Since the sad news of the death of Doctor Who script editor Christopher H Bidmead (the H stands for Hamilton), I’ve noticed a pattern has emerged in the responses. Which I will paraphrase as; “Chris B brought science back to Doctor Who, proper science based in fact, not like silly Douglas Adams who treated science as magic!” And, in fairness, that’s an opinion that Christopher held and propounded whenever given the opportunity. And, in turn, when Douglas Adams was alive, and asked what he thought about his successor, when he wasn’t maintaining a dignified silence he would criticise moments like the Master sending a blackmail message to the entire cosmos beginning “Peoples of the universe, please attend carefully.” For all of Christopher’s claims about rooting the series in science, it's hard to see how that moment fulfils that criteria; it raises all sorts of questions about the speed of light, signal diffusion, and how would anyone who didn’t speak English understand what he was on about. You can argue that that scene is not supposed to make sense, it is simply an illustration of the fact that the Master is fucking nuts, and that kind of works although it isn’t very dramatically satisfying.
But the point I have been preambling towards is this; I don’t
actually think Christopher and Douglas were that different at all. I think as
writers and script editors and possibly even as people, they were actually very
similar. We like to mark the differences in their approach, and, of course, you
can always find differences, the more closely you look. But actually, for all of
critics’ claims of their difference, and their own claims to be different, in
the Venn diagram of their approaches there was a considerable overlap.
After all, Douglas Adams didn’t really treat science as
magic in Doctor Who. Yes, he had the Doctor and Romana use their sonic screwdrivers
fairly often, but only as a dramatic shortcut to avoid long ‘rewiring from
scratch’ business. But the stories he originated – and by his own account, most
of the stories by other writers that he script edited were at his suggestion – are
all grounded in science, or at least borrow concepts from serious science
fiction. The Pirate Planet is almost overloaded with concepts;
teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, time dilation, holograms, cybernetics.
And then in season 17 you have stories encompassing ideas about game theory,
time travel, black holes being used to create wormholes, hyperspace and artificial
intelligence, along with other very Adams themes, like ecology and evolution. I
know at this point attentive readers will be going “What about Shada?”
and don’t worry, I’ll come to that in a bit.
And Christopher did kind of treat science as a fairly magical thing. In The Leisure Hive tachyons can do whatever the plot requires, because, well, tachyons are where the normal laws of physics break down anyway. Meglos has a talking cactus that can change shape and a magic crystal, although in fairness Christopher wasn’t too keen on that. The big twist of Full Circle is that after some swamp monsters broke into a spaceship they then evolved to fit their environment and became humanoid, which is a great twist but not really how evolution works. State of Decay has vampires, although in fairness Christopher wasn’t too keen on that either. And then you have Warriors’ Gate and The Keeper of Traken, both of which adhere fairly closely to the old idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a fairytale, with mirror worlds, a void universe like a new wave pop video, and all the stuff about the keeper of Traken being able to maintain a web of universal harmony by sitting on a magic throne.
And, of course, there’s Logopolis, with a society of mathematicians using abacuses as part of a living computer to maintain the existence of the universe itself, which is such a Douglas Adams idea, and the ghostly watcher straight out of The Signalman, the fairytale world of Castrovalva, and giant woodlice controlling gravity in Frontios. Is there really much difference to a giant woodlice moving worlds with gravity and a giant amoeba wrapping a neutron star with aluminium? Well, yes, there’s a bit, but not much. The writer of that amoeba story, David Fisher, always maintained that he’d got the idea for that bit after asking some scientists at Cambridge university about the best way to stop a neutron star, and being told “Wrap it in tin foil”. I’ve always wondered if they were taking the piss but he didn’t realise and took them at their word.
Anway, that’s a digression. And I can now anticipate the
next thing you’re asking; what about the jokes? Well, yes, there are more jokes
in Douglas’s year than Christopher’s, but that’s more a result of the lead cast
the change of producer, with John Nathan-Turner stating there will be 'no jokey-jokey’
in the TARDIS', and even more importantly, the influence of Barry Letts as
executive producer. You only have to look at Frontios to know that
Christopher could write beautifully funny scenes. And, also, actually, there is
a fairly huge difference between how jokey the scripts were when they left
Douglas’s typewriter to how they appeared on screen, due to the regular cast
rewriting them from top to bottom, and the guest cast deciding that now was the
ideal opportunity to treat the world to their repertoire of accents. Oh, and
also, a mix of old-guard I-really-can’t-be-arsed directors and
oh-my-god-this-is-my-first-job-help directors.
But apart from that, I think the differences are
superficial. I’m not sure the wizened scientists with long beards in Shada are
that different to the wizened scientists with long beards in Logopolis. I
think maybe Douglas was better at structure; we know from his notes on The
Pirate Planet that he obsessed about story structure to such an extent that
I suspect he was already using it as a work-displacement activity, and he kind
of had a rule that episode ones should end with the reveal of the monster, and that
the antagonists should have clearly-defined objectives and so on, while
Christopher’s stories Logopolis and Castrovalva are quite
oddly-structured; they both take quite a long time to get to the point where
you can say “Ah, the actual story has begun”. And he wasn’t as strong on
villain motivation; as mentioned earlier, whatever the Master is trying to
achieve in Logopolis makes no sense, he seems to be being evil
for the sake of it.
Although that is also a criticism that can be levelled at Skagra in Shada, a villain with no backstory or motivation beyond egomania; almost the ultimate expression of a villain being evil for the sake of it. An idea which Douglas had previously treated as a running gag in Nightmare of Eden, where Fisk keeps papering over logical flaws in his case against the Doctor by saying, “Criminals are like that”.
Which leads me to my second point. I think when Douglas and Christopher were criticising each other’s work, they were actually, unconsciously, revealing their own weaknesses. Douglas criticised Christopher for not giving the villain logical motivation because he felt self-conscious about his own weaknesses in that area, and Christopher criticised Douglas for treating science as magic because he was self-conscious about his own proclivity for doing that.
It’s what politicians always do; attack your opponent by ascribing
all your own flaws to them. But a better example that springs to mind is the ‘battle
of the songs’ between John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the early 1970s, where
Paul would write Too Many People about John being pompous and
patronising, and John would write How Do You Sleep about Paul being lightweight
and smug, and Paul would then go, “Well, you’re going to look a bit silly now, John,
because I’ve already recorded Dear Friend even if I haven’t released it
yet” . And yet, as John so cannily observed a few years later, they weren’t
really writing songs about either other, but themselves. And maybe one of the
reasons why they tried to push in different directions in the 1970s was because
they fighting against the truth that actually they weren’t that different as
songwriters, and that John could be as sentimental and twee as Paul and Paul
could be as hard-rocking and judgemental as John.
So anyway, yes, Christopher H Bidmead, Douglas N Adams, like
Lennon and McCartney, not that different after all. Both of them started out
wanting to be performers; Christopher going on to become a member of the Royal
Shakespeare Company, as well as being in the cast of the radio production of King
Lear that ended up in I Am The Walrus, Douglas not really getting further
than being an extra in a couple of episodes of Monty Python (and yes, I
do mean Monty Python and not Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Even
when they became writers, they both still had enough of the performance bug to
insist on reading the talking books of their novelisations (and yes, The Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy is a novelisation, not a novel). And there’s the other
enormous similarity, which is it that they were both fascinated with science in
general and home computers in particular, as well as gadgetry of all kinds (we
know Christopher had three coffee machines; history does not relate how many Douglas
had).
And now there’s one more thing they have in common, which is
that they are both no longer with us, which is a great shame. RIP Christopher H
Bidmead.
Next week: why Eric Saward and Andrew Cartmel weren’t that
different as script editors either.
