The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Scripts

by Douglas Adams

  SLARTI: No no, for heaven’s sake, the Galaxy isn’t nearly rich enough to support us yet . . . no, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission, it may interest you . . . there in the distance in front of us.

  ARTHUR: (Chilled) Oh no . . .

  SLARTI: You see?

  ARTHUR: The Earth!

  SLARTI: Well the Earth Mark 2 in fact. It seems that the first one was demolished five minutes too early and the most vital experiment was destroyed. There’s been a terrible hooha and so we’re going to make a copy from our original blueprints.

  ARTHUR: You . . . are you saying that you originally made the Earth?

  SLARTI: Oh yes . . . did you ever go to a place . . . I think it’s called Norway?

  ARTHUR: What? No, no I didn’t

  SLARTI: Pity . . . that was one of mine. Won an award you know, lovely crinkly edges.

  ARTHUR: I can’t take this – did I hear you say the Earth was destroyed . . . five minutes too early?

  SLARTI: Shocking cock up, the mice were furious.

  ARTHUR: (In a dead way) Mice.

  SLARTI: Yes, the whole thing was their experiment you see. A ten million year research programme to find the Ultimate Question – big job you know.

  ARTHUR: Look, would it save you all this bother if I just gave up and went mad now?

  GRAMS: SIG. TUNE

  NARRATOR: Has Slartibartfast flipped his lid? Are Ford, Zaphod and Trillian dying in fearful agony, or have they simply slipped out for a quick meal somewhere? Will Arthur Dent feel better with a good hot drink inside him? Find out in next week’s exciting instalment of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  ARTHUR: I’m sorry but I’d probably be able to cope better if I hadn’t bruised my arm.

  ANNOUNCER: Zaphod Beeblebrox is now appearing in ‘No Sex Please, We’re Amoeboid Zingat-Ularians’ at the Brantersvogon Starhouse.

  FOOTNOTES

  This show was recorded on 13 December 1977. The only addition to the cast was the splendid Richard Vernon who played Slartibartfast. Douglas adds the following note on how his name came about.

  Slartibartfast

  I thought that this character should be a dignified, elderly man, weighed down with the burden of a secret sorrow. I wondered what this sorrow should be, and thought perhaps he might be sad about his name. So I decided to give him a name that anybody would be sad to have. I wanted it to sound as gross as it possibly could, while still being broadcastable. So I started with something that was clearly completely unbroadcastable, which was PHARTIPHUKBORLZ, and simply played around with the syllables until I arrived at something which sounded that rude, but was almost, but not quite, entirely inoffensive. (DNA)

  The dramatic missile attack and all the noisy evasion manoeuvres caused us problems because, as always, the effects were put on after the actors’ recording and a lot of complicated jiggling around with their lines was needed in order not to drown them out. The lesson learnt from this was that in future when we recorded any scene that was to have loud effects over it we would force the actors to project by feeding a variety of loud noises down their headphones. All this probably added to the extreme mental uncertainty they had already from the lines they had to deliver.

  Douglas adds the following note on the origins of the whale.

  The Whale

  Ah yes, the whale. Well, this came about as a result of watching an episode of a dangerously insane TV detective show called Cannon in which people got shot the whole time for incredibly little reason. They would just happen to be walking across the street, and they would simply get killed, regardless of what their own plans for the rest of the day might have been.

  I began to find the sheer arbitrariness of this rather upsetting, not just because characters were getting killed, but because nobody ever seemed to care about it one way or another. Anybody who might have cared about any of these people – family, friends, even the postman – was kept firmly offstage. There was never any ‘Good night sweet Prince’ or ‘She should have died hereafter’ or even ‘Look you bastard, I was meant to be playing squash with this guy tonight’ just bang, clear them out of the way, on to the next. They were merely, excuse me, Cannonfodder.

  I thought I’d have a go at this. I’d write in a character whose sole function was to be killed for the sake of a small detail in the plot, and then damn well make the audience care about it, even if none of the other characters in the story did. I suppose I must have succeeded because I received quite a number of letters saying how cruel and callous this section was – letters I certainly would not have received if I had simply mentioned the whale’s fate incidentally and passed on. I probably wouldn’t have received them if it had been a human either. [DNA]

  The splat of the whale hitting the ground was partially made up from the batter pudding splat from the Goon show, a fact that might interest people who have seen similarities between the two shows.

  To publicize the stage show of Hitch-Hikers a twenty five foot whale was thrown off Tower Bridge. Unlike the stage show it floated.

  As a final note on the whale those people interested in sinister conspiracy theories might find some significance in the fact that the whale speech twice disappeared from the multi-track tape for no reason that we could fathom, and had to be re-recorded. Those people of a more technical frame of mind might be more inclined to think that we didn’t really know how our equipment worked.

  Originally the mice were gerbils, but this was changed because gerbils sounded altogether too interesting.

  Music Details

  Kotakomben from the LP Einsteig by Gruppe Between

  (Used in the opening Magrathea speech)

  Space Theme from Yamashta by Stomu Yamashta

  (Used in the story-so-far speech)

  Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre

  (Used several times as calming music during the missile attack).

  That’s Entertainment

  (Used as the light dribble of film music)

  Wind on Water from Evening Star by Fripp and Eno.

  (Used in the biro speech, which incidentally was originally written for show four but cut back into this show)

  Over Fire Island by Fripp and Eno Another Green World

  (Used in the dolphins speech)

  FIT THE FOURTH

  It has been revealed to Arthur that the Earth has been built by the Magratheans and run by mice. Meanwhile his companions have been suddenly confronted by something nasty (probably certain death).

  GRAMS: SIG ‘JOURNEY OF THE SORCERER’

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: Arthur Dent, a perfectly ordinary Earthman, was rather surprised when his friend Ford Prefect suddenly revealed himself to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and not from Guildford after all. He was even more surprised when a few minutes later the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace by pass. But this was as nothing to their joint surprise when they are rescued from certain death by a stolen spaceship manned by Ford’s semi-cousin the infamous Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Trillian, a rather nice astro-physicist Arthur once met at a party in Islington. However, all four of them are soon totally overwhelmed with surprise when they discover that the ancient world of Magrathea, a planet famed in legend for its surprising trade in manufacturing other planets is not as dead as it was supposed to be. For Zaphod, Ford and Trillian surprise is pushed to its very limits when this happens:

  F/X: ELECTRONIC ZAP AND CRIES FROM EPISODE THREE

  NARRATOR: And when Arthur Dent encounters Slartibartfast the Magrathean coastline designer who won an award for his work on Norway and learns that the whole history of mankind was run for the benefit of a few white mice anyway, surprise is no longer adequate and he is forced to resort to astonishment.

  ARTHUR: Mice? What do you mean mice? I think we must be talking at cross purposes. Mice to me mean the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing screaming on tables in ea
rly sixties sitcoms.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Earthman, it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sitcoms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusions into our dimension of vast hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, the whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.

  ARTHUR: A front?

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Oh yes, you see the mice set up the whole Earth business as an epic experiment in behavioural psychology . . . a ten million year programme . . .

  ARTHUR: No, look, you’ve got it the wrong way round. It was us, we used to do the experiments on them.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: . . . a ten million year old programme in which your planet Earth and its people formed the matrix of an organic computer. I gather that the mice did arrange for you humans to conduct some primitively staged experiments on them just to check how much you’d really learnt, give you the odd prod in the right direction, you know the sort of thing – suddenly running down the maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese or unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis.

  P.A. VOICE: (Paging) Attention please, Slartibartfast, would Slartibartfast and the visiting Earth creature please report immediately to the works reception area. Thank you.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: However, in the field of management relations they’re absolutely shocking.

  ARTHUR: Really?

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes, well you see every time they give me an order I just want to jump on a table and scream.

  ARTHUR: I can see that would be a problem.

  (Fade)

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are ‘Why are people born?’, ‘Why do they die?’, and ‘Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?’ Many millions of years ago a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings got so fed up with all the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra-Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and running away) that they decided to sit down and solve the problem once and for all. And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from first principles with ‘I think therefore I am’ and had got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.

  Could a mere computer solve the problem of Life, the Universe and Everything? Fortunately for posterity there exists a tape recording of what transpired when the computer was given this particularly monumental task. Arthur Dent stops off in Slartibartfast’s study to hear it.

  F/X: A COUPLE OF MECHANICAL TAPE SWITCHING NOISES AND A COUPLE OF BLIPS

  DEEP THOUGHT: (Very majestic and grand computer voice.) What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been called into existence?

  (Hubbub of concerned voices saying ‘Second greatest?’)

  ONE: Your task, O Computer . . .

  TWO: No, wait a minute, this isn’t right. Deep Thought?

  DEEP THOUGHT: Speak and I will hear.

  TWO: Are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest, most powerful computer in all creation?

  DEEP THOUGHT: I described myself as the second greatest, and such I am.

  TWO: But this is preposterous! Are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargantuabrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?

  DEEP THOUGHT: The Milliard Gargantuabrain? A mere abacus, mention it not.

  ONE: And are you not a greater analyst than the Googleplex Starthinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five week Aldebaran sand blizzard?

  DEEP THOUGHT: A five week sand blizzard? You ask this of me who has contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.

  ONE: And are you not a more fiendish disputant than the Great Hyperlobic (sic) Omnicognate Neutron Wrangler, which can . . .

  DEEP THOUGHT: The Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron Wrangler can talk four legs off an Arcturan Megadonkey but only I can persuade it to go for a walk afterwards.

  TWO: Then what’s the problem?

  DEEP THOUGHT: I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me.

  ONE: Oh, come on. I think this is getting needlessly messianic.

  DEEP THOUGHT: You know nothing of future time, and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my destiny eventually to design.

  THREE: Can we get on and ask the question?

  DEEP THOUGHT: Speak.

  ONE: O Deep Thought Computer, the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us . . . the answer.

  DEEP THOUGHT: The Answer? The answer to what?

  TWO: Life.

  ONE: The Universe.

  TWO: Everything.

  DEEP THOUGHT: Tricky.

  TWO: But can you do it?

  (Pause)

  DEEP THOUGHT: Yes. I can do it.

  ONE: There is an answer? A simple answer?

  DEEP THOUGHT: Yes. Life, the Universe and Everything. There is an answer. But I’ll have to think about it.

  F/X: NOISE OF SCUFFLE AT DOORWAY

  ONE: What’s happening?

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand admission!

  MAJIKTHISE: Come on, you can’t keep us out!

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand that you can’t keep us out!

  ONE: Who are you? What do you want? We’re busy.

  MAJIKTHISE: I am Majikthise.

  VROOMFONDEL: And I demand that I am Vroomfondel.

  MAJIKTHISE: It’s all right, you don’t need to demand that.

  VROOMFONDEL: All right, I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!

  MAJIKTHISE: (aside) No we don’t. That is precisely what we don’t demand.

  VROOMFONDEL: We don’t demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts! I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel.

  TWO: Who are you, anyway?

  MAJIKTHISE: We are philosophers.

  VROOMFONDEL: Though we may not be.

  MAJIKTHISE: Yes we are.

  VROOMFONDEL: Oh, sorry. We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!

  TWO: What is all this?

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand that you get rid of it!

  ONE: What’s the problem.

  MAJIKTHISE: I’ll tell you what the problem is, mate. Demarcation, that’s the problem.

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand that demarcation may or may not be the problem.

  MAJIKTHISE: You just let the machines get on with the adding up and we’ll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. By law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job aren’t we? I mean what’s the use of our sitting up all night saying there may . . .

  VROOMFONDEL: Or may not be . . .

  MAJIKTHISE: . . . or may not be, a God if this machine comes along next morning and gives you his telephone number?

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

  DEEP THOUGHT: Might I make an observation at this point?

  MAJIKTHISE: You keep out o
f this, metalnose.

  VROOMFONDEL: We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem!

  DEEP THOUGHT: If I might make an observation . . .

  VROOMFONDEL: We’ll go on strike!

  MAJIKTHISE: That’s right, you’ll have a national Philosophers’ Strike on your hands.

  DEEP THOUGHT: Who will that inconvenience?

  VROOMFONDEL: Never mind who it will inconvenience you box of blacklegging binary bits. It’ll hurt, buster, it’ll hurt!

  DEEP THOUGHT: (Considerably more loudly) If I might make an observation! All I wanted to say is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to computing the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (Loud objections from Vroomfondel and Majikthise), but the programme will take me seven and a half million years to run . . .

  TWO: Seven and a half million years?

  DEEP THOUGHT: Yes, I said I’d have to think about it didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound to cause sensational public interest and so any philosophers who are quick off the mark are going to clean up in the prediction business.

  MAJIKTHISE: Prediction business?

  DEEP THOUGHT: Obviously you just get on the pundit circuit. You all go on the chat shows and the colour supplements and violently disagree with each other about what answer I’m eventually going to produce, and if you get yourselves clever agents you’ll be on the gravy train for life.

  MAJIKTHISE: Bloody hell. Now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?

  VROOMFONDEL: Dunno. Think our minds must be too highly trained, Majikthise.

  F/X: TAPE RECORDER SWITCHED OFF

  ARTHUR: But I don’t understand what all this has got to do with the Earth and mice and things.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: All will become clear to you, Earthman. Are you not anxious to hear what the computer had to say seven and a half million years later?

  ARTHUR: Oh well, yes of course. Quite.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Here is the recording of the events of that fateful day.

  ARCHIVE VOICE: Archive material of Magrathea.

  F/X: TAPE SWITCHING AS BEFORE. CROWD CHEERING – EXTERNAL. BAND PLAYING