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The End Of Empire
Want to find out about the British Empire? Why not look on the BBC's website? After all, the corporation is not only charged with educating the masses, its global target market encompasses those fortunate parts of the world which once made up the empire.
If you do, though, you might be in for a surprise.
Go to the BBC's home page and track down the history site, which on our version of the home page is linked at the bottom right corner.
Run a search for British Empire, which should bring you to this results page.
The first result is reasonable enough - a mini site for Radio 4's 90-part series on the history of the British Empire. So the series ended in 2006, but there's a lot of background material still up there.
The second, though, will raise some eyebrows. It's a page in the BBC's h2g2 "collaborative project" based on the sci-fi parody The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy."
Designed to continue the work of the late author Douglas Adams, who created the novel the "unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything" is based on, it includes Wiki-style submissions by BBC viewers.
There's clearly a lot going on on the h2g2 site, as this (intentionally?) desperately confusing Wikipedia entry makes clear.
Naturally, not all the site submissions are as amusing as those entries created by Douglas Adams. The British Empire entry, submitted in 1999, exhibits the sort of humour only a sixth form public schoolboy could find funny.
No doubt Douglas Adams is having the last laugh. One prominent corner of the internet, a source of information as amazing, confusing and downright misleading as the Hitchhiker's Guide he dreamed up, now ranks historical parody created by his admirers alongside exhaustive 90-episode series from Radio 4.
