You can see the second season of Douglas Adams' offbeat crime show Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on Netflix right now, but the history of Douglas Adams on TV is much more than just offbeat investigators, detectives and space-travellers in dressing gowns. Here's our guide to the master's entire TV career.

1. Monty Python's Flying Circus (1974)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Douglas Adams was just 22 and fresh out of Cambridge when he was spotted by Graham Chapman in a Footlights revue and landed his first small-screen writing gig, becoming one of the few non-Pythons to pen a sketch for Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Adams' skit, titled 'Patient Abuse', appeared in the very last episode of the final, John Cleese-less series in 1974.

He also appeared in the show in a couple of sketches, here as "Dr Emile Koning":

BBC

2. Out of the Trees (1976)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Having become mates with Graham Chapman, he embarked with the fellow Footlights veteran on a typically surreal sketch-show pilot for BBC2. Sadly, only the filmed location footage survives, but Adams would rework some of the lost material for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

3. Doctor on the Go (1977)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adams buddied up once more with Graham Chapman for an episode of ITV's long-running Doctor series (Doctor on the Go was the third iteration of the show, after Doctor in Charge and Doctor at Sea) titled 'For Your Own Good'. More mainstream than perhaps anything else in Adams' oeuvre, it has the overbearing father of one of the characters visiting the hospital and causing chaos for all the doctors.

4. Doctor Who: 'The Pirate Planet' (1978)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adams had submitted his first Doctor Who pitch in 1976 (the never-made 'Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen', later reworked as Life, The Universe and Everything), but it wasn't until after Hitchhiker's had aired on Radio 4 that he got his big break in the series.

'The Pirate Planet' was the second serial in the Key to Time arc, a run of stories that had the Doctor attempting to collect together the six segments of a cosmic artefact that maintains the equilibrium of the universe.

Funnier, loopier and more conceptually epic than most Doctor Who stories of the time, 'The Pirate Planet' is scuppered only by some unforgivably OTT acting from the guest cast and some tragically duff special-effects work.

5. Doctor Who: 'City of Death' (1979)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

By 1979, Adams had been awarded the gig of Doctor Who's resident script editor. His mightiest job on that season was to rewrite a script from David Fisher titled 'The Gamble with Time'. Working alongside producer Graham Williams, the pair decided on the pseudonym "David Agnew" for the retooled tale, which plonks the Doctor and Romana in Paris for what's possibly the most acclaimed story of Doctor Who's original TV run.

6. Doctor Who: 'Shada' (1979)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

'Shada' was intended to close Doctor Who's 17th season, but, alas, it wasn't to be. Industrial action at the BBC closed down production halfway through the shoot and 'Shada' was to remain unseen until a 1992 video release (with Tom Baker narrating the missing scenes). It was finally finished – with animated inserts – in 2017.

7. Doctor Snuggles (1979)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adams had met writer/producer John Lloyd while working on the original radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide and together they would go on to co-write the 1983 book The Meaning of Liff as well as, more surprisingly, two episodes of this Euro-pudding kids' cartoon show.

Despite the series itself being a bit of an also-ran, their two episodes – 'The Remarkable Fidgety River' and 'The Great Disappearing Mystery' – have a lot of typically lopsided Adams ideas, such as the Get Lost Machine, a device "deliberately designed so that you never knew where you were going".

8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1980)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adams' magnum opus started life as a radio series first, a book second and a TV show third. Retaining most of the cast from its radio incarnation, the small-screen Hitchhiker's is a patchy affair. Despite keeping the radio script mercifully intact, it's blemished by ropey effects and production values that struggle to match the ambitions of the story.

In terms of visuals, at least, the 2005 movie version trumps it.

9. Hyperland (1990)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Adams doubled up as writer and presenter of this eye-poppingly prophetic tech documentary. Recorded a year before the launch of the World Wide Web, it has Adams, along with Tom Baker playing a typically fruity software engineer, theorising about the future of home entertainment.

10. Dirk Gently (2010)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Before Netflix's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, there was this BBC Four version, starring Stephen Mangan as the holistic 'tec who works on the basis of the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things".

Showrun by Misfits creator Howard Overman, the first episode is a loose adaptation of the first novel, with the remaining three being original stories. Sadly, the series was axed after only four episodes.

11. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016)

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Despite killing the 2010 series, the BBC decided to have another stab at Adams' eccentric sleuth by cosying up with Netflix for this appealingly nutty comedy-drama. Despite the relocation to modern day Seattle, there's still a lot of Douglas Noel Adams' DNA in showrunner Max Landis' series.

Brit actor Samuel Barnett is pleasingly quirky as Dirk, while Elijah Wood brings his blue-eyed charm to the Landis-invented role of Dirk's reluctant sidekick, Todd. Tragically, the BBC and Netflix announced last month they were canning the show, with BBC America saying: "We are beyond proud of this brilliant original series and so appreciative of the outstanding team behind it including Max Landis, Samuel Barnett, Elijah Wood, and many many others." Boooo!

Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Twitter account and you're all set.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io