Douglas laughed at himself, and at his own jokes. It was one of many ingredients of his charm:

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we
live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going
around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously
some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various
things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

This next paragraph is one of Douglas's set-pieces which will be familiar to some people here. I heard it
more than once, and I thought it was more brilliant every time.

... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I
find myself in'an interesting hole I find myself in'fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it
fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful
idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle
gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's
going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him
in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be
something we need to be on the watch out for.

Douglas introduced me to Lalla. They had worked together, years ago, on Dr Who, and it was she who
pointed out to me that he had a wonderful childlike capacity to go straight for the wood, and never mind
the trees:

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands
is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is
so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a
different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious
essence about it, was god given'and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell
comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time
before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it
seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system
to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of
anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a
monkey. It just doesn't read well.

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