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"This is the BBC."
2nd October, 2004

I'm having a big old BBC radio comedy nostalgia feast this week. After seeing The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and being entranced by the hypnotically frenetic recreation of the recording of The Goon Show that takes place as the introductory credits dwindle to an end, I've dug out a bunch of old episodes and blown the dust off. The phrase "This is the BBC", as enunciated by the pearly-toned Wallace Greenslade will always be my Doctor Pavlov's bell, its intonation catching my ears like the most intense exemplar of the cocktail phenomenon and mentally sending me right back to the age of eight, sitting hunched up under my Empire Strikes Back quilt with the dial tuned to 3LO at 8 o'clock on a Monday night with a beat-up old mono cassette player unit sitting underneath the speaker of the transistor radio as I held my breath so as to be audially invisible and to allow Messrs. Sellers, Milligan, Seacombe and their Goonish compatriots to be preserved on the shitty old dubbed-and-redubbed-and-redubbed-once-again cassette with the sticky-tape pulled tight over the lugs. Major Dennis Bludnock, Bluebottle, Eccles, Neddy Seagoon, Minnie Bannister and Henry Crun, Moriarty, Grytpype-Thynn, The Ray Ellington Quartet and the mouth-organ warblings of Max Geldray have all been released into my immediate acoustic environment, and it's like they never went away.

The second flavour of radio comedy nostalgia is a variation on a traditional theme. The BBC have just begun broadcasting the new radio serial versions of the last three books of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series (tertiary, quaternary and quintessential phases, respectively). They've brought the whole original cast back, and they've even managed somehow to give our dear departed Douglas Adams (the BBC announcers refer to him appropriately enough as "the immortal Douglas Adams") a role. He's playing Agrajag, for those familiar with the books. Listening to these actors' voices again has reminded me that my very first voice-crush was a threesome: the guy who played Arthur Dent, the guy who did Ford Prefect's lines, and the guy who played Zaphod Beeblebrox. The dulcet British accents of the two, and the velvety smooth American accent of the other, delivered Douglas's finely-tuned lines through the cheap, booming overbassy speakers of the upright mono radiocassette with the big silver dial that sat on the top of the fridge, and the deviations from the plot as I had read it in the original three books (at that stage I was unaware it had been a radio play first) were like discovering a new never-before-encountered chapter in your favourite book, the one with the sticky-taped-back-on cover and dog-ears on every page. It's a completist's lot to dream about the undiscovered countries of the unfinished manuscripts and sketchbooks of their favourite artists, and so often when those things, should they actually exist, are unearthed, it's a disappointment. Nothing holds up to the imagination, which is one of the great things about imagination, but it's always nice to be proven wrong. This new Hitch-Hiker series fits seamlessly against the old series. It's like they never went away.

Incidentally, my dad's first car was a Ford Prefect.

Related links:

The Goon Show Depository
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: New Series

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