Last Chance to See

Last Chance to See

The front cover of the first US hardcover edition.
Author Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Publisher Pan Books
Publication date
 1990
ISBN 978-0-345-37198-0
OCLC 26948233
Last Chance to See
Genre Wildlife documentary
Country United Kingdom
Language(s) English
Home station BBC Radio 4
Starring Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Air dates October 1989 to November 1989
Website BBC Radio

Last Chance to See is a 1989 BBC radio documentary series and its accompanying book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. In the series, Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. The book was published in 1990.

In 2009, the BBC broadcast a television follow-up series of the same name, with Stephen Fry replacing the late Adams.[1]

In 1985, Douglas Adams went to Madagascar in search of the (possibly extinct) lemur the Aye-aye. The trip was part of a project by the World Wide Fund for Nature and British Sunday newspaper The Observer, sending well-known authors to remote places to seek endangered species and write articles for the paper's magazine, to help raise awareness of ecological issues. Adams was met in Madagascar by zoologist Mark Carwardine (who was working for the WWF at the time). The Observer project was successful, and Adams and Carwardine developed a radio series around the same concept for BBC Radio 4. Carwardine later said:

"We put a big map of the world on a wall, Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where all the endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins."[2]

The journeys undertaken were to see:

Radio

The aye-aye programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 1 November 1985 as a pilot;[3] six further episodes were then broadcast in 1989:

The mountain gorilla and northern white rhino, although the subject of a chapter in the book, did not feature in the radio series.

Book

In 1990, an accompanying book was published in the UK, describing the various adventures that duo had encountered on journeys, often with a comic tone. The book covers most of the radio episodes, but excludes the Juan Fernández fur seal and the Amazonian manatee, allegedly due to Adams' notorious writing delays. It includes some colour photographs taken by Carwardine.

The first American hardcover edition was published by Harmony Books in 1991 (under ISBN 0-517-58215-5) and the first German paperback edition was published in 1992 by Heyne (under ISBN 3-453-06115-2). These editions carry slightly different photographs of the journeys. An abridged audiobook, read by Adams, was also published.

Later editions of the book deleted two lines from the chapter on Komodo dragons: in the original edition, Adams asks Australian venomous reptile expert Dr Struan Sutherland, whether there are any venomous creatures that he likes, and the expert replies, "There was, but she left me." These lines are deleted in later editions, for reasons unknown.

In the posthumous biography and essay collection, The Salmon of Doubt, Adams describes Last Chance to See as his favourite work.

CD ROM

The front cover of the CD-ROM box set edition of Last Chance to See for computers running Windows 3.1 or later.

The Voyager Company also published a 2 CD-ROM set (for Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Macintosh System 6), in 1992, featuring over 800 still photographs, Adams reading the nearly complete book, Carwardine reading fact files on the species they searched like side bars, and extracts from the BBC Radio 4 series.

Television series

In 2009, the BBC broadcast a TV follow-up series, in which Stephen Fry, a friend of the late Adams, accompanies Carwardine on a journey to see what has changed in the 20 years since the radio broadcasts. The series excludes the Rodrigues fruit bat, the Yangtze river dolphin, which is "in all probability extinct", and the Juan Fernandez fur seal, which had proved embarrassingly easy for Adams and Carwardine to find.[10]

References

Further reading

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