The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams

Author:Douglas Adams [Adams, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447204886
Publisher: Tor

FOOTNOTES

This final programme in the first series was recorded on 28 February 1978.

The pressures of the final deadline were evident from the fact that we no longer had time for even the smallest large meal, and were forced to discuss the ideas for the show over a hurried pint in a pub round the corner from the BBC. (Where incidentally some years before Dylan Thomas was reputed to have accidentally left the manuscript of Under Milk Wood while under the influence of one too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. It’s a pity we didn’t find it, since we could have used some of the ideas.)

Comic actor David Jason was cast as the Captain of the B Ark because at the time he was regularly protraying Dr David Owen (then Foreign Secretary and now leader of the SDP) on the satirical show Week Ending, where Dr Owen was constantly in a bath (for reasons that have become clouded, but not necessarily more amusing, in the mists of time).

Jonathan Cecil played his Number One, while Aubrey Woods was his Number Two and the Hairdresser. Beth Porter was cast as the Marketing Girl, after seeing her in the television show Rock Follies (and the same show also featured Simon Jones and provided the spur for casting Stephen Moore as Marvin since in it Stephen Moore played the almost terminally depressed boyfriend of one of the lead characters).

The various ghastly roars of the Haggunenon were made by recording someone shouting and then simply slowing their voice down and adding the traditional pinch of echo. The effects directions on page 124 are clearly nonsense. It shows a typical perversity that with an incredibly tight script deadline large amounts of time still went into writing things that had nothing to do with what would actually be heard on the radio!

The line ‘Pas de problème’ was ad libbed by Mark during the recording and when questioned about it came up with a rather quaint little theory about Zaphod’s second head speaking French. This idea was never subsequently developed, but here it is anyway in case anyone else would like to develop it (and risk the harsh and savage retribution from Douglas’ lawyer that would inevitably follow).

The line ‘A chance? As far as I can see you might as well lower haystacks off the boatdeck of the Lusitania’ was probably thought by all of us to be terribly clever at the time but Douglas no longer has the faintest idea what it means.

The B Ark scene in fact pre-dated everything in Hitch-Hiker’s, having originally been written for a Ringo Starr show some years before which never got made. The comic possibilities of telephone sanitizers had also been touched on before by Douglas in a sketch called The Telephone Sanitizers of Navarone’ in which a group of heroic telephone sanitizers heroically stormed the castle simply in order to clean their phones.

Interestingly we received several letters from telephone sanitizers saying they resented being singled out for attack but congratulating us for having a go at those dreadful management consultants.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.