John Hardress Wilfred Lloyd CBE is a British comedy writer and television producer. Lloyd was Trinity College, Cambridge, where he befriended and later shared a flat with Douglas Adams. He worked as a radio producer at the BBC 1974–1978 and created The News Quiz, The News Huddlines, To The Manor Born (with Peter Spence) and Quote... Unquote (with Nigel Rees). He wrote Hordes of the Things with Andrew ("A. P. R.") Marshall, co-authored two episodes of Doctor Snuggles with Douglas Adams and then went on to co-write the fifth and sixth episodes of the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with him. Lloyd then worked as a TV producer at both the BBC and ITV 1979–1989 where he created Not the Nine O'Clock News (with Sean Hardie) and Spitting Image (with Peter Fluck and Roger Law). He also produced all 4 Blackadder series. Lloyd was originally to have been the host of BBC topical news quiz Have I Got News For You, but was replaced by Angus Deayton. His first new TV series for 14 years, QI (short for Quite Interesting, and a deliberate reversal of IQ), starring Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, began on 11 September 2003 at 10pm on BBC2 for a run of 12 episodes. In its eighth series, which started on BBC One in September 2010, Lloyd appeared as a panelist in one of the episodes. All the episodes of QI (including the pilot) have been directed by Ian Lorimer. Lloyd currently presents the radio series, The Museum of Curiosity (2008), which he co-created with producers Richard Turner & Dan Schreiber and former co-host Bill Bailey. Lloyd was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to broadcasting.

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.