I have a love affair with the work of Douglas Adams. Starting from a young age, when my elder brother brought home some books with covers that linked up to make a bigger picture (mind blown!). He has a turn of phrase that I find relentlessly hilarious.
Dirk Maggs produces radio dramatisations for BBC radio, something I discovered a couple of years ago, when Good Omens (a top 10 book for me) was on the radio at Christmastime. (Spoiler: it was phenomenal.)
So, imagine my joy when I found a Dirk Maggs production of my favourite Douglas Adams books in my local library! (Hint: I was pretty flipping excited.)
And reader: they are excellent.
It is hard to go wrong with such good source material, but the production really excels here: Harry Enfield (Men Behaving Badly, Kevin & Perry Go Large) is spot-on as Dirk Gently, Billy Boyd (Merry in the LOTR movies) is suitably Scottish and bumbling as Richard MacDuff, and there could be no other choice for Janice Pearce than Olivia Colman (Green Wing, Broadchurch, everything ever).
So, what’s the story? Basically, it’s about a chap who is very clever, a psychic who doesn’t believe in psychics, who bills himself as a “holistic detective” who makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. Everything being connected, a three week vacation to the Bahamas is absolutely essential to the case of your missing cat, so that’s why it is appearing on your bill, ma’am. He would be a scam artist if he was any good at parting his clients from their money. This chap, his secretary and his old chum from Cambridge time-travel, discover magic tricks, talk to ghosts, and try to shift a sofa lodged in a stairwell against the rules of logic and physics. To tell you more would be to spoil the twists and turns for you. Just trust me: it’s cracking good stuff.
OMG I love these books. My library had an unabridged version of Dirk Gently on audiobook (cassette tapes, of course). I made a bootleg copy and used to listen to it at night to go to sleep. I had the damn thing memorized. I loved Long Dark Tea-Time, too. Might be time to revisit in a new format!
I bought a copy of Dirk Gently for $1 at a library sale (why would they take it off the shelves?!) in the mid 90s and read it over and over. It was so fun listening to it as a radio play – it really brings the action alive and all the little witticisms really stand out,
It really re-awakened my Adams love!