On Continuity

Memory is notoriously untrustworthy and fragile. Be that as it may, I do trust to a strange rememberance of a time when Andy Crook acted as a sort of sensitive cultural pilot. Although it seems odd now, I distincly recall that he was the person who lent me the first of the Discworld novels, when it first came out, and who got us all sitting around the radio in college one evening in 1978 to listen to the first ever broadcast episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

And now in the space of a few days we have Radio 4 broadcasting Eoin Colfer's authorised sequel to Hitchhiker and a brand new Discworld novel. I really need Andy to tell me what to think about them, but as he isn't here right now (he's in SW London), here goes...

Unseen Academicals - 37th in the Discworld series. Its about football and the wizards. It is pretty good. Somehow, it reminds me of Monstrous Regiment (perhps because when Pterry writes about the working classes and violence there is a certain similarity?). I'm not going to talk about plot, character or jokes. If you are interested you will have already read it - or be about to. So in either case I'd be doing a disservice. But there is one other area where it reads as typical Pratchett. He has never been that interested in the detailed consistency of the series from book to book. In fact I always thought the whole point of Thief of Time was to allow him to do pretty much as he wanted in that regard, without the fans getting niggled.

And yet. In this book, football is reinvented, and indeed a new, air-filled ball is introduced. The game is made more civilised. All fine, except that it seems to ignore the byplay around Captain Carrot and his inflated pig's bladder in Jingo. The Captain Carrot who doesn't appear in the latest book at all, because of course he would be the ideal referee, and the main plot just wouldn't quite work. Now it is clear that Pratchett knows and understands this discontinuity and just doesn't want to let it get in the way of his story. Fair enough - its his universe, after all. It's just that this time I felt the gap a little bit more clearly...

Anyway, on to And Another Thing. The next bit of HHGTTG. Part six of three. I haven't bought the book (yet - I probably will for completeness), and I admire Colfer (Artemis Fowl, The Wish List, etc). But first and foremost Hitchhiker was a radio series, and that is the form where it worked best, so when Radio 4 announced that they would broadcast it as Book at Bedtime I decided I just had to listen to it first.

A big mistake. A huge mistake.

Because it was Book at Bedtime. A solitary voice reading a condensed version of the book. Dull. No Peter Jones (or Stephen Fry). No music. No BBC Radiophonic Workshop. No Simon Jones. Nothing. I suspect that if in my mind Hitchhiker wasn't actually all of those things, and more, it would have been OK. But it is. So it wasn't.

I just couldn't listen to it and had to switch it off.

There was no continuity with the past, no sense that this followed on from the earlier stuff; it just fell depressingly flat. Either it is just me, or the BBC got this one horribly wrong. Once upon a time, I feel sure, Andy Crook would have warned me.