LAST CHANCE TO SEE

The night I got my copy of “Last Chance To See” signed was, ironically, the last chance that I ever got to see Douglas Adams in person. I didn’t plan it that way. I thought that there’d be loads of opportunities, but that’s not what the fates decreed and I suppose that I ought to be at least a little bit grateful that our lives overlapped in even a little way. After all, so many of the great men of history had been and gone and achieved everything they were ever going to years before I was even the beginnings of a twinkle.

It was a strange evening, if truth be told, and it was all a very, very long time ago, sometime during a period I now think of almost as having taken place during another life, in another universe and, well, everything.

Strangely, someone standing behind me in a queue in a bakery recently said something that struck me as being rather profound. This was odd in itself because he was a young chap who was obviously trying (and succeeding, it seemed to me) to impress the young girl he was with in a babble of nonsense that had “first date” scribbled all over it and I immediately loathed him with a vengeance.

However, what he said about things in your life that happened ten years ago no longer mattering did strike a chord with me, as it bored into the very heart of what has now become the current human condition; That the long past is no longer relevant and the whole of history is consigned to the dustbin, and that the “now” and what happens next seem to be all that matter to anyone any more, despite the fact that billions of us live with the consequences of what has happened to us in the past every single day, and  if we don’t learn from history we really are going to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Douglas Adams has been dead and gone for more than ten years now, but still seems more relevant than ever to those of us who have read his many thoughts upon the future of this “pathetic bloody planet”. The only time I ever met him was at that rather strange book signing for “Last Chance To See” which was held at Waterstone’s bookstore on Deansgate in Manchester way back in the days when I had another life, with another girl, on another planet…

I don’t think that she was much of a fan, to be honest. Certainly, when I got involved in a reluctant conversation with a couple of matching “überfans” she took the opportunity to impatiently lift her eyes towards the ceiling and then drifted off in a surly manner towards other, more “highbrow” sections of the shop leaving me locked inside an inescapable conversation, and didn’t return until they started handing out the free glasses of wine.

Consequently I spent the next few hours (it may have been minutes, but you know how it is when you simply cannot get away from people) in the company of a couple of hobbits who claimed that they lived their entire lives by the rules as laid out in “The Worshipful and Ancient Law of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” which seemed a very odd way of going about your life to me, but they seemed happy enough, so I probably disliked them immediately.

They were both the same height and wore matching green waterproof raincoats with hoods and had matching hair. If it hadn’t been for his beard, I might have taken them for twins. There is just a slight possibility that they were actually space aliens, of course, but I tend to dismiss that as being a little bit silly, which might be where I’m going wrong, of course.

Nevertheless, they gushed and enthused, and couldn’t wait for this opportunity to meet their guru in person, and I remained polite enough in my desperation to escape them, and I seem to recall that I did finally get away from them only to run into them in the queue for getting the books signed later on.

The world is a strange and peculiar place, which is why things like that keep happening. There is a universal law that quite clearly states that the one person you are most desperate to avoid is the one who you are most likely to keep on bumping into, especially if you are pushing a supermarket trolley in opposite directions along parallel aisles. Perhaps that’s why the “ex” returned to me when the wine was being dished out; I was the one person she wanted to get away from.

There were obvious signs of wine drinking from Mr Adams himself when he appeared, but not in an unpleasant way, just in the jolly tradition of hospitality of the “Welcome, Mr Adams, would you like a glass of wine to calm the nerves…?” persuasion. The shop had supplied him with a tall chair, which, as he was a tall man anyway, seemed rather redundant, although many of his truest disciples sat down on the floor around him as if they were a school class awaiting the next fairytale to be read to them by their teacher. He seemed so nonplussed by this development that he immediately fell off the chair for comedy effect, which led to one of those “moments” of embarrassment that English audiences are rather ill-equipped to deal with.

Some small child of about fourteen years old immediately made some reference to an incident that occurs in one of the books in the author’s famous “Trilogy in (as it was then) Four Parts” which the author himself failed to recognise, but we all laughed it off in that slightly awkward, looking at our shoes, “Oh God! It’s a fan!” kind of a way.

Then the young lad compounded the social faux pas by trying to look up the reference, and the room was, to all intents and purposes, horrified. After all, we all knew that this wasn’t a “Hitch-Hiker’s” event… This was the great man’s first opportunity to venture into worlds beyond the other worlds he had created, and make a name for himself in writing for the “real world” and yet here he was, not even out of the starting blocks, and already the “Hitch-hiker’s” fans were hijacking the event.

I suppose it was strange, but not entirely unexpected. After all whilst the book itself was very different to those which preceded it in terms of content, the people who were most likely to read an Adams book weren’t necessarily going to be the ones most likely to appreciate such a departure, but the evening went along, and the extracts that were read out were funny and entertaining, and the “Q&A” afterwards managed to generally steer away from science-fiction and stuck mostly to science-fact, although I still recall that the biggest round of applause came when he mentioned that there would indeed be a fifth book in that trilogy one day…

So I queued up with the hobbits and rather cheekily got two of my books signed and, perhaps because I’d had one or two glasses of wine myself, have no recollection at all of the one moment in my life when I met Douglas Adams, apart from the fact that he wrote my name in my book so I know that I must have met him, and I really hope that I didn’t try and be funny like I foolishly once tried to be with Alexei Sayle.

Sometimes, you see, life really is just like plummeting towards the ground and wondering whether it’ll be friends with me…

SHADA

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, during my journeys to and from work, instead of demoralising myself with the generally depressing outpourings on Radio 4  confirming to me that society as we knew it really has gone to hell in a handbasket, I have instead been listening in the car to Lalla Ward, Mrs Richard Dawkins no less (and former Romanadvoratrelundar Mk II to explain the connection), reading Gareth Roberts’ recent adaptation of Douglas Adams’ so-called great “lost” work based upon his scripts created for the episodes which were never completed in 1979 due to “industrial action at the BBC” of a six-part tale called “Shada”.

Douglas Adams was a rather unique and amazing talent, if not a prolific one. Over the course of less than a dozen books he manage to spark the imaginations of a generation and made a name for himself as one of the literary giants of the late 20th century, but sometimes I think that it is his thoughts and his essays that are actually his most important legacy, because his ideas and writings about science, computing and our own place in the environment and the wider universe are certainly the things which have stuck with me during the decade that has passed since his death in California, ironically following a bout of healthy exercise, at a ridiculously youthful 49.

In those long, dark depressing days after graduating from Cambridge, failing to become John Cleese as he wished to, but before his greatest success finally made his name, in between taking walk-on parts in “Monty Python” sketches and his eventual achievement of finally persuading Radio 4 that science fiction could be funny, Douglas Adams wrote three teleplays for Doctor Who adventures, two and a half of which actually got made, and two of which actually managed to be broadcast: “The Pirate Planet” and “City of Death”.

The third of these was called “Shada” and was struck down, as I mentioned earlier, by that scourge of many things creative in the late 1970s, “industrial action”, and was subsequently abandoned, stuck on a shelf, supposedly never to see the light of day and forgotten about, which is all rather ironic really, when you consider some of the themes and tropes being played around with were precisely about that very thing.

Douglas himself, it is said, was never all that impressed by “Shada”, not least because it has the air of being a bit of a “rush job”, but he did recycle one or two of the ideas for the first of his “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” novels a few years later.

But “Shada” was never really forgotten. A few years later, a video version was cobbled together using the location and studio footage that had already been filmed, alongside the scripts in book form, and the proceeds all went to Comic Relief, so the story was at least “out there”, knowable and was actually doing some good, instead of merely sitting on that shelf, gathering dust and no-doubt gaining the reputation of being a solid gold “classic” as things that we cannot see usually do.

Later still, a new version was adapted and created as an audio adventure which was released on CD and starred Paul McGann as the Time Lord standing in for the Mighty Tom, who wasn’t much prone towards doing such things in those days. Suddenly, having been a bit of an unknown quantity, the story was rapidly becoming one of the most adapted and well-known of Mr Adams’ lesser works.

Recently, to mark a decade passing since the death of Mr Adams, the story was released again, this time in novel form, written by another author, the aforementioned Mr Roberts. It is an adaptation which, at least occasionally, actually manages to at least echo the style of Adams himself whilst also, sadly, only reminding us of what a nimble wordsmith the original was. It’s not a bad adaptation at all, in fact there are a few pages where the Adams of old comes blasting off the page, but it does tend to start to show up the shortcomings of the TV show scripted version, as the fascinating opening premise rather transforms into lots of people running around inside various spaceships and asteroids and making miraculous escapes from moments of false jeopardy. There is also in the manuscript a rather annoying tendency to overuse the word “naughty” for my tastes, but I can’t have been that unimpressed by it. After all, I did buy it twice, once to read and again to listen to in the car.

This was because, once I’d read the book myself, I happened upon the audio-book version going cheap and ordered it up so that, for ten exquisite days, my journey to work was enhanced by something more stimulating than the economic deficit, pension reform and electioneering amongst the devious and the not-so-good.

My main gripe was practical, as the book was spread across 10 CDs, all mounted on one little spindle like when you buy a batch of blank ones from Tesco. Getting the first one out of the box was fair enough, but there was a question of where to put that one whilst you tried to extract disc 2 from the box and so on. That takes a certain amount of preparation to deal with when you know that you’re going to be stuck in traffic at the end of a disc, making sure that the next one was handy, and that the ejected one could be plonked somewhere where it wouldn’t get scratched to buggery until you had a chance to park the car and tidy things away.

I’m sure, if he were still alive to work on “The Meaning of Liff” there might now be a word for that, but I’m going to dub it a “Dukinfield” until I find out that it’s already been taken.

Anyway, rather sadly, I completed the last disc on my way home last week and now it’s finished and, do you know, I’m rather missing it as I return to the morning inquisitions of John and Jim (or whoever) on the radio. I may have to start re-exploring the less-than-impressive music collection for a while instead, which should lead to some embarrassment as someone pulls up next to me at traffic lights to overhear it. Also, for a few weeks at least, the boys from TMS will at least be able to accompany me on my journeys home, so all is not lost.

It’s not that I mind John and Jim (or whoever) personally, you understand…? In fact, in many ways they have been my accompaniment to travel for many a long year, perhaps contributing to the lugubrious air of futility that I used to exude as I arrived at various work places, but also adding to that sense that I used to have of “knowing what’s going on” that I seem recently to be rather less impressed by. No, it’s not that. I think it’s just that having had my mind expanded once again courtesy of Mr Adams and Mr Roberts, putting it back inside the box each morning seems just a little bit sad.

HITCH HAIKU

Maybe a week late*

but I was on holiday(!)

It’s the thought that counts.

* although, just to make it slightly relevant, my copy of "Shada" did arrive yesterday...

THE BEST THING SINCE…?

Accordion to what I was told by the morning newsbots recently, it’s now fifty earth years since the introduction of sliced white bread into the daily lives of a grateful nation. This means, of course, that a mere child of the early-to-mid sixties like myself has never known a time in its life when bread didn’t come in its convenient pre-sliced form, and, whilst I am obviously still happy to buy my bread in its pure, unsliced form, my default purchasing option has inevitably become the sliced loaf in a bag.

I blame the parents…

However, I do have a slight admiration for those mechanical devices, which I think I first saw in France but are now fairly ubiquitous in bakeries wherever I go, the bread slicing machine. Take a fresh baked loaf, ask the customer whether and how they want it sliced and watch it go. I could probably watch it all day, if that wouldn’t annoy absolutely everyone in the queue behind me and end up with me having to throw an awful lot of bread away.

So, why then is the not-so-new innovation of the sliced loaf taxing my braincell today? Well, apart from the obvious question that has been so often asked before during the course of the past half century, which is, of course “What exactly was the best thing before sliced bread?” (I’m guessing tinned food…), I feel another need to quote from that famous essay “How to stop worrying and learn to love the internet” by Douglas Adams in the Sunday Times (29 August 1999), which I always seem to be coming back to:-

• Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
• Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
• Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. (Here’s the link to the whole essay, if you’re interested http://bit.ly/1V3v4s)

There are so many things in the world today that I can’t really see the point of - Wars, Famine, Weapons of Mass Destruction – but about which most people (apart from those with a declared interest in the outcome of such things, many with their fingers in a particularly unpleasant pie), probably agree with me, but then there are the other things that people get so very excited about but which I can’t really see the need for.

I can just about understand why people feel the need to carry a portable telephone around with them, even if it turns out that it is actually slow-cooking their brains. The ability to let someone know that you are actually on the train and that it is about to go into a tunnel is possibly one of the biggest advances for mankind since we bothered to stick around on a beach one morning rather than staying in the ocean dancing around with all the other amoebas, and even some of the other jiggery-pokery that we attach to the things sometimes actually seems useful, although I am still more of the opinion that if I want to take a photograph I will use a camera, and if anyone should wish to ring me, there are a number of places I can usually be found and the rest of the time I would probably prefer to be doing what I was doing instead of talking about it to someone who is not there. However, mobile telephony is progress, and I’m beginning to learn to live with it. (Note to self: Try and learn to see the point of those phone apps that tell everyone where you are all the time and that your house is probably empty.)

What really troubles me is this constant need and necessity to “update” things all the time. We have a youth culture that is blaming older generations for wrecking the planet for them but then can’t make the connection that throwing away your telephone after three months because it’s no longer the latest or trendiest model is, quite simply, devastating in terms of its environmental footprint, even if you do hand in the old one for recycling. If something is working perfectly well, why change it? I know that it is in certain company’s interests to keep on updating their operating systems so that people have to keep on buying their new stuff just to keep up (and that’s a whole new trick being played upon us that we have still haven’t been wise enough to see through…), but it really is only a generation or so since people could maintain and repair their own cars rather than paying out £500 just for a “diagnostic”, or take a television to a shop and actually get it repaired, or have sturdy, reliable old “radiograms” that they treasured and loved for decades and sometimes even handed down to their offspring.

Meanwhile, the all-consuming march of the video games carries on, smashing all other forms of entertainment out of its path as it goes. Games get launched with much the same sort of fanfare as feature films used to, with even more possibilities for sucking more cash out of you. Then hours and hours are spent in the truly wholesome pursuits of shooting at zombies, blowing up buildings and pretending that we’re doing exercise or learning to paint whilst the real world beyond the double glazing is just waiting to be explored. Crikey! I can’t even settle down to read a book now without someone trying to persuade me that I would be better off reading it from some gadget or other.

One of the most depressing hours I have endured recently was spent watching “The Gadget Show” on Channel Five, waiting for a potentially interesting piece on which compact cameras were considered to be the “best” option. Watching a group of very strange folk obsessing about all manner of the latest “tech” (their word) just seemed so manifestly soul-destroying that I started to feel more and more depressed as the minutes ticked by on my cheap – and manifestly uncool - wristwatch.

I’m no Luddite. I can truly appreciate the advances that technology has made into making all our lives a lot easier. Medical equipment has photographed and scanned parts of my body that I’m still not convinced are really there, and my so-called “living” is earned by wrangling a steam-powered early variant of the equipment that they were getting so excited about, and even the cup of coffee that sits cooling on my desk as I type out these ravings was created thanks to one of the many electronic gizmos that clutter up our kitchen.

But this “cult of having stuff” – and much of it actually pretty pointless stuff at that - seems to be getting out of control. There’s loads of stuff we might want, and some of it that we might actually need, but the vast majority of today’s “must haves” are tomorrow’s rubbish, and we’ll be wondering why on earth we ever bought them.

Meanwhile, I saw a poster the other day which told me that I could have two of Apple’s latest “must haves” for the princely sum of £99, if I was prepared to part with “only” £69 a month for the contract to run them. Maybe I have got so far out of the loop that I don’t understand how the world works, but, if we’ve got to the stage where those kinds of sums are considered mere triflings (and I hate to think what you have to do if you have one, two or more ankle-biters making demands upon your wallet for such accessories) then I’m obviously not earning enough.

But then again, is anybody? After all, even a sliced loaf costs an arm and a leg these days. It must be all those development costs. Although, if I was starving, at least I could eat the bread, which is more than I can say for a rinky-dinky mobile phone, however many “apps” it may have.

PASSING FAME

How can it already be ten years since Douglas Adams died? I find it almost impossible to believe that an entire decade has passed since I got up on that promising Saturday morning to hear that almost unbelievable news from the previous day which quite ruined my weekend and the weekend of many of his fans and also (of course, lest we forget) totally devastated his friends and family. Ten whole years since that creative cornerstone of my (admittedly limited) life as a consumer of literature had been cruelly excised by an excess of exercise, having lived his entire life in a less than half century span, ruled by only one monarch, and dying at an age which made him only a couple of years older than I am now. Ten whole years from a sad morning on a planet that would still have a World Trade Center standing in the heart of New York for another four months, which is a story for another day and a tragic demonstration of humanity’s capacity for cruelty that, I suppose, as a proponent of all that was best about our potential, at least he was not around to experience.

Apparently that same sad anniversary date of May the 11th 2011 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the legendary Bob Marley which presumably goes to show that iconic figures should really be careful as we approach the mid point between the spring and summer equinoxes. I truly wish sometimes that some of them could live forever (or at least outlive me…) as their loss is something that becomes ever more difficult to bear. I mean I know that it’s inevitable, and we all have to go sometime, but when someone has spent their entire professional life giving other people happiness, it always seems such a great shame when they are snatched away far too young, although how we even define “too young” any more is something of a mystery. Would any of us feel ‘cheated’ if we didn’t reach seventy, or eighty or the now mythical status of a century? Some centurions really don’t look like they’re having much of a life, do they, but maybe it’s better to be here than not to be here…?

Still, when it comes to those public figures that we respect and admire, we can never really know how they behaved in the privacy of their personal lives (if anyone still grasps that particular concept any more…). Some of the great and the good turn out to be real disappointments when the ‘kiss-and-tell’ stories start to come out about them. I wonder in the end whether any of that really matters? I can still enjoy the work of Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers despite all the biographies I’ve read telling me what utter swines they could be in their home lives. Maybe this is why I’m not a fan of the tabloids or the celebrity magazines. I don’t want too much information about the real person behind the mystique. If it comes to the crunch I rather suspect that I would prefer to have the “Hollywood Greats” exist in the form of their almost legendary public lifestyles like they were portrayed to us back in the 1950s than the “flawed mortals who got lucky” stuff that we are exposed to nowadays.

Meanwhile, I suppose that I do get rather ridiculously and excessively moved by the slipping from this mortal coil of many of those in the public eye, all of whom wouldn’t have known me if I walked up to them and accosted them with a fresh herring (Although if I had done that… No. That way madness lies…), but I guess that it only goes to show how much people we’ve never even met do become part of our lives. Rather more frequently that I would really have liked in recent months I have had to pause for a moment in my pathetically pointless bloggery and raise one of my metaphorical glasses to the memory of some obscure performer or commentator or other whom many of my loyal readers might not have even been aware of just because they had played a large and unconscious part in the shaping of what turned out to be me. Some of those names might not have meant much to a lot of people, but, over the years, they had meant a hell of a lot to me.

A few years ago I tried to bludgeon the editor of one of the magazines that I regularly read into instigating a monthly award of some kind to recognise those figures who I regarded as being “International Treasures” or even (at the risk of immediately jinxing them) “Living Legends” but to no avail. Perhaps people in publishing are more savvy about such things and know that the minute you’ve gone to press with these things, the sad news will inevitably be announced that suddenly makes your publication seem a tad insensitive. You can tell how long ago it was that I wrote that letter because Patrick McGoohan was one of the names I mentioned and he has since slipped away. It had started to trouble me that some of the great figures of my own childhood, people like Patrick MacNee, Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman, Roger Moore, Clint Eastwood, William Shatner, the mighty Tom Baker and so many others were getting to a rather great age and I hadn’t ever had or taken the opportunity to thank them for their work and tell them quite how much I, as an insignificant little potato growing up on the battered edges of a northern city, had had my pathetic little life enriched and made happier by the work they were doing.

Lately, more and more bits of my past seem to have been melting away like ice cubes in a glass of very fine whisky (or in the case of my life, possibly more like the own-brand supermarket stuff if truth be told…), but all those great names that formed such a strong part of the social infrastructure of my life seem to be slipping away from us more and more frequently. I guess that it’s just a sign that I’m getting older. “Our ’Enry” Cooper, “Whispering Ted” Lowe and Professor Richard Holmes all drifted out of our lives over the same weekend recently and more and more of the bricks that built and supported the edifice that I like to think of as “me” seems to be crumbling away. Sidney Lumet, Farley Granger, Seve Ballesteros and all those others who so frequently popped up in our news programmes or on our movie screens seem to all be fading into history before our very eyes, and the living, breathing, real parts of our own histories seem to be transferred to mere memory and library facsimile along with them.

Also recently, the last combat veteran of the First World War has finally passed into history and the terrible stories of life in the trenches has now passed out of living memory with him, leaving only the historians to keep their memory alive and to tell their story to future generations and hopefully discourage anyone else from making the same bloody mistakes.

Naturally, and whether this is right or wrong of course is debateable, certain sad passings tend to shake society more to the core than others. The assassinations of international figures like Mahatma Gandhi are always going to be more noticed and affect more people than the deaths of so-called “ordinary” people simply because of their high profile. The murders of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, and that of Martin Luther King all shook the world in the 1960s just as much as the accident that caused the death of Princess Diana did in the 1990s. Iconic status seems assured for the young and talented if they leave us too soon. Well known and much loved media figures like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley have all gained huge status and importance that might not have happened if they had lived, although I wonder quite what any of them would have made of the legends and merchandising industries that grew up in their memories. What would James Dean have thought of someone managing to copyright his ‘stance’, for example?

Perhaps it is the high profile of these people and the sense of disbelief that they can possibly be snatched away so easily that causes all those conspiracy theories to brew up. It’s easier to believe in their indestructibility than to accept that any one of us who has become so important to so many can just be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. At least for them their immortality in some form is assured (although it is rather cruel of nature to make it so we can never be aware of the effect our passing might have) although, if it came to a straight choice, I’m sure they would all have given much of that away to have had a few more years of living instead.

Equally, there are an awful lot of famous faces that fail to move me at all when they finally leave us, even if it can still come as a shock to many. It doesn’t make them any less important, of course it doesn’t, it just means that I wasn’t as aware of them and what they did. I’m sure that when those old “Hollywood Greats” pass on, sometimes decades after they were last in the spotlight, those who remember them as contemporaries, or remember fantasising over their youth and beauty are just as heartbroken at that bright star being snuffed out as the rest of us remain indifferent to the loss of someone we’d assumed had already gone years ago.

Then there are those public figures for whom few seem to feel the need to mourn their passing. The wicked instigator of those World Trade Center attacks was also consigned to oblivion recently and few mourned his loss, although the jubilant stance taken by a few seems to have at least become a source of regret and shame for some. When a notorious British child killer finally died in prison in the early years of this century there were few to mark her passing and her ashes were anonymously scattered in a local park that still feared the vandalism and bad feeling such an act might bring. Nevertheless, both these wicked people were still as much in the public thoughts in death as in life, and still bore the brand of  a kind of fame we prefer to term ‘notoriety’.

I suppose that it does really depend mostly on how much someone’s work was admired by you as to how much the loss of someone you’ve rarely (if ever) met affects you. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older and more sentimental that I seem to be getting more and more emotional about these things and yet I can still remain more cold in my reaction to some of the things going on that actually do directly involve me. Perhaps it’s just one of those safety mechanisms that we all have. Many people have stated quite openly that they had wept buckets at the funeral of Diana but not at the loss of one of their own family, and there are many, many cases where the loss of a beloved pet has caused the locked floodgates of someone’s grief to be opened.

I know that I shouldn’t dwell. I know that it only depresses everyone, especially me, and there should be much happier things to think and talk about on a lovely spring morning, but ten years is a long time, and yet sometimes it seems like barely a moment ago.

So long, and thanks again…