One of the first things I did when hearing of Douglas Adams' death was to find and listen to the original HHGTTG radio series. It's still funny, still sharp and witty, and still thoroughly deserving of the widest audience possible.

The HHGTTG was, originally, a radio comedy drama, scriped by Douglas Adams himself, before being turned into a series of books, and a TV show. This box of two tapes or three CDs captures the first half of the HHGTTG radio saga, and on the first listen you can see how it became such a phenomenon. The writing and scenarios are superb, if a little wacky, and the humour is always spot-on.

The plot revolves, as in the books and the TV series, around a human being named Arthur Dent, and what happens to him when the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Having found out that his best friend of five years, Ford Prefect, isn't in fact human but a roving reporter for "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (an electronic book which also seems to act as the narrator for the radio drama), he hitches a lift on the demolition ship and goes off around the galaxy, cheating death, time-travelling and generally getting in eveyone's way.

Before you go off in an anti-SciFi moment, however, I should tell you that I'm not that into SciFi myself. No, what makes this brilliant is the humour and situations Arthur finds himself in. Vogon poetry, Eddie the Ship's Computer, and the Guide itself, are brilliant concepts which fit so tightly into the story.

Unlike most audiobooks, this isn't just a reading of the novels. Indeed, in several areas the storyline is quite different, and the different actors reading their roles makes this far more entralling than the books. You have the best of both worlds - your imagination allows you to make up the images of how you believe things are, but you don't have to concentrate so much on who's saying what.

I
9;d recommend both this and the Secondary Phase, since both are funny and clever, and well worth a tenner of anyone's money. It's a shame we'll never see a continuation.