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These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Downloaded from YTS.MX 2 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX 3 00:00:53,360 --> 00:00:55,440 This is the story of a book, 4 00:00:55,480 --> 00:01:00,080 a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 5 00:01:00,120 --> 00:01:03,240 Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, 6 00:01:03,280 --> 00:01:06,240 it is also a highly successful one, 7 00:01:06,280 --> 00:01:11,240 more popular than The Celestial Homecare Omnibus. 8 00:01:11,280 --> 00:01:15,920 Better selling then 53 More Things to Do in Zero Gravity. 9 00:01:15,960 --> 00:01:19,680 And more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy 10 00:01:19,720 --> 00:01:22,200 of philosophical blockbusters, 11 00:01:22,240 --> 00:01:24,080 Where God Went Wrong, 12 00:01:24,120 --> 00:01:26,720 Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes, 13 00:01:26,760 --> 00:01:29,160 and Who Is This God Person, Anyway? 14 00:01:41,240 --> 00:01:44,720 As kids, we were fascinated by the future. 15 00:01:44,760 --> 00:01:47,480 Unlike most generations before us, 16 00:01:47,520 --> 00:01:52,560 we knew for sure that it was going to be different. 17 00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:56,880 We just didn't know what it would be. 18 00:01:58,160 --> 00:02:00,880 Would there be space travel? 19 00:02:00,920 --> 00:02:04,440 Would there be time travel? 20 00:02:04,480 --> 00:02:08,200 But I guess we can say that our future is, for a while, 21 00:02:08,240 --> 00:02:11,960 going to be dominated by technology. 22 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:14,000 Have a look at this. What is it? 23 00:02:14,040 --> 00:02:16,840 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an electronic book. 24 00:02:16,880 --> 00:02:19,000 Tell you everything you want to know. 25 00:02:19,040 --> 00:02:22,320 Let's imagine a device like this for a moment. 26 00:02:22,360 --> 00:02:24,160 In the real world, if you want to know 27 00:02:24,200 --> 00:02:26,960 what the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower looks like, 28 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:28,960 you have to go there. 29 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:32,120 In the soft world, you could ask a guide device 30 00:02:32,160 --> 00:02:35,080 to show you what it looks like. 31 00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:36,840 How many of the cars you can see 32 00:02:36,880 --> 00:02:39,680 have Bach playing on their in-car stereos? 33 00:02:39,720 --> 00:02:44,480 There's one playing your favourite recording of the Schubert Preludes. 34 00:02:44,520 --> 00:02:46,440 Yes, she'll talk to you. 35 00:02:46,480 --> 00:02:48,680 What about having dinner together? 36 00:02:48,720 --> 00:02:52,160 A couple of restaurants light up in the view. 37 00:02:52,200 --> 00:02:54,720 Then you remember, damn, you're not in Paris, 38 00:02:54,760 --> 00:02:57,200 you're in New Delhi. 39 00:02:57,240 --> 00:02:59,240 "That's all right," says your new friend. 40 00:02:59,280 --> 00:03:01,720 "I'm actually in Albuquerque." 41 00:03:38,680 --> 00:03:40,920 GRIFF RHYS JONES: My relationship with Douglas 42 00:03:40,960 --> 00:03:46,080 dated from the days when we were in school together. 43 00:03:46,120 --> 00:03:50,600 It was a very hot-shot school, Brentwood, in those days. 44 00:03:50,640 --> 00:03:53,840 It was like a sort of factory. And you arrived at a young age 45 00:03:53,880 --> 00:03:56,960 and were turned into a sort of... Frightening, really, 46 00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:01,080 with this sort of pressure on people to do well. 47 00:04:05,480 --> 00:04:06,720 There were some of us 48 00:04:06,760 --> 00:04:10,680 who saw ourselves as sort of would-be actors. 49 00:04:10,720 --> 00:04:14,800 And we volunteered our services for the only drama 50 00:04:14,840 --> 00:04:17,400 that this school ever allowed us to do. 51 00:04:17,440 --> 00:04:18,920 Called the Winter Theatrical. 52 00:04:18,960 --> 00:04:23,760 He played Julius Caesar, which was a part that he was born to play, 53 00:04:23,800 --> 00:04:26,800 because of his conk and his general sort of demeanour. 54 00:04:26,840 --> 00:04:31,280 I remember everybody running around shouting "Ave, ave, ave." 55 00:04:37,880 --> 00:04:41,280 Douglas was always not only huge, tall, 56 00:04:41,320 --> 00:04:44,720 and slightly full of himself, but, also, older. 57 00:04:44,760 --> 00:04:49,160 He and his generation above that were the clever, the clever set, 58 00:04:49,200 --> 00:04:51,680 and they saw themselves 59 00:04:51,720 --> 00:04:55,760 as being people who would move from this school 60 00:04:55,800 --> 00:05:00,720 into the sort of varsity world and on to conquer the world. 61 00:05:14,040 --> 00:05:16,520 Here at Cambridge a student's room is his castle. 62 00:05:16,560 --> 00:05:19,000 He can barricade himself against all comers. 63 00:05:19,040 --> 00:05:22,200 He can hold dinner parties for five without permission. 64 00:05:22,240 --> 00:05:24,680 Decorate it as he wants to. 65 00:05:24,720 --> 00:05:28,440 And it's all kept clean for him by a lady known as a bedder. 66 00:05:28,480 --> 00:05:32,560 The only trouble is, these bedders have to be both old and unbeautiful. 67 00:05:32,600 --> 00:05:35,920 It's all in the college statues. 68 00:05:35,960 --> 00:05:38,720 DOUGLAS: I was determined to get to Cambridge 69 00:05:38,760 --> 00:05:40,760 because I wanted to be a writer performer. 70 00:05:40,800 --> 00:05:42,440 At the end of my first year, 71 00:05:42,480 --> 00:05:45,000 I'd been cast in a production of The Rivals 72 00:05:45,040 --> 00:05:48,720 and we discovered that the guy who was down to play Fag the butler 73 00:05:48,760 --> 00:05:52,560 was now languishing in a Cretan jail as a result of smoking dope. 74 00:05:52,600 --> 00:05:54,920 I said, "There was this guy I knew at school. 75 00:05:54,960 --> 00:05:58,520 He was a pretty good actor. I don't know if he could do comedy." 76 00:06:01,600 --> 00:06:03,720 I arrived in Cambridge. 77 00:06:03,760 --> 00:06:05,680 In those days we had a pigeonhole, 78 00:06:05,720 --> 00:06:09,000 and in amongst them was a little note from Douglas. 79 00:06:09,040 --> 00:06:12,720 I hadn't been there in Cambridge for more than about three days 80 00:06:12,760 --> 00:06:17,520 and I was sort of being put through my paces playing Fag in The Rivals. 81 00:06:21,600 --> 00:06:24,560 Douglas was playing Sir Lucius O'Trigger. 82 00:06:24,600 --> 00:06:29,120 I did that drawing of him sitting in a dressing room. 83 00:06:29,160 --> 00:06:31,920 I sort of launched myself and followed, really, Douglas 84 00:06:31,960 --> 00:06:36,000 into this extraordinary amateur theatre. 85 00:06:49,040 --> 00:06:51,600 The Footlights was a club at Cambridge. 86 00:06:51,640 --> 00:06:55,480 It was all about doing sketches, it was all about comedy. 87 00:06:55,520 --> 00:06:57,760 We'd do a show and people would write sketches, 88 00:06:57,800 --> 00:07:02,240 and wannabe actors or actors would perform those sketches 89 00:07:02,280 --> 00:07:05,120 and certainly Douglas was writing from very, very early 90 00:07:05,160 --> 00:07:09,880 in his time at Cambridge, and we were performing his stuff. 91 00:07:09,920 --> 00:07:12,840 Douglas' material was always slightly surreal. 92 00:07:12,880 --> 00:07:15,920 It was distinctively different. 93 00:07:24,920 --> 00:07:27,360 Some of the strongest influences on me growing up 94 00:07:27,400 --> 00:07:29,640 were The Beatles and Monty Python. 95 00:07:29,680 --> 00:07:32,600 Python was the idea that being funny 96 00:07:32,640 --> 00:07:35,000 was actually a way of being intelligent, 97 00:07:35,040 --> 00:07:38,160 and that it was a different way of looking at the world. 98 00:07:42,840 --> 00:07:45,480 Halt!Douglas referred to John Cleese as the Master, 99 00:07:45,520 --> 00:07:46,840 and John Cleese and Graham Chapman 100 00:07:46,880 --> 00:07:49,880 had been in the Cambridge Footlights Revue. 101 00:07:49,920 --> 00:07:51,720 Douglas amused the rest of us 102 00:07:51,760 --> 00:07:57,520 by going down to London to interview John Cleese for a student newspaper. 103 00:07:57,560 --> 00:07:59,320 Ambition was frowned upon. 104 00:07:59,360 --> 00:08:03,000 We all wanted to be kind of cool and sit in rooms smoking dope 105 00:08:03,040 --> 00:08:04,480 and listening to Pink Floyd. 106 00:08:04,520 --> 00:08:10,240 So we were dismissive of him. We thought, how absurd. 107 00:08:10,280 --> 00:08:14,120 I had been completely fascinated and hypnotised by Python. 108 00:08:14,160 --> 00:08:16,840 I wanted to be John Cleese. 109 00:08:16,880 --> 00:08:19,520 And of course, I realised the job is taken. 110 00:08:36,840 --> 00:08:40,440 I got to know Douglas after he came down from Cambridge. 111 00:08:40,480 --> 00:08:44,080 It was a very intense friendship. 112 00:08:44,120 --> 00:08:47,200 He had a go at all sorts of things as a writer, as a performer. 113 00:08:47,240 --> 00:08:49,440 He got a little bit part in Monty Python. 114 00:08:49,480 --> 00:08:52,320 He became very close to Graham Chapman. 115 00:08:52,360 --> 00:08:56,320 They wrote a pilot together called Out Of The Trees. 116 00:08:56,360 --> 00:08:59,840 It was something that seemed to me as a young kid out of university, 117 00:08:59,880 --> 00:09:02,440 like, the heavenly clouds opening, you know? 118 00:09:02,480 --> 00:09:04,480 Wow. Go and work with one the Pythons. 119 00:09:04,520 --> 00:09:07,480 It wasn't quite as straightforward as that. 120 00:09:10,200 --> 00:09:14,320 When Douglas and I used to go out and have lunch with Graham Chapman, 121 00:09:14,360 --> 00:09:18,120 it would be four pints and eight crosswords. 122 00:09:19,960 --> 00:09:22,400 Then Graham would get his willy out, put it on the bar 123 00:09:22,440 --> 00:09:24,520 and pay the bill. 124 00:09:27,080 --> 00:09:30,320 And then we'd go back to his house and have a bucket of gin and tonic. 125 00:09:30,360 --> 00:09:34,800 That was Graham Chapman's idea of working. 126 00:09:37,880 --> 00:09:41,040 There was a sense for Douglas of extreme frustration. 127 00:09:41,080 --> 00:09:43,640 About what, what was he supposed to do? 128 00:09:43,680 --> 00:09:47,400 If you have two very, very, clever writers, 129 00:09:47,440 --> 00:09:53,120 then there's too much ego in the way of a partnership. 130 00:09:55,200 --> 00:09:58,880 One time I came home and he was sitting on the bed 131 00:09:58,920 --> 00:10:01,680 with his head in his hands and he said, "Johnny, I can't... 132 00:10:01,720 --> 00:10:03,800 I can't cope any more. I'm not getting anywhere. 133 00:10:03,840 --> 00:10:05,920 I'm kind of desperate." 134 00:10:05,960 --> 00:10:10,400 I began to feel that there was actually not a lot of future 135 00:10:10,440 --> 00:10:12,720 for me being somebody else's sidekick as a writer. 136 00:10:12,760 --> 00:10:16,400 I thought, right, I'm going to go off and be a writer all by myself. 137 00:10:16,440 --> 00:10:18,840 This I palpably failed to do. 138 00:10:22,520 --> 00:10:24,680 I had to go and do various strange jobs, 139 00:10:24,720 --> 00:10:28,040 like working as a bodyguard for an Arab royal family. 140 00:10:31,040 --> 00:10:32,640 They put an advertisement. 141 00:10:32,680 --> 00:10:36,360 It was saying, do you want to earn £4 an hour, I think it was, 142 00:10:36,400 --> 00:10:39,000 being a... being a bodyguard. 143 00:10:43,280 --> 00:10:47,520 Douglas also being Douglas immediately needed to tell everybody 144 00:10:47,560 --> 00:10:53,040 and so a pretty large number of weeny, puny people like me 145 00:10:53,080 --> 00:10:54,360 followed in his footsteps, 146 00:10:54,400 --> 00:10:58,920 one after another of sort of arty, recent graduates from Cambridge 147 00:10:58,960 --> 00:11:00,840 coming in and offering their services. 148 00:11:07,000 --> 00:11:09,280 I just, I just remember it as a nightmare. 149 00:11:09,320 --> 00:11:14,680 A nightmare. I'd never known time pass so slowly. 150 00:11:18,680 --> 00:11:20,720 Like anything that happens to you in life, 151 00:11:20,760 --> 00:11:23,280 it turns out useful in some way or other. 152 00:11:23,320 --> 00:11:25,560 I think a lot of the sort of weirder ideas 153 00:11:25,600 --> 00:11:29,680 came from long nights sitting opposite the elevator shaft 154 00:11:29,720 --> 00:11:34,680 in the Hilton Hotel, just watching the elevators coming up and down. 155 00:11:34,720 --> 00:11:36,120 (BELL DINGS) 156 00:11:41,480 --> 00:11:44,840 As far as we were all concerned, it was all rosy. 157 00:11:44,880 --> 00:11:47,760 It was all going marvellously. It was brilliant, 158 00:11:47,800 --> 00:11:49,960 which we believed until my mother went to London one day, 159 00:11:50,000 --> 00:11:52,280 and just saw the... that things weren't, 160 00:11:52,320 --> 00:11:55,560 weren't good, weren't all right, and she said, "Right, that's it." 161 00:11:55,600 --> 00:12:00,080 And she packed him up and brought him back down to Dorset, 162 00:12:00,120 --> 00:12:04,160 back to his old bedroom at the end of the corridor. 163 00:12:04,200 --> 00:12:09,160 There would be this fanatical noise of a typewriter going. 164 00:12:09,200 --> 00:12:14,480 Then it would be the bang of the carriage going across. 165 00:12:14,520 --> 00:12:16,560 And then the noise of a piece of paper 166 00:12:16,600 --> 00:12:18,760 being torn out of a carriage, thrown up... 167 00:12:18,800 --> 00:12:22,240 and thrown across the room with his grunt. When he grunted, 168 00:12:22,280 --> 00:12:25,040 he used to make this noise that would echo the house. 169 00:12:25,080 --> 00:12:27,640 And then there would be silence. 170 00:12:31,600 --> 00:12:33,400 There was an old glove factory 171 00:12:33,440 --> 00:12:39,440 in the field behind the house that was finally being demolished. 172 00:12:39,480 --> 00:12:42,200 And unbeknown to us, that was then the start of the whole 173 00:12:42,240 --> 00:12:44,400 Hitchhiker's and Arthur Dent's house 174 00:12:44,440 --> 00:12:47,520 and then leading on basically to the destruction of the Earth. 175 00:12:47,560 --> 00:12:49,600 That's kind of where the future started. 176 00:13:02,600 --> 00:13:06,360 The actual title came to me while I was lying in a field 177 00:13:06,400 --> 00:13:09,760 drunk in Innsbruck at night and just looking up at the stars. 178 00:13:09,800 --> 00:13:13,720 And there was a book around called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. 179 00:13:13,760 --> 00:13:15,680 It occurred to me, somebody should write 180 00:13:15,720 --> 00:13:17,800 a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 181 00:13:17,840 --> 00:13:21,640 And then promptly forgot about the idea until about six years later. 182 00:13:34,160 --> 00:13:37,000 RADIO: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 183 00:13:37,040 --> 00:13:40,360 By Douglas Adams. 184 00:13:40,400 --> 00:13:42,880 THE GUICE: To tell the story of the book, 185 00:13:42,920 --> 00:13:45,880 it's best to tell the story of some the minds behind it. 186 00:13:45,920 --> 00:13:49,160 A human from the planet Earth was one of them, 187 00:13:49,200 --> 00:13:52,880 though as our story opens, he no more knows his destiny 188 00:13:52,920 --> 00:13:58,000 than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company. 189 00:13:58,040 --> 00:13:59,920 The first episode of the first series 190 00:13:59,960 --> 00:14:02,400 of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy went out. 191 00:14:02,440 --> 00:14:04,480 Douglas said, "Any reviews in the papers?" 192 00:14:04,520 --> 00:14:06,280 And we all just laughed at him 193 00:14:06,320 --> 00:14:08,600 because in those days, nobody... 194 00:14:08,640 --> 00:14:11,440 Still to this day, nobody reviewed radio programmes, 195 00:14:11,480 --> 00:14:13,880 but we opened all the papers and bloody hell, 196 00:14:13,920 --> 00:14:17,440 there he was, reviewed all over the nationals. The nationals! 197 00:14:17,480 --> 00:14:22,160 This completely obscure, weirdly titled comedy radio programme 198 00:14:22,200 --> 00:14:26,280 and it was just unstoppable from that point. 199 00:14:26,320 --> 00:14:28,120 BFBS UK, on a Tuesday, 200 00:14:28,160 --> 00:14:30,000 people of Earth, your attention, please. 201 00:14:30,040 --> 00:14:33,240 Plans for the development of the outlying regions of your galaxy 202 00:14:33,280 --> 00:14:35,920 require the building of a hyperspatial express route 203 00:14:35,960 --> 00:14:37,200 through your star system, 204 00:14:37,240 --> 00:14:40,080 and regrettably, your planet is scheduled for demolition. 205 00:14:40,120 --> 00:14:43,840 Bizarre? Certainly is. Now, Douglas Adams is its author, 206 00:14:43,880 --> 00:14:47,680 and it looks like being the comedy cult of the future. 207 00:14:47,720 --> 00:14:52,400 An extremely tall man got an extremely bright idea. 208 00:14:52,440 --> 00:14:55,920 Shortly afterwards, this rotten idea turned into four books, 209 00:14:55,960 --> 00:14:58,680 two records, a computer game, two radio series, a TV series, 210 00:14:58,720 --> 00:15:00,320 and a constellation of money. 211 00:15:09,840 --> 00:15:12,600 It was quite something when somebody you've been at college with 212 00:15:12,640 --> 00:15:15,240 suddenly goes to another stratosphere. 213 00:15:15,280 --> 00:15:18,480 And when you're sharing a flat with him, it's extraordinary. 214 00:15:18,520 --> 00:15:21,000 One day you get a call from somebody who says, 215 00:15:21,040 --> 00:15:24,560 "This is Mr Adams' shoemaker. Please tell him his shoes are ready." 216 00:15:24,600 --> 00:15:26,160 Another time I pick up the phone 217 00:15:26,200 --> 00:15:30,680 and that's a Hollywood film producer saying, "Is Douglas Adams there?" 218 00:15:30,720 --> 00:15:33,480 I said no, and the guy refused to give me a message. 219 00:15:33,520 --> 00:15:35,000 He pitched the film to me. 220 00:15:40,800 --> 00:15:45,040 Douglas had this phenomenal, huge success 221 00:15:45,080 --> 00:15:49,320 and unlike everybody else's success, it was worldwide success. 222 00:15:49,360 --> 00:15:54,080 It was global. He was a global phenomenon. 223 00:15:55,680 --> 00:15:59,160 He bought a new Porsche when he first became rich, 224 00:15:59,200 --> 00:16:02,600 and drove it down Park Lane at a ridiculous speed, 225 00:16:02,640 --> 00:16:05,360 just loving life and then forgot, as he said, 226 00:16:05,400 --> 00:16:07,160 there was a roundabout at the end 227 00:16:07,200 --> 00:16:10,040 and went smack into Hyde Park corner. 228 00:16:10,080 --> 00:16:12,200 Amazing to be still alive. 229 00:16:13,920 --> 00:16:17,280 Positronic robots. Telekinesis and clones. 230 00:16:17,320 --> 00:16:19,080 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 231 00:16:19,120 --> 00:16:21,120 which adds a dimension to science fiction 232 00:16:21,160 --> 00:16:23,440 that is both comic and domestic. 233 00:16:23,480 --> 00:16:26,000 You're gonna have to accept it, you know, 234 00:16:26,040 --> 00:16:29,400 this bypass has got to be built and it's gonna be built. 235 00:16:29,440 --> 00:16:33,480 I could imagine comedy might destroy the seriousness 236 00:16:33,520 --> 00:16:35,280 with which the genre should be taken. 237 00:16:35,320 --> 00:16:37,880 I don't think so. I mean, I see science fiction 238 00:16:37,920 --> 00:16:40,240 as a very good vehicle for comedy 239 00:16:40,280 --> 00:16:44,600 simply because it enables you as it were to turn the telescope 240 00:16:44,640 --> 00:16:47,160 the wrong way round on everyday experience. 241 00:16:47,200 --> 00:16:49,120 How would you react if I told you 242 00:16:49,160 --> 00:16:50,920 that I'm not from Guilford after all 243 00:16:50,960 --> 00:16:54,440 but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse? 244 00:16:54,480 --> 00:16:58,240 I don't know. Think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say? 245 00:16:58,280 --> 00:17:01,760 Drink up. The world's about to end. 246 00:17:03,520 --> 00:17:08,000 Douglas was taking a Pythonesque view of the world, 247 00:17:08,040 --> 00:17:12,480 a sort of world where crazy, silly things are happening, 248 00:17:12,520 --> 00:17:16,560 and applying it to science fiction. 249 00:17:18,680 --> 00:17:20,760 Nobody had done this before. 250 00:17:20,800 --> 00:17:22,000 When Douglas went there, 251 00:17:22,040 --> 00:17:26,520 he was entirely, I think, the first word in that genre, 252 00:17:26,560 --> 00:17:29,960 and it's hardly surprising that it managed to be both 253 00:17:30,000 --> 00:17:34,000 philosophically profound and hilariously funny. 254 00:17:34,040 --> 00:17:38,320 This is your captain speaking. All planet leave is cancelled. 255 00:17:38,360 --> 00:17:40,040 I've just had an unhappy love affair, 256 00:17:40,080 --> 00:17:44,360 so I don't see why anybody else should have a good time. 257 00:17:44,400 --> 00:17:47,920 Douglas understood that humour was an integral part of humanity 258 00:17:47,960 --> 00:17:51,560 and so most of the comedy of Hitchhiker's 259 00:17:51,600 --> 00:17:54,200 is about how not just humans but all the aliens too 260 00:17:54,240 --> 00:17:58,320 represent ineluctable and eternal human qualities, 261 00:17:58,360 --> 00:18:00,000 or rather vices, usually, 262 00:18:00,040 --> 00:18:04,800 of stupidity, lack of imagination, dumbness, 263 00:18:04,840 --> 00:18:07,480 like, you know, confusion, vagueness, 264 00:18:07,520 --> 00:18:11,280 and that's why Douglas is so unique a figure, 265 00:18:11,320 --> 00:18:17,320 in that he, straddling both camps of humour, novel writing and art 266 00:18:17,360 --> 00:18:20,800 and science and gazing into the future through technology... 267 00:18:24,120 --> 00:18:27,600 Fish? Very, very useful. 268 00:18:31,280 --> 00:18:33,520 What do you expect me to do with that?Stick it in your ear. 269 00:18:33,560 --> 00:18:36,120 What? It's only a little one. 270 00:18:36,160 --> 00:18:38,920 Douglas grew up watching Star Trek 271 00:18:38,960 --> 00:18:42,840 and I know wondering, why is it everybody seems to speak English? 272 00:18:42,880 --> 00:18:44,760 Once more from the top, please. 273 00:18:44,800 --> 00:18:46,880 So when he came to write Hitchhikers, 274 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:49,160 he needed something which will allow people 275 00:18:49,200 --> 00:18:52,200 to be able to communicate in the multiplicity of languages 276 00:18:52,240 --> 00:18:54,800 in the universe. Most people might have then thought, 277 00:18:54,840 --> 00:18:57,800 OK, I'll just put some kind of universal translator machine 278 00:18:57,840 --> 00:18:59,280 in the ear. 279 00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:01,000 (ROAR OVERHEAD) Listen. 280 00:19:01,040 --> 00:19:03,480 What on earth's that? It's important. 281 00:19:03,520 --> 00:19:06,160 It's the Vogon captain. I can't speak Vogon. 282 00:19:06,200 --> 00:19:09,680 Douglas' genius was not just to then create a little tech, 283 00:19:09,720 --> 00:19:11,560 you know, a little sort of earpiece. 284 00:19:11,600 --> 00:19:16,720 It was to imagine a fish which fed off brainwaves. 285 00:19:20,080 --> 00:19:22,640 What exactly am I doing with this fish in my ear? 286 00:19:22,680 --> 00:19:26,520 It's translating for you. Look in the book under Babel fish. 287 00:19:26,560 --> 00:19:29,640 So Douglas chooses the name Babel for Babel fish, 288 00:19:29,680 --> 00:19:31,520 an allusion to the Tower of Babel. 289 00:19:31,560 --> 00:19:34,920 But he also uses it as an opportunity to take a pop at God 290 00:19:34,960 --> 00:19:37,920 because he's famously an atheist. 291 00:19:39,600 --> 00:19:42,760 Not only is the Babel fish, of course, a wonderful idea 292 00:19:42,800 --> 00:19:46,200 and makes science fiction writing so much easier. 293 00:19:46,240 --> 00:19:48,520 But also, the typical Douglas idea 294 00:19:48,560 --> 00:19:51,560 that this is a proof of the non-existence of God. 295 00:19:51,600 --> 00:19:54,320 It's so remarkable, such a giveaway 296 00:19:54,360 --> 00:19:57,680 for the existence of a God that there can't be one, 297 00:19:57,720 --> 00:20:00,320 because God says, "I never have to prove myself. 298 00:20:00,360 --> 00:20:03,520 I must be only found by faith." 299 00:20:03,560 --> 00:20:06,800 GUIDE: "But," said man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? 300 00:20:06,840 --> 00:20:10,400 It proves your existence, so therefore you don't. QED." 301 00:20:10,440 --> 00:20:12,600 "Oh, dear," says God. "I hadn't thought of that," 302 00:20:12,640 --> 00:20:16,000 and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. 303 00:20:16,040 --> 00:20:20,240 That paradox of faith and belief in God 304 00:20:20,280 --> 00:20:24,040 is a... is again a just typical... 305 00:20:24,080 --> 00:20:26,960 a typical entry into a unique mind. 306 00:20:28,800 --> 00:20:31,640 I suppose there are mostly jokes not about God as such, 307 00:20:31,680 --> 00:20:33,840 but about the way people think about God. 308 00:20:33,880 --> 00:20:36,800 For instance, the thing right at the beginning of the series. 309 00:20:36,840 --> 00:20:38,560 It starts off saying Where God Went Wrong, 310 00:20:38,600 --> 00:20:40,200 Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes 311 00:20:40,240 --> 00:20:42,040 and Who Is This God Person, Anyway? 312 00:20:42,080 --> 00:20:45,840 Just deliberately being controversial about religion 313 00:20:45,880 --> 00:20:51,080 in order to get people's backs up and make them buy the books. 314 00:20:51,120 --> 00:20:54,160 Like me, I believe he was not interested 315 00:20:54,200 --> 00:20:57,560 in offending religious people or mocking their piety and devotion. 316 00:20:57,600 --> 00:21:00,440 It's the mystery of the human, the enchantment of the world, 317 00:21:00,480 --> 00:21:03,080 is so much better expressed without there being a God. 318 00:21:03,120 --> 00:21:04,400 You don't know the answer 319 00:21:04,440 --> 00:21:06,280 to all kinds of mysteries and questions. 320 00:21:06,320 --> 00:21:08,840 Life, the universe and everything is the question. 321 00:21:08,880 --> 00:21:11,960 But all these questions are now awake and alive. 322 00:21:12,000 --> 00:21:15,040 They are not solved and closed down by God. 323 00:21:20,360 --> 00:21:22,840 Science fiction like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 324 00:21:22,880 --> 00:21:29,200 is incredibly important in terms of trying to wear down people's fear 325 00:21:29,240 --> 00:21:30,960 of approaching scientific ideas 326 00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:33,000 and it was funny in a way... 327 00:21:33,040 --> 00:21:37,200 with ideas that we'd not seen be made funny before. 328 00:21:37,240 --> 00:21:39,400 (BLEATS AND SNORTS) 329 00:21:39,440 --> 00:21:42,560 Good evening, madam and gentlemen. 330 00:21:42,600 --> 00:21:44,960 I am the main dish of the day. 331 00:21:45,000 --> 00:21:49,760 May I interest you in parts of my body?Huh? 332 00:21:49,800 --> 00:21:51,200 In The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe 333 00:21:51,240 --> 00:21:55,000 where the cow comes up to your table and shows off its flank 334 00:21:55,040 --> 00:21:57,160 and says, "This bit you might find quite..." 335 00:21:57,200 --> 00:21:59,280 And Arthur Dent, of course, is disgusted. 336 00:21:59,320 --> 00:22:02,920 And again, he's flipped it for us. (LAUGHS) 337 00:22:02,960 --> 00:22:05,600 We think, eugh, eugh, this cow wants to be eaten. 338 00:22:05,640 --> 00:22:07,680 That's against all tenets of nature. 339 00:22:07,720 --> 00:22:09,720 He said, "Well, no, it's evolved to say, 340 00:22:09,760 --> 00:22:11,520 I am your cow, please eat me. 341 00:22:11,560 --> 00:22:15,040 And you think that's worse than being an animal 342 00:22:15,080 --> 00:22:17,280 that is terrified of violence 343 00:22:17,320 --> 00:22:19,400 and is programmed to run away 344 00:22:19,440 --> 00:22:23,600 at the sight of teeth and claws?" 345 00:22:23,640 --> 00:22:26,360 May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver? 346 00:22:26,400 --> 00:22:28,840 It must be very rich and tender by now. 347 00:22:28,880 --> 00:22:32,200 I have been force-feeding myself for months. 348 00:22:32,240 --> 00:22:35,440 Once you're having a conversation with what you're about to eat, 349 00:22:35,480 --> 00:22:38,400 it makes us think about levels of consciousness in animals. 350 00:22:38,440 --> 00:22:40,480 The more perspectives we have, 351 00:22:40,520 --> 00:22:43,200 the more ways we can question the world, 352 00:22:43,240 --> 00:22:45,040 the more ways we can empathise. 353 00:22:45,080 --> 00:22:49,600 He was such a curious person. And again, you know, 354 00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:53,280 the best artist and the best are constantly asking questions. 355 00:22:53,320 --> 00:22:56,200 I'll just nip off and shoot myself. 356 00:22:56,240 --> 00:22:59,360 Oh, God. Don't worry, sir. 357 00:22:59,400 --> 00:23:01,440 I'll be very humane. 358 00:23:17,160 --> 00:23:21,160 DOUGLAS: At Christmas, we went... my family, we went to Fiji. 359 00:23:23,040 --> 00:23:26,400 One day we rented a speedboat and we sped across the ocean 360 00:23:26,440 --> 00:23:30,360 to the island where they filmed the movie Castaway. 361 00:23:30,400 --> 00:23:33,440 And it's the perfect desert island. 362 00:23:33,480 --> 00:23:37,480 Sun, white sand, blue ocean, 363 00:23:37,520 --> 00:23:41,120 a single rocky hill, clump of palm trees. 364 00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:45,320 And perfect cellphone reception. 365 00:23:45,360 --> 00:23:47,560 Why was there perfect cellphone reception? 366 00:23:47,600 --> 00:23:54,200 Apparently, it was in Tom Hanks' contract that there had to be. 367 00:23:54,240 --> 00:23:57,240 I remember when Douglas got one of the first mobile phones, 368 00:23:57,280 --> 00:23:59,560 which was obviously the size of a house brick, 369 00:23:59,600 --> 00:24:02,600 and you think, "Well, what's the point of that?" 370 00:24:02,640 --> 00:24:04,360 "You can use your phone anywhere." 371 00:24:04,400 --> 00:24:07,440 "There are phones everywhere, Douglas. I've got two in my house. 372 00:24:07,480 --> 00:24:10,520 There's a phone box on every corner. Why would you want one?" 373 00:24:10,560 --> 00:24:12,680 "But you'll see. Don't you see?" 374 00:24:12,720 --> 00:24:14,600 "Not really." 375 00:24:14,640 --> 00:24:17,920 But, you know, he was always decades ahead. 376 00:24:17,960 --> 00:24:20,080 (PHONE RINGS) 377 00:24:20,120 --> 00:24:22,080 Hello? 378 00:24:22,120 --> 00:24:24,640 I'm sorry, he's out to lunch. Can you call back later? 379 00:24:24,680 --> 00:24:27,400 Cellnet's portable is a true pocket phone, 380 00:24:27,440 --> 00:24:29,680 but is at present intended for mainly urban use. 381 00:24:29,720 --> 00:24:31,680 (PHONE RINGS) Hello? 382 00:24:31,720 --> 00:24:34,240 Douglas, being a great conceptual thinker, 383 00:24:34,280 --> 00:24:37,120 thought, if I'm on the phone to somebody, 384 00:24:37,160 --> 00:24:41,600 how am I going to prove that I'm using a cordless phone? 385 00:24:41,640 --> 00:24:45,000 Yeah. Yes, hello. Yes, it's for you.Thank you. 386 00:24:45,040 --> 00:24:47,440 During the call, he would wander off 387 00:24:47,480 --> 00:24:49,560 and suddenly you'd hear this tinkling. 388 00:24:49,600 --> 00:24:52,800 And that was Douglas in the bathroom urinating. 389 00:24:52,840 --> 00:24:55,120 He'd say to the person on the other end of the line, 390 00:24:55,160 --> 00:24:59,440 "Oh, sorry about this. It's just that I've got a cordless phone." 391 00:25:03,960 --> 00:25:06,640 When you're a child you accept you turn a switch 392 00:25:06,680 --> 00:25:08,200 and a light goes on 393 00:25:08,240 --> 00:25:11,440 and you don't actually really sort of think about it 394 00:25:11,480 --> 00:25:13,120 because it's just part of what happens. 395 00:25:13,160 --> 00:25:16,680 Then you get a bit older and you find out about electricity 396 00:25:16,720 --> 00:25:18,320 and where it's come from, 397 00:25:18,360 --> 00:25:19,920 everything that's gone into making it. 398 00:25:19,960 --> 00:25:23,240 Then you begin to get excited and think, this is amazing. 399 00:25:23,280 --> 00:25:26,280 And you walk into a room, press this button and a light goes on. 400 00:25:26,320 --> 00:25:28,280 So in a way, I mean, I find I get 401 00:25:28,320 --> 00:25:30,560 more childlike wonder out of something 402 00:25:30,600 --> 00:25:34,040 if you actually know something about it.Yeah. 403 00:25:34,080 --> 00:25:38,800 When Peter was small, he played with these. They were a toy. 404 00:25:38,840 --> 00:25:43,360 And then he discovered they were helping him to learn to read. 405 00:25:43,400 --> 00:25:45,360 So it is with microcomputers 406 00:25:45,400 --> 00:25:49,600 and the revolution in information technology, it's begun with play. 407 00:25:49,640 --> 00:25:53,640 The hobbyists are the forerunners of the microprocessor revolution, 408 00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:57,080 the nutcase micro geniuses who have to do their thing, 409 00:25:57,120 --> 00:25:59,920 never mind the dinner getting cold. 410 00:26:01,200 --> 00:26:04,920 One of the things that connected us was computing. 411 00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:08,880 I had become insanely excited about the possibilities 412 00:26:08,920 --> 00:26:11,520 of what were known as microcomputers back then, 413 00:26:11,560 --> 00:26:15,160 so I could walk or bicycle to his place 414 00:26:15,200 --> 00:26:17,920 and we would play with our computers. 415 00:26:17,960 --> 00:26:21,800 We have much to be grateful to the hobbyists who can't get a girl 416 00:26:21,840 --> 00:26:25,480 because he's got a mind full of differential calculus. 417 00:26:25,520 --> 00:26:27,440 No country could possibly pay 418 00:26:27,480 --> 00:26:29,720 for the accumulation of research experience 419 00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:32,840 and criticism that these nutcases provide. 420 00:26:32,880 --> 00:26:35,680 He had a DEC Rainbow computer, 421 00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:38,720 which was quite a sort of grand office-style computer, 422 00:26:38,760 --> 00:26:40,640 because as far as I was concerned, 423 00:26:40,680 --> 00:26:43,920 he was insanely rich and I was just starting. 424 00:26:43,960 --> 00:26:49,040 So I was in awe of his purchasing power, and his enthusiasm. 425 00:26:52,480 --> 00:26:55,920 It reached its height in January 1984 426 00:26:56,920 --> 00:27:00,120 when he bought a Macintosh computer. 427 00:27:00,160 --> 00:27:03,760 We were the first two in Europe to own such a device. 428 00:27:03,800 --> 00:27:07,800 It's more sophisticated, yet less complicated. 429 00:27:07,840 --> 00:27:12,200 It can store vast amounts of yesterday 430 00:27:12,240 --> 00:27:14,800 or tell you what's in store for tomorrow. 431 00:27:14,840 --> 00:27:16,520 It was a new way of computing. 432 00:27:16,560 --> 00:27:19,920 It had things that existing computers just didn't have. 433 00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:24,040 A mouse, pull-down menus, 434 00:27:24,080 --> 00:27:26,160 a sort of graphic interface. 435 00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:30,800 With a little waste paper bin in the corner. 436 00:27:30,840 --> 00:27:34,400 And folders and these images that are all so familiar to us now 437 00:27:34,440 --> 00:27:36,080 but were brand-new then 438 00:27:36,120 --> 00:27:38,320 and a thrillingly exciting way 439 00:27:38,360 --> 00:27:40,520 of manipulating information and so on. 440 00:27:40,560 --> 00:27:44,280 And both Douglas and I thought this was absolutely the future. 441 00:27:48,880 --> 00:27:52,360 There was no Internet to join until the very end of the '80s, 442 00:27:52,400 --> 00:27:57,240 but there were modems and you could connect with another computer 443 00:27:57,280 --> 00:28:00,320 by means of what was known as a handshake. 444 00:28:00,360 --> 00:28:04,680 (DIAL TONE, NUMBER TONES AND TRILL OF CONNECTING) 445 00:28:07,680 --> 00:28:11,040 We had a microphone and we had a speaker and we had a modem. 446 00:28:11,080 --> 00:28:18,240 And eventually, after weeks of tweaking the scripts and swearing, 447 00:28:18,280 --> 00:28:20,920 we actually managed, he in Islington, 448 00:28:20,960 --> 00:28:22,840 to speak into his microphone 449 00:28:22,880 --> 00:28:27,280 and it came out of my computer in Dalston. (LAUGHS) 450 00:28:27,320 --> 00:28:30,800 At one point the line dropped... (TRILLING, WHITE NOISE) 451 00:28:32,640 --> 00:28:34,680 ..and so we called each other up. 452 00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:37,200 Douglas said, "I've just had an instant thought." 453 00:28:37,240 --> 00:28:41,080 I said, "What's that?" He said, "We already have a technology 454 00:28:41,120 --> 00:28:46,280 that allows us to speak to each other remotely. It's the telephone. 455 00:28:46,320 --> 00:28:50,280 Why are we making the telephone go through a whole other system?" 456 00:28:50,320 --> 00:28:52,200 It was a complete waste of time. 457 00:28:52,240 --> 00:28:58,680 But the pleasure of doing it, I cannot tell you. It was so exciting. 458 00:29:02,840 --> 00:29:06,040 He rang me from the South of France because he'd forgotten a book 459 00:29:06,080 --> 00:29:09,760 he was halfway through, and he wanted me to take it down with me. 460 00:29:09,800 --> 00:29:12,520 And I know what it's like when you're reading a book 461 00:29:12,560 --> 00:29:14,160 and it's gripping and you've left it. 462 00:29:14,200 --> 00:29:17,680 So I was searching the house, and I needed some more information. 463 00:29:17,720 --> 00:29:20,720 I said, "I can't find it." And it was a computer manual. 464 00:29:20,760 --> 00:29:23,360 (LAUGHS) I was like... 465 00:29:26,640 --> 00:29:29,840 Hi, this is Eddie, your shipboard computer 466 00:29:29,880 --> 00:29:33,200 and I'm feeling just great, guys." 467 00:29:33,240 --> 00:29:37,560 Douglas saw very early on that the computer wasn't just a typewriter. 468 00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:42,000 His overwhelming sense was excitement about the possibilities 469 00:29:42,040 --> 00:29:44,560 that it was all going to bring. 470 00:29:44,600 --> 00:29:47,280 Much bigger than that was what he saw 471 00:29:47,320 --> 00:29:49,680 the impact likely to be on society. 472 00:29:52,400 --> 00:29:56,000 Life is the most powerful phenomenon on this planet, 473 00:29:56,040 --> 00:29:59,360 and artificial life is going to be 474 00:29:59,400 --> 00:30:04,800 the most powerful phenomenon that we have created. 475 00:30:04,840 --> 00:30:08,920 If you look at huge science fiction monoliths in our culture 476 00:30:08,960 --> 00:30:12,160 AI to Star Trek was merely, "Computer, 477 00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:15,920 where is that star system?" (FLAT) "It is in the place..." 478 00:30:15,960 --> 00:30:19,080 You know, it was basically just relaying information. 479 00:30:19,120 --> 00:30:20,640 Well, that's not intelligence. 480 00:30:20,680 --> 00:30:24,960 And Douglas' immediate leap from that form of science fiction, 481 00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:29,960 a rather dull form of what an intelligent computer might be, 482 00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:31,760 was to understand that intelligence 483 00:30:31,800 --> 00:30:34,280 is also to do with social intelligence, 484 00:30:34,320 --> 00:30:37,280 to do with personality and if an AI had infinite 485 00:30:37,320 --> 00:30:39,720 or at least close to infinite knowledge, 486 00:30:39,760 --> 00:30:45,240 then its guesses would be surprising and interesting. 487 00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:49,040 GUIDE: One day, a race of hyper- intelligent pan-dimensional beings 488 00:30:49,080 --> 00:30:53,440 built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought 489 00:30:53,480 --> 00:30:58,120 to calculate once and for all the answer to the ultimate question 490 00:30:58,160 --> 00:31:01,600 of life, the universe and everything. 491 00:31:02,840 --> 00:31:05,920 One of the things that I think is captured by Douglas Adams 492 00:31:05,960 --> 00:31:09,960 is the importance of imagination in the scientific endeavour. 493 00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:13,760 It is an imaginative process. It is a moment where Albert Einstein 494 00:31:13,800 --> 00:31:16,400 is thinking about going down in the lift, 495 00:31:16,440 --> 00:31:20,640 or looking at the buildings as he's on a tram and he goes, but what if? 496 00:31:20,680 --> 00:31:22,840 Now, of course, science fiction and fiction generally 497 00:31:22,880 --> 00:31:25,160 is very often saying, what if? 498 00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:29,000 But the "What if?" question is very, very important. 499 00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:31,840 Oh, great computer... 500 00:31:31,880 --> 00:31:35,280 We want you to tell us the answer. 501 00:31:35,320 --> 00:31:37,320 The answer to what? 502 00:31:37,360 --> 00:31:40,160 Life. The universe.Everything. 503 00:31:41,480 --> 00:31:43,840 Tricky. 504 00:31:43,880 --> 00:31:45,800 After eons of time, 505 00:31:45,840 --> 00:31:48,960 it eventually was ready to come up with the answer, 506 00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:52,240 which astonished everybody because it was 42. 507 00:31:52,280 --> 00:31:55,240 BOTH: Forty-two? 508 00:31:57,240 --> 00:31:58,640 When you take a concept, 509 00:31:58,680 --> 00:32:01,400 what is the answer to life, the universe and everything? 510 00:32:01,440 --> 00:32:05,680 It's got to be philosophical. It's got to be complicated. 511 00:32:05,720 --> 00:32:08,760 It's got to be huge in concept. 512 00:32:08,800 --> 00:32:11,240 And Douglas said, 42. 513 00:32:13,280 --> 00:32:16,160 It's got a sort of cosy feel about it, 42. 514 00:32:16,200 --> 00:32:18,960 Sort of a plump, sort of likeable number, 515 00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:22,440 nothing offensive or spiky about it. 516 00:32:25,040 --> 00:32:27,080 There's whole Wikipedia pages on 42, 517 00:32:27,120 --> 00:32:30,240 and the significance of it in the actual world of physics 518 00:32:30,280 --> 00:32:33,400 and, you know, history and archaeology and everything else. 519 00:32:38,240 --> 00:32:41,480 He kept his cards close to his chest because he absolutely relished 520 00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:46,480 how perplexed, almost to the point of enragement, people were by this 521 00:32:46,520 --> 00:32:47,920 and wanted to know more. 522 00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:51,160 And where he got the idea from, and could he explain it further? 523 00:32:51,200 --> 00:32:53,400 And he loved just going... 524 00:32:57,680 --> 00:33:00,840 When he came up with the number 42, would he ever imagine 525 00:33:00,880 --> 00:33:02,840 that for the rest of his life 526 00:33:02,880 --> 00:33:06,560 and then for decades afterwards, people would be asking the question, 527 00:33:06,600 --> 00:33:09,280 what is the significance about the number 42? 528 00:33:09,320 --> 00:33:12,480 The Kumars at No. 42, Level 42. 529 00:33:12,520 --> 00:33:15,480 So many things out there and you think it's a coincidence 530 00:33:15,520 --> 00:33:17,840 and then you delve into it and it's not. 531 00:33:22,080 --> 00:33:25,560 The idea that life, the universe and everything is a single number, 532 00:33:25,600 --> 00:33:29,400 that's a work of genius because they haven't asked the right question. 533 00:33:29,440 --> 00:33:30,720 They've got the number right. 534 00:33:30,760 --> 00:33:32,720 But now we have to work out what is the question 535 00:33:32,760 --> 00:33:35,520 that results in 42 of anything? 536 00:33:35,560 --> 00:33:38,440 And if we find that, we will actually know the meaning of life. 537 00:33:38,480 --> 00:33:40,920 But it was the great question, 538 00:33:40,960 --> 00:33:46,880 the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. 539 00:33:46,920 --> 00:33:49,880 And so, not satisfied, they decide 540 00:33:49,920 --> 00:33:54,520 that they just simply have to build an even bigger computer, 541 00:33:54,560 --> 00:33:59,560 which turns out to be the planet Earth. That's what Earth is. 542 00:33:59,600 --> 00:34:02,960 It's a computer experiment run by white mice. 543 00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:04,640 Now, Earth creature, we have 544 00:34:04,680 --> 00:34:07,200 been running your planet for the last 10 million years 545 00:34:07,240 --> 00:34:10,480 in order to find this wretched thing called the ultimate question. 546 00:34:10,520 --> 00:34:14,080 We always thought we were using white mice in our experiments. 547 00:34:14,120 --> 00:34:16,880 It turns out they were using us. 548 00:34:20,120 --> 00:34:22,920 No, it was a joke. I mean, what can I tell you? 549 00:34:22,960 --> 00:34:25,520 Once I'd decided, OK, the answer is going to be a number 550 00:34:25,560 --> 00:34:27,680 and that's the joke. OK, what's the number? 551 00:34:27,720 --> 00:34:31,080 Well, I think it should be a very small, ordinary number. 552 00:34:31,120 --> 00:34:33,680 Why not? I don't know, 42. 553 00:34:33,720 --> 00:34:38,240 There was a moment years ago when the Hubble constant, 554 00:34:38,280 --> 00:34:43,520 which is the measure of how fast the universe is expanding, was 42 555 00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:46,800 and Douglas was absolutely jumping with joy. 556 00:34:46,840 --> 00:34:50,000 He's actually found the answer to literally everything. 557 00:34:50,040 --> 00:34:54,280 Anyway, it's now not 42. It's some other number. 558 00:35:01,320 --> 00:35:05,000 The robot, weighing 17 stone and costing about £3,000, 559 00:35:05,040 --> 00:35:07,560 is a robot who can be programmed, says his maker, 560 00:35:07,600 --> 00:35:09,480 to do ordinary household chores. 561 00:35:09,520 --> 00:35:12,080 Judging by his performance in trying to cross the road, 562 00:35:12,120 --> 00:35:14,040 he may need a bit more fine tuning. 563 00:35:14,080 --> 00:35:17,120 I commanded Clay II to bring me a glass of wine. 564 00:35:17,160 --> 00:35:20,120 He couldn't open the bottle, but he brought the tray. 565 00:35:20,160 --> 00:35:22,560 If you see the robot as all the dreams of our future 566 00:35:22,600 --> 00:35:24,560 and in the 1970s, there'd always be something, 567 00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:29,280 before long, you won't have to wash your kitchen floor because this... 568 00:35:29,320 --> 00:35:32,400 And you'd see all these things. 569 00:35:32,440 --> 00:35:34,560 All in all, as a butler, or domestic help, 570 00:35:34,600 --> 00:35:37,280 seems to need still a watchful eye and a helping hand. 571 00:35:37,320 --> 00:35:39,840 But he's clearly coming along fast. 572 00:35:39,880 --> 00:35:43,000 Most of the robots, they were just normal human characters 573 00:35:43,040 --> 00:35:46,280 that also happened to be computers. "They'd always talk like this." 574 00:35:46,320 --> 00:35:51,640 ROBOT: I am capable of speaking any language... except Greek. 575 00:35:51,680 --> 00:35:54,600 Douglas had that wonder before the world, 576 00:35:54,640 --> 00:35:56,720 because he could take a scientific concept 577 00:35:56,760 --> 00:35:59,440 and make it funny, make it absurd, 578 00:35:59,480 --> 00:36:02,920 root it in a story or a parable or an idea 579 00:36:02,960 --> 00:36:04,960 and because of his love of technology 580 00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:06,960 and because of the speed at which technology 581 00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:09,040 was growing and emerging around him, 582 00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:14,560 it gave him that space to play and to think and to imagine. 583 00:36:14,600 --> 00:36:17,840 It says "Genuine people personalities". 584 00:36:17,880 --> 00:36:23,720 Er, it sounds ghastly. It is, absolutely ghastly. 585 00:36:24,600 --> 00:36:27,600 Douglas saw that robots, if there were to be such things, 586 00:36:27,640 --> 00:36:30,160 wouldn't just be... (FLAT) "I will obey." 587 00:36:30,200 --> 00:36:34,160 But that if you can make something that appears sentient 588 00:36:34,200 --> 00:36:37,000 and can listen and obey an instruction, 589 00:36:37,040 --> 00:36:39,400 you would also throw in a personality. 590 00:36:39,440 --> 00:36:43,120 In the case of Marvin, of course, paranoid misery. 591 00:36:43,160 --> 00:36:44,880 But in the case of other ones, 592 00:36:44,920 --> 00:36:48,760 outrageous California helpfulness and cheerfulness. 593 00:36:48,800 --> 00:36:51,520 In both cases, you'd want to run screaming from them. 594 00:36:51,560 --> 00:36:57,960 Life, don't talk to me about life. 595 00:36:58,000 --> 00:36:59,840 What Marvin is a wonderful example of 596 00:36:59,880 --> 00:37:03,880 is that if you become truly sentient and you're aware of yourself, 597 00:37:03,920 --> 00:37:06,760 all of the problems come to you as well. 598 00:37:06,800 --> 00:37:09,920 All of the "Why am I here? Why am I doing this?" 599 00:37:09,960 --> 00:37:12,280 Here is something with a brain the size of a planet, 600 00:37:12,320 --> 00:37:15,960 but with depression. They'll just keep opening and closing the door 601 00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:17,680 and bringing you drinks. 602 00:37:17,720 --> 00:37:21,960 What are you supposed to do with a manically depressed robot? 603 00:37:22,000 --> 00:37:26,680 Douglas was interested, endlessly, in what science really had to, 604 00:37:26,720 --> 00:37:29,280 to offer in terms of the exploration of the world. 605 00:37:29,320 --> 00:37:32,880 I think science fiction gave him that playground. 606 00:37:32,920 --> 00:37:34,480 I see from our instruments 607 00:37:34,520 --> 00:37:37,080 we have a couple of hitchhikers on board our ship. 608 00:37:37,120 --> 00:37:39,800 I've sent out a search party and as soon as they find you, 609 00:37:39,840 --> 00:37:44,520 I shall turn you off the ship. 610 00:37:44,560 --> 00:37:46,480 He saw the world, the galaxy, 611 00:37:46,520 --> 00:37:48,960 the universe, as fundamentally relational, 612 00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:53,320 fundamentally a web of surprising connection. 613 00:37:53,360 --> 00:37:57,440 That was a big theme in terms of how Douglas liked to think. 614 00:37:57,480 --> 00:37:58,840 We've been picked up by a ship 615 00:37:58,880 --> 00:38:01,000 with the new Infinite Improbability Drive. 616 00:38:01,040 --> 00:38:03,240 I mean, this is incredible, Arthur. 617 00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:04,800 As you jump into space, 618 00:38:04,840 --> 00:38:06,920 the likelihood of you surviving is very, very low. 619 00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:08,960 And so he has a plot device, 620 00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:11,520 which actually is an extremely interesting 621 00:38:11,560 --> 00:38:14,760 exploration of physics and quantum possibility. 622 00:38:14,800 --> 00:38:18,320 As the ship's drive reaches infinite improbability, 623 00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:22,720 it passes simultaneously through every point in the universe. 624 00:38:22,760 --> 00:38:25,840 The ideas really possessed him, and he did understand them. 625 00:38:25,880 --> 00:38:30,760 He understood the nature of quantum mechanics. 626 00:38:30,800 --> 00:38:33,040 And he saw that, therefore, 627 00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:36,400 that there must be a use for this mad idea. 628 00:38:36,440 --> 00:38:38,440 And in his case, it was travel. 629 00:38:38,480 --> 00:38:40,600 You could just be there and there, 630 00:38:40,640 --> 00:38:44,280 because a particle can be and has now been proved empirically. 631 00:38:44,320 --> 00:38:48,240 GUIDE: The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method 632 00:38:48,280 --> 00:38:51,240 of crossing interstellar distances in a few seconds 633 00:38:51,280 --> 00:38:55,000 without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. 634 00:38:55,040 --> 00:38:57,640 We now are obsessed with it driving AI 635 00:38:57,680 --> 00:38:59,640 as it sees what has happened in the past 636 00:38:59,680 --> 00:39:03,200 and works out the probability of this being the right answer, 637 00:39:03,240 --> 00:39:05,880 or that being the right answer. It's a question of probabilities. 638 00:39:05,920 --> 00:39:07,200 That's what allows ChatGPT 639 00:39:07,240 --> 00:39:10,480 to work the large language models that we use today. 640 00:39:19,560 --> 00:39:24,960 GRIFF: He knew that Hitchhiker's had been very brilliant. 641 00:39:26,080 --> 00:39:31,120 But Douglas had a thing about writing and writer's block 642 00:39:31,160 --> 00:39:35,400 and an inability to get pen to paper. 643 00:39:38,800 --> 00:39:41,160 He didn't find it easy. That was never... 644 00:39:41,200 --> 00:39:43,320 He didn't set out to be an author. 645 00:39:43,360 --> 00:39:47,160 He set out, his initial thing, was to be a writer performer. 646 00:39:47,200 --> 00:39:49,840 Go and write sketches. That was what he wanted to do. 647 00:39:49,880 --> 00:39:52,880 He was an accidental novelist. 648 00:39:52,920 --> 00:39:58,120 He used to find anything that he could do rather than write. 649 00:39:58,160 --> 00:39:59,760 He used to try and think of ways 650 00:39:59,800 --> 00:40:02,320 that he could pretend that he was going to work. 651 00:40:02,360 --> 00:40:05,000 And when he was at work, he was going to write. 652 00:40:05,040 --> 00:40:06,840 That was him going to... 653 00:40:06,880 --> 00:40:10,120 So what he used to do is he used to go into a room 654 00:40:10,160 --> 00:40:12,160 where he had an exercise bicycle, 655 00:40:12,200 --> 00:40:14,640 and he would cycle for so many miles 656 00:40:14,680 --> 00:40:17,960 and that was him going to work. 657 00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:19,520 When he got off the bike, 658 00:40:19,560 --> 00:40:22,320 in his mind, he said, "That's it, I'm at work." 659 00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:26,680 But the trouble is to get to his office where he would sit and work, 660 00:40:26,720 --> 00:40:29,120 he'd have to go past the kitchen. 661 00:40:29,160 --> 00:40:34,360 He would find everything to do rather than go upstairs and write. 662 00:40:34,400 --> 00:40:38,400 When I started out, I did something on radio, on television. 663 00:40:38,440 --> 00:40:40,680 And then because the book was such a hit, 664 00:40:40,720 --> 00:40:42,000 it meant the next thing I did was a book, 665 00:40:42,040 --> 00:40:44,480 and the next thing after that was a book, and... 666 00:40:44,520 --> 00:40:49,160 You know, that wasn't the kind of life that I really wanted, 667 00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:53,720 but there was huge pressure on me to keep on doing that. 668 00:40:55,920 --> 00:41:01,960 I found myself sitting in a room by myself, really not enjoying myself. 669 00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:07,120 He had a classic writer's melancholia and remoteness. 670 00:41:08,720 --> 00:41:11,720 That guy, man, could he could use a bath. 671 00:41:11,760 --> 00:41:13,800 He'd be in there for hours. 672 00:41:13,840 --> 00:41:17,400 I mean, you'd expect him to come out and be a six-inch prune of a man. 673 00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:21,800 He was so... just in there, you might say, depressed. 674 00:41:21,840 --> 00:41:24,440 But at the time we just thought, well, that's Douglas. 675 00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:27,160 He's just thinking hard. 676 00:41:28,120 --> 00:41:32,440 The one thing that was unbearable when he sat down 677 00:41:32,480 --> 00:41:36,040 was to face the blinking cursor. 678 00:41:36,080 --> 00:41:39,680 And every blink is a stagger to the heart. 679 00:41:39,720 --> 00:41:42,400 He could start off a sentence so beautifully 680 00:41:42,440 --> 00:41:45,320 and then get really worried 681 00:41:45,360 --> 00:41:49,760 because the next sentence wouldn't be as beautiful. 682 00:41:51,440 --> 00:41:55,240 He would have an idea and he would write, 683 00:41:55,280 --> 00:41:58,160 and he could do, say, six pages, 684 00:41:58,200 --> 00:42:00,000 and then he'd go back and rewrite it, 685 00:42:00,040 --> 00:42:02,160 and then he'd go back and rewrite it, 686 00:42:02,200 --> 00:42:04,080 and then he'd go back and rewrite it. 687 00:42:04,120 --> 00:42:09,560 And he was so particular that at the end of this rewriting, 688 00:42:09,600 --> 00:42:14,200 instead of having six pages, he could have six words. 689 00:42:14,240 --> 00:42:18,400 Douglas would spend classically three months on the first paragraph, 690 00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:20,360 then realise he'd got to do something, 691 00:42:20,400 --> 00:42:23,160 and then get stuck because there's something about... 692 00:42:23,200 --> 00:42:26,160 His personality got in the way of him actually doing anything 693 00:42:26,200 --> 00:42:29,600 because he was so... "(GROANS IN FRUSTRATION) 694 00:42:29,640 --> 00:42:32,200 It's all about me. I can't do this. I'm not good enough." 695 00:42:35,720 --> 00:42:39,000 He was quite vulnerable to depression. 696 00:42:39,040 --> 00:42:41,560 He did get very low when things weren't going well. 697 00:42:41,600 --> 00:42:44,600 It was as if he had all the ideas boiling around inside him, 698 00:42:44,640 --> 00:42:49,360 and they were a bit inchoate and a bit sort of undisciplined 699 00:42:49,400 --> 00:42:53,320 and it was that process of actually finding a way to give it structure, 700 00:42:53,360 --> 00:42:56,360 form, cohesion, articulacy, 701 00:42:56,400 --> 00:42:59,840 get the idea out that he found incredibly hard. 702 00:42:59,880 --> 00:43:02,000 It's been a bit of a muddle of a year, really, 703 00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:06,520 because at the beginning of it when I was doing the second radio series 704 00:43:06,560 --> 00:43:09,040 and, you know, the scripts 705 00:43:09,080 --> 00:43:12,640 are being written within minutes of transmission sort of thing. 706 00:43:12,680 --> 00:43:16,480 That's not quite true, though it's not a million miles from true. 707 00:43:16,520 --> 00:43:19,600 I had the second book hanging over me, which had to be written. 708 00:43:19,640 --> 00:43:21,840 I was putting that off and putting it off. 709 00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:24,080 Because I couldn't get the thing started. 710 00:43:24,120 --> 00:43:26,880 If you imagine that feeling, you've got a piece of work to do 711 00:43:26,920 --> 00:43:28,520 you've got to hand in in the morning 712 00:43:28,560 --> 00:43:31,600 and you attach millions of pounds to that, 713 00:43:31,640 --> 00:43:37,720 that's a big pressure. Like anybody watching your brother suffer, 714 00:43:37,760 --> 00:43:40,120 I remember being really angry 715 00:43:40,160 --> 00:43:43,440 with the publishers, with the agents, with the, you know... 716 00:43:43,480 --> 00:43:46,480 I was like, this isn't worth it. 717 00:43:46,520 --> 00:43:51,200 But looking back now, I can see he needed the adrenaline, 718 00:43:51,240 --> 00:43:52,960 the fight or flight. 719 00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:58,240 He needed to get to the point where everybody was like, "Oh, my God." 720 00:43:58,280 --> 00:44:02,160 Eventually, when Pan sort of read me the riot act 721 00:44:02,200 --> 00:44:04,680 sometime in the beginning of August 722 00:44:04,720 --> 00:44:07,320 about the continual none appearance of this book, 723 00:44:07,360 --> 00:44:10,280 saying, "How much have you done?" And I had to... 724 00:44:10,320 --> 00:44:13,960 I didn't admit I hadn't done any, just worried, 725 00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:18,280 and I basically had a month left to write it, and that was it. 726 00:44:18,320 --> 00:44:21,160 Otherwise it was concrete overcoat time. 727 00:44:25,640 --> 00:44:28,080 When he'd got the million-pound advance, 728 00:44:28,120 --> 00:44:29,800 or won a Golden Pan or something, 729 00:44:29,840 --> 00:44:32,120 he wanted to hang out with Paul Allen. 730 00:44:32,160 --> 00:44:35,120 You know, the guy who started Microsoft with Bill Gates, 731 00:44:35,160 --> 00:44:36,680 who had a massive yacht, 732 00:44:36,720 --> 00:44:38,760 and Douglas would be on the yacht with Paul 733 00:44:38,800 --> 00:44:41,840 and a few other nobs going around Antarctica 734 00:44:41,880 --> 00:44:43,960 and partying like there was no tomorrow. 735 00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:46,400 And then as the year wore on 736 00:44:46,440 --> 00:44:49,880 and he'd written just the first half of the first paragraph, 737 00:44:49,920 --> 00:44:53,720 and he's starting to get panicky, and then he'd get really desperate, 738 00:44:53,760 --> 00:44:56,800 and then he'd want to see his old friends. He felt safe with them. 739 00:44:56,840 --> 00:44:58,560 And so he'd get worse and worse. 740 00:44:58,600 --> 00:45:01,920 And the publisher would then hold the gun to his head 741 00:45:01,960 --> 00:45:06,040 and make him write the book, which was agony, but he had to do it 742 00:45:06,080 --> 00:45:07,400 and he did it in three weeks, 743 00:45:07,440 --> 00:45:10,160 because it's all done by the subconscious anyway 744 00:45:10,200 --> 00:45:12,920 and then the book would come out and it would sell millions 745 00:45:12,960 --> 00:45:15,240 and then Douglas would be off again. 746 00:45:15,280 --> 00:45:18,840 He only wanted to hang out with millionaires and Steve Jobs. 747 00:45:23,480 --> 00:45:27,160 The phone rang and the voice said, 748 00:45:27,200 --> 00:45:30,320 "We want you to go to Madagascar. 749 00:45:31,320 --> 00:45:34,560 We want you to look for the aye-aye, 750 00:45:34,600 --> 00:45:37,320 a very rare form of lemur." 751 00:45:37,360 --> 00:45:39,040 I, assuming they'd got the wrong number, 752 00:45:39,080 --> 00:45:41,920 said yes before they could discover their mistake. 753 00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:44,360 But in fact, it turned out that they'd decided, 754 00:45:44,400 --> 00:45:47,000 here's somebody who doesn't know anything about lemurs, 755 00:45:47,040 --> 00:45:49,840 anything about the aye-aye, anything about Madagascar. 756 00:45:49,880 --> 00:45:52,320 Let's send him. 757 00:45:55,720 --> 00:45:57,560 Every science fiction writer 758 00:45:57,600 --> 00:46:00,560 tries his own version of an alternate world, 759 00:46:00,600 --> 00:46:04,280 a place where time has broken its banks. 760 00:46:04,320 --> 00:46:07,680 Madagascar is just such a place, only it's real. 761 00:46:07,720 --> 00:46:12,040 Something like 100 million years ago, it broke loose from Africa, 762 00:46:12,080 --> 00:46:17,640 and its plants and animals have evolved in isolation. 763 00:46:17,680 --> 00:46:20,280 I first met Douglas in Madagascar, of all places. 764 00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:23,840 And he'd been sent there by the Observer colour supplement. 765 00:46:23,880 --> 00:46:26,560 We had to go straight from the airport into the jungle. 766 00:46:26,600 --> 00:46:30,800 And that first night, we slept on a concrete floor in a hut. 767 00:46:30,840 --> 00:46:34,040 Spider-infested hut. Snakes everywhere, rats everywhere. 768 00:46:34,080 --> 00:46:37,760 And he was really thrown in at the deep end. 769 00:46:39,240 --> 00:46:42,480 At the time we went, the aye-aye was considered 770 00:46:42,520 --> 00:46:44,640 one of the most endangered animals on the planet. 771 00:46:44,680 --> 00:46:48,800 They were believed only to live on this one island called Nosy Mangabe, 772 00:46:48,840 --> 00:46:53,440 and the population was thought to be as low as just 12. 773 00:46:53,480 --> 00:46:56,120 We got there with all our camping kit, 774 00:46:56,160 --> 00:46:58,960 thinking there's going to be nobody else there. 775 00:46:59,000 --> 00:47:01,640 And then we got to this little hut in the forest. 776 00:47:01,680 --> 00:47:04,000 There was an American photographer there 777 00:47:04,040 --> 00:47:06,600 and he'd been there for three months on his own, 778 00:47:06,640 --> 00:47:11,040 trying to photograph an aye-aye. He'd never seen one. 779 00:47:11,080 --> 00:47:14,280 The first night, rainforest pouring with rain, 780 00:47:14,320 --> 00:47:16,760 we went off, didn't see anything. 781 00:47:16,800 --> 00:47:18,840 The next night we thought, we'll go again. 782 00:47:18,880 --> 00:47:22,280 And, you know, we're going to keep trying. 783 00:47:22,320 --> 00:47:25,960 50 yards from the hut, we sensed something, looked up with a torch. 784 00:47:26,000 --> 00:47:30,840 And there on a branch was a real-life aye-aye. 785 00:47:35,360 --> 00:47:37,680 We went rushing back to the hut and told this guy. 786 00:47:37,720 --> 00:47:43,920 Of course, he almost collapsed in tears because he hadn't come out. 787 00:47:43,960 --> 00:47:46,120 After we left, pleased with ourselves... 788 00:47:46,160 --> 00:47:47,720 We left a couple of days later. 789 00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:53,120 He spent six more months on the island. Never saw one. 790 00:47:53,160 --> 00:47:56,440 I was absolutely transfixed by that moment. 791 00:47:56,480 --> 00:48:00,960 You suddenly think, there is a huge amount of history to this moment. 792 00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:05,320 Our roots in this planet go back an awfully long way. 793 00:48:05,360 --> 00:48:07,200 And it takes a confrontation like this 794 00:48:07,240 --> 00:48:11,440 to realise how broad and deep your family goes. 795 00:48:12,960 --> 00:48:14,680 "Imagine the lemurs' surprise. 796 00:48:14,720 --> 00:48:17,800 For millions of years, they'd been all on their own as primates. 797 00:48:17,840 --> 00:48:22,320 And they'd never seen an ape since they last shaved off from Africa. 798 00:48:22,360 --> 00:48:24,200 And then suddenly apes returned." 799 00:48:24,240 --> 00:48:28,840 And I said, "Oh. So, when humans arrived in Madagascar, 800 00:48:28,880 --> 00:48:31,800 did they bring monkeys and apes with them? 801 00:48:31,840 --> 00:48:34,840 Douglas said, "No, the humans were the apes. 802 00:48:34,880 --> 00:48:38,160 We are apes, don't forget." "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that." 803 00:48:38,200 --> 00:48:40,160 He was constantly reminding me. 804 00:48:40,200 --> 00:48:46,400 Of course, while these poor lemurs had been living in Madagascar, 805 00:48:46,440 --> 00:48:48,560 apes and turned rather surprising. 806 00:48:48,600 --> 00:48:51,720 They had turned into things that could build ships. 807 00:48:54,480 --> 00:48:58,200 A lot happened in those few weeks. He definitely did change 808 00:48:58,240 --> 00:49:01,760 and he basically said, "I'd like to do more," 809 00:49:01,800 --> 00:49:05,680 and so we hatched this plan to spend a year travelling 810 00:49:05,720 --> 00:49:09,640 around the world together, looking for other endangered species. 811 00:49:09,680 --> 00:49:12,480 And as soon as we got back to London, 812 00:49:12,520 --> 00:49:14,520 he invited me up to his house in Islington, 813 00:49:14,560 --> 00:49:18,840 and he'd already put a map of the world on the wall and said, "Right, 814 00:49:18,880 --> 00:49:22,240 where are we going to go?" 815 00:49:23,600 --> 00:49:25,400 The idea was to set off straight away. 816 00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:29,080 But Douglas being Douglas was running late on a book. 817 00:49:29,120 --> 00:49:32,040 Douglas Adams, you're on the Grand Tour, as I call it, 818 00:49:32,080 --> 00:49:35,640 to publicise this book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. 819 00:49:35,680 --> 00:49:38,040 Having read the book and having enjoyed the book, 820 00:49:38,080 --> 00:49:40,280 but not having understood the book very much, 821 00:49:40,320 --> 00:49:43,280 how would you describe it? A ghost horror detective whodunit 822 00:49:43,320 --> 00:49:45,680 time-travel romantic musical comedy epic, 823 00:49:45,720 --> 00:49:50,360 which is a genre it has peculiarly to itself. 824 00:49:50,400 --> 00:49:53,320 Instead of leaving like within the next month or two, 825 00:49:53,360 --> 00:49:56,440 three years later, he had finally finished his book, 826 00:49:56,480 --> 00:49:57,800 done his author tour, 827 00:49:57,840 --> 00:50:01,000 and then we could go off and do a year travelling around the world. 828 00:50:24,440 --> 00:50:28,560 I don't think I'd seen him so excited for a very long time. 829 00:50:28,600 --> 00:50:30,760 It's not that he got bored by books. 830 00:50:30,800 --> 00:50:36,120 He got excited when he started Dirk Gently as a new stream of fiction. 831 00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:40,840 But it was still agony writing them but this woke up something in him. 832 00:50:40,880 --> 00:50:44,440 He saw it as immensely important. 833 00:50:52,400 --> 00:50:55,840 All I knew was that he was going round the world with animals. 834 00:50:55,880 --> 00:50:59,280 He'd taken a shop's worth of cameras, with huge lenses. 835 00:50:59,320 --> 00:51:03,640 How he travelled through the jungle carrying all this stuff, 836 00:51:03,680 --> 00:51:05,640 I've no idea. 837 00:51:07,600 --> 00:51:11,440 He literally turned up with a pile of books, 838 00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:14,680 which he reckoned was The Complete Works Of Shakespeare. 839 00:51:14,720 --> 00:51:17,200 Another time he turned up with a cricket bat. 840 00:51:17,240 --> 00:51:19,560 What are you going to do with a cricket bat? 841 00:51:22,640 --> 00:51:24,360 Of all the animals we went to see, 842 00:51:24,400 --> 00:51:27,040 my favourite was an animal called the kakapo. 843 00:51:27,080 --> 00:51:29,720 And the kakapo is a kind of parrot. 844 00:51:29,760 --> 00:51:32,080 It lives in New Zealand. 845 00:51:32,120 --> 00:51:35,080 It's a flightless parrot. 846 00:51:35,120 --> 00:51:37,640 It's forgotten how to fly. 847 00:51:37,680 --> 00:51:43,320 Sadly, it has also forgotten that it's forgotten how to fly. 848 00:51:43,360 --> 00:51:47,240 A seriously worried kakapo 849 00:51:47,280 --> 00:51:51,520 has been known to run up a tree 850 00:51:51,560 --> 00:51:54,080 and jump out of it. 851 00:51:56,440 --> 00:51:59,280 Kakapoo were one of the birds in New Zealand as many others 852 00:51:59,320 --> 00:52:02,640 which evolved to be flightless. They had nothing to be scared of. 853 00:52:02,680 --> 00:52:04,680 There were no predators in New Zealand. 854 00:52:04,720 --> 00:52:07,160 So they had no reason to fly away. 855 00:52:10,960 --> 00:52:14,480 These poor creatures would walk to a cooking pot, 856 00:52:14,520 --> 00:52:17,080 go, "Hello, everybody." 857 00:52:17,120 --> 00:52:19,680 You could just... You didn't have to run after it, 858 00:52:19,720 --> 00:52:22,480 just picked it up and put it in the pot. 859 00:52:22,520 --> 00:52:26,080 It's appallingly tragic. 860 00:52:26,120 --> 00:52:29,600 This is where evolution goes wrong. It's sensible for millions of years 861 00:52:29,640 --> 00:52:32,440 but it doesn't foresee that predators 862 00:52:32,480 --> 00:52:34,800 might move from continent to continent 863 00:52:34,840 --> 00:52:37,920 or from island to island and then suddenly you're done for. 864 00:52:49,400 --> 00:52:52,680 We got back and Douglas was staying in a villa 865 00:52:52,720 --> 00:52:54,760 in the South of France. 866 00:52:54,800 --> 00:52:57,680 We were doing a book of our travels. 867 00:52:57,720 --> 00:53:00,680 So the first morning we went to walk along the seafront, 868 00:53:00,720 --> 00:53:03,200 and talked about anything but the book. 869 00:53:03,240 --> 00:53:04,600 We sat and had a coffee. 870 00:53:04,640 --> 00:53:06,120 Still not happening. So... 871 00:53:06,160 --> 00:53:09,920 OK, well, we'll have lunch. We'll have lunch. That'll help. 872 00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:11,240 We'll have some wine. 873 00:53:11,280 --> 00:53:14,280 We'll have some wine. That'll help the creative juices to flow. 874 00:53:14,320 --> 00:53:16,520 Had a bottle of wine, wasn't really happening. 875 00:53:16,560 --> 00:53:20,280 So we had another bottle of wine and we're getting a bit drunk, so, OK, 876 00:53:20,320 --> 00:53:22,680 we're too drunk to do this now. We'll go back to the villa. 877 00:53:22,720 --> 00:53:25,880 It's very hot. We'll have a nap and it'll be cooler this evening. 878 00:53:25,920 --> 00:53:27,880 We'll start this evening. 879 00:53:27,920 --> 00:53:30,000 That went on for four months. 880 00:53:30,040 --> 00:53:34,120 And, we, I think after four months we had one page written 881 00:53:34,160 --> 00:53:36,160 which never made it into the final book. 882 00:53:36,200 --> 00:53:38,880 And in the end, the publisher got so fed up with us, 883 00:53:38,920 --> 00:53:40,880 they made us come back to London. 884 00:53:40,920 --> 00:53:43,640 They locked us in his house in Islington, and they said, 885 00:53:43,680 --> 00:53:47,120 "You're not allowed out until the book's finished." 886 00:53:47,160 --> 00:53:49,400 They didn't realise you could get out of his office 887 00:53:49,440 --> 00:53:52,360 down the drainpipe, onto the roof at the back, 888 00:53:52,400 --> 00:53:54,280 and then down and out through the back to the pub, 889 00:53:54,320 --> 00:53:56,240 which we did quite a lot. 890 00:54:02,920 --> 00:54:06,040 This really, to him, combines so much of what he loved 891 00:54:06,080 --> 00:54:08,040 because it combined the science, 892 00:54:08,080 --> 00:54:12,280 the science of conservation and environmentalism and zoology. 893 00:54:12,320 --> 00:54:14,160 He put in an enormous amount of energy 894 00:54:14,200 --> 00:54:16,840 into the charities he was involved with, 895 00:54:16,880 --> 00:54:19,640 Save the Rhino in particular. 896 00:54:21,160 --> 00:54:23,320 Douglas Adams, patron of Save the Rhino, 897 00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:27,000 joined the walk one week before the ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. 898 00:54:27,040 --> 00:54:29,840 From the first day, Douglas assumed his rhino role, 899 00:54:29,880 --> 00:54:31,560 giving the rest of the team a break 900 00:54:31,600 --> 00:54:36,560 from the overwhelming sweet smell of the costume. 901 00:54:36,600 --> 00:54:40,480 I walked with him and that was incredible. 902 00:54:40,520 --> 00:54:43,040 For him it was... 903 00:54:43,080 --> 00:54:45,040 "Look at this. Marvel at this. 904 00:54:45,080 --> 00:54:48,240 We need to do something around keeping this." 905 00:54:48,280 --> 00:54:53,280 The breadth of biodiversity we have on this planet is just astonishing. 906 00:54:53,320 --> 00:54:55,600 And he was astonished by that. 907 00:54:57,960 --> 00:55:03,240 The story goes that Douglas climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit, 908 00:55:03,280 --> 00:55:06,480 which he did not because he had to leave 909 00:55:06,520 --> 00:55:10,360 to get back because he'd missed a deadline. (LAUGHS) 910 00:55:10,400 --> 00:55:14,760 So we left them at the foothills and quickly flew home. 911 00:55:14,800 --> 00:55:18,120 That's better than any exercise bike. 912 00:55:21,880 --> 00:55:24,320 In those days many people thought conservationists 913 00:55:24,360 --> 00:55:27,400 were weird, weird people with pony tails 914 00:55:27,440 --> 00:55:29,040 and white socks in sandals. 915 00:55:29,080 --> 00:55:31,360 And, you know, it was an extreme activity. 916 00:55:31,400 --> 00:55:34,360 Celebrities weren't being used for, you know, 917 00:55:34,400 --> 00:55:40,560 promoting conservation or human rights. It was quite a novel idea. 918 00:55:40,600 --> 00:55:45,280 Lemurs used to be the dominant primate in all the world, 919 00:55:45,320 --> 00:55:49,120 and then Gondwanaland split up. 920 00:55:49,160 --> 00:55:52,680 It almost sounds like some sort of '70s rock group 921 00:55:52,720 --> 00:55:57,960 going their own way for reasons of musical differences. (LAUGHTER) 922 00:55:58,000 --> 00:56:00,280 If I was doing a lecture there'd be 50 people. 923 00:56:00,320 --> 00:56:01,960 But he'd attracted thousands, 924 00:56:02,000 --> 00:56:04,920 and he talked about it in such a way 925 00:56:04,960 --> 00:56:07,880 that people were laughing and they were crying. 926 00:56:07,920 --> 00:56:11,000 And, you know, he made conservation entertaining. 927 00:56:11,040 --> 00:56:12,520 There was nobody else like it 928 00:56:12,560 --> 00:56:15,800 that I can think of on the planet at the time, 929 00:56:15,840 --> 00:56:19,600 who was fronting conservation in a way that made people listen. 930 00:56:26,960 --> 00:56:28,680 GUIDE: One of the major selling points 931 00:56:28,720 --> 00:56:32,720 of that wholly remarkable book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 932 00:56:32,760 --> 00:56:35,000 apart from its relative cheapness 933 00:56:35,040 --> 00:56:37,960 and the fact it has "Don't Panic!" 934 00:56:38,000 --> 00:56:40,440 in large letters on the cover, 935 00:56:40,480 --> 00:56:44,360 is its compendious and occasionally accurate glossary. 936 00:56:44,400 --> 00:56:46,480 the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 937 00:56:46,520 --> 00:56:50,240 the object rather than the series of books or the radio shows, 938 00:56:50,280 --> 00:56:55,240 the actual thing itself with "Don't Panic!" in large, friendly letters, 939 00:56:55,280 --> 00:56:58,560 if that isn't an iPad or a tablet, I don't know what is. 940 00:56:58,600 --> 00:57:00,760 It's just astonishing how right he was 941 00:57:00,800 --> 00:57:03,520 that you could have an object 942 00:57:03,560 --> 00:57:05,920 that contained all the knowledge in the world, 943 00:57:05,960 --> 00:57:10,160 or in his case, all the knowledge in the galaxy, in a handheld device. 944 00:57:10,200 --> 00:57:12,560 GUIDE: Its simplistic style is partly explained 945 00:57:12,600 --> 00:57:16,040 by the fact that its editor, having to meet the publishing deadline, 946 00:57:16,080 --> 00:57:20,120 copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal. 947 00:57:20,160 --> 00:57:24,720 The idea, in 1977, '78, when he was writing that, 948 00:57:24,760 --> 00:57:28,280 that he could have seen it, is phenomenal. 949 00:57:28,320 --> 00:57:31,600 We want to be up for your high shot. 950 00:57:32,720 --> 00:57:34,520 Ford, who are you? 951 00:57:34,560 --> 00:57:37,440 I told you. I'm a field researcher for the Guide. 952 00:57:37,480 --> 00:57:39,200 I got stuck on the Earth longer than I meant. 953 00:57:39,240 --> 00:57:42,520 Went for a week, got stuck for 15 years. 954 00:57:43,720 --> 00:57:46,320 Can you lift the book higher now, Simon? 955 00:57:46,360 --> 00:57:49,240 Douglas saw very early that now people were talking about 956 00:57:49,280 --> 00:57:54,480 this thing called user-generated content. 957 00:57:54,520 --> 00:57:59,320 He wanted to see whether we could create the Earth edition, 958 00:57:59,360 --> 00:58:04,320 the real edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 959 00:58:04,360 --> 00:58:07,520 I went though a real sort of midlife crisis. 960 00:58:07,560 --> 00:58:09,480 You know, "What am I doing?" 961 00:58:09,520 --> 00:58:13,440 A little while ago, I thought, I've got to do something different. 962 00:58:13,480 --> 00:58:18,240 And so I've set up a company with a bunch of very, very bright people, 963 00:58:18,280 --> 00:58:22,240 and suddenly all the creative juices are flowing. 964 00:58:22,280 --> 00:58:25,600 The original concept was that we would have a website 965 00:58:25,640 --> 00:58:31,200 and that people would start to upload their Guide entries 966 00:58:31,240 --> 00:58:34,080 and of course it was life, the universe and everything. 967 00:58:34,120 --> 00:58:38,600 So, that idea of tens of thousands of field researchers for the Guide 968 00:58:38,640 --> 00:58:44,800 absolutely was now a possibility. 969 00:58:44,840 --> 00:58:50,400 It was an idea so radical. He said, "It's kind of an online community." 970 00:58:50,440 --> 00:58:52,240 I said, "What does that even mean?" 971 00:58:52,280 --> 00:58:55,160 He said, "Well, it's like the world is a village, 972 00:58:55,200 --> 00:58:56,880 and we can all get in touch online, 973 00:58:56,920 --> 00:58:59,640 and then we can have interesting articles 974 00:58:59,680 --> 00:59:01,760 and we can talk to each other. 975 00:59:01,800 --> 00:59:04,920 I said, "I've no idea what that even means." 976 00:59:09,080 --> 00:59:11,280 We were a little bit before Wikipedia 977 00:59:11,320 --> 00:59:14,720 and we had The Hitchhiker's Guide running on mobile phones very early. 978 00:59:14,760 --> 00:59:17,720 This was pre-smartphones that we were doing this. 979 00:59:17,760 --> 00:59:21,000 So the idea of having the Guide you could carry around in your pocket, 980 00:59:21,040 --> 00:59:22,440 we were making it real. 981 00:59:22,480 --> 00:59:25,920 We had home pages which people were able to decorate for themselves. 982 00:59:25,960 --> 00:59:28,680 We had chat functions so people could talk to each other. 983 00:59:28,720 --> 00:59:33,720 So we had this very rapidly growing community, creating the Guide. 984 00:59:33,760 --> 00:59:36,240 It was one of the big dot-com booms. 985 00:59:36,280 --> 00:59:40,040 And then we had the dot-com crash of 2000. 986 00:59:41,560 --> 00:59:44,120 A year ago there were hundreds of Internet companies 987 00:59:44,160 --> 00:59:46,920 being floated here on the Nasdaq, but not now. 988 00:59:46,960 --> 00:59:49,320 The rose-tinted spectacles have come off. 989 00:59:49,360 --> 00:59:52,000 The Emperor's new clothes have been seen through. 990 00:59:52,040 --> 00:59:54,360 The lunatics have been put back in the asylum 991 00:59:54,400 --> 00:59:56,960 and the Internet bubble, well, it's burst. 992 00:59:57,000 --> 01:00:00,280 It was a sort of combination of Google and Wikipedia 993 01:00:00,320 --> 01:00:04,080 and Facebook and Twitter, everything, all in one. 994 01:00:04,120 --> 01:00:07,120 And they just didn't quite get there 995 01:00:07,160 --> 01:00:09,720 before everybody else made billions out of it. 996 01:00:09,760 --> 01:00:12,560 The guy could have been Elon Musk and Bill Gates 997 01:00:12,600 --> 01:00:18,680 and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one. Easily. 998 01:00:21,600 --> 01:00:24,000 Now I'm here to talk about the future. 999 01:00:24,040 --> 01:00:27,920 The only thing I can tell you about the future with any confidence 1000 01:00:27,960 --> 01:00:30,240 is that I will be telling you a lot of stuff 1001 01:00:30,280 --> 01:00:32,720 that'll turn out not to be true. 1002 01:00:32,760 --> 01:00:38,480 Like a lot of people, I've just lost my own brilliant dot-com company. 1003 01:00:38,520 --> 01:00:41,640 Just like everybody else's brilliant dot-com companies, 1004 01:00:41,680 --> 01:00:44,800 it was based on the wonderful mathematical notion 1005 01:00:44,840 --> 01:00:47,680 that if you multiply zero by a sufficiently large number, 1006 01:00:47,720 --> 01:00:50,920 it'll suddenly turn into something. 1007 01:00:50,960 --> 01:00:53,880 It was a great shame, because I think we had a shot 1008 01:00:53,920 --> 01:00:57,560 at being a truly global social media company 1009 01:00:57,600 --> 01:01:00,200 coming out of this country, coming out of the UK, 1010 01:01:00,240 --> 01:01:02,360 because of the global nature of the brand. 1011 01:01:02,400 --> 01:01:05,600 But, yeah, it was, as the chief executive founder of a company 1012 01:01:05,640 --> 01:01:07,760 in that moment of the dot-com collapse, 1013 01:01:07,800 --> 01:01:10,480 it was a pretty tough experience all round for everybody. 1014 01:01:19,960 --> 01:01:24,120 I was at home in Dorset. 1015 01:01:24,160 --> 01:01:27,800 I was on the phone in the bath. 1016 01:01:27,840 --> 01:01:31,240 He'd got into being healthy and going to the gym. 1017 01:01:31,280 --> 01:01:33,800 He was in the gym. 1018 01:01:33,840 --> 01:01:37,680 He went to reach for his towel and he collapsed 1019 01:01:37,720 --> 01:01:42,400 and his trainer saw him collapse and he died immediately. 1020 01:02:01,000 --> 01:02:05,680 He died just after the first dot-com boom and bust 1021 01:02:05,720 --> 01:02:08,520 as things like Google were coming into the world 1022 01:02:08,560 --> 01:02:11,720 but six years before the iPhone. 1023 01:02:11,760 --> 01:02:14,320 He never saw an iPhone. It's hard to believe. 1024 01:02:14,360 --> 01:02:18,200 And six years before Facebook and Twitter. 1025 01:02:18,240 --> 01:02:22,280 And therefore, he never experienced 1026 01:02:22,320 --> 01:02:28,920 the weird and distressing... side of things. 1027 01:02:28,960 --> 01:02:33,840 Douglas would be disappointed, to say the least, by what has happened. 1028 01:02:33,880 --> 01:02:37,760 By the souring of it all, by the dream being tarnished. 1029 01:02:49,720 --> 01:02:51,720 Douglas imagined the future, 1030 01:02:51,760 --> 01:02:53,720 and the only word we have for it is a visionary. 1031 01:02:53,760 --> 01:02:57,400 He saw things that other people didn't see, 1032 01:02:57,440 --> 01:03:00,840 especially things that weren't yet visible to anybody 1033 01:03:00,880 --> 01:03:02,320 because they were in the future. 1034 01:03:02,360 --> 01:03:06,440 But he saw things in the present and how they could be adapted as well. 1035 01:03:06,480 --> 01:03:08,920 But to put together an idea of the future 1036 01:03:08,960 --> 01:03:13,440 is, is wonderful and a gift. 1037 01:03:18,760 --> 01:03:22,520 Douglas was brilliant at imagining many different 1038 01:03:22,560 --> 01:03:27,720 kinds of perspectives and that's, I think, his great imaginative feat. 1039 01:03:27,760 --> 01:03:29,000 He did it with humour. 1040 01:03:29,040 --> 01:03:31,640 He did it with a great affection for our absurdities 1041 01:03:31,680 --> 01:03:35,880 and the absurdities of mankind. And we're racing into a world 1042 01:03:35,920 --> 01:03:39,040 in which some of the things he imagined are now very real. 1043 01:03:43,800 --> 01:03:46,760 Douglas definitely saw the gravity of the situation 1044 01:03:46,800 --> 01:03:50,200 all those years ago, long before the situation we're in now. 1045 01:03:50,240 --> 01:03:52,840 And he was one of the first people to really bring to life 1046 01:03:52,880 --> 01:03:55,720 the fact that this is not just about 1047 01:03:55,760 --> 01:03:59,040 some extreme little interest for a small group of people. 1048 01:03:59,080 --> 01:04:03,280 This is about protecting humans and protecting life on Earth. 1049 01:04:03,320 --> 01:04:05,440 (APPLAUSE) 1050 01:04:13,720 --> 01:04:18,280 Now, imagine, if you will, an early man. 1051 01:04:19,240 --> 01:04:22,840 He's standing surveying his world, and he looks at it and thinks, 1052 01:04:22,880 --> 01:04:25,080 this is a very wonderful world I find myself in. 1053 01:04:25,120 --> 01:04:26,720 Behind me is the mountains, 1054 01:04:26,760 --> 01:04:29,040 there are caves where I can shelter. 1055 01:04:29,080 --> 01:04:30,760 In front of me there's the forest, 1056 01:04:30,800 --> 01:04:33,760 and the forest is full of nuts and berries. 1057 01:04:33,800 --> 01:04:35,200 And here's a stream. 1058 01:04:38,480 --> 01:04:41,880 This world, he says, so who made it? 1059 01:04:42,760 --> 01:04:45,640 It must be something a little bit like me. 1060 01:04:45,680 --> 01:04:49,800 Obviously much, much bigger... (RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER) 1061 01:04:49,840 --> 01:04:53,760 ..and necessarily invisible. (LAUGHTER) 1062 01:04:55,440 --> 01:05:00,800 So what did this person who made this world intend it for? 1063 01:05:00,840 --> 01:05:05,640 And this is the point where you think, well, it fits me very well. 1064 01:05:05,680 --> 01:05:08,760 He must have made it for me. 1065 01:05:11,360 --> 01:05:16,600 And it's rather like a puddle waking up 1066 01:05:16,640 --> 01:05:21,880 and thinks, this is a very interesting world I find myself in. 1067 01:05:21,920 --> 01:05:25,120 It fits me very neatly. 1068 01:05:25,160 --> 01:05:28,800 It must have been made to have me in it. (LAUGHTER) 1069 01:05:28,840 --> 01:05:33,160 And the sun rises and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking. 1070 01:05:33,200 --> 01:05:35,920 And by the time the puddle ceases to exist... (COW LOWS) 1071 01:05:35,960 --> 01:05:41,000 ..it's still trapped in this idea that the hole was there for it. 1072 01:05:41,040 --> 01:05:45,160 And if we think the world is here for us, 1073 01:05:45,200 --> 01:05:47,160 we will continue to destroy it 1074 01:05:47,200 --> 01:05:50,880 in the way that we've been destroying it. 1075 01:05:50,920 --> 01:05:55,160 And we are behaving as if this extraordinary, 1076 01:05:55,200 --> 01:05:58,560 utterly, utterly extraordinary little ball of life 1077 01:05:58,600 --> 01:06:03,440 is something we can just screw about with any way we like. 1078 01:06:05,400 --> 01:06:07,640 And maybe we can't. 1079 01:06:11,840 --> 01:06:15,440 (BEEPS OF CLOCK COUNTING DOWN) 1080 01:06:15,480 --> 01:06:18,800 Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky 88462

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