The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series I (Douglas Adams)
My first love in storytelling was audio-drama: both television (through Wishbone and the Simpsons) and live theatre (through school productions) would follow soon after, but I grew up listening to audio storytelling, most predominantly Adventures in Odyssey, but also all manner of old-time radio dramas and other modern productions (including to first experiencing Return of the Jedi through a radio adaptation of it.)
Most people are unaware that Douglas Adams’ immortal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a series of six episodes on BBC Radio before he painfully convinced himself to write a book about it. And while I read and loved the book first, the radio series is an especially anarchic version of the story (since it is the first it is the most formless, which is how Adams seemed to like to work,) and I was excited to pick up all twelve of the original episodes in published form many years ago.
Since I am about to embark on producing a large audio-drama series of my own I wanted to go back to these scripts to see how a noted master does it.
As the Audience
If you don’t know the story of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it’s not going to do you any good telling you. As I found out the scripts don’t have a lot of plot, but trust me when I say it’s worth your time to read the novel or find the radio series (the movie is better than people say, but not as good as the other media and I’ve never seen the television show.)
Suffice to say that in the first episode the Earth is destroyed and the only survivors are an average man named Arthur Dent and his alien friend Ford Prefect, and after that’s out of the way they go on a variety of bizarre adventures and eventually try to figure out the meaning of life.
The scripts pull off an amazing duality of both being enormously funny on the page (which can be difficult since so much of comedy is timing and inflection) and not as funny as I remember. I definitely love it, but I found myself remembering more fondly the scripts for the posthumous radio dramas adapting the third through fifth books.
Regardless, it’s a fun story in a traditional adventure serial style that makes you want to return for more.
As a Producer
I don’t know that I learned a whole lot, which isn’t surprising, I was reading the scripts not sitting in the editing bay as they fiddled with knobs to get the robot voices right. There are commentaries by the producer at the end of each script which does give me some comfort as he explained some not glamorous things to get things done.
It is some comfort to know that everyone is just fumbling around trying to figure it out, so we may as well go with my instincts and then adjust as needed.
As a Writer
Oddly enough the most useful thing I learned in terms of writing audio-dramas might just be to take my time with the sound effects.
When I’ve written radio scripts I’ve either needed to hew to a useless (but mandatory) page count or I had the knowledge that I was using page count as a (bad) proxy for runtime, so I tended to be concise, sometimes to the point of uselessness, with sound effect description.
Douglass Adams would sometimes go half a page describing a quick sound so you really felt what it was supposed to be, and since I’m not a professional writer (yet, hopefully) I haven’t fully ingrained the idea in myself that scripts are blueprints so they need to be clear, not zippy.
Other than that, I was struck by how little plot was in any episode of Hitchhiker’s. They don’t have a B plot to speak of (unless you count the musings of the book as one, which I do) and their A plots are usually two, never more than three, concrete scenes built around a few running gags for each episode and the idiosyncrasies of the characters.
Each episode has a fairly simple formula: The book gives you a “What happened last time” then it tells a quick funny story of the absurdity of the universe, our heroes get out of whatever deathtrap they were in at the end of last episode, they find themselves in a new place and explore it briefly before being caught in a new trap.
I never noticed how sparse the actual plot is before because the book interjects frequently and tells us about something going on elsewhere in space and time so everything felt much bigger even though it was actually quite small.
This simply reinforces my observation that usually the best Space Train plots were the simple ones that let the characters be themselves in an easily understood situation, instead of the more ornate ones that were built like Rube Goldberg machines and it felt like it was just plot point after plot point and our characters were along for the ride.
I don’t know what else I may learn in the second set of six episodes, but I’ll report back when I do!
