I know it was years before I began blogging, in my earliest months of being online, I was amazed to find that among the sophisticate, nothing sacred, in-crowd, kewel-kids in blog commentary it was considered sacrilegious to make fun of Adams and his one-trick pony and the repeated cloning of it, the guarantees of deterioration that brings. As I said at the time I liked the original radio series well enough (though I never thought it was great, it was merely entertaining) and kind of liked the original TV series (though not as much as the original, original) and that I'd looked at the novelization but found it boring. Really, Douglas Adams wasn't that good a writer and his limited range of thought was quickly exhausted well before he died and his heirs hired other writers to create more money making opportunities off of that already exhausted brand.
Once the impious, nothing-sacred kew-el kids let me know that dissing Adams got their knickers in a knot it certainly didn't do anything to discourage me from doing it. One did bring up that he wrote for Dr. Who during the period when Tom Baker was The Doctor, but I really don't need remakes of that, either. It was certainly never more than entertaining.
The piece in Radio Today that notified me of this claims:
David Morley, producer of the new series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, says: “When we were thinking of cameos for the new series I suddenly thought of Professor Stephen Hawking. Douglas Adams’ work is admired by many of the world’s top scientists because of its innovative and hilarious twisting of the real universe, so I took a punt and asked the Professor if he’d like to actually play a role in the new series.
which leads me to think if that's the case, many of the world's top scientists don't really ever grow up. You have to wonder if they read any serious literature, as so many American college grads appear not to. I'd also wonder how much actual science is really contained in it because other than a word thrown around here and there I don't remember it. That is unless they mean the Brit style nihilistic cynicism about the ultimate meaninglessness materialism mandates, which has more in common with sports team fandom and peer-group conformity than science.
I suspect that Hawking, ever eager for renewed attention, would have done it no matter what. I read he was on a number of really dumb TV shows like The Big Bang. I found out there's some kind of,, perhaps, investment scam that's being peddled online right now that claims he predicts that it will make you jillions of dollars. They mention that he's the official, world's greatest genius so it must be true.
* When my niece showed me that David Tennant was then playing the Doctor, I almost went back because I like Tennant so much but I couldn't help but feeling I was wasting my time. I didn't find the stories interesting.
"Doctor Who" has the peculiar quality of being absolutely fascinating to me on first viewing (with exceptions), and not that interesting afterwards.
ReplyDelete"Blink" is still the best "Who" episode ever, and one of my favorite film-stories, period. I downloaded the final episode of Peter Capaldi (whom I remembered from his debut in "Local Hero," another film I loved which should have stayed green in memory, because it lost something in being seen again) and was frankly disappointed and figured, having missed his run, I hadn't missed all that much. The writing disappointed, not Mr. Capaldi. I'd like to see the new "Doctor" because Jodie Whitaker because I know her work from other TV series, and besides: a female Gallifreyan!
But yeah, great literature it isn't. As for Adams' work, I always though it was overrated. He ran it into the ground himself, and the radio version was better than the novel, and the first TV version better than anything but the radio version. None of it, however, was all that good, or all that clever, for that matter. I remember when all the on-line atheists thought Adams' atheism was the best evah! Oddly, that didn't last long.
So it goes.