Life, The Universe and Everything: The story behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Stop me if think you’ve heard this one before…

Arthur Dent is having a very bad day for three reasons. First, he has learned that his house is to be demolished to make way for a bypass. Second, he has learned that his best friend, who goes by the name ‘Ford Prefect’ is not, in fact, from Guildford but is an alien from somewhere in the vicinity of star of Betelgeuse. Thirdly, and most worryingly, he learns that the Earth itself is also out to be demolished by a small-minded poetry-loving alien race called the Vogons. In fact, Ford’s alien status proves very useful as he is able to help Arthur escape the Earth before it explodes. The duo thus begin a series of adventures which see them encounter such wonders as the Infinite Improbability Drive, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the two-headed galactic president, Zaphod Beeblebrox and the electronic book, Ford is a researcher for. This book has the same name as the overall story: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Douglas Adams’ tale was actually a radio series before it was a book, but while the radio show was a perfect vehicle for Adams’ clever ideas, the story (though rather meandering) does work very well in book form. Sentences like ‘The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t,’ “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so” and “Reality is frequently inaccurate,” really do benefit from being written down and appreciated. Adams wrote five books in the series between 1979 and 2002 while Eoin Colfer has since written a sixth one. You’ll either be very familiar with concepts such as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the computer Deep Thought and the resonance of the number ‘42’ or you won’t be. If you are not, why not give it a try? Life, the universe and, indeed, everything will seem better once you do.

With the first two novels already a huge success, the Hitchhiker’s Guide… arrived on TV as a six-part BBC series in 1981. The TV version is not without flaws: the story was then incomplete and so rather fizzles out in the final episode. The special effects now look dated while some, such as Zaphod’s second head never looked good in the first place. I will always love the series though, partly because it is the format in which I first encountered the story. And, also, I would argue because much of it genuinely is great. Even the theme music is brilliant. The casting is excellent, and the late Peter Jones did a brilliant job of narrating and providing the voice of the Book. The explanation concerning the existence of the Babel Fish is particularly marvellously realised with sublime visual effects accompanying the hilarious narrative.

Douglas Adams was a genius: years ahead of his time. Sadly, he died in 2001 before the film project he had worked towards for so long could be realised. It seems likely more input from him might have helped as the resulting 2005 film directed by Garth Jennings while not a complete disaster, certainly disappointed many. The cast was good although more star-studded than in 1981: Stephen Fry (in fact, one of Adams’ old friends) voiced the Book and Martin Freeman played the dressing gowned hero, Arthur Dent. But the whole thing felt a bit rushed: the ingenious concept of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was dispensed with in one throwaway line. And the issue of Zaphod’s extra head – actually only mentioned once in the radio series and a joke which has been taken a bit too seriously by adaptors – was again mishandled.

More recently, it has been revealed a new TV version of Adams’ saga is planned. This might well prove to be a better medium for Adams’ creation than cinema was.

Remembering Grange Hill…

Let’s see now… There was Gonch, Zammo, Ziggy Greaves and Pogo Patterson. Tucker Jenkins, Trisha Yates, Precious Matthews, Roland, the dreaded Imelda Davis, the bully Gripper Stebson, poor old Danny Kendall, Fay Lucas, Fiona Wilson and Stewpot Stewart.

I might as well be listing figures from my own childhood and, in a sense, I am, though I never met any of them. For all of the above were pupils at the fictional comprehensive school, Grange Hill. The popular BBC children’s drama started forty-six years ago in February 1978 and ran until 2008. Perhaps I am biased, but I tend to think it’s finest years were in the 1980s i.e. during my own childhood.

Though I have watched them since, I was too young to have seen the very first episodes of Grange Hill when they were first broadcast. The original title sequence was memorable, presenting the series as if it was a story in a comic, depicting various pupils (none of them ever characters in the series) enduring typical scenes from school life: a girl missing the school bus, a swimming lesson, a rowdy game of netball, a stray sausage starting a food fight in the canteen and a boy (somewhat ironically) getting a comic confiscated in class. The original theme music, Chicken Man by Alan Hawkshaw was also used for the charades-themed, Give Us A Clue between 1979 and 1982.

Creator Phil Redmond had first come up with the idea for a school-based drama originally to be called ‘Grange Park’ while standing in a Liverpool dole queue in the mid-1970s. He later changed the name to ‘Grange Hill’, not realising this was already the name of a minor London tube station. A key innovation was to film much of the action at a child’s eye-level. The series was immediately popular but also controversial. Comprehensive schools were still a relatively new thing in 1978 and many parents were shocked to see bullying and racism portrayed openly on screen. Many complaints centred on the use of bad language. This is odd really as with the exception of one episode where microphones accidentally picked up someone swearing in the background, the language used was rarely stronger than “flipping heck”. This was, in fact, one area of the series which was consistently unrealistic.

By the time I started watching the show in about 1982, many of the original cast such as Peter ‘Tucker’ Jenkins and Benny Green (Todd Carty and the late Terry Sue-Patt) were on the verge of leaving. Tucker was a popular character and Carty returned to play the character in the spin-off series, Tucker’s Luck (1983-85). Carty is now probably more famous for his long stint as Mark Fowler in EastEnders. Many other ex-Grange Hill alumni including Susan Tully, Luisa Bradshaw-White, Michelle Gayle and Sean Maguire also moved on to the adult London-based soap, the last two also enjoying successful pop music careers.

Grange Hill enjoyed a number of memorable storylines in the 1980s. Some were arguably silly and unrealistic: the introduction of a school donkey and a special Grange Hill radio station spring to mind. Others were more shocking and hard-hitting such as the sudden death of pupil, Danny Kendall (Jonathan Lambeth) after he stole the car of teacher, Mr Bronson’s (Michael Sheard), essentially a be-wigged tyrant. No Grange Hill storyline ever received as much attention as the heroin addiction of Zammo Maguire (Lee MacDonald) in 1986 and 1987, however. It led to the release of a pop single “Just Say No” and a wider anti-drugs campaign.

By the 21st century, Grange Hill was showing signs of going into decline. In 2002, creator Phil Redmond moved the show’s setting from London to Liverpool. In time, Redmond who had subsequently created Brookside and Hollyoaks grew unhappy with the BBC’s plans for the series. Grange Hill was cancelled in 2008, but its enduring impact has continued to resonate long after the final bell rang.

Book review: Watching Neighbours Twice A Day, by Josh Widdicombe

Josh Widdicombe must be one of the busiest comedians working in Britain today. In the week before I wrote this review, I spotted him on Who Do You Think You Are?, the newly-revived Blankety Blank and, as always, appeared alongside Adam Hills and Alex Brooker on Channel 4’s Friday night hit, The Last Leg. And that’s without me even checking properly: goodness knows how many times he’s cropped up on Dave in that time, perhaps on a repeat of his own panel show, Hypothetical or on an old episode of Taskmaster.

This book isn’t a full-blown autobiography, however. It is the story of Josh’s youth growing up in Dartmoor as told through the TV he watched, specifically during the decade of the 1990s. As someone who watched a lot of TV myself during this period (and who still does), this format is very appealing to me. Many of the shows Josh watched were the ones I watched too. Josh can at least justify his childhood TV addiction on the grounds that he grew up in a remote sparsely populated area of Devon. I, however, grew up in Peterborough: not exactly a hub of culture but a busy enough, populous (new) town. What was my excuse?

Anyway, Josh begins by discussing Gus Honeybun. Gus was a regional ITV children’s puppet famous to anyone growing up in the south-west of England at almost any point during the last four decades of the 20th century but wholly unfamiliar to me and the vast silent majority of the world who grew up anywhere else or at any other time. The only reason I’d ever heard of Gus before at all, is because I moved to Devon in my twenties in the 2000s (presumably the exact opposite of what Josh himself did) and have had people talk to me about this great, mythical, winking TV birthday bunny since.

Any young viewers who, like myself, grew up in the area covered by the Anglia ITV franchise during the Eighties were lumbered with a frenzied waving TV puppet called ‘B.C.’ during this period. ‘B.C.’ stood for ‘Birthday Club’ which was also not entirely accidentally, the name of the short segments of TV, ‘B.C.’ himself appeared on, often with Norwich-based presenter, Helen McDermott. Unlike Gus Honeybun whose identity was entirely unambiguous, I am genuinely unsure what animal ‘B.C.’ was supposed to be. Some sort of wildcat? Perhaps a leopard? Maybe even a giraffe? He really doesn’t look anything like either of these. Occasionally, ‘B.C.’ would be absent because “he’s on his holidays today” (translation: he’s in the washing machine). At any rate, as with the solar eclipse of August 1999, I suspect the south-west got the best of it here. ‘B.C.’ may as well have stood for “Bored Children.”

Anyway, this is only one of many items on TV discussed here. Others include:

Neighbours: Like Josh, I too, was a huge fan of the Australian soap for a fairly short period. However, I am over six years older than him (he was born in 1983, I was born at the end of 1976) and here it really shows. I’d largely lost interest by the time he got into it. Despite us both remembering Todd Landers being run over, there is little cross-over (he doesn’t mention ‘Plain Jane Super Brain,’ the tragic death of Daphne Clarke or Dr. Clive Gibbons dressing up in a gorilla outfit at all). His discussion of a horrendously racist 1996 storyline in which the character Julie Martin accuses her new Chinese neighbours of killing and barbecuing her missing dog (which I’d never heard about) is grimly fascinating though. As is the ‘Big Break’ chapter which details just some of the horrors of Jim Davidson’s career.

Ghostwatch: Unlike Josh (and many others) I never thought this notorious dramatised ‘live broadcast from a real haunted house’ was actually real. Although as he points out, knowing it isn’t real does nothing to diminish just how terrifying it is to watch even today. Or brilliantly made. Even the bit where Michael Parkinson gets possessed.

The Simpsons and I’m Alan Partridge: These chapters are essentially songs of praise about the brilliance of 1990s TV comedy. I am in full agreement.

GamesMaster: I watched it too. And, happily, Josh’s household was so far behind that his memories of 1990s computer games sit happily with my memories of 1980s ones.

In short, I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it. I agree wholeheartedly with him about some things: Election ’97 was a joyous and memorable night. The death of Diana was a genuinely tragic and shocking event, but by time of her funeral it had descended into a distasteful grief-fest which much of the population (myself and Josh himself included) felt wholly isolated from.

I disagree with him about other things. The Spice Girls certainly were not “the greatest pop band of all time.” And on points of factual accuracy: nobody ever died of a drug overdose on Grange Hill (Zammo, the school heroin addict never died while Danny Kendall’s death in the series was not drug-related). He talks about the early Eighties Andrew Davies-scripted Schools programme, ‘Badger Girl’ as if it was made in the Nineties. And Tony Blair famously never once sent an email while in Downing Street.

There was too much football talk in the book for me, but for this he cannot be faulted. He was and is a football fan. It would be unreasonable not to expect him to discuss it.

There are chapters on many 1990s TV shows here, amongst them, Gladiators, Knightmare, You Bet!, TFI Friday, 999, The X-Files and Eldorado. There are no chapters on Twin Peaks, Our Friends in the North, Prime Suspect, Inspector Morse, Cracker or Queer as Folk. But so what? There are no chapters on Baywatch, Hollyoaks, The Darling Buds of May, Friends, Byker Grove, South Park or Sweet Valley High either. You cannot write about everything.

Who does he think he is? Josh Widdicombe is a fine comic writer and as Adam Hills would put it, “the pride of Dartmoor.”

Published by: Blink.

Tom Sharpe: a tribute

There are few authors who I can claim to have read every single book they have had published. Tom Sharpe, who has just died, aged eighty five, was one such author. Every one of his sixteen books is both funny and incredibly readable.

That is not to say they are low brow either. Although sex, contraceptives, misunderstandings and even famously, a sex doll, famously play a part, Sharpe’s novels are extremely well written and a world away from the low comedy of the Carry On films which were still being published when his novels first began appearing.

His heyday in fact occurred at that time of great low national self esteem, the mid-Seventies. Porterhouse Blue (1975) in which a reforming Tony Benn-style minister is transferred to the position of Master of an ancient and very traditionalist Cambridge college, is for me, his masterpiece. The efforts of the new Master (driven by his domineering wife) to change the rules to enable women to be admitted as undergraduates lead to a fierce Trollopian conservative campaign of resistance from the college notably Skullion, a porter.  The academic shenanigans predate Terry Pratchett’s imaginings about Unseen University and are worthy of comparison with the campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge from the same period. Blott on the Landscape (1975) was similarly excellent while Wilt (1976) drew on Sharpe’s experiences as a college lecturer in an East Anglian polytechnic. Bored of his life teaching English Literature to apprentices and butchers, Sharpe’s hero Henry Wilt soon finds himself wrongly accused of murder after his wife goes missing when Wilt is tricked into being tied to a sex doll at a party. These last misfortunes thankfully never happened to Sharpe.

All three of these books were adapted for the screen in the late Eighties. Porterhouse Blue (starring Ian Richardson as Sir Godber Evans, David Jason as Skullion and John Sessions as the hapless student Zipser) and Blott on the Landscape starring David Suchet and George Cole both worked well on TV, adapted by Malcolm Bradbury. Wilt (1989) a film starring Griff Rhys Jones and Mel  Smith was entertaining in its own way but as a version of the novel, it was poor. Wilt would appear in four more Sharpe novels.

After a hugely successful thirteen years, Shape published nothing after the third Wilt novel Wilt On High (1984) until he produced a sequel to porterhouse Blue Grantchester Grind (1995). Although not a particularly memorable sequel, Sharpe’s later books are still enjoyable, although by this time increasingly less in keeping with the times – characters still, for example, use telephone boxes a surprising amount despite the advent of mobile phones.

But to say Shape’s books are of their time is a weak criticism. The same is true of the works of Dickens, Wodehouse and Waugh, indeed of every book ever written.

The Throwback, The Great Pursuit , Wilt. One hopes such books will endure and continue to be read. It is a shame Sharpe never wrote an autobiography. The details of his past would surely have made for a great book in itself. Sharpe’s mockery of the South African Apartheid regime, a theme of his first two British novels Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973) saw him expelled in 1961, something he remained angry about for the rest of his life. As a child, his family also risked internment. His father who died in 1944 was a fascist sympathiser and a friend of William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw).

As it is, sixteen very funny books is a fine legacy from one of the greatest British comic writers of the 20^th century.