The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Making of the Hitchhikers Guide Infocom game.

Games Oh well, bloody hell. The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy text adventure was released across multiple platforms back in 1984 and the key element was that large chunks of the text were written by Douglas Adams and a proportion of that was whole new material. But he also guided the making of the game, helped with some of the puzzles and it's as close to being in the novel or radio series as its possible to be.

There have been multiple versions of the game available since then produced as interactive online experiences (all linked from the Wikipedia page here) but up until now, it's been impossible, as far as I know, to know exactly what Douglas Adams's input was on the game. Until now.

As part of his project to scan everything in existence, Jason Scott of the Internet Archive was given access to Infocom's archive which includes folders containing material pertaining to each of the games which includes The Hitchhiker's Guide.

Which means at this link there's a file containing all of the material pertaining to the making of the game, including Douglas's letters and notes on the game, maps, interviews, adverts, articles, a trove.  Wow.

Towels.

Books Yesterday would have been Douglas Adams's sixty-first birthday and to mark the occasion, Google's home page doodle was a rather nifty tribute with working guide and cameo from the television Marvin. Now their blog's been update with a permanent copy and words from one of the designers:

"The world (to be fair, the universe) of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is complex, chaotic, and often contradictory, with multiple timelines and probability axes colliding in assuredly comic ways. The various exotic planets, alien races, and intergalactic sociopolitical situations are usually filtered through the lens of the series' most useful piece of futuristic technology – the Guide itself, published out of Ursa Minor Beta. The Guide's task of organizing the galaxy's information struck a chord with us, which is why we gave it special attention in our doodle. Through it, you can get a small peek into the unrelentingly hilarious universe created by Douglas Adams."

... and it's a sodding tragedy that Douglas didn't live to see what amounts to his Guide appear in (just about) everyone's pockets.

Anachrophobia.

Books  Tick tock.  One of Doctor Who’s most iconic images is the drawing of the man with a clock for a face in The City of Death but its purpose within that story was never full explained beyond increasing the Doctor’s urgency in fighting Scaroth.  In Anachrophobia, Jonathan Morris, known for his love of Douglas Adams, utilises the image as the final stage of an infection of time, in which a person’s entire being becomes a moot point as their genetic make-up becomes transformed into that of a clock with a pendulum swinging in the chest.  Never mind the Grandfather paradox.  These are Grandfather clocks created through paradoxes.  Spoliers ahead.

Morris is now one of the franchise’s most prolific writers working for BBC Books, AudioGo and Big Finish, but Anachrophobia was just his second novel having scored something of a hit with his past Doctor novel, Festival of Death, which featured some Adams-like paradoxical shenanigans for the Fourth Doctor and Romana II of the kind that Steven Moffat has now made the series’s stock in trade (it’s no surprise that Morris would later take Moffat’s greatest creation, The Weeping Angels, and give them their second best story after Blink, Touched by an Angel, my favourite Doctor Who story of last year).

Anachrophobia once again tackles the perplexities of time as the Eighth Doctor and friends land on a planet at war in which time is being utilised as a weapon, halting soldiers in their tracks and increasing indefinitely the temporal length of battles without the participants realising and just to add some complexity the combatants are Plutocrats who’re intensely interested in the financial gains that war has to offer and the Defaulters who’re intent on foreclosing on their plans.  Such ideas are presumably timeless but in the past decade when everyone’s finances have been buffeted by curious trading, few Who novels have felt quite so relevant.

Our heroes are quickly ushered into a military research establishment in which a group of scientists are attempting bend the time technology to its natural conclusion in creating a time machine.  They’ve succeeded but it has a tragic side effect: anyone sent back in time returns infected, doomed to lose their past and become one of the men with a clock as a face.  The Doctor must find a way to stop the infection from reaching beyond the facility into the wider world, to prevent the music of the spheres from giving way to an hourly chime followed by three thousand six hundred seconds of ticking.

For much of its pagination, and for all its nuWho-like interest in the mutability of time, Anachrophobia’s a pretty traditional base under siege story, a pretty experimental choice by Morris for an Eighth Doctor range which tends to wriggle out of the constraints Who’s usual genres.  Even Dark Progeny eschews the implacable monster, protagonists trapped in rooms and desperate, last ditch attempts for victory which Morris employs along with the scientists doomed to become a body count and the random bureaucrats whose entire existence seems to be to make matters worse until he realises the error of his ways.

That Steed-silhouetted auditor called Mistletoe, is a classic of the type, with a thesaurus-like vocabulary, motivated only by his own personal gain but enigmatic to the point of obfuscation.  Rather like a scene stealing character actor, he’s often the most compelling element of the action and has some wonderful speeches ruminating on the inconceivably selfless motivations of the Doctor and his companions and later about the financial consequences of a war, whose cause, like the interminable battles in The Doctor’s Daughter, has become lost in the mists of time.

Now we’re really into spoiler territory as  I propose that the novel’s best scene occurs towards the end as the Doctor and his companions reach the dark heart of the Plutocratic cause and find a collection of advanced automata crunching numbers and its revealed controlling both sides of the war in a futile attempt to create the most profit, war always being good for profit, except they can’t remember why and who for.  This sees Morris at his most Adamsy, the Doctor raging with righteous indignation at the pointless loss of life on the ground and the machine logic that has led to the war tumbling on for four hundred years.

I’ve had a quick glance through contemporary reviews which reveals that Anachrophobia was especially well received on publication and its power hasn’t diminished in the intervening decade.  It’s still an extraordinary work, with frightening imagery that prefigures nuWho, The Girl in the Fireplace in its monsters but also the transformational body horror of The Empty Child.  It’s also incredibly tense in places, notably when the Doctor and Fitz put themselves in the time machine to investigate the source of the infection and the capsule is attacked from an unknown force outside, but unable to return because the scientist at the controls is being hald at gunpoint.

But this is an EDA through and through.  The Doctor isn’t just fighting the monsters, he’s fighting his own health, the loss of one of his hearts depleting his strength and affecting his decision-making abilities.  Part of Morris’s book seems to be designed to clarify some of the events of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street for those of us readers who found the chosen style difficult to take.  Sabbath ripped the “black” heart from the Doctor’s chest and with it some of his Time Lord energy it seems.  At crucial moments he has to take rests and is rarely his buoyant self.  One of the story arcs of the series ongoing is sure to be the Doctor’s quest to find a replacement heart.

There’s also Fitz ongoing existential crisis, his memory just as foggy as the Doctor’s thanks to him being a dodgy facsimile of a broken original which is used throughout to suggest that he’s become infected by the infection.  Plus Anji, still regretful and raw after the events in Hope but determined to regain the Doctor’s confidence.  It’s also a rare moment when her previous career in the city becomes vitally important knowledge in explaining the Plutocratic ideal, of the rich becoming even wealthier by manipulating the masses, treating them as no more important than figures in financial reports (which is often the only contact they have with them).

There’s also the final Coup de grace (that’s admittedly been thoroughly spoiled since) which glances backwards to that adventure and teases on the stories to follow.  That Mistletoe is revealed to be Sabbath goes some way to explaining why Larry Miles is unhappy with how his character became the Master in all but name in later novels, a disguise being the bearded one’s stock in trade, but his motivation, to remove the clockwork infection from the universe by manipulating the Doctor into being his Doctorish self, is very new.  Sabbath has “employers” and a plan within a wider context of the universe.  Jiggers.

the return of the modified Pertwee logo from the TV Movie

Books BBC Books have published the cover for Gareth Robert's novelisation of Shada. I'd expected Tom, Lalla and Skagra, something a bit Chris Achilleos in homage to the old Targets. Instead, they've clearly decided to go for a slightly wider audience with something to tie-in with the recent piece of professional fan fiction:



Note the return of the modified Pertwee logo from the TV Movie on a new publication from BBC Books (in keepings with the various audios and dvds), also recently used on the TARGET reprints, which suggests it'll also be employed on the series of original past Doctor novels by the likes of Stephen Baxter. Question: If there's a new Ninth or Ten (as has been rumoured), will they have their taxi cab logo on the front for consistency?

"typical Ely"

The Day In Douglas Adams & John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff, a faux-dictionary which employs proper names to put words to those elements of life which don't already have them defines an Ely as "The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong."

Ironically, that's the creeping experience of the actual people of Ely in the weeks leading away from the wedding of Kate and Wills as the bunting put up to celebrate the royal union have been left up and if the Cambridge News's account is anything to go by the local residents have become strangely angry about the whole thing.

"The bunting needs taking down. It looks scruffy – in my opinion it should only be up if there’s a celebratory or community event that’s on. If it’s up all the time then it reduces the excitement of the events it should be up for in the first place."

Presumably as it slowly dawned on local pedestrians that the bunting was still up, their brains began to seek reasons.  The general consensus  seemed to be that the local council was being a bit slow to activate, indeed a bit worksop, or as one local resident puts it "typical Ely".

Except, and it's the council's fault for not communicating this properly to their wage payers, the bunting has been left up to save money.  The extraordinary cost of hiring a hoist led them to decide that they might was well leave the coloured triangles in situ until Christmas when they'd be replaced by the festive lights.

I actually quite like the bunting.

Though I understand the idea that leaving it up is like having your Christmas decorations around your house all year ruining the temporary spectacle, this is just a one off. Plus, does this have to be single application bunting? Can't the meaning be simply transfered to celebrating life itself or less grandly the existence of Ely?

In any case, the bunting will come down eventually, and a wembley has been averted which as Liff puts it would have been "the hideous moment of confirmation that the disaster presaged in the ely had actually struck." or that the good people of the town would spend the rest of their lives seeing these tiny flags blowing in the wind.

"a joint bid put together by three parties"

Towels H2G2 (which was put up for sale as part of the BBC's restructuring of their website) has been bought by just the right people:

"It’s a joint bid put together by three parties: Robbie Stamp, h2g2c2 ('The h2g2 Community Consortium') and a company called Noesis Systems Ltd.

"As many of you know, Robbie was a very close friend of Douglas Adams and, along with Douglas, is the original founder of H2G2 back in 1999. The H2G2 Community and the site are very much close to his heart.

"h2g2c2 - 'The h2g2 Community Consortium' - have shown great energy and a real passion for continuing the very best traditions of H2G2. They will make sure the Community is always at the heart of everything H2G2 does.

"Noesis, headed by Brian Gunner Larholm, are an established social media company that specialises in online communities."

Robbie Stamp has a full report of the purchasing process which amounted to the combining of the three most attractive bids and setting up a charitable trust.  By the people, for the people.

Any Douglas Adams fans reading should sit down now.

Radio Another Ariel article surveys the soft launch of BBC Four Extra with Mary Kalemkerian, head of programmes. Any Douglas Adams fans reading should sit down now. Oh, you already are:

"I would love to broadcast Lord of the Rings, [run on Radio 4 in 1981] but there are rights issues. We keep plugging away, and hope the situation changes. I'd love to re-run Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but Disney holds the rights."

Wait, so when Disney bought the rights to Hitchhikers and made the mostly rubbish film they also tied up ownership of the radio series, which "we" paid for through the license fee, so that it couldn't be rebroadcast on the originating network?

"it’s kind of a different story"

TV I love Misfits, E4's comedy drama about special humans in orange boiler suits so when I heard that the creator, Howard Overman, had been commissioned to adapt Douglas's Dirk Gently books, I was optimistic. Then I read this quote he's given to SFX Magazine:

“What I did was take the character, Dirk Gently, and his detection method, and write a new story. It has elements from the book, obviously, in it, but it’s kind of a different story. Because if you’ve ever read the book, the story in there isn’t really adaptable for TV. Especially not on the budget we’ve been made to do it on, because it involves an alien planet and all sorts of weird and wacky ideas."

Let's review that sentence again:

"the story in there isn’t really adaptable for TV. Especially not on the budget we’ve been made to do it on, because it involves an alien planet and all sorts of weird and wacky ideas."

Harumph. Oh well, we'll see. But aren't the "all sorts of weird and wacky ideas" in Douglas's writing the point? I bet the Electric Monk was the first thing to go ...

challenge

Nature Stephen Fry takes on the challenge of taking another last chance to see. Something I didn't know:

"I wanted to find a place in Islington, but also felt that I needed time to look around and wait for the perfect property. Perhaps I should rent first? I offloaded my tedious residential worries on Douglas one afternoon as we sat in his study staring at a Mac and wondering, for the thousandth time, if we could stop it going "boing" and closing down whenever we tried to do something unusual with it. "Why don't you stay here for a year?" he suggested. "You can house-sit for me. I've decided to go round the world for 12 months seeking out rare animals."

The original radio series is available at the website for the new documentary.

I have seen the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Warning, spoilers ahead. Obviously. Click away now.

TV Concluding a television series is an impossible business. Unlike film, which Hitchcock, Welles, Goldman, Bordwell, all kinds of people acknowledge should always strive to have a clear and obvious ending mapped from the opening of the film, either because of the nature of the characters or the type of story that’s been set in motion, television series are designed never to end.

Film characters are destined to experience the most exciting/important/life changing event in their lives – on television they have a succession of them and like real life, the only definitive conclusion to their story can be death. Similarly in most films the story has a beginning, middle and end and in the best films, and the climax is so satisfactory we don’t wonder what happens to the characters afterwards.

You know all of this already, but I just wanted to put that up as a way of explaining my feelings about the close of Battlestar Galactica, the critical reaction and so that the next sentence doesn’t appear at the top the post thereby rendering the spoiler warning in the title a complete nonsense. Treat that last sentence as a buffer as well. And that last one – and this one. Here we go …

Well, why not the Douglas Adams ending?

If it’s going to mimic anything why not the closing moments of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (primary and tertiary phases)?

I mean how could you possibly conclude Battlestar Galactica satisfactorily?

Essentially the choices must have panned out as follows –

What we got.

The Blake’s 7 ending – everybody dies and the last human standing is Baltaar, hands up looking into impassive face of a cylon.

The Galactica 80 ending – they reach Earth, but discover a civilisation already in ascendancy and have to work out how to integrate themselves.

The fatalistic ending – they return to the rubbish post-apocalyptic version of Earth and decide it’s what they deserved and try to make the best of it as they slowly die of radiation poisoning

The Voyager ending – they reach Earth in the last few seconds of the episode with the fleet jumping into orbit but we don’t actually get to see them go 'home'

The Angel ending – the human race finds itself in a hopeless situation against insurmountable odds against the cylons and the series ends on a freeze frame of Apollo and Starbuck and the fleet grinning into certain doom

The surprisingly bleak ending – what we saw, but instead of the flash forward we find that the cylons were playing the long game and Caprica, Sharon and the final three turn on the humans as the centurions return along with the remaining cylon models and the final few shots are of Adama watching helplessly as the final remnants of the human race are wiped out as planned since the beginning because his son decided they need to enjoy the rural lifestyle rather than keep some way of defending themselves.

None of which would have been quite worked – wouldn’t have seemed right – because television is built that way – we always need to want to know what happens next. That’s why Angel could still continue in comics even after it ended on television, why the Star Trek franchise rolls ever onward. That’s why the Douglas Adams ending – well almost –- I’m not sure Douglas would have been too happy about the quasi-religious mysticism and the angels – is about as good as it could have been. It’s not perfect, but it’s ok.

As is the usual way of things, most of the criticism seems to be about the detail, the nitpicking. Why would the human race give up all of this scientific development like this? What about all of the diseases? Why is ‘our’ Earth in the wrong place – look at those star maps? What’s all the guff about ‘god’s plan’? How come the two most morally bankrupt characters get continue existing into our time? Does this mean we’re all cylons? Is Bob Dylan? It’s all rubbish, I tell you, rubbish!

No it isn’t. Yes, we’re back to me getting annoyed at people for expecting fiction to obey the laws of reality when it doesn’t need to. It’s fiction. I’ve quoted Hitchcock before on this. You can do what you like in fiction so long as it obeys the rules of the world you’ve created and it's entertaining in the pure sense.

The human race unilaterally give up technology to attempt to end the cycle which got them in the mess they’re in and after what they’ve been through have clearly decided to think of the future of the race, the long game, the hope for a better future for their ancestors. So what if the Earth’s in the wrong place – it’s in the wrong place in the world created by Ron Moore! Why can’t there be a deity in that version of reality – there was one in Clash of the Titans. No we’re not part cylon – the people walking around in the fictional version of New York might be.

I like this ending.

All of the main characters recieved a decent send off – the characters we’ve been following since the first year at least. Most found peace, some surprised themselves, a few found retribution, there was atonement and one just faded away. The show didn’t rest on its laurels and gave us the massive/epic/banzai epic space battle, humans (and some cylons) against cylons we’d hoped for, with the added incongruity of watching centurion battle centurion, new style and against old. It even surprised structurally, as it so often does, providing Lost-style revelations via flashback which will add texture when we decided to watch the series again.

Gestures large and small.

More than that it winds up the central themes of the series, about how we’re usually doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors, of history, despite our best intentions and the Asimovian conjunction between androids and humans and how we’re not averse to playing god ourselves. And I did adore the controversial coda with the return of the iconic image of Six in the red dress which I’ve always seen as a nod to the figure in The Matrix and the montage sequence of the robots we’re desperate to be in our image. But not in a preachy way, with that cheekiness which has been at the core of the series.

Except, of course, this isn’t the end, because this is television. There’s to be a new tv movie, The Plan, retelling the story from the cylon perspective. There’s the prequel, Caprica, set fifty years before the fall, in the world we glimpsed in the pilot and in the flashbacks here. And I’d be very surprised if we didn’t see a proper continuation set somewhere down the line, returning to these characters, now farmers, eeking out their simple existence as some new catastrophe befalls them. Aren’t they going to be doing the cave people what the cylons did to them?

The Spotify Playlist

FIAT Million Hits

"12 tracks from original artists who have sold over a million. Produced in support of the FIAT Madagascar Appeal to commemorate the 1,000,000 Fiat Uno."

It's the mid-1980s and to show their commitment to saving the planet, FIAT gave away these charity compilations with their cars. Given that it's songs which sold lots and lots of copies, it's a pretty good microcosm of what people were listening to in the 80s without the faux-amnesia which strikes when meeting new people when you pretend that the first record you bought was from The Smith, knowing full well it was Five Star.

The liner notes are a fairly spectacular fail on the part of FIAT, or at least the person attempting to justify their green credentials. They begin with this quote from naturalist David Bellamy:

"May I go on record and say thank you for caring enough to take part in the FIAT Madahascar Appeal. Thanks to you, FIAT and the World Wildlife Fund, one of the earths top ten conservation sites and hundreds of species of animals and plants which are found there and nowhere else on earth, are much safer."

Which is fine and laudable. Then there's a section describing the extinction event pending in Madagscar and the causes:

"Madagascar's population of eight million is growing at a rate of 3% a year, and with this growth the natural habitat of the wildlife, including extensive rain forests, is being ruthlessly destroyed. The effects of this development have been so dramatic that today there are more endangered species in Madagscar than in another other country in the world."

Which is true and will continue to be so what with the current political climate in the country. The notes continue by explaining why the aye-aye has been chosen as the symbol of the campaign -- it was the most under threat as Douglas Adams discovered at the time. But then you come up against this bit of prose and see if you can spot the sentence were by jaw metaphorically hit the floor:

Scientists estimate that unless something is down now, the opportunity of saving the wildlife of Madagascar will be gone within ten years. The World Wildlife Fund has given this top priority, and now their action is being funded by another organisation with a worldwide reputation.

FIAT.

For almost a century, Fiat have been associated with the production of high quality cars. But the company's international name can also be seen in areas as diverse as agricultural machinery, construction and excavation equipment, production systems, components for motor vehicles, industrial and domestic appliances, as well as in tourism and transport, aviation, and telecommunications."

To underscore their global credentials, FIAT admits to helping produce the very kinds of machinery which is putting Madagascar under threat in the first place. For the benefit of the lawyers, I should say I'm not implying that FIAT had a contract on the island; I'm just saying that I can't believe that whoever was writing the liner notes didn't find some other way of explaining why the car company is interested. Perhaps they were expecting people to be enjoying the record so much that they wouldn't bother to read it anyway.

At least they didn't mention the tanks and aircraft.

The story has been repeated many times

Film Like Waltzes from Vienna, Hitchcock's Young and Innocent is something of a surprise considering its reputation. Perhaps the reason it’s rarely talked of glowingly is because of the politically incorrect final sequence which features a jazz band in black face and though that’s a distraction it doesn’t take away from a chaser that is just as impressive as The 39 Steps. Imagine The Bourne Identity premade as an Ealing Comedy with some Capraesque screwball comedy and you’re only half describing how entertaining this story of a man falsely accused of murder chasing across country with the daughter of the chief of police.

Reference is most often made to a climactic crane shot, the nature of which would give away the ending but I can say that Nova Pilbeam is adorable as the daughter (and you don’t get names like that any more unless they’re the daughter of a rockstar), her wide-eyes drawing the viewer towards the most important elements of each scene as much as the camera and Gerald Savory’s dialogue is structurally very similar to Robert Riskin’s in It Happened One Night, the slow development of a dysfunctional bond between her and the accused similar to the trust that develops between Gable and Colbert’s characters in that early screwball.

Next to The 39 Steps, Hitch’s most famous work of the period is The Lady Vanishes which someone I know ranks as her favourite film and it’s easy to see why with its vivid characterisation, tense plotting and wacked out unexpected climax. Hitch could have simply made all of the inhabitants of the hotel faintly suspicious as they deny having seen the old dear that Margaret Lockwood claims has gone missing, but instead he reveals their reasons, unfolding the rather British view of the world that Douglas Adams describes in one of his books as the Someone Else’s Problem Effect, then showing the results of their selfishness.

The story has been repeated many times, both in direct remakes and the likes of Flightplan or Changling, the element of a woman trying to convince people that she’s not going insane. In The Lady Vanishes, you're always pointing at the screen when a clue or something that proves that Lockwood’s character wasn’t seeing things hoves into view only to be snatched away before it can make a difference. But once those surprises have drifted away on repeat viewings it’s the other furniture that make it worth a repeat viewing, such as the loveable interplay between the cricket loving Caldicott and Charters who would later be resurrected in a series by the writers and actors like some 1940s Jay and Silent Bob, inserted to reflect on events, ultimately turning up as retirees for a television series in the mid-1980s (played by someone else).

Jamaica Inn is a bit of a retrograde step, recalling the murky direction of his British International Pictures and it’s clear that he’s wasn’t sure how to handle the material and so took his cues from Charles Laughton who doesn’t have much of an idea either. There’s nothing especially wrong with the performances, but the screenplay lacks any of the charm of his preceding six thrillers, and Hitch would later reflect that if he was making this adaptation again he’d keep the reveal of Laughton’s dual nature as lawman and pirate until way into the picture. He’s attempting his usual trick of creating tension by offering the audience more information about the situation than the main character is aware of, but it unbalances the story to have Laughton overpowering presence in almost every scene when it’s Maureen O'Hara’s tragic figure who requires our sympathy.

ouldn't be less excited

Books The Penguin Blog reports on the launch of the front cover of the new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book. I couldn't be less excited about this, and a photo of author Eoin Colfer putting his thumb out doesn't make it any more legitimate.

25 more things you don't know about me

Life Hello. For the past couple of days I've had a tummy bug and spent most of my time in bed, which is nice for the bed since I've now realised how much it needs a new mattress, but not necessarily for me, since I've got to find the money to pay for it. Since I've not posted for a couple of days, I hope the following will more than make up for it.

This is the as promised, far later than it should be, 25 more things you don't know about me or whatever this meme is called these days. I know, if you look at it from a certain direction it does look more like 22 1/2 but I was picking teeth by the end and didn't see the point in adding yet another film reference (23. Still haven't seen Godfather Part II etc).

1. I was very choosy about food at the age of eight. I wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t cooked at home, apart from a Wimpy burger.
2. I often can’t tell my left from right.
3. Which makes me a nightmare when it comes to give directions. I’m reduced to gesturing which isn’t much use if you’re sitting on the back seat. I once put my … right hand out and blocked the view of the driver. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for the shock.
4. I know all the words to the opening speech of Never Never by the All Saints.
5. One of my favourite postcards is a painting of a pig making a counter-clockwise orbit around the Earth. It reminds me that all things are possible.
6. Whenever I’m ill these days and I know I’ll be banjaxed for days and spending a lot of time in my bunk, I watch Joss Whedon’s Firefly.
7. I have very hairy arms.
8. I tried shaving them once. That could be why.
9. I also tried shaving far too young. I still have the scar on my upper lips where the disposable razor dug in.
10. I once won three singles from a Radio Merseyside quiz with Linda McDermott. They were supposed to be chart hits, but one of them was Max Bygraves’s Sing-Along-A-War-Years.
11. When I was at school, I was convinced that evolution was the method God used to create all of the life on Earth. Note, when I was at school.
12. The best quote I’ve heard lately is from the film director Lindsay Anderson. Ages before he died, he was asked what he’d like written on his tombstone. He said: “Persistently surrounded by fuck-wits.”
13. I worked out the twist in The Sixth Sense from the trailer.
14. Whilst we’re on the subject, isn’t M. Night Shyamalan’s best film The Village?
15. There is a video somewhere of me at a Royal Bank of Scotland corporate training day line-dancing to Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’
16. When I was a teenager, I used to kiss a poster of Kylie every night before I went to sleep.
17. All things considered, I can be surprisingly bendy.
18. In the late nineties, I had a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy t-shirt made. The back read: “Life. Don’t talk to me about life.” It promptly got lost and it wasn’t until years later I realised I left it in the room I was staying at Oxford University one weekend.
19. I was at the University for an Archaeology conference.
20. I’ve just realised I’ve never posted this story on the blog. Rubs hands together.
21. I have a poster of the Glove Theatre the wall above my computer – it’s the free item which was given away with The Independent a couple of years ago.
22. That might have been the last time I bought The Independent.
23. It’s naughties rather than noughties.
24. I can be quite boring sometimes. You know that moment in FRIENDS when Ross is flirting and starts talking about the smell they put into gas? I know that can be sometimes and I just don’t know when to shut up.
25. My favourite not in the real world word is Twunk. It can be a surprisingly effective swear-alternative.

the porcupine pincushion

Obituary Oliver Postgate has died.

Oliver informed my childhood through programmes like The Clangers and Ivor The Engine and it’s his voice I remember hearing the most next to Mum and Dad before the age of five. Bagpuss was always my favourite, the acoustic opening, the sepia photographs, Emily, the expectation of what would be found in the shop window for her to repair and even when you knew them all, the porcupine pincushion, the ship in a bottle, you’d still be trying to guess which one it would be. The best character outside of the old saggy cloth cat was Professor Yaffle, a wise old woodpecker (ironically made from wood), based it is said, on Bertrand Russell.

Postgate only ever produced a dozen or so episodes of each during the 1970s but at least two generations of kids grew up watching them as they were endlessly repeated over the next couple of decades. It must have seemed to some like he was still working on them, but by then he’d moved on to other things – to politics and the anti-nuclear campaign – and he was even blogging for the New Statesman up until February 2008. He also auditioned to play the Voice of the Book for the film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy which I’m sure would have made that film better (with due respect to Stephen Fry who took the part instead and tried his best).

But it’s the work he did through Small Films which is his main legacy, and this intro ...



... which will probably be revisited by everyone of a certain age today as we remember what it was like to be five years old again.

badgering Davies

Books There have been few books greeted with so much anticipation in Doctor Who fan circles than The Writer’s Tale. A record of Russell T Davies’s email correspondence with friend and journalist Benjamin Cook during the writing and production of the fourth season of the revived series, it was rumoured that for the first time we, the royal ‘we’ meaning ‘we’ fans as opposed to the ‘not we’ meaning everyone else, would hear the gossip and secrets that under normal circumstances don’t come to light until years later during bitter interchanges in Doctor Who Magazine (more commonly DWM) when half the people involved are dead. Now that it has finally been published, none of us have truly been prepared for how honest and apparently uncensored the book is, and though much swearing and scandal have apparently been removed (presumably for legal reasons) at times it’s as though the reader has hacked into the writer/producer’s email account and is working their way through Davies’s ‘sent items’. It goes without saying that if you’re fan of the new series, it may be quite some time before we’re treated to such a detailed account of production, barring the DWM Special by historian Andrew Pixley.

I’d argue however that non-fans or people who simply watch the show on broadcast will find this equally entertaining, since away from the fannish trivia and scripting anecdotes it’s also a fractured biography of a very complex individual which explains why he’s walking away from his dream job at the end of next year. It seems to be killing him. Russell T Davies is arguably the most prominent producer and writer in the series history, and in an age when backstage creatives are often as famous as those who appear on screen, Davies is as likely to be interviewed just before a new series as the stars. The impression the viewer gets from his publicity appearances is of a bouncy extrovert with bags of energy, always smiling and that’s backed up by his contributions to the making of tv series Doctor Who Confidential and monthly column in DWM. Though the book doesn’t contradict that view, it fleshes out his personality, showing that even though in public he’s forever making grandiose claims about being a screenwriter who knows what he’s doing, in private like every writer he’s wracked with unsurety about his craft and abilities, never feeling as though he’s got things quite right, or that he’s got enough time.

He’s similar to 70s script editor Douglas Adams (who was writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at the same time) in that respect – forever in here, Davies frets about deadlines, often letting them whoosh past him to the point that often what’s being filmed is, if not quite a first draft (he’s forever polishing), certainly something which is into the computer one day and at a script reading the next. There are times when he admits he simply can’t get a plot point straight even as the episode enters production even to the point of being phoned from the set by the director asking for guidance on how to interpret what’s been written. It’s that brutal frankness which is endearing but also potentially frustrating because his work is potentially suffering because despite his big ideas, he's constantly interrupted by of all of the other things he has to do each day; in one entry he describes a typical twenty-four hours and the list is frightening. It’s these longer entries which are the real draw for the ‘not we’, as celebrity gossip (Kylie! Catherine! Billie!) and writing mechanics give way to confessionals on how the process of publicity and the circus that surrounds the series is exasperating him and the more negative aspects of his persona come to the fore, snapping at friends, autopilot at launch parties, walking around Cardiff bay in the middle of the night wondering how he’s going to get the work done.

Which is why Ben Cook’s contribution shouldn’t be overlooked. He’s the reader’s way into Davies’s life, like the Doctor exploring an alien world, somehow managing to ask just the right questions to trigger a revelation or anecdote. They’ve clearly already built a friendship and rapport in the preceding few years (or longer – Doctor Who fans have their inner circle just like any sub-culture), so the writer is already relaxed, but there are times when Cook is almost badgering Davies until he explains himself properly on a given topic. It helps that they both have the same field of reference – you couldn’t imagine another journalist to get Davies to write so candidly (in a chapter called ‘Bastards’ – and this in a book about a family series!) about helping other members of the production team come to terms with the online fan reaction to their work (offering sympathy to them on the phone for hours) whilst at the same time noticing his own thoughtlessness in relation to dumping the script of an old friend even though they’d been working on it for a year, agonising over what that says about him.

At just over five hundred pages this might seem like a intimidating read, but large sections are filled with first drafts and revisions of three of his episodes as well as pertinent photographs, publicity shots and candids sometimes showing the programme makers at play. It’s well designed by former DWM editor Clayton Hickman, text even punctuated here and there by Davies’s own comic illustrations of rejected story ideas and moments from life. It’s not all Davies either; exchanges with the likes of designers and incoming producer Steven Moffat are included too as they desperately try not to tell each other too much about their stories whilst simultaneously making sure their not repeating themselves. You’ll notice that I’ve not talked much about the content of the book and that’s quite deliberate. The Writer’s Tale is best savoured with all of the surprises intact, the casting replacements, the changes in story and who said what to whom about what and whom and when. In other words, no spoilers. The book does climax with some hints of what’s to come in the upcoming Christmas special and like the best stories there is a surprise ending.

But like I said, no spoilers.

[The book has its own marvellous website, which includes extracts as well as .pdfs of all of the scripts written by Davies.]

Adams is or rather was something of a folk hero

Books As originally passionately posted here. The obvious typos give away the speed with which I was tapping away:

Gosh, I'm glad I'm not the only one. I expect Penguin and Colfer assumed that fans would be pleased that the story would be carried on, that we'd be happy to simply spend the time with familiar characters no matter who the author is. What they haven't realised is that for many of us, this is personal. For some of us, particularly those of us who are Doctor Who fans too, Adams is or rather was something of a folk hero, and the story of the actual writing of the books as important a tapestry and part of the narrative as the books themselves (which I agree didn't hang together as a narrative, but that was never really the point).

Douglas found the books pure torture to write. He never kept to deadlines, often recycled ideas often from his Doctor Who and was, like Woody Allen, very self deprecating about the results. The Allen comparison is interesting, because like Woody who dumped the whole original first version of his film September, Adams substantially rewrote Life, The Universe and Everything to make it less dark and introspective. Except of course, arguably Allen is industrious to a fault whereas all of Douglas's words are precious -- even the final short chapter of the first Hitchhiker's Book.

But there's no denying that there is a kind of ramshackle structure to the series and though he toyed for ages with writing a sixth book and resolving the story, I think I read in an interview somewhere that he decided that it was best left as it was (insert the discussion from Kevin Smith's Clerks about life being a series of down endings). He began and got part way through a third Dirk Gently instead (found in The Salmon of Doubt). My favourite is 'So Long and Thanks For All The Fish' because its that most unexpected of things, a love story, and a touching and bittersweet one at that. Also it ignores Zaphod, who was never his bestest character and I assume Colfer will spread liberally through the new book like a rash, because again, he has his fans.

I've already heard the radio adaptation justification which works somewhere along the lines of 'well Dirk Maggs gave the series an ending there and introduced new material for the radio series so what's wrong with this Artemis Fowl bloke doing the same?' The difference there was that Maggs was adaopting text for a new medium, and very carefully either deployed some of Adams's ideas to fill in the narrative gaps or else produced material entirely in keeping with the original -- having known Douglas he already had a good idea of what he going to do himself with adaptations (some of which he'd already had a go at writing). In his ending for the Quandary phase (or Mostly Harmless), he was completing the radio series.

The problem with this sixth book is that it's Colfer's idea of how the story might end. As far as we can gather he's not working from Douglas's notes (presumably because there weren't any) and will be writing them in his own style rather than a faux version of Adams. Which is fine, he can do what he likes. The problem is that its being targeted and marketed as some official sequel to the series and will presumably turn up in future omnibuses and boxsets and have a paperback cover which pays homage to the originals somehow and have a title which like the other books spring from the pages of the text. And since this is basically fan fiction, there'll be all of the temptation to boxtick, explain inconsistencies, tie up loose ends, none of which Douglas himself was all that interested in doing.

I don't know, but how do Frank Herbert fans feel about all of the Kevin Anderson additions? Or the writers who've left their muddy footprints in Asimov's universes? Another point worth making is that this smells of attempting to turn the Hitchhiker's verse into a franchisable shared universe ala Doctor Who. The difference is that even though Sydney Newman is nominally listed as creator, Waris Hussein and Verity Lambert had as much to do with its development as did the original pilot writer David Whitakker and Terry Nation and every other writer whose worked on the series. Gallifrey wasn't their idea and neither was regeneration or the timelords. It's a shared universe without a single creator and is built to withstand it. I'd be horrified to thing that there'll be Young Slartibartfast novels in its future.

The point is, I don't care what happens to Arthur after Mostly Harmless, unless Douglas is writing it. And that's not likely now is it?

Books I don't care if it is written by Artemis Fowl's Eoin Colfer, the world does not need a sixth Hitchhikers book unless it's written by Douglas Adams. And that's not likely is it? It's not a shared universe and already has a perfectly good conclusion. There'll eventually be another radio series I imagine. Still, if it keeps Simon Jones et al in work.
Updated: Arthur Dent's not happy about it either.

Mystery Music March in April

What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong

Working towards writing this piece, I was horrified to discover that Clear Channel, the corporation that owns a large percentage of the commercial radio stations in America added Wonderful World to the ‘inappropriate’ list of songs that should not be played in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As well as completely misunderstanding the meaning of the song, surely exactly the thing you need in times like those is something which reminds you that actually this world is a wonderful place to live even if there’s minority of people existing on it who have a habit of doing some very, very evil things.

I’ve no compunction about saying that this is one of my favourite songs. Top ten, any list, John Lennon’s a hack for appropriating the sentiment. From hearing it over the closing titles of the non-rubbish radio and tv versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to the closing titles of the film Twelve Monkeys, I can’t think many songs infused with such hope and beauty that were also originally sung by someone who sounds as though they’ve been swallowing gravel at every meal time for their entire life. The simple accompaniment on that version, a small orchestra emphasising that voice is perfect and it’s absolutely right it should have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

It’s been covered often but rarely well. The Joey Ramone is a gold standard because it’s different enough from the original to stand alone. All too often though, balladeers, female usually, overdo that sentiment to the point of rancidity, emphasising the chorus to the point of absurdity and, well, making it sound like every other ballad they’ve ever sung. Orchestral versions fare better, The Pavão Quartet inevitably hitting just about the right tone, even if, by the mid-section you could imagine it being used on a daytime charity commercial with a Paul McGann voiceover.

The problem is, in the midst of all that, I can’t really talk. In November 2006, at a quarter to midnight according to the file’s date stamp, I recorded my own version. I don’t remember now exactly why it happened, and why I thought it would be a good idea, especially since I can’t really sing. At all (despite what I said yesterday about Zadok) . Listening back to it now, I can detect a certain amount of affection, a misguided attempting at professionalism which just sounds a bit wrong. But it is what it is even if it just sits there.

I remember dropping it onto a mix cd for someone (hello Kat) and them saying something nice. There it sits on my hard disk – and now on this blog, because it does appear to sum up what the song means to me and even if it isn’t perfect, and includes a couple of moments when I start thinking I'm Louis, it seems only fair that after criticising other people’s voices and music I should offer some of my own.

What A Wonderful World. Acapella (sorry). (2.3 mb .mp3 download)

Mystery Music March in April

Video Killed The Radio Star – Buggles

The thesis of Trevor Horn’s song (from the album The Age of Plastic) is that radio stars have become irrelevant in the world of video. With the growth of file sharing and youtube that message should be intensified but actually radio would appear to be as relevant today as ever, especially since the advent of podcasts. I recently attended a focus group for the local radio station and the opinions were a reminder that more than ever people want their lives lived to a background of music and chatter and that they hardly ever want to stop to watch that same song with pictures. Trevor Horn is wrong. There, I’ve said it.

In fact it’s very rare now for a song to become a hit on the back of a video alone – the promo’s become part of a general marketing campaign which can include talent show appearances, magazine and newspaper interviews, live appearances on radio and television, paparazzi baiting and radio air-play. And the DJ’s still king. On the asteroid I’m presently living on unfettered by popular music in which I’ve not heard of half the people in the Gallup Top 40 (or whatever it’s called these days) let alone listened to any of it, but even I’ve heard of Chris Moyles not that I could actually tell you about any of the songs he’s playing. Except Leona Lewis, because there was something about her on the news.

My suspicion is that the other reason that video hasn’t killed the radio star is because of the quality of recent work. Flicking through the freeview channels at umpteen time of the evening and stopping on The Hits, I’m yet to be impressed by what I see. Presumably because production costs have sky-rocketed, pop promos just seem so dull and samey, featuring large men shouting at each other in night clubs, women writhing up against each other in libraries or both being attacked by a giant CGI effect. If Beavis and Butthead were still around they’d have nothing to talk about. Except perhaps for the boobies. H-huh-huh. H-huh-huh.

Before you interrupt, I know I’m wrong and there is some very interesting work being done in pop videos, but since none of it is connected with music these kinds of channel generally show, we’re stuck with what looks like an inherent lack of innovation. The last really exciting video I saw was for Snow Patrol, the one with the POV from a car bonnet rushing through the streets of Paris, and that’s only because they’d appropriated the second half of Claude Lelouch’s short film C'était un rendez-vous (and makes better sense in its original form). The Culture Show recently featured an interview with Garth Jennings, the man who ruined the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and he seemed to be doing some interesting things with giant prop legs and Supergrass but really I miss the days when you could turn on the television and be sure to find Peter Gabriel turning into plasticsene or Madonna doing naughty things to Jesus.

But the song is about more than that. Horn was apparently inspired by a JG Ballard short story, The Sound-Sheep in which a deaf boy searched the world for stray music and stumbled upon a outcast opera singer hiding in a sewer. It’s about how new generations hardly ever appreciate the technology of the past, unable to comprehend that at one point, radio was the primary source of entertainment. Which is why, despite the record being available on cd and download, my only copy of Video Killed The Radiostar is a crackly but still playable original vinyl pressing. I know those clicks so well that a clean digital copy would just sound weird.