ninme

Well, I’m not hysterical, but I’m back to feeling boo-hooey.

Telegraph - The final frontier

Profile: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

After radio, books and television, Douglas Adams’s creation has a new world to conquer: cinema

In the vastness of space, time can boggle the mind: 14 billion years since the creation of the universe, five-and-a-half billion years since the formation of the planets, and an astounding 25 years trying to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy turned into a movie…

The following year Adams published - after what he described as “a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths” - the first h2g2 novel. That autumn it topped the best-seller list and, with its successors, made him a fortune, much of which he spent on left-handed guitars and fast cars.

Adams wasn’t the kind of man to stand in the way of his own success. When his American publisher objected to the use of the word “f***” in the novel, he obligingly changed it. From then on, the dirtiest word in all the universe, according to the book, is “Belgium”. Still the phenomenon grew. It became a television show, a stage production at which the audience were seated on a giant hovercraft, a concept album, a computer game and a bath towel.

The latter is of no ordinary significance to h2g2 fans. “A towel,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explains, “is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.” All that remained was the movie. It became Adams’s obsession and, perhaps, the instrument of his destruction.

sigh

Oh lord I hope it’s good. Not just good. Great. Deserving.