REVIEW: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Hexagonal Phase

Douglas Adams was one of the great comic writers of his generation, a man whose great propensity for wild ideas was matched only by his difficulty in actually getting them down on paper. He created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for radio, following it up with a second radio series, a television series, a ludicrously difficult computer game, the odd short story and five novels, before he worked on a film script that sadly did not make it to the screen before he suffered terminal existence failure.

This is not his story.

This is the story of Eoin Colfer, who wrote the official sixth Hitchhiker's novel, And Another Thing..., and of Dirk Maggs, who adapted it for radio, as he had adapted the third, fourth and fifth novels. Only small parts of it are Adams's, cribbed from recently discovered notes. The rest is the work of people who certainly admire Adams, who want to continue his work and explore the strange universe he created, but are unfortunately not as skilled as he was.

Almost forty years to the day that the original Hitchhiker's began airing, the BBC broadcast the first episode of The Hexagonal Phase (following Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential in a new ordinal numbering system for the modern age). Maggs had already done sterling work adapting the previous novels for radio (The Tertiary Phase at least having some input from Adams before his death). Due to the fact that The Secondary Phase bore very little resemblance to the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, The Tertiary Phase consigned much of it to the realms of virtuality. In a similar effort to provide the series with a more satisfying ending, The Quintessential Phase had a multiple choice denouement, all of which have now been retconned to allow the story to continue. This is fine. There are more versions of Hitchhiker's than there are realities in the Plural Zones.

The problem lies with what comes after. It's been some considerable time since I read And Another Thing... but I wasn't impressed at the time, and having read more of Colfer's work since I have come to the conclusion that he's not just a poor Adams impersonator, he's a poor author. However, with Maggs and Adams himself involved in this, I thought it was worth a try. It has its moments, certainly, some of which are genuinely funny, but they are all too few and far between.

It's lovely, yes, to hear the old cast back together, those of whom are still with us. They sound older, naturally, but they all slip effortlessly back into their roles. There's a feeling of reunion about the proceedings. The late Susan Sheridan even has a short role as the original version of Trillian, thanks to some clever use of archived material, before Sandra Dickinson takes over, but I've always felt she was miscast in the TV series and it's no different here. There are some fun cameos - Stephen Hawking makes his final appearance in popular media voicing the Guide Mk. II, Lenny Henry is the mysterious Consultant and Jim Broadbent is perfectly cast as Marvin, the Paranoid Android. Toby Longworth sounds very at home as Wowbagger, the morose immortal who first crossed paths with our heroes in the third book Life, the Universe and Everything and who takes centre stage here.

Unfortunately, The Hexagonal Phase simply isn't funny enough to work as a comedy, nor is it interesting or exciting enough to work as a drama. Colfer's style is more plot-based than Adams's, but the plot is not gripping enough to make up for the lack of jokes and the serial is, even listened to in weekly half-hour episodes, actually quite boring. It also relies heavily on references to the original stories. It's perfectly possible to write a decent story that leans heavily on winks to the past - Ready Player One has shown you can make a reasonably entertaining film almost entirely out of them - but the overall effect here just reminds the listener of how much better the originals were. There's more to a story than persistently mentioning the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

I might be controversial when I say that radio was actually never the best format for Hitchhiker's; it was prose were Adams really shone. Nonetheless, the original series was groundbreaking and even in its wonkier moments had real charm and dryly satirical humour. This final chapter of the series is sadly lacking. Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Douglas Adams.

WHO REVIEW: Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen (audio novelisation)

Written by James Goss, based on a story by Douglas Adams
Read by Dan Starkey

Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen is a strange beast. Its convoluted history begins with a TV serial pitch by Douglas Adams back when he was script editor for Doctor Who in the late 70s, before being reworked as a spec script for a Doctor Who movie. It might have stayed in the “unmade stories Hall of Fame” had Adams not been so adept at reusing his own material. Like City of Death and Shada, which we reworked aggressively to become the basis for the Dirk Gently books, The Krikkitmen was rewritten to become part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At first lined up to be the opening parts of a second Hitchhiker's TV series, it then became the basis for the third novel, Life, the Universe and Everything. Decades later, this was adapted by Dirk Maggs to become the Tertiary Phase of the original iteration of Hitchhiker's, the radio series.

Which is what makes the new novelisation of The Krikkitmen such an oddity. Based on the copious notes and plot breakdown originally submitted by Adams back in the day, the new novel by James Goss feels less like Doctor Who per se than a sort-of DW/HHGttG hybrid. This isn't odd in itself – Doctor Who was very much like Hitchhiker's in this period, mainly because Adams had his fingerprints all over it and tested out his ideas on the series. Still, The Krikkitmen does have the problem of feeling overly familiar to anyone who's read Life, the Universe and Everything.

Doctor Who fans are used to stories existing in multiple form. There are half-a-dozen versions of Adams's other grand unfinished story, Shada, and something like nine versions of the first Dalek story. It's the differences in style, content and format that make these revisits interesting. The problem with The Krikkitmen is that Adams reworked so much of it to become Life, the Universe and Everything that there isn't so much of a difference to it. The Doctor's lines were basically split between Slartibartfast and Trillian, so now the dialogue is back with the Doctor and Romana. So much of the story, particularly the opening scenes, just sound like rerunning the novel.

Still, between Adams and Goss, there's plenty more built into the Doctor Who version of the story. Goss peppers the story with references to past and (relative) future Doctor Who events, and there's a significant side plot which involves the intervention of the early Time Lords, necessitating a visit to Gallifrey. Ther's a lot more extra material, as well, with various little side trips on the quest to find the pieces of the Wicket Gate, but they make the story feel more like Hitchhiker's, not less, so rambling and bizarre they seem. Also, Adams's original story concept is still brilliant: that cricket, that most English and genteel of sports, is in fact a race memory of the most horrific and destructive interstellar war the Galaxy has ever known. Oh, and behind the Krikkitmen, there's an even worse and more destructive alien species who have the means to destroy the entire universe. It just doesn't feel fresh anymore.

Nonetheless, Goss is as close to a replacement for Adams as we're going to get. I've not read his novelisation of City of Death (my very favourite DW serial, and one I'm reluctant to revisit in prose in case it doesn't live up to the original), but the reading of The Pirate Planet is tremendous. That's one thing Goss's prose really has going for it, and another thing it has in common with Adams's: it's absolutely made to be read aloud. It's hard to beat Jon Culshaw as a reader of fourth Doctor material (as with The Pirate Planet) but Dan “Strax” Starkey does an amazing job, giving the telling a relaxed, conversational tone while perfectly capturing the Doctor and Romana.

Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen would probably have made an amazing movie once. It certainly made a great Hitchhiker's novel. It also makes for a great new Doctor Who novel, so long as you haven't read Life, the Universe and Everything first.