Douglas Adams’s first novel was was an instant bestseller. Now dogged by writer’s block, he has turned to new projects Nicholas Wroe Soon after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published in 1979, Douglas Adams was invited to sign copies at a small science fiction bookshop in London’s Soho. As he drove there, some sort of demonstration slowed his progress. “There was a traffic jam and crowds of people everywhere,” he recalls. It wasn’t until he had pushed his way inside that Adams realised the crowds were there for him. Next day his publisher called to say he was number one on the bestseller list and his life changed forever. “It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest,” he says, “or having an orgasm without the foreplay.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had already been a cult radio show and went on both television and the stage. It expanded into four more books that sold over 14- million copies worldwide. There were records and computer games and now, after 20 years of Hollywood prevarication, it is as close as it’s ever been to becoming a movie.
The story itself begins on earth with mild- mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent trying to stop the council demolishing his house to build a bypass. It moves into space when his friend Ford Prefect reveals himself as a representative of the planet Betelgeuse and informs Arthur that the earth itself is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route. They hitch a ride on a Vogon spaceship and begin to use the Guide, a repository of knowledge about life, the universe and everything. The book had a pervasive cultural influence. The phrase “hitchhiker’s guide to …” quickly became common parlance and there have been numerous copycat spoof sci- fi books and TV series. His Babel fish – a small fish you can place in your ear to translate any speech into your own language – has been adopted as the name of a translation device on an Internet search engine.
Adams followed his success with several other novels and a television programme, book and CD-ROM on endangered species. He has founded a dot.com company, H2G2, that has recently taken the idea of the Guide full circle by launching a service that promises real information on life, the universe and everything – via your mobile phone.
Much of his wealth seems to have been spent fuelling his passion for technology, but he has never really been the nerdy science- fiction type. He is relaxed, gregarious and a solidly built 2m tall. In fact, he has more the air of those English public schoolboys who became rock stars in the 1970s; he once did play guitar on stage at Earls Court with his mates Pink Floyd. In a nicely flash touch, instead of producing a passport-size photo of his daughter out of his wallet, he opens up his impressively powerful laptop, where, after a bit of fiddling about, Polly Adams, aged five, appears in pop video spoof featuring a cameo appearance by another mate, John Cleese.
So this is what his life turned into; money, A-list friends, and nice toys. Looking at the bare facts of his CV – boarding school, Cambridge and the BBC – it seems at first sight no surprise. But his has not been an entirely straightforward journey along well-worn establishment tracks.
Frank Halford, one of Adams’s schoolteachers, remembers him as “very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of- term play when Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it Doctor Which.” Many years later Adams did write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. “He once gave me 10 out of 10 for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had bestsellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me 10 out of 10, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it.”
It seems from the beginning he had a facility for turning his writing into cash. He sold some short, “almost haiku-length” stories to the Eagle comic and received 10 shillings. “You could practically buy a yacht for 10 shillings then,” he laughs. But his real interest was music. He grew up in the Sixties and The Beatles “planted a seed in my head that made it explode. Every nine months there’d be a new album which would be an earth-shattering development from where they were before. We were so obsessed by them that when Penny Lane came out and we hadn’t heard it on the radio we beat up this boy who had heard it until he hummed the tune to us. People now ask if Oasis are as good as The Beatles. I don’t think they are as good as The Rutles.” The other key influence was Monty Python. Having listened to mainstream British radio comedy of the Fifties he describes it as an “epiphanous” moment when he discovered that being funny could be a way in which intelligent people expressed themselves – “and be very, very silly at the same time”. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.” He began to write Pythonesque sketches. Arts administrator Mary Allen was a contemporary at Cambridge and performed his material, which she says was “very quirky and individualistic. You had to suit it and it had to suit you. Even in short sketches he created a weird world.” Adams says he had “something of a guilt thing” about studying literature. “I thought I should have done something useful and challenging. But I also relished the chance not to do very much.” Even his essays were full of jokes. “If I had known then what I know now I would have done biology or zoology. At the time I had no idea that was an interesting subject but now I think it is the most interesting subject in the world.” After university Adams got the chance to work with one of his heroes. Monty Python member Graham Chapman had been impressed by some of Adams’s sketches and had made contact. When Adams went to see him he was asked, much to his delight, to help out with a script Chapman had to finish that afternoon. “We ended up working together for about a year. Mostly on a prospective TV series which never made it beyond the pilot.” Chapman at this time was “sucking down couple of bottles of gin every day, which obviously gets in the way a bit.” But Adams believes he was enormously talented. “He was naturally part of a team and needed other people’s discipline to enable his brilliance to work. His strength was flinging something into the mix that would turn it all upside down.” After that, Adams’s career stalled badly. He continued to write sketches but was not making anything like a living. With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him Adams took a series of bizarre jobs including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms. “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.”At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year. He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and, while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, the insecurity remains. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the radio show, was the last throw of the dice. In retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction vogueish, and the Python aftermath meant that there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility. By the time the series was aired in 1978, Adams says he had put about nine months’ solid work into it and he had been paid oe1 000. “There seemed to be quite a long way to go before I broke even,” he says, so he accepted a producer’s job at the BBC but quit six months later when he found himself simultaneously writing a second radio series, the novel, the television series and episodes of Doctor Who. Despite this remarkable workload he was already building a legendary reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. Writer and producer John Lloyd had been a friend and collaborator with Adams since before Hitchhiker. He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday in Corfu with three friends when he was finishing a book and he ended up taking over the whole house. He had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t sleep and so on. It didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a brain the size of a planet and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a malicious person but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to finish a book everything else pales into insignificance.”
Yet the work came out eventually, and it has been extremely popular. The books all became best-sellers and Adams was given an advance of over $2-million by his American publishers.
For all his facility with humour, his editor Sue Freestone recalls Adams’s work has connected profoundly with some readers. “In Hitchhiker all you have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard about this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had her towel with her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into her own. It embarrassed the hell out of Douglas when he heard about it. But for her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an unknown journey.” There are serious themes within his work. His second novel about detective Dirk Gently can easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced and alienated from society. “His imagination goes much deeper than just cleverness,” says Freestone. “The social criticism is usually buried by the comedy but it’s there if you want to find it.” Having been through such a lean period, Adams worked constantly until the mid- Nineties, when he very deliberately applied the brakes. “I had got absolutely stuck in the middle of a novel and, although it sounds ungrateful, having to do huge book signings would drive me to angry depressions.
“I felt like a mouse in a wheel,” he says. “There was no pleasure coming into the cycle at any point. When you write your first book aged 25 or so you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon you begin to run on empty.” His response to running out of fuel was to attempt some “creative crop rotation”. In particular his interest in technology took off, as did a burgeoning passion for environmental issues. In 1990 he wrote Last Chance to See. “As is the way of these things it was my least successful book but is still the thing I am most proud of.” The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type of lemur. He thought would be quite interesting but it turned into a complete revelation. Now a link at the bottom of his e-mails directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which works to protect gorillas, and to Save the Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of moral status for great apes recognising their rights to “life, liberty and freedom from torture”. New ventures include a novel – eight years late and counting – a Dirk Gently film, the H2G2 web-site and an e-novel. The film project has been “20 years of constipation” – he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it”. But he feels ready to begin writing again. “I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel- writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not novel- writing. As opposed to running on empty it now feels like the tank is full again.”