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Arthur Dent is your average middle-class Briton. One day, while trying to prevent his house being destroyed to build a highway, his friend Ford Prefect whisks him away to the pub and explains that the Earth is about to be destroyed and they need to escape. Intergalactic, inter-time adventures ensue.
Douglas Adams's The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and its sequels - The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, Life The Universe and Everything, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and Mostly Harmless - are, for me, the most innovative, wildly creative and funny books ever written. The plots and science contained in them are often absurd but are so convincingly written that they seem incredibly plausible. Add in Adams's fantastic sense of humour and ability to describe the simplest thing in a very funny way and you have some of the greatest books ever written.
Because of the book's reliance on Adams's wonderful narrative and descriptions, I was sceptical of how this could be turned into something visual. The 2005 movie was fine but not brilliant, due to being unable to capture that sharp writing. (Another comparison is Catch 22 - the book was brilliant due to the wonderfully descriptive writing and the movie didn't do that justice). However, I need not have worried - this 1981 series comes very close to capturing the essence of the book.
The narration is the master-stroke, as this enables the producers to use Adams's own words verbatim, plus add in charts and diagrams to illustrate the science and other items. Even without that the series is great, reminding me strongly of Monty Python - the dry, understated, absurdist English humour. I kept expecting Eric Idle, Graham Chapman or John Cleese to appear.
A fantastic series. Just a pity that there weren't more seasons, as the one and only season (6 episodes of it) covers the first two books. It would have been great if some of the subsequent books were covered too (and I realise that this is only in hindsight, as Adams only wrote So Long three years and Mostly Harmless 11 years after this TV series).
score 9/10
grantss 2 January 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4020891/ |
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9-10-2020 06:39:08