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HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

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    HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

    I just listened to the second series for the first time in many years. It doesn't age well, does it?

    I mean, the sound effects are seriously crap...most of the robot voices are essentially unlistenable. The dude playing Zaphod is fucking terrible - he always sounds like he's on the verge of wetting himself. The Ford character seems to be constantly trying (and failing) to combine the hitherto uncombinable modes of "frenzied" and "sardonic". And altogether, everything that makes Adams' novels so brilliant and timeless seem to be missing, except in those bits spoken by the narrator himself.

    Am I the only one who thinks this?

    #2
    HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

    I always thought the best bits were the excerpts from the Book itself, rather than the somewhat hysterical running around and panicking that all the main characters seem to spend the main parts of the story engaged in.

    Thing is, the excerpts from the Book are such all-time moments of genius it's impossible to feel anything but love for thing as a whole.

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      #3
      HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

      But running around and panicking is virtually all they do, it's what they're there for. They're pretty good at it too. Zaphod is a tit, it works.

      Anyway, a few reasons why the radio series remains the gold:-

      Peter Jones
      Mice
      Golgafrinchams
      Waiter at the Restaurant
      Gargravarr
      Max Quordlepleen
      Vogons
      Slartibartfast
      Intergalactic police
      Roosta
      Everything to do with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Especially the lift

      And lastly, always and forever, a throwaway line by a bit-part character:-

      "Talk a lot, don't you?"

      As for the books, they drop sharply in quality once they get beyond the base material from the radio series. I do agree that series two is quite uneven though.

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        #4
        HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

        Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:
        Thing is, the excerpts from the Book are such all-time moments of genius it's impossible to feel anything but love for thing as a whole.
        Yeah, it's true. There are a couple of episodes where I just wanted to zip through all the dialogue and just listen to The Book.

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          #5
          HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

          Now listening to the first series. It's substantially better than the second one. Not only are the main characters much les breathless, the backstory bits are considerably better.

          The scene with the philosophers' union demanding that the Deep Thought be shut off because they want rigidly defined area of doubt and uncertainty is genius.

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            #6
            HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

            Les Breathless was rubbish.

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              #7
              HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

              The first radio series is better than the second. The 4th episode of the first series which has the philosophers and Deep Thought, the intergalactic police and the Vl'hurgs was probably the best thing Douglas Adams ever wrote. Owing to Adams' general problem with deadlines, he was under enormous pressure to get the second series finished in time and bits of it do seem like they were written in a hurried state.

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                #8
                HHGTG, the original radio series - a reappraisal

                The worst one is the Christmas special or whatever it was, "Fit The Seventh". Despite opening with one of the all-time great HHGTTG lines -

                "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for, and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

                There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

                - it barely seems to have been written by Adams at all. Possibly this was one of the episodes partly written by John Lloyd, I can't remember now. But it's got a much broader, "Radio 4 comedy" style, and must have really depressed fans at the time, as the first new bit of Hitch-Hikers after the original series.

                That first series is still mostly great, but what I forgot until I listened again recently is that the mice's dialogue is almost totally indecipherable - the actors' voices are sped up to the point where you just can't hear a bloody word. I mean, I know most of the stuff from early Hitch-Hikers almost off by heart, because I was obsessed with it when I was about 11 or 12, but even with that knowledge I was totally lost.

                Thing about Douglas Adams (obviously) is that he was the ultimate spunk-your-load-then-sit-there merchant. Pretty much everything he ever wrote of any worth whatsoever comes from one eighteen-month period when he was still in his mid-to-late twenties. I've tried to read the later HHG novels and Dirk Gently and all that stuff, but I can't bear it - almost as bad as Terry Pratchett. It's just the first two Hitch-Hikers series / books / records, a couple of superb Doctor Who stories, and The Meaning Of Liff. That's it. I can't think of anyone who even comes close in terms of unloading that much genius in such a short space of time, then kind of tootling along for the rest of your life (DA's life, of course, far shorter than it should have been, but unless they'd got him on board for the new Doctor Who or something I doubt he'd have changed back into a major, productive talent). Even Peter Cook would splutter back into life from time to time in middle age ("Why Bother" and the best of those Clive Anderson things are surely as good as anything he ever did).

                Then again, considering how rich Douglas Adams was by the age of 30, I don't really blame him. There's a great quote from him - something like "Writers find writing extremely unpleasant. What they like is having written". God knows I can identify with that. Probably sheds some light on why he ran so dry so fast, once he had a nice house and stuff.

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