DAWKINS: FATHER FORGIVE HIM,
FOR HE KNOWS NOT THAT HE IS A PRAT
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE THE DAWK .
His scientific unholiness, Dawkins the Gob, now a premier telly professor on the fashionable cusp of science and showbiz, is at loose in this week's Radio Times, not exactly writing but in an "as told to" piece of ghastly name-dropping about his late friend, the brilliant Cantabrian, Mr Douglas Adams, celebrated author of you-know-what but also the author of much I-never-heard-of-this-shit shit.
The BBC is serialising - or maybe it's a one-off, who cares - Adams' later novel, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. There are people, or there were people, praise God, they may now all be dead and up in fan heaven, who cherished bootleg tape recordings of Bob Dylan's kettle boiling, traded slightly differing recordings of its boiling on separate dates, completists, they might term themselves, pathetic, weedy arseholes, more like. Regulars here will know that we despair of copyright greed - a nurse gets paid only for his or her shift, why should Reg Presley earn millions, be paid everytime someone plays his bucolic warbling of Wild Thing? Especially when it is played on airwaves which, technically, we own; the fucking moron should pay us. Up against the wall, I would put them, people like him, useless, idle fucking greedy bastards. Vermeer got paid for his paintings, not for everytime someone looked at them. But even so, we were never interested in acquiring surreptitiously obtained recordings of little Bobby's work, happy, rather, to engage in the official record buying transaction. YouTube and the proliferation of recording media has made much concert and recorded material available freely (or do we now say ForFree?) and the copyright argument is largely academic, save amongst the consumerist successors to the weedy arsehole nerds who simply must own the latest dismal product of Take That or Duran Duran, Rock'n'Roll, it's the paying for it that counts. Intellectual property, Aye, right. Shitheads.
Adams, in passing, it seems, together with other literary giants, was, of course, a frustrated rockers and hee and they would "jam" in homage to Bob - Amis, Adams and Rushdie, I believe, was one such ensemble. Fuck me Jesus, what a racket that would have been. Don't know if Ricky Dawkins was at the back on the drums but he'd probably say he was; he so rocks, innit, bringing science to the streets, with that Apostasy Shuffle he does.
But we digress, to swiftly re-establish our course - how did we get here from there, that sort of thing - it is assumed in modern showbiz world that a truly inspired comic, or any sort of creative well can never run dry, that anything, anything a once creative performer or writer does is of interest, merit, commercial value - Bob Dylan's outtakes or Douglas Adams' dreary later works, there will be someone there to market them, furthermore, there will be someone to turn a radio series into a book, a book into a film or in Dawkins' case an idea into an industry and so it is with the creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. A greater man than Adams would have left it there, on the radio, where it belonged, where it shimmers and dazzles and entrances, prompting tears of mirth, gasps of admiration. No such luck, no such judgement. Hitchhiker was degraded in most possible media and at the time of his death, Adams was in negotiation with Warners or Disney or some such megacorp for further "developments."
Dawkins' self-serving bumfluffery - does he do any other sort? - in the Radio Times, though, is amazing and highly recommended. Do go and read it, down the library, if Mr Pickles the Pig has left yours open. They were friends, you see, Adams almost as clever as Dawkins, in fact, although - and this is simply too wonderful - Dawkins modestly credits himself with having "converted" Adams to atheism, coverted to unbelief; I always said Dawkins was only offering a different version of what he claims to hate, the negative image of Islamo- or Christian/Judaeo-fascism.
Adams, according to the Dawk, more into comedy-science than proper science, would contact Dawkins, pursuing scientific versimillitude, whilst Dawkins would defer to Adams on computer nerding, at which he was just a genius. Dawkins was, in fact, according to his as-told-to, was the uncredited scientific adviser to Adams' entire ouevre, everything apart from the good stuff. Adams and the revolting Steven Fag introduced Dawkins to his wife - do career atheists have wives, shouldn't they be partners-in-disbelief - and to the happy marriage which has so clearly led to Dawkins being a pisshead, check the tremors, check the capillaries, man, check the delusions, les folies de grandeur . The aforementioned wife once even appeared in Doctor Who, how's that for greatness, befitting the towering intellect of our time, that, a marriage of fucking luvvies. Adams, of course, dead as a galactic mackerel, can neither confirm nor deny Dawkins' intimate camaraderie. Maybe they just met once, at a literary atheists' luncheon, out Alpha Centauri way.
Surely time for a Nobel prize
or the Big Brother House, at the very least
Aside from gushing to a note-taker over the Dirk Gently novel - tedious, lacklustre and disappointing - the Dawk reveals nothing of the BBC production to which it is linked but one could reasonably surmise that it will be akin to the recent prurient, sexed-up, gratuitously gay, postmodern re-working of Sherlock Holmes into a metrosexual fantasy, shite, in other words; sometimes, honestly, my dears, one thinks the BBC is simply crawling with gay people.
Adams, however, redeemed himself in the manner of his death, which was something he could, would love to have have written. Une homme des lettres celebre, over celebre, actually and only among his Oxbridge peers; minted, having junked his first wife, married a US attorney and hot on the heels of Hollywood superstardom, the very picture of commercial success, the silly genius expired while "working-out" on the consumer treadmill in a Santa Barbera gym. And now he is spending Eternity dead for tax purposes, lovely.
THE FIRST TEN MILLION YEARS ARE THE WORST,
THE NEXT TEN MILLION, THEY'RE THE WORST, TOO.
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Like others here, as a matter of literary achievement, I prefer Asimov's Enclopaedia Galactica from which the Hitchhiker's Guide sprung, chortling; Adams' radio series, though, is among the great comic creations of my lifetime, this one, anyhow. Such a shame that it was all downhill from there; sometimes a man has to know his limitations.
Dawkins, however, celebrated for his science, has become a pain in the arse and God or no God, I would burn all his books to illuminate, for a few seconds, The Last Supper or Christ of Saint John of the Cross and burn his bones to generate enough power to hear Mozart's Requiem, Handels' Messiah or Monteverdi's Vespers. Odd, how one who claims to know so much actually knows so little, good, as my young friend would say, for fuck all
Dawkins, however, celebrated for his science, has become a pain in the arse and God or no God, I would burn all his books to illuminate, for a few seconds, The Last Supper or Christ of Saint John of the Cross and burn his bones to generate enough power to hear Mozart's Requiem, Handels' Messiah or Monteverdi's Vespers. Odd, how one who claims to know so much actually knows so little, good, as my young friend would say, for fuck all
