Hyperland is a 50-minute-long documentary film about hypertext and surrounding technologies. It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby for BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams had already worked on Doctor Who, as a personification of a software agent.
Tom Baker plays a "software agent," whose appearance can be manipulated by Douglas Adams. Here, Adams has (temporarily) configured Tom to look like a stereotypical Neanderthal.
Adams navigates through the interviews and explanations in the documentary using animated icons. Playback controls shown in the bottom right corner during each interview convey an additional sense of interactivity.
Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG). Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Image: Douglas adams portrait cropped
Image: Douglas Adams Unterschrift (cropped)
Adams in his first Monty Python appearance, in full surgeon's garb
Towel Day 2005 in Innsbruck, Austria, where Adams first had the idea of The Hitchhiker's Guide. In the novels, a towel is the most useful thing a space traveller can have. The annual Towel Day (25 May) was first celebrated in 2001, two weeks after Adams's death.
