Here’s the teaser for DIRK GENTLY, the BBC’s detective show based on the novels bythe late Douglas Adams (THE HITCHHIKER GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE); Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
From BBC Four’s Press Release:
“Stephen Mangan will play Douglas Adams’ eccentric detective Dirk Gently in a new BBC Four drama based on the author’s cult novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
He is joined by Darren Boyd as his unwitting sidekick Richard Macduff and Helen Baxendale as Richard’s girlfriend Susan in the adaptation by Bafta-winning Howard Overman.
Anti-hero Dirk Gently operates his eponymous detective agency based on the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
Perpetually broke, hopelessly chaotic and utterly infuriating, most people suspect Dirk is nothing more than a cheap conman. And they might be right – but nevertheless his methods, though unusual, do often produce surprising results.”
Steven Mangan (HYPERDRIVE, GREEN WING) doesn’t match the book’s description of the pudgy, bespectacled and fashion-challenged Dirk Gently, whose real name is Svlad Cjelli. However, the comedic actor brings a lot of experience to the role.
Douglas Adams had been a story editor and writer on DOCTOR WHO, and some of the plot elements and the time-traveling character Professor Chronotis from his unfinished 80’s-era Tom Baker serial, Shada wound up in the Dirk Gently novels. (Ideas from another of his episodes, City of Death, were incorporated as well.)
The serial, which dealt with a former Time Lord retired to Earth as a Cambridge don and the secret of a lost prison planet, was never completed due to a strike. An abridged and Tom Baker-narrated version was dome for home video release, and a audio version using 8th Doctor Paul McGann from the American TV movie was also made several years ago.