The Idea

One night in 1971 a 19 year old English hitchhiker named
Douglas Adams lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria. He
had with him a borrowed copy of Hitch Hiker's Guide to
Europe by Ken Walsh. "... and when the stars came out it
occurred to me that if only someone would write a Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a
shot."

The First Radio Series

Seven years later he wrote it himself. After completing a BA in English Literature and working on various writing and performance projects¹, Douglas started working on a science fiction/comedy radio series. Originally, he had the idea of writing a series called 'Ends of the Earth' in which the world was destroyed in various ways. However, as he began to write the first episode he introduced an alien named Ford Prefect and in a flash of inspiration
decided that he should be a researcher for the fictitious
Guide, and the series was renamed 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

The producer of the first episode was Simon Brett but he left
and was succeeded by Geoffrey Perkins. "Douglas Adams knew
from the start that he wanted to do something very different
with the sound of the show. He wanted to apply the kind of
production techniques used on, say, a Pink Floyd album to a
radio show," reads an unattributed quote on the BBC website,
probably by Geoffrey Perkins. Douglas recalled spending weeks in
an underground studio with Geoffrey and the sound engineers, sometimes taking as long on a single sound effect as other people took on a whole series. Douglas said, "... I felt that myself and the other people working on it... all created something that really felt groundbreaking at the time. Or rather, it felt like we were completely mad at the time." Geoffrey also said, "Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end."

The Story

The main character is an Englishman named Arthur Dent, who wakes up one morning to discover that his house is about to be bulldozed by the local council to build a bypass. His problems rapidly increase,
however, as he discovers that the entire Earth is about to be
demolished by aliens called Vogons, ostensibly to make way for a hyperspatial express route. Arthur escapes with help from his friend Ford Prefect² and soon meets up with Ford's semi-cousin, the two-headed three-armed ex-Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, as well as an astrophysicist named Trillian³ and a chronically depressed robot named Marvin⁴. Ford has with him his electronic copy of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which contains entries on just about everything⁵. They all explore the universe in a stolen starship powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive, and learn the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything, which turns out to be the number 42.

The Importance of Towels

One of the themes of the series is the importance of towels.
"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an
interstellar hitchhiker can have... any man who can hitch the
length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle
against terrible odds, win through and still know where his
towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with," says the Guide.
Douglas explained where the idea came from: "I was
vacationing with friends in Greece some years back. Every
morning they'd have to sit around and wait for me because I
couldn't find my blessed towel... I came to feel that someone
really together, one who was well organised, would always know
where his towel is."

Dates

There were originally six episodes⁶ in the radio series, which were broadcast on 8 March, 15 March, 22 March, 29 March, 5 April and 12 April. Douglas' friend John Lloyd co-wrote the fifth and sixth episodes. Later that year, a seventh episode was recorded and it was broadcast on 24 December. It became known as the 'Christmas episode' although it didn't contain any references to Christmas. In later replays of the radio shows and releases of recordings, it was bundled in with episodes from the second series (see below).

The Cast

Simon Jones played Arthur Dent, Geoffrey McGiven played Ford Prefect, Mark Wing-Davey played Zaphod Beeblebrox, Susan Sheridan played Trillian, Stephen Moore played Marvin and the famous character actor Peter Jones was the voice of the Guide. Paddy Kingsland provided music and sound effects for the series, including the theme music, a reworking of 'The Journey of the Sorceror' by The Eagles.

The Awards

The series rapidly grew in popularity. It won three awards: the Imperial Tobacco Award in 1978, the Sony Award in 1979 and the
Society of Authors/Pye Awards 'Best Programme for Young People'
in 1980. It was also the only radio show ever to be nominated
for the Hugo science fiction awards, in 1979, in the 'Dramatic
Presentation' category.

The First Book

An English publisher, Pan Books, became interested in the
series and commissioned Douglas to write a book based on it.
Like many writers, he suffered from writer's block and found it
very difficult. "After a lot of procrastination and hiding and
inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two
thirds of it done." It was an expanded version of the
first four episodes of the radio series, with a few changes.
It was published in September 1979 and soon reached number one
on the Sunday Times mass market best-seller list.
Douglas was 27 years old. By 1984, 1,000,000 copies of the
book had been sold and he received an award from his publisher,
a 'Golden Pan'. The book was translated into a number of
languages: Dutch, German, Hebrew, Finnish, French and Swedish.
In 1996, it was selected by Waterstone's Books/Channel
Four for their list of the 'One Hundred Greatest Books of the
Century', at number 24.

The Second Radio Series

In early 1980 Douglas Adams created another five radio
episodes, continuing on from where the previous ones had left
off. They were again broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on January 13,
21, 22, 24 and 25. Unlike the first series, which had received
no publicity, it was advertised on the front cover of Radio
Times. This was almost unheard of in those days.
The journalist Nicholas Wroe wrote, "It is possible to
track the movement of Adams's life even between the first and second
series of the radio show. In the first there were a lot of
jokes about pubs and being without any money. The second had
more jokes about expensive restaurants and accountants."
The first series had ended with the two main characters Arthur
and Ford trapped on prehistoric Earth. Using Ford's towel they
escape and rejoin the others on the starship. The listeners
discover the real reason the Earth was destroyed, Zaphod finds
out why he convinced himself to run for Galactic President and
he and Trillian meet the real ruler of the universe.

The Second Book

Douglas wrote a second book titled The Restaurant at the end
of the Universe which was published towards the end of
1980. It was based on episodes from both radio series: 7, 8,
9, 10, 11, 12, 5 and 6 in that order. The title refers to an extravagantly expensive restaurant that the characters visit in which they watch the universe explode for their pleasure (episode 5 of the radio series). That idea came from a song, 'Grand Hotel' by Procol Harlem. The book ends with the characters splitting up and Ford and Arthur being trapped on prehistoric Earth with a group of unwanted hairdressers, management consultants, telephone sanitizers etc from another planet (episode 6 of the radio series). The book was as successful as the first one. Douglas received another 'Golden Pan' award for it and it was translated into five foreign languages.

The TV Series

In January 1981 the BBC broadcast a television mini-series of six shows based on the first six episodes of the radio series. Alan Bell
produced it while John Lloyd was the associate producer. Some
of the actors from the radio series appeared on the tv shows
too. Arthur Dent, Zaphod and the Guide were played by the
same people. This time David Dixon played Ford Prefect, Sandra
Dickinson played Trillian and David Learner and Stephen Moore
played Marvin's body and voice respectively. The series won
three BAFTA (British Association of Film and Television Arts)
awards for 'Best TV Graphics', 'Best VTR Editing' and 'Best
Sound'.

The Third Book

In 1982 Douglas' third book, Life, the Universe, and
Everything, was simultaneously published in England and the
USA. The book is mainly about Arthur and Ford, however,
Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin appear in it too. It has a strong cricket theme. In the book Arthur and Ford escape from prehistoric Earth by jumping on a passing Chesterfield sofa and meet up with their friend Slartibartfast, vice president of the Campaign for Real Time. They travel around the universe searching for parts of the Wikket Gate to save the universe from destruction by robots from the planet Krikkit. By the end of the year the book and the previous two books were all on the New York Times and Publishers'
Weekly bestseller lists. Douglas received another 'Golden
Pan' award and the book was translated into six foreign
languages.

The Computer Game

Two years later Infocom, the computer game company, released a
text adventure game based on the first Hitchhiker's book.
Douglas developed the ideas and program flow while Infocom's
Steve Meretzky did the coding. It was the company's first game
based on a novel and was very successful, selling 350,000
copies and winning an award from Thames TV the following year.
Its difficulty level was 'extreme'. The game starts with the
player taking on the role of Arthur Dent waking up just as a
bulldozer arrives to demolish his house. The gameplay later
diverges from the plot of the book and the player can take on the role of other characters. The gameplay requires lateral
thinking. The game was written as a data file which could be
read by an interpreter program. Interpreters were developed
for a number of different computers: Acorn, Apple, Atari,
Commodore, Gameboy, IBM PC (DOS, OS/2 and Windows), UNIX
systems etc. A version was also developed in Java and can
be played on Douglas' website. However, it doesn't allow the player to save the game as the other versions do.

The Fourth Book

A fourth book, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish was
published in late 1984. With typical humour Douglas still
called the series a 'trilogy'. In the book Arthur Dent arrives
on a version of the Earth that dolphins have retrieved from
another dimension to replace the one that has been destroyed.
Most of the book is about Arthur's relationship with
his new girlfriend Fenchurch rather than the wild and zany
galactic adventures of the previous books. It ends with Arthur, Fenchurch, Ford and Marvin visiting another planet to view God's final message to his creation. Douglas wrote the book because he had been asked to but said a few years later, "... to be honest, I really shouldn't have written [it], and I felt that when I was writing it. I did the best I could, but it wasn't, you know, really from the heart." However, it too was translated into a number of languages.

The Fifth Book

Douglas took a break from Hitchhiker's to work on other things,
but eventually wrote a fifth book in the 'trilogy', Mostly
Harmless, which was published in 1992. It was translated
into five languages. In it we meet two versions of Trillian:
one living on Earth in an alternative reality and one working
as a time-travelling galactic reporter. Arthur wanders around
the universe lost before settling down on a planet to make
sandwiches, only to be confronted by a daughter whom he didn't
know he had. Meanwhile, Ford attempts to stop the Vogons from
using a corrupted version of the Guide to destroy all of the
Earths. The book has a sad ending. Douglas said of it: "...
it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple - I
was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that
I don't want to go into..."

The Website

In 1999, Douglas Adams and two friends Robbie Stamp and Richard Creasey set up the website 'H2G2'⁷. Their aim was to create a real life version of the Guide. In February 2001 they handed over control of it to the BBC. People all over the world can register as 'researchers' and write short articles on different topics. Examples of existing topics are: 'Etiquette for Chess Spectators', 'Evil from a Western Perspective',
'Alaskan Fish Plants' and 'How Soap Works'.

Popularity

To date, over 15 million copies of Douglas' books have been sold worldwide, including the Hitchhiker's 'trilogy' and five non-Hitchhiker books. Versions of Hitchhiker's appeared in a number of other forms: record albums, a book of the radio scripts, stage
adaptations, cassette recordings read by Stephen Moore and
Douglas Adams, CDs, videos and DVDs of the tv shows, comics (including electronic versions) by DC Comics and a bath towel.

When Douglas was asked by a fan club in 1998 the reason for the enduring appeal of Hitchhiker's he said, "Well, I don't know. All I
know is that I worked very hard at it... I suspect that the
amount that people have liked it is not unrelated to the amount
of work I put into it." A reviewer, Christopher Cerf, said, "He seamlessly blended world-class intelligence - and a daunting knowledge
about an impossible variety of subjects... - with transcendental silliness; technophobia with a lust for, and fascination with, every high tech toy imaginable; deep cynicism about virtually everything with an effusively joyful spirit; and one of the quickest wits on the planet with a relentless perfectionism in pursuing his craft." Douglas' friend Stephen Fry said, "Douglas has in common with certain rare artists... the ability to make the beholder feel that he is
addressing them and them alone: I think this in part explains
the immense strength and fervour of his 'fan base'..." A long-time fan, James Cullen, said, "Hitchhiker's Guide has entered into
the collective consciousness." What he liked most about the book was "the use of language to enable strangeness to seem quite possible and perhaps probable. There was a strong sense that it was founded in a real understanding of physics."

Tributes

Sadly, Douglas Adams passed away on 11 May, 2001 following a
sudden heart attack. He was 49 years old. He left behind his
wife Jane and six year old daughter Polly. As news of his
death spread around the world, thousands of people posted
tributes on the message forum of his personal website, his forum on H2G2 and on numerous other websites, e-mail lists, newsletters, newspapers, magazines etc. Fans suggested that a day be declared Towel Day in his honour, and May 25 was chosen, fairly arbitrarily. Parties were held in a number of countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway,
South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

Douglas had been working on a new novel at the time of his
death, provisionally titled The Salmon of Doubt. He
originally intended it to be one of his spoof detective novels,
but decided that it wasn't working and considered using the
material in a sixth Hitchhiker book instead. That will never
happen, however, some of Douglas' friends and associates put
together a book titled The Salmon of Doubt which was
published in 2002 as a posthumous tribute. It contains a
biography, speeches and articles Douglas wrote on various
topics, a short story he wrote about Zaphod and some of the
material from drafts of his novel.

The Future

One form in which Hitchhiker's hasn't yet appeared is film.
Douglas travelled to Los Angeles in 1983 to write a script for
one, based on the first book. He wrote many versions over the years, discussed the project with a number of people in Hollywood and tried hard to get it produced but without success. He moved to Santa Barbara with his family in 1999 and was working on the project at the
time of his death. He once compared the process of having a
Hollywood film made to "trying to grill a steak by having a
succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it."
However, his ex-agent Ed Victor said, "Ironically since
Douglas's death things have started to look better for the film
because a lot of people like me have determined that this film
must be made in some kind of honour to him..." The film news website Empire Online said recently that the film is likely to go ahead, and that the director is likely to be Jay Roach (of Austin Powers fame). The film is in pre-production and Robbie Stamp and Douglas Adams are credited as producers. As long as everyone concerned knows where their towel is, it will be successful.

Further Reading

Adams, Douglas, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide. USA, Random House, 1986.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy section of the BBC website.

Guzzardi, Peter (editor), The Salmon of Doubt. England, Macmillan, 2002.

Hughes, Nathan, Douglas Adams FAQ.

Douglas Adams' website.

Gregg Pearlman's website.

Towel Day website.

CountingDown website.

Empire Online website.