Avid followers of my weekly ramblings (by which of course I mean hello Mum) may well have noticed liberal sprinklings of Douglas Adams over the past month or so, and I feel that it is now high time I put a stop to it. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with quoting Douglas Adams I hasten to add, after all they do say that if you're going to steal you should steal from the best; but I like to think-- well, I at least like to try, to produce something that, whatever else its failings, hopefully isn't impossibly cliquey, and I have to grudgingly acknowledge that not every ape-descendant on this small blue green planet has read/heard/seen anything of Mr Adams. I have tried to just stop "cold turkey" (what a strange expression...) yet somehow I keep writing myself opportunities to slip in just one more, and so it goes on. In a bid, then, to get it all out of my system, this column is not related to either my childhood or my child, nor is it a further Meldrewesque rant along the lines of last week's tirade. Instead it is likely to turn into a winsomely gushing attempt to both praise Douglas Adams and to get him out of my writing system. I think this is the only way to do it - this time it's right, it will work, and no one will have to get nailed to anything.

Originally I was going to wax lyrical (well, wax anyway) about how and when I first came across "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" via the TV show, and how I subsequently progressed to the books. I could tell you when and where and with who I saw and read each book, and how I finally got hold of the radio series. I could go on and on about the fact that I was amazed to find stuff in the radio series which had never made it to page or screen and was thus 'brand new' to me - so amazed in fact that surprise was no longer adequate, and I was forced to resort to astonishment. Indeed, not only was I going to do that, but in fact I already have, and elsewhere in the bowels of my PC (metaphorically downstairs in the cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory) is nearly three pages of a not-yet finished ramble doing just that.

(You may note that we've only got through two paragraphs so far and I've shamelessly bunged in a further four references at least. This is getting out of hand.)

But coming back to my original version and re-reading it, it was quite apparent that I'd rather missed the point of the exercise. A page and a half into it, and the name Douglas Adams hadn't even appeared - I had spewed out something solely about THHGTTG and hardly at all about DNA. And in a piece supposedly exorcising the author, I had turned out something about his work in isolation, as if it had leapt into existence of its own volition.

Not that the two (the author and the work) should, or indeed could, necessarily be seen as two separate entities, but I want to try and discuss the writer rather than the writing on this occasion. If I was particularly mercenary (which is not beyond the realms of possibility) I could probably split up my other piece and recycle it into a trilogy of five separate articles; even more appropriately I could just delete it. But either way, the aim of this piece is not simply to praise up the story of THHGTTG but to try and work out why exactly I find the writing of it by Douglas Adams so engaging.

I actually picked up the novel of THHGTTG recently and started to read it, but I stopped fairly early on. For one thing, it is almost impossible to read it now without hearing Peter Jones narrating the story. (As an aside, my favourite THHGTTG anecdote is the one about casting the part of the book on the original radio show - apparently they spent a long time looking for somebody with a 'Peter Jonesey' voice, before somebody finally suggested that perhaps Peter Jones might be a suitable candidate! Ironically of course, with the death of Peter Jones, the new radio series has had to do that very thing, and find somebody other than the man himself with a 'Peter Jonesey' voice. They have come across William Franklyn who, if I'm thinking of the right man, used to do the adverts for 'Sh! you know who'. If it is indeed him then all in all it's not a bad choice.)

Far more interestingly, though, while reading the book I found myself struck by the fact that we (well, I at least) are almost too familiar with the first book of THHGTTG - the book, and episodes 1-4 of both the radio & TV series are all very, very similar. There are interesting differences between the three forms, but these are comparatively minor. Certainly there is an awful lot more that is the same than isn't. Consequently, and this will sound ludicrous, when reading it the other day I had to make an almost conscious effort to remember that it was funny.

That sounds like a sly insult, but it really isn't. Take the character Ford Prefect. More than twenty-five years on, and we are so used to that being his name that I think we tend to forget it is actually a 'gag'. Indeed, I'm prepared to bet that there are some people who've read the books or seen/heard the show who don't even realise that it is a joke. It's not unlike the police box effect - that shape is now immortalised as a TARDIS, so whenever anybody makes a period drama set during the period from, what, 1930-1970, even though police boxes would have been in evidence at the time, you never, ever see one. Nobody goes to the effort of putting some up in the background so as to make it look authentic, because the moment the audience sees a police box they will instantly switch off from the plot and go, "Ooh look, there's a TARDIS!" In other words, the origin of the object (or in Ford's case, the name) has become superseded by the success of the thing that has adopted it.

But it's not just obvious jokes like that. Douglas Adams' writing has a definite rhythm to it, one that even of itself is somehow humorous, or at least not entirely serious - the balancing of short and long words, the sound and the metre of the lines, has an irony to it (one, incidentally, fully enhanced by Peter Jones' voice - it really was a perfectly cast performance). I can pick a dozen examples from the earlier parts of the first book where familiarity had made me insensitive to just how funny they are. The lunacy of the submezon brain needing to be suspended in a Brownian motion producer ("say a nice hot cup of tea"), the business about humans being so primitive "that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea", the whole, "space is big" routine... There are so many stunningly polished pieces of narrative, which I have heard and read so many times, that it doesn't register any more just how solidly and beautifully crafted they are.

Which is perhaps why, a page or more in, I haven't really started to get to why I rate Douglas Adams so highly, other than some vague and unhelpful comments of the "oh he's really funny" variety. The humour, yes, certainly, but you don't just come away from Adams' writing grinning and laughing; at his best, he sends you on your way thinking as well. The rather extravagant blurb for the "Hitchhiker" biography describes him as "one of the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century" which, with all due respect, is surely nonsense. That's not to say he wasn't clearly a very deep and intelligent thinker - but I think you'd be hard-pressed to demonstrate that he has had much lasting influence on the world in general.

But nevertheless, the horrendous hyperbole of publishing aside (incidentally, that's somewhat of a steal from Doctor Who, for a bit of variety) he clearly was a very, very clever thinker. Going back to the first episode of THHGTTG, there is a superb piece about the Babel Fish. Part of the initial inspiration for the first radio series, it seems to me, was simply a light-hearted take on sci-fi, and one of the universal conventions with TV and films of that genre is that all the aliens speak English. (If the programme is made in England or America that is; if made in Guatemala then presumably the aliens would all speak Guatemalan. But you take my point.) OK, Doctor Who did once make an off-hand attempt to rationalise this as "a Timelord gift", and occasionally Star Trek will have an alien they can't quite understand, but in general it is just an accepted convention, a natural successor to all those war films where the Germans speak English with a German accent rather than, as might seem more likely, actually speaking German. However, Adams doesn't just lazily adopt this tradition for narrative convenience. No, no, he creates... the Babel Fish.

The Babel Fish. In plot terms you stick it in your ear, and it translates any alien tongue into your own language, and vice versa when you speak. We get some pseudo science to explain this, based on the language heard working to decipher the brain wave matrix (the fish being telepathic, do you see). But we then get... well, a flash of genius to be quite honest. Although I'm trying to stop myself quoting, the only real way to illustrate this is to quote verbatim:

What so impresses me about stuff like that is not just the inspired logic of the piece (ie, within its own context it is meticulously rational and makes perfect sense) but the almost casual way that it's thrown into the text. If I had produced an argument like that I would sit on my behind and be very pleased with myself, and would then try to conjure up a plot around just that one piece of genius. But in Douglas Adams case it seems that he can knock out such stunningly memorable exchanges on an all-too regular basis. Although the biography reinforces the fact that it was only usually due to the almost physical threats of his publishers that he ever sat down to write at all, he was by no means lazy in his writing - lazy in wanting to avoid it perhaps, but never in what he produced. There is also the suggestion in the biography that at times the writing wasn't the result of deep creative thought, but sheer desperation to just get something, anything, down on the page. Maybe that's true - but if it is, it surely makes the brilliance of the above and its ilk (and there's an awful lot of ilk like that) even more staggering.

Another reason for not just hanging a "Douglas Adams is really really good" argument on the back of a long ramble about my encounters with THHGTTG is that, although most well-known for that, he wasn't just a one-trick pony. Before the first radio series had even been commissioned I think, he had written for Doctor Who. His story was called "The Pirate Planet" and although fandom is rather divided on it (reaction tends to fall into either the love it or loathe it camps) it is clearly bursting with ideas. Almost too many in fact - Douglas Adams once (maybe several times, what am I, his biographer?!) remarked that he had wanted to do it as a six-parter rather than, as it ended up, a standard four parts. This may account for why the final episode is particularly full of explanation after explanation, leaving the audience almost worn out by the end. But regardless of whether it's too jokey for Doctor Who, or whether it's structured badly in terms of the rushed last episode, or whether the direction is a bit lame, or whatever sticks Doctor Who fans might find to beat it with, I think it's fairly safe to say that as a story it is full of dazzling ideas - a hollow planet that absorbs other worlds at its core; a cyborg captain who is apparently a blustering idiot but is in fact planning a carefully orchestrated; an aged tyrant queen whose moment of death is forever postponed by huge time dams...

Indeed, on the basis of that story Douglas progressed to the staff job of script editor for the entire of the next series of "Doctor Who". I won't dwell on this at length, but in a nutshell that season (the seventeenth) was my favourite as a child, and remains so to this day. In fan circles, it tends to provoke the self-same reaction as his original story - people either love it or they hate it. But whenever it comes up on the Message Boards, one argument I always trot out in its defence is that the stories are absolutely FULL OF IDEAS.

Ideas. No good writing can do without those - Terry Pratchett of Discworld fame has the same brilliance with ideas, producing absurdities but deftly sewing them into reality so that they make perfect sense. And that was what Douglas Adams had, and what his books (and radio/TV shows of course) still have. I won't, although I could, list many more examples, but rather I'll urge you to pick up at least the first THHGTTG book, especially if you are not that familiar with it, and marvel at the furious logic that drives Ford & Arthur's survival in the total vacuum of space. Whereas your run of the mill sci-fi show gets away with mere coincidence as a matter of course, here Adams justifies every coincidental twist at this point in his story as being the inevitable effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive - created, incidentally, with the aid of "a fresh cup of really hot tea". Or forget that you've ever read it before, and then marvel at the Slartibartfast sequences, with his fjords, his awards, and 42. It's very funny, even if I had forgotten that it is, but it isn't just a few idle one-liners strung together.

That's not to say, and I know I've gone on at some length but I can assure you the end is nigh, that Douglas Adams started off on page one of THHGTTG as a polished, perfected genius and remained that way. The first and particularly the second radio series have their faults, certainly. In the first, the latter two episodes aren't quite as funny, ironically because of the need to start work on the actual plot (the first four episodes seem to float around like a road movie, whereas the last two try to tie up the narrative structure). The second series has dreadfully weak scenes involving the shoe event horizon (yes, you heard me!) and clones; but equally it has breathtaking invention in spades. (Oh and John Le Mesurier pops up too.) As a cryptic method of sending you all scurrying off to listen to the radio series, let me tantalisingly remark that two of my favourites from the second series are the cup held in place by art, and the whole Man in the Shack scene which is just beyond my ability to describe.

But if he started off with just the occasional miss to accompany the hits, Douglas Adams writing if anything got better and better. As mentioned above the first series has, in the main, a very rambling structure (possibly one of the reasons why a big-screen film has been so very hard to script); but the latter books all show an increasing prowess with plot and structure. From a flippant comment ("Oh no not again") in episode three of series one, via the Agrajag interlude in "Life, the Universe and Everything" (another elusive trailer - a great bit in there is the explanation of how to fly...), the fifth novel finally ends with an absolutely dazzling tie-up, beautifully set up, expertly played for, and breathtaking in its execution. Like a countdown reaching zero, the whole thing suddenly fits together at the last moment. You could almost take it as a carefully thought out plan right from the off, except that it clearly wasn't.

The last two books ("So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" and "Mostly Harmless") have often been compared unfavourably with the earlier novels. It's certainly true that SLATFATFish is a much slimmer story, fleshed out to novel size by using an absurdly large typeface (a trick employed at one time or another by every schoolchild in the country), and it's also true that it's very different in style to the previous Hitch-Hiker tales. In fact, you could almost describe it as primarily a love story, albeit a somewhat unusual one, as it is at least as concerned with Arthur the person as it is with what happens to him. It is a striking change of direction, and I can see why it was unpopular. Personally I like the change of pace, and it gives Adams a chance to flex some different writing muscles. The same is true of the final book, where Arthur discovers he has a daughter - there is a delicate mix of emotion and absurdity in this last novel which I think works superbly well.

Hmm...

I'm not sure I've done what I set out to do, as I seem to have come back to THHGTTG after all. Perhaps it's not possible to rave about the writer without referencing his writings - but if I can put across one thing, let it be that I think Douglas Adams had two major abilities with his novels. From wherever, he was able to produce ideas that mixed the absurd with the real, expanding or twisting or enlarging upon our world to make a slightly skew other world. And he could write prose that flowed, that threw out humour and wit quite smoothly and naturally. The combination of the two is what makes his books so very, very readable. If you haven't read them before (and I know my Mum hasn't, shame on her) then get on and do so. And if you have, then read them again. Or listen to the radio shows. Or watch the TV series.

Next week I hope to have freed myself from quoting Douglas Adams, and also from being such a gushing groupie. This exercise in adulation will, I suspect, be very much a one-off, so...

...Don't Panic.

21st February 2004