Other contemporaries included the lawyer and TV presenter Clive Anderson. The culture secretary Chris Smith was president of the union. Adams used to do warm-up routines for debates, but not because of any political interest: “I was just looking for anywhere I could do gags. It is very strange seeing these people dotted around the public landscape now. My contemporaries are starting to win lifetime achievement awards, which obviously makes one feel nervous.”
After university, Adams got the chance to work with one of his heroes. Python member Graham Chapman had been impressed by some Footlights sketches and had made contact. When Adams went to see him, he was asked, much to his delight, to help out with a script Chapman had to finish that afternoon. “We ended up working together for about a year. Mostly on a prospective TV series which never made it beyond the pilot.” Chapman at this time was “sucking down a couple of bottles of gin every day, which obviously gets in the way a bit.” But Adams believes he was enormously talented. “He was naturally part of a team and needed other people’s discipline to enable his brilliance to work. His strength was flinging something into the mix that would turn it all upside down.”
After he split up with Chapman, Adams’s career stalled badly. He continued to write sketches but was not making anything like a living. “It turned out I wasn’t terribly good at writing sketches. I could never write to order, and couldn’t really do topical stuff. But occasionally I’d come out with something terrific from left field.”
Geoffrey Perkins, head of comedy at BBC television, was the producer of the radio version of Hitchhiker. He remembers first coming across Adams when he directed a Footlights show. “He was being heckled by a cast member, and then he fell into a chair. I next came across him when he was trying to write sketches for the radio show Weekending, then regarded as the big training ground for writers. Douglas was one of those writers who honourably failed to get anywhere with Weekending. It put a premium on people who could write things that lasted thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of writing a single sentence that lasted less than thirty seconds.”
With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of bizarre jobs, including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did the same job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year.
He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.
Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out of the question, there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.
Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being struck by Adams’s “intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel the stuff he is writing has come from a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong mind behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical and analytical. Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, but remembers there was little grand plan behind the project.
“Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end.”
By the time the series aired in 1978, Adams says, he had put about nine months’ solid work into it and had been paid one thousand pounds. “There seemed to be quite a long way to go before I broke even,” so he accepted a producer’s job at the BBC but quit six months later when he found himself simultaneously writing a second radio series, the novel, the television series, and episodes of Doctor Who. Despite this remarkable workload, he was already building a legendary reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. His publishing editor, Sue Freestone, quickly realised that he treated writing as performance art, and so she set up her office in his dining room. “He needs an instant audience to bounce things off, but sometimes this can weirdly backfire.
“There was a scene early in one book when he talked about some plates with, very definitely, one banana on each. This was obviously significant, so I asked him to explain. But he liked to tease his audience and he said he’d tell me later. We eventually got to the end of the book and I asked him again, ‘Okay, Douglas, what’s with the bananas?’ He looked at me completely blankly. He had forgotten all about the bananas. I still occasionally ask him if he has remembered yet, but apparently he hasn’t.”
Writer and producer John Lloyd has been a friend and collaborator with Adams since before Hitchhiker. He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday in Corfu with three friends when he was finishing a book, and he ended up taking over the whole house. He had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t sleep, and so on. It didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a brain the size of a planet, and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a malicious person, but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to finish a book, everything else pales into insignificance.”
However the work was dragged out, it was extremely popular. The books all became bestsellers, and Adams was given an advance of over $2 million by his American publishers. He wrote a hilarious spoof dictionary with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff, in which easily recognised concepts, such as the feeling you get at four in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done, were given the names of towns—Farnham being the perfect choice for this low-grade depression. In the late eighties he completed two spoof detective novels featuring Dirk Gently.
For all his facility with humour, Freestone says she has been touched by how profoundly Adams’s work has connected with some readers. “In Hitchhiker, all you have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard about this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had her towel with her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into her own. It embarrassed the hell out of Douglas when he heard about it. But for her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an unknown journey.”