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