Mark Carwardine on Douglas Adams
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Welcome to Great Lives, where I choose the living and my guest chooses the dead.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 90 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 15 million copies and still rising. So today's great life is Douglas Adams, who almost became a shipbroker, but became instead creator of the radio series that became a book, a TV series, several plays, a computer game and a film.

I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, and I can never remember what it was like, '70 or '71, and I had a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. And I remember lying there, looking up at the stars, and it just crossed my mind that somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well. Didn't even occur to me it would be me, it just seemed like a good title and that somebody should use it.

Douglas Adams was also the scriptwriter for Doctor Who, co-writer with John Lloyd of The Meaning of Lif, co-writer of A Monty Python Sketch, and co-writer of Last Chance to See, with today's guest, zoologist Mark Carwardine.

It's worth saying that we're sitting in a bar at the BBC in Bristol, home both of this series and the BBC's Natural History Unit, and I have live with me a studio audience. What do you say? I've read...

that if Douglas Adams hadn't been a writer, he wanted to be either a rock musician or a zoologist. Is that right? Well, I think it is right. He loved rock music. He had umpteen left-handed guitars. And one of his most proud moments was playing with Pink Floyd in 1994 at one of their concerts. Zoologist, he always said he wanted to be a zoologist. He'd have made a fantastic scientist out

You always looked at everything from a sort of sideways glance. You would have come up with wonderful theories nobody else would think about. Being a zoologist...

I'm not sure he would have had the patience to sit in a wet jungle for days and study the animals. He liked the bigger ideas rather than the detail. And did he have talent as a musician, would you say? He was quite good. He wasn't as good as all the rock legends he used to play with. He enjoyed it. I mean, Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd taught him how to play the guitar and he then just practised on his own a lot. Can you describe the man? I'd like us all to have a mental picture of who we're talking about.

Well, you wouldn't miss him. He was very tall. He was six foot five tall. He had a big nose. I remember that. He used to say that his mother had an exceptionally long nose and his father had an exceptionally wide nose. And he was very proud to get both those genes. So he had a long, wide nose. He was always a bit dishevelled. He looked like he'd dress quickly, which I think he probably did because he was in a rush to do stuff.

He was very sort of uncoordinated, so he kept bumping into things and knocking things over. Famously, with all his friends, we all know this story, he once actually put his back out trying to spread butter on a slice of bread. And he always had this sort of quizzical look. He was very... He was interested in everything. So whatever anybody was talking about, he'd have this particular look, like he was really focusing. And then he had this amazing laugh. Where did you first meet him?

I met him at Antananarive Airport in Madagascar. What were you doing there? Well, basically, I used to work for the World Wildlife Fund. We had this grand idea to send or take well-known writers to World Wildlife Fund projects to talk about conservation and endangered species. It was a new thing in those days. Nobody had really done it. And I got the job of taking Douglas Adams to see this strange nocturnal lemur called an aye-aye, which we thought he'd appreciate. Aye-aye...

looks like it's just come out of the cargo doors of a spaceship. I remember he was really shocked. He'd never done anything like it in his life before. He'd flown 19 hours to get there. And he thought we'd be going to a nice hotel from the airport and we'd have time for a shower and a shave and then we'd have coffee. And I was there to tell him, actually, we're going straight into the jungle. How did he take that? He was very good. He was very game for anything. Yeah.

He enjoyed being in jungles and sleeping in tents and roughing and reading it, but he only enjoyed it for a few days at a time. So we sort of had a deal where we'd do that and then we'd go back to civilisation. And generally when we went back to civilisation, what he did was he would go into a bookshop and he would buy... I remember we were in Sydney once after about four weeks in the field and he bought 21 books and he locked himself in his hotel room for just over four days.

and he read all those books day and night. Then he was ready to go back in the field again. And then you and he started voyaging all over the world quite randomly, didn't you? We spent a year travelling together after that. We're very different people. You used to put pins into the map, didn't you? Yeah, we got on really well and we just thought, let's do more of this. And it's a great way of getting conservation out to a wider audience because...

Hitchhiker had been out for six years or something, and we thought we could hook people with the Douglas impact. So we did. We literally put a map of the world on the wall in his house. He put pins in where he wanted to go. I put pins in where there were some endangered species, and we sort of combined it, and off we went. Wherever you had two pins in the same place. It wasn't quite that simple, but that's the gist of it.

I think we should hear something of the book, which was initially a radio series produced very cleverly in the style of Hitchhiker. This particular section includes the narrator, Peter Jones, plus a panicky moment when Douglas Adams appears to fall off a boat into the sea. Let's hear it.

The system of life on planet Earth is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't just something that was there. To understand how anything very complex works or even to know that there is something complex at work, man needs to see little tiny bits of it at a time. And this is why small islands have been so important to our understanding of life.

Grab the rope, Douglas. Grab the rope! Oh, no, he's misjudged it. He's got the rope, but he's slipping down. -Wait for the water to come in. -Wait! -Hold on. -Hold on to the rope. -Hey, who's got the dinghy? -Are you OK? -Yeah. -Just wait. -Yeah? -Yeah, I'm fine. I was glad to be off the boat.

What had happened? I remember that really well. It was so long ago, but we were trying to land on a little island called Round Island off Mauritius, and we were trying to jump from a dinghy onto a rock.

Seven people had done it successfully. Douglas was the eighth, and he missed the rock. And it was a slippery rock, so he'd actually beat the poor guy. It was a rough journey. He'd thrown up half his body weight. There was quite a lot of body weight to throw up. Yeah, that was quite significant. And he leapt on the rock and sort of missed...

and fell into the sea over all these jagged bits, and he was covered in blood. Remember the poor guy, we got him ashore, and then he was really shaken, so he sat leaning against this palm tree, turned out to be an extremely rare palm tree called Beverly, and he got

a telling off for leaning up against it. So he ended up lying down for an hour and then he was fine. He was very good at sort of coping with things like that and even though he'd never done any of that before, he would go through a horrible experience and sort of have his time to recover, be very quiet and then he'd be back up again bouncing around like Douglas. There seem to be so many strands to his life, the writing, the comedy, the environmentalism, the obsession with computers.

We'll zoom in on elements of this in a moment, but just zooming out for a moment and looking at the whole life, which of these strands to his life do you think mattered most to him? Gosh, that's really difficult. It's like saying to a rhino, which is the most important, your horn, your ears or your legs? I mean, they were all Douglas. That's what made Douglas. And he was an expert in all of them. You know, he actually, if he got interested in a subject, he would become an expert in

I never think of him as a science fiction writer, funnily enough. I always think of him as a satirist who sort of threw the odd robotic spaceship into his writing. And he used that skill with being an environmentalist. Before we delve further into the details of his awfully short life, he was just 49 when he died, let's hear what some of his other admirers have to say. Huge, enthusiastic, clumsy...

It's very hard to describe Douglas Adams as a man. He was more really a kind of force of nature. He was gorgeous, with a huge brain, huge creativity, and he was a huge loyal friend to all his friends. Generous, tactless, and brilliant. He was quite awkward, in a funny sort of way, with people. That's to say he wasn't, you know, he's not the easiest social companion, I would have said, you know.

I wrote him a fan letter. I think it's the only fan letter to an author I've ever written. It was for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which I read and loved and immediately read again. He was just the most wonderful guy. The answer to everything... Yes? ...life, the universe and everything... Yes? ...is... Yes? ...is... Yes? ...47. 42.

You've just heard the voices of Griff Rhys-Jones, Stephen Fry, Sandra Dickinson, Geoffrey Perkins and Richard Dawkins, so clearly he could count on some illustrious names amongst his fan base. Now, joining us too here in Bristol is Jem Roberts, author of The Frood, the authorised and very official history of Douglas Adams. Jem, who was this man? Where was he born? How did he become, as it were, Douglas Adams?

He was an Essex man, surprisingly, in his earlier days, although the family did move around quite a lot.

And his life really changed, I think, from stage to stage. He had very different... First, he wanted to be a Beatle, and then his greatest ambition was to be... What kind of a Beatle? Sorry. Oh, no, yes, natural history. Sorry, that was a very bad choice. He wanted to be Paul McCartney, I think, more than anything else at first. He had a pretty fractured childhood, didn't he? Yes, his parents split when he was quite young, and him and his sister were shuttled between the two for a while.

I think one of the strange things about Douglas Adams that people aren't aware of is how un-posh he was. Because he went to a very posh school, and eventually he went to Cambridge, but he only went to a very posh school because his father married somebody who had a bit of money, and so she paid for him to go to that school. But, I mean, his mother was a nurse.

and his father was an extraordinary man who went through a dozen different careers and never really settled on one. It was a pretty sad childhood in some ways. It was, and I think one of the big impacts was he was actually quite insecure. He always used to talk about being so tall he thought people didn't see him. Even when he was really A-list and a huge millions of adoring fans, he still questioned himself all the time.

I vaguely remember my school days, he said later. They were what was going on in the background while I was trying to listen to The Beatles. Is that true? Are his accounts of the past gospel? Douglas Adams was very good at anecdotes. The interesting thing about writing the book about him, that there's so much material and you could see the stories being honed from one generation to the next when he found another joke that he could just slip in there. And to be honest...

the absolute truth of what happened was very low on the list of priorities when he was coming up with it. So here's another story, for instance. I want to know if this is true. He went to Cambridge, that's true, but it's said that he applied to join the Cambridge Footlights, which was a sort of comedy society, because of Monty Python and Monty Python's connection. Is that true? Absolutely. Graham Chapman especially, I think, was...

became a great friend of his, but it was also the reason for him getting into Footlights and how he sort of knew what it was. All of us naturally have a desire to be successful in our field and to do well, but there was a particular desire

if I could use the word, certainly in the young Douglas. There was this feeling, knowing his background and his father had failed in so many fields. I think Douglas had an especially burning need to achieve, and that began with the Pythons and with comedy and with a real comedy anorak obsession with those kind of things.

I think that was one reason he found writing so difficult as well, because he never felt it was good enough. He wasn't somebody who could sit... When we wrote Last Chance to See, we were sitting literally opposite one another for months, and he couldn't be quiet. He'd write a bit, and he needed an audience to read bits to run them past everybody, and we'd all be saying, ''That's amazing, that's fantastic.''

and he'd cross it all out on the computer, delete it all, and start again because it wasn't quite perfect. So I think that insecurity is one reason he found writing so difficult. I'm getting the impression of a young man who, as Jem says, had a desperate need to achieve something

but was really casting around for what it was he wanted to achieve. He just wanted to be an achiever. Now, take us as quickly as you can, as quickly as you can, from graduation to the moment Hitchhiker became a reality on the radio and then as a book. Well, this is where the earlier mentioned desperation comes from. He is absolutely certain that he had something to give to the world.

But he joined BBC Radio and he was doing comedy shows and the odd sketch here and there, but really failing to get anywhere. And it was actually Christmas 1976, he had a crisis. He really thought he'd reached rock bottom and his friends sort of dragged him up a

And within six months, he was recording the pilot for Hitchhiker's Guide. Having decided not to become a shipbroker in Hong Kong. Oh, yes. That tie was thrown away, I believe. And for those who don't know, Mark, what's the book about? It's basically a story about an interstellar bypass that's going to destroy planet Earth. What's clever about it is it's not your standard science fiction book.

It's almost like a collection of ideas. And when you look back, you realise at the time that Douglas was way ahead of his time. So there was a Babel fish, which you could put into your ear and it would translate any language into your own. That's Google Translate. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an iPad with Google. Yes.

ideas about economics, ideas about the power of the, the blundering power of the state. But that's very Douglas. He's trying to combine all these things. It's like, it's like if you went out for lunch with him,

If Douglas sort of said something and he expressed interest, off he would go. And it would be like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It would be two hours later, he sort of says, what do you think about that? Well, I don't know where to start. And I think that's how he wrote the book, in a way. It's like a whole load of different thoughts...

put together as one. And you both said that he found writing difficult. Coming up, we're going to hear a clip of his friend and housemate, John Lloyd, who helped him actually finish the first Hitchhiker radio series. But before that, here's the author, Naomi Alderton, on why she finds his agonies so inspiring. One of the things that I love is hearing Douglas Adams talk about how hard writing always was for him, that he always...

insecure that his work wasn't going to be quite as good as it should be and this as a writer is very comforting. He also talks about how he got to a certain point with the first book and he was so past his delivery deadline that the publishers just said well just finish the page you're on and send it to us and this is why the first Hitchhiker's book ends where it does. The first Hitchhiker's novel was published in 1979 and was an adaptation of the first four radio shows.

You probably wonder why the first novel was an adaptation of the first four radio shows. Well, one of the reasons was the last two of the six I'd co-written with Douglas Adams and in the interim between the novel coming out and us finishing the series together, he'd given me the boot. I was extremely angry. I'm not going to mince words. But with hindsight, I think it was probably certainly the best thing that happened to me and probably good for him as well too because...

Probably he was right that his originality and freshness needed the loneliness and the pain that brought it to birth.

Gemma, I've read that Douglas Adams actually sacked John Lloyd by letter. It doesn't sound a very nice thing to do. Yes, they had offices next to each other in the BBC and they've been friends since Cambridge and they lived together as well. And Douglas just put his thoughts onto paper and put it in the internal BBC mail and it came right. But that's horrible. At some point he must have heard a cry from the more next door.

And John was also very English about the whole thing, so there wasn't really a fight or anything like that. In fact, it took Douglas's mother to get the two together and literally bang their heads together and say, play nice, and suddenly they were friends again eventually. We know people loved his work, but he's starting to sound a rather difficult person to like, Mark.

No, he wasn't at all. I don't think he had a bad bone in his body. And I genuinely do believe that. He was a genuinely really nice guy. He would maybe come across slightly as aloof sometimes because, you know, you might be talking about dogs and he'll be thinking about Messerschmitts. I mean, he was on a parallel universe. He was very easy to annoy. He used to have this very expensive Rolex watch.

And when we were travelling together, I managed to buy a fake one. I was always ribbing about it and getting very cross about it. Bought a fake one that looked identical in Bali for $5, and I switched them and then pretended to drop his into the sea, which he's never forgave me for. But then my birthday, about six months later, we were having lunch in London, and he plonked a package onto the table and said, there you are, now you've got one, you can shut up.

God! He gave me a Rolex watch to keep me quiet. I mean, no, he was a lovely guy, very easy to rib, but he gave as good as he got and it was all in good humour. I wonder whether it's fair to say that Last Chance to See was a great thing for Douglas. It kind of saved him in a way because he became extremely rich and he liked to, you know, fly first class and he...

Last Chance to See kind of returned him back to Earth, in a way, and gave him something else to work for. And I think that's when you knew him. I think, in a way, you made him a better person, if I can say that. This is a good point, I think, to ask the audience whether there are any questions you think I ought to be asking but haven't of either of my two guests. Any...

Any thoughts or questions from the audience? We've got a roving mic, I think. You mentioned how passionate he was about so many different things. Do you think he would have sustained that passion in the environment? What do you think he would be thinking about the debate about plastic today? I'm absolutely sure he would have done. The more time went on, the more specifically interested he got. So he was very keen on rhinos, very involved in Save the Rhino, very keen on mountain gorillas.

would have been exactly the kind of thing that he would have got on board with. And, as I say, he would have been a very important part of that campaign because he would have managed to tell stories. His writing was funny, but was he? Let me ask you that, Gem. Well, funnily enough, I never actually had the pleasure, so I'm not the best person to answer that question, but he wanted to be a performer. That was his original plan. Well, it's very interesting because there were two funny sides to him. One was with friends and family where it was off the cuff.

One time we were in his Porsche driving into London and he said, driving a Porsche into London is like taking a Ming vase to a football match.

You know, he said that sort of thing all the time. And the other funny side was this carefully honed series of anecdotes that, you know, I heard so many times over the years. You could hear him being interviewed and somebody would ask a question. He'd say, oh, that's interesting. Like he'd never thought of it before. This program started with the Innsbruck one, which was like probably the most honed of all. Even he said he couldn't remember if that was...

true or not, because he'd said it so many times and he could mime the words. It was word perfect. So he was very off the cuff, but also very trained and focused. His writing was more than the writing of a successful author. It became a sort of phenomenon. I was not really a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide or of that kind of thing.

It struck me a little bit like an adult version of Dr Seuss in some ways. And those are my friends that were, and I had some very good friends that were, tended to be more boys than girls. And the kind of boys that might have been playing Dungeons and Dragons rather than playing football...

I don't want to use a word like nerdy, but do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean, and it's sort of like Marmite. I mean, people tend to love it or hate it. But one thing I would say is when we did book signings for Last Chance to See, the variety of the people that were Douglas Adams fans, we had...

about 40 Hells Angels bikers, absolutely covered in tattoos. There were children, there were grannies and grandparents. I mean, it was the whole social range. So he did have, even though everybody didn't love it, his fans were very broad-based. You couldn't say all Douglas Adams fans were nerdy men in their early 40s. It wasn't like that at all. Let me try a little test.

Hands up in the audience, how many of you are Liberal Democrats? No, well, my theory is absolutely wrong, because I thought there would be a greater proportion than you might have expected. Jem, what did he do after Hitchhiker's Guide?

Well, immediately it became his biggest success, but he was sort of chained to it for a very long time. There was a point where he just wanted to put Hitchhiker's Guide to one side. But as I say, I think it was the arrival of Last Chance to See in his life which totally changed his head from comedy all the way along the line to having a deeper meaning to what he was doing. Let's talk a bit about some of his other work. Here's a clip of his editor, Sue Freestone.

I first met Douglas when he was extremely late, and no one would be surprised, no one who knew him, to hear this, writing the first Dirk Gently book. It was the middle of December 1986, and he was about three years late. And the book had been scheduled to be published in April the following year, and it had to meet that deadline, and he had one sentence.

It was an absolutely wonderful sentence. It was, in fact, "High on a rocky promontory sat an electric monk on a bored horse," which is a pure Douglas Adams sentence. So that was 13 words, and we had about 79,975, let's say, to go.

Tell me, Jem, about his private life. What was it like, do you think, living with this man? It depends really on what you say constitutes a private life. I mean, as a man, he was a heavy smoker. He liked very fine wines and everything. And he also enjoyed the physical pleasures of life, we could say. Ultimately, he had a tempestuous relationship with his eventual wife, Jane.

A barrister. Indeed. Well, they were both very equally matched, should we say. And it wasn't until the age of 42, fittingly enough...

that he became a father and I think really began to settle down and change his way of life. Really devoted to his daughter, I think. Again, it was another thing that totally revolutionised his life. And a serial barfer. He was always in the bath, apparently. There's even a play at the moment, a one-man or two-person play, which is all based in the bath. Douglas Adams in the bath. So he had all his best ideas...

and he could spend the whole day there, yeah. Let's talk a bit, Mark, about Last Chance to See, because that's the book Adams said that he was most proud of before he died. When did you two start travelling the globe?

Well, we were going to start straight after that initial trip to Madagascar. And in those days, you set up trips through telex machines and letters and phone calls. And I spent about eight months setting up a very complicated year with planes and boats and hotels and tents and all this sort of red tape and visas in our passports. We were ready to go. Two weeks before, Douglas called and said...

I'm sorry about this, but I haven't quite finished my latest novel. We couldn't just postpone it a bit, could we? So it was another two years before we actually did all the travelling. So we did the travelling over 1988-89. Let's hear a little bit from the original radio series.

It's very difficult at any point to say, right, there is a fruit bat. You can see one. On the other hand, you are aware of them fluttering backwards and forwards just sort of beyond the leaf cover. So you just get a sort of sensation of one flitting past another flitting past. You never actually see one outright. They're just sort of tantalisingly just beyond where you can get a good look of them. They're flying about 10 yards away from you. What's it like for you, Mark, hearing that voice again?

I miss him terribly. He was a very good friend and...

Although it was a very serious subject, travelling around the world doing Last Chance to See, we had a lot of laughs together. And a very good way of getting to know somebody very well is to spend months and months sleeping in tents and wet rainforests and under difficult conditions. And, yeah, we were actually... The night before he died, we were talking about doing a return journey and doing more travels together and expand on some of those issues, conservation issues. And I regret...

that we were never able to do it. Question or two from the audience. Where do you think his writing would have gone? Very good question. Do you know, I think the next book he would have written, from what he was telling me, would have been about the existence or non-existence of God...

He was a very keen atheist. He called himself a radical atheist, just to make it very clear that he wasn't... As opposed to a traditional atheist. I think he said he was an atheist and he got fed up with people thinking maybe slightly agnostic. So by saying radical atheist... He was for many years agnostic. This is the thing, he was very slow becoming an atheist.

When John Lloyd and a lot of his other friends were completely atheists, he kept something back, some belief. So that's why I think he became so atheist later on in life. And I think that's what he would have written about. He was very keen to talk about it a lot, and he was throwing ideas around with anybody who would listen. He was obviously developing the whole concept. His obsession with the sciences was just growing when he left us. It was really the beginning of...

so much. Final question, Mark. Engaging, yes. Quirky, certainly. Vastly popular, yes. Famous, yes. A sharp eye for riddle and paradox and a clever turn of phrase, no question about that. Financially successful in the end, yes, hugely.

But he's not really important as a writer or, to be frank, a thinker. Is he or is he? What lasting contribution does he leave behind? That's red rag to a bull. Go on, then. I think he was hugely important. He died 17 years ago and he's still very much at the forefront of many people's minds, very involved in ideas for development of Apple and the Macs and he was one of the earlier users of that. And through Last Chance to See, he...

He actually got a lot of people involved in conservation. Has he changed you? Did he change you? Yeah, hugely. He taught me that you can't talk as a conservationist to anyone who's not interested. You have to translate it to something that will spark an interest. Two days before Douglas Adams died suddenly of a heart attack...

An asteroid was named 18610 Arthur Dent in his honour. Every May, his fans celebrate Towel Day in recognition of what he called the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.

A sadly short life and certainly a varied one. And Mark comes some way towards persuading me, a great life too. So my thanks to Mark Carwardine and his biographer, Jem Roberts. And as Douglas Adams himself once said, flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Goodbye.

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And for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.