The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Further Radio Scripts Read online

  ARTHUR: (Moving in, bawling over music) My planet was blown up one morning –

  LAUGHING MAN: (Under) Oh no.

  ARTHUR:– that’s why I’m dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see.

  LAUGHING MAN: (Under) Ooh oh dear . . .

  ARTHUR: I didn’t realize I’d be coming to a party.

  LAUGHING MAN: Wow, right, yeah.

  ARTHUR: Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown.

  LAUGHING MAN: Oh?

  ARTHUR: Rather than the spacesuit one would normally expect.

  LAUGHING MAN: (Under) Right, yes.

  ARTHUR: Hm. Well, shortly after that I discovered my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice.

  LAUGHING MAN: Mice?

  ARTHUR: So you can imagine how I felt about that.

  LAUGHING MAN: Extraordinary!

  ARTHUR: I was then shot at for a while and blown up.

  LAUGHING MAN: Oh, really?

  ARTHUR: In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave.

  LAUGHING MAN: Uh-huh? And did you have a wonderful time?

  ARTHUR: (Spits out his drink) Blechhh.

  LAUGHING MAN: What an exciting life you must lead. I must find someone to tell about it. (Moving off)

  ARTHUR: But – oh, never mind.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: (Moving in, media type on marching powder) Hey. Hey! Hey, did I hear you say your name just now?

  ARTHUR: Yes, it’s Arthur Dent.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: Yeah, yeah, only there’s a man in a mountain wanted to see you. Well, more of a four-foot fruit bat with an orthodontic condition.

  ARTHUR: I met him.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know?

  ARTHUR: I know, I met him.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: Yeah, well, I . . . I think you should know that, yeah?

  ARTHUR: I do. I met him.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: OK, all right. I’m just telling you, all right? Good night, good luck, win awards.

  ARTHUR: (Weary) What?

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: Oh, whatever. Do what you do. Who cares? Why not go mad? Oh, get off my back, will you, guy? Just . . . just . . . just zark off!

  ARTHUR: Keep your hairpiece on, I’m going.

  AWARD-WINNING MAN: (Suddenly calm again) Yeah, yeah, right. It’s er . . . it’s been real. (Moves off) Big ups, eh? Eh?

  ARTHUR: What was that about?

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: Him?

  ARTHUR: Yes. Did you hear that?

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: Of course.

  ARTHUR: Why did he tell me to win awards?

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: Showbiz talk. He’s just won an award at the Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute Awards Ceremony, and he was hoping to be able to pass it off lightly, only you didn’t mention it, so he couldn’t.

  ARTHUR: What was it for?

  FX: Sounds of glasses being smashed in the background.

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word ‘Fuck’ In A Serious Screenplay. It’s very prestigious.

  ARTHUR: Oh. And what award do you get for that?

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: A Rory. Little silver thing set in a large black base.

  FX: Muffled in background, Krikkit ship appears with a noise like a hundred thousand people saying ‘wop’.

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: What did you say?

  ARTHUR: I didn’t say anything. I was just about to ask what the—

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: I thought you said ‘wop’. Did you say ‘wop’?

  ARTHUR: What?

  SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WOMAN: No, ‘wop’.

  INT. – THE BOOK AMBIENCE

  THE VOICE: People had been dropping in on the party for years – fashionable gatecrashers from other worlds – and for some time it occurred to the partygoers, as they looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their world was, in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways, not quite as much fun as it had been.

  Then, one day, as the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked up in haggard fear of yet another cheese-and-wine raid, it suddenly became clear that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was.

  The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a strange white spaceship which appeared to be half sticking through it.

  FX: Screams as party ship flounders.

  THE VOICE: Together they lurched, heaving and spinning their way round the sky in grotesque disregard of their own weight. Then, suddenly, the Krikkit ship was gone.

  FX: The sound of a hundred thousand people saying ‘foop’.

  THE VOICE: The party was now a mortally wounded party. All the fun had gone out of it. And the longer that it avoided the ground, the heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

  INT. – PARTY

  FX: Creaking noises, debris moving uneasily. Concerned hubbub, groans, some creature having hysterics in the background. Occasionally the party lurches sickeningly, the guests thrown from side to side, almost like actors being made to run from side to side of a West London recording studio . . .

  FORD PREFECT: (Moving in) Arthur, what happened?

  ARTHUR: The Krikkit robots . . . They’ve come and gone and taken it.

  FORD PREFECT: Taken what?

  ARTHUR: The Award for The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word ‘Fuck’ In A Serious

  Screenplay.

  FORD PREFECT: I’m sorry?

  ARTHUR: The Silver Bail! It was the Award! I feel almost as sick as a runner-up for a

  Rory!

  FORD PREFECT: Dingo’s kidneys! I need another drink.

  ARTHUR: I’m not sure you’ve got time.

  FORD PREFECT: (Decisive) Fair enough. (Voice up, announcing to the party in general:) We would love to stay and help, only we’re not going to.

  FX: Party lurches again. Screams and cries.

  FORD PREFECT: (Announcing) We have to go and save the Universe, you see, and if that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right. Either way, we’re off. (Low) Slip me that unopened bottle and the packet of crisps. Cheers.

  ARTHUR: Wh-where’s Trillian?

  SLARTIBARTFAST: (Moving in) Earthman, we must go.

  ARTHUR: Trillian!

  TRILLIAN: (Shaky, distant) I’m over here, Arthur . . .

  THOR: The girl stays with me. We’re flying on to great party going on in Valhalla.

  ARTHUR: Where were you when all this was going on?

  THOR: Upstairs. I was weighing her. Tricky business, flying, you have to calculate the—

  FX: Party lurches again. Screams and cries.

  ARTHUR: She comes with us.

  TRILLIAN: Hey, don’t I have a say in—

  ARTHUR: No. You come with us.

  THOR: (Moving in, menacing) She comes with me.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Earthman, I have the teleport device ready, we really must leave.

  FORD PREFECT: (Alarmed) Arthur – cool it with the Viking.

  ARTHUR: Want to make something of it?

  THOR: (Huge) I beg your minuscule pardon?

  ARTHUR: I said, do you want to make something of it?

  TRILLIAN: (Amazed and touched) Arthur . . . ?

  FORD PREFECT: (Close, low) Arthur – he’s got a hammer the size of a telegraph pole!

  SLARTIBARTFAST: This is madness, Earthman.

  THOR: Do I want to make something of it?

  ARTHUR: (Getting braver) Yes. You want to step outside?

  THOR: (Roar) All right!

  FX: Door opens. Gentle breeze at two thousand feet is heard.


  THOR: Follow me – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . ! (Falls away horribly)

  FX: Gasps from all around.

  ARTHUR: (Rubbing hands together) That’s got rid of him. Slarti, get us out of here.

  EXT. – SPACE

  FX: Starship Bistromath zooms past us. Sounds like a spaceship crossed with an Italian accordion wedding band.

  INT. – STARSHIP BISTROMATH – FLIGHT DECK

  FX: Ship’s steady hum throughout. Slartibartfast pottering. Whirs and beeps in the background.

  FORD PREFECT: (Shouting, annoyed) All right, so I’m a coward. The point is: I’m still alive.

  ARTHUR: So am I, aren’t I?

  FORD PREFECT: You damn nearly weren’t!

  ARTHUR: Don’t you understand anything?

  SLARTIBARTFAST: (Breaking in) Later, later. While you two are bickering, the Krikkit robots have got the Silver Bail. If they’ve already got the Gold Bail and Three Pillars, they hold the Key to the Wikkit Gate.

  FORD PREFECT: (Distracted) I’m sure I had some crisps . . .

  SLARTIBARTFAST: I’m afraid we fared rather pathetically at the party.

  ARTHUR: Story of my life. Where’s Trillian?

  FORD PREFECT: More important than that, where’s my crisps?

  SLARTIBARTFAST: They are both in the Room of Informational Illusions. Your young lady friend is trying to understand how these problems arose. The potato crisps, I can only assume, are helping her.

  FORD PREFECT: Hmph.

  SLARTIBARTFAST: Our only hope now is to try to prevent the Krikkit robots from using the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that, I don’t know. Just have to go there, I suppose. Can’t say I like the idea at all. Probably end up dead.

  INT. – THE BOOK AMBIENCE

  THE VOICE: As the Starship Bistromath alters course with the turn of a side salad and half-bottle of Chianti, what has become of Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android? Will the Krikkit robots assemble and use the Key to the Wikkit Gate? And with everything to play for, will there be time for the next instalment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

  ANNOUNCER: The sound of a hundred thousand people saying ‘wop’ is the registered trade mark of the Krikkit Cola Corporation.

  FOOTNOTES

  The Agrajag Scene Agrajag was Douglas’s posthumous contribution to the series as an actor. Contrary to information given to the press, he did not record this part ‘a few months before his death’, as he would have had to possess an eerie prescience and unsettling sang-froid to do so. The Agrajag lines were part of the recordings Douglas made in the late 1980s and early 90s when he read all the Hitchhiker books unabridged onto tape for Dove Audio. It was this section of the relevant audiobook he played me one morning in Islington, asking who I thought should play Agrajag. I was clever enough to work out that it was a trick question but then, fatally, made the suggestion he was in fact impersonating his hero John Cleese, which he was in fact not, and which peeved him a bit.

  ‘No, I mean me! I want to play Agrajag. Do you think Equity would object?’ I said I could not imagine that they would, and so far they haven’t, so I got that bit right at least.

  My biggest concern with Douglas’s wonderfully hysterical performance here was that it is relentless when edited out of his entire reading of the scene; he calms down considerably when performing the descriptions and the Arthur lines, for example. On the other hand Agrajag is a self-victimized paranoiac blinded by the vicissitudes of fate, so the performance is spot on there.

  What was not clear from Douglas’s script is the realization of all Agrajag’s actual physical presence.

  In producing any kind of scripted drama or comedy I try very hard to create layers of reality running concurrently so that one is never left feeling that the characters exist in an eerie vacuum, disembodied voices floating against an anonymous, diluted wash of ambient sound, or, worse, silence. (Worse still is voices recorded in a room acoustic when they are supposed to be outdoors, but let’s not start in on Traditional Radio Drama, or we’ll start to sound like Marvin.)

  To be utterly believable, characters should move about, breathe, interact and get interrupted by passing events. In other words, they should live in their own reality and have their lives affected by that reality not only when the plot demands but as a matter of course. So it was important to me that we should not just give Agrajag a voice (Douglas’s), but a physical presence, which we created with me breathing between his lines in a wet and hissy way, and the sounds of wingflaps (Ken with an umbrella), scratchy claws on stone (me attacking a paving slab with paper clips) and – due to Agrajag’s orthodontically challenged appearance – a really wet lisp (in the fine old radio comedy tradition of a Hugh Paddick character on Round the Horne), which I edited over every sibilant letter over two rather labour-intensive days.

  Arthur in the Cathedral of Hate/Eccentrica Gallumbits’ Chat room These reactions were added in post-production; in fact Simon’s lines were recorded while he was visiting the studio while we were finalizing the 5.1 Surround mix with his delightful wife Nancy (who fell about laughing when I suggested that he wasn’t at all like Arthur Dent in real life, was he?).

  The flying scene Surprising how many people thought this would be a problem on radio, the Truly Visual Medium – which just goes to show the hold that inferior media like television and film have on everybody. You can do anything in the audio medium. (Although invisibility is a bit of a bugger.)

  The cheese and wine raid This is one of those occasions where some illustrative scene was crying out to be written, especially with Joanna Lumley available to act it in her Germaine-Greer-on-Steroids persona. I wrote this little segment only a few days before we recorded it (not quite beating Douglas’s record of writing stuff while the cast stood about admiring the architecture of the – much missed – Paris Studio). ‘Little Sticks covered with Tasty Paint’ was our youngest son’s description of a certain cocktail snack . . .

  The Rory Award . . . ‘. . . for The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word “Fuck” In A Serious Screenplay’. A predictable fuss about censorship arose when the ‘f’ word was not clearly audible in this episode as broadcast. It’s an awkward point because Douglas is clearly tackling a taboo subject head-on and would not want it sidestepped; on the other hand I knew Radio 4 would not broadcast it unbeeped in the 6.30 p.m. slot, so during the tracklay of sound effects I made sure to build in a masking sound effect rather than doing nothing, putting on a show of resistance, and then having to resort in the inevitable last-minute climbdown to adding an intrusive blip of line-up tone.

  I am curious as to why Douglas created this gag and I wish I had asked him when I had the chance. Obviously there is always a point to be made about censorship but I wonder if there is not also a sly dig here at life in 1970s Radio Light Entertainment, where he was briefly a contemporary of Griff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville, Geoffrey Perkins and Rory McGrath, among others. Certainly when I joined Radio Light Ent as a producer in the 1980s certain writers (none of the above, who had moved on) would vie with each other to try and sneak the f-word onto the air as some kind of gesture of rebellion. If the idea did not serve an intrinsically funny purpose it seemed a bit pointless to me and I wonder if it also did to Douglas . . . with this fictional award being his reaction to all that f— f— futile effort?

  Episode 4 closing scene (extended version only) A rare disagreement between Arthur and Ford which adds nothing really to the plot but was in the book and thus I was loath to lose. The problem was that this episode would best end with Arthur’s neat solution to the problem of Thor (and did so, on the broadcast edit) but to move this argument to the start of Episode Five – which was wordy enough – would hold things up too much. In the end recording it and putting it on the extended edit was a compromise for completeness’ sake.

  EPISODE FIVE

  SIGNATURE TUNE

  ANNOUNCER: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, Tertiary Phase.

  INT. – THE B
OOK AMBIENCE

  Musical background unfolds, layered with the sounds of the Guide’s illustrative animations.

  FX: The sound of Trillian eating Ford’s crisps, throughout:

  THE VOICE: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy states unequivocally that it is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

  For example, consider the insanely aggressive race called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. Luckily they lived twenty billion years ago – when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.

  And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax did well. And as often as possible.

  The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was just to be there. They didn’t like it, they got resentful.

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: You lookin’ at me?

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 2: No, I just opened my eyes, that’s all.

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: Right, you asked for it.

  FX: Punch.

  THE VOICE: The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to leave him alone –

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: I’m bored.

  THE VOICE: – because sooner or later –

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: I hate myself when I’m bored.

  THE VOICE: – he would simply beat himself up.

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: Shut up! No, I won’t! Oh yeah, wanna make me? Right!

  FX: Bob Golding beating himself up. Something entertaining to watch during coffee break.

  THE VOICE: In time, as the birth rate was far exceeded by the murder rate, they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that everyone had to spend at least forty-five minutes a day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her or its surplus aggressions.

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: Maris Piper – you are my bitch.

  THE VOICE: This worked well, until someone thought that it would be much less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.

  SILASTIC ARMORFIEND 1: You sit there like a sack of potatoes? Eat this!

  FX: Sack of potatoes shot.

  THE VOICE: Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer.