Dirk Maggs

Interview with Dirk Maggs about H2G2

An interview with Dirk Maggs producer of the third, fourth and fifth radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This Afternoon Play had Johnny Vegas stamped all over it, the way he goes full throttle, his voice coming in stops and starts as if being squeezed from a near empty toothpaste tube, and then there is the dip as he comes to the darkness and futility that is often his pay-off line.

Interiors was a satirical and unexpectedly touching drama about property-owning during a financial slump and how homes can reflect broken lives.

Vegas, along with Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle, is credited with having written the original play on which this production, directed by Dirk Maggs, was based, implying alterations to the original. As Vegas clearly enjoys and understands radio drama acting, with a track record stretching from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists to Shedtown (whose first series is now being repeated), these tweaks to the script will have been more sensitive than those carried out by his character, Jeffrey Parkin, to the home he wants to sell.

Parkin does the en-masse viewing himself, full of empty bombast, playing to the gallery, which, if he had one, would be half-finished like everything else in the house. He issues a spluttering critique of TV property shows, a wheezy indictment of his erstwhile wife's taste in flat-packed furniture. Then, the vanity of the home-owner, once mired in the certainties of his own taste, crumples. Standing in his botched house of smashed dreams, he admits that he has wasted his energy on things that don't matter.

While this was mostly a one man tour-de-force, a cast of six actors played the viewers, a whispering, embarrassed Greek chorus, who were given few lines but whose presence is palpable.

A new comedy by Andy Lynch with an astonishingly starry cast: Clive Anderson, Ricky Tomlinson, Martine McCutcheon, Andy Parsons and Emily Head (from TV's The Inbetweeners). And now the plot. Who is this hairy old Scouser who accosts a career-minded female producer in the street? Is he just a stalker? It's directed by Dirk Maggs, the master of feelgood surround-sound.

Great diabolic plots of creeping mystery! Here come master detective Sexton Blake (Simon Jones) and his plucky sidekick Tinker (Wayne Forester) plus an assortment of posh birds, cross archbishops and fiendish profs to solve any murder going, thwart all evil ploys. For anyone who remembers the real thing in book, magazine or comic form, this aural slapstick version (directed by dynamic Dirk Maggs) will lack proper gravitas. It is, however, huge fun in a Goon-show-ish sort of way. Quick, lads, to the locomotive. The chase is on!

Bad news. Dirk Maggs won't make "the salmon of doubt" radio series

Dirk Maggs who succesfully adapted and directed the three new phases of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy radio series, the two Dirk Gently books, has decided he won't write and direct the last Dirk Gently radio series which was going to be based on the unfinished "salmon of doubt".

Series two of Dirk Maggs's brilliant dramatisation and production of Douglas Adams's cosmic sleuth, and if the first episode is anything to go by the next six weeks of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul should just surf by on a wave of surreal laughter.

It has to be admitted that knowing the book probably helps the listener to follow the plot, which seems at this early stage to be a bit all over the place.

We find Dirk Gently (Harry Enfield again, wonderful again) somewhat on his uppers (a scene in which he prizes the arrival of an envelope containing a charity appeal for the free pen that comes with it - very Ed Reardon). We also discover that Odin, Thor and other gods have been reduced to appearing in commercials. No doubt it will all start to come together next week. But even if it doesn't, who cares?