A true inspiration

It is no exaggeration to say that ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ shaped my life. From discovering the original book as a highly impressionable eleven year old to listening to the radio shows and audio books endlessly on cassette (and later on CD and MP3) it would be fair to say that a certain Douglas Adams would be more responsible for me wanting to be a writer than any other single person. He had an astonishing gift for the apparently straightforward task of placing one word in front of another. He wrote with authority, style, panache and a unique humour, and his imagination was almost unparalleled. George Orwell is widely lauded for his 1949 masterpiece ‘1984’, in which he predicts with uncanny accuracy all manner of future technological developments, but the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also foresaw innovations which, while they may be completely commonplace today, were unheard of in the mass markets of the late 1970s. Douglas introduced the world to such concepts as mobile and compact computing, computer speech recognition, search engines and even a form of Wikipedia.

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But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start at the beginning... 

Early years  

Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952, and was largely responsible for creating the DNA for modern comedy science fiction. He attended Cambridge University and was a member of Footlights; the famous University comedy club responsible for an astonishing production line of British comedy talent, including: Peter Cook, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Gryff Rhys Jones, Sue Perkins and David Mitchell among many others. After leaving university he wrote sketches and had some success with his work being used on radio and television shows such as the News Huddlines, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Not the Nine O’Clock News. Being passionate about science fiction he also wrote a number of episodes of Dr Who, including: ‘The Pirate Planet’, ‘City of Death’ and ‘Shada’. But it was when the BBC picked up his script for his fantasy science fiction story ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ in 1977 that his place among modern literary giants was assured.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - story

The story follows our unlikely hero Arthur Dent, who wakes up one morning to find bulldozers preparing to demolish his house to allow the construction of a by-pass. This quickly becomes one of the less pressing problems he has to deal with that day, as a short while later (and with wonderful symmetry) the Earth is destroyed by a ‘Vogon constructor fleet’ to make way for a hyperspace by-pass (Vogons being a race of unpleasant and extremely officious aliens). At the crucial moment of destruction Arthur is rescued by his friend ‘Ford Prefect’ who turns out to not be from Guildford as he had believed, but from “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Beetlejuice”. Ford admits to being a writer/researcher for ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’; an electronic computerised book that “tells you anything you want to know about everything”. The book acts as the narrator throughout the story and was brilliantly played by Peter Jones (on the Radio, LP album and TV series) and Stephen Fry (for the film).

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Ford and Arthur escape the Earth, firstly by hitching a ride on one of the Vogon ships and are then picked up by the ‘Heart of Gold’; a revolutionary new spaceship powered by an ‘improbability drive’ and crewed by Zaphod Beeblebrox , a two headed, three armed megalomaniac who has stolen the ship after becoming President of the Galaxy. Keeping him company are Tricia McMillian (Trillian) who Arthur had previously encountered at a party in Islington, and Marvin, an android with a somewhat less than sunny disposition.

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As the tale unfolds we learn of the quest to find the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’ which, after seven and a half million years’ procrastination, super-computer ‘Deep Thought’ proclaims to be “forty-two!” This results in a fair amount of head-scratching and so an even bigger computer has to be built to work out what the question actually means. This ultimate super-computer was the Earth and it transpires that its destruction (which came at the culmination of its ten million year program) may not have been quite as random as was first thought.

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It is a wonderful and groundbreaking story which captures the imagination and is filled with truly great humour. Douglas’ writing was unique, he was a great user of sarcasm and irony, his turn of phrase was wonderfully crafted and he would often use the most delightfully amusing and unexpected analogies, metaphors and similes. Describing the enormous Vogon spaceships that destroy the Earth he writes: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”. A brilliant and entirely unconventional way to use the English language, and there are some more examples of his wonderful writing below... 

Some examples of Douglas’ brilliant turn of phrase...

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• “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

• “You know”, said Arthur, "it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

       “Why, what did she tell you?”

       “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

• "He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down.”

• "Another world, another day, another dawn. The early morning's thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp."

• “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

• “The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”

Radio

The pilot episode of the radio show was commissioned in March 1977 and was recorded in June of the same year, following which the BBC commissioned a full series of six shows in August 1977. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started as a weekly radio series in March 1978, broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom and by National Public Radio in America, with a second series following in 1980. The radio series led to a book (based on the first series), which in turn led to LP album and cassette releases, a stage show, a TV series, and a Hollywood film starring Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Bill Nighy and Alan Rickman.

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Douglas penned four sequels to the original story: ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’, ‘Life the Universe and Everything’, ‘So Long and Thanks for all the Fish’, and ‘Mostly Harmless’, all of which were also commissioned as standalone radio series, the last three produced by the award winning radio producer Dirk Maggs. Dirk has also taken many of the original radio cast on tour with a terrific stage reproduction of the original radio show (I was lucky enough to catch it in 2013). If I had to choose, I would suggest that the radio series are perhaps the best way to explore the stories, each one is a delightful fantasy tale designed to inspire and ignite the imagination and our imagination perhaps works best without any visual stimuli to rein it in.

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It is an interesting aside that each incarnation of the stories were re-written specifically for the media on which they were to appear; and not just tweaked, but significant plot elements were changed and entire sections were omitted or added. So depending on whether you listened to the radio show, played the album, read the book, saw the stage production or watched the television series or film, you were treated to a different version of the same story.

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For completeness I should also mention the sixth instalment: ‘And Another Thing’, which was penned by Eoin Colfer after Douglas’ death and broadcast as a sixth BBC radio series, again produced by Dirk Maggs. I have to admit that while it was great to see new life breathed into the series, I struggled a little with this incarnation. More than anything, the writing felt like someone doing an impression of the original and, while I’m sure that this was a deliberate intention to try and retain continuity and the flow of the story, for me it didn’t feel quite right.   

Television

In 2022, forty-four years after the original release, the story has achieved cult status. But if we rewind to the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the radio series was well received, it was the TV show that really brought it to the attention of the masses.

First broadcast in 1981 on BBC2 and using largely the same cast from the radio series, it won a number of British Academy Awards. One award was for ‘Best Graphics’, but it was a misconception that all the ‘guide’ sections that included elaborate on-screen graphics accompanying the dialogue were computer generated; in fact they were painstakingly produced using traditional cell animation techniques.  

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The long gap between recording episode one of the television series, shot as the pilot, and the filming of the remaining five episodes resulted in some unfortunate continuity problems; one of the most noticeable was that Ford’s hair had apparently been permed in the hold of the Vogon ship between episodes one and two!

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Douglas made several cameo appearances in the television series; in the first episode he can be seen enjoying a pint at the bar in the pub and he also appeared as the naked man walking into the sea in episode two.

The film at last

The film, released in 2005 after endless delays, played fast and loose with the plot more than all other versions and consequently divides fans. In my humble opinion I do not consider it to be one of the better versions of the story. There were some positive aspects; the casting was excellent with Sam Rockwell, Martin Freeman, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy and Alan Rickman all delivering solid performances. Stephen Fry as the book was a great choice (and one that had been championed by Douglas) and the use of the original theme music (Journey of the Sorcerer, originally by The Eagles) provided a nice nostalgia hit. It was great to see the story get the big-budget Hollywood treatment and there were some nice Easter eggs included too, such as the original Marvin from the television series appearing in a queue in one scene, Simon Jones (the radio and television ‘Arthur’) making a cameo appearance, and the final shape that the Heart of Gold transforms into in the last scene of the movie was Douglas’ face, which was a touching tribute.

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Unfortunately, in my view the film is let down by a fairly significant deviation of the story (it is reported that Douglas wrote the new material but I wonder whether he would have realised that it would be at the expense so many of the iconic scenes and comedic lines from the original versions). It is a sad irony that Douglas never got to see the film that he worked so hard over so many years to get made. He also didn’t get to hear the last three radio series, as they were all released after his absurdly premature death following a heart attack in 2001, aged just 49.

Technology

Douglas held an enormous interest in technology, frequently referencing his current computer of choice in his work. He purchased his first of many word processors in 1982 and his early computers included the Digital Equipment Corporation Rainbow, an Apricot, a BBC Micro, a Tandy 1000 and in the field he used a Cambridge Z88; an early example of a portable computer.

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In 1984 he purchased an Apple Macintosh and was the first person in Europe to own one, with Stephen Fry being the second. He quickly fell in love and became an enormous advocate of the Apple Mac, owning at least nineteen different versions between 1982 and his death in 2001. He also became an ‘Apple Master’; a celebrity endorser of Apple’s products.

Computer games

Douglas’ burning enthusiasm for all things technological saw him work with Infocom to produce the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game in 1984. It was a text adventure game released for the Amiga, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS, based largely on the original story. At the time it was very successful, being Infocom’s second best selling game of 1984 (only behind Zork) and eventually racking up an impressive 400,000 sales. A knowledge of the story definitely helped players since many of the puzzles were rooted in the original plot.

Unfortunately the game suffers from those flaws that blighted many text adventures of the time - in particular it contained some unnecessarily difficult puzzles, you could play yourself into a dead end from which it was impossible to recover from, and perhaps most annoyingly the player would find themselves being killed, often, unexpectedly and repeatedly, meaning that frequent game saving was the order of the day. Accordingly, while it is an interesting curio and Douglas’ writing and humour still shines through like a beacon, you do need a degree of patience and perseverance to get the best from it. Should you want to, the BBC made it available free to play online to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the show; just Google “Hitchhikers game”.

In 1986 Douglas assisted with the development of the LucasFilm game Labyrinth and later worked with Infocom to design the game Bureaucracy (another text adventure) released in 1987 for the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 128, DOS and Macintosh.

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Douglas was also a founder and director of ‘The Digital Village’, a digital media and internet company, and in this role he helped produce the graphic adventure game: ‘Starship Titanic’, released for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh in 1998. Upon release the game received a mixed reception. It did win a Codie award in 1999 for the ‘Best New Adventure/Role Playing Game’, but other reviews were more of a mixed bag. There was consensus that the game’s graphics looked fantastic and many reviewers praised the humour, but others found the gameplay to be “dated” and “flawed”. An accompanying book; ‘Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic’ was written by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) as Douglas was too busy and unable to deliver it. (For the whole of Douglas’ career he had issues with deadlines; “I love deadlines” he once said. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”. One famous story involves him reportedly being locked in a hotel room with his editor for three weeks to ensure completion of the fourth Hitchhiker’s novel: ‘So Long and Thanks for All the Fish’.)

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As his interest in gaming and technology developed his writing began to take an apparent lower priority in his life. In fact, such was his interest, commitment and involvement in technology and gaming development at this time that he didn’t complete or release a new novel in the last nine years of his life.

Game over

Douglas’ enormously untimely death in 2001 shook the world, his heart attack being caused by previously undiagnosed heart disease. His funeral was held in his home of Santa Barbara in the USA in May 2001 and his ashes were scattered in Highgate cemetery in 2002. With apt timing, just two days prior to his death the Minor Planet Centre had announced that an asteroid was to be named ‘Arthurdent’. In 2005, another asteroid was named ‘Douglasadams’ in his memory.

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His death affected me greatly. For someone so talented, numerically he left a quite moderate collection of works and I was left feeling numb and empty, believing that I would never read fresh material from Douglas again. There was a post-script though, as ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ was published in 2002. This was a collection of writing salvaged from Douglas’ Apple Mac’s hard drive, which I avoided for some considerable time as I feared it to be a shameless cash-in of his passing. However when I finally took the plunge, I found it to be a delightful collection of his writing, including unpublished chapters of his most recent and unfinished ‘Dirk Gently’ novel and a fascinating collection of articles, speeches and other musings. I found it utterly fabulous to bask in the gloriousness of his unique eloquence just one last time.

Epilogue

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and indeed all of Douglas’ work, is definitely worth exploring if you enjoy great story telling, sprinkled with brilliant, insightful comedy and perhaps more than a dash of complete madness. This tribute may have opened a small window through which we can peek at his greatness, but to fully appreciate the genius you have to read or listen to the stories. This piece hardly scratches the surface of his work. I haven’t had space to explain why you should never be without your towel, or why you should never let a Vogon read poetry at you. There was no time to describe how Arthur gets to bowl a super-nova bomb at a killer robot at Lords, to consider why a bowl of petunias materialising in the empty void of space thought “oh no, not again”, or to reveal what God’s final message to the Universe was.

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And I still haven’t told you what the ‘ultimate’ question of life, the universe and everything actually was. If you want to try and solve that particular puzzle then you need to check out his original works or alternatively reach for your scrabble bag...

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I recently caught up with award winning radio producer Dirk Maggs to talk all things Hitchhiker’s and the changes that technology has made to radio production...

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How did you first get involved with Douglas and the Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy?

I was producing comedy and “light drama” programmes for BBC Radio Light Entertainment in the late 80s and early 90s. Douglas had just written the fifth and final Hitchhikers novel and he’d had the idea that, now he had completed the books, Hitchhikers should return “home” to radio where it had begun.

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At the same moment Douglas heard my “Adventures Of Superman” BBC Radio 4 series and liked my approach to audio production - that audio drama could sound like a rock album or a movie, not just talking heads - so he phoned my boss at the time and asked if I might be interested. I was at his front door within the hour to discuss it. Sadly he didn’t live to see us actually make the three series based on his books but I based my approach on our discussions and the surviving original cast all took part, so we carried on as if he was there with us.

Why do you think the appeal of the stories is so strong?

There is a theme in Douglas’s work where reasonable, logical thought inevitably leads to illogical but completely rational conclusions. Arthur Dent spends his time frustrated at the impossibility of resolving the simplest task in a universe where nothing fulfils its apparent function, not least the technology built to get around the issue.  What makes it so beloved is that it precisely reflects our experiences of real life in the modern era. In the end Arthur discovers that happiness lies in one’s friends and one’s lifestyle choices, and the rest is pretty much chaos.

Which did you enjoy more, producing the radio shows or the live tour, and why?

I loved both. Working in the studio with the cast, bringing Douglas’s words to life (including some massaging of timelines to resolve some plotting issues) was a joy. Working with that same cast on stage, live, to an audience who had previously only heard this stuff (and some who did not know it at all) was glorious. We had no idea if they would laugh or not - after all the scripts were not written for an audience show - but the results went way beyond anything we had expected. The high point for me was when Douglas’s Mum came to see the show. Afterwards she hugged me and said how grateful she was, saying “I never realised Douglas was so funny.”

For the live tour it was fascinating seeing the sound effects created live on stage. For radio sound effects do you use modern technology or do you still prefer ‘old-school’ methods?

On stage we wanted everything to happen in the moment as it were, the total opposite of how Simon Brett, Douglas and Geoffrey Perkins had made the radio series, when pretty much everything was added to the voice recordings separately, after the event. So I insisted on a live band providing the music and a combination of both pre-recorded sound effects (big stuff, backgrounds, etc.) with live sound effects performed on stage wherever possible, so all the tricks were visible. Ken Humphrey was the Live FX operator (occasionally assisted by myself, when I wasn’t playing drums in the band), and we came up with lots of live versions of stuff that could have been pre-recorded - like a real typewriter clacking away under Eddie The Computer, or Jibber-Jabber squeaker toys to represent the Vogon Captain’s speech before the Babel Fish translates it. The Babel Fish, by the way, was inserted into Arthur’s ear with the sound effect of a Fart Pot. My favourite effect was the making and pouring of Zaphod’s Pan Galactic Gargleblaster, which involved a lot of very silly props and stage business.

Did you have a favourite guest ‘book’ from the stage shows?

Impossible to choose between pretty much all of them. I’d particularly single out John Lloyd, Jon Culshaw, Miriam Margolyes, Billy Boyd, John Challis, Anita Dobson, Clive Anderson, Roger McGough, Andrew Sachs, Phill Jupitus, Hugh Dennis and last but far from least, Neil Gaiman.

What did you think of the film?

I thought it was ambitious and loved some of the ideas and the design. I just don’t think Hitchhikers comes across as well that way.

My feeling was that the film script was hard-edited losing much of the humour of the story. Would you agree? And do you think the film would have been made as it was had Douglas still been involved in the production?

You can’t encompass all that Douglas created in a couple of hours. You cut jokes to keep the philosophy or vice versa and you’ve lost the essence of his genius. I can’t speak to what Douglas would have done re the film as we saw it; I do think however that he would have leapt upon the idea of making it as a long-form television series, which has become the norm today. But Douglas *did* know that audio can create the same images equally efficiently at a fraction of the cost, and not leave the good stuff out. That’s why he wanted me to bring Hitchhikers “home”.

What are the main changes in radio production you have seen as technology has advanced over the years?

Digital technology has revolutionised the quality and scope of what we can do in sound, but what Douglas and Geoffrey were doing in 78-79 was revolutionary in its own right. The difference was more that I could then put the same thing on stage and the cast could perform it live in the room and it sounded like a recording. The internet is the other huge advance. Audio drama was lost to most of the world over the last four decades of the twentieth century. The internet has brought it back. If you’d told me fifteen years ago that Neil Gaiman and I would at last be able to make The Sandman as an audio drama after 30 years of trying, or that it would feature A list Hollywood stars, get billboards outside the Roxy in LA and an audio drama would become a #1 New York Times Bestseller, I’d have laughed at the idea. Our medium has become not only popular, but trendsetting. I’m thrilled about that.

Finally - you can guest on drums for any band past or present, who would you choose?

The Beatles, but they’d sack me and still get Ringo, who is a genius.

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AG 07/05/2022

Featured in Pixel Addict magazine, issue 3.

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© Words and pictures copyright grapeswriting.com

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My old and slightly less battered copy of the fourth novel

The final Hitchhiker's novel that Douglas penned

An excellent biography