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Science Fiction » alt.fan.douglas-adams » Independent on Sunday's Hitch-Hiker's article
| Independent on Sunday's Hitch-Hiker's article [message #508] |
Di, 19 April 2005 13:31 |
|
This is from the Independent on Sunday 17th April 05
writen By Nicholas Lezard.
Don't panic... ... get 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'
instead. Not the
new Hollywood film, not even Douglas Adams's own books, but the
inspired 1978
radio series, says Nicholas Lezard, in which English Suburban Man took
on the
Universe armed with a dressing gown and some silly sound- effects...
Let us imagine a space traveller, using sub light-speed technology,
who decides
to leave this planet one day in 1978, the year The Hitch-Hiker's Guide
to the
Galaxy starts being broadcast on the radio. He or she makes it to a
star system
and then returns, 26 years later. The time-dilation effects of
relativity being
what they are, she expects to have remained young while everyone, and
everything, else has aged. Yet what does she find? Hitch-Hiker's is
still going
strong in the popular consciousness, to the point that even women are
saying, in
nationwide polls, that the book has been an inspiration, and that a
high-budget
film version, stuffed with big names, is about to be released. What is
this all
about, she wonders. She had expected more changes than this. Surely
this obscure
Radio 4 comedy series would have been forgotten by now?
I can still remember the first time I heard The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to
the
Galaxy; I was being given a lift by my father. To look at or speak to
the man,
almost the last thing one would suspect of him was a fondness for any
of the
popular manifestations of sci-fi. But we watched Doctor Who
practically
religiously, Star Trek ditto. By 1978, what with the usual problems
posed by
adolescence, family time in front of the telly was becoming less
frequent. As
for me, I was slowly discovering how to be a snob about culture.
Although still
quietly in favour of science fiction in general, as long as it wasn't
either too
badly thought-out or too pious (which ruled out quite an enormous
amount of it),
I was disengaging myself from it, as one does. Star Wars was for
little kids,
and indeed still is. I didn't like Asimov and his epigones because
they took it
too seriously; I regretfully didn't like Solaris because it was so
obviously
uninterested in the mechanics of space travel.
So where is the middle ground? In Star Trek, particularly its original
series,
whose bright palette, swashbuckling style and rudimentary but, for the
time,
original exposition of basic moral concerns were a naove delight; and,
natively,
in Doctor Who, careful to balance possible science with entertainment.
Douglas
Adams had a thorough grounding in that, having written a few episodes
and been
script editor for a year. Not a thorough immersion, but enough to get
to know
the ropes, and be familiar with the conventions. (His producer,
Geoffrey
Perkins, also introduced the absurdist game Mornington Crescent to the
nation,
for what it's worth.)
The show was also almost ludicrously English, a celebration of the
national
state of mind which prefers above all else to be left alone, enjoying
a nice cup
of tea. There are a statistically anomalous number of references to
the beverage
in Hitch-Hiker's (and in 'Shada' - the Doctor Who script written by
Adams but
never broadcast due to industrial action, but available as a BBC
webcast - there
is a deliberately ludicrous amount of tea); and Dent himself, we must
remember,
travelled the universe in that most quintessentially suburban garment,
the
dressing gown. But almost from the beginning, it was clear that
Hitch-Hiker's
was something different. I can still remember this slice of dialogue,
from the
first episode, which enthralled me, and convinced me that we were in
the
presence of a worthwhile cultural development.
Anyway, there I am in the car with my father. Ten minutes or so into
the show
there had been no science fiction to speak of, beyond the economically
intriguing title itself. An absurdly typical Englishman called Arthur
Dent has
discovered his home was about to be demolished, and a council official
is trying
to reason with him, pointing out that the planning application had
been on
display for some time.
'On display?' says Dent. (Whose voice of querulous dismay, the
ineffectual
outrage of the put-upon modern human made articulate, superbly voiced
by Simon
Jones, was perfectly judged. As, so it would turn out, were all the
others.) 'I
eventually had to go down to the cellar...'
'That's the display department.'
'With a torch.'
'Ah, the lights had probably gone.'
'So had the stairs.'
'But you found the notice, didn't you?'
'Yes. It was on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck
in a
disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the
Leopard'.'
That was funny enough. When the joke was turned on all humanity a few
minutes
later " as it was revealed that the earth itself was to be demolished
to make
way for a new hyperspace bypass (and the plans had been on view in the
Alpha
Centauri system, a measly four light years away) " it was manifest
that this was
some kind of satire, not too heavy, with space stuff in it, and worth
listening
to for the jokes alone.
There was one other element to the mix. I was very aware that my
father had,
along with half his generation, been greatly enamoured of the Goons,
that
sound-world of anarchic genius which forever changed the way this
country
approached its humour " and also made them look at, or listen to, the
radio in a
new way. Yet radio writers of my time had been wary of building on
Spike
Milligan's sonic innovations. Funny noises were not what one generally
expected
from one's radio set, except by accident. And now here was a show
which made
full use of the sound-effects department, that under-exploited arm of
BBC
boffins and eccentrics.
Razor blades were scraped along a grand piano's strings (almost
exactly the same
technique which produced the Tardis's dematerialisation noise), and
much
creative use was made of the connection of unrelated bits of sound
machinery to
each other, in a very similar fashion to the ad hoc experimental work
performed
by the Beatles and George Martin. Adams cited Sergeant Pepper as an
example to
aim for in his introduction to the collected Hitch-Hiker scripts, and
bemoaned
the fact that, 10 years on, radio comedy hadn't 'progressed much
beyond Door
Slam A, Door Slam B, Footsteps On a Gravel Path and the odd Comic
Boing.' He
wanted his show 'to sound like a rock album. I wanted the voices and
the effects
and the music to be so seamlessly orchestrated as to create a coherent
picture
of a whole other world'; and he succeeded.
Not everyone has enjoyed or got Hitch-Hiker's. There are many people I
knew who
ruled it out without listening to a second of it. They had absorbed
some of the
details, cast a scornful eye on its most passionate fans, and made
their minds
up forever.
Had they had another look when Douglas Adams converted the series into
book
form, they might have felt vindicated. Had they seen the BBC TV
series, doubly
so. Although it used pretty much the same cast as the radio series, I
took one
look at the rubber prosthetic head stuck precariously to Zaphod
Beeblebrox's
neck and decided I had better ways to spend my time. In fact, the
whole
Hitch-Hiker enterprise, in its various incarnations, has demonstrated
the Law of
Diminishing Returns. The books were fine insofar as they allowed Adams
to
resolve various plotting problems (the radio series had been composed
very much
on the hoof) and the hardcore fans to have a portable hard copy of his
idiosyncratic universe. But as far as I was concerned, the best bits
were those
lifted straight from the radio scripts, and the bread-and-butter stuff
of prose
narration were obviously not in the hand of a first-rate novelist. A
first-rate
writer for radio he certainly was, but left to his own devices on the
page it
was all too easy to see how, when he needed a new gag, or a comic
frill, he
turned to the mannerisms of PG Wodehouse.
He could have done worse. The books were good enough for an
undemanding
audience, and they allowed him to take the story further and,
interestingly,
make it darker. He acknowledged how his own black mood took over
towards the end
of the sequence. There are commentators, I hear, who have compared
Arthur and
Ford to Dante and Virgil, and that raises a smile, but the more
straightforward
highbrow allusion is to Gulliver's Travels.
And so to the film. This paper has some very good film critics who
will tell
you, when the time comes, whether the film stands up qua film. I,
however, will
tell you how this stands up as an adaptation of the source material.
It is not
my colleagues' responsibility to know this stuff.
The most interesting thing about the film version is the way that not
only does
it manage to screw up on every conceivable level, it manages to screw
up in ways
which not even I, as prepared to imagine the worst as Marvin the
Paranoid
Android, had conceived. The best thing about the film is that it is
such a
disaster that there is no chance whatsoever of a sequel being made.
See that dialogue above about the plans in the cellar? Well, the film
keeps that
in, up to the word 'cellar'. The rest, someone decided, was
extraneous.
Also extraneous were all the ways that Douglas Adams had found to tie
in one's
own experience to the immensity of space. In the radio show, just as
Arthur and
Ford Prefect are chucked out into space by the Vogons, we hear this,
in the late
Peter Jones's impeccable cadences: 'The Hitch- Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy is a
truly remarkable book. The introduction starts like this. 'Space', it
says, 'is
big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely,
mind-bogglingly big
it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the
chemist's,
but that's just peanuts to space. Listen...' And so on. After a while
the style
settles down a bit and it starts telling you stuff you actually need
to know...'
Etcetera. Do I have to explain why it is that such lines stick so
pleasantly in
the memory? The running joke of the whole show is that while all the
other
life-forms condescend massively to the ape-man, Arthur Dent, they are
all as
trapped in the tiresome minutiae of life as we are, subject not only
to
tiresomely long walks to the chemist's, but also overabundances of
shoe shops,
bone-headed bureaucrats, daft psychiatrists, and passenger vehicles
that refuse
to take off until the refreshment towels have arrived. The film uses
that speech
about space quoted above, but stops before we get to the chemist and
the
peanuts. One understands that a film is subject to pressures of time
and
narrative propulsion, but then they might have made the achingly long
title song
a little shorter, or dropped some of the stuff about the love-interest
between
Dent and Trillian, or any one of the not-quite successful new gags
inserted to
make us feel that we are not simply being subjected to familiar
material in a
new medium. One does not have to be oversensitive to the specific
influences of
big American money to detect that someone, somewhere, possibly on the
other side
of the Atlantic, was baffled by almost everything that made Adams's
vision so
peculiarly original, so classically playful in the tradition of
English
zaniness, and demanded it be dropped. Everything linguistically quirky
seems to
have gone. As for the sound-world, all we have instead is the usual
over-loud
bombast of the typical space opera. And the film's solution to the
problem of
representing Zaphod's two heads is ham-fisted and almost entirely
creepy.
At the screening I went to, the film company's representative was
anxious to
reassure us how much of Adams is in the final script. He seemed,
though, to be
unaware that the show had been a radio show in the first place, and
confessed to
some difficulty with the books. When Martin Freeman (Tim from The
Office), who
plays Arthur Dent in the film, came to field some questions at the
end, it was
clear that he didn't know it had been either a radio series or a book.
I did not
have the heart to remind him of this.
There is another angle we have been asked to look at the film from:
that Adams,
we are reminded, always saw Hitch-Hiker's as an ongoing project, that
he never
regarded the radio version as the final one, and that he had been
working for
years on a film script. When one hears about his difficulties in
getting the
film made, you begin to suspect that it wasn't just an ill-advised
session in a
gym that contributed to his death at the age of 49. It might have been
the
heartbreaking business of dealing with the kind of idiots who control
the film
industry's money.
And these are not the kind of people who run radio, particularly in
this
country. In a short sketch written as a one-off for a portmanteau
Radio 4 comedy
programme in 1982 (and, until recently, considered lost), the comedian
Sheila
Steafel interviewed 'Arthur Dent'. It's only a few minutes long, but
in it Adams
allowed his most famous creation to expand on the subject of his
travels, and
what he had missed. Citing Mars Bars, 'certain types of tea'
(naturally), he
also added 'Radio 4': 'The News Quiz, Just a Minute... It's unique.
There's
nothing quite " or even faintly " like Kenneth Williams anywhere else
in the
entire galaxy.'
And, for a while, there was also nothing like The Hitch-Hiker's Guide
to the
Galaxy. That is because a large proportion of the special effects were
generated
by the most powerful CGI laboratory in existence: your brain. The
moment Adams
gave Zaphod two heads, that was it. It was a superb joke about
monstrous
egotism, and worked because it was on radio. Any attempt at
representation would
be disastrous, and kill the joke straight off. The problem with
Hitch-Hiker's
was that it was perfectly conceived for its initial medium, a
testament and a
tribute to its power. But it was so good that all the other media,
hungry to
appropriate the show's kudos, wanted a piece, and have whittled it
away until
what remains now is a very sorry shadow of the original. RIP, Douglas
Adams, and
RIP, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can resurrect it any
time you
like with a tape deck. Not a cinema screen.
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is released on 28 April. The
final series of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide...', adapted from Adams's
books, will be broadcast from 3 May on Radio 4. The original radio
series is available from
www.bbc.co.uk, pounds 11.19.
-----
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