May 25th Happy Towel Day."More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
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How many works of fiction can you name that are equally as famous as a book, radio play and TV show although not so much as a movie? I can name one, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which I've featured here on Wyrd Britain a few times but today I thought it about time we stopped and turned the spotlight on it's creator, Douglas Adams.
Made just a few months after his death in May 2001 this episode of the BBC arts show Omnibus is a celebration of Adams' life and work. With contributions from a wide variety of his friends and colleagues such as Terry Jones, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins and many more it is an affectionate homage to the man and his ideas.
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you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
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Way, way back in a time almost lost to history and now known only as Monday the 5th of January 1981 the BBC screened the first episode of the TV adaptation of the book adaptation of the radio show adaptation of the thoughts of a bloke called Douglas.
Douglas was a clever man and like all the best types of clever men he knew that some clever things were also funny things and so set about making a funny thing out of the clever things. In order to do this he drafted in some other clever people. Some who were clever at organising, some who were clever at drawing, some who were clever at filming or recording or building or musicing or pretending to be someone else.
Then, 10 years later, someone else who was clever had a clever idea to take all the extra bits that the clever people had filmed, film some new bits of some of those self-same clever people and get the main clever pretending man to talk about how clever everyone was. They even had the idea to put two different spaceships at the beginning to make less clever people who really like watching clever people at work go "Yay!" like the big geeky kid that he is they are.
I first happened across 'The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy' via the magnificence of the TV show. Radio was never a big part of my life growing up so the original radio play had passed me by and the lack of a bookshop anywhere near where I grew up meant the book had gone unnoticed also. So, the TV show was a revelation. A glorious, madly funny, revelation.
I managed to track down the first two books a little while later but the radio show eluded me for years. By the time I did get to finally hear it so entrenched was I with the TV version that it took some effort to get my head around those characters that has been recast from this original version.
One of those was the voice of Trillian. Played by Susan Sheridan who was for me a jarring change from the very distinctive Sandra Dickinson version that I'd grown up with. Another was the Geoffrey McGivern version of Ford Prefect as opposed to the David Dixon one. The radio show is, of course, fabulous and all the cast are perfectly at home in the roles and that initial "Oh, it's a different actor" aside I soon grew to love it.
So it's with sadness that I noticed this weekend the passing of Ms. Sheridan and so, with my condolences to her family and friends, I thought this would be a good opportunity to share with you, not the original show because it's not online, but the casts triumphant return to the roles with the 2014 live show.
First there was the radio series, then came the books and then in 1981 the BBC television people finally realised that they really should get in on this intergalactic guidebook lark and turn it into a series.
It tells, as I'm sure you know, the story of Arthur Dent (Simon Jones) who, on the day the local council decide to demolish his house in order to build a bypass, discovers that not only is his friend Ford an alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse but that the Earth is also about to be destroyed in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Instead of the little lie down he thinks he needs, Arthur finds himself rescued from the doomed Earth and catapaulted across space and time. Along the way he discovers the importance of towels, visits numerous planets and meets a whole host of people of various sizes, shapes, colours and configurations including a very nice girl that he had previously failed to get off with, the ex-Galactic President; the two headed, three armed hedonistic semi-cousin of Ford's called Zaphod Beeblebrox (Mark Wing-Davey), Marvin, a clinically depressed robot (Stephen Moore), a man with an unimportant name who designs fjords (Richard Vernon), the manifestations of a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings on an aeon long search for the Ultimate Question about life, the universe and everything and the officious and deeply unpleasant Vogons; all of which he does with a fish that disproves the existence of God in his ear.
To help him better understand where he's ended up Ford gives Arthur a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy an electronic and somewhat eccentric book (voiced by Peter Jones) which, via little animated entries, provides him with snippets of information about the galaxy.
I was a bit too young to catch the radio play so this series was my first exposure to the glory that is Hitchhiker's and it's still my favourite of them all. From the cast and the acting, through the animation and Paddy Kingsland's incidental music to the wonderful and inventive script, I love it all.
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
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- or watch it below