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New HHGTTG Radio Show Gets Douglas Adams' Voice
trellick writes "The BBC has not only announced that they are to make radio adaptations to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy's final three books: Life, The Universe and Everything; So Long and Thanks For All the Fish; and Mostly Harmless. Also, Douglas Adams is to himself provide the voice of Agrajag, the character constantly being reincarnated and dying at the (inadvertent) hands of Arthur Dent, since Adams 'always intended to play the part of Agrajag and recorded himself in the part a few years ago.' Wonderful stuff!"
isn't it, that the inventor of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe should project his voice back across time and death? I can't wait to hear this, one of my best memories of late childhood is hearing the Hitchiker's Guide radio series on the BBC.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
It just seems fitting that Douglas Adams had the forsight to record the lines for a character who always dies, so that he himself could be re-incarnated in a way.
Lets just hope he does'nt mind coming back as a potted plant at some point
Where are we going, and why are we in this hand cart?
...said Agrajag. Now let's all yell : "Oh yes ! Once again !"
The only other case I know of, where an author has gained additional heights of immortality through recordings is J.R.R. Tolkein, who recorded himself reading extracts from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, plus assorted elven poems.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I asked Douglas Adams sign a book for a friend. When he had asked about it, I said "it's for a friend"... he gave me a sad look and I felt like a heel.
Meanwhile my wife had him sign the Apple II version of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" Infocom game. His reaction to her was "oh, wow, I've never signed one of these".
(sigh)
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
The Bush Administration announced today that the next State of the Union Address will be delivered using Ronald Reagan's voice.
Unknown host pong.
I really want to hear the later books acted out on radio, the voices were so good and the fx imaginative. Only Adams could have the genius and foresight to record the part before he died and when it wasn't planned to dramatise those later books.
I wish to remain anomalous
In the introduction to the collection of the first four books (and short story) Douglas Adams explained why every version of HGTTG controdicted every other version. Is the BBC going to maintain this tradition, or are they going to follow the books?
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I just finished over 160 hours of driving alone.
Rather than listen to the same 20 current "top hit" songs play for approximately 120 times each, I loaded all of the Douglas Adams audio books onto my trusty Creative Nomad 60 gig player (hey, why support the iPod -- every cent goes to the enemy! Viva la Microsoft!)
It was the most enjoyable trip I've ever taken. I had no road rage, I smiled, I laughed, I cried. Those are great books, and I can't wait to hear them all remade again.
If you have to drive/train/bike/job/skydive to work, you might try some audio books... they really take the edge off.
-Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned for
Get a lif.... errr.... never mind.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
What was the question again?
/* TAANSTAFL */
In high school senior year brit lit, I wrote my thesis paper on the HHGttG series. In the course of my study, I (re)read the entire series in about a week and a half. The concentration of DA's work in such a short time made me a very strange person to be around for awhile... I can't think of any sort of parallel for the experience. I'll be sure to get a copy of the radio broadcast if i can though ;-) DA was a genius.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Hopefully they'll also make available over internet stream, though.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Obviously you meant:
;-)
"Great! Just when I finished re-reading the whole collection!"
My sig is finally relevant to the story!
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Strangely, the only thing to go through the mind of the tape recordings as they fell was "oh no, not again." It is believed that if we knew why the recordings thought this, we would know a lot more about the way the universe works.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
You can get all the books in the HG2G series in unabridged audio form, read by the man himself. They were my first purchase on audible.com and they have lived happily on my iPod ever since (in converted mp3 form).
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Douglas Adams had a website that he posted on. One of his last posts (less than a month before his death) I thought had an interesting connection to /. and electronic forums in general:
"If anybody has any suggestions of features they'd like to see added (or taken away) please say so. We will of course completely ignore them. That's how the new electronic democracy works."
- Douglas Adams talking about updating his website
Hopefully they'll also make available over internet stream, though.
Quite probably - both live and through my favouritest thing ever, Listen Again.
RealAudio, but pretty high quality...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
In related news...
A resident of Tibet by the name of Dug lah-sa Dams was reported to have screamed "Oh no, not again!" before being accidentally run over by a bus load of tourists. The driver of the bus, one Arthur Dent, originally from England, is being held for questioning.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
For my wife, it would be a big deal...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Trust me, you don't *really* want to see the TV series. Badly let down by production values. Though the book's animated graphics were quite nice (hand animated)
They are.
The article even says that "[Douglas] Adams had been working on a film version for more than a decade, but it had never got past the planning stage." In the posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt it is said that the movie will come out "any decade now".
However, the project finally seems to be getting somewhere. The cast is known, and Slashdot even covered an interview that the screenwriter had with himself.
The movie won't be released tomorrow, though. The first episode of the new radio series will. (Actually, today from where I'm posting.)
Yes. And I for one welcome our new undead rapping overlords! I'd like to remind them that, as a trusted Slashdotter, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their east-side pimpin' caves.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
British Summer Time, which is UTC + 1.
You can listen to BBC Radio 4 live on the Internet, and you can listen to the last episode of every programme, which means you'll probably be able to listen to the first episode of the new series all week.
If you're in the United Kingdom, you can actually use your radio to listen to BBC Radio 4. 92 MHz or 95 MHz FM, or 198 kHz AM (LW).
is 42 in DNA code.
FreeSpeech.org
The BBC mini-site for the new series is here, and includes a short making-of video as well as an audio montage of the new stuff.
The first of the new series (The Tertiary Phase) has been completed, and the rest are yet to be recorded.
...is that 'So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish" not only sucked (when a writer of humour inexplicably starts swearing somewhere in the middle of a series, it's a bad sign), it showed the limitations Adams' would show later-on as writer (unfinished story threads, complete breakdown of narrative, etc..) of the Dirk Gently books. I can't imagine ever wishing to hear SLaTFAtF put to another format, although conceivably it could only make the experience better.
This is not flamebait - I treasure the experience of reading the first three books, but honestly, even "Life, The Universe, and Everything" became plodding after a while, despite the ingenious ideas he hatched up (ie the hair dressers).
I will always remember Adams' books, but let's not needlessly enshrine everthing the chap wrote, eh?
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Just imagine it's being performed live on stage, not in a studio.
I mean, who else is going to know what it's like?
And it's so,,,, so... Douglas Adams.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I generally view the last two Hitchhiker books not so much as novels, but as a protest from Adams. He never liked writing (other than the Liff books), and he always hated being pigeonholed as the writer of the Hitchhiker series. Furthermore, he himself recognized the flaws in the last two books and blamed them, at least partially, on a turbulent personal life.
They're not great books (though you can find great fragments of writing within them--even Mostly Harmless had some killer dialog and a few cutesy ideas), but I think it's a little unfair of you to call them proof of Adams' "limitations as a writer." I especially don't agree with your comments about the third Hitchhiker book...
I think many people don't give Life, the Universe, and Everything a fair chance. Yes, it is slower, but only in the sense that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is slower than a typical American sitcom. In this book, Adams found the whimsicalness that was, IMHO, lost in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Even as the plot is drawn tightly into focus (and yes, it actually has a compelling central plot, unlike the first two books), he manages to give us such wonderful bits as the encounter with Agrajag, the secret of flying, Prak, Belgium, etc. By contrast, all that Restaurant... gave us was "the B Ark", the (distorted?) Ultimate Question, and a lot of (relatively) uninteresting Zaphod scenes. I've also gotta say that the first Dirk Gently book was very tightly written and quite clever, and I really don't see how anyone could call it "incoherent" ("less funny", perhaps, but you can't weave a compelling mystery when you're cracking a joke every other paragraph.) The themes were dark, interesting, and completely unpredictable, the perspective shifts were very atmospheric and well-timed, and the characters were very distinct and believable. The sequel fell on its face somewhat (the plot was much less interesting and the focus shifted around far too much), though it was a little funnier than Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Finally, anyone who fails to mention Last Chance to See is doing the late Mr. Adams a great disservice. If you still don't understand it when some people (like me) call DNA one of the greatest writers of all time, read this book. Its "plot" is, um, fairly uninteresting (just a bunch of rich westerners traveling around looking at endangered species), yet it remains one of the most hilariously stylish nonfiction books I have ever read. His narrative style is extraordinarily powerful--funny and fiendishly clever to the extreme, yet with all kinds of beautiful insights lying just beneath the surface. The events that take place are not really very interesting, but on the whole I'd have to say that it's a very good book simply because the prose itself is so engaging.
And that, I think, is the best thing I can say about the work of Douglas Noel Adams. His material might have been hit-and-miss, but his style never faltered for a moment.
Not to sound totally depressingly pessimistic or anything, but rich, famous and loved as he was, DNA got shafted by the publishing institution. Let this be a lesson to you, budding artists! Don't publish!