Scanned and corrected by Dirk Gently- as usual. If you have some interesting books to be scanned (Finnish and Estonian preferred!), and they'd interest me as well, you can contact me. Don't forget the three letters: i-R-C! Sorry, no Email addy is possible. I had lots of probs scanning/editing this text, so it'd be great (if you are a DNA fan) if you sent me some greets in demoz/diskmags of yours, if you appreciate my effort to make this book available for you.

I recommend you keeping the file's Word format coz I've edited the text with Bold and Italic characters as well.

There were some TIFFs as well in the archive. COVER.TIF was the TrueColor TIFF of the cover. The other TIFFs were:
6.tif: the name (and the text) speaks for itself :) (600 dpi, BW 256, 20%)
APP1_1... APP1_4.tif: Appendix 1's 4 pages (900 dpi, BW 256, 20%)
Anyway, to make life easier, I've also typed in the contents of the
mentioned TIFs so you won't need to get the TIFFs.

*************************COVER***********************
'IT'S ALL
ABSOLUTELY
DEVASTATINGLY
TRUE
EXCEPT THE BITS
THAT ARE LIES'

This is the story of an ape-descended human called
Douglas adams who, in a field in Innsbruck, in 1971,
had an idea.

It us also the story of a book called, at a very high level
of improbality, The Hith Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy;
of the radio series that started it all; the five book
trilogy it comprises; and the computer game, towel
and television series that it, in its turn, has spawned.

'DESERVES AS MUCH CULT
SUCCESS AS THE HITCH HIKER'S
BOOKS THEMSELVES'
Time Out

REVISED & UPDATED
************************************************


********************************************************************
`Hilarious fun... a source of much delightful trivia'
- Publisbers Weekly

`Fanciful and irreverent... adds much extra information'
- Forecast

`Droll and informative... indispensable'
- American Library Association

`Indispensable... a treasure trove of quotes and anecdotes'
- Locus

Full of fun... and much more information than most books
of this type'
- Science Fiction Chronicle

`An excellent insight into the creative process'
- Vector





BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe, and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts
The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief
Christmas Book (Editor)
The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)
Thc Decper Mcaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Thc Long Dark Tca-Timc of thc Soul
Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine)

OTHER BOOKS BY NEIL GAIMAN
Black Orchid
Thc Books of Magic
Ghastly Beyond Belief
Sandman: Thc Doll's House
Sandman: Dream Country
Sandman: A Game of You
Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
Sandman: Season of Mists
Violent Cases



DON'T PANIC - DOUGLAS ADAMS & THE
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
ISBN 185286 411 7

Published by
Titan Books Ltd
19 Valentine Place
London SE1 8QH

First edition published as `Don't Panic: The Official
Hitehhiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy Companion' January 1988
Second revised edition July 1993
1098765432

Copyright (C) Neil Gaiman 1987,1993

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all extracts from
the works of Douglas Adams are copyright Douglas
Adams 1987-1993 and used by permission of William
Heinemann Ltd



Cover illustration `Swarm Fish' (C) 1993 Britstock-IFA Ltd
used with permission.



British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue
record for this book is available from thc British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd,
Reading, Berhshire


Because she's threatened me with consequences too dreadful
to consider if I don't dedicate a book to her...

And because she's taken to starting every transatlantic
conversation with "Have you dedicated a book to me yet?"...
I would like to dedicate this book to intelligent life forms
everywhere.

And to my sister, Claire.


CONTENTS

Foreword ix
0 The Hitchhiker's Gvide to Europe 1
1 DNA 3
2 Cambridge and Other Recurrent Phenonema 9
3 The Wilderness Years 14
4 Gherkin Swallowing, Walking
Backwards and All That 19
5 When Yov Hitch Upon a Star 23
6 Radio, Radio 31
1 A Slightly Unreliable Producer 43
8 Have Tardis, Will Travel 47
9 H2 G2 53
10 All the Galaxy's a Stage 62
11 "Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping Drivel..." 68
12 level 42 72
13 Of Mice, ond Men, ond Tired TV Producers 76
14 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 101
15 Invasion USA 105
16 Life, the Universe, ond Everything 111
11 Making Movies 119
18 Liff, and Other Places 125
19 SLATFAT fish 131
20 Do You Know Where Your Towel Is? 146
21 Games with Computers 148
22 Letters to Douglas Adams 157
23 Dirk Gently and Time for Tea 167
24 Saving the World at No Extra Charge 174
25 Douglas and Other Animals 179
26 Anything That Happens, Happens 185
Appendix I: Hitchhiker's - the Original Sypnosis 191
Appendix II: The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker's What Happens Where and Why 195
Appendix III: Who's Who in the Galaxy Some Comments by Douglas Adams 201
Appendix IV: The Definitive How to Leave the Planet 210
Appendix V: Dr Who and the Krikkitmen an Excerpt from the film Treatment by Douglas Adams 214




Foreword



THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is the most
remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out
of the great publishing companies of Ursa Minor. It is about the
size of a paperback book, but looks more like a large pocket
calculator, having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons
and a screen about four inches square, upon which any one of
over six million pages can be summoned almost instantly. It
comes in a durable plastic cover, upon which the words

DON'T PANIC!

are printed in large, friendly letters.
There are no known copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy on this planet at this time.
This is not its story.
It is, however, the story of a book also called, at a very high
level of improbability, The HitchHiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy; of
the radio series that started it all; the five-book trilogy it
comprises; the computer game, towel, and television series that it,
in its turn, has spawned.
To tell the story of the book - and the radio series, and the
towel - it is best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it.
Foremost among these is an ape-descended human from the
planet Earth, although at the time our story starts he no more
knows his destiny (which will include international travel,
computers, an almost infinite number of lunches, and becoming
mindbogglingly rich) than an olive knows how to mix a Pan
Galactic Gargle Blaster.
His name is Douglas Adams, he is six foot five inches tall,
and he is about to have an idea.



0

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe






THE IDEA IN QUESTION bubbled into Douglas Adams's mind
quite spontaneously, in a field in Innsbruck. He no longer has
any personal memory of it having happened. But it's the story he
tells, and, if there can be such a thing, it's the beginning. If you
have to take a flag reading THE STORY STARTS HERE and
stick it into the story, then there is no other place to put it.
It was 1971, and the eighteen-year-old Douglas Adams was
hitchhiking his way across Europe with a copy of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe that he had stolen (he hadn't
bothered `borrowing' a copy of Europe on $5 a Day; he didn't
have that kind of money).
He was drunk. He was poverty-stricken. He was too poor to
afford a room at a youth hostel (the entire story is told at length
in his introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A
Trilogy in Four Parts in England, and The Hitchhiker's Trilogy in
the US) and he wound up, at the end of a harrowing day, flat on
his back in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the stars.
"Somebody," he thought, "somebody really ought to write a
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
He forgot about the idea shortly thereafter.
Five years later, while he was struggling to think of a
legitimate reason for an alien to visit Earth, the phrase returned to him. The rest is history, and will be told in this book.
The field in Innsbruck has since been transformed into an
unremarkable section of autobahn.

***************************************************************
"When you're a student or whatever, and you can't afford a car,
or a plane fare, or even a train fare, all you can do is hope that
someone will stop and pick you up.
"At the moment we can't afford to go to other planets. We
don't have the ships to take us there. There may be other people
out there (I don't have any opinions about Life Out There,I just
don't know) but it's nice to think that one could, even here and
now, be whisked away just by hitchhiking."
- Douglas Adams,1984.
***************************************************************
1


DNA




DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID, commonly known as DNA, is the
fundamental genetic building block for all living creatures. The
structure of DNA was discovered and unravelled, along with its
significance, in Cambridge, England, in 1952, and announced to
the world in March 1953.
This was not the first DNA to appear in Cambridge,
however. A year earlier, on the 11 th March 1952, Douglas Noel
Adams was born in a former Victorian workhouse in Cambridge.
His mother was a nurse, his father a postgraduate theology
student who was training for holy orders, but gave it up when his
friends managed to persuade him it was a terrible idea.
His parents moved from Cambridge when he was six months
old, and divorced when he was five. At that time, Douglas was
considered a little strange, possibly even retarded. He had only
just learned to talk and, "I was the only kid who anybody I knew
has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide
open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on
inside, because there sure as hell didn't seem to be anything going
on on the outside!"
Douglas was a solitary child; he had few close friends, and
one sister, Susan, three years younger than he was.
In September 1959 he started at Brentwood School in Essex,
where he stayed until 1970. He says of the school, "We tended to
produce a lot of media trendies. Me, Griff Rhys Jones, Noel
Edmunds, Simon Bell (who wrote the novelisation for Griff and
Mel Smith's famous non-award winning movie, Morons from
Outer Space; he's not a megastar yet, but he gives great parties). A
lot of the people who designed the Amstrad Computer were at
Brentwood, as well. But we had a very major lack of archbishops,
prime ministers and generals."
He was not particularly happy at school, most of his
memories having to do with "basically trying to get off games".
Although he was quite good at cricket and swimming he was
terrible at football and "diabolically bad at rugby - the first time
I ever played it, I broke my own nose on my knee. It's quite a
trick, especially standing up.
"They could never work out at school whether I was terribly
clever or terribly stupid. I always had to understand everything
fully before I was prepared to say anything."
He was a tall and gawky child, self-conscious of his height:
"My last year at prep school we had to wear short trousers, and I
was so absurdly lanky, and looked so ridiculous, that my mother
applied for special permission for me to wear long trousers. And
they said no, pointing out I was just about to go into the main
school. I went to the main school and was allowed to wear long
trousers, at which point we discovered they didn't have any long
enough for me. So for the first term I still had to go to school in
short trousers."
His ambitions at that time had more to do with the sciences
than the arts: "At the age when most kids wanted to be firemen, I
wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I never made it because my
arithmetic was too bad - I was good at maths conceptually, but
lousy at arithmetic, so I didn't specialise in the sciences. If I had known what they were, I would have liked to be a software
engineer... but they didn't have them then."
His hobbies revolved around making model aeroplanes ("I had
a big display on top of a chest of drawers at home. There was a large
old mirror that stood behind them, and one day the mirror fell
forward and crushed the lot of them. I never made a model plane
after that, I was upset, distraught for days. It was this mindless blow
that fate had dealt me..."), playing the guitar, and reading.
"I didn't read as much as, looking back, I wish I had done.
And not the right things, either. (When I have children I'll do as
much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit
them if they don't.) I read Biggles, and Captain W. E. Johns's
famous science fiction series -I particularly remember a book
called Quest for the Perfect Planet, a major influence, that was.
There was an author called Eric Leyland, who nobody else ever
seems to have heard of: he had a hero called David Flame, who
was the James Bond of the ten-year-olds. But when I should have
been packing in the old Dickens, I was reading Eric Leyland
instead. But there you go - you can' tell kids, can you?"
Douglas was also an avid reader of Eagle, at that time
Britain's top children's comic, and home of Dan Dare. `Dan
Dare', drawn by artist Frank Hampson, was a science fiction strip
detailing the banle between jut-jawed space pilot Dare, his comic
sidekick Digby, and the evil green Mekon. It was in Eagle that
Douglas first saw print. He had two letters published there at the
age of eleven, and was paid the (then) enormous sum of ten
shillings each for them. The short story shows a certain
precocious talent (see page 6).
Of Alice in Wonderland, often cited as an influence, he says I
read - or rather, had read to me - Alice in Wonderland as a child
and I hated it. It really frightened me. Some months ago, I tried to
go back to it and read a few pages, and I thought, `This is jolly
good stuff, but still...' If it wasn't for that slightly nightmarish
quality that I remember as a kid I'd've enjoyed it, but I couldn't
shake that feeling. So although people like to suggest that Carroll
was a big influence - using the number 42 and all that - he really
was not. "
The first time that Douglas ever thought seriously about
writing was at the age of ten: "There was a master at school called
Halford. Every Thursday after break we had an hour's class called
composition. We had to write a story. And I was the only person

**************** Dirk: look at 6.tif! *************
EAGLE merry-go-round
EAGLE AND BOYS' WORLD 27 FEBRUARY 1965

SHORT STORY

"' London Transporrt Lost Property Office'- this is it," said Mr. Smith, looking in at the window. As he went in, he tripped over the little step and almost crashed through the glass door.
"That could be dangerous - I must remember it when I go out," he muttered.
"Can I help you?" asked the lost-property officer.
"Yes, I lost something on the 86 bus yesterday."
"Well, what was it you lost?" asked the officer.
"I'm afraid I can't remember," said Mr. Smith.
"Well, I can't help you, then," said the exasperated officer.
"Was anything found on the bus?" asked Mr Smith.
"I'm afraid not, but can you remember anything about this thing?" said the officer, desperately tryting to be helpful.
"Yes, I can remember that it was a very bad - whatever-it-was."
"Anything else?"
"Ah, yes, now I come to think of it, it was something like a sieve," said Mr. Smith, and he put his elbow on the highly polished counter and rested his chin oon his hands. Suddenly, his chin met the counter with a resounding crack. But before the officer could assist him up, Mr Smith jumped triumphantly into the air.
"Thank you very much," he said.
"What for?" said the officer.
"I've found it," said Mr. Smith
"Found what?"
"My memory!" said Mr Smith, and he turned round, tripped over the step and smashed through the glass door!
D.N.Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex.

who ever got ten out of ten for a story. I've never forgotten that.
And the odd thing is, I was talking to someone who has a kid in
the same class, and apparently they were all grumbling about how
Mr Halford never gave out decent marks for stories. And he told
them, `I did once. The only person I ever gave ten out of ten to
was Douglas Adams.' He remembers as well.
"I was pleased by that. Whenever I'm stuck on a writer's block
(which is most of the time) and 1 just sit there, and 1 can't think of
anything,I think, `Ah! But I once did get ten out of ten!' In a way
it gives me more of a boost than having sold a million copies of this
or a million of that. I think, `I got ten out of ten once. . ."'
His writing career was not always that successful.
"I don't know when the first thoughts of writing came, but it
was actually quite early on. Rather silly thoughts, really, as there
was nothing to suggest that I could actually do it. All of my life
I've been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all
writers I don't so much like writing as having written. I came
across some old school literary magazines a couple of years ago,
and I went through them to go back and find the stuff 1 was
writing then. But I couldn't find anything I'd written, which
puzzled me until 1 remembered that each time I meant to try to
write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
He appeared in school plays, and discovered a love of
performing ("I was a slightly strange actor. There tended to be
things I could do well and other things I couldn't begin to do. . .I
couldn't do dwarves for example; I had a lot of trouble with dwarf
parts."). Then, while watching The Frost Report one evening, his
ambitions of a life well-spent as a nuclear physicist, eminent
surgeon, or professor of English began to evaporate. Douglas's
attention was caught by six-foot five-inch future Python John
Cleese, performing in sketches that were mostly self-written. "I
can do that!" thought Douglas, "I'm as tall as he is!" [Although at first glance this theory may seem flippant, a brief examination shows that thc field of British comedy is littered with incredibly tall people. John Cleese, Peter Cook, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Adams himself arc all 6'5", Frank Muir is 6'6", as is Dennis Norden.. Douglas has often mentioned that the late Graham Chapman, at only 6'3', was thus four per cent less funny than the rest. .]
In order to become a writer-performer, he had to write. This
caused problems: "I used to spend a lot of time in front of a
typewriter wondering what to write, tearing up pieces of paper
and never actually writing anything." This not-writing quality
was to become a hallmark of Douglas's later work.
But the die had been cast. Adams abandoned all his
daydreams, even those of being a rock star (he was, and indeed is;
a creditable guitarist), and set out to be a writer-performer.
He left school in December 1970, and, on the strength of an
essay on the revival of religious poetry (which brought together
on one sheet of foolscap Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley
Hopkins and John Lennon), he won an exhibition to study
English at Cambridge.
And it was important to Douglas that it was Cambridge.
Not just because his father had been to Cambridge, or simply
because he had been born there. He wanted to go to Cambridge
because it was from a Cambridge University society that the
writers and performers of such shows as Beyond the Fringe, That
Was The Week That Was, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and, of
course, many of the Monty Python's Flying Circus team had come.
Douglas Adams wanted to join Footlights.

2


Cambridge and Other
Recurrent Phenomena












BEFORE GOING UP TO CAMBRIDGE, Douglas Adams had
begun the series of jobs that would serve him on book jackets
ever after. He had decided to hitchhike to Istanbul, and in order
to make the money to travel he worked first as a chicken-shed
cleaner, then as a porter in the X-ray department of Yeovil
General Hospital (while at school he had worked as a porter in a
mental hospital).
The hitchhike itself was not spectacularly successful:
although he reached Istanbul, he contracted food poisoning there,
and was forced to return to England by train. He slept in the
corridors, felt extremely sorry for himself, and was hospitalised
on his return to England. Perhaps it was a combination of his
illness with the hospital work he had been doing, but on his
arrival home he began to feel guilty for not going on to study
medicine.
"I come from a somewhat medical family. My mother was a
nurse, my stepfather was a vet, and my father's father (whom I
never actually met) was a very eminent ear nose and throat
specialist in Glasgow. I kept working in hospitals as well. And I
had the feeling that, if there is Anyone Up There, He kept tapping
me on the shoulder and saying, `Oy! Oy! Get your stethoscope
out! This is what you should be doing!' But I never did."
Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a
writer-performer (although at least four top British writerperformers have been doctors - Jonathan Miller, Graham
Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman) and in part
because it would have meant going off for another two years to
get a new set of A-levels. Douglas went on to study English
literature at St John's College, Cambridge.
Academically, Douglas's career was covered in less than
glory, although he is still proud of the work he did on
Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet.
"For years Smart stayed at Cambridge as the most drunken
and lecherous student they'd ever had. He used to do drag revues
drank in the same pub that I did. He went from Cambridge to
Grub Street, where he was the most debauched journalist they
had ever had, when suddenly he underwent an extreme religious
conversion and did things like falling on his knees in the middle
of the street and praying to God aloud. It was for that that he was
thrust into a loony bin, in which he wrote his only work, the
Jubilate Agno, which was as long as Paradise Lost, and was an
attempt to write the first Hebraic verse in English."
Even as an undergraduate, Douglas was perpetually missing
deadlines: in three years he only managed to complete three
essays. This however may have had less to do with his fabled
lateness than with the fact that his studies came in a poor third to
his other interests - performing and pubs.
Although Douglas had gone to Cambridge with the intention
of joining Footlights, he was never happy with them, nor they
with him. His first term attempt to join Footlights was a failure
- he found them "aloof and rather pleased with themselves"
and, being made to feel rather a `new boy', he wound up joining
CULES (Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society)
and doing jolly little shows in hospitals, prisons, and the like.
These shows were not particularly popular (especially not in the
prisons), and Douglas now regards the whole thing with no little
embarrassment.
In his second term, feeling slightly more confident, he
auditioned with a friend called Keith Jeffrey at one of the
Footlights `smokers' - informal evenings at which anybody could
get up and perform. "It was there that I discovered that there was
one guy, totally unlike the rest of the Footlights Committee, who
was actually friendly and helpful, all the things the others weren't,
a completely nice guy named Simon Jones. He encouraged me, and
from then on I got on increasingly well in Footlights.
"But Footlights had a very traditional role to fulfil: it had to
produce a pantomime at Christmas, a late-night revue in the
middle term, and a spectacular commercial show at the end of
every year, as a result of which it couldn't afford to take any risks.
"I think it was Henry Porter, a history don who was
treasurer of Footlights, who said that the shows that had gone on
to become famous were not the Cambridge shows but subsequent
reworkings. Beyond the Fringe wasn't a Footlights show, neither
was Cambridge Circus (the show that launched John Cleese et
al), it wasn't the Cambridge show but a reworking done after
they'd all left Cambridge. Footlights shows themselves had to
fight against the constraints of what Footlights had to produce
every year. "
Douglas rapidly earned a reputation for suggesting ideas that
struck everyone else as hopelessly implausible. He felt straitjacketed by Footlights (and by the fact that nobody in Footlights
seemed to feel his ideas were particularly funny) and, with two
friends, he formed a `guerilla' revue group called Adams-SmithAdams (because two members of the group were called Adams,
and the third, as you might already have guessed, was called
Smith)". (Will Adams joined a knitwear company upon leaving university; Martin Smith
went into advertising, and was later immortalised as `bloody Martin Smith of
Croydon' in a book written by Douglas.)
As Douglas explained, "We invested all our money - $40, or
whatever it was - in hiring a theatre for a week, and then we knew
we had to do it. So we wrote it, performed it, and had a
considerable hit with it. It was a great moment. I really loved that."
It was then that Douglas made an irrevocable decision to become a writer. This was to cause him no little anguish and
aggravation in the years to come.
The show was called Several Poor Players Strutting and
Fretting, and this extract from the programme notes has the
flavour of early Douglas Adams:


By the time you've read the opposite page (cast and credits)
you'll probably be feeling restive and wondering when the
show will start. Well, it should start at the exact moment that
you read the first word of the next sentence. If it hasn't started
yet, you're reading too fast. If it still hasn't started, you're
reading much too fast, and we can recommend our own book
`How To Impair Your Reading Ability', written and published
by Adams-Smith-Adams. With the aid of this slim volume, you
will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing
within a very short space of time. The more you read, the
slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end,
which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought!

The following year Adams-Smith-Adams (aided in performance
by the female presence of Margaret Thomas, who, the programme
booklet declared, was `getting quite fed up with the improper
advances that are continually being made to her by the other
three, all of whom are deeply and tragically in love with her')
took to the stage again in their second revue, The Patter of Tiny
Minds. These shows were popular, packed out, and generally
considered to be somewhat better than the orthodox Footlights'
offerings.
Douglas considers his favourite sketches of this period to be
one about a railway signalman who caused havoc over the entire
Southern Region by attempting to demonstrate the principles of
existentialism using the points system, and another of which he
says, "It's hard to describe what it was about - there was a lot of
stuff about cat-shaving, which was very bizarre but seemed quite
funny at the time."
It was shortly after this that Douglas Adams gave up
performing permanently to concentrate on writing; this was due
to his continuing upset with Footlights, and specifically with the
1974 Footlights Show. As he explains, "It is something that
happened with Footlights that I still get upset about, because I
think that Footlights should be a writer-performer show. But, in
my day, Footlights became a producer's show. The producer says
who's going to be in it, and who he wants to write it, they are
appointed and the producer calls the tune. I think that's wrong,
that it's too artificial. My year in Footlights was full of immensely
talented people who never actually got the chance to work
together properly.
"In my case, Footlights came to us - Adams-Smith-Adams
- and said, `Can we use all this material that the three of you
have written?' and we said, `Fine, okay', whereupon they said,
`But we don't want you to be in it'."
As things turned out, Martin Smith did appear in the show,
(alongside Griff Rhys Jones and future Ford Prefect, Geoffrey
McGivern) but neither of the Adamses appeared, something that
Douglas Adams is still slightly bitter about.
Douglas was still hitchhiking over Europe, and taking
strange jobs to pay for incidentals. In another bid to get to
Istanbul, he took a job building barns, during the course of which
he crashed a tractor, which broke his pelvis, ripped up his arm,
and damaged the road so badly it needed to be repaired. He
wound up in hospital once more, but knew that it was far too late
for him to become a doctor.
In Summer 1974, Douglas Adams left Cambridge: young,
confident, and certain that the world would beat a path to his
door, that he was destined to change the face of comedy across
the globe.
Of course it would, and he did. But it did not seem that way
at the time.


3

The Wilderness Years










FOLLOWING HIS GRADUATION from Cambridge, Douglas
Adams began doing the occasional office job, working as a filing
clerk while trying to work out what to do with the rest of his life.
He wrote a number of sketches for Weekending - a radio show
that satirises the events, chiefly political, of the past week. Due to
his inability to write to order, and the fact that, although many of
his sketches were funny, they were unlike anything ever
broadcast on the show before, almost none of these sketches ever
went out on the air.
The Footlights show of that year, Chox, not only got to the
West End - the first Footlights show in a long time to do sobut it was also televised (Adams remembers fondly the enormous
sum of $100 he was paid for the television rights to his sketches).
The show was, in Adams's words, "a dreadful flop", but a
number of former Footlights personnel came to see it.

Among them was Graham Chapman. Chapman was a six
foot three inch-tall doctor who, instead of practising medicine,
found himself part of the Monty Python team (he was Arthur in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Brian in Monty Python's
Life of Brian). At that time the future of Monty Python was
uncertain, and the members of the team were diversifying and
experimenting with projects of their own. Chapman liked
Adams's work, and invited him over for a drink. Douglas came
for the drink, got chatting, and began a writing partnership that
was to last for the next eighteen months. It looked like it was
Adams's big break - at 22 he was working with one of the top
people in British comedy.

Unfortunately, very few of the projects that Douglas and
Graham worked on were to see the light of day.
One that did - or nearly did - was Out of the Trees, a
television sketch show that starred Chapman and Simon Jones. It
was shown once, late at night on BBC 2, with no publicity,
garnered no reviews, and went no further.
"My favourite bit from that show was a lovely sketch about
Genghis Khan; who had become so powerful and important and
successful as a conqueror he really didn't have any time for
conquering anymore, because he was constantly off seeing his
financial advisors and so on - it was partly a reflection of what
one heard Graham muttering about the other members of Monty
Python. I was very fond of that sketch.(This sketch, rewritten into a short story, incorporatcd into the Hitchhiker's
canon and illustrated by Michael Foreman, appeared in The Utterly Utterly
Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book.)
"The second episode of Out of the Trees was never even
made, although there was some nice stuff in it. My favourite
sketch was called `A Haddock at Eton', about a haddock given a
place at Eton to show the place was becoming more egalitarian. It
got terribly bullied. Only it gets a rich guardian anyway, so the
whole exercise is rather futile."
While Out of the Trees was not exactly a success, The Ringo
Starr Show was even less noteworthy. It didn't even get to the
pilot stage. The show was to be an SF comedy, starring Ringo as a
chauffeur who carried his boss around on his back, until one day
a flying saucer landed and mistakenly gave Ringo the powers of
his ancestral race - the power to travel through space, to do
flower arranging, and to destroy the universe by waving his hand.
It would have been an hour-long American television special,
but the project fell through. Douglas remembers the show with
affection, and later salvaged one of his ideas from it in
Hitchhiker's: this was the Golgafrincham B - Ark sequence.
Other Chapman-connected projects of this time include some
work on the Holy Grail record, for which a sketch of Douglas's
was highly rewritten by various hands: in its original form it
concerned the digging up of Marilyn Monroe s corpse to star in a
movie...
Douglas also helped write ("nearly came to blows over")
parts of Chapman's autobiography, A Liar's Autobiography. He
co-wrote an episode of Doctor on the Go. It was doubtless his
(not particularly major) contribution to the record, and his two
walk-on parts in the last series of Monty Python's Flying Circus
that caused the original American promotion of Hitchhiker's, five
years later, to bill him as a member of the Python team. (For
completists, or people who are interested, Douglas played a
surgeon in a sketch that never gets started, and later, in a scene
where a rag-and-bone man is hawking nuclear missiles from a
horse and cart, Douglas was one of the squeaky-voiced little
`pepperpot' ladies, as the Pythons call them.)
It is worth noting at this point that Douglas had not really
earned much money. His $17-a-week rent was being paid from
his overdraft. He was not happy. The collaboration with Graham
Chapman, far from being the break it had seemed, was a failure
that left Douglas convinced that he was a 24-year-old washout.
The collaboration's collapse was due to many factors, including
Chapman's then troubles with alcoholism, Douglas's increaslng
lack of money, the uncertainties about the future of Monty
Python's Flying Circus, and just plain bad luck.
At about the time that Douglas Adams and Chapman finally
split up, Douglas was invited to Cambridge to direct the 1976
Footlights revue. In the past, the director s job had been to go to
Cambridge every weekend for two or three months, take
whatever show Footlights had roughly worked out so far, pull it
into shape and stage it professionally.
Unfortunately for Douglas, in the two years since he had left
Cambridge, the Footlights clubroom, which was the hub of the
society, had closed down and been redeveloped into a shopping
centre. Footlights had become homeless and dispossessed, and
had almost ceased to exist.
"Whereas in my year,1974, there were tremendous battles
and competition to get in, I wound up in 1976 knocking on
people's doors, saying, `Have you heard of Footlights and would
you like to be in the May Week Revue?' It was terrible. I got
some people - Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath from Who
Dares Wins, Charles Shaughnessy, who's now a daytime soap
heart-throb in America on a show called Days of Our Livesand the final show had some good bits, but they were few and far
between, and the whole experience was pain and agony. I had to
conjure something out of nothing. At the end of the show I was
completely demoralised and exhausted."
At this point, Douglas went to the Edinburgh Festival, with
John Lloyd, David Renwick and others, with a fringe show called
The Unpleasantness of Something Close, for which Andrew
Marshall was to write some sketches. The show made no money,
and Douglas's income for the year was now approaching $200.
His overdraft was nearing $2000.
With his flatmate, John Lloyd, he worked on a film
treatment for the Stigwood Organisation - an SF comedy based
on The Guinness Book of Records - which never got off the
ground, the attitude being, "Who was John Lloyd, and who was
Douglas Adams?" Together they also wrote pilots for a television
situation comedy to be called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs,
about two astronomers living in isolation together in a fictitious
observatory situated on top of Mt. Everest. ("The idea for that
was minimum casting, minimum set, minimum number of sets,
and we'd just try to sell the series on cheapness. That failed to
come to anything.")
While demoralised and very broke, Douglas answered a
classified ad in the Evening Standard and found himself a
bodyguard to an oil-rich Arabian family - a job which involved
sitting outside hotel rooms for twelve hours a night, wearing a
suit, and running away if anybody turned up waving a gun or
grenade. (So far as it can be established, nobody ever did.) The
family had an income of $20,000,000 a day, which cannot have
done much for Douglas's morale, although it provided him with
numerous anecdotes and another profession for the book jacket
biographies.
"I remember one group of family members had gone down
to the restaurant in the Dorchester. The waiter had brought the
menu and they said, `We'll have it.' It took a while for the penny
to drop that they actually meant the whole lot, the a la carte,
which is over a thousand pounds' worth of food. So the waiters
brought it, the family tried a little bit of all of it, then went back
up to their room. Then they sent out one of their servants to
bring back a sackful of hamburgers, which is what their real
obsession was. "
All of Douglas's attempts to persuade television producers
that a comedy science fiction series might not be a bad idea had
come to nothing. His overdraft was enormous. He couldn't pay
the rent. He had almost convinced himself that he was not and
never would be a writer, and that he needed a "proper job". It
was coming on towards Christmas 1976, and a highly depressed
Douglas Adams went to his mother's house in Dorset, where he
did not have to pay any rent, to live for the next six months,
coming into London as necessary.
He was a 24-year-old flop.
4

Gherkin Swallowing, Walking Backwards
and All That




JOHN LLOYD IS PROBABLY the most influential producer in British
comedy today. His successes include Not the Nine O'Clock
News, Black Adder, and Spitting Image. He was also associate
producer of the Hitchhiker's television series, and co-wrote
Episodes Five and Six of the first radio series with Douglas
Adams. He also co-wrote The Meaning of Liff with Douglas
Adams, of which more later.
Lloyd was a member of Footlights in 1973. He had intended
to become a barrister, but was infected by show business, and on
graduating worked as a freelance writer, and as a producer in
BBC Radio Light Entertainment.
He is a phenomenally busy man. I wound up interviewing
him for this book at nine o'clock one Monday morning at the
Spitting Image studios in London's Limehouse Docks, squeezed
into a crowded schedule while people with urgent problems
gestured at him from outside the glass partitions of his office.
"I knew Douglas, although not very well, at university. I was
at Trinity, Cambridge, while he was at St John's, which is the
next college along. Douglas did some of the unfunniest sketches
ever seen on the Footlights stage - according to the people in
Footlights. He'd do very long sketches. . . there was one about a
tree, I remember, and another about a postbox. He'd stand up at
these Footlights smokers and harangue the audience with these
long, rather wearisome sketches, which didn't go down at all well
in Footlights at that time, which was almost all singing and
dancing. "
And so he went off with Martin Smith and Will Adams and
they did two absolutely brilliant college revues, packed out, at the
same time I was doing the Trinity revues. (Footlights at that time
was a bunch of nancy boys - they had this awful club where
they'd all go and pretend to be Noel Coward; but when that got
knocked down to build a car park, Footlights became more
peripatetic, and it began to attract a broader spectrum of people.)
"It was thought - especially by Douglas - that the AdamsSmith-Adams's revues were much better than Footlights' - and
indeed they were. There was one amazingly funny bit in the
interval where they told jokes very slowly to drive people out of
the audience into the bar.
"I'd met Douglas a few times at parties, but it was only when
I'd left university that I used to go and have lots of hamburgers
with Douglas in a hamburger bar called Tootsies in Notting Hill,
and we got to know each other extraordinarily well. We
eventually wound up sharing a flat.
"I was working as a radio producer and Douglas was doing
things like writing with Graham Chapman - an absolutely
bizarre experience, as they used to get phenomenally drunk.
Graham had a room in his house entirely devoted to gin: it was
just gin bottles (he later went on the wagon) that lined the walls,
and occasionally when I was working in BBC Radio I'd go up
there at lunchtime. They'd have a few gins before lunch, then
they'd go to the pub and do all the crosswords in every paper.
Then they'd, get roaring drunk, and usually Graham would take
his willy out and put it on the bar... it was quite entertaining.
"After work, I'd come back from the office, and usually
Douglas had had a very large number of baths and cups of tea and
eaten all the food, and we'd sit around and write in the evenings.
There were three of us sharing a house: my girlfriend, Douglas,
and me. I was fully employed, but Douglas was struggling rather;
he was very poor, and getting broker and broker, and his
overdraft was going up and up, and he was getting more and
more desperate. We had all these projects: Douglas and Graham
had written a treatment for a film of the Guinness Book of
Records, which fell through, so Douglas and I started doing it.
We did rather well - the Stigwood Organisation liked it, and
they invited us to come to Bermuda and discuss it, and we were
incredibly excited. It was dreadfully disappointing. We never
heard anything more from them, and we never even got paid for it.
"It would have been a science fiction thing, about a race of
aliens who were the most aggressive aliens in the whole universe,
who somehow got hold of a copy of the Guinness Book of
Records and who immediately came down to challenge the world
at wrestling and boxing and stamping on people's knuckles, that
kind of thing. And the United Nations (John Cleese was going to
be general secretary of the UN, I remember) agreed to compete,
but they wanted to do all the silly events, like gherkinswallowing, walking backwards and all that. So they had a
Guinness Book of Records Olympics, and the aliens won all the
sensible events, but lost at all the silly things.
"Then we decided to go and live in Roehampton. We were
very happy, until we started advertising for a fourth person to
share the house, and we had a succession of weird people.There
was one very bizarre person - one day we got back from work
to find he'd ripped up every carpet in the house (the house was
rented from a little old lady) and he'd thrown them out of the
window, as he said they were `smelly'. The last straw came when
we came home to find he'd chain-sawed the front hedge down
because, he said, it was untidy.
"At that time I was producing Weekending, and I was always
trying to get Douglas to produce stuff. At that time, I'd write lots
of quickies for all sorts of comedy shows, while Douglas
wouldn't. At the time, I thought he was wrong, I thought you
had to be able to do everything which I could, and he couldn't, or
wouldn't. I fitted in quite easily, and I got Douglas to write for
Weekending. He wrote a very funny sketch about John
Stonehouse, the idea being that he was pretending to be dead all
the time, but it just wasn't right for the show. It was very funny
but wrong.
"Then we went our separate ways.1 was a radio producer.
He was an unsuccessful writer. Anyway, we remained good
friends. But Douglas was at the edge of despair at that time, he
was absolutely broke (if he wanted a drink I'd have to buy it for
him). He had started applying for jobs in shipping in Hong Kong
and so on, as he'd totally given up on being a writer.
"And then Simon Brett came along..."

5


When You Hitch Upon a Star





"1976 WAS MY WORST YEAR. I'd decided I was hopeless at writing
and I'd never earn any money at it. I felt hopeless and helpless
and beached. I was overdrawn and in a bad way.
"In Hitchhiker's there's an element of writing myself back up
out of that. I was surprised and delighted to find a lot of letters
from people in the early days would say, `I was terribly depressed
and upset until I sat down and read your book. It's really shown
me the way up again'. I wrote it to do this for myself, and it's
seemed to have the same effect on a lot of other people. I can't
explain it. Perhaps I've inadvertently written a self-help book."
There are a number of people without whom Hitchhiker's,
at least in the form we know it, would never have appeared.
John Lloyd is one; Geoffrey Perkins another. But without
doubt, the most important is Simon Brett, who was, in 1976,
producer of a Radio 4 comedy programme, The Burkiss Way.
Simon Brett deserves more space than can conveniently be given
here: He's been a producer and director on radio and television.
He has written for radio and television shows as diverse as Frank
Muir Goes Into... and the cult show After Henry. As an author,
he is best known for his excellent mysteries, including the series
of murder mysteries starring Charles Paris (a lousy actor but a
great detective) which, with their accurate and incisive scrutiny of
life inside television, radio and theatre in Britain today, should be
compulsory reading for anyone interested in the environments
that Hitchhiker's comes out of; he has written a number of
humour books, and some notable pastiches, including his sequel
to Geoffrey Willan's and Ronald Searles's Molesworth books.
Brett had met Adams through John Lloyd, at that time a
junior radio producer himself, and felt, as he explained to me,
that, "Douglas was a talent without a niche. I'd encouraged him
to write for Weekending as he really didn't have any outlets for
his humour, but it wasn't his thing, it can be a restricting market.
Then I started The Burkiss Way for which he did a few sketches
- one was the Kamikaze Briefing, another was a parody of Von
Daniken, about the world being created by fluffy kittens in bow
ties singing `Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head'."
Brett had the wit to see that Douglas needed a show of his
own, rather than to try to cram his own strange talent into
someone else's format and on 4th February 1977 Douglas
travelled up from Dorset to see Simon, who wanted to know if he
had any ideas for a comedy show.
While Douglas had promoted the idea of a comedy science
fiction series to all manner of unimpressed television producers,
he had not even thought about it as a radio possibility, feeling
that radio was too conservative a medium ever to be interested in
science fiction. So, initially, the ideas he suggested to Simon were
very conservative. And then...
And then history differs. As far as Douglas remembers,
Simon Brett said, "Yes, those ideas are all very well, but what I
always wanted to do was a science fiction comedy." According to
Brett it was Douglas who suggested it, and he who agreed. It
doesn't much matter, really. The subject was broached, both were
enthusiastic, and Douglas went off to come up with an idea.
The initial idea was one that Douglas had had lying around
for a while: "It was about this guy's house being demolished and
then the Earth being demolished for the same reason. I decided to
do a series of six shows, each of which would deal with the
destruction of the Earth for a completely different reason.
"It was going to be called The Ends ofthe Earth. It's still not
a bad idea.
"But it was while I was tinkering with the story idea for the
first one that I thought, to give the story perspective there really
ought to be somebody on Earth who is an alien who knows
what's going on.
"Then I remembered this title I'd thought of while lying in a
field in Innsbruck in 1971 and thought, `OK, he's a roving
researcher for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. And the
more I thought about it, the more that seemed to be a promising
idea for a continuing story, as opposed to The Ends of the Earth,
which would have been a series of different stories."
Adams did a three-page outline for the first episode of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with an additional page of
future plans for the show (as can be seen, almost nothing remains
the same from the arrival in the Vogon hold onwards) (see Appendix 1). The
outline, with the name `Aleric B' crossed out and the last-minute
replacement. `Arthur Dent', written in above it went to the BBC
programme development group. Douglas was lucky in having
two allies in the group: Simon Brett; and producer John
Simmonds, the chief producer, who was, although fairly
conservative, a big fan of Douglas's Kamikaze Briefing sketch for
The Burkiss Way.

****************************************
KAMIKAZE
FX WILD FLURRY OF FLAMENCO MUSIC
WHICH CONTINUES FOR SOME TIME.
VOICE: Japan 1945
FLAMENCO RESUMES.

Japan!
FLAMENCO MUSIC CONTINUES. WE
VAGUELY SEE THE NARRATOR GOING
INTO THE BAND AND, FOR INSTANCE,
ATTACKING THE PIANO. JAPANESE MUSIC
STARTS RELUCTANTLY AND STOPS VERY
SOON.
VOICE: Thank you. Japan 1945. The war was moving into
its final stage. The Japanese nation was in a desperate
situation... I didn't say stop the music. (HE GOES
BACK TO THE BAND AGAIN.) Now look, what
is it? Is it the money, come on. (FLAMENCO
STARTS AGAIN.) No, flamenco won't do! What
do you mean the chords are easier? Look, we've got
all these Japanese instruments for you, why don't
you play something on this lot? (QUICK
FLAMENCO RIFF ON JAPANESE
INSTRUMENTS.) Alright, we're going to have a
chat about this. You lot (characters now on stage)
carry on.
SET CONSISTS OF A BENCH IN A BRIEFING
ROOM ON WHICH SITS ONE KAMIKAZE
PILOT WITH HIS GEAR AND HEADBAND
ON. ON THE BENCH ARE LAID OUT THE
HEADBANDS OF MANY OTHER
PRESUMABLY DECEASED KAMIKAZE
PILOTS. A COMMANDER STANDS TO
ADDRESS THE `MEETING ON WHICH SITS
ONE KAMIKAZE PILOT WITH HIS GEAR
AND HEADBAND ON. ON THE BENCH
ARE LAID OUT THE HEADBANDS OF
MANY OTHER PRESUMABLY DECEASED
KAMIKAZE PILOTS. A COMMANDER
STANDS TO ADDRESS THE `MEETING'.
COMM: Now, you all know the purpose of this mission. It is
a kamikaze mission. Your sacred task is to destroy
the ships of the American fleet in the Pacific. This
will involve the deaths of each and everyone of you.
Including you.
PILOT: Me sir?
CoMM: Yes you. You are a kamikaze pilot?
PILOT: Yes sir.
COMM: What are you?
PILOT: A kamikaze pilot sir.
COMM: And what is your function as a kamikaze pilot?
PILoT: To lay down my life for the Emperor sir!
COMM: How many missions have you flown on?
PILOT: Nineteen sir.
COMM: Yes, I have the reports on your previous missions
here. (FLIPS THROUGH EACH ONE.) Let's see.
Couldn't find target, couldn't find target, got lost,
couldn't find target, forgot to take headband,
couldn't find target, couldn't find target, headband
slipped over eyes, couldn't find target, came back
with headache...
PILOT: Headband too tight sir.
COMM: Vertigo, couldn't find target all the rest, couldn't
find target. Now I don't think you've been looking
very hard.
PILOT: Yes I have sir, I've looked all over the place!
COMM: You see, it's not actually that difficult bearing in
mind that we do have a highly sophisticated
reconnaissance unit whose job it is to tell you where
to find the targets.
PILOT: Well, it's not always accurate sir, sometimes one can
search for hours and not see a single aircraft carrier.
COMM: Well, where exactly have you been looking for these
aircraft carriers?
PILOT: Er, well sir...
COMM: (FLIPPING THROUGH NOTES.)... I mean, I
notice for instance that you seem to have more or
less ignored the sea. I would have thought that the
sea was quite a promising area.
PILOT: Yes sir...
COMM: And that the airspace directly above Tokyo was not.
And another thing...
PILOT: Yes sir?
COMM: Skip the victory rolls.
PILOT: Sir, you're being unfair, I have flown over the sea lots
of times. I actually attacked an aircraft carrier once.
COMM: Ah yes, I have the details of your `attack' here.
Mission nineteen. Let's see. Take off 0500 hours
proceeded to target area, nice start. Target spotted
0520 hours, good, climbed to a height of 6000ft,
prepared for attack, went into a power dive, and
successfully... landed on target.
PILOT: I had to go wee wees sir. Caught short. But I took off
again immediately sir. Good job too - one of our lads
crashed straight into it. Poor devil didn't stand a chance. 
COMM: What?
PILOT: No sir - and that really got me upset, and I was
going to let `em really have it -I was going to whip
it straight out, fly in low and lob it straight through
the dining room porthole - that would have sorted
them out.
COMM: You were going to do what?
PILOT: Cut it straight out and let `em have it, whee splat
right in the middle of their breakfast. They'd have
known we meant business then alright sir.
COMM: What were you going to cut straight out and throw
into their breakfast?
PILOT: My stomach sir. Oh yes, I'd like to see the
expressions on their faces when the great squelchy
mass plummetted right into. . .
COMM: Wait. . . wait a moment, let me just get this clear in
my mind. You were going to cut out...
PILOT: My stomach, yes sir, kamikaze... (DOES HARA KIRI GESTURE.)
COMM: You were going to cut out your stomach and...
throw it at the enemy?
PILOT: Yes sir, straight at them.
COMM: Any particular reason?
PILOT: Die for the Emperor sir.
COMM: And what purpose would that serve?
PILOT: Make the enemy feel guilty sir.
*****************************************************************

The BBC approved the making of the pilot on 1st March 1977,
and by 4th April Douglas had finished the first script: it was
essentially the Hitchhiker's script that we know now - with a
couple of exceptions, the longest and most striking of which is
the `parallel universes' speech of Ford's (see pages 43-44), which
gives the gradually eroded rationale for Ford rescuing Arthur in
the first place. (Originally, it should be noted, he liked Arthur
and wanted to enlist him as a fellow reporter for the Guide; by
the time Douglas came to write the computer game, all Ford
wanted to do was return Arthur's towel and get out before the
planet was demolished.) There was also a much longer dialogue
between Arthur and Prosser, the Council representative, which
was wisely cut, as the style of humour owed more to Monty
Python than to Adams himself.

*************************************************************
PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn't you?
ARTHUR: Yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked
filingcabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign
on the door saying `Beware of the Leopard'. Ever
thought of going into advertising?
PROSSER: It's not as if it's a particularly nice house anyway.
ARTHUR: I happen rather to like it.
PROSSER: Mr Dent, you may choose to scoff at Local
Government.
ARTHUR: Me? I wasn't scoffing.
PROSSER: I said you may choose to scoff at Local
Government.
ARTHUR: Alright, maybe I was a bit.
PROSSER: May I continue?
ARTHUR: Yes alright.
PROSSER: You may choose to scoff at Local Government...
ARTHUR: Is this you continuing?
PROSSER: Yes! I said....
ARTHUR: Ah, I'm sorry, it's just that it sounded more like you
saying the same thing again.
PROSSER: Mr Dent!
ARTHUR: Hello? Yes?
PROSSER: Have you any idea how much damage that
bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight
over you?
ARTHUR: How much?
PROSSER: None at all.
- Hitchhiker's pilot radio script.
***************************************************************

From April to August there were a number of delays. The pilot
episode was made, but after that it was mainly a waiting gamethe waiting in question being caused by the upper echelons of the
BBC taking summer holidays, which meant that the committees,
bodies and groups who were to give the go-aheád to Hitchhiker's
were unavailable. This had the effect of driving Douglas half-mad,
and not paying him any money; it also had the effect of making
him send the pilot script to the script editor of Dr Who, to see if
any money might be forthcoming from that direction.
However, on the last day of August 1977, word came down
from the BBC hierarchy that the series of six episodes had been
commissioned. Simon Brett would not be producing it: he was
leaving the BBC to go to London Weekend Television as a
producer. He recommended that Geoffrey Perkins, the most
junior of the department's producers, be given the job. And
luckily for everybody concerned, he was. .

6

Radio, Radio




*****************************************************************
NARRATOR: On this particular Thursday, something was moving
quietly through the ionosphere miles above the
surface of the planet. Only two people on the
surface of the planet were aware of it. One was a
deaf and dumb lunatic in the Amazon basin who
now leapt off a fifty-foot cliff in horror, and the
other was Ford Prefect.
- Hitchhiker's pilot radio script.
*****************************************************************

One thing that everyone involved in the creation of Hitchhiker's
is clear on is how definite Douglas Adams was on what kind of
show it was he wanted: how it would sound, what it would be.
(Another thing they are clear on is that he had no idea where it
was all going). But he was sure that it would be full of ideas, full
of detail, experimental - a `sound collage', unlike anything done
on radio before. Epoch-making. A milestone in radio comedy.
But first he had to write it.
This was not to prove as easy as it may sound.
Douglas Adams's introduction to the radio scripts book
gives an impression of this time, a period that he described as "six
months of baths and peanut-butter sandwiches". Six months
spent at his mother's house in Dorset filling waste-paper baskets
with sheets of half-typed paper, of relentless self-editing, of
depression. He would leave notes around for himself to find with
messages such as:
"If you ever get the chance to do a proper, regular job... take
it."
"This is not an occupation for a healthy, growing lad" and
underneath those notes, other notes, reminding him:
"This is not written after a bad day. This is written after an
average day."
After producing the pilot, Simon Brett had gone to London
Weekend Television, leaving Geoffrey Perkins in control.
Perkins, a 25-year-old Oxford graduate, had been rescued from a
life in the shipping industry by an invitation to come and work in
radio, and was the most junior of the Light Entertainment
producers. He knew Douglas vaguely, mainly as an
"embarrassment to the BBC at the time", but was interested
enough in the show to make a pitch for it, and, slightly to his
surprise, he got it. Possibly because no one else had much idea of
what the show was about, nor how to do it.
Geoffrey himself had no idea how to go about producing
Hitchhiker's, but was relieved to discover, over a meal with
Douglas before the second show, that neither of them knew what
they were doing. This made things much easier.
Douglas, for his part, was nervous of changing producers so
soon. But if on that second show (their first) they were wary of
each other, they quickly discovered that, as far as putting the
show together went, their minds worked very much on the same
lines, complementing each other, and working well together.
They also became good friends.
Was there anything that Douglas had panicularly wanted to
say during the first series of Hitchhiker's? "I just wanted to do
stuff I thought was funny. But on the other hand, whatever I find
funny is going to be conditioned by what I think about, what my
concerns or preoccupations are. You may not set out to make a
point, but points probably come across because they tend to be
the things that preoccupy you, and therefore find a way into your
writing.
"I wanted to - I say this in the introduction to the script
book - I felt you could do a great deal more with sound than I
had heard being done of late. The people who were exploring and
exploiting where you could go with sound were people in the
rock world - The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on.
"I had the idea of scenes of sound. That there would never be
a moment at which the alien world would let up, that you would
be in it for half an hour. I'm not saying we necessarily achieved
that, but I think that what we achieved came about as a result of
striving after that.
"We did spend an awfully long time getting the effects right,
and the background atmosphere, and morchestrating all the little
effects - the way Marvin spoke, and all that kind of stuff. It was
taking so long we were continually having to steal studio time
from other shows and pretending we were actually doing far less
than we were: there was no way we could justify using that
amount of time (time doesn't actually equal money to the BBC,
but it comes close - there's a complicated but dependent
relationship), so what we were doing was completely out of line
with what normally happens.
"As much as anything, we were actually having to invent the
process by which we worked, because nobody was doing multitrack recording, electronic effects, and so on. We went about it
the wrong way at the beginning, simply because we didn't know,
and then, as we began to understand it, we evolved a way to do it.
It wasn't simply doing it the wrong way and finding the right
way, it was more dependent on when we were able to get bits of
equipment - we didn't have any 8-track recorders to begin with,
and the final version didn't come about until we had an 8-track
tape recorder. After a while, I took more of a back seat, because
everyone knew how to do it, but I was always there, just sticking
my oar in and making trouble."
Geoffrey Perkins tells a slightly different story, explaining
that, "Douglas was thrown out of the director's cubicle from
about halfway through the first series onwards, because he'd get
quite excited about putting bits and pieces into scenes. You'd just
finish a scene and he would say, `I've been thinking. . . we should
go back and do it again.'
"`Why?'
"`Because I think we should have something going Bloobledoobledoobledooblebloobledoobleblob! in the background. . .'
"We used to mix the programmes and cut them down, which
wasn't a great way to do it because everything had music and
effects behind it. I started off in the early programmes asking
what we should cut, and he'd come back with a list of odd words
here and there (`the's and `and's and `but's and things) and we
couldn't do that. He'd say, `But there's nothing else I want to
cut!' In the end I stopped asking him. So I can come across as the
vandal of the programme."
Douglas Adams had found a natural foil in Geoffrey Perkins,
and the ideal Hitchhiker's producer. Perkins is currently nowhere
near as well known as he should be for his work as a writerpeformer in Radio 4's seminal comedy RadioActive and BBC2's
KYTV. He is smaller than Douglas Adams, wears spectacles with
brightly coloured frames, and is a perfectionist. He was probably
the only Radio 4 producer who would spend two days simply
getting a sound effect right, and one of the few people who could
bully, exhort and cajole scripts out of Douglas, and get them
almost on time.
The show was something very different. In the past (and
today, for that matter) as a rule a radio comedy show is rehearsed
in an afternoon, recorded in front of an audience that evening,
then edited the following day before being broadcast. Not only
was Hitchhiker's not recorded in front of an audience (as
Geoffrey Perkins has pointed out, all they would have seen was
an empty stage, a number of actors hiding in cupboards, and
some microphone leads), it was put together with almost lapidary
detail, using (albeit in a somewhat Heath Robinson fashion) the
miracles of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, lots of tape, and
scissors.
Douglas Adams says of Perkins's role, "As producer on a
show of that kind, he was a very crucial and central part of it.
When I was writing the script, he was the person I would go and
argue with about what I was going to have in it and what I
wasn't. I'd do the script and he'd say, `This bit's good and that
bit's tat.' He'd come up with casting suggestiorls. And he'd come
up with his own ideas about what to do with bits that weren't
working. Like throw them out. Or suggestions about how I
could rewrite. I'd be guided by him, or by the outcome of the
argument.
"One of Geoffrey's strengths is that he is very good at
casting. In some cases, I had very specific ideas about casting, and
in other cases I had none. Where I had ideas we'd follow them or
argue, and I'd win or he'd win. When we were in production I'd
be there, but at that point it was very much a producer's show.
"The producer gives instructions to the actors, and generally
if you have anything you want to say, or suggestions or
disagreements or points you want to make, then you'd say it to
Geoffrey, and he'd decide whether or not to ignore it. Vary rarely
do you as a writer actually start giving instructions to the actors;
it's protocol. To be honest, I'd sometimes step over it, but you
can't have more than one person in charge. When I wrote the
script I was in charge, but when it was made, Geoffrey was in
charge, and the final decisions were his, right or wrong. But we
rapidly arrived at a working relationship there. Sometimes we'd
get very annoyed at each other, and sometimes we'd have a really
terrific time - it's exactly the sort of working relationship you
would expect."
Perkins says of his involvement with Hitchhiker's, " It's
really impossible to say how much involvement I had in the
story. We used to have meetings and talk grand designs - abortive
plots which never quite worked out. It's a blur of lunches. I
changed gerbils to mice because Douglas's ex-girlfriend kept
gerbils..."
The first episode casting had been done by Douglas with
Simon Brett, crucial casting since it involved the roles of Arthur
Dent, Ford Prefect and The Book.
The making of the series is covered so well by Geoffrey
Perkins's notes in the Original Radio Scirpts book that it seems
redundant to cover the ground again. (Go out and buy a copy of '
the book if you want to know what happened - you'll get two
introductions, lots of notes, and the complete texts of the first
two radio series. Well, almost complete. There are bits in this
book that aren't in there. But you've already got this book.) (This may prove problematical as the Radio Srripts book is currently out of print.)
The BBC were unsure what they had on their hands: a
comedy, without a studio audience, to be broadcast in stereo; the
first radio science fiction since Journey into Space in the 1950s;
half an hour of semantic and philosophical jokes about the
meaning of life and ear-inserted fish? They did the only decent
thing and put it out at 10.30 on Wednesday evenings, when they
hoped nobody would be listening, with no pre-publicity, and
expected it to uphold Radio 4's reputation for obscurity.
They were undoubtedly surprised when it didn't. After the
first episode was broadcast, Douglas went into the BBC to look
at the reviews. It was pointed out to him that radio almost never
got reviews, and that an unpublicised science fiction comedy
series was less likely to get reviews than the shipping forecast.
That Sunday, two national newspapers carried favourable reviews
of the first show, to the amazement of everybody except Douglas
and the listeners.
The series rapidly began to pick up a following, accumulating
an enormous audience chiefly by word of mouth - people who
liked it told their friends. Science fiction fans liked it because it
was science fiction(In addition to its other awards, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was placed second in the 1979 Hugo Awards for best dramatic presentation, losing to Superman 1. The awards were made at thc World SF Convention, held that year in Brighton, England. When the awards announcements were made, the crowd hissed thc winner and cheered Hitchhiker's. Christophcr Reeve, collecting the trophy, suggested that the awards had been fixed, whereupon a roar of agreement went up in the hall. It is a safe bet that if a few more Americans had heard of the show then it would have won); humour fans liked it because it was funny, radio fans got off on the quality of the stereo production;
Radiophonics Workshop fans doubtless had a great time ("They talk a lot about the `wizardry of the Radiophonies Workshop' but ninety-five pereent of the first series was natural sound. And I had no idea about sound... at the end of the fourth episode I had the most wonderful explosion- the whole episode built up to it. It sounded magnificent in the studio. Then when it was broadexst the compression hit it and cut most of it out" - Geoffrey Perkins.); and
most people liked it because it was accessible, fast, and funny.
By the time the sixth episode had been broadcast, the show
had become a cult.
While the first four episodes were written by Douglas on his
own, the last two were not. This came about in the following
manner: Douglas had sent off the pilot script for Hitchhiker's to
the Dr Who script editor earlier in the year, hoping to get a
commission out of it to do some scripts. The commission came
through; unfortunately, it came through at the same time that the
six episodes of Hitchhiker's were commissioned, which meant that
as soon as Douglas Adams had finished the first four episodes of
Hitchhiker's he had to write the four episodes of a Dr Who story,
The Pirate Planet.
As a result, he was facing deadline problems with the final
two episodes of Hitchhiker's; he knew how Episode Six ended,
but he had "run out of words". In addition, he had just been made
a radio producer. He turned to his ex-flatmate, John Lloyd, for
help.
Lloyd remembers: "It's odd, but Hitchhiker's was always
liked. That's the funny thing about it. It never had to struggle at
all. Douglas struggled to write it, though; it took him about nine
months to write the first four episodes. But everyone, from the
first day, thought it was great - and the department was very
conservative at the time. Anyway, after nine months Douglas was
getting desperate, as he'd caught up with the deadline (and passed
it, as is his wont) and they'd already started broadcasting. They
were already up to programme two or three, and finally Douglas
despaired.
"He rang me up and said, `Why don't you do this with me?
I think what Douglas had wanted was to prove he was a writer in
his own right. In the past he had done all this stuff and people had
said, `It's Chapman (or whoever)'. But now he had proved it.
"He'd just started on the fifth episode when I came in.
"I'd been working for a couple of years on a silly science
fiction book of my own, that had tons and tons of chapters, all
unconnected, and I dumped it on his lap and said, `Is there
anything here you think might make a scene or two?'
"So we sat in the garage I was using for a study at that time
and wrote the fifth episode together more or less line by line.
Things like the `three phases of civilisation' and the Haggunenon
Death Flotilla, who evolved into different creatures, we sat down
and worked it out word by word. It was actually incredibly
quick, although very painstaking. Then I was busy on production
for Episode Six, so although he used stuff I wrote for it, he really
put the whole thing together.
"The pressure was fantastic. We were writing it hours before
it was due to be recorded. (Later on, in the second series, things
got really silly: he was writing during the recording.)
"Having written the thing, that was more or less it, and it had
been great fun. As Douglas said, it was a tremendous relief for
him not to have to do it on his own, and we both enjoyed it, and I
didn't think that much about it. It was just a job, and we'd
written together before.
"By the broadcast of the first three or four episodes the place
had gone absolutely mad. I think six publishing companies rang
up, and four record companies (which is extraordinary with radio
- usually by the time you've done six series of thirteen episodes
people have just about heard of it). Hitchhiker's just went
whoosh! And Douglas and I were getting on tremendously well,
and were tremendously excited. When the first publisher called
we went out and bought a bottle of champagne. It was so
exciting. We were going to do the book together. And then
Douglas had second thoughts.
"He decided he had to do it on his own - he felt the first
four episodes were different in kind, and that the last two,
although enjoyable enough, didn't have the same sense of
loneliness and loss and desperation that characterises Hitchhiker's
in a funny way. Like Marvin, who Douglas says is Andrew
Marshall, but there is a big chunk of Douglas as well. The thing
about Hitchhiker's is the wonderful bittersweet quality he gets in.
The thing is terribly sad at certain points, it really means
something. And I think that he felt that the other two episodes
were light by comparison."
Douglas Adams's version of these events is essentially the
same: "After the Dr Who episodes I was absolutely wiped out.I
knew roughly what I wanted to do in the last two episodes so I
asked John if he'd help and collaborate, and we wrote together a
bit of the Milliways sequence and the Haggunenon section. And
then after that I took over and did the B - Ark stuff and the
prehistoric Earth stuff."
The Haggunenon sequence from Episodes Five and Six is
omitted from all later versions of the story (replaced by Disaster
Area's stunt ship), although it has been used in some of the
theatrical adaptations of the show.


Douglas Adams on the casting for the radio series:

PETER JONES
That was very curious. We didn't know who to cast. I
remember saying that it should be a Peter Jonesey voice, and
who could we get to do a Peter Jonesey voice? We thought of
all sons of people - Michael Palin, Michael Hordern, all kinds
of people. Eventually Simon Brett's secretary got very annoyed
hearing us talking on and on like this and not spotting the
obvious. She said, "What about Peter Jones?" I thought, "Yes,
that would be a way of achieving it, wouldn't it?" So we asked
Peter, he was available, and he did it.
Peter was extraordinary. He always affected not to
understand what was going on at all. And he managed to
transmute his own sense of "I don't know what this is about"
into "I don't understand why this happened", which was the
keynote of his performance. He's great to work with, a very
talented guy. He's never had the recognition he should have had.
He's terribly good.
He rarely met the other actors at all, because he'd be doing
his bits completely separately. It was like getting session
musicians in on a multi-track rock album, sitting alone in a
studio doing the bass pan.

STEPHEN MOORE
He was Geoffrey Perkins's suggestion. I had no idea who to
suggest for Marvin. A wonderful actor, absolutely brilliant. Not
only did he do Marvin so well, but whenever I had a character
that I didn't have enough clues about, or didn't know how it
should be played, we'd say, "Let's give it to Stephen and see
what happens."
Stephen would find the character immediately and would
make it really excellent. One of my favourite things that he did
was the Man in the Shack - I knew what the character said,
and why he said it, but I had not the faintest idea of how he
would sound or what son of a voice he would have.

MARK WING-DAVEY
The thing that made me think of him for Zaphod was a pan he
had in Glittering Prizes. He played a guy who was a film and
television producer who always took advantage of people and
was very trendy. He did that so well I thought he would be
good for Zaphod.

DAVID TATE
He was one of the backbones of the series. He can do any voice:
he could, if he wanted to, be a very successful actor. He's
deliberately chosen to be just a voice. He's remarkable. In
Hitchhiker's he played a large number of pans and always got
them spot on. He played Eddie, he played the disc jockey
`broadcasting to intelligent life-forms everywhere', he played
one of the mice, one of the characters in the B - Ark. We had
him there every week.

RICHARD VERNON
He's so funny. He carved himself a niche playing all sons of
grandfatherly elderly types - Slartibartfast in Hitchhiker's.
He's not actually as old as he appears. I originally wrote that
pan with John Le Mesurier in mind.

SUSAN SHERIDAN
It's funny, Trillian was never that well-rounded a pan. Susan
never found anything major to do with the role, but that wasn't
her fault, it was my fault. A succession of different people have
played Trillian in different ways. It's a weak pan and that's the
best I can say. She was a delight to work with.

ROY HUDD
He played the original Max Quordlepleen. He had to come into
the studio and do his bit all by himself. To this day he still
claims he doesn't know what it was all about...
7

A Slightly Unreliable Producer




*************************************************************
ARTHUR:Ford, I don't know if this sounds like a silly
question, but what am I doing here?
FORD: Well, you know that. I rescued you from the Earth.
ARTHUR:And what has happened to the Earth?
FORD: It's been disintegrated.
ARTHUR:Has it ?
FORD: Yes, it just boiled away into space.
ARTHUR:Look. I'm a bit upset about that.
FORD: Yes, I can understand. But there are plenty more
Earths just like it.
ARTHUR:Are you going to explain that? Or would it save
time if I just went mad now?
FORD: Keep looking at the book.
ARTHUR:What ?
FORD: "Don't Panic".
ARTHUR:I'm looking.
FORD: Alright. The universe we exist in is just one of a
multiplicity of parallel universes which co-exist in
the same space but on different matter wavelengths,
and in millions of them the Earth is still alive and
throbbing much as you remember - or very similar
at least - because every possible variation of the
Earth also exists.
ARTHUR: Variation? I don't understand. You mean like a
world where Hitler won the war?
FORD: Yes. Or a world in which Shakespeare wrote
pornography, made a lot more money and got a
knighthood. They all exist. Some of course with
only the minutest variations. For instance, one
parallel universe must contain a world which is
utterly identical to yours except that one small tree
somewhere in the Amazon basin has an extra leaf.
ARTHUR: So one could quite happily live on that world
without knowing the difference?
FORD: Yes, more or less. Of course it wouldn't be quite
like home with that extra leaf.
ARTHUR: Well, it's hardly going to notice.
FORD: No, probably not for a while. It would be a few
years before you really became strongly aware that
something was off balance somewhere. Then you'd
start looking for it and you'd probably end up going
mad because you'd never be able to find it.
ARTHUR: So what do I do?
FORD: You come along with me and have a good time.
You'll need to have this fish in your ear.
ARTHUR: I beg your pardon?
- Hitchhiker's pilot radio script.
****************************************************************

From mid-1977 to the end of 1980 it often becomes difficult to
disentangle what Douglas Adams was doing when. Even he is no
longer sure. But about the time that the first Hitchhiker's radio
series was broadcast, which was about the same time that The
Pirate Planet was recorded, Douglas was offered a job as a radio
producer in Radio 4's Light Entertainment department. He took
the job. As he explains, "I felt I had to do it, because I'd set out to
be a freelance writer, had one disaster after another, ended up
having to be supported by my parents and so on, and I thought,
`Well, here is someone offering me a solid job with a regular
paycheck, which may not be exactly what I want to do, but I'm
not showing any success in doing what I want to do, and this is
pretty close to what I want to do; I am in trouble and I will take
this job.' Also John Lloyd and Simon Brett had paved the way for
me getting the job offer, and I owed it to them.
"I started as a radio producer with Hitchhiker's going out
and Dr Who shortly to go out. Everybody who starts as a radio
producer has to start doing Weekending, so I produced
Weekending for a few weeks. As the most junior member of the
department I was getting all the bum jobs, like a programme on
the history of practical jokes which involved going out and
interviewing Max Bygraves and Des O'Connor. I thought, `What
am I doing here?' But a lot of people had put themselves out to
get me the job, and it was a staff job, not a contract job."
According to his contemporaries, Douglas tended to be a
slightly unreliable producer ("He tended to think you could go
on forever."), but even so it came as a slight shock to the
department when, after six months, he left to become script
editor of Dr Who. This, as Simon Brett commented, put quite a
few noses out of joint.
However, he returned to radio very soon after leaving it for
one final production job: the Radio 4 Christmas Pantomime (Footnote for Americans, who may not undersund how a pantomime can be performed on radio: this is one of those problems you're just going to have to learn to live with.). It turned out to be the project Douglas most enjoyed from that
time. It was called Black Cinderella II Goes East, and was coproduced by John Lloyd. For no particular reason, it was written
and cast entirely from ex-Footlights personnel.
"It was an excuse for such an odd bunch of people - apart
from the obvious ones, we had John Cleese playing the Fairy
Godperson; Peter Cook playing Prince Disgusting and Rob
Buckman playing his brother, Prince Charming; The GoodiesGraeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie - played
the Ugly Sisters; Richard Baker, who used to play piano in
Footlights, was the narrator; and John Pardoe MP, who was then
Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, played the fairy-tale Liberal
Prime Minister (on the grounds that you only get Liberal Prime
Ministers in fairy-tales); Jo Kendall played the Wicked
Stepmother. . . It was terrific, but for some reason the BBC and
the Radio Times gave it no publicity at all, and it was buried
without a trace."
After slightly less than six months, Douglas's first proper job
had come to an end.
8

Have Tardis, Will Travel




IT HAS ALREADY BEEN MENTIONED THAT, while Hitchhiker's was
still in the pilot stage, Douglas found himself with time on his
hands, during which he needed money and work.
"So once it looked like I had a finished script I thought
Where else can I generate some work? I sent the Hitchhiker's
script to the then Dr Who script editor, Bob Holmes, who
thought it was interesting and said, `Come in and see me'. This
was just as Bob, who'd been script editor there for a long time,
was on the verge of leaving and handing over to Tony Reed. So I
met the two of them and Graham Williams, the producer, and
talked about ideas. The one I came up with that they thought was
promising was The Pirate Planet, so I went away and did a bit of
work on it, and they thought it was promising but there was
something wrong. So I did more reworking and took it back, and
they still thought it was promising but needed more work, and
this was going on for weeks, and eventually the inevitable
happened..."
The plan had been to do some Dr Who work as a fill-in until
Hitchhiker's was ready to go into production, and the rest of the
Hitchhiker's scripts needed to be written. As a plan, this was an
abysmal failure.
At the end of August 1977, the six scripts for Hitchhiker's
were commissioned. Within the week, four episodes of Dr Who
were also commissioned. This was the start of a period of nonstop work, confusion and panic that was to last for the next three
years.
The Pirate Planet was a less than successful story, which
managed to mix such elements as a telepathic gestalt of yellowrobed psychics, a bionic pirate captain, a planet that ate planets,
and a centuries-gone evil queen imprisoned in time stasis, into a
bit of a mess. The plot elements had obviously been worked out
carefully, then edited down to the point of incomprehensibility
by the time they reached the screen. There were Hitchhiker's injokes; there were some appalling performances; there was a
murderous robotic parrot. It was teeming with ideas, and might
have made a fairly decent six-parter.
Douglas Adams still has a soft spot for it, as he explains, "In
a way I preferred writing the Dr Who scripts to Hitchhiker's
because I would be made to get the plot straight first. In The
Pirate Planet, the plot was much more tightly worked out than
was apparent in the final show because it had to be cut back so far
in terms of time. But actually getting the mechanics to work at
that time I really loved, and felt very frustrated that a lot of that
didn't show in the final thing." Doubtless, if he ever did the
novelisation, he would put back those elements lost in the
television screening.
The Dr Who people were impressed enough to offer Douglas
a job as script editor. He had only just been given a job as a radio
producer. He did not know what to do: "I'd only just taken this
job in radio, and it seemed a pretty awful thing to do to leave
after six months and go to television. I got very mixed up about
that - I didn't know what to do. Various people gave me
conflicting advice - some people said, `This is obviously what
you must do because it's much more along the line of what you
claim as your strengths', and other people said, `You can't desert
radio immediately, just like that'. David Hatch said the latter to
me very strongly, because he was head of the department, and he
had given me the job.
"But I did take the job, and the next person to desert the
department was David Hatch, which made me feel a little better."
Remembering his experiences with The Pirate Planet,
Douglas assumed that the writing of the scripts and coming up
with the ideas was the responsibility of the writer, and that the
script editor's job was chiefly that of making sure that the scripts
arrived and were twenty-five minutes long.
"Then I discovered that other writers assumed that getting
the storyline together was the script editor's job. So all that year I
was continually working out storylines with writers, helping
others with scripts, doing substantial rewrites on other scripts
and putting yet other scripts into production. All simultaneously.
"It was a nightmare year - for the four months that I was in
control it was terrific: having all these storylines in your head
simultaneously. But as soon as you stop actually coping, then it
becomes a nightmare. At that time, I was writing the book,
script-editing the next series of Dr Who, there were the stage
productions of Hitchhiker's going on and the records were being
made. I was writing the second series of Hitchhiker's and I was
very close to blowing a fuse at the time. I was also doing some
radio production with John Lloyd. The work overload was
absolutely phenomenal."
The overload was also reflected in Douglas's dissatisfaction
with Dr Who at that time: "The crazy thing about Dr Who, one
of the things that led to my feelings of frustration, was doing
twenty-six episodes a year with one producer and one script
editor. It's a workload unlike any other drama series; if you are
doing a police series, say, you know what a police car looks like,
what the streets look like, what criminals do. With Dr Who, with
every story you have to reinvent totally, but be entirely
consistent with what's gone before. Twenty-six shows, each of
which has to be new in some extraordinary way, was a major
problem. And there was no money to do it with: in real terms Dr
Who's budget has been shrinking, but somehow or other you
have to deliver the goods. Twenty-six a year is too many. I was
going out of my tiny mind."
Douglas wrote three Dr Who stories, although only two
were actually screened (Four, if you count Dr Who and the Krikkitmen. See the chapter on Life, the Universe and Everything for further details.). The first was The Pirate Planet. The
second was The City of Death, co-written with Graham
Williams, the producer. The third is the legendary `lost' Dr Who
story, Shada (BBC Enterprises finally released all available material on video in 1992, accompanicd by the original script.).
The City of Death was broadcast under the departmental
pseudonym of `David Agnew', and was writcen in the following
circumstances:
"When I was script editor, one of our regular stalwart writers
(who we'd left alone as he was a reliable guy) turned out to have
been having terrible family problems - his wife had left him, and
he was in a real turmoil. He'd done his best, but he didn't have a
script that was going to work, and we were in deep trouble. This
was Friday, and the producer came to me and said, `We've got a
director coming on Monday, we have to have a new four-episode
show by Monday!' So he took me back to his place, locked me in
his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a
few days, and there was the script. Because of the peculiar
circumstances and Writers' Guild laws, it meant that it had to go
out under the departmental name of David Agnew. It was set in
Paris and had all sorts of bizarre things in it, including a guest
appearance by John Cleese in the last episode."
The City of Death, in contrast to Douglas's first script, was
an adult and intelligent script, in which little was redundant or
unnecessary. The humour is never forced, and it is obviously
being written by a Dr Who veteran, not a newcomer. In addition
to the cameo appearances of John Cleese and Eleanor Bron in the
last episode, it contains no less than seven Mona Lisas (all of
which are genuine, although six have `This is a fake' written
underneath the paint in felt pen), and life on Earth having been
created by the explosion of an alien space-ship (something the
Doctor must go back in time to prevent being prevented). It also
contains a detective. That Douglas still has high regard for this
story can be seen from the fact that certain plot elements were
reused in Douglas's first non-Hitchhiker's novel, Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency, as were some elements of Shada, a sixpart story that was abandoned half-way through the production
because of industrial problems (strikes).
"Once you get beyond a certain point it becomes more
expensive to remount the thing than it is to do the whole
production again from the word go. That's because when you are
casting, you're doing it from who's available - when you
remount, you have to cast the people you've already got, and this
becomes terribly difflcult."
Shada was a return to Cambridge for Douglas and the
Doctor, featuring a retired Time Lord whose TARDIS was his
study, and a book that held the secrets to the Time Lord prison
planet. The scripts for Shada (especially in early drafts) show an
amusing and intelligent show - although Adams's script is far
more comfortable with the temporal confusion of Professor
Chronotis than with the villains, or, indeed, the plot. (The
character of Chronotis, the retired Time Lord, is something else
that Douglas would resurrect for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency.)
Adams aroused resentment from many of the shows hardcore fans, who criticise his stint as script editor for resulting in a
show that was too silly, self-indulgent, and more like a comedy
than Dr Who should be. Tom Baker's Doctor, even more than
Patrick Troughton's, was a cosmic clown, always ready with a
whimsical remark in the face of danger.
Adams disagrees with this: "I think it's slightly unfair. In the
things I wrote for Dr Who, there were absurd things 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 real. 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 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
the stops, have fun, and be silly.' One always knows as soon as
someone says that that they are going to spoil it.
"So those episodes of Dr Who weren't best served by that
way of doing the shows. I can understand people saying, `They
weren't taking it seriously', but in writing it I was taking it
terribly seriously. It's just that the way you make something
work is to do it for real. . . I hate the expression `tongue-incheek'; that means `It's not really funny, but we aren't going to
do it properly'."
Douglas worked on Dr Who for fifteen months. During the
course of this time, he wrote the first Hitchhiker's book, the
second radio series, the theatrical adaptation, produced Black
Cinderella II Goes East, and acted as script editor, writer and
rewrite man for the Doctor. At the end of this time he had, much
to his and no doubt everyone else's surprise, not gone mad,
become prone to fits or to throwing himself off tall buildings. By
this time, Hitchhiker's was enough of a success for Douglas to
give up the only proper job he had held for more than a few
months.
So he did.
9


H2G2





SHORTLY AFTER THE HITCHHIKER'S RADIO SERIES first went on the
air, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd were approached by New
English Library and Pan Books, both prominent English
paperback publishers, about doing a book of the series. After
lunching with both of them, a deal was agreed with Pan; chiefly
because they liked Nick Webb, the editor who approached them.(Nick Webb left Pan almost immediately, embarking on a game of musical publishers that would take him, in traditional publishing fashion, around most major British paperback publishers.)
The book was to start out on an unhappy note. Douglas had
never written a book before, and, feeling nervous about it, had
asked John Lloyd to collaborate on it.
John had agreed. As he tells it: "I'd been working in radio
very hard for five years, and had gotten bored with it - I could
see myself a crusty old radio producer at ninety - so l was very
excited about the prospect of doing this book together. Then one
night we had rather a strange conversation. Douglas said to me,
Why don t you write your own novel?' I said, `But we're writing
this Hitchhiker's book together...', and he said, `I think you
should write your own.'
"The next day I got his letter saying, `I've thought about it
very hard and I want to do the thing on my own. It's a struggle
but I want to do it my own, lonely way.' It was the most fantastic
shock - as if the bottom had dropped out of my whole life.
We'd been trying to write together for so long that when this
letter came I simply could not believe it. Even the fact that he'd
written the letter at all seemed amazing, seeing that we went
down the pub every night, and, as Douglas was at that time a
radio producer in the office next door to me, we worked six
inches away from each other.
"Looking back, I can't see why I reacted like that. It seems
the most natural thing in the world for Douglas to have done it
alone and 1 don't think Hitchhiker's would have been the success
it was if we had written it together. I genuinely feel that.
"But at the time, I was shocked. I didn't speak to Douglas for
two days, and I seriously considered getting a solicitor, and suing
him for breach of contract. Then I met him in town a few days
later. He said, `How's it going?' I said, `You'll be hearing from
my legal representative'.
"Douglas was appalled! He thought I was over-reacting; I
thought he was insensitive. These are the kinds of things that start
wars. . .
"I saw an agent, and explained to him that we had agreed to
the contract, and on the strength of that I'd drunk a lot of
champagne, spent the money, and now wanted redress. My agent
phoned Douglas's and made some fantastic demand: he said he
wanted $2000 now, and 10% of Hitchhiker's in perpetuity, so
whenever the name The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was
used I'd get 10%. When he told me about this I was shocked - I
hadn't wanted anything like that!
"At the time everyone, even Douglas's agent, thought that he
was in the wrong. Even his mum. Then I ran into Douglas, and he.
said, `What are you doing?' I said, `You told me to get an agent!'
He said, `Yes, I told you to get an agent to write your own
bloody book - not to sue me for mine!'
"Eventually we did a deal, whereby I took half of the
advance, and that was the end of it.
"But we had booked a holiday in Greece that September to
write the book together, and I had nowhere else to go. So, despite
all that had happened, I went on holiday with Douglas. He stayed
in his room and wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and
I went down to the bar and the beach and had a good time.
Douglas showed me the first version of his first chapter, and I
read it, and it was a Vonnegut novel.I told him that, and he tore
it up and started again, and after that it started to come good. I
have always thought the books were the best bits of Hitchhiker's
by miles: you could see that they are so original, and so different
that it was obvious that he had made the right decision.
(A number of other things occurred on this holiday, the most
notable of which was the creation of what was to become The
meaning of Liff. But that will be told in its place.)
As Douglas explains, "It was very silly. On the one hand I
thought, `It might be a nice idea to collaborate', and on sober
reflection I thought, `No, I can do it myself'. It was my own
project, and I had every right to say, "No, I'll do it myself'. John
had helped me out, and been very well rewarded for the work. I
rashly talked about collaborating, and changed my mind. I was
within my rights, but I should have handled it better.
"You see, on the one hand, Johnny and I are incredibly good
friends, and have been for ages. But on the other hand, we are
incredibly good at rubbing each other up the wrong way. We
have these ridiculous fights when I'm determined to have a go at
him, and he is determined to have a go at me. So... I think it was
an over-reaction on his part, but on the other hand the entire
history of our relationship has been one or the other overreacting to something the other has done."
So Douglas wound up receiving a $1500 advance for his first
book. (He would get over five hundred times that amount as an
advance for his fifth novel.)
When the series had started, BBC Publications were offered