Firstly, thank you all for supporting this book, which is a project very dear to my heart. I was still a teenager when I worked as a young animator on the television version of my favourite radio show. By the time this is published next year, you could say I’ll have been preparing for this one for the last 45 years!

The main backbone of the book will be Douglas Adams’ script – his precious words in a form which has never been published until now. So, before I add my behind-the-scenes anecdotes, interview quotes and commentary, I needed to address the problem of how to present the pages of script in the clearest and most space-saving way.

I’ve just completed about 10 weeks of photoshop work, enhancing the original 650+ script pages for best readability. You can see from the example below how wonky and rough the originals were, with odd bits of letters missing and larger gaps between paragraphs. The purists might be happy to wade through the vagaries of ancient BBC mimeograph quality, all skew-whiff, broken typewriter letters (and sometimes coffee-stained), but I felt it was important to tidy it all up a bit. Some of the original pages had barely a single paragraph for standard television technical reasons, others were a solid column of text. But we don’t want a book full of half-empty blank spaces. I had to reserve room in the book for all the juicy illustrations and footnotes.

[fig 01 – typical page enhancement]

The most exciting part of my job is to trawl his personal archives for exclusive material. I researched a good 80% for the ‘42’ book. I was delighted recently to return to Cambridge, to the library at St. John’s College, where he once studied in the 1970s. His family have placed his 67 boxes of papers there for safe-keeping. It’s a privilege to be able to look through them and decide which will make for the best content.

 

[fig 02 – Kevin at St. John’s library in August 2024, wearing appropriate T-shirt.] 

The projected second TV series and the few pages Douglas did manage to get written were touched upon in the 42 book. I have new information to reveal about why that sequel never happened.

As those who read 42 will know, he often got stuck repeating himself and fine-tuning his ideas on the page. Much easier once he took to using a word-processor, but he wrote four books before that occurred in 1984. So, we have these earlier hard copies, typed over and over until he was satisfied. Here, for instance, are three attempts at the first page for the projected second series in 1981. These have yet to be enhanced or tidied up, but it'll give some idea of what to expect. Some passages are entirely different from any other version of the Hitchhiker story.  


[Fig 03 – three attempts at page one of a second TV series]

The work continues, and I’ll bring you more teasers very soon…