Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990)

Doctor Who’s Tom Baker Plays Douglas Adams’ Digital “Agent” in the AI-Predicting Hyperland (1990) Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open Culture an amusing retro-technological diversion called Hyperland. First broadcast on BBC2, the program stars The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams as himself and Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as his agent. “You want fifteen percent?” the former asks the latter when they first meet in a vast wasteland of flickering television sets. Not at all: “I’m here to do your every slightest bidding,” Baker explains, “to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial.” Today, we can hardly share in Adams’ bewilderm

Added 21 Oct 2026