Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' 'Why not?' 'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.

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.