Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Saturday.
Speaker 1: Let's go into the vault. This is going to be
Speaker 1: an interview episode. I talked to Kevin John Davies about
Speaker 1: his book The Mind of Douglas Adams. So for all
Speaker 1: of you Douglas Adams fans out there, you know you
Speaker 1: enjoy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in any format
Speaker 1: that it has been brought to life, then this is
Speaker 1: a really fun chat. We also get into some other
Speaker 1: discussions of popular science fiction. So I really enjoyed this
Speaker 1: interview back in the day, and I hope you enjoy
Speaker 1: it here for the first time or revisiting it. It
Speaker 1: originally published eight thirty one, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 3: is Robert. On today's show, I'll be talking with author
Speaker 3: Kevin John Davies about his new book forty two The
Speaker 3: Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. This book will be
Speaker 3: available as a physical book on the nineteenth of September.
Speaker 3: It's already available as an ebook, so one way or
Speaker 3: another you can get your hands on this book. It's
Speaker 3: a beautiful volume, so I highly recommend it now in
Speaker 3: the event that you're not familiar with the man himself.
Speaker 3: Douglas Adams born nineteen fifty two was a groundbreaking English author, humorist,
Speaker 3: and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Speaker 3: a work originally conceived for radio, but it would also
Speaker 3: take on new life as a novel in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 3: stage shows, a comic book, TV series, video game, and
Speaker 3: a two thousand and five feature film that many of
Speaker 3: you may be familiar with. His other works include the
Speaker 3: Dirk gently books, and he served as screen writer on
Speaker 3: thirteen episodes of Doctor Who in the late seventies and
Speaker 3: early eighties. He died in two thousand and one, but
Speaker 3: his influence continues to be felt in humor and science
Speaker 3: fiction and beyond. So with some of the basics out
Speaker 3: of the way, let's jump right into the interview with
Speaker 3: author Kevin John Davies. Hi, Kevin, thanks for coming on
Speaker 3: the show.
Speaker 2: Hello there, Rob, nice to be invited. Thank you.
Speaker 3: So the book is forty two the wildly improbable Ideas
Speaker 3: of Douglas Adams. Many of our listeners are well acquainted
Speaker 3: with Adam's work, and I included a short overview at
Speaker 3: the top of this episode for everyone, But as someone
Speaker 3: who worked with him and has chronicled his ideas in
Speaker 3: his work, what do you think is the most essential
Speaker 3: thing for our listeners to recognize about the man, especially
Speaker 3: they're just not that familiar with him in his work.
Speaker 2: I think what you have to realize is that Douglas
Speaker 2: never set out to be a science fiction author. You know,
Speaker 2: he's primary focused ever since his college days, you know,
Speaker 2: at university and Cambridge, he just wanted to be a writer, performer.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be John Clees until he realized that
Speaker 2: job was taken. But he certainly got to meet a
Speaker 2: few of his heroes. So his favorite kind of reading
Speaker 2: material were things like PG. Woodhouse. So he saw himself
Speaker 2: as a comedy writer, a satirist primarily. But he said
Speaker 2: that he rather ruefully, he said to me once when
Speaker 2: I interviewed him several times over the years. But he said,
Speaker 2: the trouble is everything I write seems to involve robots
Speaker 2: and spaceships. So I think he appeals across the board,
Speaker 2: you know, he appeals to people who like science fiction
Speaker 2: because he seems to be playing with the usual tropes
Speaker 2: of science fiction, and he appeals to people who don't
Speaker 2: like robots and spaceships because he seems to be sending
Speaker 2: it up. So it kind of works across the board.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't have to be a big science
Speaker 2: fiction fan to get The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Speaker 2: It works on that kind of satirical level, and it's
Speaker 2: just beautiful writing. So I hope new people will give
Speaker 2: it a go. They might discover something new that they
Speaker 2: really love.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us how you came to first work
Speaker 3: with Douglas Adams and where he was in his career
Speaker 3: at that time.
Speaker 2: Sure, well, I mean within the first few years of
Speaker 2: knowing him, he suddenly became very rich and famous. But
Speaker 2: when I first met him, I'd seen his first Doctor Who,
Speaker 2: which was called The Pirate Planet, and that had been
Speaker 2: a four part serial on television starr In Tom Baker,
Speaker 2: and then I'd heard The Hitchhiker's Guide on its second
Speaker 2: repeat within the first year. It was quite unusual for
Speaker 2: a radio show to get repeated quite so quickly, but
Speaker 2: it was popular demand, and he very soon realized he
Speaker 2: had a hit on his hands. I was invited to
Speaker 2: bring my new tape recorder. I was seventeen years old
Speaker 2: and I just had a new tape recording for my birthday,
Speaker 2: remember those cassettes, And I brought it along to interview
Speaker 2: him for a fan magazine for Doctor Who, primarily, but
Speaker 2: my friends and I kept asking him questions about Hitchhiker's
Speaker 2: Guide because that was all new and exciting, and he said,
Speaker 2: I thought this was going to be an interview about
Speaker 2: Doctor Who. He'd just taken a day job, that was it,
Speaker 2: because he needed regular income, had he had a few
Speaker 2: tough years, and so the idea of a year long
Speaker 2: contract at the BBC marshaling scripts for Doctor Who was
Speaker 2: something that he badly and sorely needed at the time.
Speaker 2: So I just met this very tall everyone remarks on that,
Speaker 2: and he's good foot taller than me, very smiley, witty,
Speaker 2: very friendly, immediately friendly, an amazing guy. Immediately you're sort
Speaker 2: of you're taken to him, you know. That was that
Speaker 2: was the flavor of it. And it was about another
Speaker 2: eighteen months later after that interview that I by pure chance,
Speaker 2: ended up working on the hit Tracker's Guide to the
Speaker 2: Galaxy TV series, and that was my first year in
Speaker 2: the business, having left Art College. So it was a
Speaker 2: glorious year for me and one that I treasured to
Speaker 2: this day and remember vividly despite it being all those
Speaker 2: years ago. And I was an animator working on the
Speaker 2: BBC television version, So yeah, it was a very strange hit.
Speaker 2: Trackers is odd that it began on radio, then it
Speaker 2: became a stage play, several stage plays, then finally a novel,
Speaker 2: a vinyl LP, and then I found myself working on
Speaker 2: the TV version, and yeah, that was it, and that's
Speaker 2: when I really got to know Douglas properly in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: Now, prior to this interview, I think my only full
Speaker 3: experience with his work was the film adaptation of Hitchaker's
Speaker 3: Guide to the Galaxy. But I listened to the Stephen
Speaker 3: Fryer narrated audiobook version in preparation for this interview, and
Speaker 3: you know, I was just really kind of taken aback
Speaker 3: just how good it is and how you know, it
Speaker 3: still feels so distinct and original, which isn't always the
Speaker 3: case with works of great popularity and influence. So I
Speaker 3: was wondering, like, why do you feel that this book
Speaker 3: in particular is still speaking to us forty four years
Speaker 3: after its initial publication.
Speaker 2: I think it's the sheer amount of work that Douglas
Speaker 2: put into the writing. He's a great friend of his.
Speaker 2: Nick Webb, who I got to know as well, also
Speaker 2: has passed now, but he became Douglas's official biographer, and
Speaker 2: I've interviewed him too in the past, and he said
Speaker 2: that Douglas Douglas could hear the music, and what he
Speaker 2: meant by that was as a writer, he could hear
Speaker 2: the rhythm and flow of a sentence. And I think
Speaker 2: you you know, if you adapt any of Douglas's work,
Speaker 2: you messed with that at your peril. And I think
Speaker 2: the movie took some liberties with the actual flow of
Speaker 2: his very carefully chosen sentences. You know, he would do
Speaker 2: very long sentences with lots of subclauses and parentheses, and
Speaker 2: then on the last word of something, he would rip
Speaker 2: the rug from under you and make you laugh. And
Speaker 2: he had thought about it, and I think it came
Speaker 2: from his days in sketch comedy. So you know, the
Speaker 2: radio series of Hit Choker and the television version are
Speaker 2: born out of that kind of footlight Cambridge footlights, sketch
Speaker 2: comedy performing background. That's it, you know, famously, Monty Python,
Speaker 2: they all came out of the same stable, and so
Speaker 2: I think when they came to the movie, it's a
Speaker 2: slightly different style of acting. Actually, you know, Martin Freeman
Speaker 2: has a much more realistic style to his. I think
Speaker 2: he was quite good actually his after Dead. But it
Speaker 2: is a different way of performing, you know, it's more traditional,
Speaker 2: you know, Hollywood movie style. And they obviously they grafted
Speaker 2: in more of a love interest with Trillion between the
Speaker 2: two main characters, Arthur and at Trillion, and you know,
Speaker 2: it tried to fit that thing that Douglas tried all
Speaker 2: his life and for twenty odd years he tried to
Speaker 2: get a movie made of Hitcherck and sadly it didn't
Speaker 2: come along into the few years after he died. And
Speaker 2: so I think some of the fans, some of the
Speaker 2: purest fans, don't really rate the movie as much. I
Speaker 2: think it looks beautiful, and I did go along to
Speaker 2: the set and I met the filmmakers, and they certainly
Speaker 2: had Douglas's best interests at heart, but they were music
Speaker 2: video producer director pair that made it, and I think
Speaker 2: they thought much much more about the visuals than they
Speaker 2: did about the script, and I think Disney had quite
Speaker 2: strong studio control on the script, so you know, it's
Speaker 2: a difficult thing to pull off. The later radio adaptations
Speaker 2: by Dirt Maggs, he adapted and directed them for BBC Radio,
Speaker 2: and they kept the flavor. They he got the style,
Speaker 2: he understood it, and he knew that Douglas had chosen
Speaker 2: Dirk as the successor to Jeffrey Perkins, the main producer
Speaker 2: of the original series. And sadly, you know, those shows
Speaker 2: didn't come along until after Douglas had passed, but certainly
Speaker 2: they kept the flavor. So I recommend, you know, try
Speaker 2: the radio shows, try the books. The books are pure Douglas.
Speaker 2: It's him playing with the language, and that's why they
Speaker 2: survive and why they still work now because the sheer
Speaker 2: effort that he put into them. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, I want to come back to Doctor Who for
Speaker 3: just a second. As you mentioned, he wrote for the
Speaker 3: TV show during with the late seventies and early eighties.
Speaker 3: In what key ways do you think Doctor Who influenced
Speaker 3: Douglas Adams and what sort of lasting influence did he
Speaker 3: leave on the franchise.
Speaker 2: Well, he said that when he was at prep school,
Speaker 2: he was writing sketches about Doctor Who with them the
Speaker 2: Daleks being powered by rush Chrispies or something, just something
Speaker 2: that he did as a thing with his friends on
Speaker 2: audio tape. And so he'd always wanted to work for
Speaker 2: Doctor Who, and we have in the book, in the
Speaker 2: forty two book, there's a letter of rejection which must
Speaker 2: have pained him deeply in nineteen seventy six when he
Speaker 2: first got turned down by the then producer and the
Speaker 2: script editor team. But two years later, you know, he
Speaker 2: got the commissioned, and thank goodness he did, because he
Speaker 2: was in a real pit at that time. And suddenly
Speaker 2: he had the first series of Hit Shriker and the
Speaker 2: first four episodes of Dr Who to write almost simultaneously,
Speaker 2: and he retreated down to the West Country where his
Speaker 2: mother lived, and the back to the family home and
Speaker 2: slaved away over those scripts until he'd sort of run
Speaker 2: out of words, as he put it, and he got
Speaker 2: John Lloyd to help him with the last two episodes
Speaker 2: of that first radio series of Hitchhiker, and it just
Speaker 2: it was obvious when you watch that Doctor Who what
Speaker 2: his take on it was. He has a peculiar turn
Speaker 2: of phrase. The humor is there the ideas. It's all
Speaker 2: about the ideas. Douglas had some extraordinary ideas, and in
Speaker 2: later years he became fascinated with real science. So it
Speaker 2: wasn't just making it up for Hitchhiker's sake, you know,
Speaker 2: and for Doctor Who. But it was obviously there was
Speaker 2: a strong talent there, and that's why he was offered
Speaker 2: the role to join the show and be its script
Speaker 2: editor for a whole year looking after other writers. Not
Speaker 2: a job he was terribly well suited to because he
Speaker 2: had trouble delivering two deadlines himself, so to get scripts
Speaker 2: out of other writers. You know, he had been a
Speaker 2: radio producer very briefly before he ran away to television.
Speaker 2: From their point of view, so yeah, pulling scripts out
Speaker 2: of other people, that's not really that wasn't really his forte.
Speaker 2: But luckily at that time Hitchhiker exploded and he then
Speaker 2: had to go off and do other things and work on,
Speaker 2: you know, milk this baby, to do sequels, and everyone
Speaker 2: kept demanding more and more Hitchhikers until he was sick
Speaker 2: of it. Really, But yeah, I think the legacy that
Speaker 2: he left behind, and people have quoted this, like Steve
Speaker 2: Moffett and Russell T. Davis. They cite one of his
Speaker 2: particular stories, The City of Death, as their kind of
Speaker 2: role model for how they'd like it to be. Don't
Speaker 2: just When I interviewed him about it, he said that
Speaker 2: he worried that when he put jokes into scripts, he
Speaker 2: still wanted the drama to be played straight. But the
Speaker 2: fear is that when you put comedy into a drama
Speaker 2: script that people then start to ham it up and
Speaker 2: play to the comedy more. And you know, he wanted
Speaker 2: to use the light and shade of the drama and
Speaker 2: the comedy. But City of Death, which he co wrote,
Speaker 2: I mean the producer. It was an emergency script written
Speaker 2: supposedly over a weekend, which is hard to imagine, but
Speaker 2: that was the legacy left behind. I think it had
Speaker 2: an effect on how the modern producers of Doctor Who
Speaker 2: tackled it when they revived it in two thousand and
Speaker 2: five onwards.
Speaker 3: So the book is a beautiful memoir, using various documents
Speaker 3: and photos from the dogals Adam's archive. Correct along with
Speaker 3: these various words and letters from friends, you words of
Speaker 3: fans collaborators tell us how this project came together and
Speaker 3: what sort of challenges were involved.
Speaker 2: Sure, the book was something that, strangely enough, I first
Speaker 2: thought about. In twenty sixteen, I was asked by the
Speaker 2: radio producer, an adaptor of Douglas's work Dirt Mags, to
Speaker 2: go along to the archive, which I didn't really know
Speaker 2: much about it. Before there had been a book another
Speaker 2: guy had written a book which had had some appendices
Speaker 2: of stuff from the archive, so we knew a little
Speaker 2: bit about that, and that was Hitchhikery material. But Dirk said,
Speaker 2: go and see if you can find anything that a
Speaker 2: bit of pure Douglas magic, any titbits, odd phrases, lines,
Speaker 2: you know, anything you can find that hasn't been used yet,
Speaker 2: and we'll put it into this final radio series. The
Speaker 2: final radio series is called the Hexagonal. Phase of hitch
Speaker 2: Hiker was based on a book by Owen Colfer, the
Speaker 2: Irish writer who wrote Artem's Foul and other young young
Speaker 2: adult readers. You know. He he felt that it needed
Speaker 2: a bit more Douglasy magic. So I went and had
Speaker 2: a look at the material. Then I spent about six
Speaker 2: days there. For me, I live right at the top
Speaker 2: of North London, so it was a drive up the
Speaker 2: motorway to Cambridge, an ancient city of Cambridge, which is
Speaker 2: full of colleges that all part of the Cambridge University.
Speaker 2: And there is Saint John's College and the ancient library there.
Speaker 2: I mean, the building's about four or five hundred years old.
Speaker 2: The front of it is all beautifully remodeled and everything,
Speaker 2: but the back is almost like a church. It feels
Speaker 2: like Hogwarts, you know, and the Harry Potter films, big
Speaker 2: heavy old bookcases with giant leather bound sort of books
Speaker 2: on the shelves, and they've got medieval manuscripts and they've
Speaker 2: got all sorts there, and Douglas's material was lodged there
Speaker 2: by his family. Now, while I was going through this,
Speaker 2: I realized that Douglas kind of argues with himself on
Speaker 2: the page, and we've got some of this in the book.
Speaker 2: He would be berating himself for forgetting an idea that
Speaker 2: he's the night before, or he just wasn't in the
Speaker 2: mood to write that day. Every now and again there's
Speaker 2: a nice little pep talk where he tells himself and
Speaker 2: you can do quite well for yourself, you know. You know.
Speaker 2: Once he was actually seeing the money rolling in. But
Speaker 2: it was interesting to watch a writer at work looking
Speaker 2: at a man that I knew for twenty years. I'm
Speaker 2: looking at his handwriting. He's terrible handwriting, very scribbly at times,
Speaker 2: and he's appalling typing with all sorts of liquid paper
Speaker 2: or tip its blobs all over it and crossings out
Speaker 2: and x x x through everything, and you know, it
Speaker 2: was quite He wrote four books before he got into
Speaker 2: using a word processor. So you know, if anyone thinks
Speaker 2: that forty two was inspired by his knowledge of asking
Speaker 2: or whether it's called a SC two, no, he knew
Speaker 2: nothing about computers when he wrote it, Chuck. So anyway,
Speaker 2: I looked at all this material and I thought, you
Speaker 2: know what, there should be a book about this, something
Speaker 2: along the lines of how Douglas Adams wrote. And I
Speaker 2: didn't think about it anymore. I didn't even think necessary
Speaker 2: that it would be me that would write the book
Speaker 2: until the publisher came out of the blue in twenty twenty. Yeah,
Speaker 2: at the end of twenty twenty they contacted me and said,
Speaker 2: you've been suggested by the estate of Douglas, the family
Speaker 2: and the agent who runs the estate to go and
Speaker 2: do some more research in the archive and prepare this book.
Speaker 2: And I said, well, isn't that strange. It's something I'd considered,
Speaker 2: but I didn't think it would be me. So thank you,
Speaker 2: and so off I went. Eventually, I mean the first
Speaker 2: year of the business. It was the unbound to the publishers.
Speaker 2: They begin each project with a Kickstarter to raise the
Speaker 2: funds and to secure it, and that protects them as
Speaker 2: a small publisher. It protects them from the risk involved
Speaker 2: in an expensive book. And they'd already done a book
Speaker 2: called what's it called Letters of Note, quite a big
Speaker 2: coffee table book of famous people's correspondents and sometimes quite
Speaker 2: old fashioned copper plate writing. You'd have on one page
Speaker 2: you'd see the actual letter, and on the other page
Speaker 2: you'd see it in a plain text to make it
Speaker 2: easier to read. So that was their kind of model
Speaker 2: that they wanted to make this book based upon. So
Speaker 2: the first year was very difficult because the library was
Speaker 2: in lockdown still and there was a member of staff
Speaker 2: there who could be very badly affected by getting COVID.
Speaker 2: She had quite severe asthma, so she was keeping it
Speaker 2: strictly to live in students only, so that was a
Speaker 2: bit of a delay. Then I got ill, then my
Speaker 2: wife got ill. So the first year was a bit
Speaker 2: of a writer. The second year twenty twenty two, I
Speaker 2: went seventeen times in all to up to Cambridge. It's
Speaker 2: about fifty miles each way, and I would spend the
Speaker 2: day looking through the material, photographing it on my iPhone
Speaker 2: because there wasn't enough time to sit and read it
Speaker 2: on the day bringing it home. And I think for
Speaker 2: every day I went, I spent at least a week
Speaker 2: reading everything and logging it and creating my own database.
Speaker 2: There is you can actually look at the Saint John's
Speaker 2: College database of Douglas's material, but it really is only
Speaker 2: very broad strokes, you know, It's like bullet points. Whereas
Speaker 2: the only way to do it is to sit there
Speaker 2: and look at the papers and go slowly through it all.
Speaker 2: And it still belongs to the family. They still have
Speaker 2: very much the control of it. You have to get
Speaker 2: written permission to go and access this stuff. So I
Speaker 2: felt very privileged. I also felt now in Douglas. I
Speaker 2: don't think he wanted me or anyone to go and
Speaker 2: look at his material in the unprepared state, and I
Speaker 2: felt very much like I was prying, especially when you
Speaker 2: look at things like his notebooks and his diaries. You know,
Speaker 2: there's not a lot that didn't exactly pour his heart
Speaker 2: out of his diaries, they're mostly just notes about meetings
Speaker 2: and birthdays and party lots of parties. But in his
Speaker 2: notebooks he was really much more personal. He would talk about,
Speaker 2: you know, how he was feeling about working on this thing.
Speaker 2: But it was lovely to see phrases that you know
Speaker 2: and love if you're a Hitchhracker fan, you know, or
Speaker 2: a Dot or two fan, you can see things. You
Speaker 2: can see him working it out on the page, and
Speaker 2: there it is in his own handwriting. So again, very privileged.
Speaker 2: And I was walking in his footsteps literally because I
Speaker 2: was going into the same you know college that he
Speaker 2: studied in all those years ago in the early seventies.
Speaker 2: I was going across the road at lunchtime in the
Speaker 2: same pub that we know he frequented, and cafes around
Speaker 2: the corner, you know, to break up the day they
Speaker 2: always shut for lunch. Very British. And it was a
Speaker 2: lovely job. It's something I thoroughly enjoyed doing. I then,
Speaker 2: unfortunately I did get rather ill last year and I
Speaker 2: had to take a slight back seat for a while.
Speaker 2: A copy editor was assigned to look after the project,
Speaker 2: to guide me through the whole business of the layout.
Speaker 2: She worked with the designer, and you took a lot
Speaker 2: of the load off me. When I was hospitalized for
Speaker 2: a while. Anyway, the hospital they promised me they'd cure me,
Speaker 2: and they did. I had six months of chemo and
Speaker 2: I got better and I was able to finish the book.
Speaker 2: The publishers were wonderful, they waited for me, and between
Speaker 2: the whole team, we've put together something that I think
Speaker 2: the fans are going to cherish. And it's beautiful book,
Speaker 2: beautifully printed. It's very heavy and very glossy, and I'm
Speaker 2: delighted with the outcome. So now's the time to tell
Speaker 2: everyone all about it rather excitedly. Is out in Britain now.
Speaker 2: It was launched on Thursday last week here in the UK,
Speaker 2: and it will be out in the middle of September
Speaker 2: in America. Takes that long for the ship to get
Speaker 2: across the Atlantic.
Speaker 3: Was the Thursday release date intentional?
Speaker 2: I wonder it also it was also the twenty fourth
Speaker 2: of August. That's forty two back. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: You can read what you like into that and people will.
Speaker 2: I mean the fans have delighted in making notes about
Speaker 2: forty two ever since I've been a what do they
Speaker 2: call it, an honorary member of zaid zed nine Plurals
Speaker 2: had Alpha, which is the official Hitchhiker's Guide appreciation society
Speaker 2: for over forty years now. And we even had the
Speaker 2: letter to Douglas and replies from him in the book
Speaker 2: from the fans. There's an old chapter about fan letters
Speaker 2: and things, which I quite enjoyed putting together. So yeah,
Speaker 2: it's been. It's mixture. It covers his whole life from
Speaker 2: cradle to grave. You know, really shows early promise when
Speaker 2: he was twelve years old. His poems are extraordinary, and
Speaker 2: then there's you know, love lorm Student Verse, and then
Speaker 2: the early sketch comedy material Doctor who Hitchhikers Dirt Gently,
Speaker 2: Last Chance to See, right up to the digital village,
Speaker 2: which was how he spent these later years doing new projects,
Speaker 2: some of which didn't make it to fruition, and we've
Speaker 2: got some pages of those as well, So it's the
Speaker 2: whole shomac.
Speaker 3: I was really intrigued by this whole world of eighties
Speaker 3: video games that the book touches on. I have very
Speaker 3: little personal experience with games of this genre in time period.
Speaker 3: So what was the nineteen eighty four Hitchhiker's game? Like,
Speaker 3: what what what was this? And what was Douglas Adam's
Speaker 3: vrovement in it.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to be I'm going to be quite
Speaker 2: honest here. It's not one that I got into at
Speaker 2: the time. I've been working in animation and we were
Speaker 2: looking at computer graphics from quite early on, and I
Speaker 2: just looked at it and thought, well, this technology is
Speaker 2: not ready yet. You know. Of course, Jurassic Park and
Speaker 2: terminated too, and all that kind of stuff was a
Speaker 2: long long way ahead in the future. Computers were quite
Speaker 2: kind of raw, and it was all very rough at
Speaker 2: that time. But those who loved tinkering with computers were
Speaker 2: having a field day. And Douglas admitted he said, do
Speaker 2: you know what, I really would quite like to have
Speaker 2: been a software engineer. I don't know if he had
Speaker 2: the discipline, To be honest, he was a quite chaotic
Speaker 2: sort of person. To wonder that his archive exists, and
Speaker 2: I've put that down to his battery of personal assistance
Speaker 2: he had over the years who probably kept it all
Speaker 2: in order. But yes, he really enjoyed the process. Of
Speaker 2: writing that first game. It's a text adventure, so you're
Speaker 2: interacting with the text in a way that he quite mischievously,
Speaker 2: would get the computer to lie. He said, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not artificial intelligence. It's actually artificially it's not user friendly.
Speaker 2: It's artificially mendacious. I what you call it. It would
Speaker 2: deliberately lie to you, and you the game, I believe
Speaker 2: was quite frustrating. I only dabbled on it briefly. I
Speaker 2: mean it was launched at a convention that we had
Speaker 2: in the middle of nineteen eighty five. I remember them
Speaker 2: doing quite a bit of publicity there for it, and
Speaker 2: a TV show that covered it at the time, and
Speaker 2: there was one guy who was quite good at it,
Speaker 2: who was explaining how it worked, and I had to
Speaker 2: dabble there, and I thought, ah, this is not for me.
Speaker 2: I didn't, but I know that, you know, from my
Speaker 2: interviews with Douglas, I knew that he loved the experience.
Speaker 2: And then he went on to do Bureaucracy, which was
Speaker 2: based on I mean, they wanted Hitchiker two, but he
Speaker 2: was much more interested in doing something different, which I
Speaker 2: think was true. Throughout his career. He kept trying to
Speaker 2: escape from hitchhiker. But the bureaucracy game was about getting
Speaker 2: a bank to register a change of address card because
Speaker 2: he had personal experience of a bank. He just bought
Speaker 2: a swanky new flat in fashionable Islington in London, and
Speaker 2: the bank kept sending all his correspondence went to the
Speaker 2: old address, and he kept saying to them, look, you know,
Speaker 2: for heaven's sake, you're into this property for X thousands
Speaker 2: of pounds. Surely you know where I am. And he said,
Speaker 2: they wrote back to me and said wherever. So sorry, yes,
Speaker 2: it's completely our fault. We will get it right in future.
Speaker 2: And he said, guess where they sent that letter? So yeah,
Speaker 2: So I mean famously in Hitchhikers the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats
Speaker 2: are the vogons. And that's kind of become a byword
Speaker 2: now for anybody that has a sort of stubborn bureaucratic streak,
Speaker 2: you know, parking wardens and petty officials that liked to
Speaker 2: wield their look a bit of power too heavily. I
Speaker 2: think a lot of people call them bogons.
Speaker 3: Now, now, am I correct that? In this did he
Speaker 3: also work on the nineteen eighty six Labyrinth the computer game.
Speaker 2: Ah, there was a dabble. He did know Jim Henson,
Speaker 2: and I know that he went to dinner with him,
Speaker 2: and I know he got involved in a discussion group.
Speaker 2: There was an educational thing that he was going to
Speaker 2: do with the Muppets. Quite how much involvement he had,
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's not something that's terribly well documented.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I can't really give you much on that,
Speaker 2: but I know that, you know, he prized his friendship
Speaker 2: with Jim Henson quite highly at the time. But who
Speaker 2: knows what they would have created together that happened. It
Speaker 2: would have been amazing.
Speaker 3: Both such creative individuals that died far too early.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I agree, Yeah, terribly missed both of them.
Speaker 3: I agree. Now, speaking of technology and also you know
Speaker 3: sci fi visions of technology, does Adams get enough credit
Speaker 3: as a kind of futurist at least as far as
Speaker 3: you know, technology is concerned.
Speaker 2: I don't know how many people know about quite how
Speaker 2: many conferences that he went to as a guest speaker.
Speaker 2: The world of sort of you know, geeks, nerds, whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, the computer and the high tech world, even
Speaker 2: to mobile phones and things like that. They clamored to
Speaker 2: have him there because he was a very entertaining speaker.
Speaker 2: He essentially gave pretty much the same speech I think
Speaker 2: at quite a few conferences, and we have his notes
Speaker 2: from one of those speeches from right towards the end
Speaker 2: of his tragically short life. But yes, he once told
Speaker 2: me on an interview in ninety two and he said, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm off to Japan next week or something. He said,
Speaker 2: I'm giving a talk at this conference, and my audience
Speaker 2: is going to include the head of Sony, Francis faul Coppola,
Speaker 2: and George Lucas. He was certainly mixing with interesting company
Speaker 2: and the high tech side of things. Yeah, he knew
Speaker 2: some very powerful people. I found a note about Jeff
Speaker 2: Bezos in one of his notebooks. He wasn't above just
Speaker 2: picking up the phone and ringing these people, you know.
Speaker 2: He he had ideas and he was communicating them quite
Speaker 2: early on. He knew long before the most of us
Speaker 2: mere mortals were really aware of the Internet. He was
Speaker 2: way ahead, he knew. And an interview I did with
Speaker 2: him further Sci Fi Channel in ninety five, he was saying, then,
Speaker 2: I want to get this country wired up, you know,
Speaker 2: I want us to have a fiber to every home,
Speaker 2: and that was a long way before. I mean we
Speaker 2: still don't have that now, but in ninety five he
Speaker 2: was talking about that. So yes, he was very aware,
Speaker 2: and he became more and more aware of it. He
Speaker 2: was fascinated by real science and that was his preferred
Speaker 2: reading matter in the latter stages of his life, and
Speaker 2: we've kind of been robbed of something. I think that
Speaker 2: he would have written some real science books. I mean,
Speaker 2: his only factual book was his favorite, and that was
Speaker 2: Last Chance to See But that was about endangered species,
Speaker 2: which was another hot topic for him. He was asked
Speaker 2: by a newspaper to go and be a sort of
Speaker 2: untrained observer for a trip to Madagascar to go and
Speaker 2: look for a rare species of lima called the AI.
Speaker 2: And I interviewed him in eighty five just after he
Speaker 2: got back, two weeks after he got back, and he said,
Speaker 2: that was fascinating experience. We went off into the jungle
Speaker 2: because the II is nocturnal, it means have ted torture.
Speaker 2: He loved it so much. And they did get to
Speaker 2: see the II, which is the most bizarre looking creature.
Speaker 2: And you said that I really enjoyed that i'd like
Speaker 2: I think I'd like to do more of that, And
Speaker 2: within a couple of years he was taking an entire
Speaker 2: year out to go around the world with Mark Card
Speaker 2: the naturalist, and that they went to all sorts of
Speaker 2: far flung places to look at endangered species and sort
Speaker 2: of report upon them, mainly originally for a radio show,
Speaker 2: but also with the idea that it would be a book.
Speaker 2: And they were given a big old chunk of money
Speaker 2: to go and do this and to make these trips,
Speaker 2: and a series of different radio producer sound recordis went
Speaker 2: with them to make the radio shows. The radio show
Speaker 2: varies slightly from the book. The book is pure Douglas.
Speaker 2: It's about the fun and games they had just getting
Speaker 2: to the places. So it's almost like a travelogue thing
Speaker 2: of what it's like to go to these tiny little
Speaker 2: airstrips in the middle of Africa where corrupt officials would
Speaker 2: want their palms greased if they were going to let
Speaker 2: you have your baggages. You know, you couldn't get your
Speaker 2: suitcases unless you you know, seen the right man sort. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: he had some great stories to tell, and we've got
Speaker 2: a couple of the stories that didn't make the book
Speaker 2: book are in this book, There's there's one where he
Speaker 2: went to see some fruit bats, and he was so
Speaker 2: preoccupied with the fact that he'd been completely bitten all
Speaker 2: over by mosquitos that he barely could look at the
Speaker 2: fruit bats. But you know, he was an intrepid traveler.
Speaker 2: He liked his home comfort. I mean, he really did
Speaker 2: go all around the world and stay in some really
Speaker 2: swanky hotels, but he wasn't above roughing it and being
Speaker 2: you know, in the outback or in jungles or whatever
Speaker 2: it took. And he became very passionately fond of endangered species,
Speaker 2: and he would have written more. I'm sure he would have.
Speaker 2: He was reading on evolution and evolutionary theory. He was
Speaker 2: keeping up to date and abreast of all the modern
Speaker 2: technological trends. What he would have thought of today's situation
Speaker 2: with AI. You know who knows we've been robbed of
Speaker 2: that sadly. And Jeffrey mcgiven, who played Full Prefect on
Speaker 2: the radio, he said, one thing we've been robbed of
Speaker 2: is Douglas's view on being the parent of a teenage girl,
Speaker 2: because sadly, his little girl, Polly was only six when
Speaker 2: he passed away. So you know, he would have had
Speaker 2: a take on what it was like to deal with
Speaker 2: a teenage girl, you know, and all that. There's all
Speaker 2: sorts of things, and the family missing terribly. I know
Speaker 2: his sisters and his brother and they champion him a lot.
Speaker 2: They get involved in when we have memorial services or
Speaker 2: we have there's an annual lecture science and comedy lecture
Speaker 2: in his name and organized partly by the family and
Speaker 2: partly by Save the Rhino International of which he was
Speaker 2: a founder patron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's some photos in the book with some sort
Speaker 3: of a rhino costume, right.
Speaker 2: That's fantastic costume. I think it was made originally for
Speaker 2: a stage show. It's a caricature of a rhino really,
Speaker 2: but it's quite familiar to Britain's for taking part in
Speaker 2: marathon and you know, city marathons and things like that.
Speaker 2: These rhinos with their low slung head hanging down in
Speaker 2: front of the costumes fabulous designed by Gerald Scarf, Foone's cartoonist.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Douglas took part in a trek. There was
Speaker 2: a team that walked across part of Africa up to
Speaker 2: the top of Manculum Manjara. I don't think Douglas made
Speaker 2: it up the mountain, but he did part of the
Speaker 2: sweltering in that costume in the African heat, and there
Speaker 2: are pictures in the book of that and a very
Speaker 2: nice portrait of him standing there holding the costume. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, no, they was serious about that. And also
Speaker 2: the Diane Fosse Guerrilla Fund. You know, he would he
Speaker 2: would give to those charities and support them.
Speaker 3: Tell us about Secret Empire and how this would have
Speaker 3: fit into the creative output of Douglas Adams. I know
Speaker 3: the book. In the book, it's compared in scope to
Speaker 3: something ultimately like Asimov's Foundation series, So like, what would
Speaker 3: tone and scope have been if this had come to
Speaker 3: fruition and why didn't it come together?
Speaker 2: I think it didn't come together primarily because the company
Speaker 2: from which he was running that and proposing it was
Speaker 2: the Digital Village, which he set up with several people,
Speaker 2: including his friend Robbie Stamp, and it went to the wall.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately in the dotcom bubble burst, you know, it was
Speaker 2: not financed quite as strongly as they'd hoped, and so
Speaker 2: I don't know, it would have been a very expensive series.
Speaker 2: His ideas were quite extraordinary and it was very much
Speaker 2: like we've now got foundation. Finally the technology is there
Speaker 2: now to make something as awesome as a story with
Speaker 2: that kind of scope. But that's what he was planning.
Speaker 2: It was. The idea was called Secret Empire because the
Speaker 2: notion was that we nearmmortals on Earth. We're not aware,
Speaker 2: but there's an international conspiracy of scientists and top people
Speaker 2: that are already out there exploring the Solar system more
Speaker 2: than we know, and over the centuries, and each series
Speaker 2: was going to be set another century later that we
Speaker 2: would go off, you know, if in the hopeful idea
Speaker 2: that there would be many series of this, we would
Speaker 2: reach into the far flung future. And there were difference
Speaker 2: engineers who were speculating using all kinds of theory about
Speaker 2: how the human race might reach out further, and all
Speaker 2: the implications politically, scientifically, you know, across across those millennia,
Speaker 2: you know, where would we end up. So it was
Speaker 2: quite far eaching grand scope of an idea. And I
Speaker 2: remember him saying to me, he said, you'll be surprised,
Speaker 2: I'm not doing science fiction. I am. I've thought up
Speaker 2: another science fiction series, and I didn't know what it
Speaker 2: was at the time. He was keeping it quite his cards,
Speaker 2: quite close to his chest. But I last saw him
Speaker 2: in December of ninety eight when he was giving one
Speaker 2: of his speeches, a variation on the usual speech, to
Speaker 2: the public Awareness of Science Drama Awards, which is something
Speaker 2: I'd been involved in since the year before. I'd been
Speaker 2: a guest speaker there whilst I was directing episodes of
Speaker 2: a science fiction series. And yeah, he was clearly, you know,
Speaker 2: firing on all cylinders, and he had great ideas. And
Speaker 2: then the following year ninety nine, he went and emigrated
Speaker 2: to live in California to get the movie done. That
Speaker 2: was the real reason for going. And sadly, two years later,
Speaker 2: after a strenuous workout in the gym, he collapsed and
Speaker 2: that was the end of him. I'm afraid. So I
Speaker 2: think I think the Secret Project, I think that was
Speaker 2: something that it's time passed. You know. It's a shame
Speaker 2: it didn't happen when it was first proposed in the
Speaker 2: mid nineties. But it's there in the book if you
Speaker 2: want to have a look, there's a few pages from it.
Speaker 2: It's not the whole thing. In fact, now I don't
Speaker 2: think there's anything in the book which is the entire
Speaker 2: thing it would be impossible. The book would be enormous.
Speaker 2: So what I've tried to do is find really good
Speaker 2: representative pages of everything, so you get a really broad
Speaker 2: sweep of his life, his projects, the surprising things that
Speaker 2: he did, you know, like working on cartoons for children,
Speaker 2: and he did some sketch comedy for Pete Town's End
Speaker 2: of the Who, And all sorts of snippets and tipbits
Speaker 2: that I found, and yeah, I think you'll find something
Speaker 2: in there. It's one of those books that you can
Speaker 2: pick up and read a few pages and then come
Speaker 2: back to another time, or if you want to work
Speaker 2: your way through the whole thing. It is vaguely chronological.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's difficult to be sure because he didn't put
Speaker 2: a lot of dates on things. You know. The diaries,
Speaker 2: of course are dated, but they're not He wasn't using
Speaker 2: them to pour his heart out. They were really disappointment diaries,
Speaker 2: you know, which is a but his notebooks are frequently undated.
Speaker 2: The other funny thing about his notebooks was he would
Speaker 2: start a fresh notebook in a burst of enthusiasm, and
Speaker 2: you'd see it on the page and he would declare, boldly,
Speaker 2: I'm now going to write something new every day, all big,
Speaker 2: bold statements and lots of optimism, and then after about
Speaker 2: six or seven pages that sort of fizzles out and
Speaker 2: the rest of the book blank. Then he starts another
Speaker 2: notebook and it's just you know, he continues on another
Speaker 2: fresh It's like a butterfly mind. He would flip from
Speaker 2: thing to thing and try very hard to make it,
Speaker 2: to make it work, and then if he would get
Speaker 2: plunged into fits of despair. He was known to have
Speaker 2: depression occasionally. I think maybe less and less as his
Speaker 2: life went along, as he got more successful. I think
Speaker 2: it helped. But yeah, he was a man of extraordinary enthusiasms,
Speaker 2: and that comes across on the page.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at
Speaker 3: the physical book, but I had the digital book, and
Speaker 3: you know, the layout is fabulous, and it provides so
Speaker 3: much insight and you get, like you say, into these
Speaker 3: different areas of his life. Is sort of pyramid of interest.
Speaker 3: Really really a treat, A great introduction I think in
Speaker 3: some respects to the man for people who aren't familiar
Speaker 3: with him. But I could see this would be a
Speaker 3: cherished volume for for Douglas Adams fans out there.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope so, I mean, that's that was the intention.
Speaker 2: So I hope we've fulfilled it. And I'm certainly delighted
Speaker 2: with when the book arrived. I was quite surprised at
Speaker 2: the at the quality of it. That's that stood out
Speaker 2: to me. You know, it's something to be proud of.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I hope people will enjoy four to two
Speaker 2: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. And we do
Speaker 2: explain forty two of the book. That's that's we've given it.
Speaker 2: We've given it a little sub chapter.
Speaker 3: Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Kevin. This
Speaker 3: is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Thanks again to Kevin for coming on the show. The
Speaker 3: book again is forty two The Wildly Improbable Ideas of
Speaker 3: Douglas Adams. It is going to be available as a
Speaker 3: physical book to you shortly. It's already available as an ebook,
Speaker 3: so go ahead and look it up an order or
Speaker 3: pre order wherever you get your volumes. Thanks as always
Speaker 3: to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. And
Speaker 3: just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 3: primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 3: Listener mail episodes on Mondays. On Wednesdays we have a
Speaker 3: short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and on Fridays
Speaker 3: we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
Speaker 3: a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And if you
Speaker 3: would like to reach out to us, well, you can
Speaker 3: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
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