With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of bizarre jobs, including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did the same job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year.

He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.

Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out of the question, there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.

Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being struck by Adams’s “intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel the stuff he is writing has come from a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong mind behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical and analytical. Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, but remembers there was little grand plan behind the project.

“Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end.”