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

by Neil Gaiman

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.

famous non-award-winning movie,

“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.”

(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.)

And I was the only person 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 was 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 I just sit there, and I 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…’”

creditable guitarist),

Douglas often mentioned that the late Graham Chapman, at only six foot three inches was thus four per cent less funny than the rest.

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).

Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a writer-performer (although at least four top British writer-performers have been doctors—Jonathan Miller, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman),

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By the time the sixth episode had been broadcast, the show had become a cult.

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

Every word is a gem… it’s only the order they’re put in that worries me —

I think a radio audience has a greater overlap with a solid reading audience than television does.

The beauty of Hitchhiker’s was that it came at just the right time. The success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had created a willingness among the public to regard science fiction as an acceptable form of entertainment;

THE MUSIC STOPS. EDDIE: A story? Once upon a time there were three computers—an analogue computer, a digital computer and a sub-meson computer. They all lived happily in a complex three-way interface

WE GO CLOSE UP ON ONE OF ZAPHOD’S HEADS. IT IS FAST ASLEEP AND SNORING. THE CAMERA PASSES OVER TO HIS OTHER HEAD WHICH OBVIOUSLY CANNOT SLEEP ON

Unable to find a bicephalic actor (or at least, one who could learn his lines), the BBC resorted to Mark Wing-Davey, Zaphod on radio, and built him an animatronic head and an extra arm (mostly stuffed, but occasionally, when all hands needed to be seen to be working, the hand of someone behind him, sticking an extra arm out, as can be seen quite clearly in the Milliways sequence of Episode Five).

That Arthur remained in the dressing gown throughout the TV series was Alan Bell’s idea:

“The Milliways set was actually the biggest set they’ve ever put into the BBC’s biggest studio. The unions said they wouldn’t put the set in, and we had to cut bits out, which was a pity.

(Although Adams later declined to discuss it, his then girlfriend had left him—as he said in an interview given about that time, “She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds that he was her husband.

“But it’s true of each book I’ve written that I’ve hated it, and then written the next book, and was so busy hating the next book I discovered I rather liked the previous book.

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

“I find it ludicrously difficult. I try and avoid it if at all possible. The business of buying new pencils assumes gigantic proportions. I have four word processors and spend a lot of time wondering which one to work on. All writers, or most, say they find writing difficult, but most writers I know are surprised at how difficult I find it.

“I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it’s the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It’s usually below the surface....

“I’m not a wit. A wit says something funny on the spot. A comedy writer says something very funny two minutes later...

“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…

Even the interviewers, most of them obviously fans, were complaining to Douglas that Life, the Universe and Everything was less funny than the earlier books. And Douglas, hating the book, couldn’t have agreed with them more. In his defence, he pointed out how depressed he had been during the writing, how he felt he was no longer writing in his own voice, how writing a third Hitchhiker’s book had been a major mistake, and one he would not repeat.

Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everybody thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people.

why Arthur Dent was the most important being in the universe (and even funnier than the frogs);

major part of the game’s success must have been due to the fact that a real-life author was, for the first time, actively involving himself in, indeed writing, a computer game based on his work; and also to Adams’s own love of messing around with computers, and devising problems, doing crosswords and the like—not to mention his need to keep himself interested and amused by that game, which communicates itself to participants.

When Leo Fender first invented an electric guitar one could have said: ‘But to what extent is this real music?’ To which the answer is: ‘All right, we’re not going to play Beethoven on it, but at least let’s see what we can do.’ What matters is whether it’s interesting and exciting.

Adams’s interest in computers, computer games and programming remained high, although at one point he found that he was spending so much time playing with his Apple Macintosh that he switched back to a manual typewriter, in order to get some work done and as a form of penance.

But I try to keep a little bit of distance because I believe the most dangerous thing a person can do is believe their own publicity. I know, from people I look up to and admire—for instance, John Cleese: it took me a long time to be able to perceive him as an ordinary human being, and I know how very very easy it is to look at somebody who is actually a perfectly normal human being, who happens to have a particular talent, an ability or facility that puts them into the limelight, to see them as being some sort of very elevated and extraordinary person, which they’re not. I think you do yourself a favour if you try not to expose yourself too much to people who are going to tell you you are God’s gift to the human race, which you’re not. The media present you as being some kind of superhuman, and you aren’t, so you just have to keep all that at arm’s length.

Did you steal the biscuits story from Jeffrey Archer? A: The origin of the story about the biscuits was that it actually happened to me at Cambridge Station, England, in 1976; since when I’ve told the story so often on radio and TV that people have begun to pinch it. This is why I wanted to put it down in black and white myself. I didn’t know Jeffrey Archer had used a similar story in A Quiver Full of Arrows (1982) having never read the book. I would point out that the date, 1982, comes somewhat after the date 1976.

Could you include a short autobiography, including anything that you consider contributing to your work? Born 1952. Haven’t died yet.

Dear Mr Adams, Let me start by telling you I’m not a Surrey Estate Agent. (God, the number of letters you must have had starting with that.) I will get straight to the point. I’m formally offering you the opportunity of an affair with me, you have been selected out of many WORLD-FAMOUS writers of humerus [sic] prose to be the recipient of a romantic involvement with me, the duration of which will depend on: a) Whether [sic] or not we speak the same language, and b) How good you are at screwing. The young lady in question said she was five feet eight, nine stone six, a brunette with multicoloured eyes, and described herself as discreet, adventurous, agile, willing to do anything provided it doesn’t do me permanent physical damage and I’ve a good phone manner. Douglas did not reply.

Then there was the fan letter from an American writer, hopefully working on a film script, who explained: It’s a lot of work, but I break the monotony getting laid in the back bars by pretending to be you. Thanks.

“A graduate student sent me a long paper on one book that we know for sure that John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress) actually read. It’s called The Plain Man’s Path to Heaven, written by an English Puritan writer called Arthur Dent. He assumed that I was aware of this and was having some extraordinary academic joke. “Once you’ve decided to find parallels you can find them all the time: you can add up numbers, you can compare images… you can pick up any two books and if you wished to prove they were parallel, you could do it. You could pick up the Bible and the telephone directory, and you could prove that each has a direct relationship to the other.” — Douglas Adams.

paperback house the schedule is so much tighter, because they are going to sell so many more copies of the book. And because everything a paperback house does is almost always after the hardback publication of the book, there’s no need to build flexibility into the system. “Hardback publishers on the other hand are completely geared to the fact that writers are always late and always difficult.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five per cent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down.

In 1985 Mark Carwardine, the zoologist, and Douglas Adams, the extremely ignorant non-zoologist, went to Madagascar in search of the Aye-Aye, a creature no one had actually seen for years, at the behest of The Observer colour supplement and the World Wildlife Fund. Setting off for an island in pursuit of the near-extinct lemur, they caught a twenty-second glimpse of the creature on the island of Neco Mangabo on the first night, photographed it and returned feeling remarkably pleased with themselves. In fact, they were so remarkably pleased, they decided to do it all again, only this time with some different species of endangered animal and in places other than Madagascar. But, as Mark Carwardine was to discover, getting himself, Douglas Adams and a bunch of threatened animals together in the same place at the same time was to prove a logistical nightmare. And since logistics were not Douglas’s strong point, this was all left to Mark.

Douglas fell out of the boat and was being smashed against the rock. There was blood everywhere and it was all quite dramatic. We got the whole thing on tape, but if we’d had a TV crew there we’d have had to dry Douglas off, mop up all the blood and then get him to do it again, and it just wouldn’t have been the same.

And they always say about radio you get better pictures.