The Salmon of Doubt

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.”

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.