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Douglas Adams: ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide’ Author Had A Front-Row Seat To England’s ’70s Comedy Invasion

By Skinner Bachs
Published on: 07:45 PST, Mar 11, 2016

Douglas Adams would have been 64 this year. Adams was best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a BBC radio play that was later adapted into various media including a five-part trilogy. This series was subsequently adapted into a television series and a feature-length film.

Adams was known for his staunch atheism and attendant skepticism, a part of his makeup that informed much of his fiction. Both Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and his Dirk Gently metaphysical detective series addressed matters of belief and reason. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams makes one of his better known references to the incompatibility of reason and faith.

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
“Oh dear,” says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.”

On this very Beatlesque of birthdays, it should be noted that Douglas Adams was a presence in some other British institutions of his time. He was a member of Footlights, a comedy cabaret, while reading English at St. John’s College at Cambridge. When an abbreviated version of the 1974 edition of Footlights was broadcast on BBC, he was discovered by Graham Chapman, a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Adams contributed as a writer and can be seen on episodes 44 and 45 of Series Four of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He was one of two people who were not members of the group to get a writing credit, the other person being Python supporting staple and musical composer, Neil Innes. Adams can be seen as a masked doctor in the “Patient Abuse” sketch in Episode 44 and as a Pepper Pot (a squat, loud fishwife) in the “Mr Neutron” sketch in Episode 45. Would it be too hard to find Douglas Adams among the mayhem that was any episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? Keep in mind that he was rather tall, so the best way to find him on-screen would be to look for the 6’5? Englishman who is not John Cleese.

His stint with Monty Python led to more work as a writer in television interspersed with odd jobs. In 1977, Adams created a science fiction comedy for radio called The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The series starred fellow Footlights member Simon Jones, who went on to repeat his role as the perpetually rattled cosmic wanderer, Arthur Dent, in the television series. Adams would later claim that he had Jones in mind for Dent when he wrote the script.

https://youtu.be/tTNuldPhP20?list=PLSkxid509XN8QRiBoPrpLkjYSSBo_ukP1

Later on in his career, Douglas Adams worked on Doctor Who as a writer and script editor. He penned two stories for Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, “The Pirate Planet” and “City of Death.” A third story arc, “Shada,” and a proposed movie script, Doctor Who and the Krikketmen, were never completed. Elements of the latter were later incorporated in his Hitchhiker’s Guide novels and Dirk Gently series.

An afficionado of all things tech, Adams bought his first word processor in 1982. He was an early adopter of the internet, establishing one of the first author websites devoted to posting information about his work and communicating with fans. His process, such as it was, was something he shared freely with his readers. The music he listened to while working, his struggles with writer’s block, and his antipathy for deadlines were all part of the Douglas Adams Canon.

The remainder of his professional life was devoted to his love of tech, his sense of mission to saving endangered wildlife, his atheism, getting Arthur Dent to the big screen, and his family. Adams became a father at the age of 42, and left the world on his 49th birthday. It was a long, strange trip cut way too short. To come into the world and leave it on March 11 nearly a half century apart has its own odd, sad symmetry.

Fans will remember him today and on May 25, which is Towel Day, a day set aside to celebrate the life and work of Douglas Adams.

[Photo by Colin Davey/Getty Images]

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