The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy Radio Show – Live!, Grand Opera House, York, July 5

AS CHANCE would have it, this interview with actor Simon Jones took place on National Towel Day, a special day whose existence is partly down to him.

It is celebrated every May 25 by followers of The Hithchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, the perennially popular show that is embarking on a tour of one-night stands around the country, with Simon leading the cast in the July 5 performance at the Grand Opera House, York.

Simon will be wearing his trademark dressing gown when bringing back to life Arthur Dent in the latest incarnation of the cult series, this time entitled The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy Radio Show – Live!

“It won’t perhaps be the original gown because it’s a bit hot, although it’s very hard to find anything like it these days,” he says.

The role of Dent was written for him by Hitchhikers’ creator Douglas Adams, whom he met at Cambridge University, and this summer he will be recreating it alongside fellow returnees Geoff McGivern as Ford Prefect; Susan Sheridan as Trillian; Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox; and the voice of Stephen Moore as Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Adams’s comic sci-fi saga spawned five best-selling novels, five award-winning BBC radio series, a television series and a film – not to mention a raft of expressions that have entered the English language. Translated into more than 30 languages, it has been voted the number one audio book and fourth best-loved book in Britain.

Simon is not really coming back to Hitchhikers because, as he says, it never went away. “Every few years we get together the cast for yet another expedition into yet another medium,” he says.

They discovered that a stage version was a good idea in 2009 following the publication of the sixth book in the series, written by Eoin Colfer after Adams’s death in 2001.

A Hitchcon ’09 convention at London’s Royal Festival Hall culminated in an appearance by the cast performing highlights from the first two series. To everyone’s astonishment, recalls Jones, they went down a storm.

“Someone would come on stage and the audience would go mad. It was like we had sung our greatest hits. We thought, ‘There’s something in this and we’ve got to take it to the public’,” he says.

“As a cast we have never had a chance to interact with an audience. Hearing them, we thought ‘this is very gratifying’. This is a natural extension of the original radio series, which was recorded in front of a live audience in the BBC’s Paris Theatre in London.”

The touring Hitchhikers show will feature VIP guests as the Voice Of The Book, John Challis from Only Fools And Horses taking his turn in York. The evening will be more than a radio programme performed on a stage and will be available to download afterwards.

“We don’t want people of a certain age standing in front of a row of microphones. That would not be terribly exciting. So there’ll be live sound effects, a live band and visual effects. It should be pretty comical visually,” says Simon.

As for the pop star-style tour of one-night stands, he says: “I think that’s going to be good for us. We’re going to have great sympathy for Crosby, Stills and not-so-Young.”

Simon seems happy to be Arthur Dent from time to time. “He never really leaves me alone but he’s not someone I trip over all the time. It’s nice to be reminded of him,” he says.

When Simon was approached about playing Dent in the original 1978 radio series, he thought the worst that could happen was that he would be paid £25 by the BBC. “It was Douglas and it was fun and it was clearly a very intelligent and interesting script, but who knew where it was going to go?” he says.

BBC bosses, he surmised, had not much rated its chances as they put out the first shows at 10.30pm, but success was instant, with the original series repeated immediately by public demand, something that had never happened before in the history of light entertainment.

Since Hitchhikers, Simon has divided his working time between here and the United States after marrying the American manager of Monty Python. The double whammy of Hitchhikers and playing Bridey, the Earl of Brideshead in the famed ITV series of Brideshead Revisited, stood him in good stead with American casting directors.

“They kept throwing work at me. Those two series had been very successful which was great for an actor,” he says.

In 2005, he had cameo appearance in the much-delayed film version of Hitchhikers that featured someone else – Martin Freeman – as Arthur Dent. Opinions differ about the merit of the movie, in which Simon played a hologram, but what is his verdict? “It had its moments,” he says tactfully.

“If you had researched the life and work of Douglas Adams, it was full of all sorts of references. I felt a little cheated because they assured me my brief cameo appearance was in 3D. They had two cameras trained on me and in the film I just look fuzzy.”

The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy Radio Show – Live!, Grand Opera House, York, July 5. Box office: 0844-8713025 or online atgtickets.com/york Steve Pratt