In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams was a busy ape-descendent, not only working as a script editor on "Doctor Who" but also writing his own satirical science fiction opus "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which began life as an audio play on BBC Radio, then spawned a "five-volume trilogy" of novels, and, in 1981, a six-part BBC Television miniseries; however, the less said about the godawful 2005 feature-film adaptation, which Adams, who died in 2001, had begun to develop, the better. Oh, all right, let's say this: It's more than a bit squalid, isn't it?
Not so about the miniseries, although fans of classic "Doctor Who" will immediately recognize the limitations the BBC faced in trying to stage "Hitchhiker's," whose six episodes roughly span the narrative from the first two novels. The radio series provided the narrative structure along with a few key actors, but while listeners could use their imaginations to conjure the visuals invoked in the narration, making those exotic visions plausible given both the technical and financial limitations of the time was a challenge for producer-director Alan Bell and associate producer-developer John Lloyd. While they managed to avoid risible gaffes overall, the production values often leave much to be desired.
At least Adams's breezy, cheeky, freewheeling story survives intact. Central to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is, well, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," an electronic field guide for tourists traversing the Milky Way voiced by Peter Jones, who serves as the narrator steering the story and explaining the highlights, and lowlights, encountered by Arthur Dent (Simon Jones), an Earthling who survives the destruction of the Earth only because his friend Ford Prefect (David Dixon) isn't really from Guilford at all but is a field researcher for the Guide from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse who learned that a Vogon destructor fleet is about to obliterate the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
By an appropriate coincidence, Arthur's house was about to be demolished by a terrestrial construction crew also engaged in building a bypass when Ford urges him to go down the pub with him so he can tell Arthur the dire news. Not only will the three pints of beer Ford implores Arthur to drink up quickly help cushion the news of the Earth's imminent demise but alcohol is a muscle relaxant necessary for their teleporting aboard a Vogan ship to avoid being annihilated.
Thus Ford's explanations along with the entries in the Guide voiced by Peter Jones begin to illuminate Adams's flights of imaginative, irreverent, sardonic fancy from the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the best alcoholic drink in existence, to the Babel fish, whose entirely improbable and staggeringly useful existence is enough to cause a theological uproar, just two of the highlights from the first episode, which certainly launches this miniseries with a big bang.
The special effects are of their time while Andrew Howe-Davies's production design makes the best of what he had to hand; his biggest challenge is to create the interior of the Vogon spaceship, squalid or not, with selective lighting helping to disguise deficiencies. As with "Doctor Who," depictions of non-human creatures often wind up being "men in rubber suits," and while costume designer Dee Robson's getup for the Vogon captain (Martin Benson) is a suitably grotesque rubber suit, the Dentrassi (the service workers employed by the Vogons) awoken by Arthur and Ford looks like an overgrown Muppet whose appearance is thankfully fleeting, with Alan Bell shooting it from afar to boot.
Apart from steering a complex narrative briskly and clearly, Bell also works in some sly background bits. One is when the bulldozer crew comes to knock down Arthur's house. As he is arguing with the foreman (Joe Melia), Arthur relates how one of his construction workers came to his house the previous day posing as a window cleaner who charged him a fiver to wipe a couple of windows; now check how the bulldozer driver behind them tries to make himself scarce. Then, in a crowded London street can be spotted a "sandwich-board man," a human billboard, whose gloom-and-doom sign reads "The End Is Nigh." When the Vogon ships appear, his sign is nigh, but he's already flown the coop.
Ending, as did episodes of "Doctor Who" serials of the time, with a cliffhanger, this inaugural episode of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will have you rushing to watch the next installment, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in hand.
POINT TO PONDER: Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept only facts and opinions you agree with. It is extremely difficult to avoid. Are reviews "helpful" only if they validate your confirmation bias? Are they "not helpful" if they contradict it? Thanks to the pervasiveness of confirmation bias, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down is essentially useless as an indicator of whether a review is or isn't "helpful."
