It’s been forty years (count ’em!) since Douglas Adams launched The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a six-part radio show.
Forty bloody years. In that time we’ve had a second radio series, a six-part TV series, five novels and a feature film that still tends to divide fans. The BBC also adapted the later three novels into six-part audio series, and it seems that they’re not done yet.
To mark four decades of an enterprise that the Corporation once displayed an attitude to that Adams described as being akin to Macbeth’s opinions on murder, “Initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm, then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking“, the Beeb are working on a sixth radio series, bringing back as many of the original cast as possible. I’ll just let that sink in for a minute.
Producer Dirk Maggs is reuniting Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern and Mark Wing-Davey, along with some very high-profile guest stars who include Lenny Henry, Jim Broadbent and Ed Byrne. The script will be based on Eoin Colfer’s book And Another Thing, but will also incorporate unfinished story ideas Adams was working on at the time of his death. Broadbent will be providing the voice of Marvin the paranoid android, taking over from the now-retired Stephen Moore.
It’ll be interesting to see (hear?) where Maggs goes with this. Not long before he died, Adams had announced that he was re-tooling the storyline of his unfinished third Dirk Gently book, The Salmon of Doubt, into a sixth Hitchhiker’s novel as he was far from happy with the downbeat ending to Mostly Harmless. However, when The Salmon of Doubt was posthumously released it only contained the first few chapters of the Gently version of the story. Possibly some of the ideas Adams had for this book will be worked into the script.
So, yeah. This is a thing. It’s possible that, behind my jaded and cynical exterior I am currently squeeing like a moe girl from a low-rent anime. Who’s to say?
The hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy returns to Radio 4 on 8 March 2018.
Source: The Guardian
Dave Bowling
Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...
Nerd Comments