A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

The next year the radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts. When he died in 2001 in California he had been trying again to get the movie project started with Disney which had bought the rights in 1998. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick and the resulting movie was released in 2005.

". Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983) Last Chance to See (1990) and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. He was a staunch atheist famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well must have been made to have me in it!" to demonstrate his view that the fine-tuned Universe argument for God was a fallacy.