Re: May the towel be with you!
Actually I do still have my original Hitch Hiker towel. It's a decent sized bath/beach towel, not a tea-towel or something like that. It has the "towel bit" from the book on it...
Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42
The weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the hugely influential BBC radio show. 42 is a significant number for fans of the innovative series by Douglas Adams so (carefully) pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, wrap yourself in a towel and join The Register …
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Tuesday 10th March 2020 10:20 GMT stuartnz
Re: May the towel be with you!
I got my towel around 1985 when my teenage self decided that joining ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha from the other side of the galaxy (NZ) was a hoopy idea. £25 plus intergalactic P&P when the exchange rate was $3NZ= 1£ meant that the effect on my budget was not unlike have my head smashed in by a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large gold brick. Still totally worth it, if only to be able to say with conviction that I always know where my towel is.
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Tuesday 10th March 2020 12:22 GMT Duffy Moon
Re: May the towel be with you!
"Actually I do still have my original Hitch Hiker towel"
I remember seeing one of those in the window of the old Forbidden Planet shop in Denmark Street. I couldn't afford it at the time (I bought the theme tune single instead), so I am quite jealous. I wonder if someone makes a reproduction...
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Monday 9th March 2020 16:28 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Philistine
What?
The opening of the third book is brilliant.
The bit about Arthur, alone on the prehistoric forests of Islington for five years suddenly meets up with Ford again. He's so glad to have human company again he could almost cry.
Unfortunately, Ford is an immediately annoying person.
Then there's the eddies in space time.
'Eddies in the space time continuum'
'Then please tell him to come and pick up his sofa'
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Saturday 14th March 2020 18:32 GMT dajames
That frood is not hoopy.
ITYM "That frood is not a hoopy".
It's quite clear from the book that "hoopy" is intended to be a noun, meaning "really together guy":
... a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Cf. "Hey, you sass that bloke Ford Prefect, there's a frood who really knows where his towel is".
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Thursday 12th March 2020 20:35 GMT Celeste Reinard
That depends. If it was white, I used it as a shroud for the cat of neighbour, Bernice. The blue one I ate (the bit with the maggots), I burned the rest to warm my cold hands and heart, and the green one I fed to the cat (which happened to become -- comatic, somehow... and to make sure, I smothered the poor fellow with a red one). The black one I used as a veil when I was getting married on Postal (Planet Postal, where scientients from all over the galaxy go to get get married for ... what passes for a posh yet highly illegal marriage, but explains a lot about 'Going Postal'. Otherwise I have no further information. Unless it was the brownish one, which had developped into something quite violent, and had to be put down (I clubbed it to death with the femur a smaller dinosaur)(I guess, it could also be the leg of a flying bedroom table) (That was before I got married to it (the table) (hence the veil).
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Monday 9th March 2020 12:52 GMT Chris G
If there is a Salmon of Doubt
There should be a prawn of regret.
In the seventies I was having too much of all kinds of fun to listen to the beeb, so I missed HHGTTG. Douglas Addans though not as prolific as the great Terry Pratchett has left a comparable legacy and I missed the start of it.
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Monday 9th March 2020 13:23 GMT phuzz
Re: If there is a Salmon of Doubt
My first introduction to Terry Pratchett was watching him interview Douglas Adams at the Cheltenham literature festival.
Or possibly my first introduction to Douglas Adams was watching him interview Terry Pratchett. It's been a while now, and my memory isn't what it was.
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Monday 9th March 2020 19:52 GMT Tom 7
Re: If there is a Salmon of Doubt
My first introduction to Adams was Dr Snuggles - a kids cartoon. I was off work with Bronchitis and guzzling Hills Bronchial Balsam and this cartoon cam on the telly and it was absolutely brilliant. I put it down to the morphine acetate in the afore mentioned balsam and only later discovered the H2G2 and even later that he had written some of Dr Snuggles.
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Tuesday 10th March 2020 19:38 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: If there is a Salmon of Doubt
"In the seventies I was having too much of all kinds of fun to listen to the beeb, so I missed HHGTTG."
You probably missed the adaption of Asimovs Foundation too then. At least nowadays, shows can often be accessed via streaming or be recorded off-air by a timer. (I'm assuming that Sky and Freeview PVRs can record radio as well TV, just like the Virgin Media one can. BBC R4 abd R4Extra still have good drama and comedy most weeks, 4Extra still do the Seventh Dimension (named from when they were Radio 7)
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Monday 9th March 2020 14:46 GMT TRT
Re: Anybody fancy a game of...
The Krikkit storyline was indeed a "Dr Who" story, but a fan-fic written when DNA was 14 IIRC, rather then when he was a script editor working on Dr Who. One of the greatest Dr Who stories was The Pirate Planet. It has so many Adamsesque gags in it... it's truly a work of art. Including the drone parrot that shits laser bolts. I kid you not.
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Monday 9th March 2020 16:35 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Anybody fancy a game of...
Oooh. I forget the name of the episode.
But another Adams Doctor Who script that actually got made, and was also reused for Dirk Gently was that Tom Baker episode with Lala Ward as Romana set in Paris..
I just remember Lala Ward in that Parisian schoolgirl outfit the entire episode.
It's probably eclipsed all else.
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Tuesday 10th March 2020 15:31 GMT TRT
Re: Anybody fancy a game of...
Yes, I see what you mean. Divorced from its function and seen purely as a piece of art, its structure of line and colour is curiously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function. And since it has no call to be here, the art lies in the fact that it *IS* here.
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