H2G2 casts a long shadow. Any radio science fiction comedy is bound to draw comparisons with it, and even more so if it’s on Radio 4. To some extent, the same problem exists on BBC television, where SF comedy is likely to be compared to ‘Red Dwarf’. This happened with the rather obscure ‘Hyperdrive’ with Miranda Hart, Nick Frost and Kevin Eldon, which ran for only two series. It wasn’t wonderful to be sure, but it was absolutely not a rip-off of ‘Red Dwarf’. It was ‘The Navy Lark’ in space. That series, of which I was never a fan but you know, it was okay, was probably unknown or forgotten by 2005 but is so much more similar to ‘Hyperdrive’ than ‘Red Dwarf’, and if people had known about that and resisted the urge to draw comparisons with the most prominent space comedy, I’m sure it would’ve been perceived much more positively.
There have been quite a few Radio 4 SF comedies since 1980, and H2G2 is rather like the Beatles in that it defined a genre and cannot be successfully imitated without being seen as derivative. What, then, do you do if you want to write a series of this kind? It has to be completely different from Douglas Adams’s work, and probably use a different kind of humour, and this is very restrictive. However, restriction is a wonderful spur to creativity and originality if you can dislodge your focus sufficiently on what you’re trying not to write. I would say Tony Bagley’s ‘Married’ has successfully escaped from Mr Different Adams’s fierce gravitational pull and managed to write something pretty fresh. I mean, he did it over twenty years ago now but it’s still good.
The premise of ‘Married’ (SPOILERS) is that steadfastly single and misanthropist architect Robin Lightfoot wakes up one morning to find himself in a parallel universe where he’s married with children and works at a greetings card company, and absolutely hates his new life. Meanwhile, his counterpart in the parallel universe has entered this one and proceeds to trash his life, since he too is misanthropic but considerably more actively antisocial and abusive. The series becomes increasingly surreal and science-fictiony as it proceeds until the existence of the entire Multiverse is threatened and the fabric of reality breaks down. Robin finds a solution in the final episode, but it isn’t clear if the Multiverse is saved.
Robin is played by Hugh Bonneville, cast somewhat against type. Arthur Smith is another central character, who plays himself, and Julian Clary makes a guest appearance. Many people who exist in this universe also exist in the other, but often have different life histories. It gently breaks the fourth wall a number of times. The only person with an initial grasp on the situation is his son, who reads a lot of graphic novels and is therefore savvy about parallel universes. In a sublime piece of technobabble, he explains to Robin that there are two types of parallel universe, Inverted Gravimetric and Temporal Neomorphic. It’s never at all clear what these are but they sound marvellous.
Although the drama centres, initially at least, on the interaction between the characters, the background is also intriguing. Much of it is based on the humour of rôle reversal. Tony Blair is leader of the Conservative Party. Environmentalists are campaigning for the legalisation of genetically-modified organisms and the use of organophosphate pesticides. Most people believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare. Jimmi Hendrix is a middle-of-the-road radio disc jockey. ‘The Guardian’ is a tabloid and has a porn page but ‘The Sun’ is a quality newspaper. There were eighteen years of Labour rule up to 1997, when the Liberal Democrats achieved power, led by Richard Branson, who is now Prime Minister. Alcohol is a Class A drug but you can buy Cannabis over the counter in Boots. There is no Sunday trading. Surrey is a deprived area but the northeast of England is affluent.
The humour is not confined to reversals. Fashion is how it was in the early 1970s, with kipper ties and flares. Richard Whiteley did something nebulous but awesome in the “Fuel Crisis of ’89” which has made him a universally-loved national hero and there are statues in his honour. Margaret Thatcher died in 1978. The death penalty is not only still in place but fast-tracked without appeal to avoid causing prolonged suffering to the perpetrator. Edward VIII didn’t abdicate and was replaced by Richard IV and then John II, who leaves his wife and comes out as gay, marrying his lover Adrian. He is of course played by Julian Clary. Janis Joplin is still alive. There’s no Marks & Spencers but instead there’s a Marks, Bruce & Willis. There’s a Channel 6. Radio 4 is called Radio 1 and there’s also a Radio 4 Live. The Today programme doesn’t exist. Nicholas Parsons presents a radio panel game called ‘The Transport Quiz’, which seems to be a reference to Mornington Crescent and ‘Just A Minute’. Kingsley and then Martin Amis read the Shipping Forecast. The Titanic wasn’t hit by an iceberg but was torpedoed in 1940. There are numerous other examples, all mainly for the sake of humour. They don’t particularly feel like they go that deep but they are fun.
I’m stuck with my usual quandary here of not knowing how well-known this is. I first came across it when its final episode was broadcast some time in the ‘noughties, and remarkably, if you know the ending, I seem to remember being in the bath at the time. This makes me wonder about false memories. I didn’t catch up with the whole series until about 2007.
Most of all, I wonder about the model of the Multiverse being used in the series. The real answer is “whatever makes the listeners laugh” of course, but those two terms, “inverted gravimetric” and “temporal neomorphic” have a real ring to them. Swapping the first words of each gets you “temporal gravimetric” and “inverted neomorphic”. The former is a real phrase, often used to refer to the measurement of subterranean water and its fluctuation. Temporal gravimetry is the measure of mass changes through time, so it is an actual thing but nothing to do with parallel universes. Inverted gravimetry is no closer. Neomorphism is to do with metamorphic change in rocks and is also a variety of gene mutation where a newly formed gene becomes manifest immediately rather than being masked or inactive.
These parallel universes are more like the “mirror Universe” of ‘Star Trek’ than the bog-standard “choose a pivotal point in history and change it” approach of alternate timelines. Like the Mirror Universe, the same people tend to exist in various universes, so they can’t be based on events which prevent people from existing or cause people to come into existence. They’re interdependent. Ultimately this becomes apparent in other ways, and it raises the question of whether the only kind of parallel universe is one which deviates in connection with events occurring within it. David Lewis’s idea of modal realism is easily confused with the idea of alternate timelines and quantum-related universe variations, but could in fact be an entirely different beast. We talk as if things could be other than they are. We say “if I were you, I wouldn’t do that” for example, but in fact that isn’t true because someone cannot be someone else and they just would act in that way. There is also the issue of paradoxes of material implication. Material implication is usually understood to mean “if P then Q”, but in fact it means “not both P and not-Q”, which lacks the kind of “direction” implication normally implies, and it means that there are peculiar situations where, to quote Wikipedia, it would be true to say that if the Nazis had won the Second World War, everyone would be happy, because if something is false, it being true can imply everything, and if sonething is true, anything can imply it. The idea behind material implication is to make it impossible to move from true premises to false conclusions, meaning that truth implying falsehood is always false.
But a different history may not be the only way in which a world can be different. An alternate universe might be just one which is located elsewhere but exists in the same way as this one does, with nothing else in common except what must be so for it to exist meaningfully as a universe. This could mean being observed in some way, or at least having its existence deducible from something observable. Maybe this kind of multiverse is like a cluster of mushrooms whose stalks sprout from their Big Bangs and become mature as caps, but multidimensionally.
Robin describes the multiverse as like a loo roll. Each universe is a single sheet of paper, separated from its neighbours but also coiled up tightly, so that you could enter another universe on either side by travelling a long way and finding a portal, which is the paper between the perforations limiting the sheets, or, much more easily, you could move towards and away from the centre and enter a neighbour much more easily, since the other universes in those directions are but a whisker away, as thin as a single sheet of toilet paper or even less. Just as accidents can occur where you accidentally poke your finger through the paper, or the roll gets wet and water wets adjacent sheets and their contents might bleed through (assume it’s monogrammed toilet paper) like ink soaking through successive sheets, so can there be bleeding through or accidental penetrations into other universes, but because they’re “rolled up”, it’s easier to enter a universe five universes away or a different number, than it is to enter any of the neighbours in other directions. Isaac Asimov explored this idea in his ‘Cosmic Corkscrew’, a completely lost and unpublished story written in 1931 where a man discovers it’s possible to move forward or backward in time by a set interval because time is like the coils of a slinky, and on travelling forward a single loop of the coil, say a week, he finds the world has ended, and is unable to convince anyone on returning to his present and ends up in a mental hospital. There is of course absolutely no scientific evidence for this but it isn’t ruled out. There’s just no reason for supposing it to be the case. It does work quite well as a model though – it’s coherent. It’s easy to imagine each universe consisting of time and space, and then there being extra dimensions which link them together in different ways, so there are not only portals to adjacent universes separated by gigaparsecs but also extra dimensions in which other universes it would otherwise take countless æons to reach are only a hairsbreadth away, if only we could find our multidimensional equivalent of an inconvenient finger poke or splash of water.
Maybe. But what does “maybe” mean here? Using possible world semantics, “maybe” means “true in some possible worlds”. In other words it’s a bold statement that there are universes where this has been done, that there are bridges between universes which have either arisen spontaneously, through accidents or have been made on purpose. It can become very difficult to talk clearly about parallel universes because language like “possibly”, “probably”, “perhaps” and so forth then become references to places where this is actually so. “Probably” means “true in most possible worlds” for example, but if there are an infinite number of them, how can the majority of worlds contain such a situation? The ones in which the state of affairs doesn’t hold could also be infinite, so how is that a majority?
There are two very implausible things which never seem to get ruled out in spite of the difficulty in accepting how they are reasonable things to expect. One of them is travel backwards in time, and the other is parallel universes. In spite of the “cat among the pigeons” effect them being true would have on science, it remains unfeasible to rule either of them out.
That’s all.
A Box Of Chocolates 