Needless to say, Adams enthusiastically agreed, and contributed to sketches in episodes 42 (‘The Light Entertainment War’), 44 (‘Mr Neutron’), and 45 (‘Party Political Broadcast On Behalf Of The Liberal Party’). For a brief moment it seemed that he had achieved his ambition, but the offers of work disappeared as swiftly as they had arrived, and his once successful pitches were met with rebuttals – a harsh but valuable reminder of the fickle nature of his chosen career.
“I left Cambridge and got in with the Pythons and everyone said, ‘God, he’s doing terribly well’,” he told Penthouse in 1979. “Then everything fell down, desperately hard, and I thought, ‘Here I am, aged 24, and I’m totally washed up. This is it.’ At that stage I felt the last two years or so had been a total waste of time. I hadn’t got anywhere and nothing had happened. I thought, ‘I’m not a writer, I can’t survive this business.’”
After the honeymoon with Monty Python ended, Adams was forced into myriad odd-jobs to make ends meet. One biography lists “a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken-shed cleaner and bodyguard,” but all the while he kept writing sketches and sending them to the few institutions in Britain at the time that might pay him. One of the ‘few’ was the BBC, and more specifically the BBC radio producer Simon Brett, who found Adams’ humour very much to his taste and included it in his programmes Week Ending and The Burkiss Way.
By this time, Adams had become passionate about embarking on a project that fused science fiction and comedy. During his brief tenure on the outer-fringes of the Pythons, around 1975, Ringo Starr had commissioned Adams and Graham Chapman to write a one-hour, sci-fi/comedy TV special for him, to be shown exclusively in America. It was never put into production.
A year later, the Robert Stigwood Organisation – the company behind Saturday Night Fever – approached them to write a treatment for a science-fiction film. Once again, the idea fell at the first hurdle. “They eventually stopped that project because, as they said, ‘We don’t think there’s a market for science-fiction films’,” Adams recalled to Penthouse. “As it turned out, this was about 12 months before Star Wars… I’d finally given up on the idea of science-fiction comedy, simply because no one was interested.”
Nobody except for Simon Brett, that is, and when Adams was called into Brett’s office and told, “I’d like to do a science-fiction comedy, and I think you might be the guy to do it,” he promptly fell out of his chair. At least, he does in one version of the story, and we very much prefer it that way.
Adams had the commission he’d been waiting for, now all he needed was an idea, and his head was swimming with them. “I had quite a lot of separate ideas in my mind, each of which involved the end of the world,” he told Penthouse, “so we thought we were going to do six, independent half-hour stories, each ending with the end of the world. It was going to be called The Ends Of The Earth, or something.”
Without warning, a long-buried memory forced its way to the surface of his consciousness. In 1970, Adams had embarked on a trip around Europe while he waited to start his course at Cambridge. One day, he found himself in a small town near Innsbruck in Austria, stopped a passerby to ask for directions, and after a protracted effort to make himself understood, realised the person he was talking very loud and very bad German at was deaf. He found another person, but they were also deaf. He tried a third, and they were deaf and dumb.
Fearing he might be losing his sanity, Adams stumbled down the nearest alleyway, where he found a venue with a large sign out front: it was advertising an annual meeting for people with hearing disabilities. Confronted with such a surreal turn of events, Adams did what most English people of his age would have done: he bought some cheap beer and got drunk. Later, as he lay on his back staring blearily at the stars, he wondered if anyone would ever write a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. “Having had this thought,” he recalled, “I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.”
Next: The Hitchhiker’s Guide, novelisations and unprecedented growth…
