It's weird. I just got off a flight to Toronto and I just watched most of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" recent movie on the plane -- like it or lump it, but Adams worked on the script and I loved it.
Anyway, what shows up when I hit the hotel room and log in? A very cool lost Douglas Adams interview...
" ...I had quite a lot of separate plots in my mind, each of which involved the end of the world, so we thought we were going to do six independent half hour stories, each ending with the end of the world. The thing was going to be called The Ends of the Earth, or something. Then I suddenly remembered what had struck me six years previously – but I hadn't done anything about it and hadn't even remembered in the intervening time – which was when I had been hitchhiking around Europe, when I was a student or just before I went up to Cambridge, I had this book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. And I remember wandering into a campsite in Innsbruck late one night, being not entirely sober, and the stars were all out and I just remember thinking at that time 'Somebody should write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.'
"But being congenitally unable to see a good idea when it was staring me in the face, I didn't do anything about it for another six years. Anyway, then I did a treatment, describing what the show was going to be about, and it took a while for that to go through the [BBC] system. By this stage, I'd gone back and lived at home with my parents in Dorset. And then the BBC came back and said 'OK, write a first episode.' So I wrote a first episode, and that also took a while to go through, and then they came back and said 'Yes, OK. Go ahead and make it.'"
There was no practice round. That first episode was the actual first episode, complete with bulldozers, Vogons, Ford Prefect, "Lucky escape for Arsenal", and, of course, the end of the Earth. The reaction was, for a surprisingly long time, silence.
http://www.darkermatter.com/issue1/douglas_adams.php
