In Search of the World's Most Endangered Species Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine travel the world in pursuit of species on the brink of extinction. In 1985, The Observer magazine sent Douglas Adams to Madagascar to look for the exotic and potentially extinct aye-aye lemur. There he met zoologist Mark Carwardine, and together they made a radio pilot about their travels, In Search of the Aye-Aye. This led to a hugely popular radio series, Last Chance to See, later adapted as a best-selling book. Douglas Adams died in 2001, but his friend Stephen Fry took his place for a follow-up 20th anniversary television series, broadcast on BBC Two in 2009. This collection includes the initial pilot show and the complete BBC radio series from 1989, in which Adams and Carwardine embark on a quest to track down weird and wonderful threatened species across the globe. Voyaging from New Zealand to Chile, they hope to encounter the flightless Kakapo parrot, the river dolphin revered as the ‘goddess of the Yangtze’ and the secretive, confusing manatee - as well as the randy Rodrigues fruit bat, the terrifying (and smelly) Komodo dragon and the solitary Juan Fernandez fur seal. Funny, thought-provoking and poignant, Last Chance to See combines Adams’ inimitable humour and Carwardine’s expertise to provide a unique snapshot of our vanishing world and the rare creatures that inhabit it. Sadly the Kakapo remains critically endangered, and the Yangtze River dolphin was declared functionally extinct in 2006. Part travelogue, part natural history show, this unforgettable account of a remarkable voyage of discovery serves as a reminder to protect our planet while we still can. 1 In Search of the Aye-Aye 2 Ralph, the Fragrant Parrot of Codfish Island (the kakapo) 3 Gone Fishing! (the Yangtze River dolphin) 4 Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? (the Amazonian manatee) 5 The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind (the Rodrigues fruit bat) 6 A Man-Eating, Evil-Smelling Dragon (the Komodo dragon) 7 The Sultan of Juan Fernandez (the Juan Fernandez fur seal) Presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Natural Selection: In Search of the Aye-Aye Produced by Tim Grout Smith. First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 1 November 1985 Produced by Chris Muir. Series producer: Gaynor Shutte. Additional music by Steven Faux. First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 4 October 1989-8 November 1989
Author
Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. He is best known as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a comic book series, a computer game, and a feature film that was completed after Adams' death. The series has also been adapted for live theatre using various scripts; the earliest such productions used material newly written by Adams. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA". In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television series Doctor Who and served as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and he co-wrote two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was produced by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002. His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Macintosh computer, and other "techno gizmos". Toward the end of his life he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment.
