Dont Panic
Page 13
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 Dr 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 ubquity 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."
********************************************************
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, tbe 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 sixties
and seventies 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 three thousand 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," says
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 (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.).)
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 $2.2 million. 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 the 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 is, Life, the Universe, and Everything and, more
especially, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish have sold
amazingly well in the US, the latter riding high on the US bestseller
lists for over eighteen months. The computer game, which was not
a big hit in the UK, was the number one game in the US for a year,
selling over a quarter of a million copies. Much of Douglas's mail
and the greater part of his income, now comes from America.
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 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 Dr Who story, but Graham
Williams thought it was just "too silly". Later, when there was
talk of a Dr Who film to star Tom Baker, he had written the story
as a film outline, Dr 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 Dr 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 Dr Who role between Slartibartfast,
Trillian and (for the final sequence) Arthur Dent, although what
would have been the last half of the Dr Who format became the
final thirty pages of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
(In the Dr 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 Dr 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 Dr 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 will no longer 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