Douglas Adams

Hitchhiker's Guide TV series two: What might have been

Some of the ideas Douglas Adams had for the never-made second TV series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy were revealed last night. His thoughts included getting rid of Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head - which never looked convincing with the 1980s special effects and BBC budgets - and building up the role of Trillian, the only major female character in the story.

Douglas Adams's secret stash revealed

Details of the previously unseen Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy material to be exclusively performed at Chortles comedy book have been revealed.

There is 'masses' of unpublished Douglas Adams writing

Apparently there's an undiscovered hoard of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author's writing that has never seen the light of day. "You don't want to titillate people, but there is masses of material," Adams's half-brother James Thrift said at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Douglas Adams: New biography sheds light on his genius

In the 13 years since he died, Douglas Adams' fictional universe has lost none of its appeal. His biographer Jem Roberts explains how he came to tell his story - and the treasures he found.

Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently set for US TV series

The world's foremost and only Holistic Detective is set to move to America. Dirk Gently, the character created by Douglas Adams in his comedy-sci-fi-mystical-mystery novels Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, has been optioned for a potential US television series and comic book.

My inspiration: Steve Cole on Douglas Adams

The Astrosaurs author explains how Douglas Adams' novels and Doctor Who scripts taught him the meaning of science fiction comedy.

"I don't want a christening yet. I've already lost you to him." Thus Olivia Colman, with just that phrase, sets the entire tone for Rev, as she has quietly done for each of the past two series. By turns giggly, mournful, drunk, charming, ballsily defiant and utterly conflicted, she encapsulates pretty much this secular nation's attitude to 21st-century Christianity, which could be summed up in the title of a fine Douglas Adams novel (writing not about God but Earth itself): Mostly Harmless.

A triumphant return but, for a comedy, it's pretty strong gravy when you think about it, as you should. The fact that God is man's finest confection detracts not one whit from "his" essential confected goodness, and the palaces of myth serve, by and large, to do great good. Except when they get in the way of real life, or bore, or nag: and that's why Colman does such a tremendous job, refracting our every niggle with organised religion through the simple premise of being married to, and more pertinently in love with, a rev. So we share her increasing frustration at the fact that hubby, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander), has to open his door not just to waifs and strays but to borderline psychopaths: troubling enough when they were just the two, but the arrival of baby Katie is a delight that is slowly, delightfully, doing their nuts in.

It is also, I should have mentioned this, extremely funny. I don't think that Hollander or his co-writer James Wood have put much more than a tootsie wrong since the first series, but their writing in this latest outing becomes ever more deft, daring, even confrontational. The scene in which Mick, the splendidly grubby dreadlocked Jimmy Akingbola (carrying the most foetidly evil one-armed doll) offers to babysit, with the well-intentioned cackle: "You take your lady out for a nice night an' when you comes back, ta-da! She still alive!" mesmerised: and also spoke of poverty, race relations, child abuse and 10 other things which don't get a better outing in an entire hour of the increasing fractious Question Time. Adam/Tom's facial reaction to this charming offer was a brief masterclass in English politesse. And at his heart is not so much a crisis of faith but the full and faithful knowledge that God does not exist other than to provide the wages.

As far away from Derek Nimmo in All Gas and Gaiters, in generational terms, as it's possible to get, and hyperspace-removed from the Vicar of Dibley, as in it's funny: not only but very. And so wise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into what is, after all, a half-hour of light entertainment on a Monday night, but when I saw Adam/Tom - I cherish the believability of the character so much, they're interchangeable - standing in some yakhole of a playground pulling on an e-cigarette, he simply felt like every small man mulling over big thoughts, as opposed to every big man thinking small thoughts, ever. I don't have too much choice in the matter, but I know which one I'd rather be.

Lost poems of Douglas Adams and Griff Rhys Jones found

The lost poems of Douglas Adams and Griff Rhys Jones have been found in school cupboard.

I am determined to believe that in the early summer of 1977, during a break from writing and recording the pilot episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams went to the cinema and saw Star Wars.

We now know, of course, that he was working on a story that would become a landmark in comedy, and in radio, and in publishing, and in video games. Yet when you listen to the opening episode again, rebroadcast for the first time in 10 years last Saturday on Radio 4 Extra, the sheer ambition of his irreverence still catches you in the kidneys. In response to what Star Wars began - the mythic, spectacular strand of sci-fi cinema - The Hitchhiker's Guide provides a messy, fun-poking alternative.

When Princess Leia watches her home planet being destroyed it is a tragedy that sends a great disturbance through the force. When the Earth gets vaporised at the beginning of Hitchhiker's, "I'm a bit upset about that" is Arthur Dent's reaction. In the cinema, when the Millennium Falcon makes the jump to hyperspace it is a blast that pins you to your seat. Ford Prefect, on the other hand, describes the experience as "unpleasantly like being drunk". "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" Arthur Dent asks. The answer: "Ask a glass of water." Bravo.