Wendy Barnaby asks whose thumbs are up

Not everyone loves the Science Museum’s current exhibition, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

‘It hasn’t dazzled me,’ said Jon, a Hitchhiker fan visiting from the US Midwest. ‘I was expecting something more interactive.’ His companion, Diane from Borehamwood, agreed. ‘It’s a good idea to have these cases on how you can build your own planet, but when you try to press the buttons, you realise they don’t do anything,’ she said. ‘I’d like fewer props and more ideas. It would have been nice to have something on the ideas from the radio series that have permeated our culture.  And it’s not funny enough.’

Jon and Diane are serious fans with seriously high expectations.  Both met Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.

But spare a thought for the Science Museum.  It has gathered together the original props from the film of the book, and arranged them in a suitably dislocated series of chambers.  The interior of Arthur Dent’s ordinary house gives way to the forms of the surreal story that began when the Earth ended - demolished to make way for a hyperspace expressway. The heartless Vogons, bureaucrats of the galactic government, are there, with their judges’ wigs, turned-up piggy noses, cavernous landscapes of vile grey skin, fraying cardigans, revolting mouths and tiny hands. The clothes worn by the film’s characters are there:  flowing capes, towels and dressing gowns all.  The Heart of Gold spaceship, the super-computer Deep Thought, Slartibartfast’s model of Earth’s surface, and Marvin the paranoid android:  they’re all there.

When – so the story goes - the drunken young Douglas lay in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the sky and thinking, ‘Someone should write a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’, he didn’t know what a cultural icon he would produce. From the 1978 BBC radio series to best-selling novels, TV series, record album, computer game, stage adaptations and now, since his death, the film, the Guide has been a touchstone in the cultural landscape of the ‘60s generation.  No wonder it’s hard to do justice to the fans’ expectations.

View from the Museum

The Museum’s expectations are less complex.  ‘Hitchhikers is one of a line of perception-busters,’ said Museum Head Jon Tucker. ‘We know from our research that there’s a group of people out there who think science is boring and museums are boring – so how boring are we going to be at the Science Museum? How can we break that perception? All the temporary exhibitions we’ve done, like Lord of the Rings, Bond, Grossology and now Hitchhikers – all are aimed at new audiences who wouldn’t normally come and see us but who think, “Oh yeh, that looks interesting - I’ll go and look at that. Maybe they’re not quite as boring as we thought.”'

Once lured in, many of the new visitors go on to have a look at other parts of the Museum. A quarter of a million people came to see the Lord of the Rings, and more than half of them went on to other galleries. This perception-buster resulted in over 15,000 new visitors coming back to the Museum within 12 months - and at no cost to its normal budget.

Although entry to the Museum is free, all the temporary exhibitions must be self-financing. Hitchhikers costs £7.95 for adults and £6.95 for children and concessions. Visitors Jon and Diane didn’t think they’d had value for money, but Tucker is uncompromising: ‘We can show it and charge, or not show it and not charge.’ The perception-busters have either broken even or made the Museum some money which is ploughed back into its exhibitions.  They are clearly a successful part of its strategy to broaden its clientele.

The Museum’s desire to broaden its visitors’ knowledge results in panels which connect Adams’s galaxy with contemporary science. The exhibition has panels on topics such as parallel universes, the existence of God, teleportation and robotics.  These are written by Michael Hanlon, author of The Science of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The next perception-buster will be The Science of Aliens: Are we alone? Opening in mid-October, it will, says the Museum, ‘explore our enduring fascination with aliens and look at astrobiology and what life on other planets could be like.’
In spite of the fans’ disappointment, I was absorbed by Hitchhikers.  I might well give the Aliens a go.

See if I don’t.

Wendy Barnaby is the editor of SPA
w.barnaby@btinternet.com

Reference
M Hanlon (2005), The Science of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Macmillan Science