Doctor Who: The Doomsday Contract
by John Lloyd; adapted by Nev Fountain (Big Finish, 2021)
Originally commissioned during Douglas Adams’ tenure as script editor, The Doomsday Contract exhibits a Hitchhiker’s tonality but without quite the same zest. Tom Baker gives it some welly but the denunciation of bureaucracy via reductio ad absurdum seems a bit old hat.
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen
by Douglas Adams & James Goss (BBC Books, 2018)
Goss takes delight in adding a fourth book to Douglas Adams’ trilogy of Doctor Who stories, channelling the unfocussed wit of ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ (Adams’ version), diligently but to the detriment of the Doctor Who tale that could have been.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Live at the Almeida Theater, London, 1995
by Douglas Adams (Phoenix Books, 2008)
The greater part of this reading (or more accurately, performance) comes in the form of two long excerpts from Life, the Universe and Everything. Suddenly that which seems facetious on the page springs to life and we hear what Adams himself intended.
Life, the Universe and Everything
by Douglas Adams (MacMillan Audio, 2006) [First published by Pan, 1982]
read by Martin Freeman
Reprising the vast zaniness and existential satire of the original Hitchhiker’s duology, Adams ups his trademark discursiveness, redoubles his protagonists’ fecklessness and yet achieves an oddly cohesive transcendence (while Martin Freeman’s delivery makes a virtue of Adams’ sometimes facetious approach to prose).