Dirk Gently Series 3

or

The Salmon of Doubt

October 2009 1830-1900 on BBC Radio 4

 

Director

Dirk Maggs

 

Producers

Dirk Maggs

Jo Wheeler

 

Executive Producer

Helen Chattwell

 

Dramatised By

Dirk Maggs

John Langdon

 

Written By

Douglas Adams

 

Production

Above the Title Productions Ltd

 

Synopsis

Nothing yet

 

Episodes

Episode 1:

 

Episode 2:

 

Episode 3:

 

Episode 4:

 

Episode 5:

 

Episode 6:

 

 

Cast for all episodes

Character

Actor
Dirk Gently
Harry Enfield
Svlad Cjelli
Harry Enfield
Dirk Cjelli
Harry Enfield
DS Gilks
Jim Carter
Janice Smith
Olivia Colman

Production Crew

Mixers

Paul Deeley

Paul Weir

 

Live Effects Operator

Alison Mackenzie

 

Recorded at

Studio 3/6 The Soundhouse Ltd London England

 

Recorded on

Some time in 2009

 

Music composed & Arranged

Phillip Pope

 

Comment by Dirk Maggs

Nothing yet

 

Cast Pictures

Harry Enfield
Olivia Colman
Harry Enfield
Olivia Colman

 

Running Time

6 Episodes of 30 minutes Each 180 minutes in total.

 

Other Links

 

Above the Title Productions Ltd page on Dirk Gently

which has photo's and two trailers of the show audio and visual

 

The BBC Dirk Gently website

 

What Others Have Said

Nothing yet

 

Other Information

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



The Salmon of Doubt (full title: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time) is a posthumous collection of previously uncollected material by Douglas Adams, published in 2001. English editions of the book were published in the USA and UK in May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death. It consists largely of a compilation of essays, most of which have a technological edge, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working when he died (and from which the collection gets its title, a reference to the Celtic myth of the Salmon of Wisdom).


The book
In a 1998 interview with Matt Newsome, Adams commented as to whether The Salmon of Doubt was going to be a Dirk Gently book or a continuation of the Hitchhiker's Guide series:

“ Adams: The thing with Dirk was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn't make that book viable, which is why I said, "Okay, let's go off and do something else." Then looking back at all the ideas that were there in Salmon of Doubt, I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I'd been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitch-Hiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.
So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitch-Hiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don't want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!

I would love to finish Hitch-Hiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in Salmon of Doubt, was planned into Salmon of Doubt and really wasn't working, I think could be yanked out and put together some new thoughts.

Newsome: Yes, because certainly some people have heard that Salmon of Doubt was now going to be a new Hitch-Hiker book.

Adams: Well, In a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn't make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitch-Hiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old time's sake, I may call it, Salmon of Doubt, I may call it... well who knows!”

The actual manuscript of the proposed novel is extremely short and only gives a glimpse of what The Salmon of Doubt would have been. It is composed of the best content out of several drafts (as were many of Adams' books). The book is set a few weeks after the events in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. A faxed summary reprinted before the text mentions travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos." Although both a rhinoceros and "The Way of the Nostril" (in the mysterious "DaveLand") are mentioned, no such nostril-based time travel occurs in the existent text.

The existing plot involves Dirk Gently, the detective protagonist of two earlier Adams novels, refusing to help find the missing half of a cat, receiving large amounts of money from an unknown client, and then flying to the United States. After refusing the case about the missing half of a cat, Dirk pays a visit to Kate Schechter (who had first appeared in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul). Dirk tells Kate that prior to the potential client, he had been so bored that he had started a habit of dialing his own phone number, and discovered that he'd answered his own call (Some of you might remember Ford Prefect (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) talking about time travel and mentioning that notion). This may have been foreshadowing some sort of time travel later on.

The extract from Newsome's full interview reprinted in the book reveals that Adams did not like the ending he wrote to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", and realised that the ideas he had been working on for Salmon of Doubt might work better as a sixth book in that series. In the book, Dirk follows around a ginger haired actor; Ford Prefect is described as having ginger-coloured hair, and his disguise during his stay on Earth includes his being an out-of-work actor. It is possible that this is him, and forms a link between the two series, or that the text was in a state of metamorphosis from one to the other – but no one will ever know.

There are slight differences in varying editions of the book. The UK edition includes a foreword by Stephen Fry, and the US edition, instead, has an introduction by Christopher Cerf. The audiobook edition consists of 7 CDs, mostly read by Simon Jones, but also includes both of the aforementioned introductions, read by their respective authors, as well as the tributes written and read by Professor Richard Dawkins. US paperback editions have yet another introduction, written by Terry Jones, and omit some material due to issues with copyright

 

Other Items

Dirk Gently Series 1

Dirk Gently Series 2

Dirk Gently Series 3

 

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