Douglas Adams: His Life, the Universe, and Everything

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Imagine that you’re in charge of sending a culture-bearing probe off into space; one capable of carrying a single example of 20th Century art. What would you pick to represent us in the cosmos? A great novel, perhaps? Or would you choose a slender volume based on a radio show? A volume emblazoned with the words “DON’T PANIC”; a volume that contains everything from the precise reason you should always carry a towel to how to mix the most powerful drink in the universe? We’re talking, of course, about the *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, perhaps one of the most unique pieces of sci-fi ever written. And the author behind the book we here at Biographics would send as our emissary to the stars? Douglas Adams.

Born in the 1950s, Adams was the product of a post-war Britain bursting with creativity. It was the era of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, of Monty Python, and *Doctor Who*. Yet even in this intensely vibrant age, Adams managed to dream up a universe so unique it has arguably never been equaled. In the video today, we’re taking a journey into the past to explore the life of the man behind a literary legend.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. It was on a planet orbiting this sun, in the year 1952, that Douglas Noel Adams was born. Later in life, Adams liked to joke that he was the first DNA in Cambridge, having been born there several months before Watson and Crick discovered the far more famous version. But aside from raising a smile, that joke may have also served to hide painful memories.

The family Douglas Adams was born into was both eccentric and fractured. Much of this fracturing came courtesy of the boy’s father, Christopher Douglas Adams. A larger-than-life man with a vibrant personality, Christopher enjoyed a lifestyle that contributed to the household’s struggles. Before Adams was even five, his parents had divorced, and he’d gone to live with his mother’s parents, who had a house filled with animals.

Perhaps due to the chaos at home, Adams became so introverted at school that his teachers thought him “mentally subnormal.” However, he never suffered financially. Not long after separating from his family, Christopher Adams had managed to seduce a wealthy widow who paid for Douglas to have a private education. Thus, at age 11, he was sent to the elite Brentwood boarding school. For Adams, Brentwood was the first time he felt his uniqueness was appreciated. Not yet 12, Adams was already a tall young man, and he would continue to grow until he reached 6ft 5in. He inherited both his father’s personality and his distinctive nose, making him both a natural performer and instantly recognizable.

This translated easily into performing in school plays, where Adams became renowned for his unique sense of humor. In 1969, the first season of *Monty Python’s Flying Circus* had exploded on the BBC. Like everyone else his age, Adams had fallen in love with the troupe. But while most kids wanted to watch the Pythons, Adams wanted to be them. As he later commented, “I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realize that the job was taken.”

But it wasn’t just Monty Python that captivated Adams. Britain in 1969 was in the midst of a cultural explosion. With a talent as distinct as Adams’s, it’s tempting to think he just sprang from nowhere. However, his sense of humor was born from a particular moment in British history. While all the ingredients for his greatest work were in the air in the 1960s, they only coalesced together thanks to pure chance.

In the summer of 1971, Adams was traveling around Europe between finishing at Brentwood and starting at Cambridge University. As the legend goes, he found himself lying in a field in Austria, contemplating his *Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe* and the stars above him. Just before he lost consciousness, the drunken teenager had a thought that would change his life. He decided that someone should write a hitchhiker’s guide not to another continent, but to the galaxy.

If it was overindulgence in alcohol that gave Adams his great idea, it was likely also alcohol that delayed him from acting on it. By 1974, Adams had graduated from Cambridge after student years filled with little work and much drinking. Now living in London, he was still drinking heavily but doing nothing except writing the odd sketch that the BBC would reject. However, this boozy London life would lead to his big break.

That same year, Adams was introduced to Graham Chapman, a member of Monty Python. Chapman, who enjoyed drinking and appreciated Adams’s talent for sketch comedy, gave him a spot on the biggest sketch show on Earth. On December 5, 1974, Douglas Adams became one of only two non-members to have ever written for Monty Python. His sketch, *Patient Abuse*, features Chapman as a doctor who forces a heavily bleeding patient to fill out endless forms before he’ll give any treatment. It’s a classic Adams riff on bureaucracy, tailored to Python’s specific brand of humor.

Although Adams would contribute a couple of one-liners to *Monty Python and the Holy Grail*, that was really it for his sketch writing career. Depressed, Adams returned to his mother’s house. Over the next year, he continued to try his hand at writing and performing, but it all went nowhere. There was a sketch show he went on tour with, which ran for two hours but only contained one good gag. There was a pilot series he wrote about astronomers discovering the world was about to be destroyed for an interstellar advertising sign, which the BBC refused to touch. There was even a spec script he sent to the *Doctor Who* production office, one about the Doctor becoming trapped on a ship crewed entirely by the useless members of society. While the *Doctor Who* team liked the idea, they didn’t pick it up.

By Christmas 1976, Adams was trapped at his mother’s place, his career stagnant, and on the verge of giving up. At that moment, it must have seemed to him that 1977 would bring nothing but more disappointment. Well, buckle up, because Adams is about to be proven wrong. The next twelve months were going to hit the young man like a black ship diving into the heart of a sun.

On a dismal February day in 1977, Adams made a trip to London to have lunch with the BBC’s light entertainment producer. It had been over a month since Adams’s depressing Christmas, and paid writing work was still out of reach. That all changed that fateful day. As the two ate, the producer mentioned that he wanted a sci-fi comedy series for Radio 4 and wondered if Adams might like to try his hand at a pilot episode. Just like that, Adams was a writer again.

Adams’ initial pitch was *The Ends of the Earth*, a six-part comedy in which every episode would end with the Earth blowing up. However, as he was writing the pilot, he decided he needed to give his alien character, Ford Prefect, a job. At last, the idea he’d had long ago lying drunk in a field in Austria came back to him. Ford Prefect would be a researcher for the *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*. From that moment, the concept of *Ends of the Earth* went out the window, replaced by a series about Ford Prefect, the Guide he was researching, and his human friend Arthur Dent.

By March, the pilot episode for *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* was ready to go, and the BBC gave it the green light. That June, the cast assembled in London to record the episode. It didn’t take long, and that should have been that. But something had changed in Douglas Adams; a zeal had come over him since he’d decided what his radio show was going to be about. No longer did Adams simply want to make a radio comedy. He wanted to create something unlike anything anyone had ever heard before—a sci-fi show with production levels that would impress anyone.

For the rest of that summer, Adams and his producer tinkered away in the booth, creating the sci-fi soundscape for their show. They spent as long on single sound effects as some radio shows did on an entire series. But it was worth it. By fall, the pilot was being circulated around the BBC, and everyone loved it.

As winter approached, Adams was called in for two very important meetings. The first was with the *Doctor Who* team, who’d heard his pilot and wanted him to write a four-part episode. The second was with Radio 4, which wanted to commission a full series of *Hitchhiker’s*. Naturally, Adams said yes to both of them. This would become a pattern in Adams’s life: taking on so much work that he became trapped in a state of panic, barely able to finish by the deadline. In the future, this would become a significant problem that limited his output. But in 1977, Adams was still young and still just able to get things done, although it was touch and go.

The biggest problem was that while Adams had a tone and ideas for *Hitchhiker’s*, he didn’t have a story. Inventing a plot on the fly became increasingly difficult. Things got so bad that Adams would be forced to finish episodes inside the booth as the cast recorded around him. When that didn’t work, he had to bring in friends to help finish them. Still, he managed to complete them. At 10:30 PM on March 8, 1978, the first episode of *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* was broadcast on Radio 4. As it aired, Adams presumably clutched his towel and hoped it would be successful. But even in his wildest fantasies, he couldn’t have foreseen how successful it would become.

Adams would later say of *Hitchhiker’s* sudden success that “It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest.” People loved it. Major newspapers raved about it. People flooded the Post Office with letters addressed to the Guide itself. If you’re new to the work of Douglas Adams, you may be wondering what made people so obsessed with *Hitchhiker’s*. Here was a show in which the basic plot was that the Earth was destroyed, and now the alien guidebook researcher Ford and his human friend Arthur were stuck traipsing around the galaxy. But the genius of *Hitchhiker’s* doesn’t lie in the plot, but in the comic concepts the show carelessly threw out by the dozens, each clever enough to make a series in its own right.

There’s the supercomputer Deep Thought, which spends centuries calculating the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” only to solemnly report that the answer is 42. There’s the android Marvin, who is created with a brain so big he can conceive of the futility of his existence and spends the series in a state of terminal depression. There are time-traveling Chesterfield sofas; a bowl of petunias that’s last thought before plummeting out of space is “oh no, not again”; and a spaceship crewed entirely by the most useless members of society. By April 1978, *Hitchhiker’s* was a British sensation. A book was swiftly commissioned for Adams to write, along with a second radio series. It was enough work for any aspiring writer. But Adams wasn’t just any aspiring writer. He was a madman with an attraction to impossible workloads, which may be why he agreed to also take on the job of script editing *Doctor Who*.

Although it’s overshadowed by *Hitchhiker’s*, Adams’ year at *Doctor Who* is semi-legendary. He took on the job out of fondness for the show and a mistaken belief that it wouldn’t be too demanding. Instead, he found himself working on a show where veteran writers would write a four-page treatment for a four-part serial, hand it to the script editor, and tell him to turn it into two hours of television. This meant Adams doing the work of ten people while also handling rewrites. But it also meant a year of *Doctor Who* filled with *Hitchhiker’s*-style inspiration. The highlight of this was *City of Death*, a four-part story set in Paris where the Doctor steals the Mona Lisa, meets Leonardo da Vinci, shares a scene with John Cleese, and accidentally creates all life on Earth. It’s a fun, joyful, hilarious bit of TV, written in a single, panic-fueled weekend when the original writer dropped out at the last second, leaving Adams to pick up the pieces.

Incredible as *City of Death* was, it severely restricted Adams’ time for working on *Hitchhiker’s*. By early 1979, Adams was in a catastrophic state of procrastination on the book adaptation, with almost nothing written. Finally, as the deadline approached, his editor told him to finish whatever page he was on and hand it over. With a third of the original season still unadapted, Adams complied. Book one of the *Hitchhiker’s* trilogy was published in September 1979. It immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists. Aged only 27, Adams was now at the head of a bona fide phenomenon.

The 1980s began in a whirlwind of success for Adams. As the rest of Britain embraced the Thatcher era, *Hitchhiker’s* season two aired on radio, followed by the second book, *The Restaurant at the End of the Universe*, and then a BAFTA-winning BBC TV adaptation. With all this exposure came what every struggling writer always craves: money. By 1981, Adams was a seriously wealthy individual. He began channeling his father’s spirit, spending money on cars, experiences, and technology.

One of the reasons companies like Google program *Hitchhiker’s* easter eggs into their search engine is because Adams was a hugely influential writer on technology. He was one of the first to grasp what the coming information age would mean and toured the US giving witty, knowledgeable lectures on the subject. But while this won him legions of fans in Silicon Valley, writing was still his bread and butter. Adams was starting to find it harder and harder to write.

When the time came to write the third *Hitchhiker’s* book, Adams cannibalized one of his old, unproduced scripts for *Doctor Who*. Thus, *Doctor Who and the Krikket Men* became *Life, the Universe and Everything*. By the time the fourth book in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy came out in 1984, Adams could barely stand to be with his own creation. “To be honest, I really shouldn’t have written it,” he later said, “and I felt that when I was writing it. I did the best I could, but it wasn’t really from the heart.”

Even as his chronic procrastination began to turn into writer’s block, Adams’s luck kept right on going. At the start of the decade, he met his future wife, Jane Elizabeth Belson. He also met many famous people. Before long, Adams and Belson’s house was hosting parties where you could bump into anyone from John Cleese to Stephen Fry. Adams described himself as a “radical atheist” and was naturally friends with Richard Dawkins. Perhaps the coolest people Adams befriended were Pink Floyd. There are legends that, halfway through his parties, Adams would hand out guitars and treat the crowd to an impromptu Pink Floyd gig.

Even as Adams’ star rose, he began to discover just how ephemeral this shiny world was. In 1985, Adams was sent alongside zoologist Mark Carwardine to Madagascar to write an article about endangered animals. The two hit it off and, a couple of years later, did a radio series together about endangered species. This show and its book, *Last Chance to See*, was Adams’ personal wake-up call to the damage humans were doing to the environment. In the aftermath, he became one of the earliest, loudest voices on conservation and the dangers posed by habitat destruction.

The 1980s ended on a relatively good note. Adams managed to get over his writer’s block long enough to write two *Dirk Gently* detective stories (one of which again cannibalized his old *Doctor Who* scripts) and, in 1991, finally married Jane Elizabeth Belson. At the start of the 90s, Adams was in his late thirties, world-famous, rich, and married to the woman of his dreams. If this kept up, who knew what the rest of his life would be like? Unfortunately, we here in the future already know the tragic answer.

The last ten years of Adams’ life dawned with the writer in a bleak place. After nearly seven years, he’d agreed to write the fifth *Hitchhiker’s* book, on the understanding that it would be the last. Even so, his writer’s block crippled him. There would be nothing for weeks on end—nothing but Adams locked away in hotels by his editor, staring at the ceiling. We’ve heard tales that the publisher hired a fleet of writers to sit downstairs, churning out chapters based on Adams’ outline, until Adams was finally roused to work by the thought of all these other writers doing his book wrong.

*Mostly Harmless* was released in 1992. It was, without a doubt, the bleakest thing Adams ever wrote, with a downer ending that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Much later, Adams would claim he’d been seriously depressed while writing it, and it really shows. Still, life moves fast, and within a couple of years of the gloomy conclusion of *Hitchhiker’s*, Adams seemed to be living life to the full again. For his 42nd birthday in 1994, for example, he was invited onstage by Pink Floyd to play a gig with them. Later that same year, his daughter, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, was born.

By the 21st Century, Adams was lecturing in Silicon Valley, developing video games with his production company, and working on turning *Hitchhiker’s* into a Hollywood movie. He’d even started writing again, tentatively putting together ten chapters of a third *Dirk Gently* book that he thought might even become the sixth *Hitchhiker’s* book. And then it happened. The moment as shocking to his fandom as the sight of a Vogon Constructor Fleet hanging in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t. On May 11, 2001, Douglas Adams suffered a massive heart attack at his local gym. At the time he died, he wasn’t even 50.

In the wake of Adams’ death, tributes poured in from around the world. This wasn’t just the regular sadness we feel when someone passes away. This