Douglas Adams

At 49 years old, Douglas Adams has this physical status:

Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, parody, satirist, and dramatist. Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, began in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy and later became a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and produced a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a feature film in 2005.

Adams' contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame (1987), Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1988), and The Meaning of Liff (1990), the show's ninth season (1990), and three articles on Doctor Who.

In the last episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, he co-wrote the Monty Python sketch "Patient Abuse."

In 2002, The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous collection of his drawings, including an unfinished book, was published as The Salmon of Doubt. Adams was a proponent of environmentalism and conservation, a fan of fast cars, electronics innovation, and the Apple Macintosh, as well as a self-proclaimed radical atheist.

Early life

Dorothy Adams, a management consultant and computer programmer, former probation officer and lecturer on probationary group therapy methods, was born in Cambridge on March 11, 1952, née Donovan. The family moved to London's East End, where his sister, Susan, was born three years ago. Douglas, Susan and their mother were born in 1957, and his parents were moved to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood, Essex, run by his maternal grandparents. Each remarried, giving Adams four-siblings. Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, the playwright, was a great-grandfather.

Adams attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. He passed the entrance exam for Brentwood School at the age of nine. He attended the preparatory school from 1959 to 1964, and then the main school until 1970. Adams was 6 foot (1.8 m) tall by age 12, and he stopped growing at 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m). Adams' height made him stand out, according to his form master, Frank Halford, who admitted he was self-conscious about it. His ability to write stories made him well-known in the classroom. He was the only student to be given a ten out of ten by Halford for creative writing, a practice he recollected for the remainder of his life, especially when dealing with writer's block.

Any of his early writings, including a research on the school's photography club in 1962, or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet, edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, later became a protagonist in The Hitchhiker's Guide, were published. He also designed the back cover of one issue of the Broadsheet and had a letter and short story published in The Eagle, the boys' magazine, in 1965. Adams' poem "A Dissertation on the job of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto encountered" was discovered in a cupboard at the school in early 2014.

He was given an Exhibition in English at St John's College, Cambridge (where his father had also been a student) in 1971 after an article on religious poetry that discussed the Beatles and William Blake. He wanted to attend the Footlights, an invitation-only student comedy club that has performed as a hotbed for comic talent. He was not elected straight away as he had wished, and began to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith; they formed a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." By 1973, he was already a member of the Footlights. Despite doing little writing, he recalled having written three essays in three years. He earned a 2:2 in English literature in 1974.

Personal life

Adams went to Upper Street, Islington, in 1981, and Duncan Terrace, just a few minutes walk away, in the late 1980s.

Adams had an affair with novelist Sally Emerson, who was divorced from her husband at the time. Emerson was given the title Life, the Universe, and Everything by Adams later. Emerson, a student of Adams at Brentwood School and later editor of The Times, returned to her husband, Peter Stothard, who was a contemporary of Adams at Adams' Adams school in 1981. Adams was quickly introduced by friends to Jane Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the "lady barrister" named in his books during the 1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh." The two appeared in Los Angeles together in 1983, although Adams worked on a young screenplay adaptation of Hitchhiker's. After the wedding fell through, they returned to London, where they married on November 25th, 1991. ("He is now not sure where he lives or with whom") and a broken engagement.

Polly Jane Rocket Adams, a student at Adams and Belson, was born on June 22, 1994, the day after Adams turned 42. The family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until his death. Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London following the funeral. Belson, 59, died of cancer on September 7, 2011.

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Career

After graduating from university, Adams returned to London, determined to return to television and radio as a writer. In 1974, an edited version of the Footlights Revue appeared on BBC2 television. Monty Python's Graham Chapman discovered Adams as a result of a live version of the Revue in London's West End. The two formed a short writing partnership, earning Adams a writing credit in Monty Python episode 45 for a sketch titled "Patient Abuse." The pair also co-wrote the "Marilyn Monroe" sketch, which appeared on Monty Python's soundtrack album and the Holy Grail. Adams is one of only two people other than the original Python members to be credited with writing (the other being Neil Innes).

Adams made two appearances in Monty Python's Flying Circus in the fourth series. Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a scene that introduces one person after another but no one gets off, but not really gets off. Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile into a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron?") at the start of episode 44, "Mr. Neutron." In November 1974, the two episodes were first broadcast in November. Out of the Trees, Adams and Chapman's also attempted non-Python projects.

Adams' writing style was unsuited to the then-popular style of radio and television comedies at this point; his career was stagnant; He worked as a hospital porter, a barn builder, and chicken shed cleaner to round up his meet. He was hired as a bodyguard by a Qatari family who had made their fortune in oil.

Adams continued to write and submit sketches, but no one was accepted. He wrote and performed Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close in 1976, just a short improvement from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. By Christmas, jobs had devolved, and a homeless Adams came to live with his mother. Adams' life began hard, and low optimism became a part of his life; "I have severe times of anxiety [...] I've been missing for a while," says the author, but after a while I realized it was like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't worry about the weather – you just have to get to it."

Sketches for The Burkis Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines were among Adams' early radio projects. He also wrote the following article, along with Chapman, about Doctor on the Go, a companion to the Doctor in the House television comedy series. Adams was made a BBC radio producer after the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became a hit on radio, and he was based in Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He departed after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.

Adams and John Lloyd wrote scripts for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles, "The Remarkable Fidy River" and "The Great Disappearing Mysteries," (episodes eight and twelve). In addition to "Fit the Fifth" and "Fit the Sixth," John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from "Fit the Fifth" and "Fit the Sixth," also known as "Episode Five" and "Fit the Sixth"), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio show to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was hired to write The Pirate Planet. He had also attempted to submit a film script called Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, which later became his book Life, the Universe and Everything, which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams went on to serve as script editor on the show's seventeenth season in 1979. Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, appeared in three Doctor Who serials together:

Adams' episodes were among the few that were not novelized, as Adams refused to encourage anyone else to write them and demanded a higher price than the publishers were willing to pay. Gareth Roberts published Shada in 2012 and City of Death and The Pirate Planet by James Goss in 2015 and 2017 respectively, before it was published as a book.

Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, including Professor Chronotis' character. Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. It was webcast on the BBC website in 2003 and then released as a two-CD set later this year, with partially animated illustrations. On December 10, 2005, an omnibus version of this version was broadcast on the British radio station BBC7.

Steven Moffat, a writer for Doctor Who's 2012 Christmas episode "The Snowmen," was inspired by a storyline that Adams created called The Doctor Retires.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a proposal for a science-fiction comedy radio series launched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams provided an outline for a pilot episode as well as a few others (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that might be used in the series.

Adams suggested the name when he was inebriated in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was holding a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that "somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Adams was expected to make up the tales as he wrote, despite the original outline. He turned to John Lloyd for support with the last two episodes of the first series. Lloyd referred to GiGax, an unpublished science fiction book of his own. In later versions of Hitchhiker's books, such as the novels and the TV series, only a small amount of Lloyd's material survived. Lloyd's words were largely rewritten in the television series, and it was based on the first six radio episodes.

Starting 8 March 1978 and running until April, BBC Radio 4 started the first radio series in the United Kingdom, broadcasting weekly from 8 to 20. National Public Radio broadcast the series in the United States. Following the success of the first series, another episode of what was commonly called the Christmas Episode was recorded and broadcast. During the week of 21 to 25 January 1980, a second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night.

Adams, who also worked on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet), had trouble with writing deadlines that got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer, and he was often obliged to write by others. So long was sitting in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long was finished, and Thanks for All the Fish was completed. "I love deadlines," he was quoted as saying. "I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Despite the complexities of deadlines, Adams wrote five books in the series, which were published in 1979, 1980, 1984, and 1992.

The books inspired several adaptations, including three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo-illustrated version, which were released in 1994. This later collection included a 42 Puzzle by Adams, which was later converted into paperback covers of the first four Hitchhiker's books (the paperback version re-used the artwork from the hardback version).

Adams began trying to convert the first Hitchhiker's book into a film in 1980, making several trips to Los Angeles and talking with Hollywood studios and potential producers. The radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts next year. He died in California in 2001 and was trying to get the film project underway with Disney, which had acquired the rights in 1998. Karey Kirkpatrick's posthumous re-write of the screenplay, and the resulting film was released in 2005.

Dirk Maggs, a radio producer, had worked with Adams, first in 1993, and later in 1997 and 2000, based on the third book in the Hitchhikers' series. They also discussed the possibility of radio adaptations of the last two books in the five-book "trilogy." This project was only realized after Adams' death, as with the film. The Tertiary Phase of BBC Radio 4 was broadcast on September 4, 2004, and then on audio CD. Adams can be seen playing Agrajag posthumously with the support of a video of his reading of Life, the Universe, and Everything. So long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and were also available on Audio CD in May and June 2005. "The very last episode of the series "more upbeat" concluded (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) is devoted to its author.

Adams' first visit to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985 and their series of travels that inspired the radio show and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other books with a new cast of characters. The Holistic Detective Agency of Dirk Gently was founded in 1987 and was described by its author as "a sort of ghost-detective-romantic-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music, and quantum mechanics."

A year later, a sequel called The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul was published. This was Adams' first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Adams began his round-the-world tour, which gave him the information for Last Chance to See.

When first published posthumously, the Salmon of Doubt was incomplete.

When he died, Adams played the guitar left-handed and had a collection of twenty-four left-handed guitars (having received his first guitar in 1964). In the 1960s, he began playing piano. Adams' career was influenced by Pink Floyd and Procol Harum.

Adams' official biography includes the name of the band "Wish You Were Here." Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" shares the song. In a section of the original 1978 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series's opening section, the first section of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was included (broadcast only, removed from commercial releases). Adams was friends with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, and he was invited to attend Pink Floyd's concert on October 28, 1994 at Earls Court in London, playing guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse." Adams chose the words from the lyrics to "High Hopes," Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell. In particular, Pink Floyd and the song "Set the Controls for the Sun" inspired Adams to create the rock band Disaster Area, who appear in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who wanted to crash a space ship into a nearby celebrity as a stunt during a performance. Gilmour was also at Adams' memorial service in 2001 and then what would have been Adams' 60th birthday party in 2012.

Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG with Steve Meretzky of Infocom in 1984. He was in 1986 for a week of brainstorming with the Lucasfilm Games crew for the game Labyrinth. Later, he was also instrumental in the establishment of bureaucracy as a parody of events in his own life.

Adams was the founder-director and Chief Fantasist of The Digital Village, a digital media and internet business for which he created Starship Titanic, a Codie award-winning and BAFTA-nominated adventure game that was released in 1998 by Simon & Schuster. Since Adams was too occupied with the computer game to do both, Terry Jones wrote Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic. Adams began the h2g2 collaborative writing project in April 1999, an experimental effort to make The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality and a way to harness the internet community's collective brainpower. From 2001 to 2011, BBC Online ran it.

In 1990, Adams produced and presented Hyperland, a television documentary agent similar to the assistant on Apple's Knowledge Navigator video of future concepts from 1987), as well as interviews with Ted Nelson, the co-inventor of hypertext and the person who coined the term. Adams was one of the early adopter and proponent of hypertext.

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