CAST

The Book.............................................. Peter Jones Arthur Dent.......................................... Simon Jones Ford Prefect........................................... David Dixon Trillian........................................... Sandra Dickinson Zaphod Beeblebrox ........................Mark Wing-Davey Marvin................................................. Steven Moore

PRODUCER     Alan Bell

PROGRAMMING HISTORY 6 35-minute episodes

BBC
5 January 1981-9 February 1981

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book, television program, radio series, record, cassette, video, and proposed feature film. The six part BBC Television adaptation of its own radio comedy is only one small part of a whole universe of merchandising which has sprung from this saga of angst and despair--from illustrated book versions to T-shirts and towels.

The story centres on an Earthman, Arthur Dent, one of a handful of survivors who remain when when the planet is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur travels through the galaxy with a group of companions, his friend called Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy, a pretty young astro-physicist called Trillian, and a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a woefully inaccurate electronic tourist guide.

The tale is a despair-ridden one. Our world, traditionally the centre of our Earthnocentric view of the universe, becomes "an utterly insignificant blue/green planet", orbiting a "small, unregarded sun at the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy". Indeed, the entire Hitchhiker's Guide entry for "Earth" reads nothing more than "Mostly Harmless". In the course of the plot, it is repeatedly made clear just how meaningless the universe is. For example, when Deep Thought, the greatest computer of all time, discovers the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything", it turns out to be "Forty Two". Indeed, the Earth is in fact a huge computer, built to discover the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. On discovering this, Arthur Dent exclaims that this explains the feeling he has always had, that there's something going on in the universe that nobody would tell him about. "Oh no" says Zaphod Beeblebrox, "That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that". This whole tone of angst is emphasised by the title sequence of the television program: a single spaceman falls, isolated, against a backdrop of distant stars; while a melancholy mandolin plays in the background.

The form of all the incarnations of this story, not least the television version, is comedy-science fiction. A sparsely populated category even in literature, it is even rarer to find films or television programs which twist the logic of the genres involved to provide innovative science fiction which is also very funny. Films like Spaceballs, for example take rules from established comedy genres (satire) and use a science fiction iconography as little more than a backdrop. Red Dwarf, the BBC's other successful science-fiction comedy, relies on well-known science-fiction standards done over as comedy (the metamorph, the good/bad sides of personalities splitting, and so on). None of these, were the jokes removed, would stand as notable science fiction in their own right.

The comedy could just as little be removed from Hitchhiker's: but this is because it is a part of the science fiction context, and vice versa. The humour in the program comes from puncturing portentous science-fiction themes. For example, there are extra-terrestrial beings--but far from being all-knowing or enlightened, all they are concerned with is getting drunk and getting laid. Similarly, the earth is under threat from aliens--not for reasons of power, or resources, but simply because it is in the way of a planned bypass.

This comic deflation is an important part of the program's feeling of despair. The jokes build up expectations of transcendent truths, then knock them down with the realisation that everything is meaningless after all. Hitchhiker's is a consistently comic dystopia.

It is also worth noting that the only constant name through all the manifestations of Hitchhiker's is one of its original authors, Douglas Adams. It is possible to make an auteur reading of the program in terms of Adams' other work. He was also a script editor of the BBC's long-standing science fiction series Doctor Who. Over the 26 seasons of that program, its style changed considerably, according to its producer and script editor--from space opera to gothic horror, adventure program to serious science fiction. While Adams was working on the program, he edited and wrote some of the most explicitly humorous episodes in that program's history. "City of Death", for example, features an alien creature forcing Leonardo Da Vinci to paint multiple copies of the Mona Lisa to be sold on the black market; while "Shada" is written almost as sit-com, with lines such as, "I am Skagra and I want the globe!--Well, I'm the Doctor, and you can't have it".

Focusing on Adam's authorship underlines other aspects of Hitchhiker's. The story has been re-used across several different formats. The great efficiency of Adams' recycling is also evident in his earlier work--material from his Doctor Who stories "Shada" and "City of Death", for example, is brought wholesale into his other major enterprise: mystery stories about a "holistic" detective called Dirk Gently.

The most noticeable things about the television production of Hitchhiker's are the sections of the program which come from "the book". As Arthur encounters the various wonders of the Universe, the live action stops and there are short sections of what is essentially comic monologue--the disembodied voice of the Hitchhiker's Guide talks, while its comments are illustrated by "computer graphics" (illustrated line drawings). The structure of these programs is somewhat like that of the musical--the narrative stops for a short performance. This gives a unique comic feel to the program.

Ultimately, though, the most impressive fact about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that so much has so repeatedly been made of so little. This is not to belittle the program in any way, but simply to point out that basically the same narrative has been reworked and reissued over more than a decade, consistently finding, with new media, new audiences. This is surely worthy of some respect if for nothing else than being an impressive feat of environmentally-sound narrative recycling.

-Alan McKee