I just finished listening through the radio plays of HHGTTG. They started out so wonderfully – anarchic, irreverent, chaotic and fun. You could almost hear the cocaine and whisky through the headphones. Then, as the series wore on and the plays caught up with the books, suddenly the joy began to wither.
Where before there was mayhem and anarchy, now there was a looming sense of grey suited editors, nagging about deadlines and plot holes and keeping it tidy. Suddenly, the humour became cliché. The originality became derivative. And the joy died, not with a bang, nor even a whimper, but a sad sigh of resignation.
Douglas Adams is one of my inspirations. Next to Spike Milligan and the Pythons, he did so much to fuck up the BBC and the Brit literary establishment. He just let it rip, when he was young and the world was beautiful… but later it faded to grey.
Listening to those plays on the bad side of forty, working a job where I write for money and not for fun, gave me a new perspective on things. It’s a sad metaphor for our lives, that the joy flees, and one day we wake up and realize it’s all just a job.
We want to be Ford Prefect.
We worry we’re Arthur Dent.
But in the end, we’re all Marvin, burned out on the plains of before the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains chuckling at the knowledge that it’s all been for naught.