H2G2 versus (H2G2)2

This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.

I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.

I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.

Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.

It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.

Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.

Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.

The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.

So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.

I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.12.13

BOOKS - Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"

I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on this sci fi work for a couple of weeks; a book that kept me happily entertained as I sat reading it in a pub with a couple of excellent pints of Reverend James.

The work, although like so much I read seeming to owe a little or lot to Banks' Culture novels - the "Gods in the Machine" characters seem to bear a resemblance to Culture sublimed races perhaps, and the grossly inhuman yet fully sentient and realised alien species reminded me of the fauna found in Banks - throws in Steampunk and retrotech elements to create a universe very much of its own devising.

The main thrust of the novel is the effect, 200 years in the future, of a non-incorporeal seemingly vastly superior race called The Festival on a planet where a sort of Tsarist elite rule over the peasant society. In return for entertaining anecdotes, the Festival offer the peasantry cornucopia technology that can create absoloutely anything, thus triggering an accelerated communist revolution that goes from village Soviets to a techono-overkill situation in a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the regime in charge of the planet, send out a battlefleet that although with a structure like that that fought in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, is equipped with faster than light technology with the potential to affect the past. This attracts the interest of a number of parties, who send out agents to "monitor" these efforts...

I enjoyed the novel. It doesn't have the complexity or richness of a Culture novel, but is correspondingly more human and a lot easier to get into. Stross is also exploring our contemporary issues in this work, like freedom of information, the problems and benefits of high techonlogy, and the nature of tyranny, benign or otherwise. There is a follow up I'd like to read, and I would recommend the book to the fan of intelligent sci fi. Especially in the pub with a beer!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/06/13