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

by Neil Gaiman

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.

The Pirate Planet was a less than successful story, which managed to mix such elements as a telepathic gestalt of yellow-robed 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 in-jokes; 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 always had a soft spot for it, as he explained, “In a way I preferred writing the Doctor 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.”

Apocryphal stories have grown up about Douglas Adams’s almost superhuman ability to miss deadlines. Upon close inspection, they all appear to be true.

“Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

The idea for the Reagan program occurred to Douglas after watching one of the Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984: “It occurred to me that people who have to brief Reagan for a debate such as that have to provide him with the minimum number of facts and the maximum number of ways of getting to those facts, and the most all-embracing fallback positions—lines to come up with when he doesn’t really know the answer to the question and maybe doesn’t even understand the question, but has recognised some key phrase, and can come up with a phrase or line that will cover it. “And I thought, ‘This is exactly the way you program a computer to appear to be taking part in a conversation.’ So, with a friend in New York, I was going to do a program to emulate Reagan, so you could sit down and talk to a computer and it would respond as Reagan would. And then we could do a Thatcher one, and after a while you could do all the world leaders, and get all the various modules to talk to each other.

So long Douglas and thanks for all the words.