Imaginary Worlds - Dirk Maggs

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

I talked with legendary audio drama producer Dirk Maggs for an episode about the history of radio dramas last year-- but a lot of great material ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. So I’m presenting a full version of our conversation, where we discuss how he brought major franchises like Batman, Alien and The X-Files to audio drama, and how he brought The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy back to radio. And he reveals a few secrets of audio production on how to trick the brain into seeing what’s not there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Every summer, I like to play an extended interview from somebody that I talked with who had a lot to say, and I always regretted how much of it ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Well, last fall, I did an episode about the history of radio dramas, and I talked with a legendary audio drama producer in the UK named Dirk Maggs. Dirk is best known for adapting big pop culture franchises like Batman, Superman, The X-Files, Independence Day, Alien, and turning them into audio dramas for the BBC,

or lately he's been working with Audible. He's also adapted several Neil Gaiman novels. But his big claim to fame is rebooting The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio drama series for the 21st century. By the way, most of the audio dramas that he worked on are not available to listen to because the BBC has a very limited window in which they make their shows available online. And the audio dramas that he worked on for Audible are exclusive to Audible. But he is so good at describing his work, you will hear these scenes in your mind. In fact, he's the kind of guest that in public radio we used to call plug and play, meaning you ask him a question and then just sit back and enjoy the stories.

I began by asking him why radio dramas kept going so strong in the UK, while in the US, they began to fade out in the 1950s with the arrival of television. I think the reason that audio survived in the UK when it sort of became old hat in the US was because we had a public broadcaster that was really well funded, which is the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC. It never went away here. We kept it. And of course, a lot of our actors kind of cut their teeth in the medium. So, you know, the Judi Dench's and the Ian McKellen's and all of these guys are just as home at home in a radio studio acting for sound as they were with a camera, a film or a television camera in

the room or indeed on the stage in the West End. And one of the great things about working in audio over here is that it hasn't been a big problem for me to book Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, because Benedict was only till about two years ago, appearing regularly in a situation comedy on BBC radio. You know, he loved the medium. And in fact, working with him and James McAvoy on Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, I said to James, gosh, you know, it's really great to have you here. I'm so glad, especially as really we're paying,

you're paying your peanuts compared to what you're earning in movies. And he said, do you know what that is? And I said, no. Well, tell me. He said, because I blooming love it. Except he didn't say blooming. But they love the medium, you know, because they can just come in and they can express themselves.

They don't need makeup, wardrobe. They don't have to wait for somebody to light the set. If you can say to an actor, would you like to be this character and not even have to learn lines, you pretty much got them a lot of the time. Do you remember as a kid, what were your favorite shows, the ones that looking back, audio dramas that looking back inspired you to want to go into this? My biggest influence was actually a comedy show on BBC radio. Now, it was actually recorded in the 50s, 1950s, and I only heard it, you know, in the late 60s when I was growing up. But it was a thing called The Goon Show, which a lot of British people reminisce about of a certain age. There are less of us as time goes by, but it was invented by three guys. One of them was Peter Sellers, who went on to become famous as Inspector Clouseau.

One of them was Harry Seacombe, who was a kind of vaudeville entertainer. And one of them was a guy called Spike Milligan. This was an influence on me because I'd never heard anything like it before. First of all it made me laugh but secondly it made your imagination go into overdrive and the sound effects were so great and it didn't need pictures. That was the thing it created its own pictures and you utterly believed it and when one character says to another let's let's go let's let's follow guys. And the other one says, well, how are we going to do it? And he says, well, you see that bicycle leaning on that wall?

And the other character says, yeah. And he says, well, that wall belongs to me. We'll take the wall. No, I know, you know, it sounds corny and weird, but it really was. And you hear this weird sound effect of a wall driving off at speed and the bicycle falling over. Well, once you got into starting working in radio dramas or audio dramas, did you start meeting some of these veterans of the field and start learning the tricks of the trade and realize, oh, that's how they made that sound?

Yes. Well, I was so influenced that when I left university and I wanted to get in the film business, but there was no film business in Britain at the time. A friend of mine joined BBC and joined BBC Radio. So I thought, well, I can start there and work my way up into television and then over into film. So I had this all mapped out. then over into film. So I had this all mapped out. But I got into radio and I found I was enjoying it so much that when I finally did work in television and I did some work on feature films, it was quite restrictive compared to what could be done in sound only. So in the end, I aimed at and managed to get a job in the comedy department where all these programs I loved came from. comedy department where all these programs I loved came from. And so I did end up working with Spike Milligan of The Goon Show. He actually, we had several encounters and we got on very well. And one of my favorite encounter was when I revived the Marx Brothers radio show, Flywheel

Shyster and Flywheel, which were discovered in the Library of Congress in the late 80s and were released in book form. And we recreated these in a London audience show. So I was able not only to get Spykin, who was whose humor was influenced by that, but also into a show where the narrative was essentially a drama. You know, you'd have the story, I don't know, Flywheel and Ravelli, his assistant, you know, which effectively was Groucho and Chico, would be running a bus company, the Flybywheel tour company or something like that. We had the sound effects played in.

We had the live sound effects on stage. I dragged the sound effects operator out from behind screens so the audience could see them doing it. And then I put a top hat and a fuzzy wig and a trench coat on them so they looked like Harpo. So we kind of had the third Marx brother on the sound effects. And all along in that process, I'm learning about how to use sound.

But comedy in particular is a very good training for learning how timing works. Even if you're doing drama, drama you know it's kind of where you drop the bombs and I met a very old a very old BBC I'm a very old BBC producer now but in those days a guy called Dennis Mayne Wilson who basically produced the first goon shows and also shows involving Tony Hancock and and he also was the originator of the show that became All in the Family on TV in the States. It was called Till Let Us Do Part over here. Oh, yeah, I've heard of that.

The Archie Bunker thing. Yeah, well, he originated that. He got that on the air. And Dennis, very interesting. When I told him, this was just before I joined the light entertainment department, which was the comedy department, and we went out for a drink. And he said, he said, so what are your hobbies? And I said, well, I'm a drummer.

He said, well, that's excellent. Then you'll know where to drop the bombs, which is, you know, jazz in jazz terms, where you do the fills and the hit, the accents and the, you know, the breaks and so on. I thought at the time, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, because I was young and I thought I knew everything. And then down the line, actually, I learned how important timing was in comedy. It's a cliche, but actually it is important in comedy and it's important in drama because the really,

really good stuff is always beautifully timed out. So I learned a lot from the old hands, definitely. That informed pretty much everything I did. Well, what are some specifics? I mean, getting into kind of the nitty gritty of the craft itself. What are some sort of interesting moments where you realized, oh, that's how they do this

or things that people listening to these audio dramas may not have known that there's certain interesting aspects of the craft you know that that could be the interesting sort of takeaways for people listening the beauty of working in pure audio is it's a hidden art it's a hidden art in the same way that when you before the music video if you bought a beatles album you didn't know what it looked like when they recorded it you just knew how it came out when you listened to it and the pictures came in your head and you didn't you know you listen to sergeant pepper and this amazing sort of you know kaleidoscope of color and sound and characters and great music

and what have you and of course what you don't know is these are four guys sitting in a really drafty, badly in need of repainting Studio 2 at Abbey Road. If you've ever been to Studio 2 at Abbey Road, it is glamour center of the world. It isn't. And yet these guys in this room create this magic. And that's what I love about working in audio. What you're doing is creating

worlds. Everything is a narrative. A song is a narrative. Any song, if you think about it, you're looking for a thread of sense in it, a sort of narrative sense to anchor yourself in it. And what I discovered was, and I think this was my biggest discovery, was that the microphone actually is more like a stereo microphone where you can pick up left and right in the room. It's less of a, how should we say, it's almost a 3D sensing instrument. If you put headphones on and listen to what a stereo microphone is recording, if the actors are moving in and out from it and back and forth in the room, you are getting a sense in your head of where they are.

That's a really interesting point because I think for most people when they want to hear about how radio dramas are made, they want to hear about the props. And in a way you're saying the mic is everything. That's the real magic of the radio drama, is the mic and the mic placement and how far you are from the mic and what kind of mic it is. The props are just props. Yes. But it doesn't even matter if it's not a good mic. We did a dramatization, I did a dramatization of Stephen Baxter's book, Voyage, which was about if NASA had gone to Mars instead of quitting the Apollo project and going straight onto the shuttles. And when we did that, in order to get the feeling of being in the capsule with them on the way, I actually put the three astronauts into into cheap jumpsuits from the local hardware store and uh little radio shack mics mounted in styrofoam cups taped onto their headphones with you know a duct tape and

put them in a people carrier like an suv in the car park outside the studio and actually took feeds from these really cheap little tinny mics because it actually sounded like they were like five thousand five hundred thousand miles away or whatever it was it's it's using you know you don't have to have thousands of dollars worth of gear to do this stuff but the thing was while I was doing that I was also mission control I did these scenes live I had these guys out in the SUV but I had in the studio where we were working was mission control and what I wanted to achieve was the effect of like a pullback a track back with a camera through mission control where you where

you you pull back from the flight director at the back of the room down to Capcom who's sitting, you know, front right talking to the astronauts. But I wanted to go through all the layers of people reporting back to the flight director before we got to the Capcom person. I'm hoping this makes any kind of sense. Yeah. And because I didn't want to track the microphone, I actually got the cast to walk backwards off the mic, sort of go in succession.

But the effect in the ear is a visual one. So what you've got, if you're watching it, is a bunch of actors walking past a microphone and a bunch of guys dressed up in the most outrageous looking decorators outfits sitting in an SUV. It's the stuff of comedy. What you hear is a drama. And that's the hidden art. That's what I love about it. They're in trouble in their little capsule in your mind, whereas in reality, it looks like, yeah, well, you know, a bit of a comedy troupe. In the early 2000s, Dirk Maggs produced a series of radio dramas based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A lot of people don't know this, but The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A lot of people don't know this, but The Hitchhiker's Guide actually began as a radio drama series in 1978. And it was so

popular that the writer, Douglas Adams, adapted his radio dramas into novels that became huge bestsellers. And in case you haven't read them, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is about regular middle-class guy named Arthur Dent, who thinks that he is the sole survivor after aliens have blown up the earth to make way for an interstellar expressway. Yes, it is a comedy. Now eventually, the literary sequels to The Hitchhiker's Guide brought the book so much further than the radio drama had ever gone. Douglas Adams wanted these later books to have their own radio drama adaptations, and he picked Dirk Maggs to make them. Sadly, Douglas Adams died

in 2001. He didn't live long enough to hear these adaptations that Dirk Maggs produced for the BBC a few years later. It was a huge honor for Dirk to work on that series because back in 1978, he was a young engineer starting his career when The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first went on the air. They really didn't think it was going to get much of a listenership. So they put it on at half past 10 at night when most of the, you know, the world was going to sleep or, you know, pretty much in the 70s they were too. It was not expected to do much business. And by the third week, the listening figures they were getting back were through the roof. So they finished the six half hours over six weeks and then they immediately, pretty much immediately repeated them.

And it did even better business. It struck this amazing nerve with people. It was really a phenomenon. Why do you think it works so well as an audio drama? Because eventually the books eclipsed it. I mean, I actually did not know that the radio drama came first. I only learned that fairly recently. But why do you think it works so well as a radio drama initially? quite come off either as a television series or as a movie, because if it had really worked as a TV series, there would have been a second series and a third and a fourth. And if it worked as a movie, there would have been sequels to that movie. Whereas it's gone to a total of six radio series, five of which are completely based on Douglas's work. And I do think that it's sort of living proof of how

the only medium that can really feed the imagination with such a vast subject is audio, because the brain is the greatest CGI computer on the planet. You can have, you know, computer on the planet you can have you know millions of ziggawats of storage and what have you and ram and so on and so forth and amazing machines that do stuff and you know you can have pixars render farm a thousand times over but there is something about the human imagination you know the thing about a an image a film or tv it goes in through your eyes and all the information is there given to you don't have to do any work that is the information your imagination is maybe working on you know how did this person get there or you know what their motivation is but basically you're being fed everything you need to see and you're hearing the soundtrack. Whereas in audio, pure audio, it bypasses the optic nerve and it sneaks in through the side doors.

It goes in through the ears and that leaves your it doesn't tell your brain anything visually. Your brain is entirely free to interpret the information. And I think that's what makes Hitchhiker work so well in audio. If you have a story that the very beginning of it is the end of everything. I mean, that's the conceit. The first episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy destroys the earth and everybody on it, and it leaves just two humans, actually only one human in the first episode alive. That is so vast and so ambitious an idea that, well, for a imaginary, in that imaginative state where all these images are coming to you and you combine that with writing which says the Vogon ships hung in the air in precisely the way that bricks don't.

You know, the collision of comedy language and the conceit of the image is so huge and breathtaking. You know, it could only be born in an audio medium. It's too big in a way to combine those elements. And that was Douglas's achievement. And I think Hitchhiker's just completely reinvented radio for the ground up. One of my favorite things about the opening of the whole saga is that, yeah, the Earth is destroyed. And then Arthur learns that the universe is incredibly, incredibly, endlessly vast in terms of beings and worlds. And B, nobody particularly cares the Earth was destroyed. Like he is literally the only person, maybe Trillid, who could care less. It's just it's sort of like, you know, or you get a reminder of that really boring fact about you.

And I feel like the combination of those two to be is always what makes it so compelling. Yeah, it was the idea that the universe doesn't care. And it's interesting because it also kids latch onto that, you know, it's really interesting. We did a touring version of a sort of two hour condensed version of the whole Hitchhiker story. And we took it on tour with the original cast in the UK about six years ago for a couple of tours. We did it live on stage. We had a robot puppet to be Marvin. We had a live band and we had live sound effects. And at the end of the evening, people could order the recording that we'd made of that night's show so they could then hear it as a radio thing, as an audio drama, if you will. And what was really fun, and I was determined not to miss out.

I did the adaptation and I directed it, but I also made sure I played drums in the band so that I could be there for the fun because it was a lot of fun but what was really great was sitting on the drum riser at the back of the band just watching the audience I was I was occasionally running and helping with sound effects but sometimes I was waiting for the next cue and there were people who had brought their kids and these were like eight nine ten, ten-year-olds. They weren't, you know, kids who, certainly they wouldn't have ever, ever heard the original series when it went out.

They'd come because their mum and dad had said, this is really fun, you'll enjoy it. And the really fun thing was they were falling about laughing. They were doubled up laughing at some of the jokes. And then afterwards, when they bought them and could hear it as a radio show, kind of showing how, from soup to nuts, how you build something in audio becomes a movie in your mind. In recent years, Dirk Maggs has been working with Audible to create audio dramas based on

The X-Files and Alien. And these audio dramas were adapted from an Alien novel and an X-Files graphic novel that were set within the established timeline of those franchises. And they got Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny to reprise their roles as Mulder and Scully. I asked Dirk what it was like to adapt something that had already been thoroughly established in a visual medium. X-Files was a challenge in that the idea of clones of people when the original is in the room, that's quite tough to do. And there's a little bit of this in the X-Files. And also, you know, when they're aliens, when they're the shapeshifters and so on. What does a shapeshifter sound like when it turns into a pile of goo?

Well, you know, sort of squidgy, splurgy, messy noises and dying noises. But the thing is, you know, when you've got two of the same person in the room, that gets trickier. And you have to make sure that the actors are directed to sort of give you an up or a down. There was one scene where there was the real Scully and there was a fake Scully. And similarly, a real Mulder and a fake Mulder. And so not only did David and Gillian have to obviously act themselves with subtle differences, but also you had to somehow preserve in the sense of the story as it plays to the ear that these are two separate entities but the trick for me really was to keep the action quotient up I have a real problem with

talking heads on radio on audio drama if if a drama is all people talking to each other they might as well be on television as far as I'm concerned. What I like is to keep the action going to get layers of reality behind what's going on. And it's fun when you have Mulder and Scully going back to their old basement office at the FBI, you know, sort of recreating the room that everybody knows. And Mulder's found one of his old sandwiches in the wastebasket, you know, all of this. So you kind of hear David put his head in a galvanized bin and then come out again. You know, little gags like that, playing little gags. It's really very good.

And, of course, what you have is two actors who know the characters backwards and can play with this stuff, you know, can play off each other, which was compounded by the fact that we couldn't record them at the same time. So it was very much down to David and Julian being familiar with each other's way of working. And then you edit together and you find, good God, yeah, it's Mulder and Scully. It's the X-Files. This is very exciting. And what about Alien in terms of the sound effects?

Well, the thing about Alien was I was going to build about six months into the pre-production period just to build Alien sound effects because, you know, you're looking at 40 years worth of cinema legend there. You can't do something that evocative without really making sure that the aliens are believable. What happened was that my kids bought me, because they knew I was doing the job, they bought me a game called Alien Isolation. The sound design on this game, which had been about two years in the making, totally blew me away. I mean, not just the creature sounds, all of it was just superb. So I said to Audible, who I was doing it with, look, you know, really, I could spend six months doing this, or we could see if these guys will license us the sound

effects. Well, it turned out that the sound effects from the game belonged to Fox, who had licensed us to do the production. So I've unashamedly used the amazing sound design from Alien Isolation. Not wholesale. I had to create quite a lot of stuff anyway. For some reason, there was no sound effect for the alien inner jaw coming out and snapping and stuff like that. You know, there were certain niceties I had to do. What did you do for the alien jaw?

Oh, crikey. What did we do for the alien jaw? It's very tempting to do a kind of cartoon crocodile jaw snap. No, I think it was a kind of a swoosh and a squidge and a kind of a chompy noise. But you know what the source, I mean, I didn't go out in our kitchen and start squidging pieces of meat together because over the years i've amassed so many sound effects

generally speaking somewhere in the archive i've got the sort of noise i want but you think in your mind's eye it's a little it's a weird thing sound effects because you have an idea you know what sound effect you need to get you know i, I need to get the sound of somebody's head being, you know, bitten by, punched into by this thing, by this jaw punching out. And you go through the sequence of events. There's a movie with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio called The Quick and the Dead. It was made in the 90s, and it's about a fast draw competition.

There's this wonderful moment where basically they both draw. I think it's Russell is quicker off the mark and he shoots and the bullet goes through DiCaprio's head. Now, you know, this all happens in the space of a second. But if you actually listen to the sound design on that scene, you hear the gun clear the holster, you hear the hammer pulled back and lock, you hear the trigger click, the hammer hit the round, the explosion inside the shell, the bullet whizzed down the tube, you hear the bullet fly across the screen and then you hear the splat as it hits the head of the bad guy, DiCaprio I think, and then there's this moment of kind of stasis and then you hear the body fall. But what I love about it is every little bit of that is sound designed up and it's kind of like my way of doing things. I try and think

through the sequence of events of even the shortest quickest sound. There is the energy behind it, the movement of air which is what it's all about and also the possibility of finding something amusing or poignant inside of that because you know even in a split second a lot can be done and one of the great moments after the bullet has gone through this guy's head just for a moment you can see through his head to the landscape behind and the soundscape the sound design goes like that and it's has got this great feeling of, you know, like through, you're looking through this guy into the great wild yonder. And that was, that is such a great kind of example of sound,

having a sort of sense of humor in even what is potentially a serious situation. Yeah, that's interesting, Chris. Your approach is very much to think about every sound effect as being a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. characters talk at each other they don't listen to each other their their reasons for doing what they're doing need context in their lives and also the sound design reflects the context i was saying to someone the other day we were talking about creating worlds in sound i i did a terry pratchett project recently where we had to create the sound of disc world where you know design up how it would sound on this strange disc light world which is on the back of Discworld where, you know, design up how it would sound on this strange disc-like world, which is on the back of four elephants, five elephants originally,

which is on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. Now, immediately I say that, you know, you're thinking, how the hell do you do that? But, you know, you come to, you take it sequentially, describe the turtle, describe the elephants, describe the world that's on there and then go into the world. That would be my way of going at it. But, you know, over the years, I've created Metropolis. I've created Gotham City. Gotham City and Metropolis don't sound like each other. Birds still sing in the parks in Metropolis, even if the traffic is heard behind them.

In Gotham, there are no birds singing. There's just the sound of sirens and the occasional scream and probably some sort of sub rumble going on underneath because it's kind of a heavy place. That's why it needs someone like Batman. Metropolis, slightly different deal. It's what is the character of the world you are creating from the very most distant horizon right up to what's happening right in front of your eyes. Or right in front of your ears. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Dirk Maggs and the crew of 20,000 Hertz who co-produced that radio drama episode with me. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine World's Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.