Douglas Adams

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.

Radio Times review

The comedy and science fiction worlds were robbed of a prodigious talent in 2001 when Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged just 49. His contributions to Doctor Who, literature, ecology and the internet are unique and impressive. But for me, his finest offering remains The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and specifically this radio version, first broadcast in 1978.

Where the Radio 4 series scored over subsequent outings on television and film was in its sublime cast (from Simon Jones's permanently bamboozled everyman, Arthur Dent, to Stephen Moore's lugubrious Marvin the Paranoid Android), and in allowing listeners to picture Adams's genuinely extraordinary ideas in their own minds.

In 1978 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was already very much a known quantity, thanks to its sonic tailoring of the Time Lord's adventures on BBC One. Here, however, its engineers excelled themselves, weaving seductive and amusing soundscapes around the fantastical action.

Any comedy that begins with the end of the world is an instant attention-grabber, and Peter Jones's avuncular narration (as "The Book") is the perfect counterpoint to the ensuing craziness. Adams had a knack for wonderful character names, but stick with the series for Slartibartfast (one of veteran actor Richard Vernon's finest hours).

If you've never heard this before, I envy you. Hyperspace bypasses, Pangalactic Gargle Blasters and Shoe Event Horizons all jostle for attention in a planetary pot-pourri.

It's full of the kind of skewed, surreal humour and conceptual genius that would become Adams's calling card. And when Marvin laments, "Here I am, brain the size of a planet...", I often think of Adams's intellect in similar terms.

So long, Douglas, and thanks for all the fish.

Dirk Maggs: "Adams told me there was more to come"

The producer and director on doing justice to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, working with Neil Gaiman, and the debt they both owe to Douglas Adams.

I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the cricked neck and spilt Radox as, bath-bound, I crane my head towards the living room.

It wasn't bad. It was co-written by Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, which you would expect to have accorded it some comedy chops, and original creator Steve Delaney, who played the titular count, a pompous, bumbling malaprop-trap from Doncaster. The problem was this: it wasn't at all funny. There's recent history here, in the form of executives merely thinking a "name" is enough - in this case, Linehan; a couple of months ago, and in a far, far worse case of unfunny, Ben Elton - to create, as they probably say, albeit with knowing cynicism, comedy gold. In the end, it was just a something about a pompous bumbling man from Donny. Quite why it ever worked on radio I'm now struggling to understand.

Here's a thought. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one, but: few programmes migrate well from radio. There's Have I Got News For You, a spin-off from the (still extant, and wickeder than ever) News Quiz; and Tony Hancock's finest half-hours were actually on the screen. But executive shoes corridor-crunch on the ossified bodies of "hit" shows that died on the transition to screen. Just a Minute became just a dirge. Famously, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's... was a roiling trough of rhino poop. Not even that lovely Martin Freeman, in the marginally better movie, could pull it off, and the original TV series was a travesty. The phrase "Zaphod Beeblebrox had two heads" works fine-ish as a line in a book, or spoken on the radio (actually it wasn't that funny, ever) - when we can imagine it, in the bath, in the wonder of the mind's eye. On TV, some poor actor was actually given a kind of "ball of saggy painted calico, with eyes" to waggle on his shoulders as a second head. It's the difference between having to show it, and trusting the listener/reader to, basically, "insert image here": and, incidentally, the reason why Lucky Jim, the funniest book of the 20th century, has never been filmed, other than execrably. Surreality, wordplay and extended interior monologues would seem particularly vulnerable to becoming lost in transition: but I don't know quite why I'm banging on about things that don't work on TV, when there were so many last week that did. It's just that I... well, I quite liked lying in the bath. Imagining.

John Lloyd to play the Fringe

...and he talks QI, Douglas Adams and blinkered TV executies.

John Lloyd to play the Edinburgh Fringe

Top comedy producer John Lloyd is to debut a solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show is partly inspired by The Meaning Of Liff, the classic, 30-year-old comedy dictionary providing words for things that should have a name but don't, which he co-wrote with Douglas Adams.

Grab your towel and celebrate Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams would have been 61 on Monday. Probably best known for his brilliant work, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams may be gone, but will never be forgotten.

Douglas Adams is still the king of comic sci-fi

Intergalactic travel may seem ripe for comedy, but Douglas Adams, whose 61st birthday is celebrated by Google today, showed that the funniest laughs are found in the real world.