Broadcasting Brain

Thirty years ago a multimedia sensation was unleashed on the world. I’m firmly convinced that I was one of the first people in North America to ever hear about The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the first novel in the series of novels, and multimedia sensation, that launched the career of British writer Douglas Adams into the stratosphere. The thing is, I didn’t discover it in book form – I heard it on the radio. That’s also when I discovered my favorite Eagles song. There was a kind of magic in that discovery that you don’t seem to find those days.

Many people have experienced H2G2 (a popular abbreviation for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series) through the novels (a “trilogy in five parts”), album recordings, a BBC TV adaptation, computer games, comic books, and even the 2005 movie adaptation. What a lot of people might not realize, however, is that H2G2 was originally released as a BBC Radio comedy program 30 years ago (yes, 30 years!)

Synopsis of the H2G2 story

H2G2 follows the adventures of Arthur Dent, a young Englishman who is saved from the destruction of the Earth (to make room for a Hyperspace bypass – I kid you not) by his friend Ford Prefect, an out of work actor who is secretly a field researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The Guide, as it’s often called, is an electronic reference book like the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, only infinitely bigger and stored on a device similar to the iPod Touch or the Amazon Kindle.

Arthur and Ford travel from one misadventure to another, meeting:

• the two-headed President of the Galaxy, currently on the lam for stealing the most amazing starship ever
• a brilliant young lady who Arthur failed to pick up at a party and who is the girlfriend of the two-headed President of the Galaxy
• a Paranoid Android (a bit different than what Radiohead sung about)
• the mice who created the Earth
• the original Fail Whale
• and much more.

They all become entangled in the search for the Question that leads to the Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything (and if someone ever mentions the number “42” to you, this is what they are talking about). All of this happens while Arthur is still in his bathrobe and pyjamas.

Loaded with comedy, satire, bits of history and science, and tons of imaginative ideas, H2G2 was a watermark achievement in both comedy and science fiction. It was also an amazing moment in radio comedy, invigorating the medium in ways that haven’t been replicated as well since.

Thoughts behind H2G2

In today’s environment, where creative content is often released in multiple formats in rapid succession, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was somewhat unique for a 1970s radio show, spawning all of the other media activity and formats that followed in ways that only franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek were doing. Unlike them, however, it came from a radio show: no pictures.

Douglas Adams once wrote that he wanted H2G2 to be the comedy equivalent of a rock album, meaning that he wanted to include imaginative sound, music, and ideas to go beyond the basic sound effects of most sketch comedies. And he did – the H2G2 radio shows and adaptations of the novels are pretty amazing to listen to. They really help build the galaxy that Adams had in mind. But, like Star Wars, it took a heck of a lot of works in the pre-digital age to pull it together.

H2G2 and me

I heard one of the radio shows by accident in either 1980 and 1981. My dad had probably left our kitchen radio set to Maine Public Radio, something I wouldn’t normally listen to, and I caught some dialog about the destruction of the Earth – whoa! Star Wars and Space: 1999 had converted me to become a science fiction fan a couple of years before, so I was hooked immediately by this radio show. The story, the humor, and the sound effects were so different from anything else I’d ever seen before that it was pretty amazing.

First discoveries always seem to shine brighter in our memories than succeeding finds, but this was the real thing – intelligent comedy and packaging. This was also the first time that I ever heard “Journey of the Sorceror” by the Eagles, which the BBC adapted for use as theme music in the H2G2 radio series. The Eagles would have had no idea of what Douglas Adams would create, but somehow that combination of drums, keyboards, guitar and banjo came together in a moment of instrumental genius that somehow meshed perfectly with Adams’s comic creation.

Missing that sense of “WOW!”

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard those radio shows, or any audio adaptation of the H2G2 series, but it still brings back a sense of wonder and excitement that is hard to capture. Perhaps there’s been some of that buzz on the Web and in this social media sphere, but that sense of “wow” seems to come less and less often these days, despite advances in technology.

I mean, how often is it that something comes along that really stretches your realm of the possible and blows your mind? That’s what I’m talking about.

So here’s to the late, great Douglas Adams: visionary, creative genius, and sadly missed since his death in 2001. If anyone out there today is creating anything as groundbreaking and creative as his stuff, then please leave a note in the comments or on FriendFeed, because I’d dearly love to check it out.

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!