#ScribesAndMakers 23 March: Do you consider yourself a frood who knows where their towel is?
I certainly do! As a teenager, I was a member of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Hitch Hiker's fan club, and that connection to unabashedly geeky folks was a lifeline in mostly pre www times.
Last year I turned 42 and had a Douglas Adams-themed birthday party. It was really lovely. I dressed as Dirk Gently.
But I read the books too many times as a youth. I know all the jokes and they'll never be>
>fresh to me again.
And there's, you know, the unexamined sexism etc of a 40~ year-old franchise. Not as bad as a lot of contemporary works, but it is what it is.
I often wonder what Douglas Adams would have written now if he were still with us.
I like to think that the Netflix Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is very much a place he could have ended up. Yes, it's different to the books, but I really do think he would be overjoyed by it.
@rubyjones My introduction came in college - a coworker brought in a cassette copy of the radio program (which had come out only a few years earlier) and we played it straight through (I worked in the AV repair shop). I was hooked.
I turned 42 the year the film came out, and I had such high hopes...in retrospect I quite preferred Zaphod's papier-mâché head in the BBC series.
Yet somehow, I missed the Dirk Gently series entirely.😩
@rubyjones You're probably right about that. The battle with the film company over Gilliam's brilliant Brazil comes to mind immediately...and that was about a single scene.
As an aside, the original radio show was perfectly timed at just about 6 hours. Before my wife and I got married, we lived exactly three hours apart. I likely got to know that entire series almost word for word.
Ruby Jones
Walter Thinman
Flamekebab
Kurt Hohmann