INT. – STARSHIP BISTROMATH – COMPUTATIONAL AREA
(FX: Ship’s steady hum throughout.)
FX: Italian restaurant FX – gentle mandolin and accordion muzak. Robot waiters trundle about. Clinking of cutlery and glasses.
SLARTIBARTFAST: The central computational area.
ARTHUR: Good grief. Are these all robots?
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes. And this is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed.
FORD PREFECT: (Moving on) Of course. And it had to look like—
SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes, I know what it looks like, but it is in fact a complex four-dimensional topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions.
ARTHUR: It looks like a joke.
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Moving off) I told you, I know what it looks like.
ARTHUR: (Quietly, worried) Ford, the Universe cannot possibly work like this, it’s absurd . . .
FORD PREFECT: But most of the really absurd things you can think of have already happened.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: (Trundles up) Would you care to take a seat, Signori?
ARTHUR: Yes, please—
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, thank you!
ARTHUR: But I’m hungry.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: (Trundling off) Not a problem, sir. I come back later.
SLARTIBARTFAST: The food is artificial, and so are the customers.
FORD PREFECT: Don’t these robots ever clear away? Look, here’s a half-eaten meal, dirty glasses . . .
SLARTIBARTFAST: Don’t touch that breadstick! Everything is set at a precisely calculated mathematical position.
ROBOT WINE WAITER: (Wheeling up) Would you care to see the wine list?
FORD PREFECT: Ooh, yes, please—
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, thank you!
ROBOT WINE WAITER: (Trundling off) Oh, be like that, then.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Don’t order anything, the knock-on effect could be catastrophic.
ARTHUR: To your stomach alone.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Wait here, please. Before we go to the Room of Informational Illusions I need to make a course correction. (Moving off)
INT. – STARSHIP BISTROMATH – COMPUTATIONAL AREA, RESTAURANT SECTION
FX: Restaurant FX continues.
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Moving on) Ah, Sergio.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: Signor Slartibartfast, your usual table?
SLARTIBARTFAST: No, I think I’ll sit with the party over there.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: But they are about to pay their bill.
SLARTIBARTFAST: Perfect timing.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: (Moving off) As Signor wishes . . .
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Off) Erm, waiter!
ROBOT WAITER: (Off) Signore?
INT. – STARSHIP BISTROMATH – COMPUTATIONAL AREA, OUTER SECTION
FX: Restaurant FX fainter, but robot business shadowing Arthur’s and Ford’s observations.
ARTHUR: What on Earth is he doing?
FORD PREFECT: I don’t know, but look, there’s a pattern. It’s like a sort of dance between the waiters and the customers. All the manipulation of menus, bill pads, wallets, credit cards and paper napkins.
ARTHUR: Oh, yes . . . Good grief, is that a gun?!
FORD PREFECT: (Dear oh dear . . .) Pepper mill.
ARTHUR: Oh.
FORD PREFECT: Ooh look. Now the customer robots are attempting to examine each other’s pieces of chicken. It all means something.
FX: Mandolin music is distorted and there is a deep rumbling. Ship’s steady hum rises by a semitone.
ARTHUR: Oh, you’re right – feel that vibration through the deck?
FX: Push sub-woofer channel a bit.
ROBOT MAITRE D’: (Off) Ah. Leaving so soon, Signore?
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Off) Thank you, Sergio, a most satisfactory meal.
FORD PREFECT: Whatever he just did, the ship has responded.
FX: The ship’s tone, and the music, rise another semitone.
ARTHUR: But what sort of calculation requires the replication of an Italian restaurant?
SLARTIBARTFAST: (Moving on) Bistromathics. The most powerful computational force known to parascience.
INT. – THE BOOK AMBIENCE
THE VOICE: The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors.
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, so it’s now realized that numbers are not absolute but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.
The first non-absolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary and bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the subset of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
The second non-absolute number is the given time of arrival, which is the one moment of time at which it’s impossible that any member of the party will arrive.
The third and most mysterious piece of non-absoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for.
And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this: numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and the science of maths was put back by years.
And being put back years is precisely how a technologically unsurpassed android feels when trying to converse with a mattress.
EXT. – SQUORNSHELLOUS ZETA, THE MATTRESS PLANET – SWAMP
FX: Marvin is still trudging round in a circle in the swamp. In the distance, wild mattresses are willoming . . .
ZEM THE MATTRESS: I sense a deep dejection in your diodes, robot. It saddens me and I globber. (He does so) Globber.
MARVIN: Don’t you think it’s discouraging enough you being born a mattress without having to globber like that?
ZEM THE MATTRESS: That is what we mattresses do. Unless we’re flolloping. Some of us flurble. Others are taken away to be slept on. But as all of us are called Zem, we never know which.
FX: Marvin sighs and continues to walk in circles.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Why are you walking in circles?
MARVIN: Because my leg is stuck.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Hmmm. It seems to me that it is a pretty poor sort of leg.
MARVIN: I expect that you find the idea of a robot with an artificial leg pretty amusing. You should tell your friends Zem and Zem when you see them later; they’ll laugh, if I know them, which I don’t, of course – except insofar as I know all organic life forms, which is much better than I would wish to. Ha, my life is but a box of wormgears.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: But why do you just keep walking round and round in circles?
MARVIN: Ask me if I ever get bored.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Ahhh . . . Do you?
MARVIN: I gave a speech once. You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast. Do you know I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you? Think of a number, any number.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Erm . . . five.
MARVIN: Wrong.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Ooh.
MARVIN: You see?
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Tell me of the speech you once made, go on.
MARVIN: I delivered it over there, about a mile distance. I would point, but this arm has been welded to my side. I was somewhat of a celebrity at the time, on account of my miraculous and bitter
ly resented escape from a fate almost as good as death in the heart of a blazing sun. You can guess from my condition how narrow my escape was. I was rescued by a scrap-metal merchant, imagine that. Here I am, brain the size of a . . . oh, never mind. He it was who fixed me up with this leg. Hateful, isn’t it? He sold me to a Mind Zoo. I was the star exhibit. I had to sit on a box and tell my story whilst people told me to cheer up and think positive.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: The speech. Flurble. I long to hear of the speech you gave in the marshes.
MARVIN: (Oh well, might as well tell the story, not that this mattress will be able to understand a word, but then that’s mattresses for you) There was a bridge built across the marshes. A cyberstructured hyperbridge, hundreds of miles in length, to carry ion-buggies and freighters over the swamp. It was going to revitalize the economy of the Squornshellous System. They spent the entire economy in building it. They asked me to open it, poor fools. I stood on the platform. For hundreds of miles in front of me, and hundreds of miles behind me, the bridge stretched.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Did it glitter?
MARVIN: It glittered.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Did it span the miles majestically?
MARVIN: It spanned the miles majestically.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Did it stretch . . . like a silver thread far out into the invisible mist?
MARVIN: Yes. Do you want to hear this story?
ZEM THE MATTRESS: No, flurble, I want to hear your speech.
MARVIN: This is what I said. I said, ‘I would like to say that this is a very great pleasure, honour and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can’t because all my lying circuits are out of commission. And to make matters worse, which I never have to anyway, I hate and despise you all and declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the unthinkable abuse of all who wantonly cross her.’ Then I plugged myself into the opening circuits. The entire thousand-mile-long bridge spontaneously folded up its glittering spans and sank weeping into the mire, taking everybody with it.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Voon. You were not bored that day!
MARVIN: Contrary to all recent experience, no.
FX: The Krikkit ship appears overhead with a noise like a hundred thousand people saying ‘wop’.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: Does this great ship suddenly hanging in the sky bore you?
MARVIN: It depends on what those white robots flying down from it have in mind.
Nothing pleasant, I expect.
FX: The Krikkit robots zoom down on rocket pads, landing around Marvin.
ROBOT: Up stumps.
FX: The sound of Marvin’s artificial leg being twisted.
MARVIN: (Being rattled about as they remove his leg) I suppose it takes all eleven of you to remove an artificial leg.
FX: The leg comes off with a dank!
MARVIN: . . . Of course.
ROBOT: Leg before wicket.
FX: Krikkit robots zoom away.
MARVIN: You see the sort of thing I have to contend with?
ZEM THE MATTRESS: I think—
FX: Krikkit robots zoom down again.
ROBOT: Change of batting order.
FX: Marvin grabbed.
FX: Krikkit robots zoom away again.
MARVIN: (As he is carried away) Typical.
FX: The Krikkit ship disappears with a noise like a hundred thousand people saying ‘foop’.
ZEM THE MATTRESS: (A bit lost and sad without his friend) Hallo . . . ? Globber. Globber.
INT. – THE BOOK AMBIENCE
THE VOICE: What arbitrary stroke has removed Marvin from his mattress swamp? What kind of artificial leg would appeal to eleven homicidal white robots in cricket pads? And how can Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect live through the most terrible war ever to ravage the Universe? Only the next instalment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can tear away the veil of ignorance . . .
ANNOUNCER: Vogon Building & Loan advise that your planet is at risk if you do not keep up repayments on any mortgage secured upon it. Please remember that the force of gravity can go up as well as down.
FOOTNOTES
Time-travel sequence When we first met to discuss this series in detail, the fifth Hitchhiker novel had just come out in hardback and Douglas seemed to feel a few post-natal pangs about it. He hinted that he might one day attempt, given the inspiration, some further evolution of Hitchhiker’s to counteract its downbeat ending, but for now he was feeling a bit bruised by it all.
Second-guessing Douglas was never my intention but on a preliminary re-reading I was reminded that these last three novels can seem more introspective and less joyful than their antecedents, finishing with Douglas’s daring conclusion to Mostly Harmless, surely one of the biggest surprise rug-pulls inflicted on the loyal reader in all of popular literature. My chief worry was that these dramatized versions were scheduled to be broadcast in half-hour comedy slots on BBC Radio 4. Now Douglas’s novels certainly merit their legendary status, but while he was always brilliant, original and entertaining, certain sections of the books were not written for comic effect whereas the radio versions would have to maintain a consistent vein of humour with some definite gag moments. So this could be a bit of a problem. Particularly the conclusion. But more of that later.
In the process of adaptation one must strip the story down into its component parts, and in doing so I was hugely relieved to find that not only were there many more opportunities to point up Douglas’s sense of humour than I had first thought, but also that there was a pattern to events in all the Hitchhiker iterations which by logical extension could lead to some kind of closure to the saga itself. It could even include – and explain – events in series two.
However, in achieving this I had to reinforce the key idea that events in the original Hitchhiker series (and novels) were part of a much bigger reality – in fact, of several Realities in the Universe As Envisioned By Douglas (UAEBD). By the time we entered the Quintessential Phase with its Guide Mark II and the notion of reverse temporal engineering, events had, were and would be taking place which could tie up the entire saga. Thus as we revisit Arthur and Ford’s original lines of dialogue about the Guide (re-recorded by Simon and Geoff, reading directly from this book’s illustrious forebear), underneath we hear the various Vogon demolition fleets cutting a destructive swathe through many other innocent planets in the Galaxy. Earth is not the sole victim of Vogon bureaucracy; there’s something more ambitious going on here and Arthur is just one of its victims.
Rising hysteria, Simon’s stockin-in-trade This was Douglas’s character note, along with ‘No Radio 2 sound effects here!’ in his original half-hour Episode One draft. This not only shows his keen if somewhat unkind ability to poke fun at both Simon’s funniest moments as Arthur Dent and my BBC heritage, but that he was instinctively hearing the programme in his mind’s ear while writing it, which is of course the only way to write great radio. (My disclaimer was added because I did not want to be seen to take other people’s liberties – especially Douglas’s!)
I should add that this rant at Ford by Arthur is another bit of original Adams, unique (I believe) to this version of the saga.
Henry Blofeld and Fred Trueman For those unfamiliar with the game of cricket and its celebrities, Henry is among the last of the old-school BBC cricket commentators (as was Brian Johnston, who was originally to take this role but sadly departed for other realities), and Fred Trueman is one of the true legends of the game. They were charming, polite, patient and unreservedly prepared to make themselves sound splendidly silly for Hitchhiker’s. No director could ask for more.
The Krikkit robots Cricket is a game widely played in the British Commonwealth and it seemed right to look for some kind of cricket-oriented Commonwealth-voice treatment for the robots. Adding a metallic rasp to Dominic Hawksley’s terrific performance was straightforward enough, but the edgy South African accents really seasoned the pudding.
EPISODE THREE
SIGNATURE TUNE
ANNOUNCER: The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, Tertiary Phase.
INT. – THE BOOK AMBIENCE
THE VOICE: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy claims that the Campaign for Real Time was inspired not only by an instinct to preserve the traditions of linear chronology but because there was once a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as being the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.
Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa, and he wrote his poems on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education. Or correcting fluid.
Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose existence might otherwise have been darker and drier.
Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correctingfluid manufacturers from the Mancunia Nebula were chatting at a sixthdimensional sales conference.
FX: Sales conference hubbub.
MANUFACTURER 1: (Northern mill-owner) ’Ere, I may not know much about poetry, but I know what I like. (Beat) I say, I may not know much about—
MANUFACTURER 2: Aye, we ’eard the first time.
MANUFACTURER 1: Oh, yeah. Well. I were just thinkin’ about that – that Lallafa. You know, poetry bloke. (Beat)
MANUFACTURER 3: What ’e could’ve done with is some ’igh-quality correcting fluid. In a variety of leafy shades.
MANUFACTURER 1: Exactly what I were thinking! And I’m, er, ahem, wondering if we could persuade ’im, like, to say a few words to that effect, eh?
MANUFACTURER 2: (Shrewd) Could open up the Andromeda market.
(General Northern mutterings of assent)
THE VOICE: So they travelled the time waves, found him and did indeed persuade him.
(Sounds of a beating) In fact they persuaded him to such an effect that he became extremely rich, and frequently commuted to the future to do chat shows, on which he sparkled wittily.
FX: Cheesy chat-show intro jingle and applause.
THE VOICE: (cont’d) Thus he never got around to writing the poems. This was a problem, but one easily solved. Each week, the correcting-fluid manufacturers simply packed him off somewhere different.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Further Radio Scripts Page 7