‘I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’
‘Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‘Dr. Who’ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.’
‘I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.’
(sound familiar that one?)
When Douglas Adams wrote ‘Pirate Planet’ and ‘City of Death’, I was a youngster – 9 or 10. I didn’t know who he was, his name would have flashed up on the opening credits, but he wasn’t Terrance Dicks or Malcolm Hulke and his name wasn’t on a Target Book spine, so how would I know him? Robert Holmes was still a mystery after all. By the early 1980’s I knew who he was – he was the man who wrote ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, my new almost favourite thing on TV and in all sorts of odd and unexpected ways he has wound like a thread through various aspects of my life.
Surely most people would agree that apart from being very funny, Douglas was also a very clever fellow? OK, he wasn’t good with deadlines, often had writers block and tended to reuse things when he was stuck (like a lot of Shada in Dirk Gently for example) – he certainly isn’t alone in that though. On the other hand he was a wildly inventive polymath, able to write and talk about an eclectic range of subjects and someone that his many friends agree was great company. In his work we get science, humour, politics, literature, philosophy and a great deal of original, often lateral thinking. In some ways Douglas, despite often being represented in his own work by an everyman figure, was very like the Doctor.
When Robert Holmes received the story outline for ‘Doctor Who and the Krikketmen’ – I think he probably knew there was talent there – but wild and undisciplined, something that would take a too much hard work to hone into a workable script. Anthony Read also recognised that talent and with a dearth of scripts available, he gave Douglas his chance to write ‘The Pirate Planet’. By some strange quirk of fate he was soon the show’s script editor. Whilst Douglas’s stories have sound plots and structure – surely the requirements of a script editor include being able to deal with deadlines and imposing discipline on writers – Douglas might have been the least qualified person on the planet to do that! However, one way or another, in a very British sort of way it all vaguely works in a haphazard, slightly ramshackle fashion Something that I appreciate much more now than I ever did in my younger years.
I think quite my favourite extra on any Who DVD is part of the ‘City of Death’ extras It is an ‘interview’ with Douglas from his garden, while he has a beer and tells a story. It is the story about an ad-hoc trip he and director Ken Grieve did to Paris when the rest of the crew were filming ‘City of Death’. Feeling left out, they made their own way over, on arrival they found Tom staring into Lalla’s eyes and an exhausted crew not really up for a night on the tiles. What followed was what we used to call a ‘large’ night out and once they’d run out of Paris nightspots an attempted trip to West Berlin in the early hours! Adams even made it back to TV centre for work the next morning, taking great delight in telling everyone that it as one of those nights when you find yourself in Paris at 4am!
Aside from ‘Doctor Who’, one of my other main interests is wildlife conservation. I’m lucky enough to have travelled with and to know someone who knew Douglas well, having travelled with him and showed him species around the world that were threatened with extinction. What was initially a single article on the wonderfully bizarre Aye-Aye of Madagascar in 1985, became a radio series and eventually the book ‘Last Chance to See’ in 1990. It took Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine to South America, Africa, New Zealand and Asia to look at the state of a series of endangered species and some of the conservation efforts or sometimes lack of effort to conserve them. The species ranged from the Northern White Rhino, the Aye Aye, the Baiji, the Kakapo, Komodo Dragon, the Juan Fernandez fur seal, Mountain Gorilla, Mauritius Kestrel and Rodrigues Fruit bat. It also lead to some brilliant stories about Douglas – the book was predictably very, very late (barely started) and had to be finished in a hurry after a trip to a villa in the South of France, supposedly to knuckle-down and finish it resulted in one extra page! Those travels also converted Douglas to become a life-long conservationist, working amongst others with ‘Save the Rhino’. In the aftermath of his untimely death, I found myself at a number of the yearly ‘Douglas Adams lectures’ in aid of the charity and others including ‘The Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund’ – the guest lecturers are an eclectic mix from his friend Richard Dawkins, to Richard Leakey, Steven Pinker and Neil Gaiman.
Since the original ‘Last Chance to See’ there have been some positives – with for example the Juan Fernandez Fur Seal (which didn’t quite make it into the book) and what looks unfortunately like only a temporary increase in Mauritius Kestrel numbers, but sadly since then one of the species featured the Baiji (the Yangtze River Dolphin) has become extinct, the first and unfortunately unlikely to be the last cetacean extinction of the 21st century. The last male Northern white Rhino also recently died, sounding the death knell long-term for this sub-species. If you haven’t read ‘Last Chance to See’, I would strongly recommend it, to my mind it is Douglas’s finest hour – the radio series is also very entertaining if you can find it, as is the follow up series from 2009 when Steven Fry (a friend of Douglas’s) joined Mark Carwardine to find out what had happened to some of the species since the original trip .
Personally it has in part shaped my life, studying conservation and influencing my own travels. Like Douglas, I’ve also travelled with Mark to quite a few places and had some great times – snorkelling with Whale sharks and Manatees, Whales and Dolphins, travelling down to Antarctica and seeing Narwhal in the North West passage. It’s been a joyful part of my life and I’m not sure it would have happened without Douglas and ‘Last Chance to See’. Instead of Svalbard where I should be right now, I am I writing this rather appropriately from Cambridge, where Douglas was born and went to University. More of that later.
‘The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.’
We lost Douglas far too young. I wonder if he would have written for the show again? I can’t help thinking that Russell would have at least asked him back. Imagine that – commissioned for series one, deadline passes, series 2 definitely, erm maybe, can you change Rose for Martha – great, oh maybe better make it Donna, look how about one of the specials? Oh well, it’s a nice dream. If only Douglas hadn’t discovered the gym – the ultimate sad irony. He is much missed and the world is a much sadder place without him.
Anyway, one of the marvellous things about ‘Doctor Who’ is the breadth of storytelling styles and techniques used. Sometimes you feel like something dark and scary, sometimes an alien invasion of earth, sometimes something touching and emotional and sometimes you just want something very silly indeed. When that happens then Douglas and more especially Season 17 is always there for you – a bohemian piss artist, his beautiful, intelligent, accomplished and rather posh female friend and their know-all robot dog – in adventures with a flying robot parrot, a giant green penis, monsters with flares and some blokes in black tights balancing on high heels in a ramshackle panto featuring Malcolm Terris’ underpants. Whilst we’ll always have Paris, we’ve never quite properly had Cambridge until now – my next review is the newly animated ‘Shada’.
A Journal of Impossible Things 