'Lying drunk in a field': Douglas Adams on the unlikely origins of the cult space comedy that inspired Elon Musk

Douglas Adams's epic series of comic novels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is loved by scientists and tech executives, including Elon Musk. In 1986, the author talked to the BBC about the unlikely origins of a wildly successful multimedia franchise.

Imagine waking up on what seems to be an ordinary morning on planet Earth, only to find out that the planet is scheduled to be demolished. That is where British writer Douglas Adams begins The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Over the next few decades, the story would take on a life of its own, spinning out into a sprawling franchise that now includes a bestselling book series, a television series, a feature film, stage shows, comic books and even a video game. It would also spark endless philosophical debates about the universe, and leave an indelible mark on pop culture. And it all began as a small BBC radio comedy.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy revolves around the misadventures of Arthur Dent, an ordinary man from a sleepy English village who finds out that some bureaucratic aliens are about to obliterate the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Dent and his friend, an alien-in-disguise named Ford Prefect, hitch a ride on a spaceship to escape the planet's destruction. Together with a motley crew comprising a two-headed space president, another Earth survivor and a depressed robot, they engage in hijinks across the galaxy while collecting research for an interplanetary encyclopedia, the eponymous Hitchhiker's Guide.

While the story encompasses scientific intricacies and complex ideological layers, the idea of Hitchhiker's came to Adams in 1971 while he was "lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck", he told Terry Wogan on the latter's BBC chat show in 1986. Inebriated beneath the swirling stars, clutching a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, Adams decided that someone should devise a similar guidebook to the whole of the Milky Way.

By 1977, Adams had written for several radio shows, and was given the chance to pitch his own to the BBC. His first idea was for a six-episode anthology called The Ends of the Earth, in which each episode would have the Earth ending in a different way. Adams would eventually return to the idea of the guide as the story's focus. "I never actually thought of myself as a science-fiction writer," he told Wogan. "I thought myself primarily a comedy writer, and I became a science-fiction writer simply because I exaggerated so much."

Hitchhiker was the first radio comedy programme produced in stereo instead of in front of a live studio audience. The project was briefly listed as a radio drama, as the BBC only allowed dramas to be recorded in stereo. "[Adams] knew the music, he knew the sound he wanted, he knew what the end of the world was going to sound like," producer Simon Brett told BBC Bookclub in 2000. Adams and Brett cast actors Simon Jones and Geoffrey McGivern as Dent and Prefect, with Peter Jones narrating the part of "The Book".

The programme was quietly launched late on a Wednesday night in March 1978, and received mixed reviews. One listener complained to the Radio Times, calling the episode "fatuous, inane, childish, pointless, codswalloping drivel". But it was also praised for its fascinating concept and its innovative and "richly textured" music and effects.

BBC Enterprises turned down the chance to publish a novel based on the series, but Nick Webb, who was an editor at Pan Books, commissioned Adams to adapt his story. "I thought [Hitchhiker's] was verbally witty and dexterous, and full of philosophical jokes – and I'm a sucker for philosophical jokes – but he had also a trick of sort of extrapolating something in a completely rational way, to a point of madness," Webb told BBC Bookclub. "Then you would scratch your head and scratch your bum and think, 'Well, what exactly is the intellectual trick that has been played upon you?' Because inference-by-inference everything makes sense, but you get to a point of surreal absurdity."

Ultimately, Adams would write five Hitchhiker's books, along with two radio series and a television show. The franchise built a cult following – although its fans weren't always open about loving what was seen in the 1980s as an unfashionably geeky genre. "People never like to admit it, actually," said Adams. "Whenever I do book signing sessions… men come along and say, 'Would you sign this please, it's for my little boy?' And then you'd get little boys come along and say, 'Would you sign this please, it's for my father?'"

Nonetheless, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy now has devotees all around the world, and the book has been translated into more than 30 languages. Dedicated fans celebrate Towel Day annually on 25 May as a tribute to Adams, who wrote: "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." In 1999, he founded a community forum called h2g2, also known as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition, where people could contribute entries to a real-time collection of titbits and vignettes about life on Earth.

Some fans are drawn to Hitchhiker's particularly for its philosophical insights and applications to future technologies. Google's artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind was named in homage to Adams's Deep Thought, a supercomputer that, in the story, calculates the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. One of the series' best jokes is how unhelpful the answer is: it's the number 42.

Tesla founder Elon Musk has not been shy about his adoration for Adams, calling the writer the "best philosopher ever" and noting the story is "so deep that people don't even understand". The book helped the tech figure through an existential crisis as a teenager, he told journalist Alison van Diggelen in 2013. "It highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer," he said. The story fuelled Musk's lofty ambitions for humanity's multiplanetary future, and in 2018 he launched a Tesla car into space with a copy of the novel in the glove compartment, and a sign on the dashboard featuring one of its key phrases: "Don't panic!" However, critics have argued that Musk misunderstands Adams' work, with Harvard historian Jill Lepore writing in The New Yorker that Hitchhiker's is a "razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism".

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In 2001, Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49. At the time, he was working on the script for the first feature-length film of his story, which would be released posthumously in 2005. After Adams's death, the BBC commissioned four more series of the Hitchhiker's radio series. In 2009, author Eoin Colfer, with the support of Adams's estate, went on to pen a sixth book in the series, And Another Thing…

The spirit of Adams's space comedy lives on in other forms of popular culture. Such motifs as the number 42 and "Don't Panic" can be found in various science-fiction works, including Doctor Who, Star Trek, Lost and The X-Files. The Hitchhiker's spirit lives on in technology, too, as Adams's fictional inventions continue to crop up in the real world. "I'm not particularly worried about whether something you invent is actually going to happen or whatever," he said. "I'm making fun of the people who are then going to use it."

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