Backlisted - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

The work of Douglas Adams - comic genius, futurologist and erstwhile hitchhiker - is the subject of this episode of Backlisted, in particular The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, first published by Pan Books in 1985. H2G2, as it is known to fans, was a cultural phenomenon in the true sense of that degraded term: first a hit radio show, then a bestselling novel, then a double LP, then a stage adaptation, then a second radio series, then another novel, then a video game, then a TV series, then another LP, then a third novel… you get the idea. We have chosen the scripts of the original radio series as our entry point into the Hitchhiker multiverse because each of us brings our own unique, informed perspective to the saga: longtime Adams fan Joel Morris has written a new book entitled Be Funny or Die: How Comedy Works and Why It Matters; author Gail Renard was a friend and colleague of Douglas’s and an eyewitness to the irresistible and highly improbable success of Hitchhiker; as a publisher, John has worked on several books by or about the great man; and Andy cheerfully admits to having borrowed many of his best ideas from The Guide. Please consider this, then, our loving tribute to a true giant of literature, comedy, technology and being an actual giant, Douglas having been one of the only people in history tall enough to break his nose with his own knee.  *Tickets are now on sale for our next two LIVE shows in London on Wednesday the 12th June, on the subject of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with guests Dr Laura Varnam and Dr Martin Shaw.  And Endless Night by Agatha Christie with Caroline Crampton and Andrew Male on Weds 17th July. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems. But turns out, therapy has some issues of its own. Finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and, of course, the cost. BetterHelp can help solve these problems. It's online, convenient, built around your schedule, and surprisingly affordable, too. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.

That's BetterHelp.com. And then, finally, add Bacardi Rum. And there you have it. The perfect summer mix. Bacardi. Do what moves you. Live passionately. Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi, its trade dress and the bat device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited. Rum 40% alcohol by volume.

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event,

skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, a podcast which gives new life to old books.

Today, you find us in a noisy Greek restaurant somewhere north of Oxford Street in London. It's 1977 by the look of everyone's clothes and hairstyles. Four men in a state of some menorment are talking very loudly. One of them, considerably taller and somewhat louder than the rest, is holding up a sheaf of what appears to be tracing paper. The type sheets are covered with

handwritten annotations. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by guests, one returning and one making their debut. Please say a very energetic hello to Gail Renard and Joel Morris. Ray! Hello. Ray! Hello, both of you. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello. Hi.

Hello. Joel Morris is a BAFTA-winning comedy writer, a long-time collaborator with Charlie Brooker and the co-creator of Dimwit pundit Philomena Kunk. He has written for countless TV and radio shows, including Michelin Web, Miranda and Murder in Successville, as well as the Paddington Films. The Paddington Films. Let's pause and pay tribute to Joel at this point. Part of a very big team.

Did everyone know that the Paddington films would become even more beloved than the original novels when they were being made? Is it good to share the anecdote about coming out of the premiere of Paddington 2 and running into Simon Farnaby, who is lead writer on it, on the red carpet? And I went, oh my my god because the crowd had been really up for it and he grabbed me and went we got away with it um and it felt like it felt like a heist and especially the first one was good and we thought we're going to ruin it with the second one so no one knows anything's going to be good right up until then audience applauds

at the end and i think it's worth knowing that no one knows. It's wonderful. I particularly enjoyed Paddington 2 and the discourse on social media, which complained that the prison scenes were not realistic. Yeah. Well done, everyone. They are in Paddington world. They're gritty.

Joel co-created cult spoof newspaper, The Framley Examiner. The hit bollocks to Alton Towers, Tourist Guides, and the chart-busting Lady Bird books for grown-ups. He's also an award-winning podcast producer and presenter for Comfort Blanket and Rule of Three, shows much enjoyed by the backlisted audience, I happen to know, a member of the band Candidate, and a regular contributor to Viz.

His book Be Funny or Die, a book about how comedy works and why it matters, was published by Unbound in March. He first joined us on Backlisted back in May 2016 when everyone here was a teenager. For the episode on Bert Fegg's nasty book for boys and girls,

The Collaboration between Terry Jones and Michael Palin. What fun that was. Only backlisted I wasn't on. Oh, right. Is that right? It is, yeah. Of course. Of course.

I've missed a lot listed, but I've never missed... We can put you in in post. Yeah. Gail Renard is a BAFTA award-winning writer, producer and presenter. Her work includes many BBC, ITV and channel 4 comedies and children's series and she is proud to have written for amongst other fine actors the chuckle brothers and hartley hair and hardly hair what was hardly hair like to work with gail well i i would say temperamental but you never know when you have to work with someone again.

You work with Hartley twice, don't you? Once on the way up and once on the way down. Yeah. But I will say Hartley is so iconic. When we did the Writers Guild Awards, I got Hartley to present an award. And he was the cues of people wanting photos it was i hate to say it was more than they wanted a photo with tom stoppard and that's very worrying i love that gail's 2010 book give me a chance was based on her true story i can't you know i've read this book and i i'm everyone who

listens to this will know how exciting this moment is based on her true story of sneaking into john lennon and yoko's bed in for peace in montreal when she was 16 to get an interview for her school newspaper john and yoko asked gail to stay for all eight days to help does Reynolds, that you are on Give Peace a Chance? Yes, it does. And it's the finest tambourine playing you will ever hear. No further questions.

We can retire now, Andy. I've gone. And John gave me the original lyrics to his handwritten lyrics to Give Peace a Chance. Wow. And the book is now being developed into something I cannot talk about, but I'm very excited about.

Wow, amazing. I was very, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time and to be a 16-year-old teenage girl who didn't know the meaning of the word no and a lot of other words because you just go for it perfect amazing speaking of being in the right place at the right time gail gail was introduced to douglas adams by john cleese and douglas asked her to join his post footlights review group responsible for the legendary show so you think you feel had a key graham chapman came up with that title and i wasn't sure whether he was doing us a favor or not i've still got the original poster for it somewhere john was fantastic at helping young comedy writers he you know so do i actually when i came to brit, I lived with him and Connie Booth for the first few weeks until I could find my own flat or flat share. And John was very generous in giving comedy tutorials. He sat me down and was showing me about how to do sitcoms, how to do sketches.

And what was also fantastic, John had all his scripts in a script cupboard. He had kept everything from his career. And he always said when he wasn't at home or working in his office, feel free to go into his office and read his material because it was the greatest education a young comedy writer could have. And I did it a lot. And one day I went into John's office and there was an interloper sitting in my seat. And that interloper was a very, very tall man called Douglas Adams. I love it. You remain good friends and sparring partners. More on this in a minute john right okay so the book we're discussing is if you haven't already guessed a comedy classic the original hitchhiker's guide

to the galaxy radio scripts by douglas adams first published by pan books uh in 1985 with a forward by douglas himself and an introduction and notes by the producer jeffrey perkins i want to give it its correct title though please john the book is actually called go on the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the original radio scripts by douglas adams edited and with an introduction by jeffrey perkins who produced it with another introduction by douglas adams largely contradicting the one by jeffrey perkins brilliant, it was subsequently re-released on its 25th anniversary in 2003 and again in 2020 to mark 42 years

since the first radio broadcast in 1978. The first radio broadcast went out, indeed, on BBC Radio 4 on March 4, 1978, at the far from promising time of 10.30pm. Despite this, it became an instant cult hit and has spawned a whole range of different formats. A trilogy of five novels, which have sold over 15 million copies, stage shows, comic books, a 1981 TV series, a 1984 text adventure game, and a 2005 feature film. For those who don't know the story of these two landmark series, now called the primary and tertiary phases, as four more phases

have followed, they follow the adventures of an Englishman, Arthur Dent, who is rescued from otherwise certain death when the earth is unexpectedly destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He is rescued by his friend, Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien and comes from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, not Guildford, as Arthur Dentall was thought. Ford, it turns out, is on Earth to research a revised edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pan-galactic encyclopedia and travel guide. Arthur and Ford find themselves aboard a stolen spaceship piloted by the hip, shyster and sometime galactic president,

Zaphod Beeblebrox, where they meet the depressed robot Marvin and Trillian, the only other human survivor of Earth's destruction. That's enough plot for now. As Douglas himself wrote in a letter pitching the series to a timeout reviewer back in 1978 quote the show has some terrible revelations to make about the origins and purpose of the human race and is otherwise well a comedy i suppose which is how we are going to address it for this episode of backlisted

each of us has a slightly different angle with which to approach the series itself and Douglas' legacy. So, Joel is with us in his role as comedy writer, and he has a new book out about how comedy, including in Douglas', actually works in a technical sense. So, we will be turning to Joel for his expertise. We will look to him to for his expertise. Right. We will look to him to dissect the frog.

Yeah. Gail is a comedy writer and is also a friend and colleagues of Douglas's, so we will be turning to her for the authentic perspective of the eyewitness. Correct, Gail? That's right. I was there. You were there. John Mitchinson is the publisher of 42, the lavishly illustrated version of Douglas's archive, and someone who is close to Douglas's

circle of influence from the writer and TV producer John Lloyd to Robbie Stamp, and who is about to launch an edition of the never-before-published TV scripts for the 1981 adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I am here as a writer of memoir and a fan of Douglass's, who encountered him on half a dozen occasions as a consumer and a bookseller and a publisher, and whose own work almost certainly carries some of DNA's literary DNA, as you will shortly discover. Let me start with the question that we ask all our guests. Gail, you've kind of answered this already. So we know when you first met Douglas.

Perhaps you could tell us a bit about how you came to work with Douglas and what it was like to work with him. Okay, there's a long story. So I'd met Douglas at John Cleese's and all the rest. there's a long story. So I'd met Douglas at John Cleese's and all the rest. And, uh, it so happened.

We shared an agent, the lovely Jill Foster and Douglas and, uh, also Martin Smith from Croydon, as he was known. And, uh, Will Adams, uh,

wanted to do some, you know, wanted that we wanted to do some, you know, post Cambridge type do some, you know, post-Cambridge type things. And Jill thought it might be a good idea to put us together because I was very lucky at this stage, almost to start, I was writing television, ITV sitcoms and things like that. So I had a bit more experience and they put the four of us together. We started to write together. And was Douglas a good, God, this is a question I've always wanted to know. Was Douglas a good clack? Was he a generous audience? If you wrote something funny,

did he laugh? We were all very, very competitive. I mean, there was a lot of joy. We had a lot of ambition. We wanted to be Monty Python, but sadly there already was a Monty Python, which is, and they were quite good at what they did. So it's a very good lesson. Because when you first start out, the odds are you're imitating your heroes. You have to find your own voice. And that's what I would question, whether we had found our own voices. Because I was going through, I have our sketches here, and we wrote various sketches.

And we did end up at the Little Theatre in St. Martin's Lane in the West End. Wow, okay. And I'm very proud to say the theatre had been there for 100 years and we closed it. After us, it became Stringfellows. You brought sexy back. Nice one. So it was an exciting time, but it was also very hand to mouth okay we're going to come back to this i'm going to turn now to you joel so for people of our generation i'm sure you are going to speak to lots of us with this when did you first encounter

the work of um douglas adams well i didn't listen to the radio and my family didn't have the radio on we weren't a radio family we so i didn't know i didn't know there was radio for comedy in fact i remember when i first did a job writing for radio for uh as a as a 20 year old i'd not heard any and i was going for meetings at a building where i hadn't actually heard any of their output it's a really bad move because they find that out really quickly but i hadn't heard it i didn't know there was a thing called radio for comedy what i did know was that my my mate in the playground said there's a brilliant thing you'll like uh and this was in a nice flat-roofed uh 60s state school playground a kid came up to me with a cassette tape and said you should borrow this

and it was an episode of hitchhikers was on it with some music and some messing about and he said borrow this and listen to it and it was that classic thing of at that age you put headphones on you have the real joy of not having to play it to your family you had headphones so whereas my family actually i did know there was comedy because we had it in the car all the time my dad had hancock and um round the horn the goonsons, but it came from the library. There were vinyl records in the library. It said BBC records on them, but I didn't know where that had happened.

It wasn't television. So I was familiar with the idea of listening to radio comedy. And then the obvious thing that happens when you listen to Hitchhikers for the first time is you go, oh, I know what this is. I know people reading out jokes. That's the same as the grumble weeds. I've heard a tape of that from the, from the library. This was totally different.

And it, it was the moment you went, I remember Paul Putner saying this about that generational shift. He said that Monty Python felt like prog rock, but the next generation felt a bit more like punk. Yeah. And I think that Douglas is right between the two of those. So if not, then I've got news is punk and scar and Monty python is prog rock even after the airbrushed artwork this is somewhere in the middle of that and it's a very 1977 1978 feel of it's a bit edgy and it sounded a bit like radio

but it sounded more like music it's it's a late caravan or early national health album that's what you're saying the giveaway for me was I remember the first time I ever heard The Eagles was on one of these tapes that a friend had given me. It was on the flip side of something I had asked for. And on the flip side of it was The Eagles. And I thought, who are these people? There's no way of finding out. There wasn't a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

or an internet to look them up. And I thought, I wonder what they look like. And I thought, I think they look like Zayford Beeblebrox. I imagined them, this band, because they sang like it, without realising that The Eagles had done the music for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

And when you're in that sound world, you go, oh, it's to do with imagining what people look like. I treat this as a part of my upbringing, not just as part of my comedy education, but as part of my music education, where you are under headphones imagining the sound world that was there. And I think Hitchhikerers was a huge leap forward. I didn't imagine people behind microphones at the Paris theater.

1978 was polyester. And, you know, you have to remember that the Navy Lark had only just finished on Radio 4. It had started in 1959. Wow. So the other things that were on at the same time, you had Weekending, which was great because we all tried to cut our teeth there, a topical comedy show, but it was a Frankie Howard variety show. Thank you, Mrs. Fathering Gill, where, you know, sort of confusion reigns over a very important visitor to the ladies' guild.

You know, you have to remember, I mean, there were breakouts like the Berkus way and things like that. But Radio 4, aside from weekending, which was, I said, topical, which was fun, was not an exciting place to be. In the 50s, you had the breakthrough of Hancock and the Goons and all that. But the 70s was quite dull until Hitchhiker, which is why it was so outstanding. And the only other person who probably experimented with sound like that was Kenny Everett. Very much. Yeah, really really interesting on his radio shows i mean what that man could do with a reel-to-reel tape recorder i mean he would create sounds that are hard to do on computer today yeah yeah yeah it was the best of times and the worst of times

it was a polyester of times i think um i think and also kenny everett and beatles link there gail thank you so much. Nice one. Ting! Joel, you wanted to come in there. Yeah, I think that's why when we're talking about the radio scripts as a book, as an artifact, as a way of consuming hitchhikers, what I found sensational when I finally got a copy of the radio scripts and they were finally published in my teens, was that they told you this story. They told you the story of the making of the sounds

of the yeah because the annotations are as important as the the scripts were great when i got the goon show script which is the other big book for comedy writers in my generation that showed you how it worked it was the monty python uh script books of things like holy grail showed you rough drafts uh the goon showed you what a script looked like written down so it was a lesson in that fx and grams and batter pudding splat and things but no one in those script books was telling you how they made the noises whereas in the hitchhiker's book there are annotations and descriptions afterwards from the producer and the writer on what they were trying to do how they were doing it how they were failing to do it and explaining that the ambition was insane and then suddenly you were given a peek behind the scenes you'd consumed the one headphones it how they were failing to do it and explaining that the ambition was insane.

And then suddenly you were given a peek behind the scenes. You'd consumed the one headphones. It felt very intimate to your relationship with them. And then someone said, Hey, do you want to know how we did it? And it was the equivalent of like a Mark Lewis book on the Beatles or something. It just,

it blew my mind. One of the things that's great about the scripts book that we're talking about is it actually, although they're not presented as footnotes because they appear at the end of each episode, each chapter, nevertheless, it is a kind of proto Nicholson Baker.

It is. Footnoted approach, which many writers since, including the writer, Andy Miller have exploited as much as they can as a kind of form of humour. So we're just going to listen to a clip now. This is Douglas Adams recorded off the radio in 1981 on a show called It Makes Me Laugh about his comedic influences.

And I remember listening to this specific bit I'm going to play you, and for me it's such a strange thing, 43 years later, to hear this again. And it was the part of this show that I remember more than any other. This is Douglas talking about one of his most beloved novels. Now, again, I'm not going to tell you anything about how funny the next item is because it's clearly not nearly as funny as this real boffo we've got coming at the end. In fact, it's not really intended to be particularly funny and I'm only putting it in because I think it's wonderful.

It's a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and unfortunately I'm going to have to read it myself. Any fanatical Vonnegut admirers such as myself who hear this are going to be outraged that this situation has been forced on us. According to copyright restrictions we can only broadcast a minute of it, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to read it terribly fast because I don't have to miss any out. I may have to do it in two 30-second chunks of the pause or a lemon slice halfway through. Now, the situation, just to explain, is that the hero, Billy Pilgrim, has come unstuck in time

and is for some reason having to live his life in a totally random order. At one point he turns on the television to watch a war movie, and since he comes unstuck at that moment he is forced to watch the movie backwards. This is how it goes. American planes full of holes and wounded men took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted them into the bellows

of the planes. Over France, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their

business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American flyers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids, and Hitler turned into a baby billy pilgrim supposed that wasn't in the movie billy was extrapolating everybody turned into a baby and all humanity without exception conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named adam and eve he supposed amazing i just want to say at the age of 12, I didn't find that remotely funny, but it never left me. And I've thought about that all the time when we recorded the Vonnegut episode that we did of Batlisted last year.

I was thinking about that all the time. And to hear that again, hairs rose on my arms listening to that. It's a really peculiar experience. I want to talk about Douglas Asden as a writer of books. your experience. I want to talk about Douglas as then as a writer of books. And I want to make the point to listeners that I don't know what the expectation was for the paperback original publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Pan Books in 1979. But I can't quite believe that anyone at the publisher or Douglas thought it would go straight to the top of the bestseller list and sell a quarter of a million copies in six weeks. Gail, do you remember that period?

Do you remember when that happened? Oh, yes. I think the thing about Douglas was everything he did surprised me. Everything he did surprised me because when we were working as a foursome, or he and I would sometimes write together, very different material was being produced. And shall we say, not of still a bit undergraduate, sketches and all the rest. There was nothing groundbreaking about it. And then suddenly Douglas, when he came out with Hitchhiker, you just went, you know, what the, where did that come from? I mean, I'm not saying Douglas wasn't very funny.

I'm not saying he wasn't a genius because he was. And this sounds terrible, but there were a lot of geniuses around because it was John Cleese, it was Michael Palin and all the rest. So, but you just went, what is in your head? Now, I would receive glimpses of it every so often. He had come back from holiday and had come to my place. And we thought we'd do some work or just have some tea. And he was stretching and he just went, I've just hitchhiked around Greece. I wonder what it would be like to hitchhike around the galaxy.

And my answer was, stop wasting time and let's write a sketch. Now, maybe I'm not the most prescient of people. So when Douglas got the radio series, that was fantastic because he hadn't really done well in radio before then because Douglas was an original. He could write his own brilliant material brilliantly, but he couldn't get on weekending, and I know which I'd rather have. So after he'd done the radio version, and again, remember,

it went out very late night, it was cult and that. And when he said he was going to write the book, we went, whoa, but we didn't think we had no expectations of it selling much. Uh, and, uh, it was incredible. And ironically, Douglas and I, our work was always synchronistic that whenever he had something out, he had something out that would top it every time. So I think I had my first book out at the same time. And to be very honest, the bookshop, I mean, when I went to the bookshop in Piccadilly and saw Douglas's book, Plastering the Window, you think, why do I bother? Gail, I swear to you, we'll record an episode on that book next time.

Yeah, I'd love that. Joel, I think the idea that you could take a radio script and not so much repurpose it, but create a completely new work of art out of many of the same jokes, but also a whole load of new stuff which occurred to you while you were writing it, was a revelation to me,

even though I'm not sure I would have appreciated it at the time. So we're talking about Hitchhiker in a very Douglas-y way, as a multimedia object. It exists in many forms. I mean, it's a book about a book it's a book about an electronic book and then it turned out in all these forms and it's kind of voguish and cool to say it existed as all these different things but each one of them to a certain extent uses that medium in a way that totally adopts that medium so the

radio is all radio the book is very book the tv series with those beautiful animations you now completely associate with it uh They all use it. And the thing is, I think it's because they're all influenced by things in that genre that are the best of their sort. So when you talk about- Go on. I want to talk about Douglas's comic voice, which when it's on the radio is very, very Monty Python.

He's very in the show. As Gail said, he's come from a thing where he's completely enthralled to his heroes and the big achievement of the radio series of hitchhikers is it's the answer that monty python never found to the question they ask which is what happens if a sketch doesn't end properly and in monty python you go what you do is you don't end the sketch properly and you go cut away and what douglas doesn't it's the it's his only stroke of genius and it's the key to everything is he goes what if i didn't cut away what if we ended what if the first thing that happened was that the world ended and in monty python that at the end of a sketch you go ta-da and it would suddenly be an animation and you'd go to a different planet but in hitchhiker's he goes right i'm gonna bloody

mindedly keep writing after the end of what i'm not going to do is change setting change scene yeah i'm doing a picaresque but with the bloody mindless and the only way he does it and he does it again and again once you notice this is his trick it's brilliant he says well it'd be very improbable that anything else would happen so he uses improbability to get you through that so the answer is always it's a parody of with one bound he was free from serials it's a serial it's a parody of a sci-fi serial and you get to the end and you go he puts his heroes in a position where they can't possibly get out of it and in monty python a foot would just come down and squash them yeah and yet it is not a purely

comedic or intellectual exercise he manages to write novels where you care about what happens to the characters they are not merely uh ciphers right and i don't know how because his other big influence as you just pointed out and is really obvious is um vonnegut and what he gets from vonnegut is the idea of being in orbit above these people all of it's done from the point of view of an orbiting station all that vonnegut piece that wonderful passage i was hoping it would be that passage from slot house five all that is is digital watches are a pretty neat idea it's observing everyday humanity from an enormous height and going aren't they weird which is all a comedian's doing is you're at an angle to the universe i think it works because the heroes are us but the person writing it is in a

god-like position and it gives it both those voices you're looking down on us and you really feel for the ants below it's got both magical gail did you have to buy a copy of hitchhikers or did douglas give you of course douglas didn't give me a copy i did buy it and what it was was again the sheer the sheer eloquence of his writing. And I thought, you can write this? Because I hadn't seen the evidence of that. But to me, one of the most points of genius of it is Arthur Dent, having the innocent, the one person that everybody can identify with as everything else breaks, you know, breaks around him. And also Ford Prefect as his sidekick, who is, you know,

sort of so laid back about it. Those are the things that ground Hitchhiker for me. You know, he can swirl off into any universe, do any improbability factor and anything, but Arthur would still like a cup of tea yes gail yes i i also think one of the geniuses of the whole thing is that ford likes arthur but is simultaneously exasperated by him oh and don't don't forget don't forget ford is described as an almost immediately annoying person yeah so it's two people who are best friends who are driving each other mad.

And you keep thinking, you see that pattern in the Pythons? They're full of best friends who drive each other mad. That's classic sitcom, isn't it, Joel? Yeah, it's a peep show. We look at Hancock and Sid, or we look at The Likely Lads, or we look at Porridge. Two people who like one another and drive one another mad is one of the tropes right

one of the the silliest and most doomed projects i ever worked on was inspired by sitting in the bbc bar when there was a bbc bar with david mitchell and robert webb and i started talking about hitchhikers and they both went to a riff and and rob was being ford and david was being arthur and i pitched to the bbc i said they just undocked her i said do you want to bring hitchhikers back because these guys want to do it and then Disney wouldn't wouldn't cough up the rights it was a long conversation it went quite away but it was that feeling of going oh they're the peep show guys

they're just the peep show guys one of them's laid back one of them's uptight and that format that archetype they ported onto it as well as Fry and Laurie did onto Jeeves and Worcester. Superhands as they thought people would discuss. It's a solid setup. But it was one of those lovely things where you went, you could take two guys who are known for one thing

and do what Fry and Laurie did with Jeeves and Worcester, put them onto another thing, and they fit exactly. Because it's a classic comedy setup. But there's also something iconic about Simon Jones, because I think everyone revered him. He was two years ahead at Cambridge, and he had been through footlights and all the rest. And I think Douglas worshipped him.

I admired him, she said in quotation marks, from afar. Because he was very attractive and a great actor and all the rest. I think it would be inconceivable for me not to have Simon Jones as Arthur Dent. Yeah. Yeah. One of the joys of the scripts is him, you know, encouraging, go on, Simon, you know you can do it.

The thing about the kind of comic voice and the characters, Michael Bywater said something I thought was really interesting. He said that Adam's characters are unaware they're taking part in a joke. For an Adam's character, the shit which he himself has thrown hits the fan, which he himself has turned on, but he learns nothing. Everybody in his bizarre intergalactic menagerie, except perhaps the dolphins, emerges untainted by insider understanding. It's a deployment of bathos unmatched in literature,

and the result is a perfect salve for the intelligent young adult provoked beyond bearing by the frantic conspectus of serious post-adolescent literature. I have to say, that really sums up... Michael Bywater was a flatmate. Yeah, he was a great friend of Douglas's. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we were talking about books.

We were talking about Hitchhikers as a book. Douglas, a great force within the publishing world. So here is a clip from a program that was recorded in 2001, a series which, against Douglas's wishes, was called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, was a series of interviews by Douglas about how technology at the turn of the millennium might affect life on Earth in the years to come. And this is a short extract from the episode about books and publishing.

And we'll just play it in, and then I would like our guests and John to comment on how accurate they feel this proved to be. The traditional skills of publishing, those of editing, and particularly copy editing, and I'm speaking here just as a reader, are clearly in decline, even though these skills are at least as applicable to e-publishing as any other kind, and their absence is more and more sorely felt. But the skills that publishers have been developing instead are those of manufacturing, warehousing, doing distribution deals, and micromanaging the bulk and acid content of

paper stock. These are the skills whose usefulness is about to fall off a cliff. Then there's the issue of what happens when you're an established author, and you can't help but notice that when someone pays £10 for something you've just written, you only get £1. This represents a 900% markup. When someone goes to a bookshop to buy a book I've written, what they actually want is my story and the precise and, I hope, unique way in which I have written it. They are after a hundred thousand hand-picked words, cunningly arranged. They're not going down to the bookshop thinking, hmm, I fancy a nice little bit of wood pulp today. And yet that is 90% of what they're paying for. This nine pounds goes towards the cost of cutting down pine forests, crunching them up, spraying them with ink,

packing them into vans which drive around spraying toxic hydrocarbons over the countryside. And it also pays for a lot of very nice people called Caroline who take you out to lunch and tell you how thrilled they are to be working with you. Is this, you end up asking yourself, good value? How things have changed, A. John. How things have changed in the last 25 years

so douglas that show have you listened to that show recently it's it's rather uncanny to hear what was right and most of what douglas says is right douglas as a force within the book world what are your thoughts about that a large part of the reason for wanting to publish 42, you know, the archive, was to sort of remind people that if Douglas was a sublime comedy writer, he was also, he was real visionary as far as technology was concerned. And, you know, the stories about him getting the first Macintosh and Stephen Fry getting the second and his kind of, his ability to make technology not seem terrifying to people. He saw the future. I mean, I think if you look at AI now, he would be making a massively interesting kind of intervention in this debate. And indeed, I think when we did the big Douglas Adams show, Gail, on the South Bank, I think we all talked about what Douglas might have written if he'd

not sadly died at 49. And you can sort of see him already becoming much more interested in being a kind of, not exactly an interpreter of technology but you know he he was always pushing the boundaries um from you know the hitchhiker's game to to shut starship titanic you know it was as as joel said massively massively kind of interested in reinventing the work that he'd done in in different mediums the thing he just didn't really enjoy was the writing yeah we'll come on to that gail john was talking there about douglas left us far too soon not least probably he would be infuriated by the thought that he missed out on all this stuff that's been happening since he died what would he have made do think, of the revolution in technology in the new century?

I think he would have been leading it. Douglas did have an incredible brain. One of the worst things for us was that you had to choose between arts and sciences when you were at school because we both had brains for both and uh douglas was excited by science and also which we can get onto anything that wasn't writing was probably preferable uh you know because because writing was so hard and so torturous for him. And science excited him. He wanted to get on to the next thing. So he would have been 20 steps ahead of us all. Well, we want to get on to the next thing. And that next thing is the book we haven't actually talked about

that we're here to talk about, which is the radio scripts. So we're going to take this little break now and we'll come back to discuss the original radio scripts publication in just a moment welcome back to the 21st century join us to discuss the book which arguably we should have been discussing but maybe this was the first half of the show was the preamble to this bit which is to talk about the publication of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the original radio scripts by douglas adams and to some extent jeffrey perkins and to some extent john lloyd and these were originally published in 1985 six years after the publication of the uh first hitchhiker's, with three or four maybe novels in at this point in the Hitchhiker's saga. As people have indicated, Douglas hated writing so much

that for so long, and thanks to all the fish, he had to be locked in a hotel suite in New York with Sonny Mehta, gathering pages every day to make sure he delivered on time, or at least something before that was published and so i can see joel that the original motivation for publishing these scripts was well we need to keep you know cashing in on this phenomenon we don't quite understand um tell me how you first encountered these scripts and why these scripts are so precious to us. doesn't matter because it's a, it's a joke. It's a joke about stories. It's like Python, a joke,

the stories that don't make sense. It's a, it's a, it's a tall tale. It's a Gulliver's travels. It's just a series of stuff. What's important is the texture and the voice. And actually the reason that,

that Hitchhiker's fascinates me and fascinated me as a kid is that there wasn't a story. It kept changing when listened to the records. It was different than the TV, the events, some key bits stay the same. The great thing was having read the books was to have this radio version of it written down to it oh that's the different story the ones that's got the shoe shop jokes in it the jokes you'd forgotten from the radio when you'd read the book again and again and again it was a chance to pull that stuff into the same place where you'd read it again and

again and also to explain it what was was really lovely, it was annotated. For those who are listening who aren't specialists, the first radio series, broadly speaking, follows the pattern of the first two novels, right? And then the second radio series, which has to be written by Douglas relatively quickly, contains lots of stuff that doesn't ever reappear in in other versions or if it does it's rewritten so there isn't a concordance

between how the novels pan out and how the radio series pan out and i agree with you joel the having the radio series version written down was almost a treat in its own right and furthermore with douglas's somewhat disappointed comments about what he would have done differently it also revealed to me him as a writer it also because i didn't have the privilege that gail had working with him i went who is this guy he's brilliant everything he does appears to be amazing there are failures in the radio scripts to read and then he'll describe how it failed and it also explains something which i didn't understand about it which people often misunderstand about hitchhikers is it's not set in the future or in

space it's set in 1978 it is in a grand tradition of satire about what annoyed douglas that morning and there's the the idea it's he's not meant to be a futurologist he's not meant to predict he's like sort of insisting that 1984 doesn't work because it didn't happen in 1984 he's not meant to predict the future he's meant to tell you what he was annoyed about that morning as all great satirists do and the idea that he was annoyed that there were too many shoe shops completely over balances the show in a way that now there are no shops at all. I go, oh, isn't it nostalgic that people hated shops? Furthermore, Joel, I will suggest that one of the things that can't travel down the decades

is the ubiquity of science fiction as a popular culture genre. And not just a popular culture genre, an intellectual genre. That in the mid to late 70s, whether it was Asimov or Star Wars or Buck Rogers in the 25th century, science fiction is absolutely everywhere. That is almost the dominant narrative form of that era. And so Adams is to sci-fi what Pratchett is to fantasy, or Python is to TV forms of the late sixties and early seventies.

It's, it's riffing off, um, cliches that are already coming into being in a, in the most dominant genre of the time. And the giveaway, I think the giveaway in these, in this book is you can see that that form is then thrown very loosely over a

lot of very good observational comedy riffs of the sort he'll do in Meaning of Life and things. And you go, oh, it suddenly opened up what he was doing. It made him a writer again, rather than a sci-fi writer. And I loved seeing him out of desperation, grabbing onto petty annoyances. You could see him at his least grandiose. And I love that about these radio scripts. They're quite petty and they're very, very human. They're incredibly human because he's writing them quickly. He's passed them under the door of the toilet while they were performing.

So it's whatever was on his mind. I love that unfettered access to his brain. Well, I'll just read, Abigail, I'm going to come to you next, but I'll just read, Abigail, I'm going to come to you next, but I'll just read in the introduction what Geoffrey Perkins says. He wrote one of the forwards to this book, the late Geoffrey Perkins, referring to what Joel just said there. Douglas is also the only person I know who can write backwards. Four days before one of

the Hitchhiker's recordings, he had written only eight pages of script. He assured me he could finish it in time. On the day of the recording, after four days of furious writing, the eight pages had shrunk to six. Some people would think this was a pretty clever trick, but I've been with Douglas when he's writing and I know how he does it when he wants to change anything a word or a comma he doesn't just cross it out and carry on he takes out the typewriter and starts all over again from the top yes he is something of a perfectionist but he would also do almost anything to avoid having to write the next bit his other favorite way of putting off writing the next bit is to have a bath.

When a deadline is really pressing, he can have as many as five baths a day. Consequently, the later the script, the cleaner he gets. Still great, still great. Gail, you have selected for us your favourite of the 12 scripts, and appropriately enough, it is fit the first what is it about this opening episode that is so appealing i think it is like with a lot of things in life you always remember your first time and the very beginning of hitchhiker was so revolutionary, so different, so awe-inspiring in a lot of ways.

Look at what he establishes in one episode. Arthur Dent, destruction of, I hate, you know, spoiler alert, destruction of the earth, Ford Prefect, the Hitchhiker's Guide, all these characters. He's peopled a universe in less than 30 minutes, incredibly. But the thing about the first series was you could see that was the series Douglas had plotted out. He knew where he was going. It might have been a painful journey, but he knew from the first flip to the final plop what he wanted to do. When reading the second lot in the Radio Scripts book, it actually upset me a bit because I could sense his, which I knew only too well, his growing panic, his, you know, sort of having to get pages in. And it really was torture for him. Don't panic. That's the advice. Don't panic.

Well, the thing was, people like me weren't very kind about it because, you know, sort of... Douglas and I did have a long talk about it toward the end. And we were both laughing because it was a thing about, we all had deadlines, but I've, I've apologized to Douglas. He apologized to me toward the end that, uh, that he really was in that much pain.

And I, you know, I just thought it was partly Douglas being Douglas, but reading the scripts again, I see what he was going through. Presumably, Gail, he's dealing with not just the unexpected and phenomenal success of Hitchhikers across its various forms, but he's also the script editor of Doctor Who at this time and contributing to all sorts of other things. just the workload that he had brought upon himself while being expected to keep the standard up must, as you say, have been panic-inducing.

It's part of earning a living, because when he did the first series of Hitchhikers, which was on radio, fantastic, but radio doesn't exactly pay a lot of money and especially then maybe one i mean i don't know what douglas was earning but you could be earning something like eight pounds a minute so that didn't exactly keep the wolf from the door very long i don't know douglas especially enjoyed doctor who he i I know he didn't. He really didn't. To be honest, I mean, I know that too, but I was trying to be polite about it. Never cross Doctor Who fans.

I always feel with Douglas, John, the thing is not that he's a perfectionist, but that he just doesn't want it to suck. He's got a sense of what is good enough. But what is good enough for Douglas Adams would be way above what might be good enough for a hack or another writer. I want to ask you, John, you've chosen which episode of the original 12 from this book?

I have chosen Fit the Fifth, which is from season season one so the penultimate episode in the first season of six and i've for two reasons one is it's a great episode and two it was the first episode talking of doctor who uh there's a slightly kind of slightly grumpy note at the end where he's you know douglas is complaining about being too busy and he asked john lloyd to come and work with him. So if, again, for specialists who don't immediately know the contents of episode five, what famous beats would we find in this episode? I think the famous beats are that it is the restaurant.

You arrive through the improbability drive. They've been shot at by the cop at the end of Fit the Fourth. And they find themselves in Millieways, the restaurant in the end of the universe. And again, I love this because it's almost Python. It's a restaurant scene with a waiter. But it's almost Python. It's a restaurant scene with a waiter. But it's so Douglas. There's a brilliant cameo on the radio of Max Quartleplein, which is Roy Hud doing a kind of…

The late, great Roy Hud. The news headlines, also produced by John Lloyd. And he does a great routine, compare routine. There is also a history of the universe. I know that was one of the things that john definitely contributed kind of rather selflessly plundered one of his own books which he was writing called the guy gags which never was and was never published and it's also got occasionally there are great one-liners in there we all like if you've done six impossible things

this morning why not round it off with breakfast at millie ways the restaurant the end of the universe it's got the idea of people gathering to watch the end of the universe which is amusing idea in itself and arthur dent gets the the absolutely killer line so you mean when they're talking about the um the burger that's being served and the ultra cuisine which is is they're being very grumpy about so you mean that the universe doesn't actually end with a bang but with a wimpy which is a terrible line but it just it just also makes me think of the late 70s w.h smith and wimpies joel joel also the the the episode john is talking about is presented differently on the LPs and again, differently on the telly and differently in other formats.

Douglas's willingness to go back and rewrite every episode beyond episode four to come up with new ideas that made him laugh more. You know, if I say to you on the TV series, we have Peter Davison cameoing as a cow, but then we also have in the radio series Hot Black. Do we have this in the radio series or is this only on the LPs? Hot Black Desiato, the rock band. Hot Black's on the TV, but not in the…

The TV, is it? I mean, you know, it's sort of the branching, as we would call it now, the branching of different outcomes which seems very appropriate to the video game yeah the text video game for which douglas also wrote a whole load of new material yeah the thing is that the plot the plot doesn't matter one of the delightful things about hitchhikers as a piece of comedy writing is you are in it for the voice and the texture and the ideas in something which has got less ideas and character and comedy you might worry about who done it you might worry about are they going to get the plans you might worry about the mcguffin they might be on a mission or a quest

what i love about douglas is because these are called fits fit the first that's lewis carroll the hunting of the snark the idea and six impossible things before breakfast is lewis carroll the idea is it's an illogical stream of logic it's illogic taken to a logical extreme or vice versa all that matters is the next unit of the module should have connected the previous unit of the module very computer programming kind of idea it is a modular story so every time you hear it it's a bit like playing a video game you might go left problem go right i love that about it because because what it means is he cannot lean back on something as lazy as story i mean one of the things that's lovely about it is the characters

don't want to do anything. So they've got no, they're not policemen or soldiers. They've not got a mission. They literally, and the great thing about Hitchhiker's is the mission might be to make a cup of tea. It's a parody of storytelling, which means that if you're a comedy fan, I love the fact that

comedy is paramount and plot is second. Alright, I'm going to ask you then, in the whole restaurant at the end of the universe scenario which might take in in the restaurant itself the fact the universe is ending the various appearances of roy hud the prophet zarquan you know the the young conservatives that's a very good joke about young conservatives. Oh, there is. What do you think is the comedic centre of that bit? What is the bit that everything, every branch comes off? It comes off where it always comes off,

which is what was it like in 1978? And the thing that I love most about Hitchcock is this is a period novel as much as woodhouses or evelyn war it's a period story you can see 1978 in every single bit of this if you make and they did a great job of it you make a 2005 sci-fi film about hitchhikers and you make it about apple douglas is delighted but there aren't bypasses there's no mr prosser yeah bypass is a 1978 idea yeah the idea is this is all about what it felt like to be in radio production which is arthur dent's job don't forget this is all it's like to be that guy the restaurant the end of the universe is a version

of every restaurant douglas has been to the prism of hitchhikers doesn't show you the galaxy it shows you the microcosm of ordinary life I love the domesticity of Hitchhikers the fact that it's about what 1978 felt like the comic centre of the restaurant

at the end of the universe is in that joke not with a bang but with a wimpy they go for a wimpy it's the most 70s thing possible it's a restaurant it's a restaurant

alright Gail I want to ask you you must have been to a restaurant with Douglas Adams the author of the theory of bistronomics. Bistromatics.

What was it like to eat a meal with Douglas Adams? Big meals. Well, we didn't go out a lot. We tended to stay in, you know. Yeah. I was going to say, one of the important things about Douglas at his best was he found the world awfully amusing. He was always telling himself a joke. He could look at you, he could look at, you know, sort of whatever was happening in the world. And smirk is the wrong word, but it really was sheer enjoyment in everything he saw. So yes, Joel, you're right. He would be looking at 1978 and the things around him.

Food was very important to us, but before we had the money for it, we ate some very bad meals. That's clear. some very bad meals. That's clear. My favourite episode of the script or the radio series as memorialised in this volume is the eighth episode, specifically because of the appearance of what Douglas called the total perspective vortex.

Long-time listeners to this show will know that I believe that all the best books are books about books. And Joel said, you know, what is Hitchhiker's, if not a book about a book about a book about, and on we go and on we go. So for me, the total perspective vortex is a metaphor for literature. I've felt that for many years the idea that this you put yourself into this machine that shows you your significance in the general place of things and it's a tiny speck on a tiny dot saying you are here while showing you everything around

it if that isn't literature well i don't know what is are you saying the british library stacks where you can go and have a total perspective vortex you can see all the books and all the thoughts ever written and in it somewhere if you're very lucky and you thought is one book you wrote yeah right hellish all authors are zephyr biebelbrox they put them into the you put them into the total perspective vortex and they go out what What did you learn? I learned I'm a pretty great guy. I'm a book published. That's the ego required to keep doing it, right?

Hoopy, man. Hoopy, man. And also, can I just say, apropos of, say, for Beaverbrooks, you know, I didn't realize, Gail and Joel, when I was reading this as a kid, that it was actually a prediction of what donald trump would be uh you know not merely a big personality but yeah a useful idiot who could be put to the front of whatever else was going on behind him them whatever. That seems to me really on point,

considering where we are now. I was thinking about that last time I read it and thought, that's a great satire. And I thought, hang on, what else is a royal family? I went, oh, you'd be able to see that from 78 as well. The idea of like a sort of a figurehead monarch. I went, oh, we had one of those. In fact, actually, we've still got them, haven't we? It was suddenly realising that it has ever been true.

You could have written that in a 17th century satire as well, I think. Can I give you a quote from one of the books? We're talking about Donald Trump and prescience. And this is Douglas' writing about the president. And on those criteria, Seyfried Bibelbrox is one of the most successful presidents the galaxy has ever had. He's already spent two of his 10 presidential years in prison for fraud. Wow.

I mean, how Trumpian is that? Trump is like the less likable Seyfried Beeblebrox. He's another head, another head hidden inside the trousers at the back. Yeah. Let me ask you then, Joel, finally, which episode you chose? Which is your favourite and why? Okay, probably the first one I heard, I think it's the eighth. It's the ninth.

It's the one after Total Perspective of Vortex. And the reason why i love that is i really remember it because it had the new traumatic drinks dispenser which i thought was a beautiful description and again a perfect thing you get oh it's about ai and about you ask for a question from a computer and it doesn't understand the meaning you phrase the question wrong yeah it's very very very modern and very very technological i think it's a drink dispenser it's just what would be in the corner of the BBC canteen.

I love the fact that Douglas's annoyance or wonder at technology has carried on and is still applicable, like 1984 is still applicable to modern politics, despite being thoroughly about its time. I love that that made me laugh when I was a kid and I went, oh, that's what a drinks machine's like. And now I go, oh, that's what my computer's like.

And the core of it is the human reaction to the technology rather than the technology itself. I love the annoyance that it won't do what he wants. It's such a simple joke. In terms of also what Gail was saying earlier about the influence of Python, the new traumatic drinks dispenser argument is a variation of the cheese shop sketch.

Isn't it? It's like the kind of the frustration of asking for one thing and being given a series of excuses why you can't have it. And then off the back of what was effectively a Python sketch about its abundance. There's supposed to be abundance and there's no abundance. And then that turns into a plot point. And I love the fact that it becomes the reason why they then can't escape something. I like the relentless march of Douglas's logic past the end of a Python sketch so that it affects the next Python sketch. And what he's doing is effectively that stream of consciousness that we got from Python.

He then applies to fantasy plotting and says, look, anything could happen next. Hence the modular nature of it. And very often what happens next is the least likely possible thing. The number of times something evolves into something impossible or they fall off something, it's impossible to fly, so we'll fly. Once you start spotting that he's always doing that, the delight is to say, whatever you didn't see coming, I am a storyteller. That's what will happen. I love that. didn't see coming i am a storyteller that's what will happen i love that yeah yeah perfect yeah that's very true joel the idea that if in a spot simply evolve your way out of it is an adamsian trope yeah or use a towel i mean the invention of the towel is so brilliant

in you know never has a towel been used in so many different ways and to be very honest towels were very close to douglas's heart because he was usually in one yeah and in the bath yeah yeah i mean if you wanted to find douglas he would be in the bath but i was going to say as well in a funny way douglas could cope with technology sometimes better than he could cope with people right go on well pack that for me a bit okay let's let's try let's try this now this is a bit cliche but remember went to a boys all boys school you know there were women at cambridge but it was a very male enclave that he was in. So I don't think he was always great at dealing with women in a sophisticated way at that age, but I suppose none of us were sophisticated. Also, it's worth pointing out that spot the women in the whole hitchhiker's canon.

You know, Trillian was a woman. Trillian wasn't a girl at first. whole hitchhiker's you know in the whole hitchhiker's canon yeah uh you know trill a trillion was was a woman trillion wasn't a girl at first douglas first wrote her as a male character and then we're into lintilla and you just clone her as often as possible okay that's really interesting so there's that also it's back to, it was a very, very competitive group at a time everybody was desperate to succeed. And the chaps were competitive. And I don't think Douglas always liked sharing his toys. We know John Lloyd helped him out,

but Douglas didn't necessarily like being beholden, and it was his baby. And I think that tends to be a recurrent theme. And I don't think Douglas always knew how to deal with people. This sounds very petulant, if he didn't get his own way. He was a complex chap. Wonderful, but not the easiest at all times. And Gail, no one gets to write for Monty Python towards the end of the TV run of Python with Graham Chapman without being terribly ambitious, presumably. Yes, I mean, who wouldn't have written with Graham? But like I always like to say, whoever thought in a writing partnership

that Douglas would be the reliable one? Well, I want to ask John, you know, you know John Lloyd. John Lloyd's a friend of yours. I'm sure we've all worked with John or met John. How does he feel about his contribution to Hitchhikers at this point? You know, it was a source of some, it was a bone of contention for a while, I know, but. I think he was very hurt. I mean, Douglas, just to be, I'm sure John won't mind me saying this but just to echo what what gail has said i mean

douglas sacked john by sticking a note under the door i mean it's very odd behavior they were kind of working in in offices next door to one yeah and he was he was he was very hurt by it and i think it's you know he sometimes says to me in his slightly eeyoreish way you know every i swish everybody all the time doesn't want to ask me about time with deyore-ish way, you know, I swish everybody all the time doesn't want to ask me about time with Douglas. He sacked me, you know? It's like, but at the same time, he loved him. I think you get what Gail said.

There's something that Michael Bywater said. He says, you know, that Douglas was a dreadful bugger, a finger-wagging, minotaur-roaring sod who caused everyone around him terrible trouble because simply he hated his work. The main outlet for thinking was writing, which he didn't like doing, and writing alone, which he didn't like being. That meant there was trouble ahead. I loved him, but our friendship in the end was almost all about him. And I think often when you have the conversations with people that everybody will always say that they love him and he was utterly lovable. But he was, as Gail said, he was a kind of difficult perfectionist.

And he found the process of writing almost unendurable because I think his brain worked at several speeds faster than his ability to sit down and write the ideas down. Also, Joel, as Gail suggests, a product of his time, place and class, you know, all these stories about how Douglas treated his collaborators remind me terribly of members of Genesis or Pink Floyd being incapable of communicating with one another, right? You know, those charterhouse school boys who who form groups and yet have no mechanism to actually communicate beyond music we want we could talk about the beatles it doesn't have to be charters but you know what i mean right it's like the kind of um i'm a collaborator but at the same time it's every man for himself

it comes out in the writing the writing is someone who is that at the same time, it's every man for himself. It comes out in the writing. The writing is someone who is that brilliant phrase that was used. It's not originally, but it was used of Peter Cook, that you're at a slight angle to the universe. And the whole point about this book is that it is observed from various angles that aren't a normal human. There are aliens observing us. There is an alien who's one of the heroes who's observing us. They refer to humans as sort of monkey man and things the idea is you're not a member of the

human race i love in science fiction i was talking to some autistic students recently they said they love in science fiction there's always a character who doesn't understand what the humans are up to there's always a robot or an alien who goes what is this thing called kissing science fiction really suits that that slight angle to the universe thing of going oh the things that the neurotypical people find really easy i find slightly difficult and i think you can see in douglas's love of science fiction and his love of being in orbit above us and saying what he thinks about us a slight spockishness which i think speaks of right either a sort of brain or a sort of upbringing that is

standing at the side going, I'll stand at the side of the party and I will watch from here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well put. If I may, there was, there was,

there was one other point that you have to remember Hitchhikers was an, was an unprecedented hit. First, the radio show, I said not much money there, but it became a cult. And then the book, which went, well, we didn't use the word viral then, bestseller. And Douglas was always petrified because he'd had such a huge hit early on that he wouldn't be able to replicate it. That was Douglas's fear. It was the fear of his own success. He's reluctant to go back to hitchhikers. He wants to find the next thing that will both interest him but also potentially open up another field to him, be it internet or CD-ROM or Dirk Gently or Last Chance to See or whatever.

Yes, absolutely. Listen, we have to wind up in a minute, so I want to ask each of you, to the neophyte who has never, for some incredible reason, never encountered the worlds of Douglas Adams, if they were to engage with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which version should they go to first? I will start with you, Joel. The best-selling novel, because it's meant to get people into it. It's the entry-level drug, I think. It's the one that really worked, didn't it? Yeah. Okay. The hit. You're saying the hit. Go with the hit. Go for the hit. Go with the single. What was the number one? What was the

number one? Gail, if you're starting with Hitchhikers, where should you start? Start with the radio series, because not only was it Douglas's exquisite writing, but that cast of actors. He had some of the best actors and character people in the business because they would do radio. Yeah. I mean, aside from Simon Jones, who was brilliant, Peter Jones is the book.

Oh, Peter Jones, Yes, hear, hear. You know, Roy Hud. It was the galaxy of the best of British and pure joy. Can I just say Geoff McGiven? Because I know Geoff McGiven. And if we don't say Geoff McGiven, Geoff McGiven will say, why didn't you say Geoff McGiven? Geoff McGiven is wonderful as Ford Prefect.

So, John, if somebody's starting with hitchhikers, where should they begin? Well, look, I've got to go, haven't I? You've given me no space to move. I've got to say, go to the 1981 TV show because it's bloody mad and it's brilliant. Are there scripts coming, John? Of course.

In book form? What I will say, and, you know, is apart from the hilariousness of the animatronic head, which I think most of the budget for the series went on, the brilliance of the graphics. I don't think you can, the actual realisation of a kind of an electronic book. It's the first time most of it, which Kevin John Davis

had helped with. I think if you're, particularly for a younger, as I say, for a younger audience, then the TV show has still got a lot going for it. And yes, indeed, there are scripts coming, Andy. Thank you for pointing that out and reminding me. You're welcome, you're welcome. I would suggest listeners go straight,

the younger listeners keen on the so-called vinyls should direct themselves to the double lp adaptation of the radio scripts re-recorded for copyright reasons but actually tweaked by douglas to create the kind of best possible audio version and in the and until quite recently these these lps the only way you could get them was by them second hand but they've they've put them out on cd and now they're on audible even though here's the thing they're a needle drop from the actual LPs because presumably nobody knows where the tapes are anymore. Those are my preferred favourite versions of Hitchhikers, yeah,

complete with hypnosis cover as well, like the original paperback was. Well, John, if only this could exist in some quantum realm where it could go on for many, many hours. But unfortunately, our producer, Nicky, the Geoffrey Perkins of our operation, is saying, for Christ's sake, wind up. So, John, take us out, please. Well, it's time for us, much like Arthur Dent at the end of the second series on radio, to leave Ford, Zafod and the guys' publisher, Zarniwoop, to ponder the mysteries of the universe with only the man

in the shack to help them. Anyway, thanks, huge thanks, to Joel and Gail for giving us the chance to revisit this old favourite in all its many variant forms. And to Nicky Birch for patiently turning our collective enthusiasms

into what we hope will be a broadcastable podcast. Let's see. Let's see. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 212 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose

Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still delighted to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, the Ether Web. Does that sound right from here? Shikers, I want to say, the Ether Web. Sub Ethernet. Ethernet.

Thank you, Joel. Thank you. And wherever else you feel compelled to write from. If you want to hear Backlisted early and without ads, subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lot listener level for a monthly fee that's much less than $30, you'll get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month.

It features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. Those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out. Like this. Liz Ellicott, thank you.

Merrin Shaw, thank you. Shandy, like this. Liz Ellicott, thank you. Merrin Shaw, thank you. Shandy, thank you. Kevin McKeegan, thank you. Richard Meehan, thank you. Sonia Walga, thank you. Jane Azari, thank you. Leah Cooper, thank you. Lee Ashworth, thank you.

Tom Rawlinson, thank you. And finally, therefore, let me first ask Joel, is there anything else you would like to add that we haven't covered on this topic or the topic of The Hitchhiker's Guide or Douglas Adams or any other related topics? Go. Only because I brought along my copy of,

my very, very battered copy of The Meaning of Lif. The Meaning of Lif is amazing. And one of my favourite things about The Meaning of Lif is that the book itself is funny, observations about the world. But the key thing that made me laugh first was the index. And I think this is Douglas as a man

and John Lloyd, of course, who wrote this with him, understanding how a book works. And it's a totally hitchhiker's thing that the index, The Meaning of Lif, should be as funny as the book. So I'm just going to read this out very quickly trousers elderly broats fissile nether poppleton garish twemlow green inflatable hubie roguish minchin hampton soaking isha stained bodily Isha, Stained, Botley, Piddletrentide, Too Long, Malibu, Wooden, Goose Creeves, Wrong Pair Of, Duggleby.

A book where the index is funny is a book with someone who understands comedy has written and who understands books. Brilliant. Absolutely wonderful. Gail, is there anything you would like to add, you wish to add to this discussion that we didn't cover? Is there anything you would like to add, you wish to add to this discussion that we didn't cover? No, just to say I'm glad I got to share the universe with Douglas for a while. It was an incredible hoot. And, you know, sort of, again, to quote Eric Idle, you should have been there. Yeah, OK. Listen, I will be failing in my duty to all our listeners, to you, Gail, to Joel,

if as an Adams superfan, I didn't mention the single greatest joke of Douglas's career, which has been making me and Joel laugh since 1981. And that was in one of the not books from tying in with not the nine o'clock news douglas was responsible for writing a uh the name of a book that you could uh available from the publisher which was called

doctor who and the shreddies of nabisco still still the greatest joke of all time for me and i hope for many other listeners so thank you so much gail and joel this has been absolutely wonderful we battled all sorts of adverse circumstances to get here across the universe so thank you thank you so much uh john anything you want to just take just one last lovely little note lovely little note from Douglas to himself in the middle of when he's trying to write

the life, the universe and everything. And he says, the world is too magical a place to be constrained by the limits of our conceptions of it. Go to the sea, feel the rain, swim with the dolphins, eat the fish. Thank you, Douglas Adams. Yes, thank you, Douglas.

And thank you, Joel and Gail. And see you next time, everybody. See you in Fortnight. See you, now. Bye. Bye. So long. Thanks for all the listening. Bye. Love it.