Douglas Adams made science fiction fun. He also made philosophy, ethics, bureaucracy, and probability fun. He made Tom Baker’s Doctor Who even more fun, and Tom Baker’s Doctor Who was already pretty fun. He much made everything fun. How did he do that? Here’s more from Kirkus Reviews:
In 1977, Adams had fallen into a deep depression: his work was faltering, and others noted that “he was a talent without a niche,” according to Webb. In February, he met Simon Brett, a producer at the BBC, and the two had met for dinner. Adams brought three ideas with him, although neither man would remember years later what the first two were. One of the three did stick out: it was a science-fiction comedy called The Ends of the Earth, in which a “guy’s house [was] being demolished and then the Earth being demolished for the same reason”: a bypass was being built. Adams realized he needed an alien for context, and created Ford Prefect: “I needed to have someone from another planet around to tell the reader what was going on, to give the story the context it needed. So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on Earth.” He remembered his night in the field several years earlier, and realized that the character was a researcher for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an intergalactic travel guide.
On March 1, the BBC approved a pilot episode for the radio, now titled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By April, Adams delivered the first script, and between then and August, they waited for approval from the BBC. The wait was agonizing, and Adams sent “the pilot script to the script editor of Doctor Who, to see if any money might be forthcoming from that direction,” according to Neil Gaiman in his book Don’t Panic: The Official Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. However, on August 31, they reached a decision: the show was approved for six episodes.
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