Okay, Maybe Panic a Little

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Primary Phase

You already know the basic story: the Earth is destroyed by the galactic Planning Council, to build a hyperspace express route. The only human saved is Arthur Dent, a sniveling wet rag of a man whose response to the grandeur of galactic civilization is to moan constantly. Arthur and his fellow hitchhikers have a string of slapstick misadventures, which never fail to end with them taking a sudden, humiliating pratfall.

Like I imagine happened for most American audiences, I first encountered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy based on Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel adaptation. (Younger audiences’ first experience might’ve been the 2005 movie.) Released in the shadow of that other science fiction extravaganza, the original Star Wars, that novel must’ve been bracing and electrifying on release. It took sci-fi’s founding principles seriously, without being po-faced and somber about them.

But it’s notably different, hearing Adams’ original radio series. Though it contains the same characters enacting the same jokes, the radio series’ auditory qualities guide listeners through the story in a different way. It’s difficult to encompass how fast-moving the original series was without hearing it. Propelled along by Adams’ frenetic pacing, Arthur Dent’s feelings of helplessness suddenly make more sense: we, too, feel overwhelmed and small.

Adams’ picaresque writing doesn’t really feature a through-line, just a succession of characters who face whatever situations Adams’ fertile mind can throw at them. He draws on shopworn science fiction stereotypes, but also on what were, in 1978, cutting-edge scientific and technological hypotheses. Perhaps surprising for a comedy series, Adams makes a more concerted effort to explain faster-than-light travel than either Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas ever did.

Simon Jones as Arthur really captures his character’s feckless desperation. He starts the story pugnacious and willful, famously eager to lay himself in front of a bulldozer to protect his house. But across six episodes, his essential inability to fight the tides of a mechanical universe becomes impossible to ignore. Like postwar British culture overall, Arthur’s illusions of Churchillian aplomb prove worthless, and worse, silly.

Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect has the debonair swagger to which Arthur aspires. But through the series, his puffery proves as useless as Arthur’s whinging. Ford believes himself a wise Cicerone showing his bumpkin friend around a galaxy heady with wonder and light. But as we watch him from outside, he’s clearly just more willing to be wrong. He doesn’t let one humiliation stop him from being equally cocksure next time.

l-r: Simon Jones, Mark Wing-Davy, and Geoffrey McGivern
(Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Ford Prefect) at a 2014 cast reunion

Equal to Adams’ actors, his soundscapes really sell his story. Aided by the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Adams and his team created innovative audio effects to depict a lush, crowded, entropy-filled galaxy. Seriously, when a console computer in this story chimes, it does so with enough panache that you virtually see an Apple IIe monitor kicking over. This is a universe teeming with life and technology.

But Adams doesn’t confuse “life” with “meaning.” A lifelong atheist who rejected the anthropic principle, Adams despised writers who felt obliged to shoehorn moral lessons into their writing. Life, for him, was a series of absurd accidents, and some people emerged from that okay, I guess. That comes across in his storytelling: every time his characters appear poised for a moral breakthrough, they inevitably slip on a banana peel.

If Adams’ story has a moral lesson, it’s this: we’re all bound for disappointment. The more assertively his characters make plans, the more certain their eventual failure. Adams rejects both Christian morality, which separates people into saints and sinners, and Nietzschean ethics, which separates people into powerful and powerless. The only distinction Adams makes is whether characters face defeat with composure, or go down whining.

Before creating his Hitchhiker franchise, Adams already had a robust science fiction media career. He’d written or co-written two Doctor Who serials, and after this series, he became Doctor Who showrunner for a year, writing in-jokes into the episodes. His disgust with the technical limitations of broadcast technology comes across in this series. He abandons all pretense of “realism” and lets himself have as much fun as the medium allows.

Audiences who have read Adams’ Hitchhiker novels won’t find the contents of this series new. Everything contained in these six episodes made it into the first two novels, except one ancillary scene that was probably written by script doctor John Lloyd. The benefit of hearing it isn’t the content, but the experience of complete loss of control, being swept along at somebody else’s pace, which was what Adams probably intended.

On a related topic:
Will the Real Arthur Dent Please Stand Up?