was not. "
The first time that Douglas ever thought seriously about
writing was at the age of ten: "There was a master at school called
Halford. Every Thursday after break we had an hour's class called
composition. We had to write a story. And I was the only person
**************** Dirk: look at 6.tif! *************
EAGLE merry-go-round
EAGLE AND BOYS' WORLD 27 FEBRUARY 1965
SHORT STORY
"' London Transporrt Lost Property Office'- this is it," said Mr. Smith, looking in at the window. As he went in, he tripped over the little step and almost crashed through the glass door.
"That could be dangerous - I must remember it when I go out," he muttered.
"Can I help you?" asked the lost-property officer.
"Yes, I lost something on the 86 bus yesterday."
"Well, what was it you lost?" asked the officer.
"I'm afraid I can't remember," said Mr. Smith.
"Well, I can't help you, then," said the exasperated officer.
"Was anything found on the bus?" asked Mr Smith.
"I'm afraid not, but can you remember anything about this thing?" said the officer, desperately tryting to be helpful.
"Yes, I can remember that it was a very bad - whatever-it-was."
"Anything else?"
"Ah, yes, now I come to think of it, it was something like a sieve," said Mr. Smith, and he put his elbow on the highly polished counter and rested his chin oon his hands. Suddenly, his chin met the counter with a resounding crack. But before the officer could assist him up, Mr Smith jumped triumphantly into the air.
"Thank you very much," he said.
"What for?" said the officer.
"I've found it," said Mr. Smith
"Found what?"
"My memory!" said Mr Smith, and he turned round, tripped over the step and smashed through the glass door!
D.N.Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex.
who ever got ten out of ten for a story. I've never forgotten that.
And the odd thing is, I was talking to someone who has a kid in
the same class, and apparently they were all grumbling about how
Mr Halford never gave out decent marks for stories. And he told
them, `I did once. The only person I ever gave ten out of ten to
was Douglas Adams.' He remembers as well.
"I was pleased by that. Whenever I'm stuck on a writer's block
(which is most of the time) and 1 just sit there, and 1 can't think of
anything,I think, `Ah! But I once did get ten out of ten!' In a way
it gives me more of a boost than having sold a million copies of this
or a million of that. I think, `I got ten out of ten once. . ."'
His writing career was not always that successful.
"I don't know when the first thoughts of writing came, but it
was actually quite early on. Rather silly thoughts, really, as there
was nothing to suggest that I could actually do it. All of my life
I've been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all
writers I don't so much like writing as having written. I came
across some old school literary magazines a couple of years ago,
and I went through them to go back and find the stuff 1 was
writing then. But I couldn't find anything I'd written, which
puzzled me until 1 remembered that each time I meant to try to
write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."
He appeared in school plays, and discovered a love of
performing ("I was a slightly strange actor. There tended to be
things I could do well and other things I couldn't begin to do. . .I
couldn't do dwarves for example; I had a lot of trouble with dwarf
parts."). Then, while watching The Frost Report one evening, his
ambitions of a life well-spent as a nuclear physicist, eminent
surgeon, or professor of English began to evaporate. Douglas's
attention was caught by six-foot five-inch future Python John
Cleese, performing in sketches that were mostly self-written. "I
can do that!" thought Douglas, "I'm as tall as he is!" [Although at first glance this theory may seem flippant, a brief examination shows that thc field of British comedy is littered with incredibly tall people. John Cleese, Peter Cook, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Adams himself arc all 6'5", Frank Muir is 6'6", as is Dennis Norden.. Douglas has often mentioned that the late Graham Chapman, at only 6'3', was thus four per cent less funny than the rest. .]
In order to become a writer-performer, he had to write. This
caused problems: "I used to spend a lot of time in front of a
typewriter wondering what to write, tearing up pieces of paper
and never actually writing anything." This not-writing quality
was to become a hallmark of Douglas's later work.
But the die had been cast. Adams abandoned all his
daydreams, even those of being a rock star (he was, and indeed is;
a creditable guitarist), and set out to be a writer-performer.
He left school in December 1970, and, on the strength of an
essay on the revival of religious poetry (which brought together
on one sheet of foolscap Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley
Hopkins and John Lennon), he won an exhibition to study
English at Cambridge.
And it was important to Douglas that it was Cambridge.
Not just because his father had been to Cambridge, or simply
because he had been born there. He wanted to go to Cambridge
because it was from a Cambridge University society that the
writers and performers of such shows as Beyond the Fringe, That
Was The Week That Was, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and, of
course, many of the Monty Python's Flying Circus team had come.
Douglas Adams wanted to join Footlights.
2
Cambridge and Other
Recurrent Phenomena
BEFORE GOING UP TO CAMBRIDGE, Douglas Adams had
begun the series of jobs that would serve him on book jackets
ever after. He had decided to hitchhike to Istanbul, and in order
to make the money to travel he worked first as a chicken-shed
cleaner, then as a porter in the X-ray department of Yeovil
General Hospital (while at school he had worked as a porter in a
mental hospital).
The hitchhike itself was not spectacularly successful:
although he reached Istanbul, he contracted food poisoning there,
and was forced to return to England by train. He slept in the
corridors, felt extremely sorry for himself, and was hospitalised
on his return to England. Perhaps it was a combination of his
illness with the hospital work he had been doing, but on his
arrival home he began to feel guilty for not going on to study
medicine.
"I come from a somewhat medical family. My mother was a
nurse, my stepfather was a vet, and my father's father (whom I
never actually met) was a very eminent ear nose and throat
specialist in Glasgow. I kept working in hospitals as well. And I
had the feeling that, if there is Anyone Up There, He kept tapping
me on the shoulder and saying, `Oy! Oy! Get your stethoscope
out! This is what you should be doing!' But I never did."
Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a
writer-performer (although at least four top British writer-
performers have been doctors - Jonathan Miller, Graham
Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman) and in part
because it would have m
eant going off for another two years to
get a new set of A-levels. Douglas went on to study English
literature at St John's College, Cambridge.
Academically, Douglas's career was covered in less than
glory, although he is still proud of the work he did on
Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet.
"For years Smart stayed at Cambridge as the most drunken
and lecherous student they'd ever had. He used to do drag revues
drank in the same pub that I did. He went from Cambridge to
Grub Street, where he was the most debauched journalist they
had ever had, when suddenly he underwent an extreme religious
conversion and did things like falling on his knees in the middle
of the street and praying to God aloud. It was for that that he was
thrust into a loony bin, in which he wrote his only work, the
Jubilate Agno, which was as long as Paradise Lost, and was an
attempt to write the first Hebraic verse in English."
Even as an undergraduate, Douglas was perpetually missing
deadlines: in three years he only managed to complete three
essays. This however may have had less to do with his fabled
lateness than with the fact that his studies came in a poor third to
his other interests - performing and pubs.
Although Douglas had gone to Cambridge with the intention
of joining Footlights, he was never happy with them, nor they
with him. His first term attempt to join Footlights was a failure
- he found them "aloof and rather pleased with themselves"
and, being made to feel rather a `new boy', he wound up joining
CULES (Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society)
and doing jolly little shows in hospitals, prisons, and the like.
These shows were not particularly popular (especially not in the
prisons), and Douglas now regards the whole thing with no little
embarrassment.
In his second term, feeling slightly more confident, he
auditioned with a friend called Keith Jeffrey at one of the
Footlights `smokers' - informal evenings at which anybody could
get up and perform. "It was there that I discovered that there was
one guy, totally unlike the rest of the Footlights Committee, who
was actually friendly and helpful, all the things the others weren't,
a completely nice guy named Simon Jones. He encouraged me, and
from then on I got on increasingly well in Footlights.
"But Footlights had a very traditional role to fulfil: it had to
produce a pantomime at Christmas, a late-night revue in the
middle term, and a spectacular commercial show at the end of
every year, as a result of which it couldn't afford to take any risks.
"I think it was Henry Porter, a history don who was
treasurer of Footlights, who said that the shows that had gone on
to become famous were not the Cambridge shows but subsequent
reworkings. Beyond the Fringe wasn't a Footlights show, neither
was Cambridge Circus (the show that launched John Cleese et
al), it wasn't the Cambridge show but a reworking done after
they'd all left Cambridge. Footlights shows themselves had to
fight against the constraints of what Footlights had to produce
every year. "
Douglas rapidly earned a reputation for suggesting ideas that
struck everyone else as hopelessly implausible. He felt strait-
jacketed by Footlights (and by the fact that nobody in Footlights
seemed to feel his ideas were particularly funny) and, with two
friends, he formed a `guerilla' revue group called Adams-Smith-
Adams (because two members of the group were called Adams,
and the third, as you might already have guessed, was called
Smith)". (Will Adams joined a knitwear company upon leaving university; Martin Smith
went into advertising, and was later immortalised as `bloody Martin Smith of
Croydon' in a book written by Douglas.)
As Douglas explained, "We invested all our money - $40, or
whatever it was - in hiring a theatre for a week, and then we knew
we had to do it. So we wrote it, performed it, and had a
considerable hit with it. It was a great moment. I really loved that."
It was then that Douglas made an irrevocable decision to become a writer. This was to cause him no little anguish and
aggravation in the years to come.
The show was called Several Poor Players Strutting and
Fretting, and this extract from the programme notes has the
flavour of early Douglas Adams:
By the time you've read the opposite page (cast and credits)
you'll probably be feeling restive and wondering when the
show will start. Well, it should start at the exact moment that
you read the first word of the next sentence. If it hasn't started
yet, you're reading too fast. If it still hasn't started, you're
reading much too fast, and we can recommend our own book
`How To Impair Your Reading Ability', written and published
by Adams-Smith-Adams. With the aid of this slim volume, you
will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing
within a very short space of time. The more you read, the
slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end,
which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought!
The following year Adams-Smith-Adams (aided in performance
by the female presence of Margaret Thomas, who, the programme
booklet declared, was `getting quite fed up with the improper
advances that are continually being made to her by the other
three, all of whom are deeply and tragically in love with her')
took to the stage again in their second revue, The Patter of Tiny
Minds. These shows were popular, packed out, and generally
considered to be somewhat better than the orthodox Footlights'
offerings.
Douglas considers his favourite sketches of this period to be
one about a railway signalman who caused havoc over the entire
Southern Region by attempting to demonstrate the principles of
existentialism using the points system, and another of which he
says, "It's hard to describe what it was about - there was a lot of
stuff about cat-shaving, which was very bizarre but seemed quite
funny at the time."
It was shortly after this that Douglas Adams gave up
performing permanently to concentrate on writing; this was due
to his continuing upset with Footlights, and specifically with the
1974 Footlights Show. As he explains, "It is something that
happened with Footlights that I still get upset about, because I
think that Footlights should be a writer-performer show. But, in
my day, Footlights became a producer's show. The producer says
who's going to be in it, and who he wants to write it, they are
appointed and the producer calls the tune. I think that's wrong,
that it's too artificial. My year in Footlights was full of immensely
talented people who never actually got the chance to work
together properly.
"In my case, Footlights came to us - Adams-Smith-Adams
- and said, `Can we use all this material that the three of you
have written?' and we said, `Fine, okay', whereupon they said,
`But we don't want you to be in it'."
As things turned out, Martin Smith did appear in the show,
(alongside Griff Rhys Jones and future Ford Prefect, Geoffrey
McGivern) but neither of the Adamses appeared, something that
Douglas Adams is still slightly bitter about.
Douglas was still hitchhiking over Europe, and taking
strange jobs to pay for incidentals. In another bid to get to
Istanbul, he took a job building barns, during the course of which
he crashed a tractor, which broke his pelvis, ripped up his arm,
and damaged the road so badly it needed to be repaired. He
wound up in hospital once more, but knew that it was far too late
for him to become a doctor.
In Summer 1974, Douglas Adams left Cambridge: young,
confident, and certain that the world would beat a path to his
door, that he was destined to change the face of comedy across
the globe.
Of course it would, and he did. But it did not seem that way
at the time.
3
The Wilderness Years
FOLLOWING HIS GRADUATION from Cambridge, Douglas
Adams began doing the occasional office job, working as a filing
clerk while trying to work out what to do with the rest of his life.
He wrote a number of sketches for Weekending - a radio show
that satirises the events, chiefly political, of the past week. Due to
his inability to write to order, and the fact that, although many of
his sketches were funny, they were unlike anything ever
broadcast on the show before, almost none of these sketches ever
went out on the air.
The Footlights show of that year, Chox, not only got to the
West End - the first Footlights show in a long time to do so-
but it was also televised (Adams remembers fondly the enormous
sum of $100 he was paid for the television rights to his sketches).
The show was, in Adams's words, "a dreadful flop", but a
number of former Footlights personnel came to see it.
Among them was Graham Chapman. Chapman was a six
foot three inch-tall doctor who, instead of practising medicine,
found himself part of the Monty Python team (he was Arthur in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Brian in Monty Python's
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