The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Scripts

by Douglas Adams

  GRAMS: PEAK MUSIC AGAIN FOR THEME PASSAGE

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: Ursa Minor is almost certainly the most appalling place in the Universe. Though it is excrutiatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of the magazine Playbeing headlined an article with the words ‘When you are tired of Ursa Minor you are tired of life’, the suicide rate in the constellation quadrupled overnight.

  Playbeing, a curious journal devoted in roughly equal parts to galactic politics, rock music, and gynaecology, has much to answer for in this respect. The current edition carries the results of an opinion poll in which the central offices of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have been voted the third hippest place in the whole of Ursa Minor. According to this same poll, the second hippest place in the whole of Ursa Minor is the entrance lobby to the same offices. This is what it sounds like.

  F/X: ENTRANCE LOBBY ATMOSPHERE, PEOPLE WANDERING ABOUT, WEIRD MUSIC PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND. AN INTERGALACTIC PHONE RINGS AND IS ANSWERED

  RECEPTIONIST: Hello, yes, Megadodo publications, home of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the most wholly remarkable book in the whole of the known Universe, can I help you? What? Yes, I passed your message on to Mr Zarniwoop, but I’m afraid he’s too cool to see you right now. He’s on an intergalactic cruise. Yes, he is in his office, but he’s on an intergalactic cruise.

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: And according to this same Playbeing poll, the hippest place in the whole Galaxy is the left cranium of the fugitive Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebox. Just entering the air traffic space of Ursa Minor Beta is an enormous Arcturan Megafreighter carrying a larger number of copies of Playbeing than the mind can comfortably conceive.

  F/X: FAIRLY DEEP HEAVY FREIGHTER LIKE BACKGROUND

  ARC ONE: Ursa Minor Beta air traffic control this is AMF 3 requesting homing beacon for planetfall. Come in control.

  ATR T. CONTROL: (Lot of static & distort) Ursa Minor Beta ATC receiving you. Beacon activated. Automatic docking will proceed in two hours.

  ARC ONE: Acknowledged. Thank you ATC.

  F/X: ELECTRONIC JIGGERY POKERY TO INDICATE ACTIVATED COCKING COMPUTERS

  ARC ONE: Makes you sick, doesn’t it captain.

  CAPTAIN: What?

  ARC ONE: Look at the visiscreen – see that big white city there the whole blooming thing is just Hitch-Hiker’s offices, palm trees – and so many swimming pools you need a bloody gondola to get about.

  CAPTAIN: Well that’s success for you, isn’t it?

  ARC ONE: Is it? Is it? Well I ask myself. All gone soft haven’t they – Hitch-Hiking, what do they know about it? Get one of that lot to stick out their thumb, it would probably fall off. I mean. It’s all just fat cat business now. What’s the name of that bloke who runs it now?

  CAPTAIN: Maxelcat.

  ARC ONE: Well you know what they say don’t you. They had to move to a bigger planet because he got so fat he kept sliding off the old one. I’ve heard, you know, that they’ve created a whole electronically synthesized Universe in one of their offices so they can go and research stories during the day and still go to parties in the evening. Yeah, bloody clever of course, but it’s nothing to do with the real Galaxy is it. Nothing to do with life.

  CAPTAIN: Talk a lot don’t you.

  ARC ONE: Yeah, well not much else to do on these ships is there? Great automated monsters. I’ve had three buttons to press in the past five hundred light years and that was just to put the coffee machine on to manual.

  ATR T CONTROL: Docking one hour fifty-four minutes.

  CAPTAIN: Peter and out.

  ARC ONE: Actually, I just picked up a hitch-hiker.

  CAPTAIN: (Startled) You what?

  ARC ONE: Odd bloke. He was in a bad way. He was hitching the hard way see, and so I said to myself . . .

  ATR T CONTROL: Docking one hour fifty two minutes. Kevin and out.

  CAPTAIN: Who is he?

  ARC ONE: I don’t know, didn’t give his name, and he’d wrapped his heads in a towel so s. . .

  CAPTAIN: Heads?

  ARC ONE: Yeah, just the two. I put him in the sleeping quarters to recover.

  F/X: DOOR FLIES OPEN

  ZAPHOD: I’ve recovered.

  CAPTAIN: Who the hell are you?

  ZAPHOD: Don’t ask.

  CAPTAIN: But . . .

  ZAPHOD: Turn the radio on.

  CAPTAIN: What?

  ZAPHOD: Turn the radio on! Look, if it’ll help you do what I tell you baby, imagine I’ve got a blaster ray in my hand.

  CAPTAIN:

  (Startled) You have got a blaster ray in your hand.

  ZAPHOD: So you shouldn’t have to tax your imagination too hard. Turn it on.

  F/X: ‘RADIO’ ON!!!

  RADIO: . . . and news reports brought to you here on the sub-ether wave band broadcasting around the galaxy around the clock, bringing light and enlightenment to all non-evolved life forms, saying a big ‘hello’ to all semi-evolved life forms and causing severe brain damage to anyone higher up the evolutionary ladder than a demented bee. But first the up to the minute shock news. Reports have just reached us that Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to terminate his term as Galactic President by stealing a spaceship he was meant to be launching, has finally met his end. Yes, the Big Z is now finally Big DEAD. We asked his private brain care specialist Gag Halfrunt if this was just a publicity stunt.

  GAG: Well, Zaphod’s just zis guy you know . . .

  RADIO INTERVIEWER: But what about these reports which say that Zaphod Beeblebrox has been eaten by a Haggunenon?

  GAG: Veil, he is an impetuous fellow you know.

  INTERVIEWER: And is now seriously dead.

  GAG: Who can say?

  INTERVIEWER: Haggunenons are, are they not, super evolutionary life forms? That is to say they can re-evolve into any shape in a matter of seconds.

  GAG: They are crazy mixed up animals you know?

  INTERVIEWER: And it was while the Haggunenon had temporarily evolved into the form of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal that he ate Zaphod Beeblebrox.

  GAG: Veil, zis is vot ve find.

  INTERVIEWER: So it would be true to say that Zaphod Beeblebrox is finally dead.

  GAG: True, but probably unimportant.

  INTERVIEWER: And why is that?

  GAG: Veil, Zaphod’s just zis guy you know?

  INTERVIEWER: And now some news from some of the outlying regions of the Galaxy. A report out today from the western spiral arm says that the wheel is commercially unviable . . .

  ZAPHOD: Turn it off. (This covers last line)

  F/X: RADIO OFF

  ZAPHOD: Look, er sorry, I had to wave this blaster at you, but as you just heard I’ve had a bad day.

  ARC ONE: What? You mean that’s you?

  ZAPHOD: Yeah.

  ARC ONE: You do lead an interesting life don’t you, Mr Beeblebrox?

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: It is, of course, perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far more exciting time than you. Human beings for instance have a phrase which describes this phenomenon – ‘The other man’s grass is always greener.’

  The Shaltanac race of Broop Kidron Thirteen had a similar phrase, but since their planet is somewhat eccentric botanically speaking, the best they could manage was ‘The other Shaltanac’s joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky russet’, and so the expression soon fell into misuse and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone else in die Galaxy who had not realized that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.

  Arthur Dent is, of course, terribly unhappy. As is now well recorded, he and Ford Prefect escaped from the planet Earth on the day that it was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspa
ce bypass. Bypasses are devices which allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they want to be.

  Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect know exactly where they don’t want to be. They don’t want to be stranded on prehistoric Earth with a load of unwanted telephone sanitizers and advertising executives who have been thrown off their home planet of Golgafrincham, a world which has subsequently been wiped out by a particularly virulent disease contracted from an unexpectedly dirty telephone. Unfortunately, that is precisely where they are. But fortunately they have found a way of coping with their predicament. They are drunk.

  FORD: Dingozekiness, there muzz be some way of getting off this planet other than getting high.

  ARTHUR: You’ve been saying that for two years.

  FORD: Have I? It must be true then.

  ARTHUR: You’ve got all that electric hitching equipment in your satchel, and none of it seems to do a dickie bird.

  FORD: We’re just too far from the space lanes. The range is limited. Wait! I’ve got it!

  ARTHUR: What? An answer?

  FORD: It’s a lateral thinking problem isn’t it? We just have to sidle up to the problem sideways when it’s not looking and . . . pounce!

  ARTHUR: Well?

  FORD: I knocked over the bottle of wine.

  ARTHUR: But have you got the answer?

  FORD: No, but I’ve got a different name for the problem.

  ARTHUR: Let’s have a drink. Here’s another bottle.

  FORD: Yes all right. No . . . look, every time we get to this point we just have another drink, till we’re totally slarmied, and then next day start all over with . . . with . . .

  ARTHUR: What’s the matter?

  FORD:

  (Faintly and hoarsely) Arthur . . . look!

  ARTHUR: What are you looking at? . . . Good God!

  FORD: It’s only a bloody spaceship, isn’t it? It’s only hovering in the air a hundred yards from us.

  ARTHUR: It looks very unreal doesn’t it? Sort of ghostly.

  FORD: But look, don’t you realize, we’re safe! We’ve been rescued. Come on, let’s celebrate, pass that bottle.

  ARTHUR: Right. Here.

  FORD: Hey, where’d it go?

  ARTHUR: What, the bottle?

  FORD: No . . . the spaceship.

  ARTHUR: What?

  FORD: It’s gone! The bloody thing’s gone!

  ARTHUR: Where did it go?

  FORD: It just sort of . . . winked out of existence.

  ARTHUR: Vanished . . .

  FORD: Here.

  ARTHUR: What?

  FORD: Take the bottle, I can’t face it.

  ARTHUR:

  (Sotto voce) Ford.

  FORD: Yeah?

  ARTHUR: It’s there again.

  FORD: Heeeeeeyyyy, so it is . . . what’s . . . going on?

  ARTHUR: It just came again, pop. It comes and goes like magic.

  FORD: Tell you our trouble mate, we’re too sober by half. Come on, I will have that drink, I think I deserve . . . Chri . . .!!!

  ARTHUR: It’s gone again!

  FORD: What is it? Some kind of deputation from Galactic Alcoholics Anonymous?

  ARTHUR: What do you mean by that?

  FORD: Well haven’t you noticed? Every time I put down the bottle it appears and every time I pick it up again it disappears! Look! I put it down, there it is, it’s back again, I pick it up and poof it’s gone. Here, gone, here, gone . . . see, it works,

  ARTHUR: But that’s mad.

  FORD: Mad it may be mate, but I tell you one thing, I’m not touching another drop of your filthy elderflower stuff till we’re safely out of this solar system. That’s it. I’ve got it.

  ARTHUR: It’s an intelligence test.

  FORD: Yes. No, no it isn’t, it isn’t at all, because that suggests someone’s doing it deliberately and that’s not it. There’s a time paradox going on . . . we’re caught at the crossroads of two alternative futures. You see?

  ARTHUR: No.

  FORD: I thought you wouldn’t. Listen, the ship first appeared when I said you know let’s actually sit down and work out this problem of getting off this planet, right?

  ARTHUR: Yes.

  FORD: And then every time we reached for a bottle instead or just expected the problem to solve itself the ship disappeared.

  ARTHUR: Right.

  FORD: So in one of the alternative futures we work out a way of signalling to a ship which then returns through time to pick us up, and in the other alternative we just get drunk and ignore the problem, so no solution, no ship. I wonder what Roosta would do?

  ARTHUR: Who’s Roosta?

  FORD: Mate of mine. Another researcher on the Guide, great little thinker is Roosta and a great hitcher. He’s a guy who really knows where his towel is.

  ARTHUR: Knows what?

  FORD: Where his towel is.

  ARTHUR: Why should he want to know where his towel is?

  FORD: Everybody should know where his towel is.

  ARTHUR: I think your head’s come undone.

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of towels.

  A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitch-Hiker can carry. For one thing it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of Jaglan Beta, sunbathe on it on the marble beaches of Santraginus Five, huddle beneath it for protection from the Arcturan Megagnats as you sleep beneath the stars of Kakrafoon, use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy river Moth, wet it for use in hand to hand combat, wrap it round your head to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (which is such a mind bogglingly stupid animal it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you), and even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough.

  F/X: ARCTURAN MEGAFREIGHTER BACKGROUND

  ARC ONE: Those were the really great days of hitch-hiking of course. A man and his towel pitted against the Universe. I mean, that lot down there in them offices. I wouldn’t give you an old face flannel for the lot of them. No disrespect to you of course Mr Beeblebrox, Mr President, sir, you’re a totally different kettle . . .

  ZAPHOD: Talk a lot, don’t you? You know, you remind me of something this really froody mate of mine once said. He spent a whole while stuck on this really weird little outback planet called Earth, right? A humanoid race, right? And they used to amaze him the way they just kept talking, like just always stating the really obvious, you know. Like they’d always say ‘It’s a nice day’ or ‘You’re very tall, aren’t you?’ or ‘Oh, dear, you seem to have fallen down a thirty foot well, are you all right?’ And he came up with this theory about it – he thought if human beings don’t keep exercising their lips their mouths probably seize up. Then he watched them a bit more, you know, and came up with a whole new theory. He said if they don’t keep exercising their lips their brains start working.

  ARC ONE: (A bit huffy) Well if that’s how you feel . . .

  ZAPHOD: How soon till we dock at Ursa Minor Beta?

  CAPT: Thirty minutes.

  ZAPHOD: OK, now I can’t risk being found in this freighter, I’d better go down in one of your EVA pods, should slip under the radar screens OK. Thanks for the ride guys.

  ARC ONE: But why are you going to Ursa Minor Beta if you want to stay hidden.

  ZAPHOD: I just wanted to find out what I’m doing.

  ARC ONE: What?

  ZAPHOD: Well, last night after I escaped from the Haggunenon . . .

  ARC ONE: Yeah, how did you . . .

  ZAPHOD: Shhh. I went int
o like a deep coma, and got this message from a person I admire, respect and deeply love.

  ARC ONE: one Who was that then?

  ZAPHOD: Me.

  ARC ONE: What? A message from yourself?

  ZAPHOD: Yeah, it was a message I’d implanted in my own mind twenty years ago, which was triggered off by the coma and it just told me that the time had come, and I had to go and see this dude I’d never heard of who would tell me something to my disadvantage.

  ARC ONE: Disadvantage?

  ZAPHOD: Yeah, so I had to go didn’t I?

  ARC ONE: Why don’t you tie a knot in your hanky like anyone else?

  ZAPHOD: Style friend, style. Now come on, I got to go.

  ARC ONE: But can I just ask you . . .

  ZAPHOD: Yeah, what is it?

  ARC ONE: That Haggunenon that ate you . . . how did you escape?

  ZAPHOD: Ah, no problems. It was a super evolving species right?

  ARC ONE: Yeah.

  ZAPHOD: It ate me whilst it was playing at being the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and then like seconds later made the mistake of re-evolving into a really neat little escape capsule.

  ARC ONE: It evolved into an escape capsule?

  ZAPHOD: Yeah.

  ARC ONE: But that’s really incredible.

  ZAPHOD: Yeah. I can’t help it if I’m lucky.

  F/X: POD DOOR CLOSES

  COMPUTER VOICE: EVA pod Five launching.

  F/X: POD LAUNCHED

  GRAMS: NARRATOR BACKGROUND

  NARRATOR: Several hours later, five billion tons of Playbeing magazine were unloaded on Ursa Minor Beta causing a slight but largely irrelevant shift in its orbital trajectory. A few hours later still, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the owner of what Playbeing readers had deemed the hippest place in the Universe, walked into the entrance lobby of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, deemed merely the second hippest place in Ursa Minor. Zaphod Beeblebrox does not like Ursa Minor either.

  F/X: ENTRANCE LOBBY ATMOS (as before) DOOR FLIES OPEN

  ZAPHOD: OK. Where’s Zarniwoop, get me Zarniwoop.

  RECEPT: Excuse me sir?

  ZAPHOD: Zarniwoop. Get him right. Get him now.

  RECEPT: Well sir, if you could be a little cool about it . . .