Adventure, excitement and really wild things: just three of the complications mild-mannered Arthur Dent does not want in his life. He’s perfectly happy --- well, perfectly miserable if he’s honest --- living out his dull, boring existence on a small, drab, blue-green planet orbiting an equally drab type G star way out in the unfashionable end of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the very last thing he needs to discover is that his best friend is an alien, and is in fact from somewhere around the region of Betelgeuse, and not from Guildford after all. He also categorically does
not need to find out that his home planet is about to be destroyed in order to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He has just about come to grips with the unsettling fact that his own house is about to be knocked down, but asking him to accept that the Earth is shortly to become just another statistic of poor intergalactic council planning is just pushing it perhaps the tiniest bit.
Sadly, everything described above happens with almost gleeful cruelty and poor Arthur is suddenly and without any warning on a journey through a galaxy he was not even aware existed, or if he did, it was best observed through a powerful telescope, preferably with a nice strong mug of tea in one hand and a hot water bottle at one’s feet. He is
most annoyed! He absolutely did
not give permission for his person to be shot at, laughed at, menaced, mangled, transported, teleported or deported and he very clearly remembers never signing
anything that said “I would like to be a space traveller, please can you arrange this for me Jim?” But the universe does not care, as he is rapidly finding out.
Conceived as a series of radio plays and then a trilogy of novels that now numbers about six, “The Hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy” found perhaps its greatest expression in the six-episode TV series commissioned by BBC in 1981, and is of course the most famous series of books written by the late Douglas Adams. As I mentioned in the intro to “Red Dwarf” and also my writeup on the movie “Dark Star”, science-fiction has been almost ninety-nine percent serious down through the decades. Even the Flash Gordon shows, broadcast on early-morning television and with effects so woeful they were destined to be lampooned forever after, were played with a straight face. For a long time, it was not considered right to mock or even satirise sci-fi. It was seen as the perview of the geek, the nerd and more importantly the scientist. And you did
not mock science!
But gradually this has changed, mostly thanks to this series, which challenged our notions of science-fiction, and even comedy in general. Like all the best comedy, of course, there is social commentary looking out of every porthole, satirical stabs at the establishment, at civilisation, at Man himself hiding behind the jokes. It’s not slapstick and it’s not farce, though in some cases these elements are used in the plotlines. But mostly it’s comedy that makes you think. The whole story begins with the destruction of the Earth and the escape of its only remaining inhabitant, Arthur Dent, who’s about as far from an action hero or space adventurer as you can get. Dragged very unwillingly and somewhat bemusedly into space by his best friend, Ford Prefect, Arthur very quickly has to accept that his worldview --- that Man is the dominant, perhaps only lifeform in the universe --- is completely wrong, and that aliens do exist. His friend is one, and he meets many others. Sadly for him, most are very humanlike in their attitude and aspirations, which is a nice way of saying they all want to rip him off. Careening from adventure to adventure with all the control and grace of a pinball, Arthur is rather amazed to find that a lot more people than he could possibly have imagined are interested in the contents of his brain, and many of them will do whatever it takes to get to those contents, including, if necessary, removing that brain from the “semi-evolved ape”’s head.
A cult classic in every way, HHG2G has been recently updated for the big screen, but the series was my first real introduction to it after the books, and remains my second-favourite medium through which to enjoy this masterpiece. The casting is perfect, each actor bringing each character alive exactly how you might have imagined them on the page, and the addition of the narrative of the Book together with what were for the time state of the art graphics makes this a brilliant realisation for the small screen of the story told within the pages of the novels. Of course, with three main books to get through the series does compact down the story somewhat, but the main points are all there and it ends pretty much as you would expect.
The metaphor, of course, for a man blundering through his life constantly groping for meaning while knowing with a fatalistic certainty that there is no such meaning, can’t be overemphasised. Arthur Dent is the eternal everyman, the guy in the street, the bloke in the pub whom you wouldn’t look twice at --- if he weren’t in his dressing gown, that is --- and the whole idea that these sort of things happen to other people, not to him, only serves to heighten the irony of the madcap capers he gets dragged into, along with a manically depressed robot, one more survivor of his home planet and a man with two heads who has stolen the most expensive starship in the galaxy. As he says himself with glum matter-of-factness when Ford tells him that the Earth is about to be destroyed in a few moments, “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
CAST
The cast of HHG2G is of course a cast of billions, but the main characters comprise five very different people. One isn’t even human. Well, two aren’t even human. Actually, now you come to mention it, that would be three who aren’t …. okay then. Two are human. The rest, well, aren’t. Did I mention one is a robot? One is a robot.
Arthur Phillip Dent, played by Simon Jones: The unhappy hero of the tale, the gloomy protagonist, Arthur is the type of man who would be less likely to even pick up a book about space and aliens and adventures than actually end up going into space and meeting aliens and having adventures. All he wants in the world now is a nice cup of tea. But unfortunately the last teabag, tealeaf and teapot all perished, along with all tea plants, when the Earth was blown up in order to make way for the new hyperspace bypass. Arthur can never go home, but he doesn’t want to be out among the stars either. He has no time for adventures and japes and mysteries: he thinks they’re a waste of time. And like the new guy in town (literally, if town measures about a billion parsecs across in every direction and somehow this guy has never managed to stumble across its borders) he greets every new discovery, every piece of eye-opening technology and every stunning new vista with the sort of wide-eyed (but annoyed) wonder that makes these experienced space travellers laugh at him. Well, all except Marvin. He doesn’t laugh at anything. Life? Don’t talk to him about life…
Ford Prefect, played by David Dixon: Due to a rather unfortunate misunderstanding about human names, Arthur’s best friend managed to choose for himself, rather than a nice inconspicuous name, one that was completely unique. He also failed to blend in as a normal human, dressing rather flamboyantly and talking rather fast and with something of a degree of impatience. Ford is a field researcher for the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and became stranded on Earth while researching an article for the Guide. When he learns that the Earth is to be destroyed he seeks out Arthur and masterminds their escape (okay: he thumbs a lift on one of the ships carrying out the destruction: that’s what hitch-hikers do!), whereafter he attempts to introduce his friend to the wonders the galaxy has to offer. Sadly for him, Arthur is not interested, having had to come to terms both with the fact that his home planet has just been exterminated and, perhaps worse, that there is literally nowhere in the galaxy now where he can find a cup of tea.
Trillian, played by Sandra Dickinson: A sexy girl with the body and voice of a blonde bimbo but with the intelligence of several particle physicists, Trillian escaped the destruction of Earth by the simple expedient of not being there when it blew. She had already left with an alien she had met, and with whom she remains. She vaguely remembers Arthur, and for a while it’s comforting for him not to be the last human alive, but Trillian has spent long enough out in the galaxy that she really can’t be considered an Earth girl anymore. She has adjusted, adapted, embraced the alien lifestyle in a way Arthur can’t, won’t and does not want to.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, played by Mark Wing-Davey: Space hippie, playboy and occasional president of the galaxy, Zaphod has two heads and an ego that is bigger than both. In fact he is not a two-headed alien (though he is an alien; he’s the same race as Ford) but had the extra head grafted on because “it looked cool”. He it was who took Trillian off-world, but though he fell for her (inasmuch as he could love anyone other than himself) she is not really interested and is just using him. He is utterly contemptuous of Arthur when he meets him, and keeps calling him a monkey. Which, at some level, you can’t really argue with.
Marvin, the paranoid android, played by Stephen Moore: Well, voiced by Stephen Moore. David Learner occupied the robot body, but as all that really did was trudge despondently from place to place I’m not seeing a huge amount of acting talent required, sorry guy. And the true personality of Marvin is in his voice. He is permanently depressed, a robot with a massive brain who is cursed to serve humans and carry out menial tasks that hardly befit his hyper intelligence. As he says, or moans, himself: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Open the door, Marvin, they say. Take the prisoners up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Cos I don’t!”