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

by Neil Gaiman

“Nobody thought that radio had that much impact, but it does. I think a radio audience has a greater overlap with a solid reading audience than television does. All power to radio, it’s a good medium.”

“You can see all the elements in Hitchhiker’s in which it is a bit this or a bit that. I mean, it’s an easy line for people wanting to categorise it in the press to say it is a cross between Monty Python and Doctor Who, and in a sense it is, there are all kinds of elements that go into making it what it is. But at the end of the mixing you have something which is different from anything else in its own peculiar way. “But then, everything is like that. Python was a mixture of all kinds of things thrown together to give you something different from anything else. Even the Beatles (let’s get really elevated here) were a mixture of all kinds of elements drawn from other things, mixed together and they created something which was extraordinarily different. “Although Hitchhiker’s does not have any real political significance, there is a theme there of the ubiquity of bureaucracy and paranoia rampant throughout the universe. And that is a direct debt to Python, along with the comparative style of ‘individual events, little worlds’. The difference comes with the narrative structure, so the world of Hitchhiker’s is based outside the ‘Real World’ while still co-existing with it. It’s like looking at events through the wrong end of a telescope.”

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