Dirk Gently Detective on BBC Radio

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Douglas Adams’s much loved detective, the enigmatic Dirk Gently, will be make his UK broadcast debut on BBC Radio 4 this October.

Featuring a star-studded cast with Harry Enfield in the lead role, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency will be produced by the same award-winning team that made the conclusion to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Dirk Gently has an unshakeable belief in the interconnectedness of all things but his Holistic Detective Agency’s only success seems to be tracking down missing cats for old ladies. Then Dirk stumbles upon an old friend behaving bizarrely, and he is drawn into a 4 billion-year-old mystery that must be solved if the human race is to avoid immediate extinction.

This first series of six 30-minute episodes is adapted from the book of the same name and directed by Dirk Maggs, himself chosen by Douglas Adams to conclude the Hitchhikers saga.

The cast includes Billy Boyd as Dirk’s client Richard Macduff; Olivia Colman as Dirk’s secretary Janice Pearce; Jim Carter is Dirk’s nemesis DS Gilks; Andrew Sachs as Professor Reg Chronotis; Felicity Montagu (I’m Alan Partridge) as Susan Way, with Robert Duncan (Drop The Dead Donkey) as her brother Gordon; Toby Longworth (Star Wars) as the Electric Monk; and Michael Fenton Stevens (Nighty Night) as Michael Wenton Weakes.

Guest appearances are made by Andrew Secombe (Star Wars); Jon Glover (Harry Enfield And Chums); Jeffrey Holland (Hi-De-Hi); Wayne Forester (Captain Scarlet) and Tamsin Heatley (Broken Sword).

Considered by many Adams fans to be as funny as, if darker than, Hitchhikers, the Dirk Gently novels reflect Douglas’s unique and funny take on matters as wide-ranging as consciousness, conservation, man’s place in the cosmos and crime. The first series features everything from quantum physics to missing cats, via Coleridge, Bach and an Electric Monk.

The cast and production team feature many old friends and colleagues of Douglas, including music composer Phillip Pope. The production team, from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases is led by Executive Producer Helen Chattwell and the Producers are Jo Wheeler and Dirk Maggs.

The series begins in October and will also have its own dedicated webpages featuring trailers, photographs, production diaries, video and competitions. Programmes will also be available on Radio 4’s listen again service.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

No matter how many times I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I’ve read it quite a few times already, it never fails to thrill me and induce bouts of almost uncontrollably hearty laughter. With this novel, Douglas Adams gave life to a phenomenon that will long outlive his tragically short life, delighting millions of readers for untold years to come. I’m not sure if science fiction had ever seen anything like this before 1979. This is science fiction made to laugh at itself while honoring its rich tradition, but it is much more than that. Adams’ peculiarly dead-on humor also draws deeply from the well of sociology, philosophy, and of course science. Whenever Adams encountered a sacred cow of any sort, he milked it dry before moving on. Beneath the surface of utter hilarity, Adams actually used his sarcasm and wit to make some rather poignant statements about this silly thing called life and the manner in which we are going about living it. This is one reason the book is so well-suited for multiple readings-a high level of enjoyment is guaranteed each time around, and there are always new insights to be gained from Adams’ underlying, oftentimes subtle, ideas and approach.

Arthur Dent is your normal human being, and so he naturally is more concerned about his house being knocked down than facing the fact that the world is about to end. His friend Ford Prefect, he comes to learn, is actually a researcher from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, but before he can even begin to comprehend this fact, he finds himself zipped up into the confines of the Vogon space cruiser that has just destroyed the planet Earth. Things become even trickier for him when he discovers the great usefulness of sticking a Babel fish into his ear and then meets the singular President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and his shipmate Trillian, both of whom Arthur actually met months before at a party. Such impossible coincidences are explained by the fact that Beeblebrox’s ship is powered by the new Infinite Improbability Drive. Dent grows more and more confused during his travels on board the Heart of Gold, and the story eventually culminates with an amazing visit to an astronomically improbable world.

Much of the humor here is impossible to describe; this novel must be read to be appreciated. It seems like every single line holds a joke of some kind within it. The characters are also terrific: the unfortunate Arthur Dent, who basically has no idea what is going on; Ford Prefect, Arthur’s remarkable friend from Betelgeuse; Zaphod Beeblebrox, with his two heads, three arms, and cavalier attitude; Trillian the lovely Earth girl who basically flies the Heart of Gold; Slartibartfast the planet builder and fjord-make extraordinaire; and my favorite character of all, Marvin the eternally depressed robot. Life-“loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it” is the Paranoid Android’s philosophy. One brilliant thing that Adams does is to step away from the action every so often to present interesting facts about the universe as recorded in the Hitchhiker’s Guide; here we learn about Vogon poetry, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, Trans Galactic Gargle Blasters, and other fascinating tidbits about life in the crazy universe Adams created. He even gives the reader the ultimate answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in these pages.

This novel is just an amazingly hilarious read that will leave you yearning for more; to our great fortune, Adams indeed left us more in the form of four subsequent books in the Hitchhiker’s “trilogy.” If you don’t like science fiction, it doesn’t matter; read this book just for the laughs. The most amazing thing about Adams’ humor is the fact that everyone seems to “get” it. Adams broke all the rules in writing a novel quite unlike any that had come before it, and he succeeded in spades. This may well be the funniest novel ever written.