Will the Real Arthur Dent Please Stand Up?

Simon Jones as Arthur Dent in 1981

I re-watched the 1981 television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time since VHS days recently, and something struck me about Arthur Dent. Through the years, I’ve read him described as the story’s protagonist, antihero, viewpoint character, or voice, but importantly, never as the hero. Watching it again, it seemed glaring, what a wet rag Arthur Dent is. One wonders how such a gormless character can have such lasting appeal.

Simon Jones played Arthur Dent on TV, and also radio, audiobooks, and occasionally onstage. Writer Douglas Adams reputedly wrote Arthur specifically for Jones, with whom he performed in the Cambridge Footlights; and Jones ducked into the role, off-and-on, for twenty-five years, from 1978 to 2003. Only thirty-one when he played Arthur on TV, Jones is tall and good-looking, with broad shoulders and lustrous hair; yet he makes Arthur look childlike, a black hole of charisma.

Contrast Martin Freeman, who played Arthur in Garth Jennings’ 2005 HHGttG movie. Freeman is almost studiously average: in height, looks, body type. Freeman’s Arthur is a mildly altered version of Tim Canterbury, the role from The Office that made Freeman famous: amiable and kind, but largely forgettable. Yet, like Freeman’s other major big-screen role, Bilbo Baggins, this Arthur grows into his newfound role. He starts relishing confrontations with aliens, and eventually embraces the hitchhiking life.

Perhaps these different Arthurs reflect their creator, Douglas Adams, a man who struggled with identity throughout his career. In the introduction printed in most omnibus editions of his HHGttG novels, Adams describes conceiving the story’s first core while hitchhiking aimlessly around Europe after college, a nominal adult nevertheless lacking direction, both literally and figuratively. The story only took form, though during a period of prolonged pessimism, when he wrote it specifically to destroy planet Earth.

Adams’ original Arthur reflects both Adams’ frequently purposeless life, and Britain a generation after World War II. Witnessing its global empire enduring its death throes, Britain produced new literary heroes: venal monsters fighting international tyranny, like John le Carré’s George Smiley, or pathetic, nebulous, frequently comedic entities like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Clearly, Arthur Dent falls into the latter category: his individual wandering and lack of direction reflects the United Kingdom’s national sense of futility.

Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent in 2005

For Arthur, in the original radio and TV series, this directionlessness manifests as frequent whining. “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style,” Jones’ Arthur mewls, almost directly into the camera. Presumably, Adams’ first-generation British audience would’ve understood why that complaint mattered—and also why, when that complaint passed into a wormhole, it would’ve offended two warlike races preparing for battle. Because such a whimper certainly would have offended Brits of Churchill’s generation.

Notably, that whine doesn’t appear in the 2005 movie. Though the movie dropped four years after Adams’ passing, Adams was involved in the movie’s production for twenty years, and the final production used a lightly doctored version of Adams’ own script. (The movie’s development hell caused Adams’ lack of productivity through the 1990s.) Presumably Adams himself excised that moment from the story. It reflected a moment long past, both for Britain generally, and Adams personally.

My theory is: Adams himself changed. Adams cranked out two radio series of HHGttG and four novels in quick succession, from 1978 to 1984, then went suspiciously quiet. Notoriously bad at deadlines, Adams only produced the fifth novel eight years later, in 1992. That novel, Mostly Harmless, is markedly different from the previous four. Largely dry, often angry, and lacking Adams’ trademark wordplay, it features Arthur living mostly in one place, his hitchhiking days over.

It also features Arthur raising the teenage daughter he never knew he had. Adams married in 1991, and though his only daughter wasn’t born until 1994, surely he understood fatherhood was a possibility. Forced to take stock, Adams probably decided that wandering through life, lacking purpose and goals, wasn’t acceptable anymore. A lifelong atheist, Adams couldn’t derive purpose from transcendence; therefore he had to manufacture it internally. Aimless wandering became a journey towards a destination.

That, I believe, conditions these two different Arthurs. Simon Jones’ Arthur reflects a new Britain, born of wartime conditions, trapped in protracted adolescence. Martin Freeman’s Arthur reflects Douglas Adams specifically, a man who got away with living like a teenager well into his forties, suddenly accepting adulthood. Had Adams lived, one wonders how the character would’ve continued evolving: Adams would be pushing seventy now. We, his audience, have the opportunity to continue evolving with him.