Donald P. Borchers discusses Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1982)
1Donald P. Borchers discusses his failed attempt in 1982 to produce Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
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Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Adams also wrote "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (1987) and "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" (1988), and co-wrote "The Meaning of Liff" (1983), "The Deeper Meaning of Liff" (1990), and "Last Chance to See" (1990). He wrote two stories for the television series "Doctor Who", co-wrote "City of Death" (1979), and served as script editor for its seventeenth season. He co-wrote the sketch "Patient Abuse" for the final episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus".
Adams was a self-proclaimed "radical atheist", an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, and a lover of fast cars, technological innovation and the Apple Macintosh. Adams played the guitar left-handed and had a collection of left-handed guitars. He also studied piano in the 1960s. Pink Floyd and Procol Harum had important influence on Adams's work.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was a concept for a science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977.
In the novels, a towel is the most useful thing a space traveller can have. The annual Towel Day (25 May) in Innsbruck, Austria, where Adams first had the idea of "The Hitchhiker's Guide", was first celebrated in 2001, two weeks after Adams's death.
According to Adams, the idea for the title occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that "somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK in 1978. The series was distributed in the United States by National Public Radio. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast in 1980.
The TV series was based on the first six radio episodes.
While working on the radio series Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. Despite the difficulty with deadlines, Adams wrote five novels in the series, published in 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1992.
The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo-illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four Hitchhiker's novels.
In 1980, Adams began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a film, making several trips to Los Angeles, and working with Hollywood studios and potential producers. The next year, the radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts. When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the film project started with Disney, which had bought the rights in 1998. The screenplay got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, and the resulting film was released in 2005.
Radio producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams, first in 1993, and later in 1997 and 2000 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy". As with the film, this project was realised only after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and was subsequently released on audio CD. With the aid of a recording of his reading of "Life, the Universe and Everything" and editing, Adams can be heard playing the part of Agrajag posthumously. "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" and "Mostly Harmless" made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in 2005, and subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author.
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