June 24, 2025 • 38 mins
Here's a preview of a new audiobook, Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth, which celebrates the wit and wisdom of the legendary science fiction author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Twenty-five years after his death, Adams’ books continue to be read by new generations and his creations along with his ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything being “42”, have seeped deep into public consciousness. Written and narrated by Arvind Ethan David, Adams’ former protégé, this one-of-a-kind audiobook includes rare archival material from the Adams Estate, interviews with Adams’ personal friends like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel, and reenactments of his work to form an immersive journey through the mind of one of the most beloved and visionary writers of our time. The preview you’re about to hear examines how Adams thought of himself as a writer and explores the films, books, and TV shows that would come to influence his craft.
Get Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth now at Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello there, listeners. My name is R. Vindithan David. I'm
an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work has
won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any of that,
I started my career working for Douglas Adams, and I'm
dropping into your feed to day to share a preview
of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams The Ends
(00:41):
of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy. Adams
was more than a science fiction or comedy writer. He
was someone with deep insights into our world. He foresaw
the dangers of our current age, from social media to
chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even had
(01:04):
some good ideas about how we might survive these dangerous times.
In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive journey through
Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from his personal archive,
original readings of his work, and interviews with those who
knew and loved him best, from Stephen Fry and David
(01:25):
Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists. I do
hope you enjoyed this excerpt, and if you do, you
can find Douglas Adams the Ends of the Earth at
Pushkin dot fm, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or wherever
else good audiobooks are found. Thank you. Chapter one writing.
(01:54):
If we are to investigate this idea of Douglas as
a general purpose genius, then we should probably start with
the sphere in which he had his greatest successes as
a science fiction novelist. Surely we can all agree that
Douglas Adams was a genius science fiction writer.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I never actually thought of myself as a science fiction writer.
I thought myself primarily a comedy writer, and I became
a science fiction writer simply because I exaggerated so much
more loss science fiction is actually extremely boundly written. The
idea is maybe great, but the writing is just I
find it really hard work to deal with. I mean like,
I'm an Isaac Asimov, for instance, who has terrific ideas
(02:34):
which are really very interesting, but he writes like a
piece of American Express junk.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
Male.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
It's not proper writing, and my eyes get irritated.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
For the science fiction fans among us, this is a
bitter pill to have to swallow. It's tough enough to
have anyone mock a genre you love, but to have
science fiction taken down by one of its high priests.
That's a very specific type of betrayal. The creator of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn't like science fiction.
(03:05):
What on earth is going on? Have we all missed something?
Stephen Frye, the British comedian, author, actor, general polymath and
one of Douglas's closest friends, talking about his reaction upon
first reading Hitchhiker.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
I hadn't noticed it with science fiction because all the
things about science fiction that I dislike, all the things
that appeal to the sort of bottle end spectacle's brigade,
these sort of dreary arguments about you know, oh what
apparently he broke the second role of the Federation by
entering the Stained Quadrant at the wrong time, you know,
and all this kind of didn't seem to be there.
It was absolutely This.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Just gets worse and worse. Not only does Douglas Adams
not like science fiction, but his best friend, comedy and
intellectual icon and national treasure Stephen Frye, is mocking science
fiction fans, and he's praising Hitchhiker only because it is
not like other science fiction. This is agonizing why am
(04:07):
I including this stuff in his This is tantamount to
hate crime. There is a deep disconnect going on here
because Hitchhiker wasn't Douglas's only science fiction work. Dirk Gently
is profoundly grounded in ideas from theoretical physics, and Douglas's
first real television job was on Doctor Who, the ever
(04:30):
regenerating granddaddy of all British science fiction. I spoke about
this with James Goss, a science fiction author and a
leading Hoovian. James and I have known each other since
we were schoolboys together. In fact, it was with James
that I first adapted Dirk Gently as a play, and
we met Douglas together on the same faithful night.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Hello. I'm James Goss, and I am a writer, and
I've adapted various of Douglas's Doctor Who scripts into novels.
And I guess I first encountered Douglas Adams by watching
the Hitchhiker's TV series, which I thought was great.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Now, for those of you who aren't deep Doctor Who fans,
there's a lot of jargon and inside tardis talk in
what James is about to say, So let me give
a quick guide. One doctor who is an immortal alien,
a time traveling time lord who seems to spend most
(05:31):
of his days hanging out with attractive earthwomen and foiling
alien plots. He does this in a time traveling police
box called the Tardis. Footnote on the footnote, a police
box was a public telephone Kiosk used to contact the police.
The Tardis looks like one, but it isn't one. It
(05:54):
is also famously bigger on the inside. Two. The show,
which has been running on and off for more than
sixty years, is one of the longest running television shows
in history. Multiple generations of British children have grown up
with it and it is a cultural touchstone that transcends
(06:16):
science fiction. It is as if Star Trek and Saturday
Night Live were the same shown. Some of the greatest
writers in British television, including Russell T. Davis, creator of
Queer Folk, and Stephen Moffatt co creator of The Benedict
Cumberbat Sherlock, have served as showrunners.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
SEC.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Three to that list ad Douglas Adams, who served as
script editor, which in his case was effectively lead writer
between nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty. During that time,
he wrote three legendary episodes, Shada, which was never completed,
City of Death, generally regarded as one of the best
(07:00):
Doctor Who stories ever made, and finally The Pirate Planet. Okay,
explainer over back to James.
Speaker 6 (07:09):
You do realize that Douglas was the biggest Doctor Who fan.
One of the most astonishing things about Douglas, especially his
Doctor Who work, is you can literally in all of
his Doctor Who scripts and even in some of his
Hitchhikers ones, you can go he's parodying an episode of
Doctor Who. And they are very specific episodes of Doctor Who.
(07:31):
There's a whole chunk of a missing episode of Doctor
Who that turns up in life, the universe and everything.
So an episode from like nineteen sixty six where the
Tardiss arrives on Lord's cricket ground turns up in life,
the universe and everything, very very famously, and it's like
that is a childhood memory that he's carried forward into
(07:51):
one of his Hitchhikers books. And similarly, the whole idea
of the b RC and the arch and all of
that is lifted both from a sixties Doctor whose story
called the Arc, but also from an early seventies Doctor
Whose story called Arc in Space, both of them brilliant
and clearly Douglas Adams kept watching them all and at
the back of his head went yes, but and just
(08:13):
the sheer joy of seeing these ideas just turn up
over and over again. I don't think Douglas Adams would
be writing Hitchhikers if he hadn't seen Doctor Who, and
if he hadn't carried on absolutely loving it when he
was an adult.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
That's my argument.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Now, James is an intense sort passionate about science fiction
in general and ready to defend Doctor Who in particular
to the death. But he also knows both Doctor Who
and Douglas Adams's work better than almost anyone alive. So
is he right? Did Douglas Adams secretly love science fiction?
(08:51):
The trouble is that Douglas himself talked about this period
of his career as mere journeyman work, a stop off
on the way to Hitchhiker. Listen to him here, being
interviewed on Terry Wigan's chat show in the mid eighties.
Speaker 7 (09:09):
First of all, science fiction.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
It's not something that I suppose you were writing after
Who at the time.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Well, no, that was coincidence. Actually, I never actually thought
of myself as a science fiction writer.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Terry Wogan, at the time of this interview is the
dominant chat show host on British television. He is Johnny
Carson rolled into Stephen Colbert with a side order of
the Jimmys combined. So the condescension in Wogan's voice in
the unfinished sentence science fiction is not something that is
(09:41):
the condescension of the mainstream to the fringe, not something
that what that decent people, that proper writers, that grown
ups do. And note also that Douglas doesn't defend science
fiction at all. He seems happy to batter aside. James Goss, however,
(10:04):
who has part of his work adapting Douglas's scripts into novels,
has had unf fettered access to the Doctor Who archives,
makes a pretty convincing case that, despite his public denials,
in his heart of heart, Douglas loved Doctor Who and
brought his genius to it in a very specific fashion.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
The thing that astonished me with the Pirate Plant is,
you know, Douglas's first ever Doctor Who TV script was
seems to be famously shambolic. You know, it's an absolute
mess about space pirates and traveling spaceships. You know, it's
all the ideas you ever known in Doctor Who. It's
an explosion of ideas. And then when I was going
through the notes, you realize that it's the most incredibly
(10:46):
structured Doctor Who. I remember chatting about it ross Vie
Davis and he went, it's my favorite story because it's
so clever. And the story is so clever because there
are charts in Douglas's notes. There are charts where he
plots the moral journeys of every character. The entire story
is about genocide and whether or not people knew, and
(11:08):
their guilt, how that guilt is passed down to generations.
So it seems to be about robot parrots and space
pirates and exploding planets and things like that, but it's
really all about a whole society that is made rich
by devouring other planets and whether or not they know,
and the collective guilt starts to poison them. So there
(11:28):
are pages and pages of charts where he just draws
out the journey of guilt and how that guilt affects people.
You know, it's a story about people poisoned by their
own immorality. But everybody just goes, oh, it's the one
with the tin space pirate and his robot parrot. You go, yeah,
it is, But it's so much more than that.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
How do we reconcile the image of the twenty somethingter
Douglas Adams on his first screenwriting job, spending time making
detailed charts of the moral guilt of a civilization, with
the glibness with which he dismisses science fiction less than
a decade later. Let's go back to that clip of
him being interviewed by Terry Wogan.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
What kind of people read science fiction? I know everybody
wather hitchhikers, but what kind of people do you think
read science fiction?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
To be on Wogan's show is a very big deal.
So when he says what sort of people read science fiction?
The subtext in his intonation is not people like us,
not people like you, me or our audience, not normal people.
(12:43):
If Douglas was truly suspicious of science fiction, he could
have made a cheap joke here of the type Stephen
Fry made about the thick reading glasses of the science
fiction fan. But he doesn't. This is what he says
about who reads science fiction, a pretty.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Wide cross section people never like to admit it. Actually,
whenever I do book signing sessions, you always get along
so of men come along and say would you sign
this please, it's for my little boy. And then you
get little boys come along and we say would you
sign this please, it's my father. So you get the
widest possibleness.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Now this is a change in tone. Douglas does not
mock science fiction fans, as Wigan is inviting him to do. Instead,
he defends the fandom. He recognizes their humanity as fathers
and sons, and says by implication that these are the
same people, the same wide cross section, who are watching
(13:43):
this TV show right now, And in a gesture of compassion,
he recognizes the slight shame that science fiction fans were
forced to feel in the nineteen eighties. Thirteen years later,
in nineteen ninety nine, Douglas is once again given the
chance to defend or deny sci fi fans on the
(14:06):
then very popular morning show The Big Breakfast. Here he
is talking to host and pop culture pundit Johnny Vaughan.
Speaker 7 (14:16):
Do you think it is.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
About sci fi?
Speaker 4 (14:18):
One of people get so anrakish about it.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Well, they do say that real life is a crutch
for those who can't handle sunce fiction. I guess that
people tend to be very weird, and there's a little
bit of me that's a little bit weird, and I
kind of sort of plug into that last with But
I used to love sunce fiction when I was good.
I don't anymore because it's kind of too close to home.
And I actually watched the first ever episode of Doctor
Who when it went.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Out Again, Douglas goes sort of halfway in defense of
the genre that has made him rich and famous. He
makes a clever swipe at people who don't get science
fiction and who denigrate those who do, and then conceding
that while some of the fandom is weird, he makes
clear that he is one of them, one of us.
(15:01):
He is at least a little bit weird too. In fact,
Douglas's love for and understanding off science face goes far
deeper than he admits here. The truth appears to be
that Douglas was a huge sci fi and comic book
fan as a child, and he often cited Kurt Vonnegut
as an influence. Unsurprisingly, it was James Goss who found
(15:26):
the smoking gun in the case that Douglas Adams remained,
in his deepest heart a proper science fiction geek. In
nineteen seventy seven, Douglas was developing a Doctor Who feature film.
Now his bosses at the BBC were extremely skeptical of
the idea of a science fiction movie. Given that this
(15:50):
was about eighteen months before Star Wars came out, it
probably says a lot about the BBC's ability to anticipate trends.
But Douglas was convinced, and to make his case he
wrote a detailed treatise on how to make a proper
science fiction film. He has an extra treatise read by Jamescoss.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Science fiction in films it is a question of getting
the angle right. It has been tried many times unsuccessfully.
This is probably because the average non sci fi reading
member of the public probably sees sci fi as being
gloomy extrapolations of present tendencies towards totalitarianism verdict boring. Even I,
as a science fiction fan, do not go and see
(16:34):
these films. Science fiction must not ignore what we already know.
It can go way beyond it on fantastic flights of fancy,
but the structure of the fantastic must be logical, and
this is a lot of the beauty of science fiction,
the wild fantasies that can be created from imaginative, logical
extrapolations of what we already know. For instance, it is
(16:57):
completely unacceptable in modern sci fi to talk of spaceships
traveling faster than light, because Einstein must be taken into account. However,
theories of hyperspace which allow instantaneous transportation are accepted. In
other words, current knowledge can be argued against, but not
thrown out the window. Again, black holes a marvelous area
(17:18):
for fantasy, but it must be informed fantasy. Anything a
writer invents about black holes must take into account the
arguments put forward by the theorists. A science fiction audience
wants to make that suspension of disbelief, and you must
allow him to do that by not insulting his intelligence. However,
this does not in any way preclude the adventure romp
like Doctor Who or Harry Harrison, which is one of
(17:40):
the brightest and best errors of sci fi, because it
can be so outrageous in its fantasy, but the fun
and the skill of it is the maintenance of the
inner logic. All the best wild ideas in surreal comedy,
science fiction, spy throers, etc. Adhere to a stricterner logic.
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy. That
like a golden rule in the universe. According to Douglas Adams,
Douglas was in his mid twenties when he wrote that
Hitchhiker and All It brought is ahead of him. He's
just a few years out of university, but already you
(18:24):
can see the mercilessly rigorous intellect at work, taking incredibly
seriously the demands of science fiction as a genre and
full of respect for its audience. For those of us
who love science fiction, and in particular those of us
who love science fiction because of Douglas Adams, this comes
(18:44):
as a huge relief. It is also true, however, that
science fiction was not the sole tradition that Douglas drew
from when he created Hitchhiker, as or more important was
the inspiration of comedy. The specific influence that is most
talked about is that of Monty Python, in part because
(19:07):
Douglas actually worked with the Python crew for a few years,
mainly through his co writing partnership with Gray and Chapman.
But once he moved past the realm of sketch comedy
and became a novelist, there is no question who Douglas's
touchstone was. The author who he most venerated and emulated
(19:27):
was not a science fiction novelist at all, but a
comic novelist PG Woodhouse, creator of Jeeves and Wooster. Here
once again is Stephen Frye.
Speaker 7 (19:41):
Douglas and I shared many passions, and many preferences and
peccadillos and peculiarities, and one of them of which we
were deeply proud, was an adoration of the great PG Woodhouse,
Sir Pelham Grenville Woodhouse, who died with a manuscript on
his lap in his nineties, still writing to the very end.
(20:04):
And the manuscript was of a story called Sunset at Blandings,
and it was reprinted again in the nineties, I think.
And they asked Douglas very wisely if he would write
an introduction, and here is some of what he wrote.
(20:24):
One of the most blissful joys of the English language
is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever,
one of the guys at the very top table of all,
was a jokesmith though maybe it shouldn't be that big
a surprise. Who else would be up there Austin, of course,
(20:46):
Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn't make a
joke to save his life would be Shakespeare, we would
House fans are very fond of phoning each other up
with new discoveries. But we made of the great man
a disservice when we pull out our favorite quotes in public,
like ice formed on the butler's upper slopes, or here
(21:12):
I go again, my current favorite. He spun round with
a sort of guilty bound like a Nadadgio dancer surprised
while watering the cat's milk. Because irreducibly wonderful though they
are by themselves, they are a little like stuffed fish
on a mantlepiece. You need to see them in action
(21:35):
to get the full effect. There is not much in
Freddie Threepwood's isolated line. I have here in this sack
a few simple rats to tell you that, when you
read it in context, you are at the pinnacle of
one of the most sublime moments in all English literature. Shakespeare,
(22:00):
Milton Keats. How can I possibly mention the author of
Pearls Girls in Monte Bodkin and pigs have wing in
the same breath as these men. He's just not serious.
He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that.
(22:20):
He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind
can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will
find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feinemann, and Louis Armstrong in the
realms of pure creative playfulness.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That is one of the rare pieces of literary criticism
that lives up to the genius of the writing it
is describing genius. Yes, because I happen to be in
the camp of people who completely agree with Douglas and
Stephen Woodhouse deserves his place amongst the greats, and readers
who know both Douglas Adams and PG Woodhouse will immediately
(23:07):
recognize the influence. Both are champions of transferred epithets, unexpected metaphors,
similes that turn on a dime, of elaborate, convoluted plotting
that pays off to huge comic effect, and of the
constant use of bathos to undercut a poignant moment. Now,
(23:28):
just to approach Woodhouse's comic genius and his extraordinary exacting sentence, construction.
His ear for the musicality of language would be achievement enough.
But what Douglas does is to take Woodhouse's methods and
apply them in a whole new way. Here, once again
is Stephen Fry.
Speaker 7 (23:51):
Wood has stayed within a very very closed mediau which
is what we value so highly in him, his world,
and you know we step through into it. Every time
we pick up one of his books, we are transported
into a very particular individual world that wood Has stays in,
his characters stay in. Whereas Douglas is exploring, he's pushing
(24:13):
the front, is literally going to the ends of the
universe and playing with time and chance and all the
most enormous concepts.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That we have to take the methods of a grand
master and apply them in a whole new way is
of itself, I would argue, the move of a genius.
Another aspect of Woodhouse that Douglas shared was his perfectionism
and his compulsive rewriting. In the same essay that Stephen
(24:42):
has just read from, Douglas described Woodhouse's habit of pinning
up the typewritten pages on the walls of his study.
Woodhouse would start at the floor level and pinned each
subsequent improvement higher up the wall, till eventually the entire
novel would exist at the level of the picture rail,
(25:03):
and then and only then was it ready for publication.
Douglas's own methods of writing or not writing are legendary,
but his compulsive need to rewrite till the thing got
to perfection was always apparent in him. He once said
that he can never really understand anything until he could
(25:26):
make a good joke about it, and even in this
making of jokes, he was obsessive.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
My name is Grifferies James, and I'm a sort of
spitful writer and a little bit of a sort of
businessman and a very very old friend of Douglas's, because
I was at senior school, you know, from the age
of eleven with Douglas, and sort of would admit him
about the age of twelve because we were in place together.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I talked to griff Rys Jones for a couple of hours.
It was perhaps the funniest and most raucous interview that
I conducted for this book. Of the many wonderful stories
he told about his long history with Douglas, there were
one that stood out. Here is griff talking about a
late night drive he had with Douglas. The third person
(26:17):
in the car is the late great comedian Mel Smith.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
He was quite involved in the process of tweaking out jokes.
It's one of the things that made him quite complicated
as a performer of his own.
Speaker 7 (26:32):
MA two.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
One year, Mel and I got in contact. We were
can film there once, a terrible film. We were put up,
and we invited Douglas down because Douglas was there. And
Douglas loved the good things. Let's not forget that he
absolutely adored expensive food, he adored wine, he adored that
whole There was nothing, you know, eganitarian about Douglas when
(26:56):
it came to pampering Douglas, do you I mean? So
he said, let's go off to this really expensive, this
is expensive restaurant in the hills, which was so we did,
and we then got a car a huge expense to
get us back to the Hotel de Care where Mel
and I had been put up for the duration. And
the day before, Douglas had come over for lunch and
(27:16):
we'd run up the most colossal bill drinking armeni act
and things like that in the dynoom and on the
way back in the car, I distinctly remember this. Douglas
started to tell a story and Melonie Meldon, no, Douglas
very well. We were sitting in the back of the
calf for some reason, and Douglas in the front necks
of the driver, and don't get halfway through the story
(27:37):
and start talking to himself, and we'd have to say,
do we can't hear you? And he go back to
the beginning or halfway through the story and start tell
it again, improving the anecdote, writing it in front of me,
the anecdote. You could a goodness, I've hired this bid.
He never quite understood that the secret of telling a story,
(27:59):
if you like, is to follow through to the very end,
and not to sort of stop and think, no, there's
a better way of expressing this, and let me try
and go back to the beginning again and start reframing
the whole anecdote to turn it into the perfect anecdote,
which of course is a process which suits right very well,
but doesn't really suit a performer or indeed a sometimes
(28:20):
a companion. It's a rather bizarre sort of self indulgent.
So he could be a little bit self indulgent like that,
But we forgave him because he was, obviously, you know,
a great writer.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Pause for a moment and realize what a very strange
story Griffreys Jones is telling us. Here, three young creatives
on the upswing of their careers, reveling in their youthful success,
go for a night out on the tiles at the
can Film Festival. Then in the car on the way
(28:54):
back to their magnificent hotel, they swap funny stories. Except
Douglas Adams isn't telling stories. He's writing them half drunk.
He's compulsively going back to the beginning of his story
and redrafting it, trying to make it better, to advance
(29:15):
it further up the wall in P. G. Woodhouse's study
until it could touch the picture, aale of the great
master he so wanted to emulate. This is a man
who was a writer to his call, who is rigorous
about writing all writing, science fiction, comedy, even drunken funny stories,
(29:41):
drafting and redrafting, analyzing and reworking. While Douglas might have
been more public about the influence of comedy and comedians
than he was about science fiction, don't think comedy got
a free pass either. Here is an essay he wrote
in the year two thousand, a few months before he died,
(30:04):
read by Dirk Gently actor Samuel Barnett.
Speaker 8 (30:09):
There's always a moment when you start to fall out
of love, whether it's with a person, or an idea
or a cause. Even if it's one you only narrate
yourself years after the event. You know, a tiny thing,
a word, a false note, which means that things can
never be quite the same again. For me, it was
hearing a stand up comedian make the following observation. These
(30:34):
scientists say, they're so stupid. You know those black box
flight recorders they put on airplanes, and you know they're
meant to be indestructible. It's always the thing that doesn't
get smashed, So why don't they make the planes out
of the same stuff? And the audience roared with laughter
at how stupid scientists were couldn't think their way out
(30:55):
of a paper bag. But I sat feeling uncomfortable. It
was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke
didn't really work, because flight recorders are made out of titanium,
and that if you planes out of titanium rather than aluminium,
they'd be far too heavy.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
To get off the ground.
Speaker 8 (31:13):
In the first place, I began to pick away at
the joke. Supposing Eric Morkam had said it would it
be funny? Then well, not quite, because that would have
relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb.
In other words, they would have had to know, as
a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of
titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke.
(31:36):
If you think this is obsessive behaf you should try
living with it. That didn't rely on the teller and
the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who
knew more than they did. It sent a chill down
my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy.
(31:58):
I also began to wonder how many of the jokes
I was making were just well ignorant.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
There's so much to unpack in this little analysis. First,
you can sense the pain in Douglas, a lifelong comic writer,
feeling regretfully and sadly the limits of comedy. Also, note
his disappointment, his fear, even at what we would later
(32:29):
come to recognize as a growing distrust in experts in
science and the scientific method. What is also fascinating is
how Douglas's rigorous application of logic to humor calls back
so clearly to his prescription for successful science fiction writing.
(32:51):
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy, he
wrote in nineteen seventy eight, at the start of his career,
and here, twenty two years later, near the end of
his life, he continues, with relentless, obsessive logic to drill
down to take a part a joke, a joke that
(33:12):
he felt was not only illogical, but more importantly, was
devoid of joy, A joke that was motivated by a
meanness of spirit and a distrust of science that was
antithetical to Douglas Adams. I hope by now it's becoming
clear that to describe Douglas as a particular type of
(33:33):
genre writer, whether that genre was comedy or science fiction,
is missing the point. The answer is, of course that
he was both, but that defining him by reference to
a category doesn't give us a complete view of the
type of writer he was. Genius transcends categorization. Being confronted
(33:57):
with a talent that won't fit neatly into a category
is one of the ways you know that you're dealing
with a genius. There is a contemporary idea, a meme
rarely the parable of the ten thousand hours, the idea
that one can achieve mastery of a given domain through
(34:18):
ten thousand hours of focus practice Malcolm Gladwell is mainly
to credit or blame, depending on your point of view,
for how widespread this idea is and how widely and
incorrectly it is applied. The public perception of the idea
is that you can become great at anything if only
(34:40):
you'd practice it for ten thousand hours. Let's take a
look at this. The academic research behind the ten thousand
hour theory was a study by kay Anders Ericsson done
at Berlin's Academy of Music and focused specifically on violin players,
all of whom were already pretty good by normal standards.
(35:01):
Ericson evaluated that the most elite of these players had
achieved an average of ten thousand hours of practice by
age twenty. Properly understood, this theory was only ever intended
to apply in certain tightly defined domains violin play and chess,
for example, and only applies if certain necessary prerequisites are present.
(35:27):
Starting young with a basic level of talent, it says
that talented people who practice things like chess and violin
for ten thousand hours will become pretty good at playing
chess or playing violin. It does not mean that anyone
can become world class at anything just by spending ten
(35:49):
thousand hours on it, and it definitely doesn't mean that
every complex skill can be mastered in ten thousand hours.
To take an example, I could spend ten thousand hours
trying to be an NBA player, and the fact that
I am five foot eight and a half and a
pretty average eye hand coordination would mean it would never
(36:13):
ever happen. Being a great writer, a writer of genius,
is one of those things that is rather more complex
than being good at chess or playing the violin. Douglas
Adams spent a lot more than ten thousand hours writing,
and certainly many times ten thousand hours thinking about writing.
(36:38):
He was an obsessive writer, a compulsive writer, the type
of writer who drew grafts off the moral guilt of
his characters, the type of writer who would draft and
redraft everything, whether it was a drunken joke or a novel,
endlessly seeking for the draft that would touch the picture rail.
(37:04):
He was also a writer who suffered in his writing,
Who famously missed dead lines whushing by and had to
be locked into a hotel room by his publisher to
deliver the second du Gently novel. There is a line
from Chaucer that always makes me think of Douglas Adams.
Speaker 8 (37:24):
The leaf so short, the craft is so long to learn.
The say so hard, so sharp, the conquering.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
For those not conversant in old English, the life so short,
the craft so hard to learn, the attempt so hard,
so sharp, the conquering. Writing at the level that Douglas
Adams wrote is a very hard craft to learn. In
(37:57):
his so short forty nine years, Douglas struggled mightily with
the craft of writing. He transcended both comedy and science fiction.
He produced a radio play that redefined the genre, several
of the best episodes of Doctor Who Ever, written five
(38:17):
Hitchhiker novels, two Dirk Gently mysteries, two books of Funny Names,
and in Last Chance to See, a landmark work of
conservation writing. Alongside this, he wrote dozens of essays and
articles and speeches on subjects that ranged from evolution, computing, god,
(38:41):
the Internet, and physics. Douglas Adams is, of course best
remembered for his novels. But I would like to argue
that to really understand his legacy, it is necessary to
get our arms around the full breadth of his output,
and in particular, his nonfiction work.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello there, listeners. My name is R. Vindithan David. I'm
an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work has
won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any of that,
I started my career working for Douglas Adams, and I'm
dropping into your feed to day to share a preview
of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams The Ends
(00:41):
of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy. Adams
was more than a science fiction or comedy writer. He
was someone with deep insights into our world. He foresaw
the dangers of our current age, from social media to
chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even had
(01:04):
some good ideas about how we might survive these dangerous times.
In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive journey through
Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from his personal archive,
original readings of his work, and interviews with those who
knew and loved him best, from Stephen Fry and David
(01:25):
Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists. I do
hope you enjoyed this excerpt, and if you do, you
can find Douglas Adams the Ends of the Earth at
Pushkin dot fm, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or wherever
else good audiobooks are found. Thank you. Chapter one writing.
(01:54):
If we are to investigate this idea of Douglas as
a general purpose genius, then we should probably start with
the sphere in which he had his greatest successes as
a science fiction novelist. Surely we can all agree that
Douglas Adams was a genius science fiction writer.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I never actually thought of myself as a science fiction writer.
I thought myself primarily a comedy writer, and I became
a science fiction writer simply because I exaggerated so much
more loss science fiction is actually extremely boundly written. The
idea is maybe great, but the writing is just I
find it really hard work to deal with. I mean like,
I'm an Isaac Asimov, for instance, who has terrific ideas
(02:34):
which are really very interesting, but he writes like a
piece of American Express junk.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
Male.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
It's not proper writing, and my eyes get irritated.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
For the science fiction fans among us, this is a
bitter pill to have to swallow. It's tough enough to
have anyone mock a genre you love, but to have
science fiction taken down by one of its high priests.
That's a very specific type of betrayal. The creator of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn't like science fiction.
(03:05):
What on earth is going on? Have we all missed something?
Stephen Frye, the British comedian, author, actor, general polymath and
one of Douglas's closest friends, talking about his reaction upon
first reading Hitchhiker.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
I hadn't noticed it with science fiction because all the
things about science fiction that I dislike, all the things
that appeal to the sort of bottle end spectacle's brigade,
these sort of dreary arguments about you know, oh what
apparently he broke the second role of the Federation by
entering the Stained Quadrant at the wrong time, you know,
and all this kind of didn't seem to be there.
It was absolutely This.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Just gets worse and worse. Not only does Douglas Adams
not like science fiction, but his best friend, comedy and
intellectual icon and national treasure Stephen Frye, is mocking science
fiction fans, and he's praising Hitchhiker only because it is
not like other science fiction. This is agonizing why am
(04:07):
I including this stuff in his This is tantamount to
hate crime. There is a deep disconnect going on here
because Hitchhiker wasn't Douglas's only science fiction work. Dirk Gently
is profoundly grounded in ideas from theoretical physics, and Douglas's
first real television job was on Doctor Who, the ever
(04:30):
regenerating granddaddy of all British science fiction. I spoke about
this with James Goss, a science fiction author and a
leading Hoovian. James and I have known each other since
we were schoolboys together. In fact, it was with James
that I first adapted Dirk Gently as a play, and
we met Douglas together on the same faithful night.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Hello. I'm James Goss, and I am a writer, and
I've adapted various of Douglas's Doctor Who scripts into novels.
And I guess I first encountered Douglas Adams by watching
the Hitchhiker's TV series, which I thought was great.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Now, for those of you who aren't deep Doctor Who fans,
there's a lot of jargon and inside tardis talk in
what James is about to say, So let me give
a quick guide. One doctor who is an immortal alien,
a time traveling time lord who seems to spend most
(05:31):
of his days hanging out with attractive earthwomen and foiling
alien plots. He does this in a time traveling police
box called the Tardis. Footnote on the footnote, a police
box was a public telephone Kiosk used to contact the police.
The Tardis looks like one, but it isn't one. It
(05:54):
is also famously bigger on the inside. Two. The show,
which has been running on and off for more than
sixty years, is one of the longest running television shows
in history. Multiple generations of British children have grown up
with it and it is a cultural touchstone that transcends
(06:16):
science fiction. It is as if Star Trek and Saturday
Night Live were the same shown. Some of the greatest
writers in British television, including Russell T. Davis, creator of
Queer Folk, and Stephen Moffatt co creator of The Benedict
Cumberbat Sherlock, have served as showrunners.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
SEC.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Three to that list ad Douglas Adams, who served as
script editor, which in his case was effectively lead writer
between nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty. During that time,
he wrote three legendary episodes, Shada, which was never completed,
City of Death, generally regarded as one of the best
(07:00):
Doctor Who stories ever made, and finally The Pirate Planet. Okay,
explainer over back to James.
Speaker 6 (07:09):
You do realize that Douglas was the biggest Doctor Who fan.
One of the most astonishing things about Douglas, especially his
Doctor Who work, is you can literally in all of
his Doctor Who scripts and even in some of his
Hitchhikers ones, you can go he's parodying an episode of
Doctor Who. And they are very specific episodes of Doctor Who.
(07:31):
There's a whole chunk of a missing episode of Doctor
Who that turns up in life, the universe and everything.
So an episode from like nineteen sixty six where the
Tardiss arrives on Lord's cricket ground turns up in life,
the universe and everything, very very famously, and it's like
that is a childhood memory that he's carried forward into
(07:51):
one of his Hitchhikers books. And similarly, the whole idea
of the b RC and the arch and all of
that is lifted both from a sixties Doctor whose story
called the Arc, but also from an early seventies Doctor
Whose story called Arc in Space, both of them brilliant
and clearly Douglas Adams kept watching them all and at
the back of his head went yes, but and just
(08:13):
the sheer joy of seeing these ideas just turn up
over and over again. I don't think Douglas Adams would
be writing Hitchhikers if he hadn't seen Doctor Who, and
if he hadn't carried on absolutely loving it when he
was an adult.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
That's my argument.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Now, James is an intense sort passionate about science fiction
in general and ready to defend Doctor Who in particular
to the death. But he also knows both Doctor Who
and Douglas Adams's work better than almost anyone alive. So
is he right? Did Douglas Adams secretly love science fiction?
(08:51):
The trouble is that Douglas himself talked about this period
of his career as mere journeyman work, a stop off
on the way to Hitchhiker. Listen to him here, being
interviewed on Terry Wigan's chat show in the mid eighties.
Speaker 7 (09:09):
First of all, science fiction.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
It's not something that I suppose you were writing after
Who at the time.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Well, no, that was coincidence. Actually, I never actually thought
of myself as a science fiction writer.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Terry Wogan, at the time of this interview is the
dominant chat show host on British television. He is Johnny
Carson rolled into Stephen Colbert with a side order of
the Jimmys combined. So the condescension in Wogan's voice in
the unfinished sentence science fiction is not something that is
(09:41):
the condescension of the mainstream to the fringe, not something
that what that decent people, that proper writers, that grown
ups do. And note also that Douglas doesn't defend science
fiction at all. He seems happy to batter aside. James Goss, however,
(10:04):
who has part of his work adapting Douglas's scripts into novels,
has had unf fettered access to the Doctor Who archives,
makes a pretty convincing case that, despite his public denials,
in his heart of heart, Douglas loved Doctor Who and
brought his genius to it in a very specific fashion.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
The thing that astonished me with the Pirate Plant is,
you know, Douglas's first ever Doctor Who TV script was
seems to be famously shambolic. You know, it's an absolute
mess about space pirates and traveling spaceships. You know, it's
all the ideas you ever known in Doctor Who. It's
an explosion of ideas. And then when I was going
through the notes, you realize that it's the most incredibly
(10:46):
structured Doctor Who. I remember chatting about it ross Vie
Davis and he went, it's my favorite story because it's
so clever. And the story is so clever because there
are charts in Douglas's notes. There are charts where he
plots the moral journeys of every character. The entire story
is about genocide and whether or not people knew, and
(11:08):
their guilt, how that guilt is passed down to generations.
So it seems to be about robot parrots and space
pirates and exploding planets and things like that, but it's
really all about a whole society that is made rich
by devouring other planets and whether or not they know,
and the collective guilt starts to poison them. So there
(11:28):
are pages and pages of charts where he just draws
out the journey of guilt and how that guilt affects people.
You know, it's a story about people poisoned by their
own immorality. But everybody just goes, oh, it's the one
with the tin space pirate and his robot parrot. You go, yeah,
it is, But it's so much more than that.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
How do we reconcile the image of the twenty somethingter
Douglas Adams on his first screenwriting job, spending time making
detailed charts of the moral guilt of a civilization, with
the glibness with which he dismisses science fiction less than
a decade later. Let's go back to that clip of
him being interviewed by Terry Wogan.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
What kind of people read science fiction? I know everybody
wather hitchhikers, but what kind of people do you think
read science fiction?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
To be on Wogan's show is a very big deal.
So when he says what sort of people read science fiction?
The subtext in his intonation is not people like us,
not people like you, me or our audience, not normal people.
(12:43):
If Douglas was truly suspicious of science fiction, he could
have made a cheap joke here of the type Stephen
Fry made about the thick reading glasses of the science
fiction fan. But he doesn't. This is what he says
about who reads science fiction, a pretty.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Wide cross section people never like to admit it. Actually,
whenever I do book signing sessions, you always get along
so of men come along and say would you sign
this please, it's for my little boy. And then you
get little boys come along and we say would you
sign this please, it's my father. So you get the
widest possibleness.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Now this is a change in tone. Douglas does not
mock science fiction fans, as Wigan is inviting him to do. Instead,
he defends the fandom. He recognizes their humanity as fathers
and sons, and says by implication that these are the
same people, the same wide cross section, who are watching
(13:43):
this TV show right now, And in a gesture of compassion,
he recognizes the slight shame that science fiction fans were
forced to feel in the nineteen eighties. Thirteen years later,
in nineteen ninety nine, Douglas is once again given the
chance to defend or deny sci fi fans on the
(14:06):
then very popular morning show The Big Breakfast. Here he
is talking to host and pop culture pundit Johnny Vaughan.
Speaker 7 (14:16):
Do you think it is.
Speaker 8 (14:17):
About sci fi?
Speaker 4 (14:18):
One of people get so anrakish about it.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Well, they do say that real life is a crutch
for those who can't handle sunce fiction. I guess that
people tend to be very weird, and there's a little
bit of me that's a little bit weird, and I
kind of sort of plug into that last with But
I used to love sunce fiction when I was good.
I don't anymore because it's kind of too close to home.
And I actually watched the first ever episode of Doctor
Who when it went.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Out Again, Douglas goes sort of halfway in defense of
the genre that has made him rich and famous. He
makes a clever swipe at people who don't get science
fiction and who denigrate those who do, and then conceding
that while some of the fandom is weird, he makes
clear that he is one of them, one of us.
(15:01):
He is at least a little bit weird too. In fact,
Douglas's love for and understanding off science face goes far
deeper than he admits here. The truth appears to be
that Douglas was a huge sci fi and comic book
fan as a child, and he often cited Kurt Vonnegut
as an influence. Unsurprisingly, it was James Goss who found
(15:26):
the smoking gun in the case that Douglas Adams remained,
in his deepest heart a proper science fiction geek. In
nineteen seventy seven, Douglas was developing a Doctor Who feature film.
Now his bosses at the BBC were extremely skeptical of
the idea of a science fiction movie. Given that this
(15:50):
was about eighteen months before Star Wars came out, it
probably says a lot about the BBC's ability to anticipate trends.
But Douglas was convinced, and to make his case he
wrote a detailed treatise on how to make a proper
science fiction film. He has an extra treatise read by Jamescoss.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Science fiction in films it is a question of getting
the angle right. It has been tried many times unsuccessfully.
This is probably because the average non sci fi reading
member of the public probably sees sci fi as being
gloomy extrapolations of present tendencies towards totalitarianism verdict boring. Even I,
as a science fiction fan, do not go and see
(16:34):
these films. Science fiction must not ignore what we already know.
It can go way beyond it on fantastic flights of fancy,
but the structure of the fantastic must be logical, and
this is a lot of the beauty of science fiction,
the wild fantasies that can be created from imaginative, logical
extrapolations of what we already know. For instance, it is
(16:57):
completely unacceptable in modern sci fi to talk of spaceships
traveling faster than light, because Einstein must be taken into account. However,
theories of hyperspace which allow instantaneous transportation are accepted. In
other words, current knowledge can be argued against, but not
thrown out the window. Again, black holes a marvelous area
(17:18):
for fantasy, but it must be informed fantasy. Anything a
writer invents about black holes must take into account the
arguments put forward by the theorists. A science fiction audience
wants to make that suspension of disbelief, and you must
allow him to do that by not insulting his intelligence. However,
this does not in any way preclude the adventure romp
like Doctor Who or Harry Harrison, which is one of
(17:40):
the brightest and best errors of sci fi, because it
can be so outrageous in its fantasy, but the fun
and the skill of it is the maintenance of the
inner logic. All the best wild ideas in surreal comedy,
science fiction, spy throers, etc. Adhere to a stricterner logic.
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy. That
like a golden rule in the universe. According to Douglas Adams,
Douglas was in his mid twenties when he wrote that
Hitchhiker and All It brought is ahead of him. He's
just a few years out of university, but already you
(18:24):
can see the mercilessly rigorous intellect at work, taking incredibly
seriously the demands of science fiction as a genre and
full of respect for its audience. For those of us
who love science fiction, and in particular those of us
who love science fiction because of Douglas Adams, this comes
(18:44):
as a huge relief. It is also true, however, that
science fiction was not the sole tradition that Douglas drew
from when he created Hitchhiker, as or more important was
the inspiration of comedy. The specific influence that is most
talked about is that of Monty Python, in part because
(19:07):
Douglas actually worked with the Python crew for a few years,
mainly through his co writing partnership with Gray and Chapman.
But once he moved past the realm of sketch comedy
and became a novelist, there is no question who Douglas's
touchstone was. The author who he most venerated and emulated
(19:27):
was not a science fiction novelist at all, but a
comic novelist PG Woodhouse, creator of Jeeves and Wooster. Here
once again is Stephen Frye.
Speaker 7 (19:41):
Douglas and I shared many passions, and many preferences and
peccadillos and peculiarities, and one of them of which we
were deeply proud, was an adoration of the great PG Woodhouse,
Sir Pelham Grenville Woodhouse, who died with a manuscript on
his lap in his nineties, still writing to the very end.
(20:04):
And the manuscript was of a story called Sunset at Blandings,
and it was reprinted again in the nineties, I think.
And they asked Douglas very wisely if he would write
an introduction, and here is some of what he wrote.
(20:24):
One of the most blissful joys of the English language
is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever,
one of the guys at the very top table of all,
was a jokesmith though maybe it shouldn't be that big
a surprise. Who else would be up there Austin, of course,
(20:46):
Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn't make a
joke to save his life would be Shakespeare, we would
House fans are very fond of phoning each other up
with new discoveries. But we made of the great man
a disservice when we pull out our favorite quotes in public,
like ice formed on the butler's upper slopes, or here
(21:12):
I go again, my current favorite. He spun round with
a sort of guilty bound like a Nadadgio dancer surprised
while watering the cat's milk. Because irreducibly wonderful though they
are by themselves, they are a little like stuffed fish
on a mantlepiece. You need to see them in action
(21:35):
to get the full effect. There is not much in
Freddie Threepwood's isolated line. I have here in this sack
a few simple rats to tell you that, when you
read it in context, you are at the pinnacle of
one of the most sublime moments in all English literature. Shakespeare,
(22:00):
Milton Keats. How can I possibly mention the author of
Pearls Girls in Monte Bodkin and pigs have wing in
the same breath as these men. He's just not serious.
He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that.
(22:20):
He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind
can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will
find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feinemann, and Louis Armstrong in the
realms of pure creative playfulness.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That is one of the rare pieces of literary criticism
that lives up to the genius of the writing it
is describing genius. Yes, because I happen to be in
the camp of people who completely agree with Douglas and
Stephen Woodhouse deserves his place amongst the greats, and readers
who know both Douglas Adams and PG Woodhouse will immediately
(23:07):
recognize the influence. Both are champions of transferred epithets, unexpected metaphors,
similes that turn on a dime, of elaborate, convoluted plotting
that pays off to huge comic effect, and of the
constant use of bathos to undercut a poignant moment. Now,
(23:28):
just to approach Woodhouse's comic genius and his extraordinary exacting sentence, construction.
His ear for the musicality of language would be achievement enough.
But what Douglas does is to take Woodhouse's methods and
apply them in a whole new way. Here, once again
is Stephen Fry.
Speaker 7 (23:51):
Wood has stayed within a very very closed mediau which
is what we value so highly in him, his world,
and you know we step through into it. Every time
we pick up one of his books, we are transported
into a very particular individual world that wood Has stays in,
his characters stay in. Whereas Douglas is exploring, he's pushing
(24:13):
the front, is literally going to the ends of the
universe and playing with time and chance and all the
most enormous concepts.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That we have to take the methods of a grand
master and apply them in a whole new way is
of itself, I would argue, the move of a genius.
Another aspect of Woodhouse that Douglas shared was his perfectionism
and his compulsive rewriting. In the same essay that Stephen
(24:42):
has just read from, Douglas described Woodhouse's habit of pinning
up the typewritten pages on the walls of his study.
Woodhouse would start at the floor level and pinned each
subsequent improvement higher up the wall, till eventually the entire
novel would exist at the level of the picture rail,
(25:03):
and then and only then was it ready for publication.
Douglas's own methods of writing or not writing are legendary,
but his compulsive need to rewrite till the thing got
to perfection was always apparent in him. He once said
that he can never really understand anything until he could
(25:26):
make a good joke about it, and even in this
making of jokes, he was obsessive.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
My name is Grifferies James, and I'm a sort of
spitful writer and a little bit of a sort of
businessman and a very very old friend of Douglas's, because
I was at senior school, you know, from the age
of eleven with Douglas, and sort of would admit him
about the age of twelve because we were in place together.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I talked to griff Rys Jones for a couple of hours.
It was perhaps the funniest and most raucous interview that
I conducted for this book. Of the many wonderful stories
he told about his long history with Douglas, there were
one that stood out. Here is griff talking about a
late night drive he had with Douglas. The third person
(26:17):
in the car is the late great comedian Mel Smith.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
He was quite involved in the process of tweaking out jokes.
It's one of the things that made him quite complicated
as a performer of his own.
Speaker 7 (26:32):
MA two.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
One year, Mel and I got in contact. We were
can film there once, a terrible film. We were put up,
and we invited Douglas down because Douglas was there. And
Douglas loved the good things. Let's not forget that he
absolutely adored expensive food, he adored wine, he adored that
whole There was nothing, you know, eganitarian about Douglas when
(26:56):
it came to pampering Douglas, do you I mean? So
he said, let's go off to this really expensive, this
is expensive restaurant in the hills, which was so we did,
and we then got a car a huge expense to
get us back to the Hotel de Care where Mel
and I had been put up for the duration. And
the day before, Douglas had come over for lunch and
(27:16):
we'd run up the most colossal bill drinking armeni act
and things like that in the dynoom and on the
way back in the car, I distinctly remember this. Douglas
started to tell a story and Melonie Meldon, no, Douglas
very well. We were sitting in the back of the
calf for some reason, and Douglas in the front necks
of the driver, and don't get halfway through the story
(27:37):
and start talking to himself, and we'd have to say,
do we can't hear you? And he go back to
the beginning or halfway through the story and start tell
it again, improving the anecdote, writing it in front of me,
the anecdote. You could a goodness, I've hired this bid.
He never quite understood that the secret of telling a story,
(27:59):
if you like, is to follow through to the very end,
and not to sort of stop and think, no, there's
a better way of expressing this, and let me try
and go back to the beginning again and start reframing
the whole anecdote to turn it into the perfect anecdote,
which of course is a process which suits right very well,
but doesn't really suit a performer or indeed a sometimes
(28:20):
a companion. It's a rather bizarre sort of self indulgent.
So he could be a little bit self indulgent like that,
But we forgave him because he was, obviously, you know,
a great writer.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Pause for a moment and realize what a very strange
story Griffreys Jones is telling us. Here, three young creatives
on the upswing of their careers, reveling in their youthful success,
go for a night out on the tiles at the
can Film Festival. Then in the car on the way
(28:54):
back to their magnificent hotel, they swap funny stories. Except
Douglas Adams isn't telling stories. He's writing them half drunk.
He's compulsively going back to the beginning of his story
and redrafting it, trying to make it better, to advance
(29:15):
it further up the wall in P. G. Woodhouse's study
until it could touch the picture, aale of the great
master he so wanted to emulate. This is a man
who was a writer to his call, who is rigorous
about writing all writing, science fiction, comedy, even drunken funny stories,
(29:41):
drafting and redrafting, analyzing and reworking. While Douglas might have
been more public about the influence of comedy and comedians
than he was about science fiction, don't think comedy got
a free pass either. Here is an essay he wrote
in the year two thousand, a few months before he died,
(30:04):
read by Dirk Gently actor Samuel Barnett.
Speaker 8 (30:09):
There's always a moment when you start to fall out
of love, whether it's with a person, or an idea
or a cause. Even if it's one you only narrate
yourself years after the event. You know, a tiny thing,
a word, a false note, which means that things can
never be quite the same again. For me, it was
hearing a stand up comedian make the following observation. These
(30:34):
scientists say, they're so stupid. You know those black box
flight recorders they put on airplanes, and you know they're
meant to be indestructible. It's always the thing that doesn't
get smashed, So why don't they make the planes out
of the same stuff? And the audience roared with laughter
at how stupid scientists were couldn't think their way out
(30:55):
of a paper bag. But I sat feeling uncomfortable. It
was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke
didn't really work, because flight recorders are made out of titanium,
and that if you planes out of titanium rather than aluminium,
they'd be far too heavy.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
To get off the ground.
Speaker 8 (31:13):
In the first place, I began to pick away at
the joke. Supposing Eric Morkam had said it would it
be funny? Then well, not quite, because that would have
relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb.
In other words, they would have had to know, as
a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of
titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke.
(31:36):
If you think this is obsessive behaf you should try
living with it. That didn't rely on the teller and
the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who
knew more than they did. It sent a chill down
my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy.
(31:58):
I also began to wonder how many of the jokes
I was making were just well ignorant.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
There's so much to unpack in this little analysis. First,
you can sense the pain in Douglas, a lifelong comic writer,
feeling regretfully and sadly the limits of comedy. Also, note
his disappointment, his fear, even at what we would later
(32:29):
come to recognize as a growing distrust in experts in
science and the scientific method. What is also fascinating is
how Douglas's rigorous application of logic to humor calls back
so clearly to his prescription for successful science fiction writing.
(32:51):
Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy, he
wrote in nineteen seventy eight, at the start of his career,
and here, twenty two years later, near the end of
his life, he continues, with relentless, obsessive logic to drill
down to take a part a joke, a joke that
(33:12):
he felt was not only illogical, but more importantly, was
devoid of joy, A joke that was motivated by a
meanness of spirit and a distrust of science that was
antithetical to Douglas Adams. I hope by now it's becoming
clear that to describe Douglas as a particular type of
(33:33):
genre writer, whether that genre was comedy or science fiction,
is missing the point. The answer is, of course that
he was both, but that defining him by reference to
a category doesn't give us a complete view of the
type of writer he was. Genius transcends categorization. Being confronted
(33:57):
with a talent that won't fit neatly into a category
is one of the ways you know that you're dealing
with a genius. There is a contemporary idea, a meme
rarely the parable of the ten thousand hours, the idea
that one can achieve mastery of a given domain through
(34:18):
ten thousand hours of focus practice Malcolm Gladwell is mainly
to credit or blame, depending on your point of view,
for how widespread this idea is and how widely and
incorrectly it is applied. The public perception of the idea
is that you can become great at anything if only
(34:40):
you'd practice it for ten thousand hours. Let's take a
look at this. The academic research behind the ten thousand
hour theory was a study by kay Anders Ericsson done
at Berlin's Academy of Music and focused specifically on violin players,
all of whom were already pretty good by normal standards.
(35:01):
Ericson evaluated that the most elite of these players had
achieved an average of ten thousand hours of practice by
age twenty. Properly understood, this theory was only ever intended
to apply in certain tightly defined domains violin play and chess,
for example, and only applies if certain necessary prerequisites are present.
(35:27):
Starting young with a basic level of talent, it says
that talented people who practice things like chess and violin
for ten thousand hours will become pretty good at playing
chess or playing violin. It does not mean that anyone
can become world class at anything just by spending ten
(35:49):
thousand hours on it, and it definitely doesn't mean that
every complex skill can be mastered in ten thousand hours.
To take an example, I could spend ten thousand hours
trying to be an NBA player, and the fact that
I am five foot eight and a half and a
pretty average eye hand coordination would mean it would never
(36:13):
ever happen. Being a great writer, a writer of genius,
is one of those things that is rather more complex
than being good at chess or playing the violin. Douglas
Adams spent a lot more than ten thousand hours writing,
and certainly many times ten thousand hours thinking about writing.
(36:38):
He was an obsessive writer, a compulsive writer, the type
of writer who drew grafts off the moral guilt of
his characters, the type of writer who would draft and
redraft everything, whether it was a drunken joke or a novel,
endlessly seeking for the draft that would touch the picture rail.
(37:04):
He was also a writer who suffered in his writing,
Who famously missed dead lines whushing by and had to
be locked into a hotel room by his publisher to
deliver the second du Gently novel. There is a line
from Chaucer that always makes me think of Douglas Adams.
Speaker 8 (37:24):
The leaf so short, the craft is so long to learn.
The say so hard, so sharp, the conquering.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
For those not conversant in old English, the life so short,
the craft so hard to learn, the attempt so hard,
so sharp, the conquering. Writing at the level that Douglas
Adams wrote is a very hard craft to learn. In
(37:57):
his so short forty nine years, Douglas struggled mightily with
the craft of writing. He transcended both comedy and science fiction.
He produced a radio play that redefined the genre, several
of the best episodes of Doctor Who Ever, written five
(38:17):
Hitchhiker novels, two Dirk Gently mysteries, two books of Funny Names,
and in Last Chance to See, a landmark work of
conservation writing. Alongside this, he wrote dozens of essays and
articles and speeches on subjects that ranged from evolution, computing, god,
(38:41):
the Internet, and physics. Douglas Adams is, of course best
remembered for his novels. But I would like to argue
that to really understand his legacy, it is necessary to
get our arms around the full breadth of his output,
and in particular, his nonfiction work.
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