Is this excerpt spurious? Or was it destined for fame until one of Douglas Adams’ infamous last-minute rewrites? Sadly, many of the people best connected with the original radio series have passed away: Adams himself; producer Geoffrey Perkins; Richard Vernon (Slartibartfast); Peter Jones (The Book); and also David Tate (Vogon Guard), any of whom might have given testimony as to the authenticity (or otherwise) of Max Mooney’s discovery.
The physical script itself offers no clues other than being typewritten and roughly of the correct vintage. (Ordinary, typed pages, that is, not the carbon paper ‘snappies’ upon which Adams would type when writing or revising during an actual recording session.1) Although unable to establish whether or not his find truly belongs to the Hitchhiker’s canon, Max Mooney has decided to offer it up for public scrutiny.
If genuine, the ‘nine lines’ fragment would have been slated for recording as part of the Hitchhiker’s pilot, which came to life on 28 June 1977 under the one-off auspices of Simon Brett, and was broadcast to an unsuspecting radio audience on 8 March 1978.
* * *
VOGON: So, Earthlings, I offer you a simple choice. Think carefully for you hold your very lives in your hands. Now choose! Either die in the vacuum of space, or …
FORD: Wait for it.
VOGON: … recite me a poem!
ARTHUR: I beg your pardon?
VOGON: Vogonic nanometer should do nicely. That’s nine lines, not counting the title. You have thirty seconds. Oh, and it has to be about my cat.
F/X: [THERE COMES A FLATULENT THOUGH PLEASURABLE YOWL]
ARTHUR: Ah, right, yes … Nine lines …
FORD: Nice title.
ARTHUR: Ah …
VOGON: Twenty-five seconds.
FORD: Come on, Arthur!
ARTHUR: Oh, Toasty Vogon, thy star-spungled poose so fat, thurdwurst furblursts in this whole univoose or … or …
FORD: That.
ARTHUR: Cowed, you meow me, kowtow on my towel fleas …
FORD: Nice.
ARTHUR: … how now how your, er …
FORD: Brown jowls.
ARTHUR: … churn foul chicken cowfees.
VOGON: Fifteen seconds.
ARTHUR: Stoop zarniwooping with hairballs chinstructed, your, ah …
FORD: Gloophoopy!
ARTHUR: Yes, gloophoopy nose slarting up, airspinducted, you …
FORD: Fly, Toasty Vogon, you critlittered spacecat!
F/X: [THERE COMES ANOTHER YOWL, MORE PAINED]
FORD: Sorry, I shouldn’t wave my arms around.
VOGON: Five seconds.
ARTHUR: [Getting desperate] … yet sky-green you die with each line’s epi-petithet. Oh!
F/X: [THERE COMES A THIRD YOWL, LIKE A TORTURED BOWEL MOVEMENT]
FORD: So that’s why you’re yowling, for owlspowling, hoot-given …
VOGON: Time’s up.
ARTHUR: Shet.
VOGON: [After an expectant silence] And that was your poem, was it?
ARTHUR: Er, well …
VOGON In Vogonic nanometer? About my cat?
FORD: Yes. Yes, that was it. ‘Nine Lines’, we call it. Well done, Arthur. That was …
VOGON: It was ten.
FORD: What?
VOGON: Your poem was ten lines. Not bad, otherwise, but totally anathematic to cats. Rather insensitive of you, actually. Guard! Take the prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out.
* * *
That Arthur and Ford recite a ‘nonsense poem’ tallies well with Adams’ fondness for Lewis Carroll (remembering that, in homage to Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’, the original Hitchhiker’s was broadcast as a series of ‘fits’). Textually, however, there are some problems. ‘Zarniwooping’ seems rather to predate the character Zarniwoop, who isn’t mentioned until Fit the Seventh (recorded 20 November, broadcast 24 December 1978). ‘Gloophoopy’ is surely an agglutinative compounding of the one hit wonder word ‘hoopy’, first heard in Fit the Eighth (recorded 19 May 1979, broadcast 21 January 1980). Even ‘slarting up’ smacks of anachronistic portmanteau. But then again, perhaps these were merely sounds that Adams had pinging around his brain, just waiting to be called upon. (The Vogon Captain’s poem, as broadcast, does, after all, contain the line, ‘and hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindle werdles’.2)
One person with a keen ear for authenticity is Susan Sheridan (Trillian), who, although not making her Hitchhiker’s debut until Fit the Second (recorded 23 November 1977, broadcast 15 March 1978), has been kind enough to give her thoughts on the appellant text:
Douglas could’ve written it. Except the Vogon captain didn’t have a cat. Or did he? Not that that matters of course—random characters appear at any time. No, the big error is the absence of sound effects. A few caterwauls wouldn’t satisfy Douglas. Where’s the FX of Ford whacking said cat with his arm? No, I can’t accept this as genuine.3
Douglas Adams certainly was fond of special effects. The original scripts are littered with them and the audio-obsessed Adams clearly conceptualised his radio serial as being innovative generally in its use of sound.4 But if Susan Sheridan is correct in asserting that three feline F/X are insufficient to establish credibility, could it be instead that the ‘nine lines’ script, instead of predating the broadcast version, was penned as a possible improvement but then never used?
The appearance (or otherwise) of a cat might here be of some interest. Subsequent to completing the first series of Hitchhiker’s, Douglas Adams pulled a stint as script editor of Doctor Who, where a young John Nathan-Turner was employed as Production Unit Manager. Years later, when Nathan-Turner became Producer of the show, Colin Baker portrayed a Doctor with cats prominently displayed on the collar of his garishly patterned coat. Was this Baker’s own predilection (as lore would have it), or could it have been JNT’s tribute to Toasty Vogon, Adams’ very own Cheshire cat? Sadly, John Nathan-Turner is no longer with us, and both Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant (Peri) have declined to comment.
One person who remains uniquely placed to pass judgement on the ‘nine lines’ treatment is Bill Wallis, who was called in at the last minute to play Vogon Captain Prostetnic Jeltz in Fit the First5—a role he subsequently reprised in Fit the Second. (Please note that in the following critique, handwritten on the back of Ronald Searle’s A Bigger Slash, the word ‘eclat’ is merely an interpretation. Although it does have an alliterative ring.)
It seems to me that the VOGON is very likely from the fertile synapses of old Adams’s brain functions. Arthur, however, is having far too much fun—evidence of another hand. It’s not the eclat Adams quality of exhibitionism … but I am biased: I never liked young Douglas; and I failed to find the HGTTG of the least interest; utterly boring—apart from the Vogon, with whom I am sympathetic—and it heralded a period of comedy writing that it took some time to dispel.6
So the Vogon may be genuine but Arthur not? Might it be that Adams penned this piece while in an inappropriately jolly mood, accidentally affording Arthur more enjoyment than the character would receive until later in the series? Unfortunately, Simon Jones (Arthur) and Geoffrey McGivern (Ford) have proven to be unavailable for comment. Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod), though amenable to discussing Hitchhiker’s in general, went strangely silent when asked about the ‘nine lines’ fragment.7
Are we seeing here, then, an indifference brought on by a spurious script, or is there instead something more sinister being swept well under the rug? For a more detailed appraisal, we may turn to comedic novelist Tom Holt, a scholar who knows his Vogons from his Vogans:
It is well established that Adams wrote late and fast, and relied heavily on his editors and producers to keep him honest. Crucial, I think, to the analysis of this fragment is the fact that episode 1 of series 1 was produced by Simon Brett; thereafter, Geoffrey Perkins took over for the rest of the season. Significantly, the scene in question leads directly on from the episode cliffhanger. It thus falls exactly on the fracture line, as it were, between Brett and Perkins.<
br />
Once this key element has been noted, everything else falls into place. Even the most superficial textual analysis must reach the conclusion that this fragment was written in a hurry—by two people. Logically, those two disparate voices must be Adams and Brett. Anyone familiar with Brett’s own scriptwriting style (the later episodes of ‘After Henry’, for example) must inevitably recognise both the trademark timing-of-interruptions 5 and the infelicities of slight overemphasis (overdoing the joke, if you like) that are quintessential Brett footprints. Because of the cliffhanger situation, and assuming (as I think we can) that at the time the script was written, Brett anticipated that he would be producing episode 2, it’s logical to assume that the first scene of episode 2 existed, in draft form at the very least, when episode 1 was recorded.
Anyone familiar with Perkins’ extensive work as a light entertainment writer and producer will testify to his tighter, slightly more limited approach. With this in mind, we can confidently hypothesize that Perkins felt uncomfortable with both the length and the excessive reliance on inherently absurd word-sound humour resulting from a last-minute Adams/Brett collaboration. He will have insisted on a rewrite resulting in a smoother, calmer, shorter scene. This will, of course, have necessitated going back to the already-recorded first episode, editing out the introduction to the cliffhanger and re-recording (essentially, replacing ‘recite me a poem’ with ‘tell me how good my poem was’). This would, of course, have had to be done in a tearing hurry, to meet broadcast schedule commitments.
Fortuitously, this hypothesis can be easily and conclusively proved simply by listening to the concluding moments of episode one. Pay close attention to the pitch of Bill Wallis’ voice. ‘Tell me how good my poem was’ is precisely a semitone lower than ‘die in the vacuum of space’—an error that an actor of Wallis’ vast experience would never make unless called upon to patch in a replacement line months after the original session.8
Anyone listening to Fit the First will note that the aforementioned break is covered by an overly prolonged burst of György Ligeti’s organ piece Volumina—written into the script as ‘DRAMATIC CHORD’ but in fact offering little by way of drama or tension; more a discordant, ‘Whoops, that’s broken. How can we fix it? Quick, hum something while I’m thinking,’ sort of legerdemain. Yet, if Bill Wallis were involved in a patch-up re-recording, surely he’d remember the original script, even if it were then subjected to damnatio memoriae?
Not necessarily.
Hitchhiker’s broke from BBC comedy tradition in that it was not recorded in front of a studio audience.9 Furthermore, for the purposes of achieving ‘voice separation’, actors were often kept thoroughly segregated or had their parts spliced into the recording during post-production. (Richard Goolden, for instance, was hidden in a cupboard to play Zaphod Beeblebrox IV.10 Roy Hudd (Max Quordlepleen) and Stephen Moore (Marvin) both played in Fit the Fifth but remained unaware of each other’s involvement until they met for a BBC World Service interview and discovered that the ‘really strange thing’ Hudd had just recorded for was indeed, as it sounded, the very same thing as Moore’s ‘that sounds like the thing that I’m in’.11) It seems perfectly feasible, then, that the Vogon Captain’s speech in the ‘nine lines’ fragment might ring true to Bill Wallis while Arthur’s character does not—in all likelihood he would have performed one without ever hearing the other.
Douglas Adams became notoriously possessive over Hitchhiker’s; most famously in his having cal ed upon John Lloyd to help finish Fits the Fifth and Sixth before the deadline flat-lined, only then to write Lloyd’s contributions out of all subsequent versions of the production.12 Hitchhiker’s was, au fond, Adams’ possession, and there is a tendency amongst those involved with the production to downplay their own contributions. Simon Brett, for instance, makes no claim of co-authorship, and merely says of the ‘nine lines’ excerpt:
Douglas had already written something very similar, but he did it rather better.13
The tense here is significant: not ‘wrote’ but ‘had already written’. Beyond the self-effacement that also pervades Brett’s website,14 there lies implicit in his verdict the suggestion both of contemporaneous composition and of a changed (yet still inclusive) authorial hand. With this subtext in mind, it seems highly probable that Max Mooney’s discovery is, in fact, genuine Hitchhiker’s material—revised and discarded, perhaps, between recording and broadcast, but genuine nonetheless.
Tom Holt concludes:
Surgeons proverbially bury their mistakes. Producers of cult radio shows don’t have that privilege. This fragment and the implications it raises for Adams scholarship in general casts a fascinating light on the development of the text, and in particular the influence of Adams’ crucial but often overlooked hidden collaborators.15
A nail-clipping from the Hitchhiker’s thumb? Fly, Toasty Vogon …
References:
1 Simpson, M. J., Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams (Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 119. (back)
2 Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts—25th Anniversary Edition (Pan, 2003), p. 31. (back)
3 Susan Sheridan, personal correspondence, 19 October 2010. (back)
4 Simpson, M. J., The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker’s Guide (Pocket Essentials, 2005), p. 31. (back)
5 Simpson, Hitchhiker, p. 98. (back)
6 Bill Wallis, personal correspondence, 17 November 2010. (back)
7 Mark Wing-Davey, personal correspondence, 22 October 2010. (back)
8 Tom Holt, personal correspondence, 15 April 2011. (back)
9 Gaiman, Neil, Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion (Pocket Books, 1988), p. 31. (back)
10 Webb, Nick, Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams (Headline, 2003), p. 126. (back)
11 Geoffrey Perkins, quoted in Webb, Nick, Wish You Were Here, p. 124. (back)
12 Gaiman, Don’t Panic, pp. 33-35. (back)
13 Brett, Simon, personal correspondence, 13 June 2011. (back)
14 http://www.simonbrett.com/ (back)
15 Tom Holt, personal correspondence, 15 April 2011. (back)
An Interview with Brenda Cooper
…Edwina Harvey
I had the pleasure of meeting American author, Brenda Cooper, recently when she was visiting with mutual friends Ted and Ros Scribner following the FutureGov Australia conference which she attended in Canberra.
Anyone who has read the invitation only anthology, Tales for Canterbury, published to donate funds to the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal, will be familiar with Brenda’s story, ‘Phoenix Dogs’, about two totally different rescue dogs and their respective handlers.
The story was written with such an insight of a working dog’s attachment to its handler that I had to ask the obvious. While the answer was no, she didn’t train rescue dogs, she knew others who did, and yes, she was a dog lover. Three border collies and a golden retriever share her household. The inspiration for the story came from the Chilean earthquake.
Like a lot of us, Brenda always wanted to be a writer. She took an adult writing class, and had some success in getting her poetry and contemporary stories published. Her turning point came when her son turned 18, and she decided to pursue her dream.
Brenda has been privileged to co-author Building Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven. The novel was developed from the first spec fic short story that Brenda had published. She got to know Larry Niven through Steve Barnes. She describes Niven as a good teacher and a social writer who enjoys collaborating with other authors.
While science fiction is popular in movies and TV series, she laments that written SF often isn’t viewed as marketable by the bigger publishers, despite it having respectable sales via titles published by smaller publishing houses.
When asked what she thinks of the revolution the writing and publishing industry in presently undergoing, she is candid and refreshingly optimistic in her outlook. A self-described
techno-geek, she finds these changeable times very exciting. Self-publishing is much easier and also becoming more respected. While the readership of paper-based books, journals and newspapers is in decline, we are reading more than ever, using online books, journals, blogs and forums for information and entertainment.
We agree that after many failed attempts over the past few decades, with the variety of easily attainable and affordable e-readers now on the market, e-books have finally come into their own. Brenda states that while e-books cost roughly the same in lay-out and design as paper books, e-publishing overcomes the problems of storage, remainders, and returns that plague paper book publishers.
Her latest book, the time travel fantasy, Mayan December, (Prime Books, 2011) is available in print and for the Kindle and the Nook. And while Brenda’s a techno-geek, she’s also quick to admit that there’s something pretty special about seeing your book in print, and displayed in a book fair, shop or convention.
ASIM_issue_54 Page 22