Adams, Douglas

Person

Adams, Douglas

1952-2001

Douglas Noël Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge. He was the son of Christopher Douglas Adams and his wife, Janet Dora Sydney, née Donovan. By the time Adams was five his parents were separated, and then divorced. Janet Adams and the children then moved to her parents' house in Brentwood, Essex. In 1960 Christopher Adams remarried Mary Judith Stewart, née Robertson who paid for Douglas and Susan Adams to be educated at private schools. In 1964 Adams's mother married Ron Thrift, a vet whose work took them to Dorset. Their children, Jane and James, were half-siblings to Douglas, whose teenage years were spent moving between different branches of his family.
Adams was educated at Middleton Hall from 1959, the preparatory school for Brentwood School. He became a boarder at Brentwood in September 1964. He was then awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge, to read English, entering in 1971. At Cambridge Adams spent much of his time writing sketches for student revues with his friends Will Adams and Martin Smith. He eventually became one of the principal writers for Footlights, the university's theatrical club.
After graduating from St John's in 1974 with a 2:2, Adams lived in a series of London flats with friends from his time at Cambridge. He was determined to write sketches, but his attempts to get material commissioned for radio did not go well. The BBC took the occasional sketch, but Adams's fantastical style was unsuitable for the punchy, topical material then in demand. Adams gained exposure at the Edinburgh fringe festival in August 1976, when he wrote for and performed in a successful revue, 'The Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close', but by the end of the year his career had stalled. Intensely depressed, he retreated to his family in Dorset, making only occasional trips up to London.
On one of these visits to London, on 4 February 1977, Adams had lunch with Simon Brett, a producer at BBC radio, who indicated that he would be willing to commission a comic science fiction series which became 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. With encouragement from his family and his friend Jon Canter, Adams returned to London where he and Canter shared a flat off the Holloway Road. Shortly afterwards he was also commissioned by BBC television to write a four-part serial for the long-running science fiction series, 'Doctor Who'.
The creation of the six Hitch-Hiker scripts was difficult and John Lloyd was drafted in to help with episodes five and six. On 8 March 1978 the first episode of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' was broadcast at 10.30 p.m. on BBC Radio 4. Nothing like it had ever been heard before; its freshness was shocking. Unusually for radio, the series was reviewed by the Oberver as 'possibly the most original radio comedy for years' The audience grew exponentially from episode to episode. Adams was offered a post as a producer in BBC radio's light entertainment department, which he held between May and October 1978. Adams then wrote a Christmas special and a second series of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. The first of many stage versions was produced in May 1979 by Ken Campbell and the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
The rights to a novel based on the series were sold to Pan Books, then the leading mass-market paperback house. The book, adapted from the first four episodes, was published in October 1979 and was an instant bestseller, winning a Golden Pan award for selling a million copies faster than any other title in Pan's history. Writing the book conspired with the pressure of work as script editor of 'Doctor Who' (a post which Adams held throughout 1979) to delay the production of the second series of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy', which was eventually broadcast in five parts on Radio 4 in January 1980. A second book, 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe', followed at the end of 1980 and was also a bestseller. Adams meanwhile adapted 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' for BBC television, with Alan J. W. Bell as producer and director. It was broadcast in six episodes in January and February 1981.
Adams' wit made him much in demand on the promotion circuit, and he was one of the first to see how radically information technology would change the world. He was especially passionate about the virtues of the Apple Macintosh over the IBM-derived PC. In 1981 he met Jane Elizabeth Belson. They lived together and eventually married on 25 November 1991. Polly Jane Rocket Adams, their daughter, was born on 22 June 1994.
Adams continued to produce books all through the 1980s. 'Life, the Universe and Everything', the third Hitch-Hiker novel, was published in 1982. 'The Meaning of Liff', a mock dictionary of humorous definitions co-written with John Lloyd, followed in 1983. 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish', a fourth Hitch-Hiker novel, appeared in 1984. He then broke away from the constraints of the Hitch-Hiker format with 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' (1987) and 'The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul' (1988). The year 1990 saw another collaboration with Lloyd, 'The Deeper Meaning of Liff' and the same year saw another collaboration with the zoologist Mark Carwardine which resulted in a book about endangered species, 'Last Chance to See'. This was Adams's favourite among his own works.
The 1990s saw Adams produce fewer new books but he managed to produce a fifth Hitch-Hiker novel, 'Mostly Harmless', in 1992. However, he was in great demand on the American university and corporate lecture circuit, being an amusing and prescient thinker and speaker on the impact of the personal computer. He was also committed to making the film of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and he and his family spent much of the decade trying to source funding for the project in Hollywood, California, and they settled in Santa Barbara, in 1999.
Adams was writing another book 'The Salmon of Doubt', when he died of a heart attack in Montecito, California, on 11 May 2001. Adams's remains were cremated and later interred in Highgate cemetery, London, in June 2002. In that year, ten chapters of his uncompleted last novel were published with other articles and stories under the title 'The Salmon of Doubt'. Adams's creativity survived him; his ideas are still cited as inspirations by thinkers in both the arts and sciences, and new iterations of his work continue to appear. A film of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' was released in 2005, while the BBC broadcast a third, fourth, and fifth series, adapted by Dirk Maggs from 'Life, the Universe and Everything', on Radio 4 in 2004–5.

Nick Webb, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2017: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-1013073?rskey=gBy1ao&result=1