Dirk Gently: The case of the missing electric monk We made the deliberate decision not to do a straight translation of the books. If we'd done that the fans would have felt badly let down, because you can never portray that world on the screen as well as it's been done in people's own imaginations," he says. By comparison, the 2005 film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Martin Freeman was roundly despised by Adams-istas. If you just do a straight adaptation like The Hitchhiker's Guide film, people are always going to be quite brutal about it because it's never going to live up to their expectations. Anoraks appeased, the Dirk Gently pilot has led to a three-part series, which begins this week. At one level, Gently is a welcome screen presence because he's unlike any other detective. Sherlock, Morse and Poirot are all very well, but matchless brilliance and its consequent superciliousness can get tiresome. Dirk, at least, is a likeable klutz. "He is part detective, part con man," says Overman, "and you never know if he really knows what he's doing. He can't really prove his methodology works and so he is almost going on the journey with you. You never know whether to quite believe him - he's a total chancer and things inevitably go wrong. You never know if he's doing it for a quest for the truth... or just to get his next pay cheque. The funny thing is that Adams's central character, who in the books feels as much a part of the Eighties as leg warmers, has aged rather well. "When I reread the books," says Overman, "it struck me that even though they were written years and years ago, they felt very contemporary. Gently was ahead of his time. Overman offers Zen Navigation, Gently's method of finding his way around, as an example. Gently describes it as follows in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul: "My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it is going and follow it." In an age where drivers will follow their satnav's commands off cliff edges, that strikes a chord. The books, Overman says, "chime with how we live our lives today. In episode one, we talk about a computer program that could be used to justify anything. That reminds me of what's happening in the world today in terms of wars that are based on spurious arguments. Even Gently's detecting method, a loafer's variant of EM Forster's "only connect," has started to look more prescient as the years have gone by. Adams, famously, was fascinated by technology - he owned one of the first Macintosh computers in Britain and his office was a stash of circuit boards and vintage synths. In 1987, a character who thinks everything is interconnected was a good joke. Yet the way Gently uses his whiteboard to make links now looks like an obvious forerunner of the internet. And how Adams would have laughed, or possibly shuddered, to have seen how the pond circles of some dodgy loans in North America led to the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Dirk Gently would have seen that coming. Dirk Gently starts on BBC Four on Monday at 9.00pm