Don't Panic - Douglas Adams and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman

Author:Neil Gaiman [Gaiman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Douglas Adams
Publisher: Titan Books Ltd.
Published: 1993-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

16 Life, the Universe, and Everything

ZAPHOD: There's nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight.

- Cut from radio script, Episode Three.

The first two Hitchhiker's books were based on material developed for the radio series. When Douglas Adams agreed to write the third book he had sworn he would never write, he took the plot from a storyline he had had “knocking around for ages”. He had once suggested it as a Dr Who story, but Graham Williams thought it was just “too silly”. Later, when there was talk of a Dr Who film to star Tom Baker, he had written the story as a film outline, Dr Who and the Krikkitmen (see Appendix V). The film never materialised, but later, when talk began of the second Hitchhiker's television series, Douglas began to look at the Krikkitmen script as a Hitchhiker's vehicle. As things turned out, for reasons explained at length elsewhere, there was not going to be a second television series. However, the process of turning Dr Who and the Krikkitmen into Life, the Universe, and Everything, had begun.

As far as plots go, the storylines are essentially the same. Douglas divided the Dr Who role between Slartibartfast, Trillian and (for the final sequence) Arthur Dent, although what would have been the last half of the Dr Who format became the final thirty pages of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (In the Dr Who version, after having failed to prevent the Krikkitmen from taking the components of the Wicket Gate, the Doctor arrives with Sarah Jane on Krikkit and spends most of the rest of the story, in classic Dr Who style, running around, getting captured, escaping, learning vital bits of plot, running around, getting captured, escaping, rescuing Sarah Jane, and so on.)

Life, the Universe, and Everything was different in kind from the other Hitchhiker's books, in that it was not written serially. Douglas knew what was going to happen next, but this gave him a new problem, that of fitting the Hitchhiker's characters into the Dr Who plot. Hitchhiker's characters are essentially feckless, and instead of, say, saving the universe they would tend instead towards going to a party (Ford), staying cool (Zaphod), looking bewildered (Arthur) or moaning (Marvin); this really left only Trillian, whose personality had never been fully explored (indeed, barely glanced at), as a substitute worldsaver. More so, perhaps, than any other part of Douglas's oeuvre, the creation of Life, the Universe, and Everything was fraught with difficulties:

“As with everything, I put it off longer than I should have, and then I had a huge domestic crisis which knocked me for six; I couldn't think of anything funny to save my life; I wanted to jump off cliffs and things like that. It was an emotional episode which I'm not going to go into in any detail...” (Although Adams will no longer discuss it, his then girlfriend had left him – as he said in an interview given about that time, “She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds that he was her husband.

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