Radio 4 is not usually the preferred station of teenagers, let alone the punk-drunk youths of 1978. Yet I, and thousands like me, lay on the floor of a darkened room at 10.30pm each week, listening to what can only be approximated as Star Wars rewritten by P. G. Wodehouse. It was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a cult that became a colossus, spinning off from radio into a TV mini-series, a “trilogy” of five books, a computer game, an internet network, and a long-delayed big-screen blockbuster, filmed recently three years after the death at 49 of its creator, Douglas Adams. We’re now back full circle: this week Radio 4 picks up where it left off 26 years ago, broadcasting a six-part adaptation of Adams’s third book with all the surviving members of the original cast.
“It was like trying on an old glove,” says Simon Jones, who again plays the perpetually bewildered galaxy-hopping Everyman, Arthur Dent, “and feeling relief that it still fitted.”
Why so long a gap since the last radio series? “Douglas always intended to do another series,” says Jones, the writer’s good friend since university, “but he never got round to it. Writing was such a torment for him.”
Adams’s lateness was legendary. The second and fourth THGTTG books were written in four and three weeks respectively. Not because Adams was a swift writer, but because after the last possible extension to the last possible deadline had passed with not a word written, his publishers literally locked him in an hotel room until he’d typed enough pages to be let out. During the original radio series, the cast at times had to start acting out an episode while its final pages were still being ripped one by one from Adams’s typewriter.
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“Even on the first episode of the first series,” Jones confirms, “Douglas would be rewriting as we went along, disappearing into the gents to scribble new passages. We thought, how is this ever going to come together?” But it did. It was Adams’s perfectionism that won the listeners over, coupled with the conviction, which he professed when I interviewed him in 1992, that radio is not the most staid of media, but the most cutting-edge. “With TV there was never the same sense of groundbreaking,” Adams said then. “Sadly, one can’t work in radio and pay the mortgage. But everyone loved doing Hitchhiker’s because instead of ‘steps on gravel path’ or ‘door slam 8a’, here we were saying ‘have a whale splat down with a bowl of petunias’.”
It’s a sentiment passionately shared by the adapter/ director of the new radio series, Dirk Maggs. Maggs was originally approached by Adams, who was impressed by his cinematic-sounding radio productions of Superman and Batman, back in 1993, though the author never did find the time to write it himself. “Audio theatre, or radio drama, is much better than TV,” Maggs enthuses. “It bypasses the optic nerve, sneaks through the side-door and paints a picture in the mind more compelling than any you could be shown.”
He certainly has Simon Jones’s seal of approval. “Maggs is just the man; he is the Phil Spector of Radio 4. As in the Wall of Sound, that is,” he adds hastily. “Not as in being accused of shooting your girlfriend.”
The sound is indeed extraordinary. If you want to know how intelligent aquatic mattresses burble, or how Arthur Dent might sound when chasing a flying sofa across a prehistoric forest, listen on. But be warned: the need to shoehorn in years of back-story, coupled with Adams’s famous love of digression, make this first episode dense to the point of incomprehensibility. Even Maggs and Jones admit that it takes until episode two to get warmed up.
Will the new series attract the young listeners that all agree are vital to the future of radio drama? The success of the first series, says Jones, was “definitely a generational thing. My parents said: ‘Very nice, dear, but what’s it all about?’ ” It would be ironic if, this time round, Britain’s living rooms were full of middle-aged parents enthusiastically foisting the show on their bewildered children.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is broadcast on Radio 4, Tuesday, 6.30pm