The BBC bills it as a “cult sci-fi classic”, though an empire that stretches to five bestselling novels, a television series, a stage show, audio cassettes, internet sites and, next year, a £20m Disney movie somehow seems a bit too large and lucrative to be a cult.
Still, you know what they mean — the fact that it spread by word of mouth, not a PR campaign. Created by a troubled, talented and tall (6ft 5in) Cambridge graduate called Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s began as a six-part series he wrote for Radio 4 in 1978, when he was working as a staff producer. He did another the following year. There were only ever 12 radio episodes.
Its central character is one Arthur Dent (played by Simon Jones, who, like most of the original cast, returns to the role this week). A mild man trying to stop the council from bulldozing his house, he discovers that the whole of earth is about to be bulldozed to make way for a hyper-space bypass.
With his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher on a cosmic reference book entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he escapes the doomed planet and embarks on a series of zany adventures in the space-time continuum, in which the number 42 is found to be the answer to life, the universe and everything.
If all this sounds ineffably silly, that is because it was and is. But some people love silliness. Just as there was a European Theatre of the Absurd, so there is the (slightly cheerier) British radio equivalent. It is no accident that it was radio, with its ability to conjure infinite wild imaginings for an audience largely listening on their own, that proved the original medium for a 20th-century Alice in Wonderland. Television, by contrast, had to rely on computer graphics, as will the film.
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Radio 4 is dramatising the last three Hitchhiker’s novels, one starting this week and the other two next summer. If you liked the original radio series, you will certainly like these new ones, with their speeded-up, slowed-down, muffled and twin-tracked voices, and their facetious references to hangovers, teleporters and the Titanic. The cast still sound young, another advantage of reviving it on radio.
The stories have never appealed to me — neither funny nor ex-citing enough. But comedy is a personal thing, after all.
The key point is that millions of people, both here and abroad, have found themselves drawn to Adams’s eccentric mixture of serendipity, youthful travel, technology and playfulness, and first did so via radio. Their affection was deepened by the author’s premature death from a heart attack in California in 2001, aged 49.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is dated in two ways. First, who now dares to hitchhike? And second, the theme of space travel harks back to the decade of Star Wars, which was also the last one in which man stepped on the moon. But it is not dated in its surrealism, its sense of madness allied to its implicit yearning for a better world, its juvenile word play, love of gibberish and jokes about Islington and saggy bottoms.