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This is the story of a book,
a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book,
it is also a highly successful one,
more popular than The Celestial Homecare Omnibus.
Better selling then 53 More Things to Do in Zero Gravity.
And more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy
of philosophical blockbusters,
Where God Went Wrong,
Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes,
and Who Is This God Person, Anyway?
As kids, we were fascinated by the future.
Unlike most generations before us,
we knew for sure that it was going to be different.
We just didn't know what it would be.
Would there be space travel?
Would there be time travel?
But I guess we can say that our future is, for a while,
going to be dominated by technology.
Have a look at this. What is it?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an electronic book.
Tell you everything you want to know.
Let's imagine a device like this for a moment.
In the real world, if you want to know
what the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower looks like,
you have to go there.
In the soft world, you could ask a guide device
to show you what it looks like.
How many of the cars you can see
have Bach playing on their in-car stereos?
There's one playing your favourite recording of the Schubert Preludes.
Yes, she'll talk to you.
What about having dinner together?
A couple of restaurants light up in the view.
Then you remember, damn, you're not in Paris,
you're in New Delhi.
"That's all right," says your new friend.
"I'm actually in Albuquerque."
GRIFF RHYS JONES: My relationship with Douglas
dated from the days when we were in school together.
It was a very hot-shot school, Brentwood, in those days.
It was like a sort of factory. And you arrived at a young age
and were turned into a sort of... Frightening, really,
with this sort of pressure on people to do well.
There were some of us
who saw ourselves as sort of would-be actors.
And we volunteered our services for the only drama
that this school ever allowed us to do.
Called the Winter Theatrical.
He played Julius Caesar, which was a part that he was born to play,
because of his conk and his general sort of demeanour.
I remember everybody running around shouting "Ave, ave, ave."
Douglas was always not only huge, tall,
and slightly full of himself, but, also, older.
He and his generation above that were the clever, the clever set,
and they saw themselves
as being people who would move from this school
into the sort of varsity world and on to conquer the world.
Here at Cambridge a student's room is his castle.
He can barricade himself against all comers.
He can hold dinner parties for five without permission.
Decorate it as he wants to.
And it's all kept clean for him by a lady known as a bedder.
The only trouble is, these bedders have to be both old and unbeautiful.
It's all in the college statues.
DOUGLAS: I was determined to get to Cambridge
because I wanted to be a writer performer.
At the end of my first year,
I'd been cast in a production of The Rivals
and we discovered that the guy who was down to play Fag the butler
was now languishing in a Cretan jail as a result of smoking dope.
I said, "There was this guy I knew at school.
He was a pretty good actor. I don't know if he could do comedy."
I arrived in Cambridge.
In those days we had a pigeonhole,
and in amongst them was a little note from Douglas.
I hadn't been there in Cambridge for more than about three days
and I was sort of being put through my paces playing Fag in The Rivals.
Douglas was playing Sir Lucius O'Trigger.
I did that drawing of him sitting in a dressing room.
I sort of launched myself and followed, really, Douglas
into this extraordinary amateur theatre.
The Footlights was a club at Cambridge.
It was all about doing sketches, it was all about comedy.
We'd do a show and people would write sketches,
and wannabe actors or actors would perform those sketches
and certainly Douglas was writing from very, very early
in his time at Cambridge, and we were performing his stuff.
Douglas' material was always slightly surreal.
It was distinctively different.
Some of the strongest influences on me growing up
were The Beatles and Monty Python.
Python was the idea that being funny
was actually a way of being intelligent,
and that it was a different way of looking at the world.
Halt!Douglas referred to John Cleese as the Master,
and John Cleese and Graham Chapman
had been in the Cambridge Footlights Revue.
Douglas amused the rest of us
by going down to London to interview John Cleese for a student newspaper.
Ambition was frowned upon.
We all wanted to be kind of cool and sit in rooms smoking dope
and listening to Pink Floyd.
So we were dismissive of him. We thought, how absurd.
I had been completely fascinated and hypnotised by Python.
I wanted to be John Cleese.
And of course, I realised the job is taken.
I got to know Douglas after he came down from Cambridge.
It was a very intense friendship.
He had a go at all sorts of things as a writer, as a performer.
He got a little bit part in Monty Python.
He became very close to Graham Chapman.
They wrote a pilot together called Out Of The Trees.
It was something that seemed to me as a young kid out of university,
like, the heavenly clouds opening, you know?
Wow. Go and work with one the Pythons.
It wasn't quite as straightforward as that.
When Douglas and I used to go out and have lunch with Graham Chapman,
it would be four pints and eight crosswords.
Then Graham would get his willy out, put it on the bar
and pay the bill.
And then we'd go back to his house and have a bucket of gin and tonic.
That was Graham Chapman's idea of working.
There was a sense for Douglas of extreme frustration.
About what, what was he supposed to do?
If you have two very, very, clever writers,
then there's too much ego in the way of a partnership.
One time I came home and he was sitting on the bed
with his head in his hands and he said, "Johnny, I can't...
I can't cope any more. I'm not getting anywhere.
I'm kind of desperate."
I began to feel that there was actually not a lot of future
for me being somebody else's sidekick as a writer.
I thought, right, I'm going to go off and be a writer all by myself.
This I palpably failed to do.
I had to go and do various strange jobs,
like working as a bodyguard for an Arab royal family.
They put an advertisement.
It was saying, do you want to earn £4 an hour, I think it was,
being a... being a bodyguard.
Douglas also being Douglas immediately needed to tell everybody
and so a pretty large number of weeny, puny people like me
followed in his footsteps,
one after another of sort of arty, recent graduates from Cambridge
coming in and offering their services.
I just, I just remember it as a nightmare.
A nightmare. I'd never known time pass so slowly.
Like anything that happens to you in life,
it turns out useful in some way or other.
I think a lot of the sort of weirder ideas
came from long nights sitting opposite the elevator shaft
in the Hilton Hotel, just watching the elevators coming up and down.
(BELL DINGS)
As far as we were all concerned, it was all rosy.
It was all going marvellously. It was brilliant,
which we believed until my mother went to London one day,
and just saw the... that things weren't,
weren't good, weren't all right, and she said, "Right, that's it."
And she packed him up and brought him back down to Dorset,
back to his old bedroom at the end of the corridor.
There would be this fanatical noise of a typewriter going.
Then it would be the bang of the carriage going across.
And then the noise of a piece of paper
being torn out of a carriage, thrown up...
and thrown across the room with his grunt. When he grunted,
he used to make this noise that would echo the house.
And then there would be silence.
There was an old glove factory
in the field behind the house that was finally being demolished.
And unbeknown to us, that was then the start of the whole
Hitchhiker's and Arthur Dent's house
and then leading on basically to the destruction of the Earth.
That's kind of where the future started.
The actual title came to me while I was lying in a field
drunk in Innsbruck at night and just looking up at the stars.
And there was a book around called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe.
It occurred to me, somebody should write
a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
And then promptly forgot about the idea until about six years later.
RADIO: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
By Douglas Adams.
THE GUICE: To tell the story of the book,
it's best to tell the story of some the minds behind it.
A human from the planet Earth was one of them,
though as our story opens, he no more knows his destiny
than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company.
The first episode of the first series
of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy went out.
Douglas said, "Any reviews in the papers?"
And we all just laughed at him
because in those days, nobody...
Still to this day, nobody reviewed radio programmes,
but we opened all the papers and bloody hell,
there he was, reviewed all over the nationals. The nationals!
This completely obscure, weirdly titled comedy radio programme
and it was just unstoppable from that point.
BFBS UK, on a Tuesday,
people of Earth, your attention, please.
Plans for the development of the outlying regions of your galaxy
require the building of a hyperspatial express route
through your star system,
and regrettably, your planet is scheduled for demolition.
Bizarre? Certainly is. Now, Douglas Adams is its author,
and it looks like being the comedy cult of the future.
An extremely tall man got an extremely bright idea.
Shortly afterwards, this rotten idea turned into four books,
two records, a computer game, two radio series, a TV series,
and a constellation of money.
It was quite something when somebody you've been at college with
suddenly goes to another stratosphere.
And when you're sharing a flat with him, it's extraordinary.
One day you get a call from somebody who says,
"This is Mr Adams' shoemaker. Please tell him his shoes are ready."
Another time I pick up the phone
and that's a Hollywood film producer saying, "Is Douglas Adams there?"
I said no, and the guy refused to give me a message.
He pitched the film to me.
Douglas had this phenomenal, huge success
and unlike everybody else's success, it was worldwide success.
It was global. He was a global phenomenon.
He bought a new Porsche when he first became rich,
and drove it down Park Lane at a ridiculous speed,
just loving life and then forgot, as he said,
there was a roundabout at the end
and went smack into Hyde Park corner.
Amazing to be still alive.
Positronic robots. Telekinesis and clones.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
which adds a dimension to science fiction
that is both comic and domestic.
You're gonna have to accept it, you know,
this bypass has got to be built and it's gonna be built.
I could imagine comedy might destroy the seriousness
with which the genre should be taken.
I don't think so. I mean, I see science fiction
as a very good vehicle for comedy
simply because it enables you as it were to turn the telescope
the wrong way round on everyday experience.
How would you react if I told you
that I'm not from Guilford after all
but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?
I don't know. Think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?
Drink up. The world's about to end.
Douglas was taking a Pythonesque view of the world,
a sort of world where crazy, silly things are happening,
and applying it to science fiction.
Nobody had done this before.
When Douglas went there,
he was entirely, I think, the first word in that genre,
and it's hardly surprising that it managed to be both
philosophically profound and hilariously funny.
This is your captain speaking. All planet leave is cancelled.
I've just had an unhappy love affair,
so I don't see why anybody else should have a good time.
Douglas understood that humour was an integral part of humanity
and so most of the comedy of Hitchhiker's
is about how not just humans but all the aliens too
represent ineluctable and eternal human qualities,
or rather vices, usually,
of stupidity, lack of imagination, dumbness,
like, you know, confusion, vagueness,
and that's why Douglas is so unique a figure,
in that he, straddling both camps of humour, novel writing and art
and science and gazing into the future through technology...
Fish? Very, very useful.
What do you expect me to do with that?Stick it in your ear.
What? It's only a little one.
Douglas grew up watching Star Trek
and I know wondering, why is it everybody seems to speak English?
Once more from the top, please.
So when he came to write Hitchhikers,
he needed something which will allow people
to be able to communicate in the multiplicity of languages
in the universe. Most people might have then thought,
OK, I'll just put some kind of universal translator machine
in the ear.
(ROAR OVERHEAD) Listen.
What on earth's that? It's important.
It's the Vogon captain. I can't speak Vogon.
Douglas' genius was not just to then create a little tech,
you know, a little sort of earpiece.
It was to imagine a fish which fed off brainwaves.
What exactly am I doing with this fish in my ear?
It's translating for you. Look in the book under Babel fish.
So Douglas chooses the name Babel for Babel fish,
an allusion to the Tower of Babel.
But he also uses it as an opportunity to take a pop at God
because he's famously an atheist.
Not only is the Babel fish, of course, a wonderful idea
and makes science fiction writing so much easier.
But also, the typical Douglas idea
that this is a proof of the non-existence of God.
It's so remarkable, such a giveaway
for the existence of a God that there can't be one,
because God says, "I never have to prove myself.
I must be only found by faith."
GUIDE: "But," said man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it?
It proves your existence, so therefore you don't. QED."
"Oh, dear," says God. "I hadn't thought of that,"
and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
That paradox of faith and belief in God
is a... is again a just typical...
a typical entry into a unique mind.
I suppose there are mostly jokes not about God as such,
but about the way people think about God.
For instance, the thing right at the beginning of the series.
It starts off saying Where God Went Wrong,
Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes
and Who Is This God Person, Anyway?
Just deliberately being controversial about religion
in order to get people's backs up and make them buy the books.
Like me, I believe he was not interested
in offending religious people or mocking their piety and devotion.
It's the mystery of the human, the enchantment of the world,
is so much better expressed without there being a God.
You don't know the answer
to all kinds of mysteries and questions.
Life, the universe and everything is the question.
But all these questions are now awake and alive.
They are not solved and closed down by God.
Science fiction like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
is incredibly important in terms of trying to wear down people's fear
of approaching scientific ideas
and it was funny in a way...
with ideas that we'd not seen be made funny before.
(BLEATS AND SNORTS)
Good evening, madam and gentlemen.
I am the main dish of the day.
May I interest you in parts of my body?Huh?
In The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
where the cow comes up to your table and shows off its flank
and says, "This bit you might find quite..."
And Arthur Dent, of course, is disgusted.
And again, he's flipped it for us. (LAUGHS)
We think, eugh, eugh, this cow wants to be eaten.
That's against all tenets of nature.
He said, "Well, no, it's evolved to say,
I am your cow, please eat me.
And you think that's worse than being an animal
that is terrified of violence
and is programmed to run away
at the sight of teeth and claws?"
May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver?
It must be very rich and tender by now.
I have been force-feeding myself for months.
Once you're having a conversation with what you're about to eat,
it makes us think about levels of consciousness in animals.
The more perspectives we have,
the more ways we can question the world,
the more ways we can empathise.
He was such a curious person. And again, you know,
the best artist and the best are constantly asking questions.
I'll just nip off and shoot myself.
Oh, God. Don't worry, sir.
I'll be very humane.
DOUGLAS: At Christmas, we went... my family, we went to Fiji.
One day we rented a speedboat and we sped across the ocean
to the island where they filmed the movie Castaway.
And it's the perfect desert island.
Sun, white sand, blue ocean,
a single rocky hill, clump of palm trees.
And perfect cellphone reception.
Why was there perfect cellphone reception?
Apparently, it was in Tom Hanks' contract that there had to be.
I remember when Douglas got one of the first mobile phones,
which was obviously the size of a house brick,
and you think, "Well, what's the point of that?"
"You can use your phone anywhere."
"There are phones everywhere, Douglas. I've got two in my house.
There's a phone box on every corner. Why would you want one?"
"But you'll see. Don't you see?"
"Not really."
But, you know, he was always decades ahead.
(PHONE RINGS)
Hello?
I'm sorry, he's out to lunch. Can you call back later?
Cellnet's portable is a true pocket phone,
but is at present intended for mainly urban use.
(PHONE RINGS) Hello?
Douglas, being a great conceptual thinker,
thought, if I'm on the phone to somebody,
how am I going to prove that I'm using a cordless phone?
Yeah. Yes, hello. Yes, it's for you.Thank you.
During the call, he would wander off
and suddenly you'd hear this tinkling.
And that was Douglas in the bathroom urinating.
He'd say to the person on the other end of the line,
"Oh, sorry about this. It's just that I've got a cordless phone."
When you're a child you accept you turn a switch
and a light goes on
and you don't actually really sort of think about it
because it's just part of what happens.
Then you get a bit older and you find out about electricity
and where it's come from,
everything that's gone into making it.
Then you begin to get excited and think, this is amazing.
And you walk into a room, press this button and a light goes on.
So in a way, I mean, I find I get
more childlike wonder out of something
if you actually know something about it.Yeah.
When Peter was small, he played with these. They were a toy.
And then he discovered they were helping him to learn to read.
So it is with microcomputers
and the revolution in information technology, it's begun with play.
The hobbyists are the forerunners of the microprocessor revolution,
the nutcase micro geniuses who have to do their thing,
never mind the dinner getting cold.
One of the things that connected us was computing.
I had become insanely excited about the possibilities
of what were known as microcomputers back then,
so I could walk or bicycle to his place
and we would play with our computers.
We have much to be grateful to the hobbyists who can't get a girl
because he's got a mind full of differential calculus.
No country could possibly pay
for the accumulation of research experience
and criticism that these nutcases provide.
He had a DEC Rainbow computer,
which was quite a sort of grand office-style computer,
because as far as I was concerned,
he was insanely rich and I was just starting.
So I was in awe of his purchasing power, and his enthusiasm.
It reached its height in January 1984
when he bought a Macintosh computer.
We were the first two in Europe to own such a device.
It's more sophisticated, yet less complicated.
It can store vast amounts of yesterday
or tell you what's in store for tomorrow.
It was a new way of computing.
It had things that existing computers just didn't have.
A mouse, pull-down menus,
a sort of graphic interface.
With a little waste paper bin in the corner.
And folders and these images that are all so familiar to us now
but were brand-new then
and a thrillingly exciting way
of manipulating information and so on.
And both Douglas and I thought this was absolutely the future.
There was no Internet to join until the very end of the '80s,
but there were modems and you could connect with another computer
by means of what was known as a handshake.
(DIAL TONE, NUMBER TONES AND TRILL OF CONNECTING)
We had a microphone and we had a speaker and we had a modem.
And eventually, after weeks of tweaking the scripts and swearing,
we actually managed, he in Islington,
to speak into his microphone
and it came out of my computer in Dalston. (LAUGHS)
At one point the line dropped... (TRILLING, WHITE NOISE)
..and so we called each other up.
Douglas said, "I've just had an instant thought."
I said, "What's that?" He said, "We already have a technology
that allows us to speak to each other remotely. It's the telephone.
Why are we making the telephone go through a whole other system?"
It was a complete waste of time.
But the pleasure of doing it, I cannot tell you. It was so exciting.
He rang me from the South of France because he'd forgotten a book
he was halfway through, and he wanted me to take it down with me.
And I know what it's like when you're reading a book
and it's gripping and you've left it.
So I was searching the house, and I needed some more information.
I said, "I can't find it." And it was a computer manual.
(LAUGHS) I was like...
Hi, this is Eddie, your shipboard computer
and I'm feeling just great, guys."
Douglas saw very early on that the computer wasn't just a typewriter.
His overwhelming sense was excitement about the possibilities
that it was all going to bring.
Much bigger than that was what he saw
the impact likely to be on society.
Life is the most powerful phenomenon on this planet,
and artificial life is going to be
the most powerful phenomenon that we have created.
If you look at huge science fiction monoliths in our culture
AI to Star Trek was merely, "Computer,
where is that star system?" (FLAT) "It is in the place..."
You know, it was basically just relaying information.
Well, that's not intelligence.
And Douglas' immediate leap from that form of science fiction,
a rather dull form of what an intelligent computer might be,
was to understand that intelligence
is also to do with social intelligence,
to do with personality and if an AI had infinite
or at least close to infinite knowledge,
then its guesses would be surprising and interesting.
GUIDE: One day, a race of hyper- intelligent pan-dimensional beings
built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought
to calculate once and for all the answer to the ultimate question
of life, the universe and everything.
One of the things that I think is captured by Douglas Adams
is the importance of imagination in the scientific endeavour.
It is an imaginative process. It is a moment where Albert Einstein
is thinking about going down in the lift,
or looking at the buildings as he's on a tram and he goes, but what if?
Now, of course, science fiction and fiction generally
is very often saying, what if?
But the "What if?" question is very, very important.
Oh, great computer...
We want you to tell us the answer.
The answer to what?
Life. The universe.Everything.
Tricky.
After eons of time,
it eventually was ready to come up with the answer,
which astonished everybody because it was 42.
BOTH: Forty-two?
When you take a concept,
what is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
It's got to be philosophical. It's got to be complicated.
It's got to be huge in concept.
And Douglas said, 42.
It's got a sort of cosy feel about it, 42.
Sort of a plump, sort of likeable number,
nothing offensive or spiky about it.
There's whole Wikipedia pages on 42,
and the significance of it in the actual world of physics
and, you know, history and archaeology and everything else.
He kept his cards close to his chest because he absolutely relished
how perplexed, almost to the point of enragement, people were by this
and wanted to know more.
And where he got the idea from, and could he explain it further?
And he loved just going...
When he came up with the number 42, would he ever imagine
that for the rest of his life
and then for decades afterwards, people would be asking the question,
what is the significance about the number 42?
The Kumars at No. 42, Level 42.
So many things out there and you think it's a coincidence
and then you delve into it and it's not.
The idea that life, the universe and everything is a single number,
that's a work of genius because they haven't asked the right question.
They've got the number right.
But now we have to work out what is the question
that results in 42 of anything?
And if we find that, we will actually know the meaning of life.
But it was the great question,
the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
And so, not satisfied, they decide
that they just simply have to build an even bigger computer,
which turns out to be the planet Earth. That's what Earth is.
It's a computer experiment run by white mice.
Now, Earth creature, we have
been running your planet for the last 10 million years
in order to find this wretched thing called the ultimate question.
We always thought we were using white mice in our experiments.
It turns out they were using us.
No, it was a joke. I mean, what can I tell you?
Once I'd decided, OK, the answer is going to be a number
and that's the joke. OK, what's the number?
Well, I think it should be a very small, ordinary number.
Why not? I don't know, 42.
There was a moment years ago when the Hubble constant,
which is the measure of how fast the universe is expanding, was 42
and Douglas was absolutely jumping with joy.
He's actually found the answer to literally everything.
Anyway, it's now not 42. It's some other number.
The robot, weighing 17 stone and costing about £3,000,
is a robot who can be programmed, says his maker,
to do ordinary household chores.
Judging by his performance in trying to cross the road,
he may need a bit more fine tuning.
I commanded Clay II to bring me a glass of wine.
He couldn't open the bottle, but he brought the tray.
If you see the robot as all the dreams of our future
and in the 1970s, there'd always be something,
before long, you won't have to wash your kitchen floor because this...
And you'd see all these things.
All in all, as a butler, or domestic help,
seems to need still a watchful eye and a helping hand.
But he's clearly coming along fast.
Most of the robots, they were just normal human characters
that also happened to be computers. "They'd always talk like this."
ROBOT: I am capable of speaking any language... except Greek.
Douglas had that wonder before the world,
because he could take a scientific concept
and make it funny, make it absurd,
root it in a story or a parable or an idea
and because of his love of technology
and because of the speed at which technology
was growing and emerging around him,
it gave him that space to play and to think and to imagine.
It says "Genuine people personalities".
Er, it sounds ghastly. It is, absolutely ghastly.
Douglas saw that robots, if there were to be such things,
wouldn't just be... (FLAT) "I will obey."
But that if you can make something that appears sentient
and can listen and obey an instruction,
you would also throw in a personality.
In the case of Marvin, of course, paranoid misery.
But in the case of other ones,
outrageous California helpfulness and cheerfulness.
In both cases, you'd want to run screaming from them.
Life, don't talk to me about life.
What Marvin is a wonderful example of
is that if you become truly sentient and you're aware of yourself,
all of the problems come to you as well.
All of the "Why am I here? Why am I doing this?"
Here is something with a brain the size of a planet,
but with depression. They'll just keep opening and closing the door
and bringing you drinks.
What are you supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?
Douglas was interested, endlessly, in what science really had to,
to offer in terms of the exploration of the world.
I think science fiction gave him that playground.
I see from our instruments
we have a couple of hitchhikers on board our ship.
I've sent out a search party and as soon as they find you,
I shall turn you off the ship.
He saw the world, the galaxy,
the universe, as fundamentally relational,
fundamentally a web of surprising connection.
That was a big theme in terms of how Douglas liked to think.
We've been picked up by a ship
with the new Infinite Improbability Drive.
I mean, this is incredible, Arthur.
As you jump into space,
the likelihood of you surviving is very, very low.
And so he has a plot device,
which actually is an extremely interesting
exploration of physics and quantum possibility.
As the ship's drive reaches infinite improbability,
it passes simultaneously through every point in the universe.
The ideas really possessed him, and he did understand them.
He understood the nature of quantum mechanics.
And he saw that, therefore,
that there must be a use for this mad idea.
And in his case, it was travel.
You could just be there and there,
because a particle can be and has now been proved empirically.
GUIDE: The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method
of crossing interstellar distances in a few seconds
without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
We now are obsessed with it driving AI
as it sees what has happened in the past
and works out the probability of this being the right answer,
or that being the right answer. It's a question of probabilities.
That's what allows ChatGPT
to work the large language models that we use today.
GRIFF: He knew that Hitchhiker's had been very brilliant.
But Douglas had a thing about writing and writer's block
and an inability to get pen to paper.
He didn't find it easy. That was never...
He didn't set out to be an author.
He set out, his initial thing, was to be a writer performer.
Go and write sketches. That was what he wanted to do.
He was an accidental novelist.
He used to find anything that he could do rather than write.
He used to try and think of ways
that he could pretend that he was going to work.
And when he was at work, he was going to write.
That was him going to...
So what he used to do is he used to go into a room
where he had an exercise bicycle,
and he would cycle for so many miles
and that was him going to work.
When he got off the bike,
in his mind, he said, "That's it, I'm at work."
But the trouble is to get to his office where he would sit and work,
he'd have to go past the kitchen.
He would find everything to do rather than go upstairs and write.
When I started out, I did something on radio, on television.
And then because the book was such a hit,
it meant the next thing I did was a book,
and the next thing after that was a book, and...
You know, that wasn't the kind of life that I really wanted,
but there was huge pressure on me to keep on doing that.
I found myself sitting in a room by myself, really not enjoying myself.
He had a classic writer's melancholia and remoteness.
That guy, man, could he could use a bath.
He'd be in there for hours.
I mean, you'd expect him to come out and be a six-inch prune of a man.
He was so... just in there, you might say, depressed.
But at the time we just thought, well, that's Douglas.
He's just thinking hard.
The one thing that was unbearable when he sat down
was to face the blinking cursor.
And every blink is a stagger to the heart.
He could start off a sentence so beautifully
and then get really worried
because the next sentence wouldn't be as beautiful.
He would have an idea and he would write,
and he could do, say, six pages,
and then he'd go back and rewrite it,
and then he'd go back and rewrite it.
And he was so particular that at the end of this rewriting,
instead of having six pages, he could have six words.
Douglas would spend classically three months on the first paragraph,
then realise he'd got to do something,
and then get stuck because there's something about...
His personality got in the way of him actually doing anything
because he was so... "(GROANS IN FRUSTRATION)
It's all about me. I can't do this. I'm not good enough."
He was quite vulnerable to depression.
He did get very low when things weren't going well.
It was as if he had all the ideas boiling around inside him,
and they were a bit inchoate and a bit sort of undisciplined
and it was that process of actually finding a way to give it structure,
form, cohesion, articulacy,
get the idea out that he found incredibly hard.
It's been a bit of a muddle of a year, really,
because at the beginning of it when I was doing the second radio series
and, you know, the scripts
are being written within minutes of transmission sort of thing.
That's not quite true, though it's not a million miles from true.
I had the second book hanging over me, which had to be written.
I was putting that off and putting it off.
Because I couldn't get the thing started.
If you imagine that feeling, you've got a piece of work to do
you've got to hand in in the morning
and you attach millions of pounds to that,
that's a big pressure. Like anybody watching your brother suffer,
I remember being really angry
with the publishers, with the agents, with the, you know...
I was like, this isn't worth it.
But looking back now, I can see he needed the adrenaline,
the fight or flight.
He needed to get to the point where everybody was like, "Oh, my God."
Eventually, when Pan sort of read me the riot act
sometime in the beginning of August
about the continual none appearance of this book,
saying, "How much have you done?" And I had to...
I didn't admit I hadn't done any, just worried,
and I basically had a month left to write it, and that was it.
Otherwise it was concrete overcoat time.
When he'd got the million-pound advance,
or won a Golden Pan or something,
he wanted to hang out with Paul Allen.
You know, the guy who started Microsoft with Bill Gates,
who had a massive yacht,
and Douglas would be on the yacht with Paul
and a few other nobs going around Antarctica
and partying like there was no tomorrow.
And then as the year wore on
and he'd written just the first half of the first paragraph,
and he's starting to get panicky, and then he'd get really desperate,
and then he'd want to see his old friends. He felt safe with them.
And so he'd get worse and worse.
And the publisher would then hold the gun to his head
and make him write the book, which was agony, but he had to do it
and he did it in three weeks,
because it's all done by the subconscious anyway
and then the book would come out and it would sell millions
and then Douglas would be off again.
He only wanted to hang out with millionaires and Steve Jobs.
The phone rang and the voice said,
"We want you to go to Madagascar.
We want you to look for the aye-aye,
a very rare form of lemur."
I, assuming they'd got the wrong number,
said yes before they could discover their mistake.
But in fact, it turned out that they'd decided,
here's somebody who doesn't know anything about lemurs,
anything about the aye-aye, anything about Madagascar.
Let's send him.
Every science fiction writer
tries his own version of an alternate world,
a place where time has broken its banks.
Madagascar is just such a place, only it's real.
Something like 100 million years ago, it broke loose from Africa,
and its plants and animals have evolved in isolation.
I first met Douglas in Madagascar, of all places.
And he'd been sent there by the Observer colour supplement.
We had to go straight from the airport into the jungle.
And that first night, we slept on a concrete floor in a hut.
Spider-infested hut. Snakes everywhere, rats everywhere.
And he was really thrown in at the deep end.
At the time we went, the aye-aye was considered
one of the most endangered animals on the planet.
They were believed only to live on this one island called Nosy Mangabe,
and the population was thought to be as low as just 12.
We got there with all our camping kit,
thinking there's going to be nobody else there.
And then we got to this little hut in the forest.
There was an American photographer there
and he'd been there for three months on his own,
trying to photograph an aye-aye. He'd never seen one.
The first night, rainforest pouring with rain,
we went off, didn't see anything.
The next night we thought, we'll go again.
And, you know, we're going to keep trying.
50 yards from the hut, we sensed something, looked up with a torch.
And there on a branch was a real-life aye-aye.
We went rushing back to the hut and told this guy.
Of course, he almost collapsed in tears because he hadn't come out.
After we left, pleased with ourselves...
We left a couple of days later.
He spent six more months on the island. Never saw one.
I was absolutely transfixed by that moment.
You suddenly think, there is a huge amount of history to this moment.
Our roots in this planet go back an awfully long way.
And it takes a confrontation like this
to realise how broad and deep your family goes.
"Imagine the lemurs' surprise.
For millions of years, they'd been all on their own as primates.
And they'd never seen an ape since they last shaved off from Africa.
And then suddenly apes returned."
And I said, "Oh. So, when humans arrived in Madagascar,
did they bring monkeys and apes with them?
Douglas said, "No, the humans were the apes.
We are apes, don't forget." "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that."
He was constantly reminding me.
Of course, while these poor lemurs had been living in Madagascar,
apes and turned rather surprising.
They had turned into things that could build ships.
A lot happened in those few weeks. He definitely did change
and he basically said, "I'd like to do more,"
and so we hatched this plan to spend a year travelling
around the world together, looking for other endangered species.
And as soon as we got back to London,
he invited me up to his house in Islington,
and he'd already put a map of the world on the wall and said, "Right,
where are we going to go?"
The idea was to set off straight away.
But Douglas being Douglas was running late on a book.
Douglas Adams, you're on the Grand Tour, as I call it,
to publicise this book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Having read the book and having enjoyed the book,
but not having understood the book very much,
how would you describe it? A ghost horror detective whodunit
time-travel romantic musical comedy epic,
which is a genre it has peculiarly to itself.
Instead of leaving like within the next month or two,
three years later, he had finally finished his book,
done his author tour,
and then we could go off and do a year travelling around the world.
I don't think I'd seen him so excited for a very long time.
It's not that he got bored by books.
He got excited when he started Dirk Gently as a new stream of fiction.
But it was still agony writing them but this woke up something in him.
He saw it as immensely important.
All I knew was that he was going round the world with animals.
He'd taken a shop's worth of cameras, with huge lenses.
How he travelled through the jungle carrying all this stuff,
I've no idea.
He literally turned up with a pile of books,
which he reckoned was The Complete Works Of Shakespeare.
Another time he turned up with a cricket bat.
What are you going to do with a cricket bat?
Of all the animals we went to see,
my favourite was an animal called the kakapo.
And the kakapo is a kind of parrot.
It lives in New Zealand.
It's a flightless parrot.
It's forgotten how to fly.
Sadly, it has also forgotten that it's forgotten how to fly.
A seriously worried kakapo
has been known to run up a tree
and jump out of it.
Kakapoo were one of the birds in New Zealand as many others
which evolved to be flightless. They had nothing to be scared of.
There were no predators in New Zealand.
So they had no reason to fly away.
These poor creatures would walk to a cooking pot,
go, "Hello, everybody."
You could just... You didn't have to run after it,
just picked it up and put it in the pot.
It's appallingly tragic.
This is where evolution goes wrong. It's sensible for millions of years
but it doesn't foresee that predators
might move from continent to continent
or from island to island and then suddenly you're done for.
We got back and Douglas was staying in a villa
in the South of France.
We were doing a book of our travels.
So the first morning we went to walk along the seafront,
and talked about anything but the book.
We sat and had a coffee.
Still not happening. So...
OK, well, we'll have lunch. We'll have lunch. That'll help.
We'll have some wine.
We'll have some wine. That'll help the creative juices to flow.
Had a bottle of wine, wasn't really happening.
So we had another bottle of wine and we're getting a bit drunk, so, OK,
we're too drunk to do this now. We'll go back to the villa.
It's very hot. We'll have a nap and it'll be cooler this evening.
We'll start this evening.
That went on for four months.
And, we, I think after four months we had one page written
which never made it into the final book.
And in the end, the publisher got so fed up with us,
they made us come back to London.
They locked us in his house in Islington, and they said,
"You're not allowed out until the book's finished."
They didn't realise you could get out of his office
down the drainpipe, onto the roof at the back,
and then down and out through the back to the pub,
which we did quite a lot.
This really, to him, combines so much of what he loved
because it combined the science,
the science of conservation and environmentalism and zoology.
He put in an enormous amount of energy
into the charities he was involved with,
Save the Rhino in particular.
Douglas Adams, patron of Save the Rhino,
joined the walk one week before the ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.
From the first day, Douglas assumed his rhino role,
giving the rest of the team a break
from the overwhelming sweet smell of the costume.
I walked with him and that was incredible.
For him it was...
"Look at this. Marvel at this.
We need to do something around keeping this."
The breadth of biodiversity we have on this planet is just astonishing.
And he was astonished by that.
The story goes that Douglas climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit,
which he did not because he had to leave
to get back because he'd missed a deadline. (LAUGHS)
So we left them at the foothills and quickly flew home.
That's better than any exercise bike.
In those days many people thought conservationists
were weird, weird people with pony tails
and white socks in sandals.
And, you know, it was an extreme activity.
Celebrities weren't being used for, you know,
promoting conservation or human rights. It was quite a novel idea.
Lemurs used to be the dominant primate in all the world,
and then Gondwanaland split up.
It almost sounds like some sort of '70s rock group
going their own way for reasons of musical differences. (LAUGHTER)
If I was doing a lecture there'd be 50 people.
But he'd attracted thousands,
and he talked about it in such a way
that people were laughing and they were crying.
And, you know, he made conservation entertaining.
There was nobody else like it
that I can think of on the planet at the time,
who was fronting conservation in a way that made people listen.
GUIDE: One of the major selling points
of that wholly remarkable book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
apart from its relative cheapness
and the fact it has "Don't Panic!"
in large letters on the cover,
is its compendious and occasionally accurate glossary.
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
the object rather than the series of books or the radio shows,
the actual thing itself with "Don't Panic!" in large, friendly letters,
if that isn't an iPad or a tablet, I don't know what is.
It's just astonishing how right he was
that you could have an object
that contained all the knowledge in the world,
or in his case, all the knowledge in the galaxy, in a handheld device.
GUIDE: Its simplistic style is partly explained
by the fact that its editor, having to meet the publishing deadline,
copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal.
The idea, in 1977, '78, when he was writing that,
that he could have seen it, is phenomenal.
We want to be up for your high shot.
Ford, who are you?
I told you. I'm a field researcher for the Guide.
I got stuck on the Earth longer than I meant.
Went for a week, got stuck for 15 years.
Can you lift the book higher now, Simon?
Douglas saw very early that now people were talking about
this thing called user-generated content.
He wanted to see whether we could create the Earth edition,
the real edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I went though a real sort of midlife crisis.
You know, "What am I doing?"
A little while ago, I thought, I've got to do something different.
And so I've set up a company with a bunch of very, very bright people,
and suddenly all the creative juices are flowing.
The original concept was that we would have a website
and that people would start to upload their Guide entries
and of course it was life, the universe and everything.
So, that idea of tens of thousands of field researchers for the Guide
absolutely was now a possibility.
It was an idea so radical. He said, "It's kind of an online community."
I said, "What does that even mean?"
He said, "Well, it's like the world is a village,
and we can all get in touch online,
and then we can have interesting articles
and we can talk to each other.
I said, "I've no idea what that even means."
We were a little bit before Wikipedia
and we had The Hitchhiker's Guide running on mobile phones very early.
This was pre-smartphones that we were doing this.
So the idea of having the Guide you could carry around in your pocket,
we were making it real.
We had home pages which people were able to decorate for themselves.
We had chat functions so people could talk to each other.
So we had this very rapidly growing community, creating the Guide.
It was one of the big dot-com booms.
And then we had the dot-com crash of 2000.
A year ago there were hundreds of Internet companies
being floated here on the Nasdaq, but not now.
The rose-tinted spectacles have come off.
The Emperor's new clothes have been seen through.
The lunatics have been put back in the asylum
and the Internet bubble, well, it's burst.
It was a sort of combination of Google and Wikipedia
and Facebook and Twitter, everything, all in one.
And they just didn't quite get there
before everybody else made billions out of it.
The guy could have been Elon Musk and Bill Gates
and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one. Easily.
Now I'm here to talk about the future.
The only thing I can tell you about the future with any confidence
is that I will be telling you a lot of stuff
that'll turn out not to be true.
Like a lot of people, I've just lost my own brilliant dot-com company.
Just like everybody else's brilliant dot-com companies,
it was based on the wonderful mathematical notion
that if you multiply zero by a sufficiently large number,
it'll suddenly turn into something.
It was a great shame, because I think we had a shot
at being a truly global social media company
coming out of this country, coming out of the UK,
because of the global nature of the brand.
But, yeah, it was, as the chief executive founder of a company
in that moment of the dot-com collapse,
it was a pretty tough experience all round for everybody.
I was at home in Dorset.
I was on the phone in the bath.
He'd got into being healthy and going to the gym.
He was in the gym.
He went to reach for his towel and he collapsed
and his trainer saw him collapse and he died immediately.
He died just after the first dot-com boom and bust
as things like Google were coming into the world
but six years before the iPhone.
He never saw an iPhone. It's hard to believe.
And six years before Facebook and Twitter.
And therefore, he never experienced
the weird and distressing... side of things.
Douglas would be disappointed, to say the least, by what has happened.
By the souring of it all, by the dream being tarnished.
Douglas imagined the future,
and the only word we have for it is a visionary.
He saw things that other people didn't see,
especially things that weren't yet visible to anybody
because they were in the future.
But he saw things in the present and how they could be adapted as well.
But to put together an idea of the future
is, is wonderful and a gift.
Douglas was brilliant at imagining many different
kinds of perspectives and that's, I think, his great imaginative feat.
He did it with humour.
He did it with a great affection for our absurdities
and the absurdities of mankind. And we're racing into a world
in which some of the things he imagined are now very real.
Douglas definitely saw the gravity of the situation
all those years ago, long before the situation we're in now.
And he was one of the first people to really bring to life
the fact that this is not just about
some extreme little interest for a small group of people.
This is about protecting humans and protecting life on Earth.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, imagine, if you will, an early man.
He's standing surveying his world, and he looks at it and thinks,
this is a very wonderful world I find myself in.
Behind me is the mountains,
there are caves where I can shelter.
In front of me there's the forest,
and the forest is full of nuts and berries.
And here's a stream.
This world, he says, so who made it?
It must be something a little bit like me.
Obviously much, much bigger... (RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER)
..and necessarily invisible. (LAUGHTER)
So what did this person who made this world intend it for?
And this is the point where you think, well, it fits me very well.
He must have made it for me.
And it's rather like a puddle waking up
and thinks, this is a very interesting world I find myself in.
It fits me very neatly.
It must have been made to have me in it. (LAUGHTER)
And the sun rises and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking.
And by the time the puddle ceases to exist... (COW LOWS)
..it's still trapped in this idea that the hole was there for it.
And if we think the world is here for us,
we will continue to destroy it
in the way that we've been destroying it.
And we are behaving as if this extraordinary,
utterly, utterly extraordinary little ball of life
is something we can just screw about with any way we like.
And maybe we can't.
(BEEPS OF CLOCK COUNTING DOWN)
Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky