Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’ve just finished listening to the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobooks.

And when I say audiobooks, I mean the radio plays. Proper Hitchhiker’s, as I like to think of it.

I’ve been introducing Megan, my daughter, to Hitchhiker’s. I was about her age when I discovered it—I started with series 2 (the total perspective vortex, body debit cards, the Nutrimat machine, the séance, the statue of Arthur Dent, Belgium, the shoe event horizon, Zarniwhoop, Lentilla and the Allitnels, the ruler of the universe).

Series 1 (the destruction of Earth, Vogons, infinite improbability drive, Deep Thought, 42, Magrathea, Milliways, the Golgrincham ark fleet) never hit the mark for me—series 2 always seemed newer and crazier. It also had the benefit of never being fully repeated in print—it’s chopped up in the novels.

And series 1 was repeated. First as two albums (which I listened to repeatedly), then as the BBC television series, a computer game, and eventually as a movie. Series 1 was never the same twice: the TV series included the dish of the day, the albums replaced the Hagunenons with Disaster Area. But the radio series was always proper Hitchhiker’s.

(I didn’t see the play. However, I do have a towel and the radio scripts (which are wonderful for their footnotes.))

I’m not sure exactly what Megan thinks of Hitchhiker’s. She says she likes it, but I don’t think it will replace Harry Potter or Shadowhunters any time soon. We heard them in tiny sections, when I ran her to Guides or Rangers. (They’re not Mrs H’s thing, so we had to wait for when she wasn’t in the car with us.)

However, Megan lasted only about twenty minutes of the Tertiary Phase (the dramatisation of Life, the Universe, and Everything). “You’re right, not as good as the others,” was her damning assessment.

I carried on listening.

There are things I like about the later audiobooks: reuniting the original cast; using Susan Sheridan and Sandra Dickinson (radio and tv Trillian respectively) for Mostly Harmless; Douglas Adams as Agrajag. And little things, like Geoffrey Perkins (the original BBC producer) playing Arthur Dent’s producer.

And I liked the happy ending they gave the otherwise bleak Mostly Harmless. (I was intrigued to learn recently that Douglas Adams had admitted that he would like to write a sixth book with a happier ending.)

But… the latter phases aren’t proper Hitchhiker’s. The story makes sense (rather than seeming to be random flights of fancy), there are fewer random asides, and the ambient sounds don’t quite match the original.

But that’s because they are based on the novels, which felt less and less like proper Hitchhiker’s the longer they went on. (And let’s not talk about the sixth book, And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer. It was a nice try, but I wish they’d never bothered. The happy ending to the audiobooks was good enough.)

I haven’t re-read the books in a long, long while. So it’s probably time I revisited them.

I have two Douglas Adams stories.

He came to Leeds on a book tour, and I saw him in Waterstones. He read the opening to Mostly Harmless (which is much funnier when he read it than it was when I read it later) and the bit with Marvin and the Frogstar Robot in the Guide's offices.

Before that, I wrote him a fan letter about the Lintilla clones. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was something about the 578,000,000,000 Lintilla clones—and if you assumed that it took a second to make each clone, that meant they were around 18,000 years old. While I can’t remember my letter, I can remember his reply almost word-for-word: “You’re right. Appalling, isn’t it?”

I wish I still had that letter.