Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  Sharing the minuscule changing rooms must have been the stuff of sitcoms, with the youngsters exquisitely anxious not to give out any of the wrong signals. Douglas was thrilled that the review made a profit of £25 for each of them.

  For the second time in the history of comedy (and possibly for good reason, the last), the show introduced the odd notion of shaving a cat. This entailed no harm to any moggy; it was a thought experiment rather like Schrödinger’s unrealistically ambiguous cat of quantum mechanics fame. Both were used to suggest absurdity. In the surreal Adams, Smith, Adams, Smith, Adams version, shaving a cat weaves in and out of the programme—rather cat-like in fact. Does it mean anything? Does it stand for the impossibility of romantic yearning, hem hem? Is it just a daft idea that appealed to their undergraduate imaginations? Here are a few examples:* 62

  THE ROMANTIC TRADITION

  Mike and John sitting, facing audience

  John reading newspaper, or Freud, or Usage and Abusage

  [Lots of Pinteresque pinging words across the void in fraught but inconsequential fashion. Then:]

  J: Look, Keats was a romantic, wasn’t he?

  M: May have been . . .

  J: Well, he didn’t shave cats.

  M: Yes he did.

  J: No he didn’t.

  M: Yes he did!

  J: No he didn’t!

  M: Look, cleverdick, do you know the “Ode on Melancholy?”

  J: Yes . . .

  M: The one that begins: “No, no, go not to Lethe/Neither get your knickers in a twist.

  J: That’s not what Keats wrote.

  M: Yes it is, and he went on to say: “But when the melancholy fit shall fall,/Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud/Go and shave the cat.”

  J: You’re making that up, Mike.

  M: I am not!

  And so on . . . Or there’s this song:

  SHEER ROMANCE

  Well, babe, it often seems,

  I’ve always known you in my dreams,

  You came to me beneath the moon,

  That starry night in early June.

  Well, babe, I think I love you,

  You make my heart go pitterpat,

  Feeling so romantic,

  Think I’ll go and shave the cat.

  The final scene in the three-part sketch has a man and a woman talking with hopeless desire about doing it (no doubt in the audience’s mind that it equalled sex at this point) before dashing off stage in some excitement. Then there are sound effects of—you’ve guessed it—cat shaving. Describing this in prose is a vivid reminder about why you have to see sketches performed; yanked out of their natural medium they flop about like distressed goldfish.

  Incidentally, about this time, in his second year at St. John’s, Douglas met Michael Bywater, who was in his first year at Corpus Christi. Michael, a dauntingly bright man, was studying English, having switched from Medicine, although he had originally planned to be there on an organ scholarship. His interest in the theatre was rather more conventional than the Footlights approach, but he sometimes contributed to their musical interludes. He recalls that what brought them together was that they both fancied (with that terrible urgency of nineteen-year-olds) a lovely woman called Isabel. Later she married Michael (and much later they divorced). He was destined to reappear in Douglas’s life in the early 1980s.

  But for now, Douglas was seldom so happy as when he was on stage performing. He often remarked that he really wanted to be John Cleese—he was tall enough—but was disappointed to discover that the job had already been taken. This did not stop him from being in some ways a rather Pythonesque character—mercurial, funny and given to occasional attacks of ill-coordinated panic. Then Douglas actually met John Cleese. Douglas had come down to London to see a show at the Roundhouse and found himself in the interval standing in the bar, by happy coincidence, right next to John Cleese. Please, please, he said, for since he was seventeen he had been a fervid admirer of Monty Python, please could I interview you for Varsity magazine? Perhaps John was taken by surprise—or it was difficult to say no to someone so earnest who could look you straight in the eye—but he was kind enough to assent. Indeed, it was an exceptionally long interview with the kind of searching questions and intelligent dialogue that have now become alien to media complicit in the celebrity game.

  Douglas treasured his interview with John Cleese and kept a bound copy in the great crates of stuff that biographers are pleased to call “archives.” He marked one passage in biro that is perhaps the bedrock of a lot of surreal humour. In response to a question about the development of his particular style, John Cleese said this:

  Some people have said, like Marty Feldman, that it [a Cleese sketch] has got a very strong internal logic . . . That despite the fact that it’s mad, the rules are laid down at the very beginning and the rules of the madness are followed very carefully. It is not a conscious thing. I think it comes from the fact that I was a scientist and a lawyer by training . . . The nearest simile I can find to actually writing a sketch is that you dig around a bit in the top soil and all of a sudden you hit something, a vein of something, and you follow it, and sometimes you lose it, and you have to track your way back to where it last was.* 63

  Years later, Douglas was one of only two writers—other than the Pythons themselves—who ever got a writing credit on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (Neil Innes was the other one.)

  Monty Python occupied a special place in Douglas’s affections, as it did for an entire generation of British students. It was a show that turned the map upside down, an anarchic convention-shatterer that was always stimulating even when the viewers winced rather than laughed. Blokes of a certain age can voice such classics as the dead parrot sketch with word perfect synchrony. For the students who were kids in the sixties, Monty Python had a place in our hearts rather like the one occupied by The Goon Show for those growing up in the fifties. You still come across men who only need put on an Eccles or Bluebottle voice to fall about pole-axed with mirth.* 64 Decades later, Douglas provided the same service for his own fans. Douglas was in that great tradition of the Goons and Monty Python—he wrote something that became the special property of a generation.* 65

  Despite that tone of “we’re adults now, and damn hard to please” from Douglas’s college mates, The Patter of Tiny Minds had been greeted with delight. The three principals, according to John Lloyd, were “easily funnier than anything in Footlights.” They were in demand but like the three musketeers, so several informants have assured me, they had in a moment of passion formed a pact. According to this legend, they would all audition for Footlights, and it would have to take all of them or none of them. All for one, and one for all. This understanding was put to the test when Martin Smith was recruited by Crispin Thomas to perform in a Footlights May revue without the other two, though as a sop they were invited to be script consultants. For a while there were apparently some dislocated noses. Douglas could certainly sulk, though Will is recorded by all as being insanely good-natured. The only other trouble with this story is that neither Will nor Martin can remember their lives being blighted by any such incident. In any event, all ended well. By 1974, under the presidency of Jon Canter, Martin Smith was the secretary and Douglas and Will were both committee members, though they did not perform on stage.

  As a performer Douglas was largely frustrated, but as part of Adams, Smith, Adams, he helped to write great chunks of Chox, the 1974 Footlights show. The intermission divided the show into the top layer and the bottom layer (chox = chocs). The production was a knock-out. The cast was particularly talented: Jon Canter, Sue Aldred, Jane Ellison, Griff Rhys Jones, Martin Smith, Crispin Thomas, an improbably hairy Clive Anderson and Geoff McGivern. (Geoff was later to become Ford Prefect in the radio version of Hitchhiker’s, and—to great effect—also did the voices of Deep Thought and the Frogstar Robot and Traffic Controller.)

  But amid all that brilliance, there was still no spot on stage for Douglas. He was disgruntled about it
at the time. There is a suggestion that the committee struck a deal with him whereby as compensation he could write, with Will and Martin, many of the sketches, so that the team almost became in effect the principal scriptwriter. Years later he was still a little bitter. “Footlights was becoming a producer’s show,” he said, “in which the producer calls the tune. I think it should be a writer-performer show.”

  By the way, one sketch by the trio, “Beyond the Infinite,” prefigured some of the best-known lines of Hitchhiker’s by four years. Consider this from Adams, Smith, Adams (1974):

  Far out in the depths of the cosmos, beyond the furthest reach of man’s perception, amidst the swirling mists of unknown Galaxies, where lost worlds roll eternally against the gateway of infinity, inexorably on through millions of light years of celestial darkness we call Space—Space—where man dares to brave indescribably elemental horrors, Space [there follows a Star Trek split infinitive joke now too familiar to be reproduced] . . . I can’t begin to tell you how far it is—I mean it is so far. You may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to Space . . .

  Why this unwillingness on behalf of his fellow thesps to let Douglas act? It wasn’t deliberate unkindness. Mary Allen, an actor with impeccable stagecraft,* 66 thinks he tended to unbalance the general performance:

  Douglas was never in a Footlights revue, and I think that was because he was such an idiosyncratic stage presence. In a group revue you have to have your own presence, but also be able to lose it. Sometimes you have to play second fiddle to other people so you have to be able to blend in with the group. You need a fluid stage presence that you can either crank up, to be someone wild and weird and eccentric—a character—or you can crank down, to get lost in a supporting role. Partly through physical size Douglas wasn’t able to do that. He wasn’t able to lose his identity . . .

  He was huge, and he always looked as if he was about to burst into laughter. And you felt that was partly because what he was doing was extremely funny, but you also felt that it was a sort of cosmic laughter if you like—that the whole thing was absurd. It wasn’t that purely ironic, parodic approach to absurdity. It was an affectionate, comic approach to absurdity.

  Douglas was a talented actor, but Mary’s comments chime with other sources. He was not good in ensemble pieces. His timing was not perfect, he was as conspicuous as a double-decker bus, and he could not do deadpan if you stood poised over him with red-hot scrotal shears. He was just too easily amused—especially, as one slightly envious friend remarked, by his own jokes. A 6’5" giant grinning wildly in anticipation of a line yet to be delivered is distracting for the other actors on the stage, and it telegraphs what is to come to the detriment of that notoriously tricky art of comic timing. The axiom of thesps is this: don’t act with animals or children—to which might have been added, nor Douglas Adams.

  But, you must be wondering, was Cambridge all fun? Didn’t the damn students ever do any work? Where did he live when he wasn’t in the pub or on stage? Well, in his first year he had a room in college (the less glamorous “new” bit of St. John’s). In his second year he was in digs in Sydney Street in a house for which Douglas could not muster an atom of sentiment. But in his third year he shared palatial rooms back in college with Nick Burton and a chap called Johnny Simpson, handily located near the student bar. This accommodation subsequently became the model for the rooms of Dr. Chronotis of Dr. Who and Dirk Gently fame. They were book-lined and comfortable, with a distinct ambience of erudition and naughtiness, a film set in which you could practise feeling very grown-up indeed—especially if you were asking someone back for a drink, or even tea, with or without an option on your body. Perhaps there is no such thing as true adulthood, only better and better impersonations of it. On second thoughts, that may only apply to men.

  As for academic work, Douglas ended up with a BA degree, class 2.2. His tutor, Mr. K.J. Pascoe, wrote to inform him that his compulsory dissertation earned him a high 2.1, his other essays were of 2.2 standard and that he had actually failed his tragedy paper. Douglas seems to have done just enough work to wing it, but nevertheless seemed to have got on well with his tutors if the amiable tone of their correspondence is a guide.

  With his true passion always lying in non-fiction science, it is interesting to see what he made of the traditional liberal arts syllabus. In Don’t Panic he told Neil Gaiman that he was proud of the work he’d done on Christopher Smart, the subject of his Part 1 Tripos English Dissertation. Having unearthed this document, I suspect that Douglas’s gift for parody didn’t stop short of literary criticism. He could do scholarship, but he was jolly well going to make sure that that’s how it sounded. Try reading the chunk below as if you were Alan Bennett doing his steeple-fingered academic (“Very few people who knew Kafka as I did, that is to say, scarcely at all . . .”), and you will see what I mean:

  It was only after W.H. Bond’s discovery of its antiphonal structure [of Smart’s Jubilate Agno] that it began to be recognized as something more important—a fragment of a failed literary experiment, gigantic, perhaps bizarre, eventually out of control, but nevertheless the product of a rational and coherent idea—the transplantation of the rhythms and structure of Hebrew poetry into an English religious poem.

  Does this remind you of anything? Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect bullshitting to the Vogon captain about his execrable poetry perhaps? “Oh, yes, I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was really particularly effective . . .”* 67

  Christopher Smart was an eighteenth-century poet who had also been educated at Cambridge. From the student’s point of view he had two virtues: he only produced two poems of significance and he was sufficiently obscure for there to be no body of knowledge with which one’s opinions could be easily challenged. He was the perfect choice for the clever student keener on the pub than the library. There is a legend that Douglas only wrote three essays in his entire time at St. John’s. Cambridge is good at accommodating eccentrics as long as they are talented, and St. John’s (which is rich from investments and makes no call on the public purse) clearly recognized something of value in Douglas. However, one essay a year would have tried the patience of even the most detached academic. It is difficult to track down the actual output, but the most likely explanation is that Douglas was delinquent about getting his work in on time but he was forgiven on the grounds that when it finally arrived, it sparkled.

  Despite simulating the voice of scholarship, Douglas was nevertheless genuinely intrigued by Smart. Most of Smart’s life had been spent drunk and debauched until, quite suddenly, in 1756 he suffered an extreme attack of religious ecstasy that left him under a compulsion to pray in the streets. This led to his eventual confinement in a loony bin in Bethnal Green. (How much did Douglas know about his father’s experience on Iona?) On leaving the asylum Smart wrote a long poem, A Song of David, but he is better known for Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), an immense manuscript of which only a fragment survives, that was rediscovered in 1939. The poem consists of an interminable call and response pattern, like a parallel text in which many hundreds of lines beginning with the word “Let . . .” are matched by an equal number that relate to them beginning with the word “For . . .”* 68 Only thirty-two pages of this remain, but for all its oddness and the rigour of its construction, it feels positively Homeric in length. Fortunately some of it, though celebrating the mystery of God, is about Smart’s cat, Jeoffrey (sic), and it is quite droll to learn about this beast’s fleas in such a feverishly spiritual context. Those keen to trace the provenance of the answer (forty-two) might be interested to know that line nineteen of Jubilate Agno reads: “For there is a mystery in numbers.”

  Douglas would have grinned at this over-egged connection. Nevertheless, Smart liked his cat (“For the English cats are the best in Europe”) and his line forty-two—quite by chance the antiphon to another overexcited observation about the moggy—reads: “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.�
�

  This is an apposite comment on Douglas himself, for the time was upon him when a young man—albeit one fortified by a network of the brightest mates—is flushed down the plughole of the educational system into the world of possibilities.

  In the summer of 1974, he left Cambridge and set out upon three rather bleak years.

  FOUR

  The Seedy Flats

  “Was this really the Earth? Was there the slightest possibility that he had made some extraordinary mistake?”

  SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

  “What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.”

  P.G. WODEHOUSE,

  The Adventures of Sally

  After Cambridge, so far from reaching the “commanding heights” of the economy, Douglas embarked upon an era of seedy flats. The first was in a classic location for transitory accommodation. Every city must have such a place where no names are ever put on doorbells because the turnover would make the task tiresome. In London it is Earl’s Court, an area of cliff-like red-brick Edwardian terraces known then as Kangaroo Valley because of the favour it found with itinerant Aussies. (The Aussies have moved on to colonize the whole city, but the extraordinary density of flats remains.) Douglas and Martin Smith shared a large room in a flat in Redcliffe Gardens that was owned by two upmarket and grimly constipated Sloaney women who needed help with the rent but who hated Martin and Douglas being there (and possibly also Martin and Douglas as people).