September 28, 2024 • 43 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Kevin Jon Davies about his new book “The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams,” detailing the mind of the author who gave us “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” (originally published 08/31/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Saturday.
Let's go into the vault. This is going to be
an interview episode. I talked to Kevin John Davies about
his book The Mind of Douglas Adams. So for all
of you Douglas Adams fans out there, you know you
enjoy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in any format
(00:26):
that it has been brought to life, then this is
a really fun chat. We also get into some other
discussions of popular science fiction. So I really enjoyed this
interview back in the day, and I hope you enjoy
it here for the first time or revisiting it. It
originally published eight thirty one, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert. On today's show, I'll be talking with author
Kevin John Davies about his new book forty two The
Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. This book will be
available as a physical book on the nineteenth of September.
It's already available as an ebook, so one way or
(01:20):
another you can get your hands on this book. It's
a beautiful volume, so I highly recommend it now in
the event that you're not familiar with the man himself.
Douglas Adams born nineteen fifty two was a groundbreaking English author, humorist,
and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
a work originally conceived for radio, but it would also
(01:43):
take on new life as a novel in nineteen seventy nine,
stage shows, a comic book, TV series, video game, and
a two thousand and five feature film that many of
you may be familiar with. His other works include the
Dirk gently books, and he served as screen writer on
thirteen episodes of Doctor Who in the late seventies and
(02:03):
early eighties. He died in two thousand and one, but
his influence continues to be felt in humor and science
fiction and beyond. So with some of the basics out
of the way, let's jump right into the interview with
author Kevin John Davies. Hi, Kevin, thanks for coming on
the show.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hello there, Rob, nice to be invited. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So the book is forty two the wildly improbable Ideas
of Douglas Adams. Many of our listeners are well acquainted
with Adam's work, and I included a short overview at
the top of this episode for everyone, But as someone
who worked with him and has chronicled his ideas in
his work, what do you think is the most essential
thing for our listeners to recognize about the man, especially
(02:47):
they're just not that familiar with him in his work.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I think what you have to realize is that Douglas
never set out to be a science fiction author. You know,
he's primary focused ever since his college days, you know,
at university and Cambridge, he just wanted to be a writer, performer.
He wanted to be John Clees until he realized that
job was taken. But he certainly got to meet a
(03:12):
few of his heroes. So his favorite kind of reading
material were things like PG. Woodhouse. So he saw himself
as a comedy writer, a satirist primarily. But he said
that he rather ruefully, he said to me once when
I interviewed him several times over the years. But he said,
(03:32):
the trouble is everything I write seems to involve robots
and spaceships. So I think he appeals across the board,
you know, he appeals to people who like science fiction
because he seems to be playing with the usual tropes
of science fiction, and he appeals to people who don't
like robots and spaceships because he seems to be sending
(03:54):
it up. So it kind of works across the board.
You know, you don't have to be a big science
fiction fan to get The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It works on that kind of satirical level, and it's
just beautiful writing. So I hope new people will give
it a go. They might discover something new that they
(04:15):
really love.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Can you tell us how you came to first work
with Douglas Adams and where he was in his career
at that time.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Sure, well, I mean within the first few years of
knowing him, he suddenly became very rich and famous. But
when I first met him, I'd seen his first Doctor Who,
which was called The Pirate Planet, and that had been
a four part serial on television starr In Tom Baker,
and then I'd heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on its second
(04:45):
repeat within the first year. It was quite unusual for
a radio show to get repeated quite so quickly, but
it was popular demand, and he very soon realized he
had a hit on his hands. I was invited to
bring my new tape recorder. I was seventeen years old
and I just had a new tape recording for my birthday,
remember those cassettes, And I brought it along to interview
(05:06):
him for a fan magazine for Doctor Who, primarily, but
my friends and I kept asking him questions about Hitchhiker's
Guide because that was all new and exciting, and he said,
I thought this was going to be an interview about
Doctor Who. He'd just taken a day job, that was it,
because he needed regular income, had he had a few
tough years, and so the idea of a year long
(05:28):
contract at the BBC marshaling scripts for Doctor Who was
something that he badly and sorely needed at the time.
So I just met this very tall everyone remarks on that,
and he's good foot taller than me, very smiley, witty,
very friendly, immediately friendly, an amazing guy. Immediately you're sort
(05:53):
of you're taken to him, you know. That was that
was the flavor of it. And it was about another
eighteen months later after that interview that I by pure chance,
ended up working on the hit Tracker's Guide to the
Galaxy TV series, and that was my first year in
the business, having left Art College. So it was a
(06:13):
glorious year for me and one that I treasured to
this day and remember vividly despite it being all those
years ago. And I was an animator working on the
BBC television version, So yeah, it was a very strange hit.
Trackers is odd that it began on radio, then it
became a stage play, several stage plays, then finally a novel,
(06:38):
a vinyl LP, and then I found myself working on
the TV version, and yeah, that was it, and that's
when I really got to know Douglas properly in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Now, prior to this interview, I think my only full
experience with his work was the film adaptation of Hitchaker's
Guide to the Galaxy. But I listened to the Stephen
Fryer narrated audiobook version in preparation for this interview, and
you know, I was just really kind of taken aback
just how good it is and how you know, it
(07:09):
still feels so distinct and original, which isn't always the
case with works of great popularity and influence. So I
was wondering, like, why do you feel that this book
in particular is still speaking to us forty four years
after its initial publication.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I think it's the sheer amount of work that Douglas
put into the writing. He's a great friend of his.
Nick Webb, who I got to know as well, also
has passed now, but he became Douglas's official biographer, and
I've interviewed him too in the past, and he said
(07:45):
that Douglas Douglas could hear the music, and what he
meant by that was as a writer, he could hear
the rhythm and flow of a sentence. And I think
you you know, if you adapt any of Douglas's work,
you messed with that at your peril. And I think
the movie took some liberties with the actual flow of
(08:06):
his very carefully chosen sentences. You know, he would do
very long sentences with lots of subclauses and parentheses, and
then on the last word of something, he would rip
the rug from under you and make you laugh. And
he had thought about it, and I think it came
from his days in sketch comedy. So you know, the
(08:27):
radio series of Hit Choker and the television version are
born out of that kind of footlight Cambridge footlights, sketch
comedy performing background. That's it, you know, famously, Monty Python,
they all came out of the same stable, and so
I think when they came to the movie, it's a
(08:49):
slightly different style of acting. Actually, you know, Martin Freeman
has a much more realistic style to his. I think
he was quite good actually his after Dead. But it
is a different way of performing, you know, it's more traditional,
you know, Hollywood movie style. And they obviously they grafted
in more of a love interest with Trillion between the
(09:10):
two main characters, Arthur and at Trillion, and you know,
it tried to fit that thing that Douglas tried all
his life and for twenty odd years he tried to
get a movie made of Hitcherck and sadly it didn't
come along into the few years after he died. And
so I think some of the fans, some of the
purest fans, don't really rate the movie as much. I
(09:33):
think it looks beautiful, and I did go along to
the set and I met the filmmakers, and they certainly
had Douglas's best interests at heart, but they were music
video producer director pair that made it, and I think
they thought much much more about the visuals than they
did about the script, and I think Disney had quite
(09:55):
strong studio control on the script, so you know, it's
a difficult thing to pull off. The later radio adaptations
by Dirt Maggs, he adapted and directed them for BBC Radio,
and they kept the flavor. They he got the style,
he understood it, and he knew that Douglas had chosen
(10:18):
Dirk as the successor to Jeffrey Perkins, the main producer
of the original series. And sadly, you know, those shows
didn't come along until after Douglas had passed, but certainly
they kept the flavor. So I recommend, you know, try
the radio shows, try the books. The books are pure Douglas.
It's him playing with the language, and that's why they
(10:41):
survive and why they still work now because the sheer
effort that he put into them. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Now, I want to come back to Doctor Who for
just a second. As you mentioned, he wrote for the
TV show during with the late seventies and early eighties.
In what key ways do you think Doctor Who influenced
Douglas Adams and what sort of lasting influence did he
leave on the franchise.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Well, he said that when he was at prep school,
he was writing sketches about Doctor Who with them the
Daleks being powered by rush Chrispies or something, just something
that he did as a thing with his friends on
audio tape. And so he'd always wanted to work for
Doctor Who, and we have in the book, in the
(11:27):
forty two book, there's a letter of rejection which must
have pained him deeply in nineteen seventy six when he
first got turned down by the then producer and the
script editor team. But two years later, you know, he
got the commissioned, and thank goodness he did, because he
was in a real pit at that time. And suddenly
he had the first series of Hit Shriker and the
(11:50):
first four episodes of Dr Who to write almost simultaneously,
and he retreated down to the West Country where his
mother lived, and the back to the family home and
slaved away over those scripts until he'd sort of run
out of words, as he put it, and he got
John Lloyd to help him with the last two episodes
(12:12):
of that first radio series of Hitchhiker, and it just
it was obvious when you watch that Doctor Who what
his take on it was. He has a peculiar turn
of phrase. The humor is there the ideas. It's all
(12:33):
about the ideas. Douglas had some extraordinary ideas, and in
later years he became fascinated with real science. So it
wasn't just making it up for Hitchhiker's sake, you know,
and for Doctor Who. But it was obviously there was
a strong talent there, and that's why he was offered
the role to join the show and be its script
editor for a whole year looking after other writers. Not
(12:56):
a job he was terribly well suited to because he
had trouble delivering two deadlines himself, so to get scripts
out of other writers. You know, he had been a
radio producer very briefly before he ran away to television.
From their point of view, so yeah, pulling scripts out
of other people, that's not really that wasn't really his forte.
(13:17):
But luckily at that time Hitchhiker exploded and he then
had to go off and do other things and work on,
you know, milk this baby, to do sequels, and everyone
kept demanding more and more Hitchhikers until he was sick
of it. Really, But yeah, I think the legacy that
he left behind, and people have quoted this, like Steve
(13:39):
Moffett and Russell T. Davis. They cite one of his
particular stories, The City of Death, as their kind of
role model for how they'd like it to be. Don't
just When I interviewed him about it, he said that
he worried that when he put jokes into scripts, he
still wanted the drama to be played straight. But the
fear is that when you put comedy into a drama
(14:01):
script that people then start to ham it up and
play to the comedy more. And you know, he wanted
to use the light and shade of the drama and
the comedy. But City of Death, which he co wrote,
I mean the producer. It was an emergency script written
supposedly over a weekend, which is hard to imagine, but
(14:21):
that was the legacy left behind. I think it had
an effect on how the modern producers of Doctor Who
tackled it when they revived it in two thousand and
five onwards.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So the book is a beautiful memoir, using various documents
and photos from the dogals Adam's archive. Correct along with
these various words and letters from friends, you words of
fans collaborators tell us how this project came together and
what sort of challenges were involved.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Sure, the book was something that, strangely enough, I first
thought about. In twenty sixteen, I was asked by the
radio producer, an adaptor of Douglas's work Dirt Mags, to
go along to the archive, which I didn't really know
much about it. Before there had been a book another
(15:20):
guy had written a book which had had some appendices
of stuff from the archive, so we knew a little
bit about that, and that was Hitchhikery material. But Dirk said,
go and see if you can find anything that a
bit of pure Douglas magic, any titbits, odd phrases, lines,
you know, anything you can find that hasn't been used yet,
(15:40):
and we'll put it into this final radio series. The
final radio series is called the Hexagonal. Phase of hitch
Hiker was based on a book by Owen Colfer, the
Irish writer who wrote Artem's Foul and other young young
adult readers. You know. He he felt that it needed
(16:01):
a bit more Douglasy magic. So I went and had
a look at the material. Then I spent about six
days there. For me, I live right at the top
of North London, so it was a drive up the
motorway to Cambridge, an ancient city of Cambridge, which is
full of colleges that all part of the Cambridge University.
And there is Saint John's College and the ancient library there.
(16:22):
I mean, the building's about four or five hundred years old.
The front of it is all beautifully remodeled and everything,
but the back is almost like a church. It feels
like Hogwarts, you know, and the Harry Potter films, big
heavy old bookcases with giant leather bound sort of books
on the shelves, and they've got medieval manuscripts and they've
(16:43):
got all sorts there, and Douglas's material was lodged there
by his family. Now, while I was going through this,
I realized that Douglas kind of argues with himself on
the page, and we've got some of this in the book.
He would be berating himself for forgetting an idea that
he's the night before, or he just wasn't in the
mood to write that day. Every now and again there's
(17:04):
a nice little pep talk where he tells himself and
you can do quite well for yourself, you know. You know.
Once he was actually seeing the money rolling in. But
it was interesting to watch a writer at work looking
at a man that I knew for twenty years. I'm
looking at his handwriting. He's terrible handwriting, very scribbly at times,
and he's appalling typing with all sorts of liquid paper
(17:25):
or tip its blobs all over it and crossings out
and x x x through everything, and you know, it
was quite He wrote four books before he got into
using a word processor. So you know, if anyone thinks
that forty two was inspired by his knowledge of asking
or whether it's called a SC two, no, he knew
(17:46):
nothing about computers when he wrote it, Chuck. So anyway,
I looked at all this material and I thought, you
know what, there should be a book about this, something
along the lines of how Douglas Adams wrote. And I
didn't think about it anymore. I didn't even think necessary
that it would be me that would write the book
until the publisher came out of the blue in twenty twenty. Yeah,
(18:09):
at the end of twenty twenty they contacted me and said,
you've been suggested by the estate of Douglas, the family
and the agent who runs the estate to go and
do some more research in the archive and prepare this book.
And I said, well, isn't that strange. It's something I'd considered,
(18:32):
but I didn't think it would be me. So thank you,
and so off I went. Eventually, I mean the first
year of the business. It was the unbound to the publishers.
They begin each project with a Kickstarter to raise the
funds and to secure it, and that protects them as
a small publisher. It protects them from the risk involved
(18:56):
in an expensive book. And they'd already done a book
called what's it called Letters of Note, quite a big
coffee table book of famous people's correspondents and sometimes quite
old fashioned copper plate writing. You'd have on one page
(19:17):
you'd see the actual letter, and on the other page
you'd see it in a plain text to make it
easier to read. So that was their kind of model
that they wanted to make this book based upon. So
the first year was very difficult because the library was
in lockdown still and there was a member of staff
there who could be very badly affected by getting COVID.
(19:38):
She had quite severe asthma, so she was keeping it
strictly to live in students only, so that was a
bit of a delay. Then I got ill, then my
wife got ill. So the first year was a bit
of a writer. The second year twenty twenty two, I
went seventeen times in all to up to Cambridge. It's
about fifty miles each way, and I would spend the
(20:01):
day looking through the material, photographing it on my iPhone
because there wasn't enough time to sit and read it
on the day bringing it home. And I think for
every day I went, I spent at least a week
reading everything and logging it and creating my own database.
There is you can actually look at the Saint John's
College database of Douglas's material, but it really is only
(20:26):
very broad strokes, you know, It's like bullet points. Whereas
the only way to do it is to sit there
and look at the papers and go slowly through it all.
And it still belongs to the family. They still have
very much the control of it. You have to get
written permission to go and access this stuff. So I
felt very privileged. I also felt now in Douglas. I
(20:46):
don't think he wanted me or anyone to go and
look at his material in the unprepared state, and I
felt very much like I was prying, especially when you
look at things like his notebooks and his diaries. You know,
there's not a lot that didn't exactly pour his heart
out of his diaries, they're mostly just notes about meetings
(21:08):
and birthdays and party lots of parties. But in his
notebooks he was really much more personal. He would talk about,
you know, how he was feeling about working on this thing.
But it was lovely to see phrases that you know
and love if you're a Hitchhracker fan, you know, or
a Dot or two fan, you can see things. You
(21:28):
can see him working it out on the page, and
there it is in his own handwriting. So again, very privileged.
And I was walking in his footsteps literally because I
was going into the same you know college that he
studied in all those years ago in the early seventies.
I was going across the road at lunchtime in the
same pub that we know he frequented, and cafes around
(21:51):
the corner, you know, to break up the day they
always shut for lunch. Very British. And it was a
lovely job. It's something I thoroughly enjoyed doing. I then,
unfortunately I did get rather ill last year and I
had to take a slight back seat for a while.
A copy editor was assigned to look after the project,
(22:15):
to guide me through the whole business of the layout.
She worked with the designer, and you took a lot
of the load off me. When I was hospitalized for
a while. Anyway, the hospital they promised me they'd cure me,
and they did. I had six months of chemo and
I got better and I was able to finish the book.
(22:36):
The publishers were wonderful, they waited for me, and between
the whole team, we've put together something that I think
the fans are going to cherish. And it's beautiful book,
beautifully printed. It's very heavy and very glossy, and I'm
delighted with the outcome. So now's the time to tell
(22:57):
everyone all about it rather excitedly. Is out in Britain now.
It was launched on Thursday last week here in the UK,
and it will be out in the middle of September
in America. Takes that long for the ship to get
across the Atlantic.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Was the Thursday release date intentional?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I wonder it also it was also the twenty fourth
of August. That's forty two back. But I don't know.
You can read what you like into that and people will.
I mean the fans have delighted in making notes about
forty two ever since I've been a what do they
call it, an honorary member of zaid zed nine Plurals
(23:38):
had Alpha, which is the official Hitchhiker's Guide appreciation society
for over forty years now. And we even had the
letter to Douglas and replies from him in the book
from the fans. There's an old chapter about fan letters
and things, which I quite enjoyed putting together. So yeah,
(23:59):
it's been. It's mixture. It covers his whole life from
cradle to grave. You know, really shows early promise when
he was twelve years old. His poems are extraordinary, and
then there's you know, love lorm Student Verse, and then
the early sketch comedy material Doctor who Hitchhikers Dirt Gently,
Last Chance to See, right up to the digital village,
(24:22):
which was how he spent these later years doing new projects,
some of which didn't make it to fruition, and we've
got some pages of those as well, So it's the
whole shomac.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
I was really intrigued by this whole world of eighties
video games that the book touches on. I have very
little personal experience with games of this genre in time period.
So what was the nineteen eighty four Hitchhiker's game? Like,
what what what was this? And what was Douglas Adam's
vrovement in it.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Well, I'm going to be I'm going to be quite
honest here. It's not one that I got into at
the time. I've been working in animation and we were
looking at computer graphics from quite early on, and I
just looked at it and thought, well, this technology is
not ready yet. You know. Of course, Jurassic Park and
terminated too, and all that kind of stuff was a
(25:22):
long long way ahead in the future. Computers were quite
kind of raw, and it was all very rough at
that time. But those who loved tinkering with computers were
having a field day. And Douglas admitted he said, do
you know what, I really would quite like to have
been a software engineer. I don't know if he had
the discipline, To be honest, he was a quite chaotic
sort of person. To wonder that his archive exists, and
(25:43):
I've put that down to his battery of personal assistance
he had over the years who probably kept it all
in order. But yes, he really enjoyed the process. Of
writing that first game. It's a text adventure, so you're
interacting with the text in a way that he quite mischievously,
would get the computer to lie. He said, you know,
(26:07):
it's not artificial intelligence. It's actually artificially it's not user friendly.
It's artificially mendacious. I what you call it. It would
deliberately lie to you, and you the game, I believe
was quite frustrating. I only dabbled on it briefly. I
mean it was launched at a convention that we had
(26:27):
in the middle of nineteen eighty five. I remember them
doing quite a bit of publicity there for it, and
a TV show that covered it at the time, and
there was one guy who was quite good at it,
who was explaining how it worked, and I had to
dabble there, and I thought, ah, this is not for me.
I didn't, but I know that, you know, from my
interviews with Douglas, I knew that he loved the experience.
(26:49):
And then he went on to do Bureaucracy, which was
based on I mean, they wanted Hitchiker two, but he
was much more interested in doing something different, which I
think was true. Throughout his career. He kept trying to
escape from hitchhiker. But the bureaucracy game was about getting
a bank to register a change of address card because
(27:10):
he had personal experience of a bank. He just bought
a swanky new flat in fashionable Islington in London, and
the bank kept sending all his correspondence went to the
old address, and he kept saying to them, look, you know,
for heaven's sake, you're into this property for X thousands
(27:31):
of pounds. Surely you know where I am. And he said,
they wrote back to me and said wherever. So sorry, yes,
it's completely our fault. We will get it right in future.
And he said, guess where they sent that letter? So yeah,
So I mean famously in Hitchhikers the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats
are the vogons. And that's kind of become a byword
(27:54):
now for anybody that has a sort of stubborn bureaucratic streak,
you know, parking wardens and petty officials that liked to
wield their look a bit of power too heavily. I
think a lot of people call them bogons.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Now, now, am I correct that? In this did he
also work on the nineteen eighty six Labyrinth the computer game.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Ah, there was a dabble. He did know Jim Henson,
and I know that he went to dinner with him,
and I know he got involved in a discussion group.
There was an educational thing that he was going to
do with the Muppets. Quite how much involvement he had,
I don't know. It's not something that's terribly well documented.
And yeah, I can't really give you much on that,
(28:37):
but I know that, you know, he prized his friendship
with Jim Henson quite highly at the time. But who
knows what they would have created together that happened. It
would have been amazing.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Both such creative individuals that died far too early.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, I agree, Yeah, terribly missed both of them.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
I agree. Now, speaking of technology and also you know
sci fi visions of technology, does Adams get enough credit
as a kind of futurist at least as far as
you know, technology is concerned.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I don't know how many people know about quite how
many conferences that he went to as a guest speaker.
The world of sort of you know, geeks, nerds, whatever,
you know, the computer and the high tech world, even
to mobile phones and things like that. They clamored to
have him there because he was a very entertaining speaker.
(29:33):
He essentially gave pretty much the same speech I think
at quite a few conferences, and we have his notes
from one of those speeches from right towards the end
of his tragically short life. But yes, he once told
me on an interview in ninety two and he said, oh,
I'm off to Japan next week or something. He said,
(29:56):
I'm giving a talk at this conference, and my audience
is going to include the head of Sony, Francis faul Coppola,
and George Lucas. He was certainly mixing with interesting company
and the high tech side of things. Yeah, he knew
some very powerful people. I found a note about Jeff
Bezos in one of his notebooks. He wasn't above just
picking up the phone and ringing these people, you know.
(30:19):
He he had ideas and he was communicating them quite
early on. He knew long before the most of us
mere mortals were really aware of the Internet. He was
way ahead, he knew. And an interview I did with
him further Sci Fi Channel in ninety five, he was saying, then,
I want to get this country wired up, you know,
I want us to have a fiber to every home,
(30:40):
and that was a long way before. I mean we
still don't have that now, but in ninety five he
was talking about that. So yes, he was very aware,
and he became more and more aware of it. He
was fascinated by real science and that was his preferred
reading matter in the latter stages of his life, and
we've kind of been robbed of something. I think that
he would have written some real science books. I mean,
(31:02):
his only factual book was his favorite, and that was
Last Chance to See But that was about endangered species,
which was another hot topic for him. He was asked
by a newspaper to go and be a sort of
untrained observer for a trip to Madagascar to go and
look for a rare species of lima called the AI.
(31:25):
And I interviewed him in eighty five just after he
got back, two weeks after he got back, and he said,
that was fascinating experience. We went off into the jungle
because the II is nocturnal, it means have ted torture.
He loved it so much. And they did get to
see the II, which is the most bizarre looking creature.
And you said that I really enjoyed that i'd like
(31:47):
I think I'd like to do more of that, And
within a couple of years he was taking an entire
year out to go around the world with Mark Card
the naturalist, and that they went to all sorts of
far flung places to look at endangered species and sort
of report upon them, mainly originally for a radio show,
(32:09):
but also with the idea that it would be a book.
And they were given a big old chunk of money
to go and do this and to make these trips,
and a series of different radio producer sound recordis went
with them to make the radio shows. The radio show
varies slightly from the book. The book is pure Douglas.
(32:30):
It's about the fun and games they had just getting
to the places. So it's almost like a travelogue thing
of what it's like to go to these tiny little
airstrips in the middle of Africa where corrupt officials would
want their palms greased if they were going to let
you have your baggages. You know, you couldn't get your
(32:51):
suitcases unless you you know, seen the right man sort. So, yeah,
he had some great stories to tell, and we've got
a couple of the stories that didn't make the book
book are in this book, There's there's one where he
went to see some fruit bats, and he was so
preoccupied with the fact that he'd been completely bitten all
over by mosquitos that he barely could look at the
(33:12):
fruit bats. But you know, he was an intrepid traveler.
He liked his home comfort. I mean, he really did
go all around the world and stay in some really
swanky hotels, but he wasn't above roughing it and being
you know, in the outback or in jungles or whatever
it took. And he became very passionately fond of endangered species,
(33:36):
and he would have written more. I'm sure he would have.
He was reading on evolution and evolutionary theory. He was
keeping up to date and abreast of all the modern
technological trends. What he would have thought of today's situation
with AI. You know who knows we've been robbed of
that sadly. And Jeffrey mcgiven, who played Full Prefect on
(33:58):
the radio, he said, one thing we've been robbed of
is Douglas's view on being the parent of a teenage girl,
because sadly, his little girl, Polly was only six when
he passed away. So you know, he would have had
a take on what it was like to deal with
a teenage girl, you know, and all that. There's all
(34:18):
sorts of things, and the family missing terribly. I know
his sisters and his brother and they champion him a lot.
They get involved in when we have memorial services or
we have there's an annual lecture science and comedy lecture
in his name and organized partly by the family and
(34:39):
partly by Save the Rhino International of which he was
a founder patron.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Yeah, there's some photos in the book with some sort
of a rhino costume, right.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
That's fantastic costume. I think it was made originally for
a stage show. It's a caricature of a rhino really,
but it's quite familiar to Britain's for taking part in
marathon and you know, city marathons and things like that.
These rhinos with their low slung head hanging down in
front of the costumes fabulous designed by Gerald Scarf, Foone's cartoonist.
(35:12):
But yeah, Douglas took part in a trek. There was
a team that walked across part of Africa up to
the top of Manculum Manjara. I don't think Douglas made
it up the mountain, but he did part of the
sweltering in that costume in the African heat, and there
are pictures in the book of that and a very
(35:32):
nice portrait of him standing there holding the costume. Yeah.
So yeah, no, they was serious about that. And also
the Diane Fosse Guerrilla Fund. You know, he would he
would give to those charities and support them.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Tell us about Secret Empire and how this would have
fit into the creative output of Douglas Adams. I know
the book. In the book, it's compared in scope to
something ultimately like Asimov's Foundation series, So like, what would
tone and scope have been if this had come to
fruition and why didn't it come together?
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I think it didn't come together primarily because the company
from which he was running that and proposing it was
the Digital Village, which he set up with several people,
including his friend Robbie Stamp, and it went to the wall.
Unfortunately in the dotcom bubble burst, you know, it was
(36:27):
not financed quite as strongly as they'd hoped, and so
I don't know, it would have been a very expensive series.
His ideas were quite extraordinary and it was very much
like we've now got foundation. Finally the technology is there
now to make something as awesome as a story with
that kind of scope. But that's what he was planning.
(36:49):
It was. The idea was called Secret Empire because the
notion was that we nearmmortals on Earth. We're not aware,
but there's an international conspiracy of scientists and top people
that are already out there exploring the Solar system more
than we know, and over the centuries, and each series
(37:12):
was going to be set another century later that we
would go off, you know, if in the hopeful idea
that there would be many series of this, we would
reach into the far flung future. And there were difference
engineers who were speculating using all kinds of theory about
how the human race might reach out further, and all
(37:34):
the implications politically, scientifically, you know, across across those millennia,
you know, where would we end up. So it was
quite far eaching grand scope of an idea. And I
remember him saying to me, he said, you'll be surprised,
I'm not doing science fiction. I am. I've thought up
another science fiction series, and I didn't know what it
(37:56):
was at the time. He was keeping it quite his cards,
quite close to his chest. But I last saw him
in December of ninety eight when he was giving one
of his speeches, a variation on the usual speech, to
the public Awareness of Science Drama Awards, which is something
I'd been involved in since the year before. I'd been
a guest speaker there whilst I was directing episodes of
(38:17):
a science fiction series. And yeah, he was clearly, you know,
firing on all cylinders, and he had great ideas. And
then the following year ninety nine, he went and emigrated
to live in California to get the movie done. That
was the real reason for going. And sadly, two years later,
after a strenuous workout in the gym, he collapsed and
(38:41):
that was the end of him. I'm afraid. So I
think I think the Secret Project, I think that was
something that it's time passed. You know. It's a shame
it didn't happen when it was first proposed in the
mid nineties. But it's there in the book if you
want to have a look, there's a few pages from it.
It's not the whole thing. In fact, now I don't
(39:01):
think there's anything in the book which is the entire
thing it would be impossible. The book would be enormous.
So what I've tried to do is find really good
representative pages of everything, so you get a really broad
sweep of his life, his projects, the surprising things that
he did, you know, like working on cartoons for children,
(39:23):
and he did some sketch comedy for Pete Town's End
of the Who, And all sorts of snippets and tipbits
that I found, and yeah, I think you'll find something
in there. It's one of those books that you can
pick up and read a few pages and then come
back to another time, or if you want to work
your way through the whole thing. It is vaguely chronological.
(39:45):
Sometimes it's difficult to be sure because he didn't put
a lot of dates on things. You know. The diaries,
of course are dated, but they're not He wasn't using
them to pour his heart out. They were really disappointment diaries,
you know, which is a but his notebooks are frequently undated.
The other funny thing about his notebooks was he would
(40:06):
start a fresh notebook in a burst of enthusiasm, and
you'd see it on the page and he would declare, boldly,
I'm now going to write something new every day, all big,
bold statements and lots of optimism, and then after about
six or seven pages that sort of fizzles out and
the rest of the book blank. Then he starts another
(40:26):
notebook and it's just you know, he continues on another
fresh It's like a butterfly mind. He would flip from
thing to thing and try very hard to make it,
to make it work, and then if he would get
plunged into fits of despair. He was known to have
depression occasionally. I think maybe less and less as his
(40:48):
life went along, as he got more successful. I think
it helped. But yeah, he was a man of extraordinary enthusiasms,
and that comes across on the page.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Absolutely. Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at
the physical book, but I had the digital book, and
you know, the layout is fabulous, and it provides so
much insight and you get, like you say, into these
different areas of his life. Is sort of pyramid of interest.
Really really a treat, A great introduction I think in
some respects to the man for people who aren't familiar
(41:21):
with him. But I could see this would be a
cherished volume for for Douglas Adams fans out there.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Well, I hope so, I mean, that's that was the intention.
So I hope we've fulfilled it. And I'm certainly delighted
with when the book arrived. I was quite surprised at
the at the quality of it. That's that stood out
to me. You know, it's something to be proud of.
And yeah, I hope people will enjoy four to two
(41:48):
The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. And we do
explain forty two of the book. That's that's we've given it.
We've given it a little sub chapter.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. This
is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Thanks again to Kevin for coming on the show. The
book again is forty two The Wildly Improbable Ideas of
Douglas Adams. It is going to be available as a
physical book to you shortly. It's already available as an ebook,
so go ahead and look it up an order or
pre order wherever you get your volumes. Thanks as always
(42:21):
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. And
just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Listener mail episodes on Mondays. On Wednesdays we have a
short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(42:41):
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And if you
would like to reach out to us, well, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Saturday.
Let's go into the vault. This is going to be
an interview episode. I talked to Kevin John Davies about
his book The Mind of Douglas Adams. So for all
of you Douglas Adams fans out there, you know you
enjoy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in any format
(00:26):
that it has been brought to life, then this is
a really fun chat. We also get into some other
discussions of popular science fiction. So I really enjoyed this
interview back in the day, and I hope you enjoy
it here for the first time or revisiting it. It
originally published eight thirty one, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert. On today's show, I'll be talking with author
Kevin John Davies about his new book forty two The
Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. This book will be
available as a physical book on the nineteenth of September.
It's already available as an ebook, so one way or
(01:20):
another you can get your hands on this book. It's
a beautiful volume, so I highly recommend it now in
the event that you're not familiar with the man himself.
Douglas Adams born nineteen fifty two was a groundbreaking English author, humorist,
and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
a work originally conceived for radio, but it would also
(01:43):
take on new life as a novel in nineteen seventy nine,
stage shows, a comic book, TV series, video game, and
a two thousand and five feature film that many of
you may be familiar with. His other works include the
Dirk gently books, and he served as screen writer on
thirteen episodes of Doctor Who in the late seventies and
(02:03):
early eighties. He died in two thousand and one, but
his influence continues to be felt in humor and science
fiction and beyond. So with some of the basics out
of the way, let's jump right into the interview with
author Kevin John Davies. Hi, Kevin, thanks for coming on
the show.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hello there, Rob, nice to be invited. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So the book is forty two the wildly improbable Ideas
of Douglas Adams. Many of our listeners are well acquainted
with Adam's work, and I included a short overview at
the top of this episode for everyone, But as someone
who worked with him and has chronicled his ideas in
his work, what do you think is the most essential
thing for our listeners to recognize about the man, especially
(02:47):
they're just not that familiar with him in his work.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I think what you have to realize is that Douglas
never set out to be a science fiction author. You know,
he's primary focused ever since his college days, you know,
at university and Cambridge, he just wanted to be a writer, performer.
He wanted to be John Clees until he realized that
job was taken. But he certainly got to meet a
(03:12):
few of his heroes. So his favorite kind of reading
material were things like PG. Woodhouse. So he saw himself
as a comedy writer, a satirist primarily. But he said
that he rather ruefully, he said to me once when
I interviewed him several times over the years. But he said,
(03:32):
the trouble is everything I write seems to involve robots
and spaceships. So I think he appeals across the board,
you know, he appeals to people who like science fiction
because he seems to be playing with the usual tropes
of science fiction, and he appeals to people who don't
like robots and spaceships because he seems to be sending
(03:54):
it up. So it kind of works across the board.
You know, you don't have to be a big science
fiction fan to get The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It works on that kind of satirical level, and it's
just beautiful writing. So I hope new people will give
it a go. They might discover something new that they
(04:15):
really love.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Can you tell us how you came to first work
with Douglas Adams and where he was in his career
at that time.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Sure, well, I mean within the first few years of
knowing him, he suddenly became very rich and famous. But
when I first met him, I'd seen his first Doctor Who,
which was called The Pirate Planet, and that had been
a four part serial on television starr In Tom Baker,
and then I'd heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on its second
(04:45):
repeat within the first year. It was quite unusual for
a radio show to get repeated quite so quickly, but
it was popular demand, and he very soon realized he
had a hit on his hands. I was invited to
bring my new tape recorder. I was seventeen years old
and I just had a new tape recording for my birthday,
remember those cassettes, And I brought it along to interview
(05:06):
him for a fan magazine for Doctor Who, primarily, but
my friends and I kept asking him questions about Hitchhiker's
Guide because that was all new and exciting, and he said,
I thought this was going to be an interview about
Doctor Who. He'd just taken a day job, that was it,
because he needed regular income, had he had a few
tough years, and so the idea of a year long
(05:28):
contract at the BBC marshaling scripts for Doctor Who was
something that he badly and sorely needed at the time.
So I just met this very tall everyone remarks on that,
and he's good foot taller than me, very smiley, witty,
very friendly, immediately friendly, an amazing guy. Immediately you're sort
(05:53):
of you're taken to him, you know. That was that
was the flavor of it. And it was about another
eighteen months later after that interview that I by pure chance,
ended up working on the hit Tracker's Guide to the
Galaxy TV series, and that was my first year in
the business, having left Art College. So it was a
(06:13):
glorious year for me and one that I treasured to
this day and remember vividly despite it being all those
years ago. And I was an animator working on the
BBC television version, So yeah, it was a very strange hit.
Trackers is odd that it began on radio, then it
became a stage play, several stage plays, then finally a novel,
(06:38):
a vinyl LP, and then I found myself working on
the TV version, and yeah, that was it, and that's
when I really got to know Douglas properly in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Now, prior to this interview, I think my only full
experience with his work was the film adaptation of Hitchaker's
Guide to the Galaxy. But I listened to the Stephen
Fryer narrated audiobook version in preparation for this interview, and
you know, I was just really kind of taken aback
just how good it is and how you know, it
(07:09):
still feels so distinct and original, which isn't always the
case with works of great popularity and influence. So I
was wondering, like, why do you feel that this book
in particular is still speaking to us forty four years
after its initial publication.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I think it's the sheer amount of work that Douglas
put into the writing. He's a great friend of his.
Nick Webb, who I got to know as well, also
has passed now, but he became Douglas's official biographer, and
I've interviewed him too in the past, and he said
(07:45):
that Douglas Douglas could hear the music, and what he
meant by that was as a writer, he could hear
the rhythm and flow of a sentence. And I think
you you know, if you adapt any of Douglas's work,
you messed with that at your peril. And I think
the movie took some liberties with the actual flow of
(08:06):
his very carefully chosen sentences. You know, he would do
very long sentences with lots of subclauses and parentheses, and
then on the last word of something, he would rip
the rug from under you and make you laugh. And
he had thought about it, and I think it came
from his days in sketch comedy. So you know, the
(08:27):
radio series of Hit Choker and the television version are
born out of that kind of footlight Cambridge footlights, sketch
comedy performing background. That's it, you know, famously, Monty Python,
they all came out of the same stable, and so
I think when they came to the movie, it's a
(08:49):
slightly different style of acting. Actually, you know, Martin Freeman
has a much more realistic style to his. I think
he was quite good actually his after Dead. But it
is a different way of performing, you know, it's more traditional,
you know, Hollywood movie style. And they obviously they grafted
in more of a love interest with Trillion between the
(09:10):
two main characters, Arthur and at Trillion, and you know,
it tried to fit that thing that Douglas tried all
his life and for twenty odd years he tried to
get a movie made of Hitcherck and sadly it didn't
come along into the few years after he died. And
so I think some of the fans, some of the
purest fans, don't really rate the movie as much. I
(09:33):
think it looks beautiful, and I did go along to
the set and I met the filmmakers, and they certainly
had Douglas's best interests at heart, but they were music
video producer director pair that made it, and I think
they thought much much more about the visuals than they
did about the script, and I think Disney had quite
(09:55):
strong studio control on the script, so you know, it's
a difficult thing to pull off. The later radio adaptations
by Dirt Maggs, he adapted and directed them for BBC Radio,
and they kept the flavor. They he got the style,
he understood it, and he knew that Douglas had chosen
(10:18):
Dirk as the successor to Jeffrey Perkins, the main producer
of the original series. And sadly, you know, those shows
didn't come along until after Douglas had passed, but certainly
they kept the flavor. So I recommend, you know, try
the radio shows, try the books. The books are pure Douglas.
It's him playing with the language, and that's why they
(10:41):
survive and why they still work now because the sheer
effort that he put into them. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Now, I want to come back to Doctor Who for
just a second. As you mentioned, he wrote for the
TV show during with the late seventies and early eighties.
In what key ways do you think Doctor Who influenced
Douglas Adams and what sort of lasting influence did he
leave on the franchise.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Well, he said that when he was at prep school,
he was writing sketches about Doctor Who with them the
Daleks being powered by rush Chrispies or something, just something
that he did as a thing with his friends on
audio tape. And so he'd always wanted to work for
Doctor Who, and we have in the book, in the
(11:27):
forty two book, there's a letter of rejection which must
have pained him deeply in nineteen seventy six when he
first got turned down by the then producer and the
script editor team. But two years later, you know, he
got the commissioned, and thank goodness he did, because he
was in a real pit at that time. And suddenly
he had the first series of Hit Shriker and the
(11:50):
first four episodes of Dr Who to write almost simultaneously,
and he retreated down to the West Country where his
mother lived, and the back to the family home and
slaved away over those scripts until he'd sort of run
out of words, as he put it, and he got
John Lloyd to help him with the last two episodes
(12:12):
of that first radio series of Hitchhiker, and it just
it was obvious when you watch that Doctor Who what
his take on it was. He has a peculiar turn
of phrase. The humor is there the ideas. It's all
(12:33):
about the ideas. Douglas had some extraordinary ideas, and in
later years he became fascinated with real science. So it
wasn't just making it up for Hitchhiker's sake, you know,
and for Doctor Who. But it was obviously there was
a strong talent there, and that's why he was offered
the role to join the show and be its script
editor for a whole year looking after other writers. Not
(12:56):
a job he was terribly well suited to because he
had trouble delivering two deadlines himself, so to get scripts
out of other writers. You know, he had been a
radio producer very briefly before he ran away to television.
From their point of view, so yeah, pulling scripts out
of other people, that's not really that wasn't really his forte.
(13:17):
But luckily at that time Hitchhiker exploded and he then
had to go off and do other things and work on,
you know, milk this baby, to do sequels, and everyone
kept demanding more and more Hitchhikers until he was sick
of it. Really, But yeah, I think the legacy that
he left behind, and people have quoted this, like Steve
(13:39):
Moffett and Russell T. Davis. They cite one of his
particular stories, The City of Death, as their kind of
role model for how they'd like it to be. Don't
just When I interviewed him about it, he said that
he worried that when he put jokes into scripts, he
still wanted the drama to be played straight. But the
fear is that when you put comedy into a drama
(14:01):
script that people then start to ham it up and
play to the comedy more. And you know, he wanted
to use the light and shade of the drama and
the comedy. But City of Death, which he co wrote,
I mean the producer. It was an emergency script written
supposedly over a weekend, which is hard to imagine, but
(14:21):
that was the legacy left behind. I think it had
an effect on how the modern producers of Doctor Who
tackled it when they revived it in two thousand and
five onwards.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So the book is a beautiful memoir, using various documents
and photos from the dogals Adam's archive. Correct along with
these various words and letters from friends, you words of
fans collaborators tell us how this project came together and
what sort of challenges were involved.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Sure, the book was something that, strangely enough, I first
thought about. In twenty sixteen, I was asked by the
radio producer, an adaptor of Douglas's work Dirt Mags, to
go along to the archive, which I didn't really know
much about it. Before there had been a book another
(15:20):
guy had written a book which had had some appendices
of stuff from the archive, so we knew a little
bit about that, and that was Hitchhikery material. But Dirk said,
go and see if you can find anything that a
bit of pure Douglas magic, any titbits, odd phrases, lines,
you know, anything you can find that hasn't been used yet,
(15:40):
and we'll put it into this final radio series. The
final radio series is called the Hexagonal. Phase of hitch
Hiker was based on a book by Owen Colfer, the
Irish writer who wrote Artem's Foul and other young young
adult readers. You know. He he felt that it needed
(16:01):
a bit more Douglasy magic. So I went and had
a look at the material. Then I spent about six
days there. For me, I live right at the top
of North London, so it was a drive up the
motorway to Cambridge, an ancient city of Cambridge, which is
full of colleges that all part of the Cambridge University.
And there is Saint John's College and the ancient library there.
(16:22):
I mean, the building's about four or five hundred years old.
The front of it is all beautifully remodeled and everything,
but the back is almost like a church. It feels
like Hogwarts, you know, and the Harry Potter films, big
heavy old bookcases with giant leather bound sort of books
on the shelves, and they've got medieval manuscripts and they've
(16:43):
got all sorts there, and Douglas's material was lodged there
by his family. Now, while I was going through this,
I realized that Douglas kind of argues with himself on
the page, and we've got some of this in the book.
He would be berating himself for forgetting an idea that
he's the night before, or he just wasn't in the
mood to write that day. Every now and again there's
(17:04):
a nice little pep talk where he tells himself and
you can do quite well for yourself, you know. You know.
Once he was actually seeing the money rolling in. But
it was interesting to watch a writer at work looking
at a man that I knew for twenty years. I'm
looking at his handwriting. He's terrible handwriting, very scribbly at times,
and he's appalling typing with all sorts of liquid paper
(17:25):
or tip its blobs all over it and crossings out
and x x x through everything, and you know, it
was quite He wrote four books before he got into
using a word processor. So you know, if anyone thinks
that forty two was inspired by his knowledge of asking
or whether it's called a SC two, no, he knew
(17:46):
nothing about computers when he wrote it, Chuck. So anyway,
I looked at all this material and I thought, you
know what, there should be a book about this, something
along the lines of how Douglas Adams wrote. And I
didn't think about it anymore. I didn't even think necessary
that it would be me that would write the book
until the publisher came out of the blue in twenty twenty. Yeah,
(18:09):
at the end of twenty twenty they contacted me and said,
you've been suggested by the estate of Douglas, the family
and the agent who runs the estate to go and
do some more research in the archive and prepare this book.
And I said, well, isn't that strange. It's something I'd considered,
(18:32):
but I didn't think it would be me. So thank you,
and so off I went. Eventually, I mean the first
year of the business. It was the unbound to the publishers.
They begin each project with a Kickstarter to raise the
funds and to secure it, and that protects them as
a small publisher. It protects them from the risk involved
(18:56):
in an expensive book. And they'd already done a book
called what's it called Letters of Note, quite a big
coffee table book of famous people's correspondents and sometimes quite
old fashioned copper plate writing. You'd have on one page
(19:17):
you'd see the actual letter, and on the other page
you'd see it in a plain text to make it
easier to read. So that was their kind of model
that they wanted to make this book based upon. So
the first year was very difficult because the library was
in lockdown still and there was a member of staff
there who could be very badly affected by getting COVID.
(19:38):
She had quite severe asthma, so she was keeping it
strictly to live in students only, so that was a
bit of a delay. Then I got ill, then my
wife got ill. So the first year was a bit
of a writer. The second year twenty twenty two, I
went seventeen times in all to up to Cambridge. It's
about fifty miles each way, and I would spend the
(20:01):
day looking through the material, photographing it on my iPhone
because there wasn't enough time to sit and read it
on the day bringing it home. And I think for
every day I went, I spent at least a week
reading everything and logging it and creating my own database.
There is you can actually look at the Saint John's
College database of Douglas's material, but it really is only
(20:26):
very broad strokes, you know, It's like bullet points. Whereas
the only way to do it is to sit there
and look at the papers and go slowly through it all.
And it still belongs to the family. They still have
very much the control of it. You have to get
written permission to go and access this stuff. So I
felt very privileged. I also felt now in Douglas. I
(20:46):
don't think he wanted me or anyone to go and
look at his material in the unprepared state, and I
felt very much like I was prying, especially when you
look at things like his notebooks and his diaries. You know,
there's not a lot that didn't exactly pour his heart
out of his diaries, they're mostly just notes about meetings
(21:08):
and birthdays and party lots of parties. But in his
notebooks he was really much more personal. He would talk about,
you know, how he was feeling about working on this thing.
But it was lovely to see phrases that you know
and love if you're a Hitchhracker fan, you know, or
a Dot or two fan, you can see things. You
(21:28):
can see him working it out on the page, and
there it is in his own handwriting. So again, very privileged.
And I was walking in his footsteps literally because I
was going into the same you know college that he
studied in all those years ago in the early seventies.
I was going across the road at lunchtime in the
same pub that we know he frequented, and cafes around
(21:51):
the corner, you know, to break up the day they
always shut for lunch. Very British. And it was a
lovely job. It's something I thoroughly enjoyed doing. I then,
unfortunately I did get rather ill last year and I
had to take a slight back seat for a while.
A copy editor was assigned to look after the project,
(22:15):
to guide me through the whole business of the layout.
She worked with the designer, and you took a lot
of the load off me. When I was hospitalized for
a while. Anyway, the hospital they promised me they'd cure me,
and they did. I had six months of chemo and
I got better and I was able to finish the book.
(22:36):
The publishers were wonderful, they waited for me, and between
the whole team, we've put together something that I think
the fans are going to cherish. And it's beautiful book,
beautifully printed. It's very heavy and very glossy, and I'm
delighted with the outcome. So now's the time to tell
(22:57):
everyone all about it rather excitedly. Is out in Britain now.
It was launched on Thursday last week here in the UK,
and it will be out in the middle of September
in America. Takes that long for the ship to get
across the Atlantic.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Was the Thursday release date intentional?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I wonder it also it was also the twenty fourth
of August. That's forty two back. But I don't know.
You can read what you like into that and people will.
I mean the fans have delighted in making notes about
forty two ever since I've been a what do they
call it, an honorary member of zaid zed nine Plurals
(23:38):
had Alpha, which is the official Hitchhiker's Guide appreciation society
for over forty years now. And we even had the
letter to Douglas and replies from him in the book
from the fans. There's an old chapter about fan letters
and things, which I quite enjoyed putting together. So yeah,
(23:59):
it's been. It's mixture. It covers his whole life from
cradle to grave. You know, really shows early promise when
he was twelve years old. His poems are extraordinary, and
then there's you know, love lorm Student Verse, and then
the early sketch comedy material Doctor who Hitchhikers Dirt Gently,
Last Chance to See, right up to the digital village,
(24:22):
which was how he spent these later years doing new projects,
some of which didn't make it to fruition, and we've
got some pages of those as well, So it's the
whole shomac.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
I was really intrigued by this whole world of eighties
video games that the book touches on. I have very
little personal experience with games of this genre in time period.
So what was the nineteen eighty four Hitchhiker's game? Like,
what what what was this? And what was Douglas Adam's
vrovement in it.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Well, I'm going to be I'm going to be quite
honest here. It's not one that I got into at
the time. I've been working in animation and we were
looking at computer graphics from quite early on, and I
just looked at it and thought, well, this technology is
not ready yet. You know. Of course, Jurassic Park and
terminated too, and all that kind of stuff was a
(25:22):
long long way ahead in the future. Computers were quite
kind of raw, and it was all very rough at
that time. But those who loved tinkering with computers were
having a field day. And Douglas admitted he said, do
you know what, I really would quite like to have
been a software engineer. I don't know if he had
the discipline, To be honest, he was a quite chaotic
sort of person. To wonder that his archive exists, and
(25:43):
I've put that down to his battery of personal assistance
he had over the years who probably kept it all
in order. But yes, he really enjoyed the process. Of
writing that first game. It's a text adventure, so you're
interacting with the text in a way that he quite mischievously,
would get the computer to lie. He said, you know,
(26:07):
it's not artificial intelligence. It's actually artificially it's not user friendly.
It's artificially mendacious. I what you call it. It would
deliberately lie to you, and you the game, I believe
was quite frustrating. I only dabbled on it briefly. I
mean it was launched at a convention that we had
(26:27):
in the middle of nineteen eighty five. I remember them
doing quite a bit of publicity there for it, and
a TV show that covered it at the time, and
there was one guy who was quite good at it,
who was explaining how it worked, and I had to
dabble there, and I thought, ah, this is not for me.
I didn't, but I know that, you know, from my
interviews with Douglas, I knew that he loved the experience.
(26:49):
And then he went on to do Bureaucracy, which was
based on I mean, they wanted Hitchiker two, but he
was much more interested in doing something different, which I
think was true. Throughout his career. He kept trying to
escape from hitchhiker. But the bureaucracy game was about getting
a bank to register a change of address card because
(27:10):
he had personal experience of a bank. He just bought
a swanky new flat in fashionable Islington in London, and
the bank kept sending all his correspondence went to the
old address, and he kept saying to them, look, you know,
for heaven's sake, you're into this property for X thousands
(27:31):
of pounds. Surely you know where I am. And he said,
they wrote back to me and said wherever. So sorry, yes,
it's completely our fault. We will get it right in future.
And he said, guess where they sent that letter? So yeah,
So I mean famously in Hitchhikers the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats
are the vogons. And that's kind of become a byword
(27:54):
now for anybody that has a sort of stubborn bureaucratic streak,
you know, parking wardens and petty officials that liked to
wield their look a bit of power too heavily. I
think a lot of people call them bogons.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Now, now, am I correct that? In this did he
also work on the nineteen eighty six Labyrinth the computer game.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Ah, there was a dabble. He did know Jim Henson,
and I know that he went to dinner with him,
and I know he got involved in a discussion group.
There was an educational thing that he was going to
do with the Muppets. Quite how much involvement he had,
I don't know. It's not something that's terribly well documented.
And yeah, I can't really give you much on that,
(28:37):
but I know that, you know, he prized his friendship
with Jim Henson quite highly at the time. But who
knows what they would have created together that happened. It
would have been amazing.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Both such creative individuals that died far too early.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, I agree, Yeah, terribly missed both of them.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
I agree. Now, speaking of technology and also you know
sci fi visions of technology, does Adams get enough credit
as a kind of futurist at least as far as
you know, technology is concerned.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I don't know how many people know about quite how
many conferences that he went to as a guest speaker.
The world of sort of you know, geeks, nerds, whatever,
you know, the computer and the high tech world, even
to mobile phones and things like that. They clamored to
have him there because he was a very entertaining speaker.
(29:33):
He essentially gave pretty much the same speech I think
at quite a few conferences, and we have his notes
from one of those speeches from right towards the end
of his tragically short life. But yes, he once told
me on an interview in ninety two and he said, oh,
I'm off to Japan next week or something. He said,
(29:56):
I'm giving a talk at this conference, and my audience
is going to include the head of Sony, Francis faul Coppola,
and George Lucas. He was certainly mixing with interesting company
and the high tech side of things. Yeah, he knew
some very powerful people. I found a note about Jeff
Bezos in one of his notebooks. He wasn't above just
picking up the phone and ringing these people, you know.
(30:19):
He he had ideas and he was communicating them quite
early on. He knew long before the most of us
mere mortals were really aware of the Internet. He was
way ahead, he knew. And an interview I did with
him further Sci Fi Channel in ninety five, he was saying, then,
I want to get this country wired up, you know,
I want us to have a fiber to every home,
(30:40):
and that was a long way before. I mean we
still don't have that now, but in ninety five he
was talking about that. So yes, he was very aware,
and he became more and more aware of it. He
was fascinated by real science and that was his preferred
reading matter in the latter stages of his life, and
we've kind of been robbed of something. I think that
he would have written some real science books. I mean,
(31:02):
his only factual book was his favorite, and that was
Last Chance to See But that was about endangered species,
which was another hot topic for him. He was asked
by a newspaper to go and be a sort of
untrained observer for a trip to Madagascar to go and
look for a rare species of lima called the AI.
(31:25):
And I interviewed him in eighty five just after he
got back, two weeks after he got back, and he said,
that was fascinating experience. We went off into the jungle
because the II is nocturnal, it means have ted torture.
He loved it so much. And they did get to
see the II, which is the most bizarre looking creature.
And you said that I really enjoyed that i'd like
(31:47):
I think I'd like to do more of that, And
within a couple of years he was taking an entire
year out to go around the world with Mark Card
the naturalist, and that they went to all sorts of
far flung places to look at endangered species and sort
of report upon them, mainly originally for a radio show,
(32:09):
but also with the idea that it would be a book.
And they were given a big old chunk of money
to go and do this and to make these trips,
and a series of different radio producer sound recordis went
with them to make the radio shows. The radio show
varies slightly from the book. The book is pure Douglas.
(32:30):
It's about the fun and games they had just getting
to the places. So it's almost like a travelogue thing
of what it's like to go to these tiny little
airstrips in the middle of Africa where corrupt officials would
want their palms greased if they were going to let
you have your baggages. You know, you couldn't get your
(32:51):
suitcases unless you you know, seen the right man sort. So, yeah,
he had some great stories to tell, and we've got
a couple of the stories that didn't make the book
book are in this book, There's there's one where he
went to see some fruit bats, and he was so
preoccupied with the fact that he'd been completely bitten all
over by mosquitos that he barely could look at the
(33:12):
fruit bats. But you know, he was an intrepid traveler.
He liked his home comfort. I mean, he really did
go all around the world and stay in some really
swanky hotels, but he wasn't above roughing it and being
you know, in the outback or in jungles or whatever
it took. And he became very passionately fond of endangered species,
(33:36):
and he would have written more. I'm sure he would have.
He was reading on evolution and evolutionary theory. He was
keeping up to date and abreast of all the modern
technological trends. What he would have thought of today's situation
with AI. You know who knows we've been robbed of
that sadly. And Jeffrey mcgiven, who played Full Prefect on
(33:58):
the radio, he said, one thing we've been robbed of
is Douglas's view on being the parent of a teenage girl,
because sadly, his little girl, Polly was only six when
he passed away. So you know, he would have had
a take on what it was like to deal with
a teenage girl, you know, and all that. There's all
(34:18):
sorts of things, and the family missing terribly. I know
his sisters and his brother and they champion him a lot.
They get involved in when we have memorial services or
we have there's an annual lecture science and comedy lecture
in his name and organized partly by the family and
(34:39):
partly by Save the Rhino International of which he was
a founder patron.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Yeah, there's some photos in the book with some sort
of a rhino costume, right.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
That's fantastic costume. I think it was made originally for
a stage show. It's a caricature of a rhino really,
but it's quite familiar to Britain's for taking part in
marathon and you know, city marathons and things like that.
These rhinos with their low slung head hanging down in
front of the costumes fabulous designed by Gerald Scarf, Foone's cartoonist.
(35:12):
But yeah, Douglas took part in a trek. There was
a team that walked across part of Africa up to
the top of Manculum Manjara. I don't think Douglas made
it up the mountain, but he did part of the
sweltering in that costume in the African heat, and there
are pictures in the book of that and a very
(35:32):
nice portrait of him standing there holding the costume. Yeah.
So yeah, no, they was serious about that. And also
the Diane Fosse Guerrilla Fund. You know, he would he
would give to those charities and support them.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Tell us about Secret Empire and how this would have
fit into the creative output of Douglas Adams. I know
the book. In the book, it's compared in scope to
something ultimately like Asimov's Foundation series, So like, what would
tone and scope have been if this had come to
fruition and why didn't it come together?
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I think it didn't come together primarily because the company
from which he was running that and proposing it was
the Digital Village, which he set up with several people,
including his friend Robbie Stamp, and it went to the wall.
Unfortunately in the dotcom bubble burst, you know, it was
(36:27):
not financed quite as strongly as they'd hoped, and so
I don't know, it would have been a very expensive series.
His ideas were quite extraordinary and it was very much
like we've now got foundation. Finally the technology is there
now to make something as awesome as a story with
that kind of scope. But that's what he was planning.
(36:49):
It was. The idea was called Secret Empire because the
notion was that we nearmmortals on Earth. We're not aware,
but there's an international conspiracy of scientists and top people
that are already out there exploring the Solar system more
than we know, and over the centuries, and each series
(37:12):
was going to be set another century later that we
would go off, you know, if in the hopeful idea
that there would be many series of this, we would
reach into the far flung future. And there were difference
engineers who were speculating using all kinds of theory about
how the human race might reach out further, and all
(37:34):
the implications politically, scientifically, you know, across across those millennia,
you know, where would we end up. So it was
quite far eaching grand scope of an idea. And I
remember him saying to me, he said, you'll be surprised,
I'm not doing science fiction. I am. I've thought up
another science fiction series, and I didn't know what it
(37:56):
was at the time. He was keeping it quite his cards,
quite close to his chest. But I last saw him
in December of ninety eight when he was giving one
of his speeches, a variation on the usual speech, to
the public Awareness of Science Drama Awards, which is something
I'd been involved in since the year before. I'd been
a guest speaker there whilst I was directing episodes of
(38:17):
a science fiction series. And yeah, he was clearly, you know,
firing on all cylinders, and he had great ideas. And
then the following year ninety nine, he went and emigrated
to live in California to get the movie done. That
was the real reason for going. And sadly, two years later,
after a strenuous workout in the gym, he collapsed and
(38:41):
that was the end of him. I'm afraid. So I
think I think the Secret Project, I think that was
something that it's time passed. You know. It's a shame
it didn't happen when it was first proposed in the
mid nineties. But it's there in the book if you
want to have a look, there's a few pages from it.
It's not the whole thing. In fact, now I don't
(39:01):
think there's anything in the book which is the entire
thing it would be impossible. The book would be enormous.
So what I've tried to do is find really good
representative pages of everything, so you get a really broad
sweep of his life, his projects, the surprising things that
he did, you know, like working on cartoons for children,
(39:23):
and he did some sketch comedy for Pete Town's End
of the Who, And all sorts of snippets and tipbits
that I found, and yeah, I think you'll find something
in there. It's one of those books that you can
pick up and read a few pages and then come
back to another time, or if you want to work
your way through the whole thing. It is vaguely chronological.
(39:45):
Sometimes it's difficult to be sure because he didn't put
a lot of dates on things. You know. The diaries,
of course are dated, but they're not He wasn't using
them to pour his heart out. They were really disappointment diaries,
you know, which is a but his notebooks are frequently undated.
The other funny thing about his notebooks was he would
(40:06):
start a fresh notebook in a burst of enthusiasm, and
you'd see it on the page and he would declare, boldly,
I'm now going to write something new every day, all big,
bold statements and lots of optimism, and then after about
six or seven pages that sort of fizzles out and
the rest of the book blank. Then he starts another
(40:26):
notebook and it's just you know, he continues on another
fresh It's like a butterfly mind. He would flip from
thing to thing and try very hard to make it,
to make it work, and then if he would get
plunged into fits of despair. He was known to have
depression occasionally. I think maybe less and less as his
(40:48):
life went along, as he got more successful. I think
it helped. But yeah, he was a man of extraordinary enthusiasms,
and that comes across on the page.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Absolutely. Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at
the physical book, but I had the digital book, and
you know, the layout is fabulous, and it provides so
much insight and you get, like you say, into these
different areas of his life. Is sort of pyramid of interest.
Really really a treat, A great introduction I think in
some respects to the man for people who aren't familiar
(41:21):
with him. But I could see this would be a
cherished volume for for Douglas Adams fans out there.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Well, I hope so, I mean, that's that was the intention.
So I hope we've fulfilled it. And I'm certainly delighted
with when the book arrived. I was quite surprised at
the at the quality of it. That's that stood out
to me. You know, it's something to be proud of.
And yeah, I hope people will enjoy four to two
(41:48):
The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. And we do
explain forty two of the book. That's that's we've given it.
We've given it a little sub chapter.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. This
is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Thanks again to Kevin for coming on the show. The
book again is forty two The Wildly Improbable Ideas of
Douglas Adams. It is going to be available as a
physical book to you shortly. It's already available as an ebook,
so go ahead and look it up an order or
pre order wherever you get your volumes. Thanks as always
(42:21):
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. And
just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Listener mail episodes on Mondays. On Wednesdays we have a
short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(42:41):
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And if you
would like to reach out to us, well, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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