Hitchhiker's Guide

Mike Simpson, M. J. Simpson

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781904048466
• eBook ISBN: 9781842435809
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a unique phenomenon which started life as a radio series in 1978 and was subsequently adapted into five best-selling novels, remade as a BAFTA-winning TV series, re-recorded as a chart LP, reinvented as a computer game, dramatized for the West End stage, and translated into more than 30 languages. For the first time, the full story is told in all its bizarre detail. Every variant of the story, every spin-off and cash-in is documented in context, the contradictory storylines are explained, the background to the many adaptations are chronicled, and the success of the different versions is analyzed. Based on 20 years of research, it includes an interviews with Douglas Adams.

1. Introduction

Where to begin?

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does not follow any sort of pattern. It does not, for example, have any preferred medium. It has been equally successful on radio, on television, on record, as novels, as talking books, on stage, as a computer game and most recently as a feature film. All these different versions tell roughly the same story, but not necessarily in the same way. And on numerous occasions they flatly contradict each other.

  This does not make it an easy subject to write a book about. Far from it.

  There is no logical progression to be had here: no episode guide, no filmography, not even a clearly defined chronological progression. What there is instead is a genuine multimedia phenomenon – a global success without precedent or parallel. Or, unfortunately, order. I have done my best to make sense of it.

  Surprisingly, there has been relatively little attempt to document this phenomenon (with the obvious exception of Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic, which I had the honour of revising and updating for its third edition in 2002), although two biographies of the Hitchhiker's Guide's creator Douglas Adams have been published since his death in 2001. It is hoped that this book will go some way to explaining and charting this incredible story, and the incredible story behind it.

  So where to begin?

  Half past ten on Wednesday 8 March 1978 is as good a place as any to begin the story of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In those days, the BBC still made a lot of radio comedy, almost invariably written and performed by Oxbridge graduates (the 'alternative comedy' scene was still struggling to find its own identity in a London strip club). Regular listeners to Radio 4 knew to check the Radio Times each week, examining certain broadcast slots – 12.27pm, 6.30pm, 10.30pm – for the latest offerings from the Light Entertainment Department at Broadcasting House.

  That initial listing for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gave no indication that it was to be any different from any of the series before, after, or running concurrently. There was a recognisable name in the cast – Peter Jones, rather mysteriously credited as 'The Book' – and radio comedy obsessives may have recognised writer Douglas Adams' name from occasional credits on The News Huddlines. The episode title, 'Fit the First', would have seemed a mere whim to most, although fans of Lewis Carroll may have recognised a reference to The Hunting of the Snark. (The Milliways restaurant slogan 'If you've believed six impossible things before breakfast this morning …' was another Carroll reference, although the existence of a 'rule 42' in Through the Looking Glass was mere coincidence, according to Adams.) Nevertheless, there was no clue as to quite how different this new series was going to be.

  For one thing, it did not have an audience. Radio 4 policy was clear: if you were a comedy series, whether sitcom, revue or variety, you had to have an audience. Yet the listeners on that March evening, in their bedsits and their baths, found themselves laughing aloud and alone – which, given the solitary nature of the typical late-night Radio 4 listener, was not as embarrassing as it might have been.

  The show was an instant hit, on a scale unseen since the golden age of radio in the 1950s. It very rapidly established itself as worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as radio classics like Hancock's Half Hour, The Goon Show and I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again.

  Real, hardcore, purist Hitchhiker's Guide fans still consider the original six-part radio series to be the definitive version of the story. But The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a popularity that extends way beyond its hard core fans, and its numerous incarnations mean that it is something different to different people.

  To some it is a cult radio series, to others an early 1980s TV comedy, to others a series of best-selling science fiction novels – and to some people it is now a Hollywood movie. Ironically, Douglas Adams never set out to be either a science fiction writer or a novelist.

  If one is to trace the origins of Hitchhiker's Guide, one has to look at the Footlights Society, that elitist yet prolific group of ever-changing Cambridge undergraduates which has been producing great names in comedy for over a century. The casts of Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Goodies and Beyond the Fringe were wholly or partly composed of Footlights alumni, and the Footlights influence is as strong in Hitchhiker's as in any of those other shows. Douglas Adams attended Cambridge University in the early 1970s and there met Simon Jones, Mark Wing Davey and Geoffrey McGivern, who were to be the inspirations rations for the characters they were later to play.

  Pinning down just why The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been so successful is an impossible task, but there is one very obvious way in which it was truly groundbreaking. It was the first genuinely successful attempt to combine science fiction with comedy. Which is not to say that there had not previously been humorous science fiction, but the works of writers like Harry Harrison or Robert Sheckley were spoofs of the genre, written by and for people familiar with science fiction's conventions and intricacies. They were humorous science fiction, as opposed to science fiction humour.

  Attempts at injecting science fiction into more populist comedy were more problematical. American TV producers had managed it briefly with the 1960s sitcom My Favorite Martian, but this was simply a strictly Earth bound fish-out-of-water fantasy along the lines of I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched. The BBC's misguided attempts at this blending of genres resulted in the infamously dire Come Back Mrs Noah, starring Molly Sugden (broadcast after Hitchhiker's Guide's radio debut, but shown as a pilot before it). It was to be another decade before they got it right again with Red Dwarf.

  Where Douglas Adams succeeded was in writing a story which was actually a satire on human existence and foibles, just blown up to a galactic scale. In that respect his predecessors were people like Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels ploughed a similar furrow. Adams always maintained that he didn't set out to write a science fiction series, but after blowing up the world in the first episode, he was left with no other choice.

  One of the reasons for the series' initial success was undoubtedly the science fiction fever which gripped the UK, and indeed the world, in the late 1970s, fuelled by the massive success of Star Wars. George Lucas' film, which had created a media craving for anything to do with spaceships, aliens or robots, very fortuitously opened across the UK in January 1978, less than six weeks before Hitchhiker's debuted. However, the BBC commissioned Adams to write 'Fit the First' in March 1977, before Star Wars even opened in America, and certainly before the sci-fi hype began.

  Despite his best efforts to deny the label, Douglas Adams became irrevocably branded as a science fiction author, and a spectacularly successful one at that, whose books could command enormous advances. He was also an almost evangelical advocate of new technology, from his early experiments with computers that produced, for example, the distorted self-portrait on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:The Original Radio Scripts, to his later directorship of h2g2 (aka The Digital Village) and his position as one of the most sought-after speakers for technology conferences.

  But above all this, above and beyond the success of Hitchhiker's Guide, the state-of-the-art Apple Macintoshes, the world's largest collection of left-handed guitars and the endless globe-trotting, one thing asserts itself time and again as one reads this book and follows the story of Douglas Adams' success.

He never got the hang of deadlines.

  Everybody who ever worked with Douglas Adams encountered this problem, and tales are legion of the author being locked in hotel rooms to finish novels or scribbling last-minute changes to scripts on toilet paper. Not all of these stories are apocryphal. Even more incredibly , this inability to make deadlines seemed to be transferable and affected even aspects of the Hitchhiker's Guide canon with which Adams himself was not directly involved. Publicists around the globe threw their hands up in horror when presented with a new Douglas Adams project because there was no way of knowing when, if ever, it would appear.

  Fortunately, Douglas Adams was actually not very prolific. As an author, he published only seven novels in 21 years, of which two were largely derived from radio scripts, and two were based on Doctor Who stories. Never afraid to reformat material into new media, Adams had something of a reputation for recycling, which became a running joke among his friends.

  Many ideas from Hitchhiker's Guide have become common cultural currency in the past two decades, notably phrases such as 'life, don't talk to me about life' and 'large, friendly letters,' but the most celebrated element of the entire Hitchhiker's saga is the idea that there is a single, definitive answer to all the questions of the universe, and that it is the number 42. More than any other aspect of the story, the significance of 42 and the phrase which pre-empted it,'life, the universe and every thing' have become enshrined in the cultural zeitgeist of the late twentieth century (and now the twenty-first).

  Scientists have for many years been searching for a single, unifying theory of everything, and consequently Hitchhiker's Guide and its central joke have always been enormously popular among the scientific community. Even Arthur C Clarke referred to 42 as the meaning of life in his novel Rama Revealed. In fact, the idea that a single number may lie at the heart of all science is not inconceivable, given the range of factors which have a constant numerical value. Pi, e, c and the Avogadro constant are just four examples of numerical absolutes liable to be encountered by students of maths or physics, although none of them, admittedly, is a nice, round integer like 42.

  Adams claimed that he picked 42 because it was 'the most humorous of the two-figure numbers' and undoubtedly got fed up with questions from fans, some of whom seemed to think that the number had genuine (probably hilarious) significance but just needed to be explained a wee bit more. An audible groan could be heard at Adams' talks whenever someone (usually, it must be said, an American) asked him why he chose 42, presumably believing that (a) he had not been asked this before, or (b) his previous explanations had somehow passed the questioner by.

  There are many coincidental appearances of 42 in literature , the media and the world, some of which (if created after 1978) may be in deliberate homage to Hitchhiker's Guide. However, most occurrences of the number are merely coincidental, and not particularly interesting coincidences at that. In any corner shop or supermarket there will be items which cost 42p, in any reasonably sized street there will be a house number 42. Every individual encounters scores of two-figure numbers every day, and on a purely statistical level, approximately one per cent of those are likely to be 42. (In fact, since smaller numbers are commoner – they occur in both small groups and large groups – and 42 lies in the bottom half of the range 1–99, it will likely account for slightly more than one per cent.)

  There is no special significance to 42. That, in fact, is precisely what makes the joke so funny.

  Clear proof of 42's ordinariness lies in the fact that other two-figure numbers have just as much significance to other groups of fans. Readers of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus Trilogy, for example, know the importance of 23 and how frequently it occurs, while fans of American musical japester 'Weird Al' Yankovic watch out for occurrences of 27 and find them just as often. It is obvious that Douglas Adams could have picked any reasonably sized number for Deep Thought's answer and it would have been discovered to crop up elsewhere on a frequent basis. The one and only significance to 42 is that (in English, at least) it sounds amusing with its 'or,''ee' and 'oo' sounds.That's it. That is the sum total significance of 42. It's a funny-sounding number.

  The storyline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is complex, contradictory and unfailingly bizarre, full of inexplicable events and bizarre characters. The story behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is just as complex, contradictory and bizarre, and is equally full of inexplicable events and bizarre characters. The one perfectly complements the other. This book is an attempt to tell this latter story, based on extensive research and numerous interviews.

  The first edition of this book was published in April 2001. Less than a month later, Douglas Adams suffered a massive, unexpected heart attack in a Californian gym and passed away at the appallingly early age of 49. I have been told that the copy which I sent to him was found on his desk. A second edition with a new afterword was published later that year. For this new edition the entire text has been substantially revised, taking into account not only Adams' death but also the flurry of Hitchhiker's Guide activity since then.

  Where then, should we actually begin?

  Why not begin on a rock on the North side of Santorini in 1974, where 22-year-old Douglas Adams is lying exhausted but happy, under a starry sky and along side a young lady from Holland? He picks up his well thumbed copy of the essential undergraduate travel book, A Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and wonders whether somebody could write a similar volume for interstellar travellers – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

  That was more than thirty years ago …

                              M.J. Simpson Leicester, October 2000 and February 2004

Feedback on this book is positively encouraged, and may be sent c/o Pocket Essentials, or directly to pocket@plan etmagrathea.com

2. The Radio Series

The Primary Phase

Fit the First: First broadcast: 8 March 1978

Cast: Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Bill Wallis, Jo Kendall, David Gooderson

Story: Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to discover that his house is about to be knocked down to make way for a bypass. Before this can happen, he discovers that his friend Ford Prefect is an alien and that the entire Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

Ford is a travelling researcher for an electronic guide book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and successfully transports himself and Arthur onto the Vogon ship moments before it destroys the planet. Arthur is given a Babel Fish in his ear to help him understand alien languages and a towel for everything else. Unfortunately, the Vogons have detected their arrival on the ship and the Vogon captain tortures them with some of his poetry.

Fit the Second: First broadcast: 15 March 1978

Cast: Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Bill Wallis, David Tate, Susan Sheridan, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Moore

Story: After unsuccessfully attempting to flatter the Vogon Captain, Arthur and Ford are thrown off the ship but are unexpectedly picked up by the Heart of Gold, a spaceship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. Improbable as it may seem, the stolen spaceship is under the command of Zaphod Beeblebrox, part-time Galactic President and a distant relative of Ford's, accompanied by his human girlfriend, Tricia 'Trillian' McMillan. Zaphod met Trillian at a party in Islington where she was being chatted up by Arthur. The ship is also equipped with an overly cheerful computer named Eddie and a manically depressed robot called Marvin.

Fit the Third: First broadcast: 22 March 1978

Cast: Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, David Tate, Susan Sheridan, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Moore, Richard Vernon

Story: The Heart of Gold orbits the legendary planet Magrathea, once the home of a custom planet-building industry. Two automated guided missiles aimed at the ship are rendered harmless when Arthur turns on the Infinite

Improbability Drive. In the chaos, Trillian's two pet mice escape.

Landing on the planet, Zaphod, Trillian and Ford explore the underground remains of Magrathean civilisation , leaving Arthur and Marvin on the planet's surface. Arthur bumps into a Magrathean named Slartibartfast who t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword by Simon Jones
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Radio Series
• 3. The Stage Productions
• 4. The Books
• 5. The Recordings
• 6. The Television Series
• 7. Other Versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• 8. Documenting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• 9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Overseas
• 10. The Film
• 11. Dirk Gently
• 12. Other Work by Douglas Adams
• 13. The Digital Village
• 14. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the Web
• Douglas Adams – A Select Bibliography