The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio series)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy radio series written by Douglas Adams. It was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Radio 4 in 1978, and afterwards the BBC World Service, National Public Radio in the US and CBC Radio in Canada. A second series was commissioned in 1979, transmitted in 1980. Adams adapted the first series into a best-selling novel in 1979. After the 1980 transmissions of the second radio series, a second novel was published. This was followed by three further novels, a computer game, and various other media. A sixth series, adapting Eoin Colfer’s sixth part in the “trilogy”, And Another Thing… was broadcast in March 2018.

About The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio series) in brief

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy radio series written by Douglas Adams. It was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Radio 4 in 1978, and afterwards the BBC World Service, National Public Radio in the US and CBC Radio in Canada. The series was the first radio comedy programme to be produced in stereo, and was innovative in its use of music and sound effects. A second series was commissioned in 1979, transmitted in 1980. Adams adapted the first series into a best-selling novel in 1979. After the 1980 transmissions of the second radio series, a second novel was published. This was followed by three further novels, a computer game, and various other media. A sixth series, adapting Eoin Colfer’s sixth part in the “trilogy”, And Another Thing… was broadcast in March 2018. Adams wrote his first outlines in February 1977. Originally to be called The Ends of the Earth, each episode would have ended with the planet Earth meeting its demise in a different way. While writing the first episode, Adams realised that he needed a character who knew what was going to happen to Earth before the other characters. He made this character an alien and, remembering an idea he supposedly had had while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria in 1971, decided that this character would be a reporter for the encyclopaedia. Adams considered writing a third radio series to be based on his novel Life, the Universe and Everything in 1993, but the project did not begin until after his death in 2001.

Dirk Maggs, with whom Adams had discussed the new series, directed and co-produced the radio adaptation as well as adaptations of the remaining Hitchhiking’s Guide novels So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless. Adams’ biographer M. J. Simpson suggested that the character was almost certainly named after the 17th century puritan writer Arthur Dent, author of The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven first published in 1601, although Adams himself claimed no recollection of choosing the name. A pilot episode was commissioned on 1 March 1977 and the recording was completed on 28 June 1977. Adams recounted different episode’s genesis, convincing the BBC that such a programme could not be recorded with a studio audience, insisting that the programme could be recorded in stereo. To win the latter argument, Adams wrote a four-part Doctor Who serial, which was later commissioned to write a few weeks later. A full series of six episodes was commissioned by the BBC on 31 August 1977, and a few days later a serial of a few episodes of Doctor Who was a serial was also commissioned. Adams said in an interview that when Simon Brett proposed a radio science fiction series, he fell off his chair because it was what I’d been fighting for all these years. The character of Arthur Dent was called ‘Aleric B’, the joke being that the audience initially assume the character is also an alien rather than a human. Adams renamed the character for the pilot to ‘Arthur Dent’

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