Master of the universe
Searching for the meaning to life, the universe and everything? MARION MCMULLEN looks at how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came up with the answer 42... 42 years ago
‘IWANTED to be a writer-performer like the Pythons,” writer Douglas Adams once admitted. “In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.”
The creator of sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy turned his hand to everything from cleaning chicken sheds to working as a bodyguard to make ends meet before his talent for writing came to the fore.
He wrote with Monty Python’s Graham Chapman for a while and was working as a radio producer at the BBC when the idea for a new style of sci-fi radio series took off. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was first aired 42 years ago in 1978 and followed the intergalactic misadventures of mild-mannered, dressing-gown wearing Earth man, Arthur Dent, and his alien friend, Ford Prefect.
The science fiction comedy was described in the Radio Times at the time as “an epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day”.
The series also featured super-computer Deep Thought who was tasked with solving the “ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. His solution was the enigmatic 42.
Douglas later said he chose 42 because it was the funniest-sounding of all two digit numbers explaining “a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it’s the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents”.
The radio series produced by Simon Brett also introduced listeners to Marvin the paranoid android, two-headed megalomanic Zaphod Beeblebrox and, of course, the Guide itself which featured the calming instruction Don’t Panic in huge letters across the cover and was narrated by Peter Jones. It was packed with useful information about everything from bad Vogon poetry to Babel fish. The entry for Earth, however, contained just one word... “harmless”.
The series was such a success that television, books, a computer game, film, record albums, a stage production and even a bath towel followed because, as the Guide pointed out, “a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have”.
The BBC’s sci-fi cult classic was adapted for television in 1981 following the success of a second radio series. Many of the original cast reprised their roles including Simon Jones as Arthur Dent and Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod. Douglas Adams himself appeared in several scenes and even stripped off naked to walk into the sea when the actor hired for the role called in sick.
The original book has gone on to sell more than 15 million copies and all five volumes including The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish; and Mostly Harmless have been reissued for the 42nd anniversary while the radio series recently aired on BBC Radio 4. Douglas himself once said: “I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker’s. It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.”
He also memorably said “getting a film made in Hollywood was like trying to cook a steak by having a bunch of people come into the room and breathe on it” and he was in LA in 2001 working on a film version when he sadly suffered a fatal heart attack during a gym workout at Santa Barbara.
He was 49.
The day before his untimely death it was announced asteroid 18610 had been named Arthurdent after his Hitchhiker’s character, but he never lived to see the movie version of his screenplay which came out four years after his death with Martin Freeman as Arthur, Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide and Dame Helen Mirren as the voice of computer Deep Thought. Douglas and Stephen Fry were friends and had both graduated from Cambridge University.
Doulgas, who often proudly pointed out that his initials Douglas Noel Adams spelled out DNA, was also invited to write for Doctor Who at the same time as the commission for the second radio series of Hitchhiker’s also came through. He used to laugh: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
He wrote several Doctor Who scripts for Tom Baker, but most did not make it to the small screen because of industrial action at the time, but Douglas used to say: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”