AS I file this column, I am looking forward with immense eagerness to a radio programme.

In fact, I don't think anyone has anticipated a BBC broadcast so keenly since people tuned in one September to see what Neville Chamberlain had to say for himself.

You see, last night saw the return, after almost 25 years, of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Despite the death of its creator, Douglas Adams, and of Peter Jones, whose voice was such a vital part of the original, the BBC has pressed ahead with an adaptation of Adams's last three Hitch-Hiker books.

Why all the fuss about an attempt to revive an old radio programme? Well, because for people of a certain age, it's much more than that. Hitch-Hiker was one of those comedy events that inspires people at an impressionable age and probably even influence their personality a bit.

I believe that if you're lucky enough to come across some really great, ground-breaking comedy during your adolescence, it will be every bit as important to you as will a big breakthrough in popular music.

I'm talking about the kind of comedy that represents something radically new, either in its form or in the subject it takes on.

For many people, The Goon Show is that kind of comedy, with its downright surreal detours into fantasy.

For others, it is the satire boom of the 1960s - Beyond the Fringe and Not Only But Also, joking about the kind of things you weren't previously supposed to poke fun at, and showing that comedy could be unashamedly clever.

Then came Monty Python, which was probably the first comedy phenomenon whose fans related to it in the same way people to do rock music. People who saw it in their formative years would repeat every word among fellow fans at school, and still do so years later. That's why a lot of workplaces have a devoted contingent of Holy Grail fans who repeat "We are the knights who say 'Ni'" a lot.

In my adolescence, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Python was a few years old, and we'd grown up with it rather than had it come at us out of a clear blue sky. The Python team was still arousing controversy with The Life of Brian, but it was years before I saw that one, by which time I found it actually rather inoffensive and mild.

In the meantime, people of my age were struck by two great comedies. The first was Not the Nine O'Clock News. I think people forget how great that show was, but I still recall practically every word of the Ayatollah Song, the Constable Savage sketch and the skit in which a separated couple solemnly recite their divorce vows.

And, at around the same time, came Hitch-Hiker's - a series which consisted of hundreds of first-rate comic ideas crammed into each episode. When Earth was destroyed in the part one, you knew the programme was not going to be like anything you'd heard before.

I may practically know it word for word, but I still seem to make discoveries every time I hear it. For example, now I'm in the working world, I laugh all the more at the episode in which prehistoric people hold off on discovering fire until they've done market research on what image people have of it.

So, as the new Hitch-Hiker adaptations go out, I'll be on tenterhooks. Will it be like seeing a pop group who have aged a bit but still have all the talent that made them famous? Or will it be like watching a once-great band whose singer has wrecked his voice and who looks as though he's recently swallowed an entire cow?