Just finished reading The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Jem Roberts. I’m an Adams completist, you see, which shouldn’t be that difficult, unless you are pedantically thorough about it, which I am. From where I’m sitting I can see the radio script book, the Comic Relief book and the American edition of Life, The Universe & Everything I bought because it has a page which isn’t in the UK edition.
This biography builds on, and mostly supplants, the earlier
biographies by Neil Gaiman and Nick Webb. Pretty much all of Adams’
contributions to Gaiman’s Don’t Panic
are in The Frood, and it revisits all
of the ground covered in Wish You Were
Here a little more thoroughly, due largely to the fact that Roberts has had
access to the Adams archive.
This, has to be said, was the main selling point of this
book for me. In the appendix there are a few pages cut from the Hitchhiker’s novelisation, extracts from
the largely-abandoned first draft of Life,
The Universe and Everything, mostly various false starts, and some
discarded ideas from Mostly Harmless.
It’s all interesting stuff, and there are some witty lines and potentially
mind-boggling ideas, but it’s all clearly been rescued from Adams’ bottom
drawer.
While the books’ coverage of Adams’ pre-Hitchhiker work and the genesis and success of Hitchhiker will be familiar to readers of the other biographies –
and MJ Simpsons’ meticulous critical biography Hitchhiker – thanks to the archive material it casts new light on his
work in the early ‘80s. There are tantalizing extracts from Adams’ script for
the first episode of the second TV series of Hitchhiker and his first draft for the film (full of lengthy, witty
and almost entirely unhelpful scene descriptions). While there isn’t much more
to be discovered about his Dirk Gently books or Last Chance to See, it also reveals a few tantalizing notes about
Adams’ ‘trying to grill a steak’ years, where it turns out he found time to
develop half-a-dozen or so other projects and to write screenplays for Starship Titanic and Dirk Gently. If they come to nothing, it
would be lovely to see them published (alongside Adams’ drafts of the film and
his scripts for the TV Hitchhiker’s).
Following on, the other area where The Frood breaks new ground is in detailing Adams’ surprisingly (and
uncharacteristically) prolific posthumous career. What comes across very
strongly is that these projects are not borne out of a desire to cash in or
fleece the fans, but borne out of the fact that Adams’ work (and his own humanity)
has inspired so many people to pay tribute by carrying on his legacy,
whether by making radio adaptations, a film, stageshows, novels and novelisations,
or by checking up to see whether all those endangered species he visited in 1989 are
still around.
Of course, I have one or two quibbles. The author occasionally
referring to Adams as ‘The Frood’ is cutesy and irritating. Also cutesy and irritating
is the borderline illegible handwriting typeface used for some extracts of
Adams’ work; I can only assume this is some sort of attempt to confound people
trying to scan it in.
And it wouldn’t be an Adams book without containing a little
that was apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, in this case repeating the
story of people queuing around the block for a signing of the Hitchhiker’s novelisation at Forbidden Planet; as MJ Simpson exhaustively
covered in his biography, it didn’t quite happen like that.
In addition, wearing my Doctor
Who pedants hat (accurately speaking it’s more of a cap than a hat) there
were a some bits on his Doctor Who
work where I raised my eyebrows with a thought of ‘Really?’ For example, it makes
the common – mistake is too strong a word but it’ll have to do – of overlooking
that Graham Williams claimed to have co-written Shada; similarly, I’d be wary of attributing any specific lines
from City of Death to Adams given how
much ‘plumpening’ of the script went on by Tom and Lalla. There is also some
doubt about whether Adams wrote the feeble comedic opening scene of Destiny of the Daleks – Terry Nation was
happy to take credit for it until he realised that people didn’t like it – and,
finally, K-9 is not actually in City of
Death.
