Stephen Mangan

Following on from a successful pilot in late 2010, BBC Four's commissioned a full series of this comedy drama loosely based on the novels by Douglas Adams, and starring Stephen Mangan as the holistic detective.

The first episode in the series, which sees Dirk deal with a murder that has links to the Pentagon, contains some funny situations created by Howard Overman, the man behind the adaptation. Such things include Dirk breaking into a house of the murder victim by smashing a glass door being witnessed by those inside. Then there's Dirk surveillance operation which goes completely wrong thanks to his partner/assistant MacDuff's (Darren Boyd) new chair.

However, personally speaking I'm one of those people who would have been happier with the original stories being adapted for the screen rather than having new ones developed. While it does contain some elements from the original books, such as Zen navigation (instead of using a map to go where you want to go, you follow someone who looks like they know where they go, often leading you to somewhere you need to be), it would be nice to see Adams's original tales on screen.

Still, if you too are annoyed by the lack of faithfulness in this adaptation, there are always the more faithful Radio 4 stories starring Harry Enfield, which does follow Adam's work much more closely (Electric Monks and Norse Gods included).

The main plus point for Dirk Gently is having the consistently great Stephen Mangan on board in the lead role - he's certainly one of our most watchable comedy actors, and is in particularly fine form as the infuriatingly self-sure (but still rather lovely) private detective who believes in 'the fundamental interconnectedness of all things'.

Since the superb Sky One comedy Spy, my eyes have also been belatedly opened to the huge talent of Darren Boyd, who plays Gently's rather more conventional assistant-slash-business-partner MacDuff - so all in all I can't help but come to Dirk Gently with a whole heap of goodwill.

But I think my enjoyment of this episode can be put down to more than that. It's a great-looking thing, and the script was sharper than the pilot - I particularly enjoyed the line "his cheque bounced like the proverbial basketball... on a trampoline." Miss out the word "proverbial" there and it's prosaic; with it, it's a winner. There were little gems like this throughout the hour, and Douglas Adams's genius sense of the absurd is perfectly encapsulated in the idea of 'zen navigation': find a car that looks like it knows where it's going, and follow it. Pretty silly, but highly entertaining.

I struggled with Dirk Gently (Monday, BBC Four). It had nothing to do with Stephen Mangan's considerable comedic talents, still less with Darren Boyd who plays Macduff, the Dr Watson to Dirk's Holmes. It is more to do with my devotion to Douglas Adams, upon whose comic novel this series is based. Adams was never well served by TV or film adaptations of his work, even big budget ones such as the 2005 film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His books always worked much better as radio adaptations that could leave the listener's imagination to fill in the gaps (indeed the Radio 4 version of Hitchhiker's even managed to be better than the book).

Jeeves and Wooster was similarly hard to make work on screen. Though Fry and Laurie's version was as good as any TV adaptation could be, it tried to tell the story through dialogue alone, which merely drew attention to the silliness of the plots. In PG Wodehouse, as in Douglas Adams, 90 per cent of the pleasure is in the prose, the narration, the felicities of language.

Over the course of a novel, Adams could afford to be quite subtle about Dirk's big idea, that all things are fundamentally interconnected. A TV adaptation can't be, and, as it keeps labouring the point, you find yourself saying: "Yes, yes, I get it." Perhaps as the series develops they will tone down this side of things.

Finally, and this is an anoraky point, Mangan looks nothing like the Dirk of the novels. At Cambridge Dirk was "rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats", and in later life he becomes rounder still, and scruffier, and more chaotic. Mangan seems too neat, too thin, too orderly.

With regards to Dirk Gently, there's nothing wrong with the actors Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd and some nice moments from Howard Overman's script. It's just that those qualities in the end spread a little too thinly over a nonsensical thriller plot.

It's supposed to be nonsensical, of course - Dirk's belief that "everything is interconnected" pretty much necessitating a chain of wildly improbable coincidences and consequences. But since anything can happen you don't very much care about anything that does, and Dirk's metaphysical musings about "Zen navigation" and the complexity of the world begin to get repetitious quite quickly. There were laughs, including a nice reveal when Mangan opened a Valentine's card in the middle of a complacent speech about his powers of attraction to find that the inscription inside read "I hate you, you're a pig". But they were far too widely spaced in a script that could have done with a lot more editing. Scorning someone's belief in astrology, Dirk asked him whether he really believed that planets "billions of light years" away could affect human destiny. Millions of miles would cover it, Dirk, and yes, you might justly point out that this scientific pedantry is irrelevant. But I probably wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't used the same phrase three times. Or if I'd been laughing enough to distract myself.

Since 2010's largely successful pilot episode based on Douglas Adams's comic detective novels, public appreciation of bromantic bickering between sociopathic north London super-sleuths and their prissy but redoubtable sidemen has risen considerably. A fluffy pig, some bogus horoscopes and an extramarital affair are the dots that Stephen Mangan's 'holistic' private eye - a shaggy-haired Sherlock with a belief in the interconnectedness of seemingly random coincidences - and grounded associate Darren Boyd must join to stop some global meltdown or other. It ditches the more ornate lunacy and the dark, portentous undercurrents of the Adams originals, but just enough of his charm, fun and spirit of closeted anarchy remains to appeal to fans as well as newcomers.

The thousands of creative decisions behind Dirk Gently

One man, Douglas Adams, wrote two and a half books about the adventures of holistic detective, Dirk Gently, and now over 100 people have collaborated to bring his character to the small screen for a new series which starts tonight.

The late Douglas Adams, upon whose work Dirk Gently is loosely based, once served as script editor during Doctor Who's original run, so the links are inherent anyway. But television really doesn't need another straggle-haired, loose-limbed, people-phobic, geek-chic eccentric solving crazy puzzles with assistance from a more diffident and human sidekick. It's probably only a matter of time before they revive Catweazle starring Ben Whishaw as a sexy nerd wizard in a pin-striped smock (I really shouldn't be giving them any ideas).

Stephen Mangan is fine as Gently, a conceited, bumbling, shabby detective who conducts "tangential investigations" based on his belief in the interconnectedness of all things. But his borderline charming performance isn't enough to rescue this micro-budgeted production from resembling a CBBC version of Sherlock.

The gritty cheapness of original BBC4 comedies such as The Thick Of It and Getting On actually works in their favour, as their dark, jittery essence practically demands flat lighting etc. But Dirk Gently, in trying to create a much lighter and more fantastical mood, is ill-served by its cheapo aesthetic.

Everything about it is far too slight: slightly likeable, slightly funny, slightly clever, but never enough to really succeed as either comedy or drama. And while the decision to downplay the science-fiction concepts found in the original books makes sense from a budgetary point of view, it also exacerbates the general feeling of pointlessness. It's just too generic and ordinary. And Douglas Adams was never generic and ordinary.

Video: Interview with Dirk Gently star Stephen Mangan

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Audio: Stephen Mangan on the return of Dirk Gently

Nikki Bedi talks to actor Stephen Mangan, who returns to our screens in the guise of Dirk Gently, Douglas Adams' self-styled 'holistic detective'.

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Stephen Mangan, star of BBC4's Dirk Gently, talks about his love affair with the work of the late author Douglas Adams...