Douglas Adams predicted our digital world – AI and all – but "found life extraordinarily difficult"

And yet, as the film shows, Adams was often unhappy and found it very hard to write anything. We spoke to John Lloyd, his former flatmate and the creator, writer or producer of Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder, QI and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, about why Adams may be the last great sci-fi satirist.

John, why is Douglas Adams still so influential 24 years after his death, in 2001, aged only 49?

"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy takes its name from an electronic 'book' in the story that is an iPhone crossed with Wikipedia. Douglas imagined this in 1978, many years before the internet. He imagined AI, lifts that talk to us and many of the things we live with today, when they didn’t exist at the time. And he predicted them in a funny and imaginative way. For people like [Apple’s] Steve Jobs and [Microsoft’s] Paul Allen, it was huge. He became friends with them and because they were a bit younger than him, they idolised his prescience."

You don't mention this in the programme, but you are credited as co-writer on Hitchhiker's.

"Douglas was my best friend. After writing four episodes of Hitchhiker’s, which took him 11 months, he was desperate. Eventually he said, 'Can you help me out?' We wrote the last two episodes in three weeks. It was fun. Then when the series went out, it was an instant hit. Publishers begged us to sign with them, which eventually we did for £3,000, a lot in 1978.

"Then I got a letter from Douglas, who, at that time, had an next office to me. It said, 'I think it’s best I write this on my own.' I was heartbroken. I couldn't understand what had happened. Eventually, after a considerable struggle, I got half the advance, and we cautiously became friends again. It was the first real disaster of my life, but for Douglas, it was the beginning of his fame and wealth."

How did success affect him?

"He'd get an advance for a million quid, be incredibly happy and have parties. And then, as deadlines came trundling towards him, he’d get unhappy and desperate and want to see his old friends. Famously, when he was trying to finish one of the books, his publisher Sonny Mehta, boss of Pan, knocked on his door at eight o’clock in the morning, made him pack a bag, took him to a hotel, locked him in his room and made him write the book."

Do you think it was possible for him to keep being satirical about technology when he was hanging out with the people who made it?

"I think you have to be young and an outsider to write great satire. There was a point with Not the Nine O’Clock News where the actors got famous and would say, 'I don't want to be nasty about that person, I’ve just met them.' Satire requires courage and ignorance.

"The broadcasters need to have courage in standing up to the newspapers. And the best satire is made by kids who don’t know how things ought to be done. They have no fear, break the rules and say things that middle-aged writers would never say. It’s a very rare broadcaster today that has the courage to hire a lot of 19-year-old writers and give them a budget to mock the rich and famous."

What is the health of satire today?

"In satire, the audience should never know what your actual opinion is. In the 80s, this was a very divided country, but people could still have a conversation. Spitting Image was watched by 15 million people of all different classes and political persuasions because they were curious about opinions. Now everybody is divided and they don't just disagree, they hate each other. I don't know what's gone wrong there, but satire is harder than ever. I suspect he [Douglas Adams] would have been trolled and hated it."

The film seems to suggest Adams was incredibly sad a lot of the time.

"The film is based on his archive, hundreds of cardboard boxes of his jottings, and there’s a lot of self-hatred and despair in there. He found life extraordinarily difficult. In the books he asked all the great questions of philosophy, but he was young, and very quickly rich and famous, and he didn’t really have time to discover any of the answers."

You've worked with many comedians – is the "tears of a clown" idea true?

"I’m not sure truly happy people ever achieve anything very much. Why would they need to? But, for example, Stephen Fry was diagnosed as bipolar. That’s very uncommon in the general population – five per cent of people have it. But for poets, playwrights, it’s 60 per cent.

"I would say that the young Billy Connolly and Ben Elton were driven by anger. Peter Cook, who was a good friend, confessed he was driven by despair. Douglas had something of that – he had a mind second to none, but he was tortured by being unable to let anyone help him do anything or edit anything. That’s why they couldn’t make a Hitchhiker’s film while he was alive."

How would he have worked if he was still around today?

"Like most of us, Douglas was uncertain when he started out. He became successful, met famous people and grew certain he was right. If you’re not careful, that’s how fame, success, power and riches tend to affect people. But you can grow out of it. Many of my friends have, and I believe that, had he lived, Douglas would have, too. In the meantime, for all his suffering – or perhaps because of it – no one can take away from him his ground-breaking canon of work. It’s not just tech oligarchs who are inspired by him. Today’s generation of 15-year-olds read his almost 50-year-old books as if they were newly minted."

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Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future is on Sky Arts on Thursday 27th March at 8pm.

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