August 31, 2023 • 42 mins
In this 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.”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. 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
(00:36):
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 can see for radio, but it would
(00:58):
also 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 screenwriter on
thirteen episodes of Doctor Who in the late seventies and
(01:19):
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 3 (01:37):
Hello there, Rob, nice to be invited. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
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
(02:02):
they're just not that familiar with him in his work.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
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
(02:28):
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,
(02:48):
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
(03:10):
it up. So it kind of works across the boards.
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
(03:31):
really love.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Can you tell us how you came to first work
with Douglas Adams and where he was in his career
at that time.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
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 starring Tom Baker. And
then I'd heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on its second repeat
(04:02):
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 recorder for my birthday,
remember those cassettes, And I brought it along to interview
(04:22):
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
Dr Who. He'd just taken a day job, that was it,
because he needed regular income. He had a few tough years,
and so the idea of a year long contract at
(04:44):
the BBC marshaling scripts for Dr 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 sort of you're
(05:09):
taken to him, you know. 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 Tricker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series, And
that was my first year in the business, having left
Art College. So it was a glorious year for me
(05:31):
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 that it began
on radio, then it became a stage play, several stage plays,
then then finally a novel, a vinyl LP, and then
(05:56):
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 2 (06:04):
Now, prior to this interview, I think my only full
experience with his work was the film adaptation of Hitchiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. But I listened to the Stephen
Frye 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
(06:25):
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 3 (06:39):
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 Dougs's official biographer, and
I've interviewed him too in the past, and he said
(07:01):
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 mess with that at your peril. And I think
the movie took some liberties with the actual flow of
(07:21):
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
(07:42):
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 you know, famously Monty Python. They
all came out of the same stable, and so I
(08:03):
think when they came to do the movie, it's a
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 is 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
(08:23):
in more of a love interest with trillion between the
two main characters after and a 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
(08:44):
purest fans, don't really rate the movie as much. I
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
(09:07):
did about the script. And I think Disney had quite
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. He got the style, he
(09:30):
understood it, and he knew that Douglas had chosen 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.
(09:53):
It's him playing with the language, and that's why they
survive and why they still work now because the sheer
effort that he put into them.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
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 3 (10:21):
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
(10:43):
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 because he was in
a real pit at that time, and suddenly he had
(11:04):
the first series of Hit Shriker and the 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
(11:25):
help him with the last two episodes of that first
radio series of Hit Shriker, 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 about the ideas.
(11:50):
Douglas had some extraordinary ideas, and in later years he
became fascinated with real science. So it wasn't just making
it up for Hit Shriker'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 it script editor for
a whole year looking after other writers. Not a job
(12:12):
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 But luckily
(12:34):
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 Moffett and Russell T. Davis.
(12:57):
They cite one of his particular stock is The City
of Death, as their kind of role model for how
they'd like it to be. Don't. 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 script that people then start
(13:18):
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 that was the legacy left behind.
(13:38):
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 2 (13:56):
So the book is a beautiful memoir using various documents,
photos from the Dougals Adams 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 3 (14:15):
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 Dougas's work Dirt Mags, to
go along to the archive, which I didn't really know
much about. Before there had been a book. Another guy
(14:36):
had written a book which had had some appendices of
stuff from the archive, so we knew a little bit
about that that was Hitchhiker 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, and
(14:56):
we'll put it into this final radio series. The final
radio series is called the Hexagonal Phase of Hitchhiker 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 felt that it needed a bit more
(15:17):
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 in
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. I mean, the
(15:38):
building's about four or five hundred years old. All 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 got all sorts there,
(16:00):
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 thought of
the night before, or he just wasn't in the mood
to write that day. Every now and again there's a
(16:20):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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 necessarily
that it would be me that would write the book
until the publisher came out of the blue in twenty twenty. Yeah,
(17:24):
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,
(17:47):
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. 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
(18:11):
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
(18:33):
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.
(18:54):
She had quite severe asthma, so she was keeping it
strictly to live in students, 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 day
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
database of Douglas's material, but it really is only 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
(20:02):
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 really exactly pour his
heart out. Of his diaries, they're mostly just notes about
(20:23):
meetings 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 hitch Tracker fan,
you know, or a Dot or two fan, you can
(20:43):
see things. You 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 college
that he studied in all those years ago. In the
early set, I was going across the road at lunchtime
in the same pub that we know he frequented and
(21:05):
cafes around the corner, you know, to break up the day.
They always shot 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
(21:27):
copy editor was assigned to look after the project, to
guide me through the whole business of the layout. She
worked with the designer and you know, took a lot
of the load off me when I was hospitalized for
a while. Anyway, the hospital they promised me they'd cured me,
and they did. I had six months of chemo and
(21:47):
I got better and I was able to finish the book.
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
(22:09):
delighted with the outcome. So now's the time to tell
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 2 (22:28):
Was the Thursday release date intentional?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I wonder? Also it was also the twenty fourth of August.
That's forty two.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Backwards, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
But I don't know. You can read what you like
into that, and people will. I mean, the fans are
delighted in making notes about forty two ever since. I've
been a what do they call it, an honorary member
of z Z nine plurals ad Alpha, which is the
official Hitchhiker's Guide Appreciation society for over forty years now.
(23:01):
And we even had the letter to Douglas and replies
from him in the book from the fans. There's old
chapter about fan letters and things, which I quite enjoyed
putting together. So yeah, it's been It's a real mixture.
It covers his whole life from cradle to grave, you know,
really shows early promise when he was twelve years old.
(23:22):
His poems are extraordinary, and then there's you know, loved
RM student verse and then the early sketch comedy material
Doctor who Hitchhikers Dirt Gently, Last Chance to see right
up to the digital Village, which was how he spent
the later years doing new projects, some of which didn't
(23:43):
make it to fruition, and we've got some pages of
those as well. So it's the whole shamac.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
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 was this and what was Douglas Adam's involvement in it?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
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
Terminator too, and all that kind of stuff was a
(24:37):
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 It's wonder that his archive exists and I've
(24:59):
put that down. Who's 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
(25:19):
get the computer to lie. He said, you know, it's
not artificial intelligence. He's actually artificially it's not user friendly.
It's artificially mendacious I what you call it. It would
deliberately lie to you. And the game, I believe, was
quite frustrating. I only dabbled on it briefly. I mean
it was launched at a convention that we had in
(25:43):
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. But
I know that Doug. You know, from my interviews with Douglas,
(26:03):
I knew that he loved the experience, and then he
went on to do bureaucracy, which was based on I mean,
they wanted Hitchhiker too, but he was much more interested
in doing something different, which I think was true throughout
his career. He kept trying to escape from Hitchhoker. But
the bureaucracy game was about getting a bank to register
(26:24):
a change of address card because 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,
(26:44):
you're into this property for X thousands 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
(27:05):
are the vogons, and that's kind of become a byword
now for anybody that has a sort of stubborn bureaucratic streak,
you know, parking wardens and petty officials that like to
wield their look a bit of power too heavily. I
think a lot of people call them vogons.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Now, now I might correct that in this did he
also work on the nineteen eighty six Labyrinth the computer game?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
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,
(27:53):
but I know that 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 2 (28:05):
Both such creative individuals that died far too early.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Oh yeah, yeah, I agree, Yeah, terribly missed both of them.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
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 at least as
far as you know technology is concerned.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
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.
(28:49):
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,
(29:12):
I'm giving a talk at this conference, and my audience
is going to include the head of Sony, Francis Faull 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,
(29:35):
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 fighter to every home.
(29:56):
And that was a long way before. I mean, we
still don't have that now, but 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
(30:16):
some real science books. I mean, his only factory 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
(30:38):
species of lima called the II. 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 ted talture. He loved it so much, and
they did get to see the II, which is the
(30:58):
most bizarre looking creature. And you said, I really enjoyed that.
I'd like 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 Carld,
the naturalist, and that they went to all sorts of
far flung places to look at endangered species and sort
(31:20):
of report upon them, mainly originally for a radio show,
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 Sam mccordyce went
with them to make the radio shows. The radio show
(31:42):
varies slightly from the book. The book is pure Douglas.
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
(32:03):
you have your baggages, you know, you couldn't get your
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
are in this book. There's there's one where he went
to see some fruit bats and he was so preoccupied
(32:23):
with the fact that he'd been completely bitten all over
by mosquitos that he barely could look at the fruit bats.
But you know, he was an intrepid traveler. He liked
his home comforts. I mean, he really did go all
around the world and stay in some really swanky hotels.
But but he wasn't above roughing it and being you know,
(32:44):
in the outback or in jungles or whatever it took.
And he became very passionately fond of endangered species, 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
(33:05):
with AI. You know who knows we've been robbed of that, sadly.
And Jeffrey mcgiven, who played full Prefect on 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,
he's a little girl. Polly was only six when he
(33:26):
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 sorts
of things that 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
(33:47):
we have there's an annual lecture science and comedy lecture
in his name and organized partly by the family and
partly by Save the Rhino International of which he was
a founder patron.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, there's some photos in the book with some sort
of a rhino costume, right.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
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 marathons,
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, fomous cartoonist. But yeah,
(34:28):
Douglas took part in a trek. There was a team
that walked across part of Africa up to the top
of Manculum Andnjara. 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 nice portrait
(34:49):
of him standing there holding the costume. Yeah. So yeah, no,
it was serious about that. And also the Diane Fossy
Gorilla Fund. You know, he would give to those charities
and support them.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
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
the tone and scope have been if this had come
to fruition and why didn't it come together?
Speaker 3 (35:20):
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
(35:43):
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.
(36:05):
It was. The idea was called Secret Empire because the
notion was that we nearmortals 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
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
the implications politically, scientifically, you know, across across those millennia,
you know where would we end up. So it was
quite far reaching, grand scope of an idea. And I
remember him saying to me, he said, you'll be surprised.
All I'm not doing science fiction. I am. I thought
up another science fiction series, and I didn't know what
(37:11):
it 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
(37:32):
episodes of 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
(37:56):
collapsed and that was the end of him. I'm afraid.
So I think the 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,
(38:17):
now I don't 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 suite of his life, his projects, the
surprising things that he did, you know, like working on
(38:37):
cartoons for children, 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
(38:59):
is vaguely chronological. 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 shame. But
his notebooks are frequently undated. The other funny thing about
(39:20):
his notebooks was he would 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 notebook and it's just
(39:45):
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 life went along, as he
(40:05):
got more successful. I think it helped. But yeah, he
was a man of extraordinary enthusiasms, and that comes across
on the page.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
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 it get, like you say, into these
different areas of his life, this 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
(40:36):
familiar with him. But I could see this would be
a cherished volume for Douglas Adams fans out there.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
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
(41:03):
The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. And we do
explain forty two of the books we've given it. We've
given it a little sub chapter. Excellent.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. This is
a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
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
(41:36):
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 to ail 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
(41:57):
about a weird film on Weird Houses 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.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. 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
(00:36):
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 can see for radio, but it would
(00:58):
also 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 screenwriter on
thirteen episodes of Doctor Who in the late seventies and
(01:19):
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 3 (01:37):
Hello there, Rob, nice to be invited. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
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
(02:02):
they're just not that familiar with him in his work.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
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
(02:28):
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,
(02:48):
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
(03:10):
it up. So it kind of works across the boards.
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
(03:31):
really love.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Can you tell us how you came to first work
with Douglas Adams and where he was in his career
at that time.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
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 starring Tom Baker. And
then I'd heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on its second repeat
(04:02):
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 recorder for my birthday,
remember those cassettes, And I brought it along to interview
(04:22):
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
Dr Who. He'd just taken a day job, that was it,
because he needed regular income. He had a few tough years,
and so the idea of a year long contract at
(04:44):
the BBC marshaling scripts for Dr 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 sort of you're
(05:09):
taken to him, you know. 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 Tricker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series, And
that was my first year in the business, having left
Art College. So it was a glorious year for me
(05:31):
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 that it began
on radio, then it became a stage play, several stage plays,
then then finally a novel, a vinyl LP, and then
(05:56):
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 2 (06:04):
Now, prior to this interview, I think my only full
experience with his work was the film adaptation of Hitchiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. But I listened to the Stephen
Frye 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
(06:25):
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 3 (06:39):
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 Dougs's official biographer, and
I've interviewed him too in the past, and he said
(07:01):
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 mess with that at your peril. And I think
the movie took some liberties with the actual flow of
(07:21):
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
(07:42):
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 you know, famously Monty Python. They
all came out of the same stable, and so I
(08:03):
think when they came to do the movie, it's a
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 is 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
(08:23):
in more of a love interest with trillion between the
two main characters after and a 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
(08:44):
purest fans, don't really rate the movie as much. I
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
(09:07):
did about the script. And I think Disney had quite
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. He got the style, he
(09:30):
understood it, and he knew that Douglas had chosen 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.
(09:53):
It's him playing with the language, and that's why they
survive and why they still work now because the sheer
effort that he put into them.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
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 3 (10:21):
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
(10:43):
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 because he was in
a real pit at that time, and suddenly he had
(11:04):
the first series of Hit Shriker and the 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
(11:25):
help him with the last two episodes of that first
radio series of Hit Shriker, 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 about the ideas.
(11:50):
Douglas had some extraordinary ideas, and in later years he
became fascinated with real science. So it wasn't just making
it up for Hit Shriker'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 it script editor for
a whole year looking after other writers. Not a job
(12:12):
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 But luckily
(12:34):
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 Moffett and Russell T. Davis.
(12:57):
They cite one of his particular stock is The City
of Death, as their kind of role model for how
they'd like it to be. Don't. 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 script that people then start
(13:18):
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 that was the legacy left behind.
(13:38):
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 2 (13:56):
So the book is a beautiful memoir using various documents,
photos from the Dougals Adams 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 3 (14:15):
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 Dougas's work Dirt Mags, to
go along to the archive, which I didn't really know
much about. Before there had been a book. Another guy
(14:36):
had written a book which had had some appendices of
stuff from the archive, so we knew a little bit
about that that was Hitchhiker 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, and
(14:56):
we'll put it into this final radio series. The final
radio series is called the Hexagonal Phase of Hitchhiker 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 felt that it needed a bit more
(15:17):
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 in
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. I mean, the
(15:38):
building's about four or five hundred years old. All 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 got all sorts there,
(16:00):
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 thought of
the night before, or he just wasn't in the mood
to write that day. Every now and again there's a
(16:20):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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 necessarily
that it would be me that would write the book
until the publisher came out of the blue in twenty twenty. Yeah,
(17:24):
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,
(17:47):
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. 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
(18:11):
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
(18:33):
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.
(18:54):
She had quite severe asthma, so she was keeping it
strictly to live in students, 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 day
(19:17):
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
(19:38):
database of Douglas's material, but it really is only 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
(20:02):
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 really exactly pour his
heart out. Of his diaries, they're mostly just notes about
(20:23):
meetings 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 hitch Tracker fan,
you know, or a Dot or two fan, you can
(20:43):
see things. You 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 college
that he studied in all those years ago. In the
early set, I was going across the road at lunchtime
in the same pub that we know he frequented and
(21:05):
cafes around the corner, you know, to break up the day.
They always shot 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
(21:27):
copy editor was assigned to look after the project, to
guide me through the whole business of the layout. She
worked with the designer and you know, took a lot
of the load off me when I was hospitalized for
a while. Anyway, the hospital they promised me they'd cured me,
and they did. I had six months of chemo and
(21:47):
I got better and I was able to finish the book.
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
(22:09):
delighted with the outcome. So now's the time to tell
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 2 (22:28):
Was the Thursday release date intentional?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I wonder? Also it was also the twenty fourth of August.
That's forty two.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Backwards, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
But I don't know. You can read what you like
into that, and people will. I mean, the fans are
delighted in making notes about forty two ever since. I've
been a what do they call it, an honorary member
of z Z nine plurals ad Alpha, which is the
official Hitchhiker's Guide Appreciation society for over forty years now.
(23:01):
And we even had the letter to Douglas and replies
from him in the book from the fans. There's old
chapter about fan letters and things, which I quite enjoyed
putting together. So yeah, it's been It's a real mixture.
It covers his whole life from cradle to grave, you know,
really shows early promise when he was twelve years old.
(23:22):
His poems are extraordinary, and then there's you know, loved
RM student verse and then the early sketch comedy material
Doctor who Hitchhikers Dirt Gently, Last Chance to see right
up to the digital Village, which was how he spent
the later years doing new projects, some of which didn't
(23:43):
make it to fruition, and we've got some pages of
those as well. So it's the whole shamac.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
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 was this and what was Douglas Adam's involvement in it?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
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
Terminator too, and all that kind of stuff was a
(24:37):
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 It's wonder that his archive exists and I've
(24:59):
put that down. Who's 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
(25:19):
get the computer to lie. He said, you know, it's
not artificial intelligence. He's actually artificially it's not user friendly.
It's artificially mendacious I what you call it. It would
deliberately lie to you. And the game, I believe, was
quite frustrating. I only dabbled on it briefly. I mean
it was launched at a convention that we had in
(25:43):
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. But
I know that Doug. You know, from my interviews with Douglas,
(26:03):
I knew that he loved the experience, and then he
went on to do bureaucracy, which was based on I mean,
they wanted Hitchhiker too, but he was much more interested
in doing something different, which I think was true throughout
his career. He kept trying to escape from Hitchhoker. But
the bureaucracy game was about getting a bank to register
(26:24):
a change of address card because 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,
(26:44):
you're into this property for X thousands 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
(27:05):
are the vogons, and that's kind of become a byword
now for anybody that has a sort of stubborn bureaucratic streak,
you know, parking wardens and petty officials that like to
wield their look a bit of power too heavily. I
think a lot of people call them vogons.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Now, now I might correct that in this did he
also work on the nineteen eighty six Labyrinth the computer game?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
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,
(27:53):
but I know that 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 2 (28:05):
Both such creative individuals that died far too early.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Oh yeah, yeah, I agree, Yeah, terribly missed both of them.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
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 at least as
far as you know technology is concerned.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
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.
(28:49):
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,
(29:12):
I'm giving a talk at this conference, and my audience
is going to include the head of Sony, Francis Faull 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,
(29:35):
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 fighter to every home.
(29:56):
And that was a long way before. I mean, we
still don't have that now, but 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
(30:16):
some real science books. I mean, his only factory 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
(30:38):
species of lima called the II. 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 ted talture. He loved it so much, and
they did get to see the II, which is the
(30:58):
most bizarre looking creature. And you said, I really enjoyed that.
I'd like 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 Carld,
the naturalist, and that they went to all sorts of
far flung places to look at endangered species and sort
(31:20):
of report upon them, mainly originally for a radio show,
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 Sam mccordyce went
with them to make the radio shows. The radio show
(31:42):
varies slightly from the book. The book is pure Douglas.
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
(32:03):
you have your baggages, you know, you couldn't get your
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
are in this book. There's there's one where he went
to see some fruit bats and he was so preoccupied
(32:23):
with the fact that he'd been completely bitten all over
by mosquitos that he barely could look at the fruit bats.
But you know, he was an intrepid traveler. He liked
his home comforts. I mean, he really did go all
around the world and stay in some really swanky hotels.
But but he wasn't above roughing it and being you know,
(32:44):
in the outback or in jungles or whatever it took.
And he became very passionately fond of endangered species, 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
(33:05):
with AI. You know who knows we've been robbed of that, sadly.
And Jeffrey mcgiven, who played full Prefect on 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,
he's a little girl. Polly was only six when he
(33:26):
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 sorts
of things that 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
(33:47):
we have there's an annual lecture science and comedy lecture
in his name and organized partly by the family and
partly by Save the Rhino International of which he was
a founder patron.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, there's some photos in the book with some sort
of a rhino costume, right.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
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 marathons,
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, fomous cartoonist. But yeah,
(34:28):
Douglas took part in a trek. There was a team
that walked across part of Africa up to the top
of Manculum Andnjara. 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 nice portrait
(34:49):
of him standing there holding the costume. Yeah. So yeah, no,
it was serious about that. And also the Diane Fossy
Gorilla Fund. You know, he would give to those charities
and support them.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
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
the tone and scope have been if this had come
to fruition and why didn't it come together?
Speaker 3 (35:20):
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
(35:43):
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.
(36:05):
It was. The idea was called Secret Empire because the
notion was that we nearmortals 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
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
the implications politically, scientifically, you know, across across those millennia,
you know where would we end up. So it was
quite far reaching, grand scope of an idea. And I
remember him saying to me, he said, you'll be surprised.
All I'm not doing science fiction. I am. I thought
up another science fiction series, and I didn't know what
(37:11):
it 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
(37:32):
episodes of 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
(37:56):
collapsed and that was the end of him. I'm afraid.
So I think the 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,
(38:17):
now I don't 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 suite of his life, his projects, the
surprising things that he did, you know, like working on
(38:37):
cartoons for children, 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
(38:59):
is vaguely chronological. 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 shame. But
his notebooks are frequently undated. The other funny thing about
(39:20):
his notebooks was he would 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 notebook and it's just
(39:45):
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 life went along, as he
(40:05):
got more successful. I think it helped. But yeah, he
was a man of extraordinary enthusiasms, and that comes across
on the page.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
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 it get, like you say, into these
different areas of his life, this 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
(40:36):
familiar with him. But I could see this would be
a cherished volume for Douglas Adams fans out there.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
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
(41:03):
The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. And we do
explain forty two of the books we've given it. We've
given it a little sub chapter. Excellent.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. This is
a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
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
(41:36):
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 to ail 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
(41:57):
about a weird film on Weird Houses 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.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows
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