Douglas Adams to Return to TV, No Hitchhiking Involved

Lauren Davis — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:20:00 PDT

While Eoin Colfer tries to extend The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series past its expiration date, the BBC looks to adapt a different chapter of Douglas Adams' work. Coming to a television near you: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Ed Victor, a literary agent who represents the late author's estate, told British humor outlet Chortle that the BBC has Dirk Gently series in the works, although there's no telling when we could see such a show:

He said he had seen ‘a great script – not just a good script' for the planned adaptation, but warned: ‘With the BBC, it can take forever'.

In the books, Dirk Gently is a detective who solves crimes not by looking at the minutiae of evidence, but at the larger picture, figuring out the interconnectedness of everything. In the first book, he goes on the hunt for a missing cat and stumbles on a greater problem involving the ghost of an alien engineer, the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, time travel, and the very fate of humanity. The BBC previously adapted the Dirk Gently novels as a radio series in 2007.

Victor said the BBC has also expressed interest in remaking their The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series, but that would involve obtaining a license from Disney, which currently owns the Hitchhiker rights.

BBC plans Dirk Gently TV series [Chortle via Topless Robot]

The Unknown Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Prequel You've Already Read

Graeme McMillan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:20:00 PDT

Seven years after his death, an unfulfilled idea of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy creator Douglas Adams is about to come to fruition, as the BBC prepares to bring unlikely detective Dirk Gently into the Hitchhikers universe in a new radio series. This strange move is a result of creative frustrations that led Adams to consider changing the unfinished third Dirk Gently novel (following on from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul) into a book from the Hitchhikers series.

The upcoming BBC radio adaptation of Long Dark Tea-Time will act, in part, as a bridge between the two series:

“There is definitely Hitchhiker’s/crossover,” explains Dirk Gently adapter-in-chief and director Dirk Maggs. “In this second series there is one particular idea from Douglas’s notes for the third [unfinished] Dirk Gently book which at one point he thought might be a Hitchhiker’s book. It’s a very simple idea that puts one of the Hitchhiker’s characters in the same universe as Dirk Gently in a way that I thought had enormous potential. In this series we find that the characters in both universes are inhabiting the same world, and I think where we’re going with this is something that actually resolves later on in Hitchhiker’s. It’s turning into a bit of a prequel!”

The radio adaptation of the novel is due to be broadcast on UK BBC Radio 4 before the end of this year.

EXCLUSIVE Dirk Gently 2 to feature Hitchhiker's crossover [SFX]

io9: dirk gently

Douglas Adams to Return to TV, No Hitchhiking Involved

The Unknown Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Prequel You've Already Read