TV review: They should have called this show ‘Now That’s What I Call Man-Splaining’

Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined our Future is peppered with people who are smart rather than funny

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Picture: Kevin Jon Davies

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of those things quoted verbatim in the 1980s, when the screen adaptation of the books made it to the BBC. People would give you a loan of those books, as if they were sacred texts of comedy. I didn’t laugh once. They struck me as self-satisfied smart rather than funny.

I always presumed the author, Douglas Adams, was the same. So I didn’t expect much from Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined our Future (Sky Arts). It starts well, with Adams kind-of predicting the internet in the 1970s. Then it drifts into a plodding biography: Adams moves to London after graduation to become a side-kick writer with Graham Chapman from Monty Python, earning money on the side as a bodyguard to members of the Saudi royal family. It’s vaguely interesting if you’re an Adams fan, not so much if you’re not.