A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

In 1971, a young British television producer named Jeremy Isaacs and a team of writers, directors, editors, and other production staff began work on   The World at War  a 26-part documentary about World War II. Isaacs knew that the war is too vast and complicated a topic; not even 26 hours of television air time (including commercial breaks) is enough to cover every campaign, battle, or major personalities.  After consulting with Noble Frankland, then the director of the Imperial War Museum, Isaacs decided to cover 15 decisive campaigns and battles, with the rest of the episodes devoted to such specific topics as the rise of Hitler in Germany, life in occupied Europe, day-to-day life inside the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.    The emphasis of the series is not so much the  history  of the war but rather the human  story , not only because simple dry facts and endless clips of censored war footage are mind-numbingly dull, but because televis...

In the late 1970s, prompted by the success of Douglas Adams' original sci-fi/comedy radio series  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  the British Broadcasting Corporation's television department commissioned him and John Lloyd to adapt it into a six-episode miniseries. Adams, who had also worked for a while on the venerable  Dr. Who  TV series, had already adapted part of the radio series into a couple of novels ( The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  and  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe ) was notorious for being a procrastinator, so the project took a while in getting started. At first, the TV version of  Hitchiker's Guide  was going to be an animated series, but this idea was nixed in favor of giving viewers a live-action version featuring some of the original radio series' actors, particularly Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox), Stephen Moore (Marvin the Paranoid Android) and Peter...