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Post by fitzoliverj on Jan 22, 2017 15:11:03 GMT
In the interviews for "Song of the Megabigwhaleything" (I don't want to attempt the spelling) Pat Mills recalls that when he first submitted the story for television, he was given Douglas Adams's notes on how to write for the series. I was wondering whether these have ever been published? It strikes me as the kind of thing that might have been good in "The Salmon of Doubt" but I don't recall them being in it.
(Also, while I'm on the subject, has anybody else noticed that in the last few years the credit for "City of Death" has downplayed Graham Williams's role and boosted David Fisher's? I'm not saying that's wrong, just surprising).
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
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Post by shutupbanks on Jan 22, 2017 23:09:37 GMT
Not sure how helpful this is but in an interview with Neil Gaiman for the sadly defunct "Space Voyager" magazine in 1985 (later edited into parts of "Don't Panic," his 1988 bio/reference guide to Adams/ H2G2) Adams said the following:
"In the things I wrote for Doctor Who, there were absurd thing that happened in it, and funny things. But I feel that Dr Who is essentially a drama show, and only secondarily amusing. My aim was to create apparently bizarre situations and then pursue the logic so much that it became true. So on the one hand, someone behaves in an interesting, and apparently outrageous way, and you think at first that it's funny. Then you realise that they mean it, and that, at least to my mind, begins to make it more gripping and terrifying.
"The trouble is that as soon as you produce some scripts with some humour in them, there is a temptation on the part of the people making the show to say, 'This is a funny bit. Let's pull out all the stops, have fun, and be silly.' One always knows as soon as someone says that that they are going to spoil it."
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2017 14:11:13 GMT
I've heard it repeated elsewhere, but that sounds about the size of it. The great irony of Adams's tenure was that his stories were serious plots with humourous asides rather than humourous plots with serious asides. City of Death is about dangerous experiments by an eldritch monster that could bring about the end of humanity and Shada is about seeking out a notorious Time Lord criminal for his frightening mental potential.
Gareth Roberts managed to get that down to a tee in The English Way of Death (even the title!) and you can see a similar approach taken with The Song of Megaptera's delirious Peri and leetspeaking AI, although how they got "Teabag it? Teabag it?" into production, I'll never know. Written down in script form, Adams's gags tend to emphasise the Doctor's utter otherworldiness, but produced on screen it often tended to overbalance and, well, "How many Nimons have you seen today?" If I didn't know better, I'd have said that there was a gas leak in studio when they recorded scenes for Soldeed ("You're DOOMED! DOOOMED!").
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