Simon Jones (a.k.a. Arthur Dent from the original radio and TV series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) guides listeners on an A-to-Z guide through the highlights of Douglas Adams' career, represented by interviews and archival clips from Adams' long association with the British Broadcasting Corporation.

I was dubious at first at this package's claims that it would explore Douglas Adams' career and widely varied interests solely with clips from the BBC archives, but over the course of three discs it manages to do just that. And, to be fair, not all of the clips are from the BBC archives; as any Doctor Who fan will no doubt be aware, the BBC isn't exactly known for steadfastly preserving its entire history. Several of the radio and TV clips presented here were in fact preserved by fans with tape recorders and VCRs; clips from those sources are prefaced with apologetic warnings from Simon Jones that the quality might not be up to digital standards.

As with his posthumous book The Salmon Of Doubt, Douglas Adams At The BBC gives us - especially those of us outside the U.K. who weren't necessarily exposed to Adams through the media with any frequency - a glimpse at the man's interests, passions and talents, often through his own words. Clips recorded during his searches for endangered species, and selections from his BBC Radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Future, are among the most compelling. (And hopefully you find the endangered species clips as fascinating as I did, because there are a great many of them.) There are also quite a few examples of performances of his early, pre-Hitchhiker writing work, including my personal favorite, a sort of meta-comedy-sketch that involves color commentators waiting for a comedy sketch to begin so they can offer a play-by-play, and then realizing that they're laying in wait far from where the joke will happen.

Another fascinating clip was from Adams' own appearance in a BBC-TV special about the future of technology and computers, in which he interacts with a "software agent" played by Tom Baker. That needs to wind up on DVD somewhere. Many of these clips display Adams' ability as a performer in his own right, something which several of his colleagues from the Cambridge Footlights performing group refer to in a round-table interview segment: Adams had always hoped to be a writer/performer, a la the members of the Monty Python troupe, not a novelist holed up somewhere until he finished his latest book. But returning to his futurist/technology advocate leanings, Adams' comments on many digital-age issues, such as copyright in the internet age, are very interesting stuff; perhaps the BBC should issue The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Future on its own.

If there's one area where things sagged a bit, somewhat surprsingly, it's in the extended section dealing with Adams' stint as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This subject is covered mainly with audio from Adams' Tom Baker story The Pirate Planet, when I would rather have heard more interview material from Adams himself. (And I know, from having watched specials such as More Than 30 Years In The TARDIS, that such interview material does in fact exist in the BBC's vaults.) What could have been an ultimate appraisal of Adams' influence on Doctor Who instead became a section I found myself fast-forwarding through, because I've already seen the episodes from which the audio comes - and chances are, most of the fans picking this collection up will have seen them as well.

A fascinating listen, and a nice companion to the aforementioned Salmon Of Doubt (I listened to bits of this 3-CD set in between reading stretches of the book, and they complement each other very nicely).

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster

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