Douglas Noel Adams was making rapid progress through his teenage years before the thought of a career in writing entered his head. A bright student at the pleasingly middle-class Brentwood School in Essex, he was a stalwart of the top-stream in a number of subjects, and had chosen to specialise in the Arts in the sixth form.
Adams had brushed up against the sort of experiences that might enflame a budding author’s imagination on several occasions; he had a short story published in the UK comic The Eagle in 1965, for example, and made regular, well-received contributions to Broadsheet, the school magazine. Yet it took a day just like any other to kick-start Adams’ future, when he was given the only perfect mark his English teacher would see fit to award in his entire career. Even as a multi-millionaire suffering from writer’s block in California, he would still look back on that moment as a reminder that he had talent enough to succeed.
This is not to say that English teachers named Frank Halford were the only influences on Adams’ creative development, of course. “One day I saw John Cleese on The Frost Report,” Adams recalled in a 1979 interview with Penthouse. “It was the first time I’d seen him on television, and I thought, ‘Aha, that’s what I want to be’.” And for an up-and-coming comedic talent in the dying days of the Sixties, there was only one place to turn: Cambridge university, and its legendary culture of writers, entertainers and performers.
“It’s not so much that people get there and then suddenly get careers in comedy,” he told Gregg Pearlman in 1987. “But people who have that natural bent think, ‘Well, that’s where I’ll go because that’s where I’ll meet like-minded people.’ Certainly, that was very much in my mind: as far as I was concerned I went to Cambridge to join Footlights.”
One startlingly brave entrance essay on religious poetry later – in which Adams discussed William Blake, The Beatles, and all stops in between – he was awarded a place at St John’s College to read English. A premature attempt to join Footlights was swiftly rebuked, but through grit, determination, and his involvement with the rival comedy troupe Adams-Smith-Adams, he finally gained entrance to the venerable institution that had schooled so many of his heroes.
“When I was at Cambridge, I wanted to be a writer and a performer – I very much had [Monty Python] in my sights,” Adams reminded Pearlman, “but for some reason the world wasn’t that keen on me being a performer. And probably quite rightly.”
But his enthusiasm for Footlights began to pay dividends almost immediately after his graduation in 1974. As was the custom at the time, an edited version of the Footlights Revue was screened on BBC Two and performed onstage in London’s West End, where it attracted the attention of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman. A short time later, Chapman contacted Adams and asked him to write some material for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
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