned with things like continuity and narrative consistency within the various forms of Hitchhiker’s. Unlike Dirk. “When we’d done the Tertiary Phase* I realized it just wasn’t possible to let that opening go without trying to explain what had occurred,” he says.
But more of that later.
For a while there had been plans for the Tertiary Phase to explode through our speakers as an altogether different beast to the serials that had come before. When it came to recording, however, such notions as a huge sonic montage telling the story so far—set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’ no less—were scrapped and replaced by something more traditionally Hitchhiker’s, the series would open with the Voice of the Book. Using original recordings of Peter Jones from the Primary Phase, spliced together with new actor William Franklyn, it was explained that the Guide was undergoing an upgrade to its speech circuit, allowing the original narrator to segue into the new one. So far, so seamless.
Stephen Moore was back as Marvin, though Dirk was concerned that the experience was so joyous for the actor that his voice betrayed a little more joie de vivre that one might wish from a depressive robot. The original harmonizer used to create the cybernetic quality of Marvin’s voice had long since passed into obsolescence, so replicating his miserable tone would require time and experimentation. Cycling through the hundreds of pre-programmed settings on a piece of effects kit, they finally found the right voice treatment. It was setting number forty-two.*
Back in 1993, during initial discussions about the new radio series, Douglas and Dirk had talked about the role of Agrajag, the unfortunate creature who slowly becomes aware—after countless reincarnations—that he keeps being killed by Arthur Dent. Douglas, having recently completed readings of all the books for Dove Audio in the States, played Dirk the relevant section from Life, the Universe and Everything before asking him who he thought should play the role. Dirk tells the story as part of his annotations for the published Hitchhiker’s scripts:
I was clever enough to realize it wa
s a trick question, but then, fatally, made the suggestion he was impersonating his hero John Cleese, which he was in fact not, and which peeved him a bit. “No, I mean me!” Douglas said. “I want to play Agrajag. Do you think Equity** would object?” I said I could not imagine they would, and so far they haven’t, so I got that bit right at least.
So, by lifting out the original audiobook performance and dropping it in to the relevant scene, Douglas was able to fulfill his dream of performing the role, albeit four years after his death. Which is precisely the sort of technological absurdism that would have appealed to him.
The Tertiary Phase was very successful, gathering a great deal of pre-publicity with articles in The Times, The Mail On Sunday* and Radio Times.
Finally, on 21st September 2004, Hitchhiker’s returned to the airwaves, broadcasting over the next six weeks.
“I find the Tertiary Phase slightly ponderous, when listening to it,” Dirk confesses. “I don’t apologize for it, I’m very happy about it (and it is exactly what Douglas and I agreed), but if the chance to do it again came up in a different life, a different probability, I would maybe make it a little more zippy in some ways.
“When I started working on the Quandary and Quintessential Phases I’d learned from that. One has to lighten the mix sometimes, it’s just not possible to go into so much detail.”
And given that the only note Douglas had given Dirk for adapting the final two books was “they only need four episodes each”, less detail was certainly what listeners were going to get.
“I feel now,” Dirk continues, “that we were in the wrong slot. It was put in the 6.30pm comedy slot, whereas the original series were given a late night broadcast and allowed to slowly grow an audience by word of mouth. I felt we were pushing too hard for the quick laughs which made it harder to stay true to the more thoughtful stuff in the books, thoughtful stuff that Douglas was able to put in series one and two because it was on at 10.30pm and the rules change when you’re not trying to please a mass comedy audience driving home from work. But of course Hitchhiker’s was big business the second time around, it needed to justify itself with a primetime slot. I do think that bolstered the idea of telling the next two books over the course of only four episodes each though, the knowledge that we’d have to pare a lot of the material down.”