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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Complete Radio Series [Audiobook, Box set] [Audio CD]

Douglas Adams (Author)

4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Release Date: 3 Oct 2005

This really is the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything - all five radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy collected together for the first time, in a handsome box with magnetic lid. From the original Primary and Secondary Phases, through to the more recent Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases, these are the adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and their assorted human, robotic and alien companions. These full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramas star Simon Jones, Peter Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Moore and Susan Sheridan, with a stellar guest cast including John le Mesurier, Joanna Lumley, Christian Slater, Jackie Mason, Sandra Dickinson, Rula Lenska, Griff Rhys Jones and Jonathan Pryce. Also included is an exclusive bonus disc containing two programmes from the BBC Archive: Kaleidoscope from 1980 (going behind the scenes of the second series) and Six Characters in Search of an Answer: Arthur Dent from 2002.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } This really is the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything - all five radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy collected together for the first time, in a handsome box with magnetic lid. From the original Primary and Secondary Phases, through to the more recent Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases, these are the adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and their assorted human, robotic and alien companions. These full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramas star Simon Jones, Peter Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Moore and Susan Sheridan, with a stellar guest cast including John le Mesurier, Joanna Lumley, Christian Slater, Jackie Mason, Sandra Dickinson, Rula Lenska, Griff Rhys Jones and Jonathan Pryce. Also included is an exclusive bonus disc containing two programmes from the BBC Archive: Kaleidoscope from 1980 (going behind the scenes of the second series) and Six Characters in Search of an Answer: Arthur Dent from 2002.

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Product details

Audio CD
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks Ltd (3 Oct 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0563504196
ISBN-13: 978-0563504191
Product Dimensions: 15.6 x 14.6 x 13.6 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 6,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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195 of 198 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, funny and kind of sad 20 Feb 2010

By lexo1941

Format:Audio CD

Douglas Adams's 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' exists in so many different media by this stage that it can be hard for the newbie to know which version to tackle first. If you've only ever seen the movie you may think that it's all a bit overrated and you'd be right to do so, as although the film looked great and had some fine performances, the story was a mess. If you've only read the books, you're missing out. If you've only seen the TV series and you liked it, you're in for a treat. The original radio series is not only the best way to do Hitch-Hiker but certainly the best thing its author ever did.

The original radio series was written and broadcast in 1978, with a second series a couple of years later. These suffered, perhaps, from Adams's habits as a writer (he was a compulsive rewriter and could never finish things) and the BBC's habits as a producer. At the end of writing the first series, Adams wound it all up very conclusively because he assumed that a second series wouldn't be commissioned. However, a second series was commissioned, and he had to go through some incredibly tortuous writing to get the story going again. At the end of the second series, he left it deliberately open-ended because he assumed that the BBC would immediately commission a third series, but they didn't. So the original radio series has the effect of coming to a natural end halfway through, then grinding back into motion again and finishing in a rather unsatisfying way. For all that, the first two series are the real gold: brilliantly witty, astonishingly inventive and full of unforgettable moments. These are the reason why Hitch-Hiker fans tend to be obsessive.... Adams's best jokes stick in your mind and change the way you see the world: a restaurant at the end of the universe; a starship powered by the fact that it's infinitely improbable that you could pass through every point in the universe simultaneously; a coffee machine that tries to second-guess what you really want to drink by reading your mind; lifts that know what floor to pick you up from before you've decided to go there; a permanently depressed robot...

The cast was great. Simon Jones, an old college friend of Adams, was endearingly bewildered as Arthur Dent, the Earthman who is whisked away from our planet seconds before it's demolished (one of the underlying and most elusive moods of Hitch-Hiker is a pervasive melancholy about the pointless destruction of things; the show starts with Arthur's house being demolished, then his whole planet is blown up, and by the end of the first series the final destruction of the universe has become something that people watch while they have dinner). Geoffrey McGivern is his manic alien friend Ford Prefect; Mark Wing-Davey is Ford's ever-so-cool cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox; the great British character actor Richard Vernon is wonderfully deadpan as a gloomy planet designer named Slartibartfast. One of the best performances is one of the least conspicuous; Peter Jones as the voice of The Book, or the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself, providing useful bits of connecting narrative and helpful nuggets of information about the baffling variety of stuff in the galaxy. (One of my favourite jokes is a Book aside about a form of currency which consists mostly of giant triangular rubber coins several thousand miles along each side: you can't exchange them for any other currency because the banks refuse to deal in 'fiddling small change'.) The Book works as a character because he makes you think that somebody out there knows exactly what's going on, and Peter Jones's marvellously reassuring voice helps a lot in that respect, although the story goes that while Jones liked playing the Book he found the whole thing rather confusing, so it's part of the mystery of acting that he sounds so authoritative.

In 1992 the BBC talked to Adams about a third series based on the third Hitch-Hiker novel, but nothing came of it. He was too busy with other things and they weren't interested enough. After his tragically early death in 2001 the BBC finally pulled its corporate finger out and producer/writer Dirk Maggs was commissioned to adapt the last three Hitch-Hiker novels as three separate series. He managed to secure most of the original cast, although Peter Jones and Richard Vernon were among those who had passed away since the second series more than twenty years earlier. (Their replacements, respectively William Franklyn and Richard Griffiths, were exemplars of the established Hitch-Hiker tradition of hiring veteran character actors to play roles that need natural authority. One of Maggs's good jokes is the initial transition between Peter Jones's voice and William Franklyn's, which is done as if the Guide had a new voice system which is still in beta mode.)

It has to be said that series 3, 4 and 5 are not as great as the first two. They suffer from being based on Adams's later Hitch-Hiker novels which lack some of the sparkle of the earlier ones - although even Adams's lesser books are still better than a lot of other attempts at comedy science fiction. It doesn't help that Maggs is, I think, a bit over-reverential towards his source material, but then a lot of the most vocal Hitch-Hiker fans are very much of the don't-change-a-syllable school and they probably think he butchered the books. But some of Maggs's attempts to preserve Adams's writing are at the expense of characterisation: for example, at one point in the third book, it is mentioned in passing that Slartibartfast had planned to spend his retirement learning to play the 'Octaventral Heebiephone', but that this was a 'pleasantly futile task since he had the wrong number of mouths'. Maggs saves this joke but gives it to Slartibartfast himself, who remarks at one point in series 3 that 'I planned to learn to play the Octaventral Heebiephone, a pleasantly futile task since I have the wrong number of mouths'. In context this isn't as funny, not only because it seems to be an overly detached way for a character to talk about himself, but also because Slartibartfast makes this remark at a moment of great stress and high action, and the remark yanks you out of the moment.

One benefit of having the later books dramatised is that the performers got to stretch themselves a bit. In the original series, Simon Jones as Arthur spends most of his time (as Jones himself once put it) 'whingeing his way around the universe looking for a cup of tea', but in the later series Arthur has to go partly mad, learn to fly, fall in love, lose his love and discover all sorts of things about himself that weren't there the first time round, in the course of which we get to hear what a fine actor Simon Jones really is. Martin Freeman in the movie was a more 21st century Arthur, less Oxbridge and more normal bloke, and none the worse for that. But since there probably won't be another movie, Freeman may never get another chance, and in the meantime Simon Jones has made the character his own.

Some of the best jokes are in the later series, such as the sparkling aside about a spaceship powered by bad news (which I won't spoil because it gets funnier as it goes on). But Adams admitted that the last book, in particular, was written during a fairly bleak time in his life and it feels like it. Dirk Maggs comes into his own here, rewriting and restructuring things so that the radio series has a more open-ended and optimistic finale than the books, in accordance with Adams's own stated intention of writing another Hitch-Hiker book someday.

Nevertheless, it gets darker and more pessimistic as it goes on. In the beginning, Adams's targets - insofar as such a basically cheerful writer had any - were bureaucracy and computers. He changed his mind about computers after buying his first Apple Mac, but his distrust of bureaucracy, which he dramatised as the pathologically petty and cruel Vogons, grew into full-blown contempt by the end of the saga. Other writers who've had a go at the Hitch-Hiker universe haven't quite captured this: the Vogons in the radio series are an unstoppable force for evil, whereas in the movie they're bumbling idiots who clock off from doing bad things whenever it happens to be lunchtime. When Eoin Colfer was recently commissioned with the blessing of the Adams estate to write a new Hitch-Hiker novel, he did a generally fine job but he included a nice Vogon, which is arguably missing the point. On the other hand, it does suggest that Vogons, like every other species in the universe, evolve, which Adams (a great mate of Richard Dawkins) would probably have liked.

As one early reviewer noted, Adams is not great at plots. The most purely pleasurable bits of Hitch-Hiker are the digressions, the halts, the asides, and not so much the story. The story in series 3, adapted from the third novel 'Life, the Universe and Everything', is in fact an adaptation of an unproduced Doctor Who script that Adams had written years earlier, and it shows: if you look hard at Trillian during her encounter with the Krikkitmen, you can see the Doctor's attitude and verbal style showing through.

Still, the technical achievement of all the teams that made the various series is amazing. The late Geoffrey Perkins produced the original radio series and he and his crew did an incredible job on a very tight budget, all without the benefit of things like digital audio which we now take for granted. Dirk Maggs has the same kind of loony inventiveness, and in a nice nod to his predecessor he gave Perkins a funny cameo as Arthur's boss in series 4. And Maggs gets some fabulous performances out of his own semi-regular rep company, such as Rupert Degas as a terminally cool galactic judge. Toby Longworth plays several roles but is drop-dead hilarious as Wowbagger, a bloody-minded immortal being who never wanted to be immortal and who takes his revenge on the universe by insulting every single living creature in it...in alphabetical order.

There are many versions of Hitch-Hiker on audio. There are the original broadcasts. These were cut slightly on rebroadcasting, usually for legal reasons, and it's the cut versions that were released on BBC cassette in the 90s. There's the slightly abridged Original Records version, which was completely re-recorded with most of the same cast because in those days the BBC didn't sell audio of its own productions: this is long out of print and was never released on CD because the record company folded, but if you look very hard you might be able to find it on the internet in some format or another. The Original Records version has fans of its own, of whom I am one; apart from having different and arguably more subtle performances, it also has witty and beautiful incidental music by the late Tim Souster, yet another member of the H2G2 family who died too young.

I don't think you can say you like Hitch-Hiker if you've never listened to this. It may or may not be the most satisfying version of the whole story. Series 4 is probably an improvement on the rather skimpy novel it was adapted from. The finale of series 5 is definitely an improvement on Adams's original ending. The whole thing is one of the most remarkable radio productions ever made, a stunning widescreen movie for your ears and one of the funniest stories about loneliness ever written. Once you start listening, you may never be the same again. Read more ›

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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars *This* is the version you want to buy 21 Mar 2007

By A. Percy

Format:Audio CD

This CD box set contains all the radio episodes (the older ones plus the more recently produced episodes), as well as some bonus materials.

I was in heaven for many hours during a long car trip!

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars This is not the original radio series 20 July 2012

By D. Sanders

Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase

Up until the point where Arthur Dent and the others go to Brontitor, the recordings in this box set are not the original I heard in the early eighties. The script is different, the music is different (less synthesizers and more banjo and strings), the performances and special effects are different. The whole vibe of the recordings is that of a second attempt, missing that first time spontaneity. Clearly, the first episodes were re-recorded for some reason, but lost something in the process; I am certainly not the only one making this claim. If anyone knows of a legitimate source for the true original radio series, please let me know.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars What a Blast! 28 Oct 2009

By G. Streets

Format:Audio CD

I first heard HHGTTG on it's 2nd airing on the radio - I then carefully taped all 12 episodes, thoroughly decorated the inner sleeves of the cassette tape boxes, bought the double album with the warm and friendly words "Don't Panic" on the cover and listened to the epic again and again. It was brilliant! Radio comedy drama at it's best! The TV series was good but limited - still watched it religously though. I bought most of Douglas's books and thoroughly enjoyed them as well. The Hollywood film was also good but, of course, different again. This collection brings it all back and then some! Pity the packaging couldn't include some of the cover art of the original BBC album but Hey! That's Cool!
If you have any kind of properly developed funny bone, get this collection and embrace it! And if life ever starts to really puzzle you, the answer is 42.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great but flawed technology 29 May 2009

By P. J. Sparkes

Format:Audio CD

The series is extraordinary but I have had two boxes now, each of which has had at least one track that will not play. It might be because they are trying to fit too much onto a disc (it was the last track of a disc in each case that would not play) but I'm still mid-problem.

Otherwise, it's a great achievement.

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64 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest works of science fiction ever created 21 Aug 2005

By A Customer

Format:Audio CD

I first listened to the primary phase of The Guide when I was about 12. Fantastic! Even at that age I could appreciate most of the humour. After that I listened to the secondary phase, read the books, and more recently the new lot of radio series. They are all superb. The humour (both subtle and obvious) is unrelenting, the theme music is a classic, the sound effects superb, and the actors brilliantly portray their characters.
Arthur Dent's journey through space (still wearing his dressing gown) has become a modern classic, and is likely to remain so for a very long time. If you ask me, the new film is an insult to a brilliant, and sometimes very meaningfull, work of science fiction.
And by the way, the answer to LTUAE really IS 42!

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars More than expected! 17 Nov 2009

By Michael Langridge

Format:Audio CD

I was very pleasantly surprised.

I expected the 2 radio plays, but not only did it have them on 3 CDs each @ 2 episodes per CD, it also has a 3 CD radio dramatisation of Life, The Universe and Everything, a 2 CD dramatisation each of Mostly Harmless and So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, and a final disc containing Kaleidoscope and Six Characters in Search of an Answer: Arthur Dent. These being a behind the scenes look at the first 2 radio series and Douglas Adams talking about the genesis of the radio series; Simon Jones on being asked to take on the role of Arthur and Geoffrey Perkins on the struggles with the BBC to get them broadcast in the first place.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Mostly Brilliant

I listened to the original broadcast of the first two series (phases) and immediately became, well, enchanted both with the insanely logical plot line and characters that ought to... Read more

Published 26 days ago by RJ

5.0 out of 5 stars Great fun and quality

The person I bought this for loves it, the digital quality is great. As always the writing of Douglas Adams is laugh out loud funny.

Published 27 days ago by Mr Paul R Thomas

3.0 out of 5 stars Not in the box shown

It was hard to tell from the description if it was going to be as shown in the picture but it's not. However, arrived early so happy with service. Not played yet so hope all ok.

Published 2 months ago by susan cartin

5.0 out of 5 stars Great purchase

I bought this for by 13 year old son who loves listening to audio books when winding down of an evening. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Karen Masterton

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Hit!

Arrived very quickly. Fair value for money. Great hit with 10 year old boy. It's fantastic to hear all the original stuff I loved 30 years ago. Thoroughly recommend it

Published 2 months ago by Bex by the sea

5.0 out of 5 stars Review

Gift for 16 year old nephew who loved it! A good gift for the geeks in you life I reckon...

Published 3 months ago by Mrs L Cooper

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolute bargain

the five radio series on audio cds in a uniform boxed edition with some extra material for �15 plus postage. Read more

Published 4 months ago by music lover

5.0 out of 5 stars Completes The Collection

Having read other reviews complaining that the first series is partly re-recorded didn't really bother me as I have the original BBC black box of CD's that came out in the far... Read more

Published 7 months ago by I. Sayles

5.0 out of 5 stars Fond memories

I ran home from school at lunch time to listen to the original series on the radio, it is just as good now as then. the later series is alright but not as good in my opinion. Read more

Published 12 months ago by John

2.0 out of 5 stars The more recent radio shows tend to be tedious

I think the mistake was basing them on the later rather poorer books than the first two novelisations being based on the original two radio shows- actually these later ones, like... Read more

Published 13 months ago by Barry Wom

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