Narrating the festivities is Peter Jones as the voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a cut-rate intergalactic travel guide with the words “Don’t Panic!” written on the cover. Jones, like the rest of the leads, played the same part in the BBC radio production of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” which runs about four times as long as the television version. The radio production, long as it is, is of course a shortened version of Adams’ 5-book trilogy (no, that’s not a mistake, that’s how Adams wanted it). Each successive production is an enormous compression of its predecessor, culminating in the forthcoming feature film. Adams has a superhuman ability to tie absurd details from one book to a larger feature in a novel he wrote twenty years later. The end results include Dent’s ability to outsmart gravity and Marvin becoming older than the entire universe by several times over.
Naturally, you couldn’t possibly cram all this into three hours, but the BBC miniseries uses Jones’ narration and several delightfully low-fi animated sequences to capture the sense of Adams’ tangents and verbose wanderings. So often sci-fi writers come across as hopeless braggarts, begging us to congratulate them on the world they have created. The miniseries captures Adams’ tone, which is not boastful at all, but simply a criticism of an exaggerated version of the real world around him, couched in a deeply ironic and British love of wordiness. Just remember to set up the audio correctly on the DVD, or you might end up watching “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” sans narration, which, admittedly, has a minimalist charm to it.
Producer-director Alan J.W. Bell gives the series a loose, jazzy, and inane feel. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not one thrill after another, but one hilarious disappointment after another, as Dent’s—and, therefore, our—illusions are stripped away one by one. “The Guide” is not wholly cynical though. We realize that our endeavors, stances, and choices are literally unimportant in the grand scheme of a doomed universe. But as Dent and Ford walk off side-by-side into the countryside at the series’ end, as Louie Armstrong serenades us, we realize that if we cannot control our destinies and all we pride is ultimately stupid, we should at least treasure what we do have. We should take joy in our friendships, in a sunrise, or in a beautiful day, because we never know when space bulldozers might take it all away.
Finished Monday, March 28th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."