Douglas Adams: The First and Lost Tapes

This is an ebook, not an audio book. It contains many highlights from a long, rambling taped interview with DNA before he was famous. It is not an audio recording, however, nor a full verbatim transcript.... Nearly 33 years ago, a young (27) and still overdrawn Douglas Adams was poised on the brink of fame. The first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had been released (‘Escaped,’ was more the word, according to Douglas) and largely ignored in a late night slot on BBC Radio 4. It had then been repeated at a less perverse time, gathering listeners and momentum as the six episodes unfolded. But the books, the second radio series, the TV show and the long-, long-delayed movie version were still to come. 

 Douglas Adams had done a handful of short interview pieces, most of which had just pinched his jokes and ignored his opinions. But when I got the chance to spend several hours with him under cover of an unlikely feature for the soft-porn magazine Penthouse, Adams found himself with half a day to ruminate, pontificate and smoke too many cigarettes in the cluttered office where he was earning a crust as script editor for the Tom Baker-era Dr Who. The dusty cassette tapes of this historic interview were then lost from view for almost three decades, until they suddenly turned up during a once-in-a-lifetime burst of spring cleaning. Apart from the few column inches Penthouse was able to accommodate, the material on these tapes, from 1979, had lain unexplored and unpublished ever since. Parts of the interview had a brief airing in the early issues of an obscure online SF magazine in 2007, but this little book is the first time these extracts have been made available to a wider public.