It was a cute little series that ran for only four episodes. It had an excellent cast, led by the incomparable Stephen Mangan, and was wonderfully written and diverse in the story types it could use. Sadly, it was a series that was cancelled due to budget cuts, rather than any sensible decision, and by a stubborn insistence that it could not be transferred from BBC Four to any other channel. 'Dirk Gently' is one of only two series, the other inexplicably being 'Moon Over Miami', which I still mourn and feel bad about years after it's demise.
It's not easy to write well about something you feel strongly about. The balance must be sought with more care than usual. 'Dirk Gently' was fantastic, if a bit uneven. At the end of episode four, you felt as if even greater things would come in subsequent years, and then nothing came of it at all. To give a clear idea of how out of the ordinary the show was, the theme tune and music incorporated zither, Marxophone and harpsichord, as well as some more conventional instruments.
The challenge in adapting 'Dirk Gently' to television is a massive one. There were only two original source novels, from the late great Douglas Adams, the first being the excellent and romantic 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency', which cannot be categorised and is twinned with the similarly unclassifiable and romantic fourth 'Hitchhiker's Guide' chronicle, 'So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish'. The second Dirk novel is the very sombre 'The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul', which is twinned with the equally miserable last 'Hitchhiker's Guide' novel 'Mostly Harmless'. So, we are faced with effectively one source novel and elements of another, both of which are totally unadaptable. Instead, what they did was to distill the idea of 'holistic detective work', the character of Dirk Gently himself, and then mix and match Douglas Adams ideas on an episode-by-episode basis.
The four episodes of 'Dirk Gently' featured, in order, a time travelling lovelorn genius and a hitchhiking cat, a conspiracy about the Pentagon and a program that justifies unjustifiable decisions, an artificial intelligence and a murder at Dirk's old college, and a rash of murders of Dirk's prospective clients and the repercussions of his experimental stalking. The scope was just as vast as that of the first novel which, as we said, defied classification! My own personal favourite was episode three, with the artificial intelligence, a curious romance, and lots of chips.
It was a great but limited run, with a great sense of fun and unusual format. Yes, the supporting performance by Darren Boyd could land a bit heavy, but it worked, and the results were still great. I miss this series even now, and wish that it could have gone on, perhaps instead of 'Sherlock' which seems to have descended into a mode of defying the very things which made it an early success. Anyway, I miss 'Dirk Gently', and watch those four episodes every year at about this time.
Everyone should have a brainstorming pattern on their wall and paint it over regularly.
O.
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