Two radio documentaries exploring Douglas Adams' vision of the digital future, plus Did Douglas Get it Right?, presented by Mitch Benn
Douglas Adams (Author)
Douglas Noel Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge. His
parents divorced when he was five, and Douglas and his younger
sister Susan were brought up by their mother in Essex. From 1959 to
1970 Douglas attended Brentwood School, and he first thought
seriously about writing when a teacher named Frank Halford gave him
ten out of ten for a composition. He was the only boy ever to have
been awarded full marks.
Leaving school in December 1970, Douglas won a scholarship to study
English at Cambridge. His main reason for going there was to join
Footlights, although his first attempt to do so was a failure. He
succeeded in joining in his second term, but found the group which
ran the society a bit stand-offish. He also felt constrained by the
limits of pantomimes and mid-term revues, so instead he set up his
own revue group, Adams-Smith-Adams, with two friends. It was very
successful.
Douglas left Cambridge in the summer of 1974 and took occasional
office jobs before joining forces with Monty Python team member
Graham Chapman. They collaborated on a number of projects;
unfortunately, very few of them were ever broadcast. A while later
he was invited to Cambridge to direct the 1976 Footlights revue,
but even this turned out to be a disappointment. At the end of the
year, broke and feeling like a failure, Douglas moved back home
with his mother.
In 1977 his luck changed. Through his former flatmate John Lloyd,
Douglas met BBC Radio 4 producer Simon Brett. He felt that Douglas'
style of humour should have its own show, rather than being crammed
into existing formats. Having been inspired by a copy of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, Douglas came up with a draft for The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After several delays the first
six-episode series was broadcast, with a second rapidly following.
The worldwide phenomenon they spawned includes five novels, a book
of scripts, two LPs, a television series, a computer game and two
stage plays.
In addition to Hitchhiker, Douglas' work included two Dirk Gently
detective novels and two humorous place-name 'dictionaries', The
Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff (both co-written
with John Lloyd) as well as Last Chance to See, an account of a
global search for rare and endangered species which he co-wrote
with Mark Carwardine.
In 1999 Douglas moved to Santa Barbara with his wife and daughter
to work on a proposed Hitchhiker film. Always a keen advocate of
new technology, his last series for Radio 4 was The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Future, a look at the advances mankind was likely to
make in future years.He died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 49,
in May 2001. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy feature film was
produced in 2005, whilst both Stephen Mangan and Samuel Barnett
have portrayed Dirk Gently on television in recent years.
Douglas Adams (Reader)
DOUGLAS ADAMS was born in Cambridge in March 1952. He is best known
as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which
started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. The book went on to be a No.
1 bestseller. He followed this success with The Restaurant at the
End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything
(1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); Mostly Harmless
(1992) and many more. He sold over 15 million books in the UK, the
US and Australia. Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 at the age
of 49.
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