The movie version of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy is gaining it a host of new fans but the Gazette's LEWIS COWEN has more reason than most to be interested in its success

MY lacklustre theatrical career may not have many highlights to it, but I can boast that Douglas Adams based one of the characters in his excellent books on my performance in a spectacularly disastrous stage production of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy in London.

How do I know this? From the man himself.

After the exquisitely bizarre 1980 production closed at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, I went on tour with a different version of it with the Theatre Clywd company.

Mr Adams caught up with us in Cardiff. He asked me: "What did you think of the book?" meaning The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which had just been published. I said I had enjoyed reading it. "Yes, but what did you think of your part?" he asked. "Sorry?" "Max Quordlepleen. You must know I based it on your performance at the Rainbow."

Apologetically, I admitted that I had no idea. He was disgusted at my idiocy.

My involvement in what the London arts guide Time Out insisted on calling the West End production of Hitchhikers came out of the blue. Having just finished a long season in rep at Manchester, I was keen to find employment rapidly and had written to a number of theatres.

One of these was the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, where that anarchic showman Ken Campbell had just taken over the reins. He was impressed by the fact that I had just played the Woody Allen part in Play It Again, Sam and asked when I was available. "Yesterday," I said.

Mr Campbell had been asked to direct Hitchhikers at the Rainbow and I was in. I turned up on the first day of rehearsal and found a motley crew.

Two cast members were sadly out of place. They were just ordinary blokes with no acting experience who had just asked Mr Campbell for a job and found themselves together playing the two-headed space playboy Zaphod Beeblebrox.

After two weeks it was quite clear that they were not going to work and a democratic vote of the rest of the cast sent them on their way.

The following day we had a new Zaphod, in the form of Nick D'Aviro and Terry Johnson, who subsequently made a name for himself as a playwright and director.

As time went on we moved from the rehearsal room into the Rainbow itself. Originally built as a cinema, it seats over 3,000 and is the size of the A380's hangar.

The sets were of proportionate size and the costumes were designed by a big fashion designer of whom I had never heard and boffins who built creatures for Dr Who.

I was particularly fond of my Vogon costume, which looked like a cross between a Disney dragon and Kenneth Clarke. Among the other parts I played were the builder who knocks Arthur Dent's house down, Slartibartfast, the designer of the Earth computer, and a space policeman who doesn't enjoy killing people but does it all the same.

But the part for which I created the template, as immortalised in the book, is Max Quordlepleen, the master of ceremonies at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I played it as a sort of south London Hughie Green and was dressed in a gold lam suit.

My agent came to see the show on its horrendous first night. I phoned her the next day and she said she had stayed awake through the whole thing, which was something of an accolade.

She said: "I thought everyone was OK, except for that chap in the gold suit. God!"

I said: "That was me."

She said: "You were brilliant!"

Whatever you say about agents, they are nothing if not loyal.