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

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

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.

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

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

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

`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)

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

Copyright (C) Neil Gaiman 1987,1993

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

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.

CONTENTS

DON'T PANIC!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe

***************************************************************
"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

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

"' 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

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!

3

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.

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

5

"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.

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.
*****************************************************************

*************************************************************
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.
***************************************************************

6

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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