[Article] HHGTTG radio series sequel

Orion

I for one will look forward to this

Irish Times wrote:

Hitch-hikers go back to the future

The long-awaited radio sequel to 'The Hitch -Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy' begins this month. Roger Gregg, one of its stars, describes how the series came about

It is a wet November morning as the actor Stephen Moore, the voice of Marvin the paranoid android, enters the Soundhouse, a London recording studio. He could easily be mistaken for a courier in his tailored leather motorcycle gear. Simon Jones, who plays Arthur Dent, Geoffrey McGivern, who plays Ford Prefect, Mark Wing-Davey, who plays Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Susan Sheridan, who plays Trillian, are already gathered round the sofas. Electricity sparks through the air. A documentary team are perched in the corner, their cameras poised.

I'm sitting next to these legends, the new voice of Eddie the shipboard computer. Don't panic, I remind myself. Douglas Adams was right: a towel would be handy at a time like this. The last time these actors worked together was nearly 30 years ago, when Adams invited them to record the pilot for a new series, the title of which had been strangely lodged in his head for years: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Little did they know in 1977 that they were about to make radio history. Even after recording the first episodes they hadn't a clue. Susan Sheridan sums it up: "We didn't really understand what we were saying back then. But we said it with conviction and we didn't fall over the furniture. So we got away with it."

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was revolutionary: not only was Adams's hybrid of sci-fi, comedy and adventure a radical and very funny innovation for British radio, but also his notes for the sound design were as bold as his plots. It was the first BBC radio comedy to be recorded in stereo, to use layers of music and to consciously exploit audio production's image-creating possibilities.

The producer Geoffrey Perkins also broke ground by making extensive use of separation booths for multitrack recording, enabling the use of voice effects, such as Marvin's woeful warble, Eddie's electronic clicks and all the whoops and gurgles necessary to bring to life Adams's weirdly wonderful universe. Adams had set out to create the kind of rich soundscapes he knew so well from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd - soundscapes of which most radio-drama productions were resoundingly bereft.

It has taken nearly three decades, but, as Adams wished, his great creation, chronicling the pan-galactic travels of Arthur Dent, has finally come full circle. For it all started on radio. Long before the best-selling book, the television show, the play, the towel and the soon-to-be-movie, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was a radio series.

As with most things Douglas Adams, it is a rather lateral and multi-layered path. It all began with the Primary Phase radio series, in 1977, then the Secondary Phase, in 1978.

Then followed the first two book adaptations: The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, from 1979, and The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, from 1980. They were international best-sellers. Next came the television series, making Adams a household name. Encouraged by his number-one status, Adams went on to write more books. The novel Life, The Universe And Everything followed in 1982, then came So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, in 1984. And a final novel, Mostly Harmless, in 1992.

It was always Adams's wish that the final three novels would be adapted for radio, so returning to the medium where it all started. But by the 1990s he was based in Hollywood and occupied with the film script. A perfectionist, Adams wanted to make sure that the radio adaptations of his final books were as innovatively produced in the digital age as the originals were in the analogue 1970s. And so it happened that, just a few years before he died, Adams finally found the right man to make it all happen: the producer, director and writer Dirk Maggs.

Maggs was the genius who in the 1980s and 1990s produced a string of surround-sound hits for BBC Radio 2, winning numerous awards for his dramatic "audio movies", such as The Amazing Spider-man, The Adventures Of Superman and Batman: Knightfall. When Adams heard The Adventures Of Superman he immediately invited Maggs to adapt and direct the final three books for radio.

By 2003 Maggs had turned Life, The Universe And Everything into the script for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Tertiary Phase. Then the original cast was hunted down. Simon Jones was flown in from New York. Richard Griffiths, who played Uncle Monty in Withnail & I, was cast to replace the late Richard Vernon as Slartibartfast. A slew of voice talent was drawn in, with my humble self replacing the late David Tate as Eddie the chirpy computer.

How I ended up in the cast is one of those serendipitous twists much associated with Adams. For it turned out that just as I have stacks of Dirk Maggs's productions sitting on my shelves, Maggs had stacks of mine. Over the past five years our Crazy Dog Audio Theatre company, which is based in Dublin, has won several international audio science-fiction and fantasy awards, therefore coming to Maggs's attention. And so he invited me to audition for the part of Eddie.

After reaching for maximum jubilant cheerfulness, my Eddie voice was cheerfully annoying enough to convince Maggs and the panel.

Everyone involved knows that The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Tertiary Phase is destined for radio history. As the documentary cameras run, Simon Jones passes a stack of scripts over a buttered croissant. He politely asks everyone to autograph them. He explains that, having been based in the US for many years and done his share of guest appearances on the sci-fi-convention circuit, he is keenly aware of the radio series and their millions of adoring fans. The stack of signed scripts he announces are for charity raffles: each will sell for several hundred dollars in the US, he says. This starts a whirlwind of script signing.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Tertiary Phase begins on BBC Radio 4 on September 21st at 8.30 p.m. An expanded surround-sound CD box set of the series will be available later this year. Roger Gregg's Diabolic Playhouse is on RTÉ Radio 1 every Saturday at 8 p.m. More details from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitch hikers/cast.shtml and www.crazydog audiotheatre.com

mike65

Broadcast details are BBC Radio 4 Tuesday 6.30 pm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/newseries.shtml

Mike.