Wish You Were Here (19 page)

The Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, founded in 1976, could not have been further from the luvvie world of the West End with all those nicely observed plays with sofas and French windows. Ken was not interested in miniatures; he liked a bigger canvas. One of his first projects was a “Discordian production” (“We’re Discordians—We Stick Apart”), in which anybody could take part. This was based upon the
Illuminatus!
trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. These books may be a fruitcake, but they are the giants of the fruitcake world—indigestibly rich, spanning thousands of years, and containing every possible paranoia-inducing or arcane ingredient you can imagine. The Illuminati are the ultimate conspirators with their octupoid fingers in a plenitude of pies—the Cathars, the masons, the Catholic Church, the great Pyramids, the Knights Templar, Atlantis . . . One seductive angle to the conspiracy is that the lack of evidence to support it, supports it, for surely only
they
—the Illuminati themselves—have the resources to cover their tracks up so completely. Fearing that
Illuminatus!
did not require sufficient commitment from its audience, being a mere eight hours, Ken’s next production was
The Warp,
a twenty-two hour cult epic with breaks for food, hygiene and alcohol. According to Robert Anton Wilson, it also achieved the distinction of winning the prize for the greatest number of simulated blow jobs in one drama in the history of theatre.

Ken’s approach to
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was characteristically imaginative, quick and energetic. He says he had never heard of the programme until some fans rang him up and told him to listen. “That seemed great,” he said. “I mean, here was an audience demanding a show.”

The production took place with dazzling promptness (the end of May, 1979) in the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in Carlton Terrace, London. This elegant Regency building on the Mall (the wide avenue that runs from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace) is possibly the poshest bit of real estate in London. The drama starts with the destruction of the Earth so, in order for the audience to feel fully engaged, Ken decided to take them off-planet. Proceedings began with the sale of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, a cocktail that Douglas described as having an effect like being hit over the head with a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick. The performance kicked off in the foyer with the audience—only eighty or so per performance—sitting down on a raised dais. In fact this was a platform, devised by a man called Mike Hurst, mounted on industrial skates. These were designed to move massive bits of plant by floating them on a millimetre or two of air pumped under pressure through thousands of tiny holes.*
 
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Despite the weight, the result was almost frictionless, so the whole audience—with the platform, all seventeen hundred tons of it—could be moved around smoothly from set to set rather than sitting there like non-participant potatoes while underpaid ASMs changed the scenery in front of them. It was a radical and innovative idea, and the production was a huge success.

The show was also stunningly noisy, but
Tribune
magazine said in a review that “the actors resisted the temptation to overreact against the din.” The two-headed Zaphod problem was solved by having two actors in a single suit. You couldn’t get a ticket to save your life. More people were turned away than were let in.

It was a complete sell-out. Douglas was thrilled.

Inspired by the success of the first outing, Ken Campbell decided to restage
Hitchhiker’s
the following year (July 1980) at the Rainbow, a huge, rather gloomy building in Finsbury Park, north London, that had started life as a confident 1930s cinema, suffered from a changing market for it was just too big to make economic sense, and eventually transmogrified into a funky venue for rock concerts. (More recently it was home to charismatic Christian evangelists, something that Douglas would have grieved about.) The Rainbow production was brave, but doomed. As Mike Simpson says in his
Hitchhiker’s Guide,
the most charitable thing that can be said about this production was that it featured lasers, and was long. The critics excoriated it. The subtlety and wit of the original did not survive the big treatment happily. The most successful theatrical versions, like the Theatr Clwyd show directed by Jonathan Petherbridge, are quite intimate.

Another deal executed before the publication of the first book was for the recording rights. Perversely (for surely they knew what they had by now?), BBC Enterprises had once again passed on the audio opportunity, perhaps on the grounds that in record form the unabridged radio series would have required a three-album set—we’re talking big vinyl platters here, don’t forget, not CDs—or a double tape cassette. Both would have been expensive and daunting for the market. With the wisdom of retrospect the BBC feels nauseous about this now.

In 1979, Geoffrey Perkins had talked to several record companies that had expressed interest in issuing
Hitchhiker’s
commercially. He was on the point of signing with one of them when the proprietor insisted on showing him a hardcore porn film, a hopeless misjudgement of the culture of his potential business partner. In the end, Geoffrey and Douglas decided on a small company, Original Records, that seemed in sympathy with the nature of the project and had specialized in comedy.*
 
¹¹²

Geoffrey assembled much of the original radio cast with a few minor changes. Susan Sheridan was on a Disney film so Cindy Oswin from the ICA production played Trillian. Deep Thought was not played by Geoffrey McGivern but by Valentine Dyall, the owner of a famously chocolatey voice.*
 
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Some of the radio music could not be replayed on a record for copyright reasons (for instance, it had come from albums already licensed exclusively to a record company). The new music, by Tim Souster, was regarded as a triumph. All in all, Geoffrey was pleased. The cutting had sharpened the narrative line and there were a number of improvements to the voice treatments and the effects. Some slightly more high-tech equipment was available and this time the team were better able to draw breath and think about what they were doing.

The double album sold remarkably well (over 120,000 units), especially as it was initially available only through mail order at £6.99 (including postage and packing) via a coupon, ostensibly written by Zarniwoop himself, at the back of the Pan paperback. The cheque had to be made out to Megadodo Publications. This coupon was taken out of later printings after Pan received complaints about fulfilment, and indeed Geoffrey Perkins reported that he and the cast never got paid for the first recording, something that made the second recording of
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“a lot less interesting.” In fact there was a major problem with the royalties, with the result that Ed Victor, who became Douglas’s agent, pushed the company into bankruptcy when it defaulted. Original Records seem to have hurried the making of the second album to the extent that the quality suffered, but the first is superb, and if you have a copy, hang on to it. It is now a collector’s item and quite valuable.

Douglas now was starting to make some money. It was not a tsunami of cash, but enough for him to buy a blue MG sports car. He went everywhere in it, possibly the ten yards to the pillar box at the end of the road and certainly down to Dorset to show it off to his mum and all the family.

Douglas was not one of nature’s drivers. It’s not so much that he was clumsy, it was more a matter of attention. He loved to talk, even in the car. He’d be making some fascinating point but he would not be focused on the six-axle forty-ton cement lorry with the pneumatic brakes that had improbably just stopped on a sixpence in the lane ahead. “For God’s sake,” you wanted to say, “stop your mind zooming and pirouetting about the stratosphere and come down to road level.” When Douglas was driving a manual he would change gear from time to time as if he remembered that that’s what drivers did.

When he became successful, and before he settled down with large, sensible, automatic saloons, he had flings (so reminiscent of his father’s romance with Aston Martins) with several Porsches. The first one, a 911, he crashed into the Piccadilly underpass at Hyde Park Corner just outside the Hard Rock Café where a huge queue of people applauded with satirical cheeriness; nice Jacqui Graham, the Press Officer of Pan, had to come out in her little Renault and rescue him. He walked away from the car and never saw it again. He said he hated the car anyway: “Going for a drive was like setting out to invade Poland.”*
 
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Nevertheless, he bought another one of which he said: “It was like taking a Ming vase to a football match.” (Buffs might note that an obnoxious Porsche driver features in
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
) This second car he sold when he was in a militantly anti-smoking phase and Stephen Fry smoked in it—but he may have just fancied a new one anyway. The third was stolen and never seen again. The final sports car, like the ritual scene of cleansing at the end of a Hammer Horror movie, was totally consumed by fire at the Porsche garage when it was in for a service. After this, Douglas took a brief car holiday. In Douglas’s account of the story, the garage still asked for their awesome bill to be paid on the grounds that they had completed the service before the fire broke out. Once Douglas took me for a ride in this last absurd vehicle. It was a 928 turbo. “When you put your foot down,” Douglas explained, “there’s just the teensiest delay: it’s the car asking you—do you
really
want to do this?”

All through 1979, the momentum of
Hitchhiker’s
fame went on gathering. Douglas gave more and more interviews from his squalid flat, for it would have been bad form to invite journos to his workplace in the BBC. In August, he was Guest of Honour at the world annual SF convention. That year it was “Seacon,” held in the Grand Hotel, Brighton. There is a degree of contact between the writers and readers of SF that is not matched in any other literary genre. The writers get a weekend on expenses, a welcome boost to their egos and a valuable opportunity to get feedback straight from the market. In a sense all writing is talking to the readers, but it is—as far as I know—only SF that has formalized the process of turning the monologue into a dialogue via so many large and well-organized conventions. What’s in it for the fans? They get to meet authors they admire and to enjoy the society of those with a similar interest. They also have fun and frequently drink too much.

In fact it was not long before
Hitchhiker’s
spawned its own dedicated conventions. Only the year after publication there was “Hitchercon” in the Albany Hotel in Glasgow (26–28 September 1980). Douglas—or the Big D as he was known—was guest of honour. There were many subsequent conventions and the Big D attended when he could in order to perform as himself—and receive a tremendous boost to his
amour propre.
An official fan club, ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, with its own nifty and well-written magazine,
Mostly Harmless,
started in 1980. This was available on subscription for enthusiastic “ZZ9ers,” the nomenclature based on the coordinates at which Arthur and Ford are plucked from the icy vacuum of space by Zaphod’s stolen Improbability Drive.

Usually at conventions like the one in Brighton—“worldcons” to give them their slightly surreal title—there is no prize for radio. However, there is an award for the best SF representation other than in artwork or words. Rather to everybody’s disappointment in Brighton, it was won by the film
Superman,
which received a polite round of applause.
Hitchhiker’s
came second; the audience stood up and gave it a standing ovation, a fact not lost on the producers of
Superman,
who were gracious enough to suggest that the order should have been reversed.

I was at that convention in the line of duty, but I’m embarrassed to admit that in a moment of weakness I met up with someone who thought a sound strategy for appreciating the Best SF Creature Costume Competition was to take illegal drugs. Alas, I remember very little. However, before being led astray, I had a date with Douglas for a beer. An incident that sticks in my mind was being displaced at the bar by a female fan (seriously enthusiastic as well as seriously female) who had pointed her bosom at Douglas with the kind of graceful singleness of purpose that one associates with naval guns swivelling for a broadside. Tactfully I departed, leaving Douglas with a huge, uncontrollable priapic grin on his phizzog. History does not record whether he kept himself entirely pure that weekend.

By the time Pan published
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas was already in great demand. Jacqui Graham nevertheless did a relentlessly professional job of promoting him. There was no radio or TV station so obscure, no magazine or journal so esoteric that it did not get a letter, a copy of the book and a follow-up call. The list of interviews could be mistaken for Brad’s Press Guide. From the
International Herald Tribune
to
Miss London,
Douglas did the lot. His signing session in Roger Peyton’s celebrated Andromeda bookshop in Birmingham sold over 450 copies, a record unbroken to this day. On the road, being made a fuss of, on expenses, and performing the role he knew best, that of himself—he adored it, and was always a complete trouper. Autographing books until his arm ached, listening politely to the same question that he’d heard only thirty times that day and chortling appreciatively at its insight, telling jokes on cue, not overrunning his allotted time, tailoring his anecdotes to the preoccupations of the interviewer, it was like days and days of stand-up to an audience that loved you before you even got on stage.

Even better for his morale was that he and Jacqui became, as we used to say in those days, an item. Jacqui Graham was an unattached, brainy, very elegant blonde who still looks much as she did then (though now happily married with children). She speaks of Douglas warmly but with a certain cool clarity. He was, she recalls, romantic, amusing, relentlessly self-absorbed, spoilt, vain, emotional, entertaining, given to extravagant gestures, unpragmatic, exasperating, and fun to be with most of the time. Theirs was not a relationship destined to last forever, but they enjoyed themselves while it did and remained friends.