Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by Neil Gaiman

“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.”

“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.)

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.)

When the series had started, BBC Publications were offered the idea of doing the book, and quite sensibly turned it down. After the contracts were signed with Pan, BBC Publications asked to see the scripts, since it had occurred to them that they might possibly do a book of Hitchhiker’s. On being told that Pan had already bought the book rights BBC Publications asked bitterly why the book had not been offered to them.

Although later Douglas was to express dissatisfaction with the instant success of the first book (“It was like going from foreplay to orgasm with nothing in the middle—where do you go after that?”), at the time he was jubilant.

THERE IS ALSO (THOUGH NO ONE CALLS ATTENTION TO IT) A GOAT WITH A SCALE MODEL OF THE EIFFEL TOWER STRAPPED TO ITS HEAD STANDING ABOUT. THIS GOAT IS NEVER EVER REFERRED TO, BUT IT WILL CONTINUE TO BE WITH THEM FOR MOST OF THE REST OF THE SERIES.

I may just be a menial robot but I’m far too intelligent to expect anyone to think of me for a moment. Far too intelligent. In fact, I’m so intelligent I’ve probably got time to go through the five million things I hate most about organic life forms. One. They’re so stupid…

“What I do now on many occasions is have, say, an inconsequential idea for a throwaway line that seems quite neat, then I go to huge lengths to create the context in which to throw that line away and make it appear that it was just a throwaway line, when in fact you’ve constructed this huge edifice off which to chuck this line. It’s a really exhausting way of writing but when it works…

there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.

‘Farnham’—that’s the feeling you get at four in the afternoon, when you haven’t got enough done.

Of passing interest is the fact that a suggestion for a photograph involving dolphins was dropped when it was discovered that there were no dolphins in captivity in the UK. Which is a Good Thing.

So long Douglas and thanks for all the words.