…of the somewhat fashionable end of Blackpool lies a small, unregarded exhibition.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy world consists of an excellent Radio series, a trilogy of 5 books, a delightfully bad BBC TV adaptation and, most recently, a somewhat dodgy film. I like them all, though in that order of preference, and have listened to and read and watched each more than once. As luck would have it, though, it's the last of these - the somewhat dodgy film, my least favourite of the bunch - that is the subject of a new exhibition which until recently was spending its days at the Science Museum in London and is now, for some obscure reason, based at Blackpool Zoo. Following our slightly underwhelming visit to the local Doctor Who museum on the promenade we decided that this couldn't be any worse than that and spend Easter Sunday morning having a nosy round the HHGTG set up.
Blackpool Zoo was the venue for many years of school trips when I was growing up locally and so I know it reasonably well. It's been done up all fancy recently, however, and is, well, quite swish. There are currently 3 main features - the Zoo itself, a Dinosaur safari and the Hitchhiker's exhibition, and each has an individual entry fee. For the exhibition it's Ł5 for adults and Ł4 for children and although it's not advertised they will whip up a student discount if you ask, so do just that.
The exhibition is of a much higher quality than the ones at the Doctor Who museum. For one thing, the labels and signs are printed on proper, colourful boards, not ink-jetted onto tatty pieces of paper. For another, the English used it almost entirely grammatically accurate. Fancy! The only problem is that, on occasion, it's not factually correct. Slartibartfast, it says, really liked doing the Norwegian fjords, and was pleased to have the chance to redo them when he got to work on the Earth, Mark 2, following the untimely destruction of the first version. But in the books / radio / TV shows and the film it clearly states how annoyed he was to be assigned to Africa for the remake ("No fjords, you see"). Hmmm.
Nit-picking aside, the exhibition is actually a decent one. It includes everything from Arthur Dent's kitchen to the inside of the Heart of Gold, though it doesn't make immediately clear whether these are the actual sets used in filming, or just replicas thereof. There are lots of costumes too, but although one of these is labelled as being the exact one worn by one of the actors in the film, the others aren't tagged in this way so you can't quite be sure whether to assume they are too. In fact the labelling as a whole switches briskly from lots of stating the obvious (a Vogon cup….a Vogon gun) to none at all.
The information provided on the boards doesn't always directly relate to the exhibits in that room but is there more to give a background to the story for those who aren't quite at the level of addiction I am. They tell you about how it all starts (bypasses and what not - you've got to build bypasses, y'know) to the trek to the mythical land of Magrathea (planet makers extraordinaire) to what the infinite improbability drive is all about. They even go so far as to include a bucket of sick from, or at least inspired by, the film but thankfully this is from the stage where the characters all appear as knitted beings, and therefore capable of only producing a woolly, yarn-like barf. Finally, just before you leave there are several dozen pieces of Vogon poetry for you to 'enjoy' including one which, quite appropriately, makes reference to Blackpool Zoo and its animals.
If I have one complaint about the exhibition it is that the sound-bites that accompany some of the displays are loud, and the walls of the rooms are not high, meaning you can hear what's coming up before you get there, and sometimes can be getting one display talking into one ear while another, further up, yaks into your other ear. This is particularly noticeable at the beginning where you start off listening to the 'So long, and thanks for all the fish' ditty but are soon also being subjected to a moaning Vogon whinging on about hitchhikers without yet being out of ear shot of the song. The exhibition is also not fun and interactive - it's more about looking and reading that pressing buttons - but this is probably just as well as the one area that does encourage visitor involvement was broken when we went, with only half of the terminals working. (Incidentally those which were working only offered up short documentaries also featured in the extras section of the DVD, so no new material for us).
The other downside of the touring exhibition is the tiny shop with limited merchandise, though what it did offer was very reasonably priced, with t-shirts for a fiver and books and tapes well below the rrp printed on reverse. There really wasn't much of interest though - no post-cards, or mini-Marvins, or anything fun like that.
I'm not expecting the exhibition to be there all that long. Though no finish-date is as yet publicly available the guy on the counter said they were trying to get hold of the sets from Narnia instead. I'm not sure where it will end up next, but if you fancy seeing it, I would recommend going sooner rather than later. I thought the exhibition was, for the most part, well done, and worth the money.
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