Dont Panic
Page 6
ROY HUDD
He played the original Max Quordlepleen. He had to come into
the studio and do his bit all by himself. To this day he still
claims he doesn't know what it was all about...
7
A Slightly Unreliable Producer
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ARTHUR:Ford, I don't know if this sounds like a silly
question, but what am I doing here?
FORD: Well, you know that. I rescued you from the Earth.
ARTHUR:And what has happened to the Earth?
FORD: It's been disintegrated.
ARTHUR:Has it ?
FORD: Yes, it just boiled away into space.
ARTHUR:Look. I'm a bit upset about that.
FORD: Yes, I can understand. But there are plenty more
Earths just like it.
ARTHUR:Are you going to explain that? Or would it save
time if I just went mad now?
FORD: Keep looking at the book.
ARTHUR:What ?
FORD: "Don't Panic".
ARTHUR:I'm looking.
FORD: Alright. The universe we exist in is just one of a
multiplicity of parallel universes which co-exist in
the same space but on different matter wavelengths,
and in millions of them the Earth is still alive and
throbbing much as you remember - or very similar
at least - because every possible variation of the
Earth also exists.
ARTHUR: Variation? I don't understand. You mean like a
world where Hitler won the war?
FORD: Yes. Or a world in which Shakespeare wrote
pornography, made a lot more money and got a
knighthood. They all exist. Some of course with
only the minutest variations. For instance, one
parallel universe must contain a world which is
utterly identical to yours except that one small tree
somewhere in the Amazon basin has an extra leaf.
ARTHUR: So one could quite happily live on that world
without knowing the difference?
FORD: Yes, more or less. Of course it wouldn't be quite
like home with that extra leaf.
ARTHUR: Well, it's hardly going to notice.
FORD: No, probably not for a while. It would be a few
years before you really became strongly aware that
something was off balance somewhere. Then you'd
start looking for it and you'd probably end up going
mad because you'd never be able to find it.
ARTHUR: So what do I do?
FORD: You come along with me and have a good time.
You'll need to have this fish in your ear.
ARTHUR: I beg your pardon?
- Hitchhiker's pilot radio script.
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From mid-1977 to the end of 1980 it often becomes difficult to
disentangle what Douglas Adams was doing when. Even he is no
longer sure. But about the time that the first Hitchhiker's radio
series was broadcast, which was about the same time that The
Pirate Planet was recorded, Douglas was offered a job as a radio
producer in Radio 4's Light Entertainment department. He took
the job. As he explains, "I felt I had to do it, because I'd set out to
be a freelance writer, had one disaster after another, ended up
having to be supported by my parents and so on, and I thought,
`Well, here is someone offering me a solid job with a regular
paycheck, which may not be exactly what I want to do, but I'm
not showing any success in doing what I want to do, and this is
pretty close to what I want to do; I am in trouble and I will take
this job.' Also John Lloyd and Simon Brett had paved the way for
me getting the job offer, and I owed it to them.
"I started as a radio producer with Hitchhiker's going out
and Dr Who shortly to go out. Everybody who starts as a radio
producer has to start doing Weekending, so I produced
Weekending for a few weeks. As the most junior member of the
department I was getting all the bum jobs, like a programme on
the history of practical jokes which involved going out and
interviewing Max Bygraves and Des O'Connor. I thought, `What
am I doing here?' But a lot of people had put themselves out to
get me the job, and it was a staff job, not a contract job."
According to his contemporaries, Douglas tended to be a
slightly unreliable producer ("He tended to think you could go
on forever."), but even so it came as a slight shock to the
department when, after six months, he left to become script
editor of Dr Who. This, as Simon Brett commented, put quite a
few noses out of joint.
However, he returned to radio very soon after leaving it for
one final production job: the Radio 4 Christmas Pantomime (Footnote for Americans, who may not undersund how a pantomime can be performed on radio: this is one of those problems you're just going to have to learn to live with.). It turned out to be the project Douglas most enjoyed from that
time. It was called Black Cinderella II Goes East, and was co-
produced by John Lloyd. For no particular reason, it was written
and cast entirely from ex-Footlights personnel.
"It was an excuse for such an odd bunch of people - apart
from the obvious ones, we had John Cleese playing the Fairy
Godperson; Peter Cook playing Prince Disgusting and Rob
Buckman playing his brother, Prince Charming; The Goodies-
Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie - played
the Ugly Sisters; Richard Baker, who used to play piano in
Footlights, was the narrator; and John Pardoe MP, who was then
Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, played the fairy-tale Liberal
Prime Minister (on the grounds that you only get Liberal Prime
Ministers in fairy-tales); Jo Kendall played the Wicked
Stepmother. . . It was terrific, but for some reason the BBC and
the Radio Times gave it no publicity at all, and it was buried
without a trace."
After slightly less than six months, Douglas's first proper job
had come to an end.
8
Have Tardis, Will Travel
IT HAS ALREADY BEEN MENTIONED THAT, while Hitchhiker's was
still in the pilot stage, Douglas found himself with time on his
hands, during which he needed money and work.
"So once it looked like I had a finished script I thought
Where else can I generate some work? I sent the Hitchhiker's
script to the then Dr Who script editor, Bob Holmes, who
thought it was interesting and said, `Come in and see me'. This
was just as Bob, who'd been script editor there for a long time,
was on the verge of leaving and handing over to Tony Reed. So I
met the two of them and Graham Williams, the producer, and
talked about ideas. The one I came up with that they thought was
promising was The Pirate Planet, so I went away and did a bit of
work on it, and they thought it was promising but there was
something wrong. So I did more reworking and took it back, and
they still thought it was promising but needed more work, and
this was going on for weeks, and eventually the inevitable
happened..."
The plan had been to do some Dr Who work as a fill-in until
Hitchhiker's was ready to go into producti
on, and the rest of the
Hitchhiker's scripts needed to be written. As a plan, this was an
abysmal failure.
At the end of August 1977, the six scripts for Hitchhiker's
were commissioned. Within the week, four episodes of Dr Who
were also commissioned. This was the start of a period of non-
stop work, confusion and panic that was to last for the next three
years.
The Pirate Planet was a less than successful story, which
managed to mix such elements as a telepathic gestalt of yellow-
robed psychics, a bionic pirate captain, a planet that ate planets,
and a centuries-gone evil queen imprisoned in time stasis, into a
bit of a mess. The plot elements had obviously been worked out
carefully, then edited down to the point of incomprehensibility
by the time they reached the screen. There were Hitchhiker's in-
jokes; there were some appalling performances; there was a
murderous robotic parrot. It was teeming with ideas, and might
have made a fairly decent six-parter.
Douglas Adams still has a soft spot for it, as he explains, "In
a way I preferred writing the Dr Who scripts to Hitchhiker's
because I would be made to get the plot straight first. In The
Pirate Planet, the plot was much more tightly worked out than
was apparent in the final show because it had to be cut back so far
in terms of time. But actually getting the mechanics to work at
that time I really loved, and felt very frustrated that a lot of that
didn't show in the final thing." Doubtless, if he ever did the
novelisation, he would put back those elements lost in the
television screening.
The Dr Who people were impressed enough to offer Douglas
a job as script editor. He had only just been given a job as a radio
producer. He did not know what to do: "I'd only just taken this
job in radio, and it seemed a pretty awful thing to do to leave
after six months and go to television. I got very mixed up about
that - I didn't know what to do. Various people gave me
conflicting advice - some people said, `This is obviously what
you must do because it's much more along the line of what you
claim as your strengths', and other people said, `You can't desert
radio immediately, just like that'. David Hatch said the latter to
me very strongly, because he was head of the department, and he
had given me the job.
"But I did take the job, and the next person to desert the
department was David Hatch, which made me feel a little better."
Remembering his experiences with The Pirate Planet,
Douglas assumed that the writing of the scripts and coming up
with the ideas was the responsibility of the writer, and that the
script editor's job was chiefly that of making sure that the scripts
arrived and were twenty-five minutes long.
"Then I discovered that other writers assumed that getting
the storyline together was the script editor's job. So all that year I
was continually working out storylines with writers, helping
others with scripts, doing substantial rewrites on other scripts
and putting yet other scripts into production. All simultaneously.
"It was a nightmare year - for the four months that I was in
control it was terrific: having all these storylines in your head
simultaneously. But as soon as you stop actually coping, then it
becomes a nightmare. At that time, I was writing the book,
script-editing the next series of Dr Who, there were the stage
productions of Hitchhiker's going on and the records were being
made. I was writing the second series of Hitchhiker's and I was
very close to blowing a fuse at the time. I was also doing some
radio production with John Lloyd. The work overload was
absolutely phenomenal."
The overload was also reflected in Douglas's dissatisfaction
with Dr Who at that time: "The crazy thing about Dr Who, one
of the things that led to my feelings of frustration, was doing
twenty-six episodes a year with one producer and one script
editor. It's a workload unlike any other drama series; if you are
doing a police series, say, you know what a police car looks like,
what the streets look like, what criminals do. With Dr Who, with
every story you have to reinvent totally, but be entirely
consistent with what's gone before. Twenty-six shows, each of
which has to be new in some extraordinary way, was a major
problem. And there was no money to do it with: in real terms Dr
Who's budget has been shrinking, but somehow or other you
have to deliver the goods. Twenty-six a year is too many. I was
going out of my tiny mind."
Douglas wrote three Dr Who stories, although only two
were actually screened (Four, if you count Dr Who and the Krikkitmen. See the chapter on Life, the Universe and Everything for further details.). The first was The Pirate Planet. The
second was The City of Death, co-written with Graham
Williams, the producer. The third is the legendary `lost' Dr Who
story, Shada (BBC Enterprises finally released all available material on video in 1992, accompanicd by the original script.).
The City of Death was broadcast under the departmental
pseudonym of `David Agnew', and was writcen in the following
circumstances:
"When I was script editor, one of our regular stalwart writers
(who we'd left alone as he was a reliable guy) turned out to have
been having terrible family problems - his wife had left him, and
he was in a real turmoil. He'd done his best, but he didn't have a
script that was going to work, and we were in deep trouble. This
was Friday, and the producer came to me and said, `We've got a
director coming on Monday, we have to have a new four-episode
show by Monday!' So he took me back to his place, locked me in
his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a
few days, and there was the script. Because of the peculiar
circumstances and Writers' Guild laws, it meant that it had to go
out under the departmental name of David Agnew. It was set in
Paris and had all sorts of bizarre things in it, including a guest
appearance by John Cleese in the last episode."
The City of Death, in contrast to Douglas's first script, was
an adult and intelligent script, in which little was redundant or
unnecessary. The humour is never forced, and it is obviously
being written by a Dr Who veteran, not a newcomer. In addition
to the cameo appearances of John Cleese and Eleanor Bron in the
last episode, it contains no less than seven Mona Lisas (all of
which are genuine, although six have `This is a fake' written
underneath the paint in felt pen), and life on Earth having been
created by the explosion of an alien space-ship (something the
Doctor must go back in time to prevent being prevented). It also
contains a detective. That Douglas still has high regard for this
story can be seen from the fact that certain plot elements were
reused in Douglas's first non-Hitchhiker's novel, Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency, as were some elements of Shada, a six-
part story that was abandoned half
-way through the production
because of industrial problems (strikes).
"Once you get beyond a certain point it becomes more
expensive to remount the thing than it is to do the whole
production again from the word go. That's because when you are
casting, you're doing it from who's available - when you
remount, you have to cast the people you've already got, and this
becomes terribly difflcult."
Shada was a return to Cambridge for Douglas and the
Doctor, featuring a retired Time Lord whose TARDIS was his
study, and a book that held the secrets to the Time Lord prison
planet. The scripts for Shada (especially in early drafts) show an
amusing and intelligent show - although Adams's script is far
more comfortable with the temporal confusion of Professor
Chronotis than with the villains, or, indeed, the plot. (The
character of Chronotis, the retired Time Lord, is something else
that Douglas would resurrect for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency.)
Adams aroused resentment from many of the shows hard-
core fans, who criticise his stint as script editor for resulting in a
show that was too silly, self-indulgent, and more like a comedy
than Dr Who should be. Tom Baker's Doctor, even more than
Patrick Troughton's, was a cosmic clown, always ready with a
whimsical remark in the face of danger.
Adams disagrees with this: "I think it's slightly unfair. In the
things I wrote for Dr Who, there were absurd things that
happened in it, and funny things. But I feel that Dr Who is
essentially a drama show, and only secondarily amusing. My aim
was to create apparently bizarre situations and then pursue the
logic so much that it became real. So on the one hand, someone
behaves in an interesting, and apparently outrageous way, and
you think at first that it's funny. Then you realise that they mean
it, and that, at least to my mind, begins to make it more gripping
and terrifying.
"The trouble is that as soon as you produce scripts with
some humour in them, there is a temptation on the part of the
people making the show to say, `This is a funny bit. Let's pull out
the stops, have fun, and be silly.' One always knows as soon as
someone says that that they are going to spoil it.
"So those episodes of Dr Who weren't best served by that