I have a confession. I never listened to the original radio broadcasts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I didn’t read the books until long after they had each come out.
(All right, that’s two confessions.)
This failure on my part – and I admit, it is a failure – was not because I was too young – I was seven at the time of the original broadcast – nor because I didn’t like science fiction.
A year earlier I had seen Star Wars. If I hadn’t been interested in science fiction before Star Wars, then afterwards I was making up for lost time. For the next eleven years of my life I was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to anything that smacked of the other worldly.
This meant I watched, read, listened to and imagined a whole bunch of crap (plus not a few good things) in the fevered hope I might get my ‘out-there’ fix. At the same time I ignored or simply didn’t notice a bunch of other stuff that was really rather good because it didn’t have a large enough label attached to it saying ‘Really Out There’, or similar.
Which nearly brings me back to Hitchhikers. The problem for me was the title – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – and the Radio Station, Radio Four. In our house Radio Four was only ever on in the early morning – which as we all know means the (then at least) very, very serious Today program. To a seven-year-old in Jersey it was all incomprehensible news about uninteresting people in unbelievably far-away places.
To my juvenile ears it was simply not possible that something with so potentially interesting sounding a title as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy could be on Radio 4 and live up to my expectations. I concluded therefore that the title must be a colossal exaggeration. This was clearly nothing more than a program about hitchhiking with ideas well and truly above its station.
So I avoided it.
When the books started coming out I learned of my error. They sold them in the school tuck shop. But I did not buy them. I did not read them. I didn’t even pick them up and browse them there or in the bookshops I frequented, looking for my lurid SF covers.
I still do not know why.
I have half-convinced myself that it was the intimidatingly smart kids who I saw reading them that put me off. Or that once I’d seen the TV series on BBC One – I did at least have the wherewithal to watch that (though I realize now that it is rightly described as the poorer man’s Hitch) – with its, for the Eighties at least, extraordinary graphics, I didn’t see the point in reading the books. Or perhaps the books didn’t appear obviously whiz-bang or heroic enough for my still-developing tastes.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that for years my stupidity denied me access to the smartest, funniest, sharpest, meanest satire on life, the universe and everything ever written. Bar none.
Douglas Adams took the sum, the entirety of human existence and achievement and turned it into a vast, cosmic joke. A gargantuan gag at our expense.
The universe is laughing at us, and we, humanity, life on Earth, could either be in on the joke or, quite simply, the butt of it.
I’m just sorry it took me so long to get it.
Guybrush
Colin Brush should have been a Hitchhiker’s fan from the age of 7. But he thought the radio series’ title was just a silly name for a programme about real hitchhiking. Simple, but fundamental, mistakes such as this continue to blight and frustrate his life.
Comments are turned off for this article.