Director, animator, and author Kevin Jon Davies grew up enthralled by Doctor Who and Spike Milligan’s The Goon Show. When he discovered the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show, it seemed like the best of both worlds. Before long, he was doing animation for the TV series. Kevin tells me how he got into animation, how he moved from animation into directing—including directing 30th anniversary documentaries for both Doctor Who and Hitchhiker’s in the same year—and all about the process of writing his new book, 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.
Episode breakdown:
[00:07:22] Learning to direct through osmosis on set. Enjoyed being with others in live action. Lucky breaks in animation and directing.
[00:14:58] Early Doctor Who, Spike Milligan’s comedy influence.
[00:17:53] Douglas Adams: famous for procrastinating.
[00:24:42] Making 30 Years in the TARDIS.
[00:28:48] The BBC’s unfortunate habit of throwing things away.
[00:32:32] The Alchemists of Sound documentary and unsung genius Delia Derbyshire.
[00:39:20] Complex copyright issues for BBC staff artists.
[00:43:06] Following in Douglas Adams’s footsteps while researching the new book.
[00:50:31] Adams’s an increasing interest in science toward the end of his life.
[00:55:48] Last Chance to See.
[01:03:02] Adams’s untimely death, and the continued celebration of his work.
[01:08:05] Readers’ sense of connection with Adams’s work.
Please leave a review and in it, tell us how a childhood influence has stuck with you.
Show links
Kevin’s Instagram
The Alchemists of Sound documentary
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Transcript: Kevin Jon Davies
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Before we get started, I want to let you know about a way to hang out with me online. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that when ordinary people engage their creativity, they connect with their joy and their deepest selves come to life. I’ve started a newsletter called the spark.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:36]:
It’s a place for me to experiment with my writing and share it with an audience and also a place to get to know you better. I’m using the Substack platform because it offer some really cool ways to connect with readers, including comments and chats. I’d love for you to join me as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. Because it’s an experiment, you never know what sort of thing I might share on this park, and honestly, neither do I. Could be my thoughts on something I’ve noticed recently, a poem, a response to a photo or a piece of music, or just something completely unexpected. It’s always accessible, always personal, and usually has something to do with creativity. The spark is where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners too, so you really want to be there to hear what’s happening. It is totally free to subscribe, and you can find a link to the spark in your podcast app.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:26]:
So sign up today. I can’t wait to see you there. Director, animator, and author Kevin John Davies grew up enthralled by doctor who and Spike Milligan’s the goon show. When he discovered the original hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy radio show, It seemed like the best of both worlds. Before long, he was doing animation for the TV series. Kevin tells me how he got into animation, how he moved from animation into directing, including directing 30th anniversary documentaries for both doctor who and hitchhikers in the same year, and all about the process of writing his new book, 42, the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams. Here’s my conversation with Kevin John Davies. Kevin, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:02:15]:
Well, thank you for having me, Nancy. I’m looking forward to this.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:18]:
Me too.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:02:19]:
It’s a little bit a little bit different from the sounds of your, Sort of your questionnaire you sent me. I with a quite thought provoking questions. So, I hope that can be of you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:30]:
Well, I start everybody off with the same question, which is, were you a creative kid, or did you discover your creative side later on in life?
Kevin Jon Davies [00:02:38]:
I think I was quite a creative kid. I was always drawing. I had a couple of family members who were very gifted in that area. An uncle and a great aunt who I looked up to a lot. The the uncle could Do everything, really. He performed magic trips, and he played the guitar. He could draw. And I remember him teaching me to on my blackboard as a very small toddler To draw the prow of a ship, so it was like a an ocean going liner, but coming towards you.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:03:11]:
And, my mom always reminded me that when I did this at school, the Teacher thought I was some kind of genius, but I have my uncle to thank for showing me it. You know? And I had an aunt who was very creative. She did all sorts of things, Dressmaking and art and things and, always very encouraging. So yes. I I I and, I had a my grandfather who worked in sort of publicity for the London Transport, you know, the buses and the tube system and things. He used to get me off cuts of their paper And, strangely, sort of red and blue pencils. I don’t know why they needed those so much, but, and he would get these for me, and I would just be Drawing all over this stuff. It was printed red and white on the back, but the flip side was a kind of more rough texture.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:04:00]:
So I had endless reams of this cartridge paper that I could just keep drawing on. So I love that. I remember being at school and, when I was in sort of very I mean, 7 years old or something, and, a couple of kids sort of Gathering around me trying to copy what I was doing. I think later on, I was not so I I wasn’t as good as I’d like to have been at life Drawing. I mean, that’s the real essence. If you can draw people, you can draw anything. I did a couple years at art school Instead of the 6th form, so I came out of art college, quite early. I was still only 18 when I finished.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:04:42]:
And, I I got very lucky and got into animation, which is I it was a toss-up. I wanted to do either special effects where you had to make things or animation where you draw things, and I found out I was better at drawing things than making things. But, yeah, loved it. And, lots and lots of Lego. I was mad about playing with Lego. And I often think that maybe the putting together of Legos and doing the odd sort of Airfix Kits, I think maybe gave give some kind of idea of how to slot things together. My father was an engineer stroke mechanic, Again, for London Transport. My mom was a librarian, and I did it I I did do a job as a librarian for a little while.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:05:27]:
So books and that kind of thing, you know, and a technical mind, it kind of all comes together when you research a big archive And then make a documentary out of it. You know, that seems that’s been my main job for the last 30 years. But for a good sort of decade or more before I was an animator, drawn animation. So, yeah, I think creativity has always been there.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:51]:
Sounds like it. So how did you move from animate animation into directing?
Kevin Jon Davies [00:05:57]:
Well, I think I’d always been dabbling with, Video directing while I was an animator. I think the thing about animation is that you sat at a drawing board all day, And, I began to enjoy being with other people on a studio or on a location with a camera because it was interacting with people. And I started to enjoy that more than the business of sitting down Where you’re in your own little world. And increasingly at that time in the late eighties, I was finding that I was working on commercials for about 5 years. I did I did Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That was a huge project, and, I think every freelance animator in London went to work on that. But I was in the special effects department with a very, very inspirational boss, who was a bit of a genius, a quiet genius, who, A guy called Chris Knott, and I followed him into this, a production company that made, TV commercials, mixing animation with live action. And, I think, because I was sent on the shoots to go and supervise on the live action shoot that was then gonna have an animated element added to it later. You know, we after Roger Rabbit, everyone wanted that look, and we were just starting to experiment with the early digital compositing techniques.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:07:22]:
And I think the more that I went on shoots to be the animator’s eyes and ears on set and stood alongside the cameraman, I was sort of by osmosis. I was getting an education in how to direct and how to look at things on a live action shoot, But I was enjoying the whole business of being with Accru. And then, you know, when that job then I then have to go back and work at the drawing board for the next few weeks To do all the drawn element. I was kind of resenting it because it was back into a solitary world, and more and more people were wearing Phones, you know, the Sony Walkman and things like that. They were lost in little worlds on their own, and it became less Less of a a group activity, and I I enjoyed the whole business of being with the other people. So that was it, and I gravitated towards the live action, and I got lucky. I got lucky with the very first animation job I ever got, and I got lucky with the 1st, live action directing job, which was for the BBC and was a respect retrospective on the making of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy, which I had loved. It’s my 1st year in the business as an animator, by the door to all that.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:08:35]:
And I’d made, Video recordings and lots and lots of, still photography and, you know, borrowed cameras mostly it had to be at the time. And I stored all that stuff away. And then I got a job to do a documentary looking back about 12 years my 1st year in the business and summing it up in a in a quite complex documentary. It had lots of elements to it. I just pulled in favors. Everybody I knew, they all wanted to come and work on it for nothing Just to get their name on Hitchhiker’s Guide. It was that that popular. It was that prestigious a title.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:09:13]:
You know? So that’s why I got lucky doing that, and that led, I think I said in one of my answers to your questionnaire, one thing leads to another. You know? If you do a reasonable job, someone thinks of you, I know the guy to do that, and, the things just roll up.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:31]:
Right.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:09:31]:
You know? I can’t I can’t pretend it’s been constant. I mean, I have had periods of unemployment. You know? The freelance life goes up and down. You never know when it’s it’s feast or famine. You know? There’s, I mean, it looks like I’ve had a lot of feasts, but there have been a bit of there’s been a bit of famine in between.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:49]:
So Let me make sure that I have the chronology right here because you grew up watching doctor who and then so so doctor who came before hitchhikers for
Kevin Jon Davies [00:10:01]:
you. Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean, I I’m 2 years older doctor who. Doctor who’s about to celebrate its 60th Mhmm. Anniversary, and, I can’t remember a time when doctor who wasn’t on television. And my my mother Told me that I she reckons that I was sat on her lap when she watched the earliest ones. I do remember seeing William Hartnell, the very first doctor who, you know, ran for the 1st 3 years.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:10:27]:
I I have vivid memories of having nightmares about Daleks and things, and there were certain characters and events from those early days that I can remember even now. Patrick Trautton came along when I was just about Starting at school in primary school. And, by the time we’d got to the 4th doctor, Tom Baker, I was at senior school, And they had a black and white reel to reel video recorder. And with that, we tried to make our own doctor who episode. I I built a Dalek with friends and with the help of 1 of the project, teachers, sort of art and craft teacher, And they built this rather shonky dialect, which, if I look at it, now it’s pretty terrible. But we did take it along in 1975, took it along to meet Terry Nation. I was very excited to meet him, and he created the Daleks. And, he said that he’s got a new science fiction thing coming up soon.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:11:27]:
I when I now look back and I did documentaries about Blake seven, I realized that’s what he was talking about. He already had another one called Survivors was on at that point. But, yeah. No. I I was very excited to meet him. But it was those days before video recorders and things really, and not before domestic ones anyway. We had this old one real to real at the school, but, we had said goodbye to Teri Nation, my friend and I, because we wanted to get home to watch doctor And it was in those days, you know, if you weren’t there, bums on seats, you know, you’d missed it forever, we thought. We thought we’d never see it again.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:12:05]:
You know? Little do we know now we can access every single bit of it, everything we can find. Right. There’s still a bundle missing, because the BBC stupidly threw them away. BBC have a reputation for this. They they they keep all the paperwork and throw away the films.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:23]:
They’re good at that. Yeah. I I just gave a couple of the target novels to my older nephew, and we had to explain to him that, you know, when I was just a little bit older than he was, you know, before streaming that this was how you kind of watched the old
Kevin Jon Davies [00:12:39]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:39]:
Shows, and I felt so old.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:12:43]:
Oh, it’s thrilling. In those days, I can still remember family holidays where you’d go along to the bookshop, you know, on the seafront, and There’s a brand new Target paperback, you know, and I think I can remember, Web of Fear, when that book first came out. I was on a holiday, I think, in Wales and Just devoured it on the beach and all through the evening, and, you know, it was just so exciting because then it’s So funny to think, and we’re talking about the late seventies, but then you were reaching back in time, which was really only about a decade, But it seemed forever when you’re that age.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:19]:
Right.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:13:20]:
You know? It was a way of accessing the past, and Doctor Who’s all about time travel. So being able to access, a story from that was half remembered from a childhood memory or Something as in the case of many people from before they were born. And good old Terence Styx, I got to know him a little bit, worked on a couple of things with him. He he wrote quite a few of them and, his contemporaries as well. And so they were a very important part of, I mean, they they were very well written. They were designed for, as they used to say, he and Robert Holmes. The script editor used to say that they write for the intelligent 14 year old.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:02]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:14:03]:
So I kind of, I preened myself. That’s me. That’s that’s that’s They’re writing it for me. You know? Right. And I think every fan who read the target books thought they were written for them, whatever age they were. So yeah. No. It was lovely.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:14:16]:
And, they told you a bit about the world. There was a little bit of politics in there occasionally. It’s quite funny to see doctor being criticized for that nowadays because it was all it was always there. They were there was always a a bit of an agenda from the writers, And, they were clever men. They were classically trained men. They were not they did not grow up watching television. They were creating television, but they came from a more literary background. I mean, they might spoof, you know, whatever was current in horror movies or whatever During their various eras, but, they were essentially, you know, men who had read a lot.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:14:58]:
And I think that comes across in those early Doctor Who’s. You know? So, yes, I I admire them enormously. So that was a first love. That and also the comedian Spike Milligan and his friends, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacom had a comedy troupe called The Goons, Which did predate me. They were really in the fifties, and they for 10 years, they made Lagoon shows, which were irreverent, knockabout, surrealistic comedies with a set number of characters put into different scenarios every week, And, I fell in love with that, first of all, in its script form. And then my mom explained that she used to run home from the library to listen to this on the radio. So I’d be asking, now how did they sound? Because I’d read it in script form, and I love Spike Milligan. I had these silly verse for kids and things like that, his books.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:15:49]:
But the scripts just grabbed me, the whole idea and the this imagination behind it. So I used to record them on a tape recorder with friends. First of all, on an old reel to reel tape recorder and then little cassettes. And, we just did impressions of my mom’s bad impressions until I eventually got vinyl records of the BBC Radio programs, And I could finally hear them, the voices for myself. And so loving that with all the weird sound effects and the knockabout comedy and the Strange surreal sense of humor. That combined with doctor who are my 2 great loves. Bit of Monty Python thrown in as well for good measure. Although I was I I was at that age.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:16:32]:
My mom and dad didn’t really watch that, and I didn’t really see a lot of it when it was first being broadcast. I think I came to it, first of all, through the movies, Monty Python. But all of that mixed together, in 1978, I discovered this radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Written by the man who’d just written a really good Doctor Who, the pirate planet, which had a certain peculiar Sense of humor to it. Mhmm. And, literally, I’d only heard 2 episodes of the radio show, which seemed to synthesize Lagoons and Doctor Who to me. It was a bit of a mixture of the 2. And, this friend who had introduced it to me to this Title. 2 weeks later, I said that I’m I’ve I’ve got an appointment.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:17:18]:
We go and see the guy who wrote it, Douglas Adams. He’s just become the new Doctor Who script editor. And, would you like to come and meet him? I said, sure. I would. And then I found the reason. He said, And if you still got that tape recorder that you got for your birthday. He really wanted my tape recorder more than he wanted me there. But, anyway, 3 of us went along and interviewed Douglas Adams, and that was my first meeting with the great man himself, where, clearly, He loved the whole thing of dragging him away from his real job of having to write.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:17:53]:
He could just sit there and chain smoking and answering the phone occasionally and Pontificating, and the producer Graham Williams would stick his head in the door every now and again and go, Douglas, you know, we’ve got a scene to write Before the end of the afternoon, you know, try to chivvy us along a bit, and then Douglass would draw him into the conversation as well Yes. Douglas was a famous procrastinator. And, anything anything to take him away from writing, even these 3 young hermits, you know, coming along and asking him questions. I mean, we’re asking questions about hitchhiking to start with this. I thought this is He said that, oh, you know about that. You know? Because it was so new. And he said, I thought this is gonna be an issue about doctor who. And we got on to the Doctor Who stuff eventually, but, we were all fascinated to know where did you get the ideas and that sort of thing.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:18:49]:
So, I’ve still got this audio cassette. I’ve used bits of it in documentaries and on various projects in the past. I interviewed Douglas on and off over the years, and I have paths crossed for the next 20 years after that. Mainly, I mean, I’ve mainly got to know him on the on the TV series 2 years later working on the the animation for the TV series. He loved our animation. Thank goodness. He didn’t always get on with the producer. We did.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:19:15]:
We liked Allen Bell, but, he and he and Douglas were 2 very different men. Luckily, we got on with both of them and you know? But never the twain should meet, really. Douglas liked the cast. He enjoyed their company. They were all around about his age and more his kind of wavelength, whereas the producer producer director, Alan Bell, was more slightly more old school. He’s a bit older than them. He knew how to get things done. That was the important thing.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:19:42]:
I think some of Douglas’ wild ideas Had to be scotched for practicality, so practical reasons. And, but it was a fab year for me. I was 19 that summer. We’d made episode 1. I went and worked on the stage show of Hitchhiker, the 3rd stage show at that point, and met him again there. And then in the After half of that year, we made the next 5 episodes. So there was a bit of gap while the BBC decided the upper echelon weren’t sure. Is this thing funny or not? So we had to have a screening of episode 1 to get a laughter track.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:20]:
Oh, wow.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:20:21]:
And it was like, oh, it was terrible because it sounded like every other terrible British sitcom with a laughter track. And thank god they decided to go without it. But I think it was done as a political point to prove that To these BBC executives that it was funny and that, yes, the pilot had gone, like, massively over budget, But it would be worth investing in the rest of the series. And so they eventually did give it the green light, and, we went back to work on the next part of the show, which has took me right the way through to the beginning of 81. So, you know, that was, there was a lot of intense work there To get it done in time. And I I just I’ve been I made a nuisance of myself. I was under their feet. I was there with cameras and Hoping around the side of the scenery, snapping pictures.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:21:12]:
And at one point, Sandra Dickinson, who was there on Friday night at the launch of this book, She went, oh my god. You’re everywhere.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:22]:
You were making the documentary before you were making the documentary.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:21:25]:
Well, quite. I didn’t know. I was just enjoying it and reveling in it. I mean, I I Join it and reveling in it. I mean, I I used to gate crash at the BBC and go watch doctor who being made. One of the special effects people, Matt Irvin, who used to appear as the BBC’s resident special effects, expert. He would appear on a Saturday morning show quite regularly to explain how the models were done, and he used to inspire a lot of kids to make their own models and things like that. He was fantastic with the fans, And I wasn’t the only one.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:21:56]:
There were plenty of people went to visit him at his workshop and, to go on the set of doctor who and watch it. I spent 3 days watching a story called The Stones of Blood being made when doctor Hu was only 15 years old. It’s hard to imagine now. Here we are coming up on the 60th. So, yeah, I was well prepared for when, you know, I got to make the documentaries of Hitchhiker, And that followed that same year, 93. I went straight into making a a 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, a big BBC one program, Looking at the history of the show so far, it was off air at that point, and everyone was hoping it was gonna come back. It had a good 26 year run, And, BBC chose to celebrate it even though it was off air, which was nice. So we and they gave us a decent budget.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:22:49]:
In those days, we’ve got Reasonable money from one of the arts strands of the BBC documentary side of things. Of course, I wanted to play doctor who, so I had I got back all the actors and all the paraphernalia. I found fans who had made beautiful copies of the monsters and Costumes and things. We got original ones as well, and we got the actors to go and do little reenact reenactments of scenes from the classic era, and created some new new style cliffhangers of our own and dabbled with a little bit of modern special effects to show how I was hoping that the sort of really, it’s a a sort of a a a cloaked way of Showing the BBC what Doctor Who could be with modern style effects because Doctor Who used to be rather derided, I think for for its cheapness, and it’s but we all love it for that now. You know? I mean, it was the it was the stories. It was we didn’t care.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:48]:
Rap monster.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:23:49]:
Oh, yeah. Terrible. Certain chunky, old, dinosaurs, that one particularly. I I loved that originally, but it does look pretty pretty, chunky now. But, we got access to the animatronic dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum and draped them with, blue cloth so we were able to isolate them as a blue screen And drop them into shots of Pertwee, John Pertwee, the 3rd doctor, with his Whomobile, which we managed to find. The collector had kept it, And, we did reunited them, in a famous location from one of his stories and plopped the dinosaurs into the shots. You know? And we and we also did a shot that I really love, which was the, the camera. I wanted to go from the Tardis, the police box on location, the iconic blue police box on location, and we’re better than Tower Bridge, very iconic image of London.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:24:42]:
And we went in through the doors of the Tardis into the inner control room To prove that the whole thing was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, and it’s the 1st time anyone did that. And I think that that gave a lot of fans a bit of a Bit of a kick, you know, something they’ve always wanted to see. It was to prove it could be done. They did do it. They did it beautifully later. And when the series came back, there was a Peter Capaldi or was it oh, no. It was Matt Smith, I think, the episode where, where they did the same thing, and, they did it with great One of the companions drove a motorbike, from a a a a dirt track somewhere out in the countryside straight into the police box and skidded Skidded to a halt next to the console, and I loved that. And that was a nice little sort of, you know, wink to the possibilities, I think.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:25:32]:
So, yeah, I’ve had a have a a lovely time doing those kind of jobs, and I look back on them with great fondness.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:38]:
And that’s the kind of thing that I wonder if I don’t wanna say that it sounds like it’s not possible for someone who wasn’t a fan to come up with that idea, but it seems like it’s more likely That if you were a fan, you would want to come up with a way to show something like that.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:25:55]:
Yeah. I think so. There there was at that time, there was going to be a drama, a big BBC drama to celebrate the 30th anniversary. In the end, that crashed and burned, and we’re still really not really sure of the entire details for that. There was talk that Spielberg’s company was gonna make doctor who. In the end, it was, You know, it was hived off to a different company, and it did happen a couple of years after I did that big documentary. But that drama, if it had happened, you know, I was gonna be involved in that doing postproduction effects, which is what the sort of thing I was doing in big sort of blue chip commercials at that time. And then I had the opportunity to do the documentary.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:26:36]:
And for 1 crazy day Where I had about 2 hours of trying to work out, will I do will I be the big fish in a liquor pool make my own documentary about the show, or am I gonna be just very much a cog in the machine of this biggest doctor whoever and run the postproduction effects. And I knew I couldn’t do both, not in time for the big 30th anniversary. And I was pacing up and down my Kitchen, trying to work out the pros and cons of which job should I do. And then I got a phone call. And for 2 hours, I was like that pacing. And then I got a phone call saying that the big drama had been canceled. I didn’t know why at that point, but in a way, I was relieved because it made the decision for me. Sure.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:27:24]:
And, you know, I was sad that the drama didn’t go, especially for the guy who wrote it, who was also a fan, and I’ve gone alright with him. But, you know, I was also delighted to be able to celebrate it in my own way and and be the kingpin of that. And They gave me an office at the BBC. I used to go into television center and, you know, commute in every day. And, just for a little while, I was I was holding the The keys to the toy box. You know? In fact, everything everything to do with Doctor Who came to our office because at that time, the show wasn’t being produced. And, so any bit of fan mail or any other thing that came in to the BBC for doctor who Suddenly arrived on our doorstep, and we had to deal with it. You know? That was a bit weird for just for
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:12]:
Sure.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:28:12]:
A number of weeks. So, you know, a few months. But, Yeah. That was a it was a good time leading up to the Christmas of 93. And then I recut it the following year to feature length, and that’s the version that’s out on DVD and has been for over a decade now. There’s rumble. There’s a rumor that we might do a Blu ray. But they’re trying to do all the Doctor Who’s on Blu ray at the moment.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:28:37]:
When they’re done, I expect probably the last thing they’ll do will be the wilderness years as they call it
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:42]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:28:43]:
Which hopefully will include my big documentary, maybe a few extras. I’ve kept all the tapes, because I knew the BBC would throw them away. So I I absconded with the rushes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:55]:
Can imagine where you got that idea.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:28:57]:
I had I had, I had an inkling. No. I we knew. We knew that it was like the chances are if they were on the shelf at the BBC, someone would look at A clipboard and go, you know, we don’t really need these anymore, and it would all be gone. So I I had access while I did recut it for full length for feature length, and, I quietly left the editing room with various boxes in the boot of my car And, took them home, and that’s where they stayed. But they’ve now gone back to a certain person at the BBC who looks after The Blu rays and all that, and, they it they’re they’re ready to be remastered, so we’ll see.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:41]:
Those folks do an amazing job too.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:29:43]:
They do. They do. Packaging the packaging and everything, astonishing. The quality of the technology they’re using is extraordinary because, Mark Ayers, who is a great friend of mine, who helped me on more than 30 years and a few other projects. We’ve been friends since way back As long as doctor Fandam had been around from the late seventies, we’d known each other, and we’d done a couple of amateur things as well. He became the savior of the radiophonic workshop when the BBC were literally gonna throw it all away. When that department closed in 98, There were 3 rooms of audio tape, which was the entire Radiophonic archive. And somebody, somewhere, an accountant, decided that 3 rooms charged internally didn’t make sense.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:30:34]:
So they took them from these custom built shelving where they had been since the place had started. You know, that that Sort of archive had grown and grown since 1958 through to 98. And they took them off the shelves, and It was all due to be put in a skip and taken away by a truck. And as Marquez put it, in a staggering bit of BBC efficiency, no one had thought to book the skip. So he he he found them in a room, All dumped unceremoniously in piles on the floor, and he rescued it all. He was given Bless you. A tie A tiny budget. He put a lot of his blood, sweat, and tears into it.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:31:19]:
He created a database. He rescued all the tapes. He went through every tape and consolidated it down to as few reels as possible, still 100. And he now has got it all digitized, and it’s all safe. But, you know, all that resource could have been thrown away. Delia Derbyshire and all the, compatriots, you know, all their work across the 4 decades, Could have been lost forever, but, no, it’s safe. So, you know, it takes the passion of fans, and the guys that Mark, who does the audio of all the Doctor Who’s and, Paul Vinesis and Steve Roberts and various other people that work with them, have saved the series and polished it up, and they’re still working on it. They’re they’re working on every Every era of the show because the the plan is to eventually have it all.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:32:10]:
Everything that exists, we know there’s still lots missing. Everything exists will eventually be out on Blu ray. I just keep praying that they don’t cancel Blu ray. You know, that the BBC If the BBC decide they’re not doing any more Blu rays, so, you know, what will happen then? You know? Right. But, I I think, fingers crossed, we’re we’re we’ll see the completion of that project.
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:32]:
Well and I have to put in a plug for the alchemists of sound documentary.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:32:36]:
Oh, yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:37]:
I I the last time I looked, and it’s been a while, was available in pieces on YouTube, but the fabulous documentary about the Radiophonics workshop and all of the things that they came up with over the years.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:32:49]:
Victor Lewis Smith’s film, wasn’t it? I think. The the producer of that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:54]:
Than I would.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:32:54]:
Yeah. Victor Lewis Smith Victor Lewis Smith was, comedian. He’d been a critic, a radio producer, television producer, and he was passionate about it. And, sadly, he passed away last year. But he was a great, you know, character, and, I never met him, but I did help out a bit on that project, with some footage and things. Yeah. That was a good one. There’s the one where the guy was there was a guy in the background Yes.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:33:20]:
And the clock
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:21]:
Yes.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:33:21]:
That said I think it’s spelled out when you worked it out. It’s at 1958. Oh, had I
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:28]:
figured out? But there was lots of conversation in the comments on YouTube.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:33:32]:
Yeah. Who
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:32]:
is that guy in the background?
Kevin Jon Davies [00:33:34]:
That guy. A lot of think people didn’t know what Mark looked like. I think they thought it was him. No. It was, it was a friend of Victor Lewis Smith, the producer. He said he’d get him on television. That was it. He was just hanging around in the background of lots and lots of interviews.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:33:49]:
Very funny. But that’s the quirky sort of thing that Victor Lewis Smith used to do. He he did a brilliant program called bygones, Which was little short 5 minute vignettes about strange, weird cultural things from Britain in the bygone days of the fifties sixties, particularly, Things that we’ve all forgotten about, and then he says he does it in a book or in a program. And it just makes you laugh because you I’ve forgotten about that. Yeah. We all did that. Whatever it was.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:19]:
That’s like fun.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:34:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. No. He was He was a genius and a bit twisted genius. You know? But no. Yeah. I think his heart was in the right place when it came to things like History of the BBC and the Radiophonic Archive. Yeah.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:34:33]:
Yeah. No. That was a good good good program. I did a little short program, Out of the rushes from 30 years in the Tardis, I did one that was on one of the Doctor Who Blu rays, called masters of sound. And it was just a short 15 minutes so that we could use the interview with Delia Derbyshire who had become a recluse by that point. She was quite a damaged person, very fragile. I liked her, and the the the guys on my team looked after her. When we finally persuaded her, it took a lot of work persuading her.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:35:06]:
One of her colleagues, Brian Hodgson, who also worked at the very funny workshop, he Promised to sit with her and hold her hand literally, through her interview, and, she was a bit eccentric. She was, As I say, a bit fragile, but we we got the interview. But sadly, I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t fit it into the documentary. You know? Sometimes that happens. You think I could put in 2 minutes of this or even a minute something, but it wouldn’t do it justice. And I cannot tell this this entire story properly in the way that I wanted to here. And I’d also been dangled the carrot of I might get to do a follow on The behind the scenes story would have been a program in its own right, and I thought, actually, this footage would be would fit better there Because that program never happened.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:36:01]:
So, it was sometime later before for the DVD range. If you have a look at the beginning box set, I think it’s on the, The 2nd Doctor Who story, in inside the spaceship, whatever they call it, Edge of Destruction. There’s a a DVD extra there about the radiophonic workshop, and I quite enjoyed doing that one. So yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:36:23]:
And I think for people who don’t know who Delia was, could you give a, just a little description. Yeah.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:36:29]:
She was an electronic music pioneer who created well, I think they called it realized The doctor who theme. The the, composer who wrote the score was Ron Graener, who was sort of master of the signature tune at that time and did lots of other stuff that you’d might know and recognize like the prisoner.
Nancy Norbeck [00:36:51]:
The prisoner.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:36:52]:
Yeah. But he was known for other things too. And, he wrote a little score for the for the theme, and she went away and worked on it, with her colleagues. I think Dick Mills helped as well And, created this weird, unreal, unearthly sound that, clearly was something extraordinary and unique. And that was the theme tune to the program for its first. I can’t remember how many years. Something like 17 years or something till it got revamped and done slightly differently. But he’s always there, the the the the the the the the that whole bit is is still in every version that’s ever come along Since, however, it’s performed.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:37:37]:
And, Delia was known for that particularly, but she did lots and lots of other radiophonic sounds as well. Found sounds. She liked to sort of bang things and create notes out of oscillators and, by using real things and her famous green lampshade that she used to ding and record and then slow it down and speed it up. And She was a mathematician too, so she would make sounds and then cut the tape to the right length. There were hundreds of joints in the tape. Marquez said, you know, the the the sticky tape that held it altogether was rotting over the years and had to be replaced and that. And there are stories of them running the tape up and down the corridor. There’s very, very long corridor in the building, which has only just been sold, to, you know, I forgot who it is that’s bought it.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:38:29]:
Famous composer is part of the team that bought it. Anyway, It’s it’s now, you know, a a legendary place. The Beatles recorded there. All sorts of people went there. It was it was part of BBC Radio, it was where the BBC Orchestra used to be based. Made BBC Made Avail, you know, earned its place in history, and she was very much part of all that. And so, yes, she was an important lady, and she’s She’s celebrated now. She’s gone now.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:39:00]:
But, as I say, she was quite fragile when we met her in 93. So, yeah, I was glad to sort of, you know, make a program that showcased who she was. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:39:13]:
Because I I don’t if I correctly recall, she didn’t get a whole lot of credit for her work back when she was doing it. Is that
Kevin Jon Davies [00:39:20]:
It was difficult. This is this is what happens when people are BBC staff. They don’t get the royalties. They don’t get the Recognition as artists that they would have done if they’d been freelance and outside the BBC. Doctor Who is a very complicated show, copyright wise, Because although the premise and the title is owned by the BBC and certain other rights have been snapped up over the years, All the individual stories are owned by the writers who created them. All the music over the years for the show, The incidental music is owned by the composers and the musicians that performed for each era of the show. And so you’ve got all that to take into account. You know? If a monster that’s created by 1 writer in an early era of the show gets reused again, sometimes by them, sometimes by other writers, Then due credit is given to that freelance writer, and payments, you know, are due.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:40:28]:
And if the thing gets novelized or if someone puts out, a vinyl record of the soundtrack, then, you know, There are rights involved that that have to be paid for and paperwork done. I don’t know whether you can hear it, but I’ve got a helicopter passing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:47]:
Oh, is that what that is? I can’t hear it.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:40:49]:
Yeah. Sorry about that. Can’t do much about that except shut the window, and it is that strangely, We’re in the middle of a bit of a heatwave lately. Today was a little bit cooler, but the window’s open. So I’m just trying to get some air through. It’s I think it’s just a police helicopter. Occasionally, we get them go by circling around. They’re off.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:12]:
Well, so let’s let’s make sure that we have time to talk about the book Sure. Because I I’m still Eager to get my hands on a copy when it finally comes out here, which will be soon. It’ll be it’ll be out in the US by the time this episode is released, but it
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:28]:
is There it is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:29]:
Yes. 42.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:30]:
I know your listeners your listeners won’t be able to see, but I’m showing you on Zoom, I’m showing you a copy of the book. Yeah. It’s a blooming heavy thing. It’s got real weight. It’s huge, and it is very glossy. It’s vaguely A4 size, but it’s 320 pages. So it’s like having a almost a ream of
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:49]:
Oh, that’s fantastic.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:50]:
Paper, you know, typing paper
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:51]:
or whatever. 42
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:53]:
42.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:53]:
The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:57]:
That’s the one.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:58]:
Who had
Kevin Jon Davies [00:41:58]:
the 1? Wild
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:00]:
42 wildly improbable ideas.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:42:03]:
Oh, yes. You did. This is from from unbound.com, who are a small publisher, really, in the scheme of things. They operate by creating geeky kind of interest projects, on Kickstarter And their own website, and, that helps to sort of slightly protect them from the huge risks involved, especially when it’s a big picture book like this. It’s essentially pictures of Douglass’s own handwriting and typing, terrible typing, covered in White paper or whatever we call it, TIPx and, you know, the, correction fluid and things and scratching out and crossing out and x, x, x, x, x, x through things where he wants to delete something. But, of course, we love all that texture. The fact that he wrote his 1st 4 books while he was, You know, actually using an old fashioned typewriter. And I used to laugh when I I heard about William Gibson You know, Neuromancer and all that.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:43:06]:
He he said, I think people think that I I work on something that looks like a stealth fighter. Could he just use an old mechanical typewriter? That was that was it. And it the ideas are what makes it. You know? And, Douglas, he had notebooks diaries and endless loose paper. Someone had gone through and kept it in order. I don’t know if it was him. I don’t know if it is one of his, several different, PAs that he had over the years, secretaries who helped him, I keep everything in order, but it’s astonishing for such a someone who I thought was quite a chaotic sort of chap. All the times I met him, I I thought he was a bit more haphazard, really.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:43:49]:
I’m surprised he kept he was a little bit sentimental, I reckon, because there’s quite a lot of stuff there from his school days. And the book covers everything from his school days to his untimely death. So, you know, he died age 49, For those who don’t know, in 2001, so he’s been missing a long time from this, you know, mortal coil. He went way too soon. Who knows what he would have written later on had he survived? But, so I’ve gone through and I’ve been through the 67 boxes that are lodged at his former College. I’ve been through nearly all of it, I think. There were still some that I probably need to have a look at again, but, the I tried to find the cream of Everything that was Douglas Adams so that you get a little bit of everything in each chapter. It’s vaguely chronological.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:44:41]:
Not strictly, but it is pretty much in the order. I mean, a lot of his stuff’s not dated, but we can work it out from the context in which we found the papers. He did have folders and things. He kept things in ring binders and folders, but the library has a policy of taking them out of those. They very carefully, in pencil on the back of each page, would put a little Roman numeral because they like to keep it roughly in the order it was donated Mhmm. To the library. It still very much all belongs to Douglass’s family, and the estate, so you can only access it with written permission from them, but it’s held like many other former, Students and staff of St. John’s College at Cambridge, part of the big Cambridge University, town.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:45:30]:
You know? And it’s in the library there alongside medieval manuscripts and all sorts of, you know, other former famous. I think there’s astronomers and all sorts of people there that that represent, you know, the history of the place. There’s some papers from William Wilberforce, I think, and, Wordsworth. You know? He’s in good company. I went there was 1 lady there researching when I I I went in. I did about 17 trips there last year. I live at the top of North London. It’s about an hour north up the motorway to Cambridge, and, I did that trip about 17 times last year and, would photograph everything on my iPhone because there’s not enough time today.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:46:16]:
They have very strict hours, and so, they close for lunch, which is a very quaint British It’s a way of doing things. And so I would I would go across the to the pub across the road where Douglas used to go as a student and where, there was a documentary about him, in 91 where he went there, because he wanted to film in the college, and they wouldn’t let him. So he kept going back to the pub. So this is the pub I used to go to, and I’m gonna do this bit here. But so, yeah, I used to go there for the lunchtime and then go back across the road to the library And just get through as much as I possibly could in one day, photographing everything. And then I would then spend for every day that I’d been to the library, I’d spend a week, maybe 2 weeks, Just cataloging it or reading it properly, cataloging it myself, although the I have to say, the library had done a very good job. A guy called, doctor Adam Crothers had, created the online catalog, which you can read, but they’re very much bullet points. You know, there’s not every page.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:47:15]:
It’s it says you know, it might say 1 single page, or it might say 17 pages or 48. You know, it’s each item. You’ve got to go there’s only one way to do it, and that is to wade through it all. And then decide, okay. Does this Describe something about Douglas. Does this show his process? Does this show some unique aspect of a particular project? Is this a project we’ve even heard of before? There’s several things in that book, which I didn’t know until I did this work, and it’s gonna be a surprise to some people who think they know Douglas. I mean, there’s been some very good biographies already By friends of mine, strangely. I don’t I know most of them.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:47:54]:
1 of them has passed away, sadly. The very first person to document hitchhikers as a phenomenon was Neil Gaiman. Mhmm. And, I met him when he was working on his book, Don’t Panic, long before he was the famous Neil Gaiman, you know, story story writer extraordinaire. He was a kinda jobbing reporter, and, he’d just started to dabble in comics, I think, at that point. But it was very much at the start of his career. But he loved Douglas, and they they got on famously. And, so, you know, he he’s very much a part of of the whole history of it.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:48:29]:
The he wrote a great book called Don’t Panic, which has been updated several times across the years by other writers. And there was the official biography by Nick Webb, who was a great mate of Douglass’. He was the man at Pan Books who first commissioned Douglass To write the very first, paperback and then promptly left Pan Books. That’s probably why they’re still friends because Nick Webb never had to get a, you know, a a a manuscript out of Douglass by a certain date. He left that to others. They did the genius thing of Of saying, hey, Douglas. I think you can write. In fact, it was gonna be John Lloyd and Douglas Adams together writing the first novel until Douglas unceremoniously Dumped his best friend and said, I’m gonna go it alone, which caused great rift between them for a short while.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:49:15]:
John Lloyd is very gracious nowadays. He’s been very helpful on the book. Nice to me, but he’s he always said ever since. He said, it’s the right thing for Douglas to have done Because the novels are unique, Douglass’s pure voice. You know? I love the radio shows where it all began because That is, you know, the heart of what Hitchhiker is. It began on radio weirdly, and I love that particularly. But if you wanna get because that has to be worked on by a producer and then the voices of the actors and people doing sound effects and all the various things in between, music and all that. But if you just want Douglas’s voice, then it’s the novels.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:49:58]:
And, either one, the radio or the novels, that’s the pure hitchhiker. Of course, then he spent the next sort of rest of his life, really, trying to escape from Hitchhiker and do other things. And, there’s a bit in the book with him berating himself for not being able to get on with it and write it. Oh, god. You know? Arthur Dent is a burp. He doesn’t interest me. Things like that written on the page, and then, oh, Douglas, you’re writing complete garbage Typing this onto the page, you know, berating himself. But, yeah, he wanted to do other things.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:50:31]:
And increasingly in later life, became more interested in real science. And one wonders if he if he had lived, would he have written a real science book? I think it was brewing. He got interested in, all sorts of things, you know, right the way across the board from chaos theory, Astronomy, all the advances in telecommunications, computing. We know he loved the Apple Mac. He bought every iteration of an Apple that there was. I was actually there at the Digital Village when he set up the company with Robbie Stamp. I was visiting when they they hadn’t got premises yet, and they were using, Ed Victor’s office, which is Douglas’ agent, and I went there for a meeting. He was introducing everybody he knew to everybody else, Trying to work out what this new company was gonna become, and I did go there a few times.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:51:23]:
And, on my 1st visit, Douglas has just taken delivery of a bunch of PowerBooks. Apple was sending him stuff for free. You know, he was an Apple master. He was very much part of the the, you know, So the culture of the company, and, and he would be an inspirational speaker at tech conferences. So, yeah, he was well steeped in it all. And, of course, alongside that his passion for ecology and conservation. Mhmm. One of the times I interviewed him, the most probably the most in-depth interview I ever did Was in 1985, when, my wife and a couple of friends and that, we took a camera, microphones that we went and interviewed him because he couldn’t come to the convention that year.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:52:08]:
There was, a big hitchhikers convention for z zed 9, plural zed alpha, the, Official Hitchhiker’s Fan Club. We’re having a a games convention, a Hitchhiker themed games convention in Birmingham. And, so he couldn’t be at it because he was going to a a book fair somewhere else, And he said, I’ll I’ll I’ll do a video for you then. So we went and interviewed him on the roof garden of his house. He had a a kind of, Well, he called it apartment, but it was multistory apartment above a shop on the green Islington, a fashionable part of London now. It’s very much, The in place to be for a certain crowd. Very gentrified now. And, yeah, we climbed up his stairs, and he had a green Spiral staircase to get out onto the roof, and we interviewed him there.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:52:59]:
And, yeah, he was all full of the fact that he’d just come back from Madagascar. It was his 1st trip abroad. He’d been sent there by, one of the big Sunday newspapers, The Observer, to be This sort of untrained eye on a trip into the jungle in Madagascar to look for a strange, weird looking, rare breed of lemur called an aye aye. And he said, you know, you’ve gotta go into the jungle. I mean, It’s it’s nocturnal. Means you gotta take a torch. And so and so now he’s laughing. So that’s important.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:53:41]:
Could have a torch in the jungle. And, yeah, he loved it. He found it absolutely riveting. And he’s and we Called him at that moment. He’d just been back 2 weeks, and he said, you know what? I really would like to do some more of that. 2 years later, he took a whole year out and went around the world On a number of different trips to different parts of the world looking at weird and strange and sadly, you know, bedeviled by mankind mostly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:09]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:54:10]:
Animals near the near the edge of this, extinction. And, when his great friend, Stephen Fry, who was, you know, the voice of the guide in the Yep. Move movie of Hitchhiker, when Stephen Fry, when 20 years later, he recreated Douglass’s steps with Mark Carvedine, who was Douglass’s friend that he traveled with, The the naturalist, zoologist. They found that one of them had died out, which was the Yangtze River dolphin. And, you know, it’s kind of sad to know that the the the legacy wasn’t that they’d saved Mhmm. Necessarily anything, but he did do. He as a founder patron of Save the Rhino, they’re doing great work, And, you know, they’ve had some successes there. But I recommend that book.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:55:02]:
The book that came out of that project was called Last Chance to See. And if you’ve only ever read Hitchhiker’s Guide or maybe Dirk Gently and you’ve never read Last Chance to See, then you’re missing something because it was Douglass’s personal favorite of his own work. You know? He used to like reading real science. So I do wonder whether this particular book, which is also one of his funniest. You know? Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s factual. You know? It’s it’s I’m sure you’ve read it, but For those of you listeners in that, I I think I recommend it as as a just great fun to read with a point behind it. You know, Douglas is is making a firm point about how we’re mistreating the environment of these animals. And, Yeah.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:55:48]:
He was fascinated by the rhino, which he wrote into, his last, Dirk Gently book, which remained incomplete at his death, so it was published posthumously in its in its unfinished form, it’s having a doubt. So, if you’ve read the other Dirk Gently books, there’s a third one there that you might like to give a go, but Doesn’t have a proper ending, sadly. But so, yeah. So this book, 42, Covers a whole shebang, and you’ll learn something about Douglass. You’ll learn something about writers and how they write Or how they fail to write in Douglas’ case. And he’s very funny about it. He’s quite poignant in places. You know? You learn about his ups and downs when he was a struggling sort of, just after leaving university, when he was trying to get, Get his foot in the door, really, at the BBC as a comedy scriptwriter, and some of his Sort of minor successes that he had at that time.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:56:55]:
He nearly gave it all up. There’s job application in there to go and do something else. He was gonna be a shipping clerk in Hong Kong. Wow. And very nearly. We nearly lost him at that point, when he nearly went and got a proper job.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:10]:
Can you imagine?
Kevin Jon Davies [00:57:12]:
Well, no. I don’t wanna. I I wish I’m one of those who wish that they’d been a lot more hitchhiker, and that’s clearly what a lot of people wanted. But it’s not what Douglas wanted. You know? I mean, his last book, Mostly Harmless, was a bit of a downer at the end. I won’t say too much if you haven’t read it, But, it’s worth a read. Dirk Maggs, the radio producer, adapted the later books and continued the radio series. So there are 6 radio series based on Douglas’s 5 books and a 6th one that was given the official nod Douglas’s estate by Eoin Colfer, the Irish writer who writes, Artemis Fowl Mhmm.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:57:52]:
Which was a terrific series. And, Dirk adapted that for radio. And that’s when I first got involved. I was asked to go and investigate the archive and see if there were any unique bits of Hitchhiker material that had not been used. And I did that in 2016 for Dirk when he was preparing An adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s book so that there’d be a little bit of Douglas magic peppered around in it. And I did manage to find some stuff, and I but I also looked at it and thought, do you know what? This is this this should be a book just looking at all the papers, and it was quite emotional seeing it in Dunks’ own handwriting and all that, And especially when he’s berating himself on the page for not getting it done. I thought there’s something as a book here, maybe something like how Douglas Adams wrote. Mhmm.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:58:38]:
You know? But I never dreamt it would be me. And then out of the blue, the publishers unbound came to me and said, You’ve been recommended by the family and the estate and the agent for Douglas’s estate. And so I was very flattered, and I said, well, the research Side of it is the same as what I do day job, you know, making documentaries. It’s the same process, really. You look for a giant archive, and you look for what is the Story. Where what what are we trying to say here and how to string it all together and make it flow, all that. And so the outcome was was this book. Well, indeed, it was me.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:59:14]:
There’s that book. I’ve got another book here I haven’t shown you that wouldn’t really work for your listeners, but You might recognize that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:59:23]:
Uh-huh. The guide.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:59:25]:
The guide. That’s my copy of the guide. It’s taken from the same mold. I had it, to describe it. It’s the electronic book itself from the TV version. The actual one from the TV No longer exists. It it’s long since gone. But luckily, a friend who worked at BBC, Visual Effects struck a copy out of the mold.
Kevin Jon Davies [00:59:46]:
It’s vacuum form plastic, and it comes apart. And inside, Right. In the eighties, I’ve got I’ve got it signed by Douglas Adams, Mark Wing Davey, and Jeffrey Perkins. That’s the producer, one of the actors, and Douglas himself. And, the way it was done back on the television, We had, the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Obviously, an electronic book was something that didn’t exist in those days. It was just Douglas’s idea. And so This plastic form had a an opal glass screen and a projector projected the animation onto the back of the screen, and then it was held by Arthur Dent.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:00:30]:
Simon Jones would hold it and move it around. And because the projector was bolted to the book On a long arm, the projector would follow the screen even if he moved a little bit. So it looked very real, and we actually got letters from people saying, did you use one of those new Sinclair flat screen TVs we’ve heard about? No. Sorry. It was a very old fashioned Film technique called back projection. That’s, that was quite funny. But now so I I I used that in the making of Hitchhikers. So it’s it is screen used by by Arthur Dent, Simon Jones himself, in 1992 when we we filmed a little sequence Loosely based on the 4th novel that Arthur Dent arrives back home on Earth after it’s been destroyed.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:01:19]:
Hysteriously, earth is back again. But in my version, it was something else, but, you know, they kind of they kind of did that in, in the radio shows, and You know, Douglas addressed that in his later books. So, yeah, the idea that there are multiple universes and maybe multiple Earths. So, yeah. So but that’s it, really, so I’m kinda rambling now.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:44]:
That’s alright.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:01:45]:
I’m aware that your time is probably up.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:49]:
That’s okay. I I am wondering because I cannot think of another book or series that has existed in so many different iterations as Hitchhiker has. Because as you mentioned, it started as the radio show and then the books and then Mhmm. Was it a record? I mean, there was the computer game. There’s the you know, so many different things. And I wonder if that is that part of why eventually he just reached the point where he’s like, I’m sick of Arthur Dent.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:02:20]:
Well, he was so upset because he he always wanted there to be a movie during his lifetime. And the sad thing is, although he he he, emigrated to live in California for the last 2 years of his life. You know, it was because he was trying to get the movie done, and he was very close to clinching it. And then it went into turnaround, and he was quite depressed, I believe, about the whole situation. But he loved living in Santa Barbara. And but, unfortunately, he overdid it one day in the in the gym, in Montecito, I think it was. And and, He got off a piece of exercise equipment, and he had a heart attack and died. So terrible tragedy for his family.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:03:02]:
He had a a young daughter, only 6 years old, Polly, We got married about a week ago. So and, you know, there’s a happy ending there. And, you know, it it it’s just, Tragic that that the family, his friends, his fans, they were all robbed at that moment of whatever Douglas might have done next. You know, his his company, the Digital Village, sadly, went bust like a lot of the .com companies did. The finance went a bit wonky and something happened. But Douglas, you know, would have done more, I’m sure, and, he never quite saw the movie. The movie came out, you know, several years after his death And was continued by his business partner, Robbie Stamp, who was an exec producer on the movie, spoke rather movingly about him the other day, At the launch that we had at the British Library, which was a lovely evening. And, Yeah.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:03:59]:
It’s just, we all celebrate him now. We have towel day every 25th May, International Towel Day where everyone carries their towels. The fan club still has organized events. This Friday, I’m doing a signing at bookshop in Cambridge, the same bookshop That Douglas attended and used as a student at Cambridge just down the road from his college, Saint John’s, Heffers, the bookshop. I’m doing a talk there and signing the book. Douglas went back there in 81, I believe, To sign copies of Restaurant at the End of the Union as he may have gone at other times as well, but we found a note of that in one of his diaries. And, so I’m quite delighted to be going there. And An exhibition of his papers is being, held, in Saint John’s, in the 400 year old library, which looks like I mean, the the main gallery of the library.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:04:53]:
There’s a very modern section, but the main gallery looks like a church. I mean Mhmm. And and the bookcases are big, heavy bookcases with leather tomes on them. Looks like something out of Hogwarts. You know? Yes. It’s very much redolent of that. But that’s where his stuff will be exhibited under glass in their cabinets there, and, that’s open on the Friday afternoon and Saturday. And then on the Saturday afternoon, the fans are having an organized, walking tour around Cambridge, which, Dave Haddock, who is a member of z z nine, one of the stalwarts of the whole thing.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:05:28]:
He does guided tours both of Of his hometown of Cambridge, Douglass’ Cambridge, and also Douglass’ Islington in North London, where he lived for the main part of when he was working. So, you know, the the stories and the legend of Doctor. Adams carries on.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:46]:
Yeah. Do you what what do you think he would think if he knew that He was having an exhibition
Kevin Jon Davies [01:05:52]:
in Well, I think he’d fridge. He would think it’s very bizarre. I think he’d also see it Street cheeky and rude that people are looking into his private papers. I mean, I I was very aware sitting there, you know, in all the trips that I made up there and in the special collections reading room, which is a very small room. There’s only, like, 3 or 4 desks in it. And I’m sitting there looking at these Papers think you know, Tapis. You wouldn’t want me or anybody else looking at this stuff, really, would you? But we want more. You know? You’ve left us wanting more.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:06:23]:
And so, you know, in the absence of any other material, this is it. This book gives you What there is, it’s the best of what’s left behind.
Nancy Norbeck [01:06:35]:
Right.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:06:35]:
And it’s it’s, it’s both, Poignant and sad, but, of course, the material itself is invariably funny. You know, it’s a good read. There’s good stuff in that book. There are some pictures as well as photographs and stuff, but it’s mostly about his writing. And, You know, I hope we’ve done him justice. I think we have. We get some nice reviews where there have been some very nice positive comments and reviews, which I I tried to address I tried to thank everyone who, expresses an interest online. It’s been quite a bit.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:07:12]:
So, I’ve been very, very busy on social media lately.
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:15]:
I’m sure.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:07:15]:
I I’ve I’ve I’ve had a a sort of, you know, baptism of fire as with regard PR. I’ve not dealt with a lot of PR. Well, I mean, I once had a big press call on Westminster Bridge with 8 Daleks for for the big doctor who documented. That was 30 years ago, And, that was a bit of an epic in itself because I’ve been told by the police on no in no uncertain terms, do not stop the traffic. And that’s the first thing the gentlemen of the British press, so called, did was, of course, they stopped the traffic to put a line of Daleks across the bridge. So I went to the policeman on duty and said, look. I’m telling you, I’m running this lot from the BBC. We are finished.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:07:55]:
Okay? Anything that happens now is down to the papers. So yeah. Me. Yeah. Quite. Yeah. But no. I’ve got a few nice things coming up.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:08:05]:
There’s gonna be another big event on the 21st October At, the Rolf not Rolf Festival. The, Queen Elizabeth Hall at Southbank complex in Central London, On the river there, and, we’re having a big do that is gonna be hosted by Douglass’ friend, former flatmate, cowriter, Producer of Blackadder, spitting image, QI, John Lloyd, who’s gonna host the evening. We had Clive Anderson, another one of Douglas’s friends on last Friday night, at the British Library, and that was lovely. And, Yeah. I feel very lucky to be, you know, in the center of this little storm around Douglas’s name. But but, you know, I’m not I’m not sort of daft. I know that it’s all about Douglass. So I I I I’m just lucky recipient of the attention at the moment, but This is the book about Douglas for the fans of Douglas, for everyone who loved him.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:09:04]:
And, you know, as as somebody else pointed out, People feel they know him through his writing even if they never met him. Goodness knows. Thousands of people met him. He toured, and he signed books, you know, for years on end, And he loved doing that. There’s even a little piece in here about what it is like when he’s confronted by a whole line of people who want to talk to him And when they come to a signing, you know, he’s written about that. So, yeah, I I’m I’m delighted that everyone’s enjoying it, as it thuds through their letterbox. Put somebody said, I put a pillow under the letterbox so that when it comes through the door, it’s not gonna get damaged because it is it is incredibly heavy. But it’s a lovely coffee table book, and so you can savor it.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:09:51]:
It’s vaguely chronological, but you can dip in and out and find something new each time, I hope.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:57]:
Well, I know I am looking forward to giving it a good look When I get the opportunity, and I’m sure that I am not the only one.
Kevin Jon Davies [01:10:04]:
Thank you very much.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:06]:
Well, thank you for coming and spending some time with me. This has been so much fun. I’ve enjoyed it. That’s this week’s show. Thanks so much to Kevin John Davies and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. There’s a link right in your podcast app, and in it, tell us how a childhood influence has stuck with you. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:28]:
Thank you so much. If this episode resonated with you or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, Join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, Please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends.
Nancy Norbeck [01:11:08]:
It really helps me reach new listeners.