This Week In Retro: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [1981] (Patreon)

January 5, 1981: Finally, a comedy about Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Diamond Feit

Considering how we are descendants from apes who still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, human beings can be a complicated bunch. We spend our entire lives reading, observing, and absorbing ideas, concepts, or notions. All of these things clump together and end up informing our personalities, our preferences, and our entire nature as people. Since there's so much information spinning around inside our brains, collected from so many sources, it is impossible to nail down exactly what came from where, leaving us to wonder just how we ended up being the way we are today.

This is, of course, as true for me as much as the next Earth person, with one notable exception: 40 years ago this week, a BBC television adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first went out over the airwaves, seeding itself as a bedrock in my mind.

If this is the first time you're hearing of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, supposedly the entire idea started when author Douglas Adams got drunk in a field and stared up at the night sky while holding a copy of Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, leading him to speculate about the existence of a book that would explain how to hitchhike around the galaxy itself. Originally a six-episode radio drama, its sudden and surprise popularity quickly led to more episodes, and then to non-radio adaptations as well.

Adams began writing novels based on the radio scripts, and stage productions were quick to follow. Adams was soon asked to adapt his material into a television pilot, which he did on the side as he continued working on another very famous BBC science-fiction TV property: Doctor Who. (In my opinion, the two stories he wrote for Doctor Who are amongst the show's finest: "The Pirate Planet" and "City of Death")

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a rare combination of science-fiction and comedy, a pairing that I wish were much more common. Each version of the story varies in its plot details to one degree or another, but the basic premise across all media remains the same: It follows Arthur Dent, a human being who is forced to protect his house from being demolished on the very same day he learns his best friend Ford Prefect is an alien. He learns this because Ford needs to convince him to leave the Earth before it is demolished, and they do this by hitching a ride on the alien construction fleet who did the job.

Arthur and Ford's subsequent antics are laced with peril, yet they’re consistently absurd as well. Before the aliens throw the two stowaways off the ship into the vacuum of space, the captain reads his famously terrible poetry, which is akin to torture. The two are immediately rescued by an amazing ship powered by an "infinite improbability drive", which forces them to experience a series of highly unlikely scenarios before probability normalizes itself—that is, until Arthur and Ford discover that both of the thieves who stole this magnificent ship are people they’ve previously met. What are the odds? The ship tells them the odds!

The newly-formed quartet of space explorers happen upon an ancient planet famed for building "luxury planets" and, after a brief encounter with a pair of guided missiles, discover that the inhabitants are both very much alive and working hard on building a brand new Earth. See, they were the ones who had built the original Earth in order to solve a millenia-old riddle: What is the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? I say question because they had foolishly decided to seek the answer first, only to learn that the answer made no sense without the context provided by the more difficult task of determining the question (the answer, of course, is “42”).

One of my favorite aspects of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is how the comedy throughout always builds upon tragic events—the tragedy in this case being the destruction of the planet Earth. As much as I enjoy straight comedy, this tightrope walk between the two disparate moods makes the ridiculous aspects all the more laughable. Arthur Dent is so busy meeting new races and learning shocking truths about his own reality that he has no time to confront the very real trauma of his home's demolition. You can see a similar dynamic at work in later British science-fiction like Red Dwarf, and even in the basic premise of Futurama: Both stories are about a goofy idiot who wakes up from a long hibernation to discover he is alone in an unfamiliar world.

Combining this tragicomedy with science-fiction made the story even more inviting to me as a child, just as it still resonates with me as an adult. The best science-fiction uses far-out alien worlds and unreal technology to address very real problems faced in our society. Arthur's house is scheduled for razing in order to build a bypass by an uncaring construction foreman. Minutes later, the entire planet is similarly destroyed in order to build a "hyperspace bypass" by an uncaring alien space captain (in the original radio drama, actor Bill Wallis plays both parts to ensure the symmetry is apparent).

Rewatching the six episodes for this column, I was surprised by how much more commentary the series included, some of which I found quite timely. When the four space travelers encounter the galactic police, they find cops to be trigger-happy idiots who insist they will lament the excessive force which they are using after the fact (they also notably speak with American accents). In the final episode, Arthur and Ford hook up with an entire space colony that had been dismissed from their homeworld as inessential personnel, yet the civilization that deemed them expendable would later perish when their former jobs were left undone.

Watching The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 40 years later, having since become familiar with the original radio play and novels, there's an aspect to the TV series that is fundamentally flawed. Much of the humor (excuse me, humour) is slowed down; radio cannot allow for dead air, but actors on a set must move and deliver lines at a certain pace. There's also the matter of the BBC never being known for, shall we say "believable" special effects; it's a funny joke to hear Zaphod Beeblebrox described as having an extra arm and an extra head, but seeing it brought to life by placing a puppet on an actor's shoulder is clunky at best.

On the other hand, translating The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into a television series made it accessible in a way no previous incarnation could have been. I was in kindergarten when this series first aired, and even though I can’t be sure when I actually saw it, I was certainly too young to go to the library and read an entire novel—to say nothing of sitting down and listening to a radio drama performed in unfamiliar accents. This TV version is concise, it has lots of animation to simulate advanced computer graphics, and the low-budget costuming is still as eye-catching as it is implausible. It also ends on a surreal note that surely must have thrown me for a loop all those years ago: Arthur and Ford end up back on the Earth, stranded in prehistoric times, and the "ultimate question" that they had been seeking turns out to be "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" The two are left to contemplate this revelation as "What a Wonderful World" plays over the credits.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio play but developed into an entire franchise across nearly all forms of media. Books, video games, and even a Hollywood feature film have all since sprung from its creation, and even the untimely passing of Douglas Adams 20 years ago has not slowed the tide; a sixth novel was written in 2009, and a brand-new TV version has entered production which might air as soon as this year—if it weren't for this entirely preventable pandemic that has enveloped our planet.

Forty years later, I remain enamoured with this particular version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy more than any other. The radio drama is more amusing, the novels are more in-depth, but the television series’ odd blend of cheap sets and far-out concepts captured my imagination in a unique way. I'm positive that seeing this at a young age was vital to my later fascination with Monty Python (with whom Douglas Adams wrote), Doctor Who (Adams, again), and science-fiction in general.

Hell, would I have been so excited to see my first iPad if I hadn't watched a British man in his bathrobe type commands into an electronic book three decades earlier? Or marvelled at the idea of instant translation services that were not based on shoving a fish in my ear? If nothing else, I can find comfort in the knowledge that no matter how badly my depression gets, I cannot write poetry worse than that of Grunthos the Flatulent. And there's something wonderful about having one random number putting a smirk on my face whenever it appears.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan, is an active Twitter user, and is proud of xyr digital watch.