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After Douglas’s travels undertaken for Last Chance to See, his outlook on the world and its mercurial workings were altered irrevocably.
But Arthur manages to remain stoical throughout since he knows he can’t die until he meets the hapless Agrajag on the anarchically named Stavromula Beta, as
programme also featured Douglas’s friend Professor Richard Dawkins and his editor Sue Freestone.
“like a pub, only smaller”. It eventually turned out to be a fridge.
Shooty and Bang Bang, the Galactic Cops, were played by Douglas Adams and his agent Ed Victor, while Kevin Davies made an unbilled cameo as the bulldozer driver.
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.
“The problem with text-to-speech at the moment is not that it doesn’t work. It actually does work, but it becomes very, very tiresome on the ear after a while, simply because it’s not natural speech rhythms and all the characters tend to end up sounding like either Stephen Hawking or a semi-concussed Scandinavian.” — Douglas Adams, June 1997.
So I was then coming up against the problem of the number of hours in a day and the number of days in a week, and the unfortunate necessity of getting regular amounts of sleep.”
I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course—the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end. — Douglas Adams, introduction to h2g2.com.
h2g2.com closed on 29th January 2001, another victim of the dot.com boom. Or was it? On 21st February it was announced that h2g2 would be re-opening—as part of the BBC. And indeed, on 12th March, the whole affair went back online at www.bbc.co.uk, where it has remained happily ever since, gradually increasing in size. Many observers noted the irony of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy coming home, twenty-three years later, to the BBC where it had all started at 10.30 pm on that Wednesday night.
The specific circumstances were that Douglas Adams suffered a fatal heart attack while exercising in his gym in Santa Barbara on 11th May 2001.
even death couldn’t stop Douglas from breaking new ground in communications technology: this was the first church service broadcast live over the web by the BBC.
At the memorial service it was announced that this final, unfinished novel would be published posthumously.
taxi driver who has never been asked to “Follow that cab!” and has come to the conclusion that his is the cab all the other cabbies are following,
many speeches which he had made to business conferences (he was one of the most popular speakers on the international business circuit and frequently talked on the subjects of ecology and information technology).
Dawkins had been a close friend of Douglas’s for a number of years. He had sent Douglas a fan letter—the only time Dawkins had been moved to do so—after reading (and re-reading) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It transpired that Douglas had greatly enjoyed Dawkins’ book on evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, and the two of them hit it off immediately. In 1992, at his fortieth birthday party, Douglas introduced Dawkins to the actress Lalla Ward who had played the Doctor’s companion, Romana, during Douglas’s time as script editor on the show. Dawkins married her later that year.
would go on to dedicate his groundbreaking book The God Delusion to him, appending the Hitchhiker’s quote, “Isn’t it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
“Douglas Adams brought to Doctor Who something completely useless, he brought the revelation of what Doctor Who would look like if it was written by a genius… Well, there just aren’t that many geniuses about…” — Stephen Moffat.
So, by lifting out the original audiobook performance and dropping it in to the relevant scene, Douglas was able to fulfill his dream of performing the role, albeit four years after his death.
Douglas had a habit of trying out new bits of software; it wasn’t enough to have Pages or Word, he’d also have Nisus Writer, ClarisWorks, Mariner-Write… He’d even try it in Chinese sometimes just to see how it would work!
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying, “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.
Eoin* Colfer, an Irish writer famous for his children’s fiction, most particularly the Artemis Fowl series.
Last Chance to See planetary trek, this time accompanied (for a change) by a tall, startlingly intelligent technophile, Stephen Fry*
The 30th anniversary also brings another publication, Neil Gaiman’s biography of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic,
So long Douglas and thanks for all the words.
A close friend of Douglas, Stephen Fry lived in Douglas’s house during the year Douglas spent travelling the world with Mark. During that time, Stephen recalls “taking urgent phone calls to send maps and lenses to faraway places.” ** Although one hopes you’ve found this tome slightly more reliable.
DEEP THOUGHT “The name is a very obvious
THE WORST POET IN THE UNIVERSE “He was a bloke I was at school with. He used to write appalling stuff about dead swans in stagnant pools. Dreadful garbage.” [The name of this character was changed to Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings after complaints by Paul Neil Milne Johnson, an ex-schoolfriend of Douglas Adams.]
