Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer who can't bear writing. An imaginative but remote child he found it difficult

to communicate with the outside world. However, music as diverse as Bach and the Beatles convinced

him that he wasn't entirely alone as later did his

fascination for Monte Python. At the age of 24 he invented a fantasy world for radio which

was to reinvent science fiction. The Hitchhiker's guide to the

Galaxy with its anarchic humour pointed up the idiocy of the human existence and

spawning books, a television series, stage plays and computer games has made him a millionaire.

Now 41 he's more interested in future reality than in fantasy.

I enjoy more than anything making a new discovery, he says. He is Douglas Adams.

Let's talk about your dislike of writing, then Douglas that's made you a millionaire.

How great is it? I mean, does it border on hatred?

I just find it fantastically difficult to do. People assume by the time

that you've reached a certain level of recognition and status that you must

therefore have mastered something. You find that actually makes it more rather than less difficult.

Oddly enough, I mean the one thing that sort of gives me confidence from time to time,

when I most need it, is not anything to do with critical reaction you might have received or numbers of books sold or bestsellers and so on.

But is the fact that once when I was, must have been about 10, 11,

my English master at my prep school gave me 10 out of 10 for a story and

apparently it was the only time he ever did it that's my kind of bedrock that

means I must be okay so you touch back down there again and then it's so it's fear really is it is fear of being found out it's I think it's partly a terribly British

...