Pilot: Meet the Genuine Podcast Personalities [GPP1]

Genuine Podcast Personalities — Episode One edited transcript

Srihari · 00:00 Greetings from the Genuine Podcast Personalities of Ursa Minor Beta. This is a show - rather, a quasi-book club, if you will - dedicated to exploring the widely popular series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, one that spread across multiple adaptations. I’m your host, Srihari, and I seek to unpack every possible detail pertinent to the series. As a newer enthusiast, relatively speaking, who looks to draw more people into the fanbase, as I had intended to, ever since I started reading the books, listening to the radio series, and so on and so forth. I have been an enthusiast, properly speaking, for the past year. I had definitely heard about the series back in 2020, which was the 42nd anniversary of the series coming to fruition.

Srihari · 01:09 First as a radio show, however, I never really got around to reading the books, nor was I even aware of the fact that there were multiple adaptations across different media formats. Nonetheless, since I have been listening to the radio series and reading the books in tandem, of course, after a point it’s a little difficult to do. My primary objective was to have fellow enthusiasts not only to discuss this with, but also to try to draw more crowds into the series. That is the motivation behind the show. I would leave the floor open to the members I’m joined by for them to introduce themselves. Firstly, I could start with Nemo.

Nemo · 02:01 Good morning, everyone. Nemo. I’ve been a fan for far too long, if theres such a thing. I was aware of Hitchhiker since the mid-’80s and a fan since the early ’90s. My fandom has waxed and waned over the years. I’ve been very involved in various fan forums, then drifted away, and at the moment I’m very much in the fandom. I’m on the committee for ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, which is the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Appreciation Society, as blessed by Douglas Adams and his agent sometime back in the early ’80s.

Srihari · 02:51 Right, after that, I have Davorin with me.

Davorin · 02:57 Hello hello. Yeah, I’ve been a fan since the mid-’90s, when I stumbled by accident upon the fourth book and got hooked - instantly became a superfan. Since I’m from a small town, from a small country, in the back pocket of Europe, very close to Innsbruck, I would say there wasn’t a fandom per se. I wasn’t officially in some kind of fandom thingy, rather than working on a podcast about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the last six years, in which me and my colleagues and I devoured every chapter.

Davorin · 03:52 One chapter per episode. The problem with the podcast is that it’s recorded in our native tongue, Slovenian, so it didn’t reach the audience that we wanted. But we have fun and we’re still working on it. Although we’ve read all five books in the trilogy and the sixth one as well, now we’re on Last Chance to See. So, yeah.

Srihari · 04:31 Thank you. And last but not least, I’m also joined by Christian.

Christian · 04:35 Good morning. So my journey started with the movie sometime around 2006, 2007, when I was probably around 12 years old. And being at that age, seeing the movie and unaware of everything else, I really loved it. And I don’t have those same movie opinions a lot of people do because it’s how I first got into it. But then I took a really long break up until COVID, when I got into the books, the radio series, but then I got further into the nonfiction work, like Last Chance to See, looking at Douglas’s tech keynote conferences and lots of different other works like Hyperland. So really, his technology stuff made me a lifelong fan. I want to get deep into the research, but the movie after his death is what actually got me here in the first place.

Srihari · 05:25 Yeah, that sounds nice. I mean, there’s a bit of overlap between you and me there. It was during the pandemic, 2020, I think is the year you’re referring to, maybe 2021, because, you know, that pandemic spanned for quite a bit of time, which was, of course, the 42nd anniversary of the series. Of course, my mind was on other things and it was quite hard to, you know, get past a few pages in the beginning. But it was only last year, when doing long drives to and from work, I would listen to the radio series. And it was fun for a while when there was no contradiction or divergence between the two, which is something we will definitely touch upon as we progress along this episode.

Srihari · 06:14 But, yeah, so I guess you get the rough idea that I’ve been a proper fan since 2025, whereas you have a couple of members here who have been enthusiasts since the ’90s. And you have another one who, you know, has safely been a fan of the series for close to 15 to 20 years longer than I have. So, since the show is in its infancy at the time of recording, it’s only right that we document the origin story of the entire series to begin with. Nemo, first I’d like to tap into your brain a little bit.

Srihari · 06:53 The old adage regarding the genesis of, you know, the whole idea behind starting a series like this was that Douglas Adams was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck holding a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe. And he was lying drunk in the field with stars seemingly swirling over his head in the night sky. And that’s when it apparently occurred to him that somebody ought to write Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, much like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe. This is what I genuinely believed was the origin story up until I came across you all and you told me, no, that’s not quite it. So why exactly are people objecting to this? And what more can you tell us?

Nemo · 07:40 All right, so, in many ways I’m relating what has been documented in a couple of biographies. So the Innsbruck story, as Douglas told it - and he told it so many times that he himself said he didn’t really have a memory of the event; he had a memory of telling the event so often that that’s the version of events he remembered - his story, in summary, was that he was drunk in Innsbruck, lying in a field, looking up at the stars, and thought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would be a fantastic idea and somebody should write that. And then he promptly forgot about the idea for six years, until the idea of doing a sci-fi comedy radio series with the BBC in 1977 and the title came back to him and, you know, the rest is history.

Srihari · 08:31 Yeah, The Ends of the Earth is what he mentioned.

Nemo · 08:37 Yes, The Ends of the Earth was the original idea that evolved into Hitchhiker’s. It was originally going to be an anthology series. Each episode would be the destruction of the Earth by a different method. As that evolved, he realized he needed somebody who was outside the Earth, as it were, to document things and show things. From there, Ford Prefect and the Guide - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself - came about, and the Vogons destroying the Earth for the hyperspace bypass was originally episode one. That evolved into its own story, and we never got the other ways that the Earth would have been destroyed. There are, I believe, some notes in his archives that might have some very early ideas.

Nemo · 09:28 I think some of them may have even made their way into the biographies. But there was nothing further that was really explored. In terms of that Innsbruck story. So M. J. Simpson, when he wrote his unauthorized biography - it’s unauthorized in the sense that, as I understand it, the family estate authorized Nick Webb, who was Douglas’s original agent for the novel, to write his biography. And by all accounts, Nick Webb’s a great guy. I’ve read that biography some years ago. It’s a little bit dry. Nick Webb was a literary agent, not an author, but that doesn’t mean he had no skills. It’s a great biography. M. J. Simpson was, and arguably still is, a superfan of Douglas Adams and has written a number of books and the unauthorized biography.

Nemo · 10:31 He ghost-wrote updates to Don’t Panic, the earlier Neil Gaiman biography, and has written some other guides published in collector magazines about collecting Hitchhiker’s. He was a superfan to the point that he had previously been president of ZZ9. He had early access to the movie, visited the movie on set and wrote reviews about the process, basically saying it was clear this was made by people who love Hitchhiker’s. He was very positive about it. Then he saw an early screening, which was either the final cut of the movie or a near-final cut, and he wrote what famously became a very scathing and negative review. The fandom at the time turned on him quite savagely.

Nemo · 11:29 And he was so offended by, or so put out by that reaction to what he saw as an honest review that he turned away from the Hitchhiker’s fandom. And yeah, he’s still around online, but he hasn’t been involved in the fandom anywhere near as much in the last couple of decades. So that’s the background of who M. J. Simpson is. But when he wrote the unauthorized biography, that was 2002, so he was still very deep in Hitchhiker’s lore and Douglas Adams lore and heaps of research.

Nemo · 12:06 In his biography he recounts the Innsbruck story and then, right at the end, notes that while he was literally finishing and tidying up the last bits of the book, he got in touch with Gail Renard, I believe that’s the right pronunciation of the name, who had been a colleague of Douglas’s in the mid-’70s. She said Douglas had mentioned the idea of a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to her. M. J. Simpson points out that she didn’t know Douglas back in [the] 1971 Innsbruck era. He then follows up and says he had an interview with Martin Smith, who is, you know, bloody Martin Smith from Croydon.

Nemo · 12:55 And Martin Smith said that Douglas had mentioned the idea of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to him in 1975. And so M. J. Simpson concludes that clearly the original idea - that he thought of it in Innsbruck and then didn’t think of it again for another six years - is, in fact, a fabrication. He thought of it in 1973. The Jem Roberts biography also confirms, and I don’t know if Jem Roberts re-interviewed Gail Renard or if he was basing his information on M. J. Simpson’s, but he confirms the timeline: Gail Renard met, or knew, Douglas around 1975. So that’s the counter-view. I was thinking about this the other day and realized that, despite M. J. Simpson’s statement that this refutes the Innsbruck theory, I don’t think it nessecary does.

Nemo · 13:52 The original story is that Douglas thought of it in a field in Innsbruck in 1971 and then forgot about it for six years. All this extra information does is it rebuts the idea that he didn’t think of it for six years. It doesn’t actually rebut the idea that it first came to him while lying drunk in a field back in 1971. That’s still perfectly plausible. Maybe he did.

Srihari · 14:21 So, since Davorin knows somebody who was in the company of Douglas Adams that night. What was his account of events?

Davorin · 14:33 I must say that I don’t know the fellow per se. I tried to contact him several times for our intro on Douglas.

Davorin · 14:46 But the story goes that this guy on Reddit - we can post a link to the thread and you can be the judge; everybody can be the judge of it - his story confirms that Douglas was in Innsbruck because he says he met Douglas in 1971 at the campsite in Reichenau. This is a place near Innsbruck which is sadly no more. And the joke that there is now a bypass in place of the field is also a lie, because it’s a nursing home for old people. But his story is that, as Douglas said so many times, everybody had The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe. This campsite was very popular with young travelers from all over the world. It was recently opened and fresh, and blah blah blah.

Davorin · 15:49 And let’s call him Billy, because part of his nickname on Reddit is Billy. Billy said that he was actually the one, while they were lying there after a few stiff Gössers and watching the stars above them, that somebody should write The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I haven’t been able to verify it with him or with anybody else. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but it doesn’t matter. It’s another confirmation that Douglas got the idea, from Billy or from himself, it doesn’t really matter. Until anybody started working on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the idea was just an idea.

Davorin · 16:59 If Billy had been faster about it and written his own version, for example, in 1972, we wouldn’t be talking about Douglas and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But Billy didn’t do anything except brag on the Internet that he met Douglas and that he gave him an idea. Well we cannot say if this is false or true, but we can say that Douglas got the idea and, as we heard previously, he was thinking about it in the years in between. So the end result is the same.

Nemo · 17:44 Very true. I always feel like ideas like that can be relatively easy to have; it’s doing the hard work of turning it into something. Douglas did that work.

Davorin · 17:56 And I mean, if I was at that campsite with a copy of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh - was it Ken Welsh? I think it was - and if I drank a few stiff Gössers, and if hashish was widely available in Europe then, probably I would get a similar idea, you know.

Srihari · 18:26 What he said was that he didn’t have a lot to drink; rather, he had a couple of drinks but nothing to eat, and that’s why he felt so drunk. I think Christian would like to say something about the person who was with Douglas Adams at Innsbruck.

Christian · 18:40 So I had done additional research on Billy as well, trying to see if I could confirm or deny or find anyone else. I couldn’t really find much more and really he had claimed that he had talked about this in multiple places, but I couldn’t find anywhere else besides those Reddit comments he had mentioned it pre those Reddit comments. So for me, that sort of seems like it’s on him. If he can find more proof, cool. If not, it still doesn’t change the origin. The only other alleged piece of physical proof that Douglas was there is in 2004 someone had posted on his fan site or the fan forum/Usenet group at the time that they were going to list Douglas’s tent from that hitchhiking trip for sale.

Christian · 19:23 I don’t believe it ever got sold, but we have screenshots of at least the conversations, and I don’t have a picture of the specific tent, but I know which model was listed up for sale. Either way, there’s no proof that was really his tent. It could have just been a joke that a fan made, but it was at least interesting because it factually lined up with what we saw. On the Ken Welsh Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe, Douglas said he actually stole it because he borrowed it and didn’t bring it back. He did write a letter to Ken Welsh later on thanking him for that book. So it was very close to Douglas, and he had visited not just Austria on that trip, but also Italy, Yugoslavia and Turkey.

Christian · 20:05 So he was kind of traveling all over the place. So even if it wasn’t Austria and Innsbruck where he had the idea, although it seems like it is because he hasn’t said it was anywhere else, it could have been anywhere along that hitchhiking trip he had the idea. It doesn’t really matter though, because again, you have to do something with the idea once you have it.

Davorin · 20:23 Yeah. Imagine that if he was traveling through Yugoslavia, then probably he traveled through Ljubljana because it’s a direct line from Innsbruck towards Turkey. And then maybe he met my father, who was a very heavy drinker back in the day, and he would buy every tourist a couple of - not Gössers, but the local beers - just to have a laugh. And probably it happened here, but I cannot deny or confirm that because both of the parties have passed on. So, damn, I wish I knew. I wish I knew the Yugoslavia part previously.

Srihari · 21:08 Yeah, I guess it’s only right that there’s so many divergences and contradictions in just the origin story, considering the trajectory of the series thereafter. Nonetheless, what I want to delve into now is the influences of, you know, other works on this particular series, and specifically works that Douglas Adams himself had parts to play. Every interview where he talks about the origins, nearly every interview, at least if you watch or listen to them, he mentions Monty Python, Doctor Who. So, Christian, could you just shine some light on what specific tropes that showed up in the Hitchhiker series that would sort of mirror what we saw in those two?

Christian · 21:56 So Douglas himself was a big fan of a lot of different things growing up. He liked listening to comedy. He had a radio that he would actually keep in his bed and just listen to shows late at night because he was trying to learn what is funny. He, as a young kid, had a really hard time, up until, I want to say, the age of four, verbally communicating anything at all. So he was sort of a late bloomer. He was a big thinker, but he wasn’t expressive and he was sort of awkward and shy and he didn’t have a good peer group to work with.

Srihari · 22:30 Right. This is something he mentioned on Desert Island Discs, if I’m not mistaken. I think his parents got divorced shortly after, too, if I’m not mistaken.

Christian · 22:39 Yeah, when he was around five years old.

Christian · 22:44 And so for him, I think he latched on to Doctor Who and also other types of comedy, Monty Python, a little bit later on as things that sort of related to how he saw the world. Things were disjointed, broken, didn’t always make sense. But also, you know, there was this fun fantasy out there. When he was in school, he wrote a book called Dr. Which, which was sort of a parody of Doctor Who. So it was on his mind very early on as things that he liked and he wanted to write and work with. I don’t know that he always pictured working on Doctor Who eventually, but those things did sort of make their way into Hitchhiker’s things as well. I won’t say Doctor Who came first because they overlapped.

Christian · 23:27 He had sent his original Hitchhiker script to the Doctor Who writers, which is what got him a job writing for Doctor Who while simultaneously writing the radio series for Hitchhikers. It was a very messy, overlapping time. And even other Douglas properties besides Hitchhikers pull from unused Doctor Who material or will allude to things from Doctor Who. So the working relationship between all those properties is very messy. First, though, I guess if we’re going to go chronologically, his Monty Python direction or connections are closer to how his writing style worked, I would want to say he wasn’t directly acknowledged as a Python at the time. If we wanted to give him some sort of role in Monty Python, we could say he was the ‘ninth’ Python. And really there were six official.

Christian · 24:23 They credited a seventh one, Carol Cleveland becomes number eight, and Douglas becomes number nine. He worked with a lot of the Pythons before he was doing Hitchhikers on various projects. He had worked with [John] Cleese. Not as closely as he did, though, with Graham Chapman. And so his work with Chapman, a lot more of that stuff, I think, directly makes it into Hitchhikers. It’s not exactly Monty Python, but it’s very very close to Monty Python. And specifically, I would say his stuff with Out of the Trees, which was him and Chapman’s sort of Monty Python-esque show. There’s a very big sketch about Genghis Khan and that makes it through to a lot of Douglas’s other stuff and got reused because I think he just fell in love with that idea once he wrote it down.

Christian · 25:10 He would also work with Terry Jones from Monty Python, not before he wrote Hitchhikers, but later on. But he was around the group, so I think they in general were an influence. He got to go and see the tapings, see their style. He made cameos in two episodes and then he received a screenwriting credit for one sketch later on. So they’re big in his heart. Doctor Who on the other side, he was looking for work and so he ended up over there after he had sent them his Hitchhiker script and he had written a couple of episodes for them, but he was really the script editor. So other people were writing stuff. He co-wrote stuff. They actually had some ghost authoring names for who wrote stuff when it represented three different authors at the same time.

Christian · 25:58 It’s a tangled up mess and not all of it ever even made it out.

Srihari · 26:03 Right. There’s also The Pirate Planet. I think I spoke to Nemo about this, and until he told me, I had no clue that the fourth book - or the fourth story in the Hitchhiker’s series - was the first one not based on something pre-existing. It turns out the third one, Life, the Universe and Everything, has some parallels with - or maybe a lot of parallels with; I’m probably mistaken - that specific Doctor Who story, The Pirate Planet. What can you tell us?

[Corrections cut out]

Nemo · 26:39 The Pirate Planet was its own thing. Douglas had also planned a Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen. [Corrections cut out] He’d pitched that to the Doctor Who team for the series where he was the script editor. The tradition at the time was that the script editor wrote the final story in the season. And the other tradition at the time for Doctor Who was that each story was four episodes except for the final story, which was a six-parter. But the script editor only did that one story in their own name, and that was either tradition or active policy - I’m not sure which.

Nemo · 27:30 Douglas had wanted Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen as the final story for the season. And the BBC bosses and bean counters had basically said, ‘That’s too big a story. That’d be too expensive. You’re going to have to come up with something else.’ And Douglas apparently was very much like, ‘Well, look, I’ll just keep pitching it and eventually we’ll run out of time and they’ll have to accept the story.’ And what actually happened was that they ran out of time and they still said, ‘No, you need something else.’ And so he had to come up with Shada kind of in a weekend. Shada then famously didn’t get finished and became famous as the unfinished story by Doctor Who legend Douglas Adams. And Douglas himself didn’t actually think Shada was that great.

Nemo · 28:20 He felt that it was a bit of a rush job. It was a story that was really only worth a four-parter, but it was stretched out to be a six-part story because that’s what the final story in the season was. And so then elements of Shada he recycled into Dirk Gently later on. And Douglas very much was not one to let a joke go, if the joke was good.

Nemo · 28:42 I mean, if it had never been used, of course he was going to reuse it.

Srihari · 28:46 The story about the biscuits or cookies at the railway station made its way into So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It’s quite interesting to me, along with the Innsbruck story, that this was probably from a time when it was not that easy, I suppose, to telegraph or keep a record of who came up with what first. So there’s quite a bit of that. There are also all of these contradictions. In a way it’s quite cathartic, isn’t it, considering how the series itself panned out afterward. One thing I wanted to clarify: The Pirate Planet had nothing to do with Hitchhiker’s at all, or was there any kind of inspiration?

Nemo · 29:26 The Pirate Planet was a standalone story that Douglas wrote.

Nemo · 29:34 It started off as quite an expansive story and got edited down in the rewriting to make it fit into a four-part story, and it became a little unclear what some of the parallels and symbologies were meant to be. But it served the basic need to be a four-part Doctor Who story in the season. I think Douglas was script editor in season 17. I think this was a season 16 story. It was The Keys of Time season, so Douglas also had to incorporate one of the elements of the Keys of Time as part of the season-long story arc. I believe it’s largely been reviewed as “it’s a passable Doctor Who story.” You can kind of tell that this is a writer having their first go at writing a Doctor Who story. You know, it’s okay, maybe a bit silly.

Nemo · 30:30 The Pirate Captain of The Pirate Planet kind of chews the scenery a bit, almost overacting, and comes across as a bit bombastic in a funny way. There are definitely humor elements to it, which some Doctor Who fans found off-putting. But obviously he impressed the BBC enough that they contacted him to be script editor for the following season. And, as Christian said, what he actually wrote versus didn’t write is a bit of a tangle.

Nemo · 31:12 And this is a little bit of trivia that’s kind of obvious once you watch it, but the Romana regeneration scene at the beginning of Genesis of the Daleks - how much of the story, versus detailed script, that Terry Nation provided, versus how much Douglas Adams fleshed out or polished or just edited, or whatever - that’s arguable. There are certainly a lot of people who say that Terry Nation just submitted a story outline and the actual script details completely were written by Douglas, but I don’t think that can be verified. But what’s pretty straightforward is that the Dalek story was a Dalek story. The idea that Romana would be regenerating at the start of it was not part of the brief. That’s not something that Terry Nation would have written.

Nemo · 32:08 So that regeneration scene is - I don’t know that it’s provable provable - but by any reasonable analysis that’s pure Douglas Adams, and that’s literally the job of a script editor: ‘Oh, we need an extra scene to explain a thing and the original writer didn’t do it. I’ll polish the script to add that bit in.’ It’s definitely a funny scene and is very Adams-ish in a way that most of the rest of the season - which is a great season of Doctor Who. But it doesn’t have that Adams-like, ‘Oh, that’s clearly a Douglas Adams story,’ whereas that scene does. City of Death the one that was written by Douglas from somebody else’s idea, who wasn’t able to finish it.

Nemo · 32:57 It wasn’t credited to Douglas because of the multiple authors, and script editors didn’t get stories within the season except for the final one. All of those elements meant that it wasn’t his name. But City of Death is clearly a Douglas Adams story as well.

[Cut out question, but reasked later]

Davorin · 33:22 I was just recently watching MASH, the TV series, and I couldn’t escape the idea that some of the tropes the writers of MASH were using were also used by Douglas in The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Mostly the bathrobes B.J. and the other main characters are using most of the time; also heavy drinking; also having fun like hoopy froods do; also insulting banter; also the insane bureaucracy of the war versus the insane bureaucracy of the Vogons; and the list goes on and on. He never mentioned it anywhere, but I’m suspecting that, since MAS*H was such a smash hit back in the ’70s, he must have gotten a little bit of influence from that TV series as well. Just as a thought maybe.

Christian · 34:32 Yeah, I would say there were a lot of things that Douglas would just kind of pull from the ether of things around him in general. And unless we could go back and sit in a time machine in the room with him, it’s going to be really hard to track it down because he himself, even though he wrote obsessively, he did not always take the best notes on where things came from or even remember it later on when stuff happened. Even some of the favorite passages that people will recognize from Hitchhiker’s were things that came from his childhood that he didn’t remember had come from his childhood, or didn’t say had come from his childhood. Later on, people like Jem Roberts would find out from his family, ‘Oh, yeah, Mom used to say that all the time.’

Christian · 35:14 He pulled from everywhere, everywhere around him. And that’s what made him special.

[Corrections cut out]

Srihari · 35:37 Now that the foundation is pretty neatly laid from every which direction, I think it’s a perfect time to segue to the main characters. First we have Arthur Dent, who is introduced as an ape descendant from planet Earth. I say ‘introduced’ because there’s obviously something toward the end of the series, without actually spoiling it. Funny I knew this because this was spoiled to me. Then there’s Ford Prefect, who is Arthur’s best friend and an alien from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. Then you have Zaphod Beeblebrox, the President of the Galaxy, somebody who has two heads - something that’s quite important lore moving forward.

Srihari · 36:24 Then there’s Tricia McMillan, who goes by Trillian, who is also an ape descendant. She is known to be a very intelligent person who has degrees in maths and astrophysics. And finally, Marvin the Paranoid Android, who is a depressed robot with a brain the size of a planet - something he loves to repeat on multiple occasions. Something that I’d like to say briefly as we introduce the characters, something I learned quite recently from - I think it was Douglas Adams’s appearance on Bookclub, which, interestingly enough, was the very first Bookclub episode of this millennium, BBC Bookclub, that is - where he spoke about Hitchhiker’s. When he was asked about Arthur Dent, he said that Arthur Dent is someone who comes across as quite dull, but he’s actually much smarter than people give him credit for.

Srihari · 37:22 And that is something that he sees - he sort of sees himself in Arthur that way. So there could be some parallels between him and Arthur Dent from this vantage point. I’ll get to the other one shortly, but because there are two pretty big questions that I have, which could only be dignified with lengthy responses, I’ll get the easier one out of the way. So, Davorin, regarding Ford Prefect: there is this theory that such a name was given to him because, of course, Ford Prefect picked a name that would allow him to neatly blend into human society, but he apparently mistook the Earth to be ruled by automobiles instead of human beings. What do you have to say about that?

Davorin · 38:19 I mean, it’s a really funny joke, but since I’m not a native English speaker, I didn’t get the joke until we started prepping for the Slovenian version of the podcast. So we decided that if the translator were to translate this joke, he wouldn’t be called Ford Prefect either, but something from ex-Yugoslavia. So Zastava 101 was the car that was similar to the Ford Prefect back in the days of old England. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a funny joke if you know where to look for it. But if you’re out of context - as I was most of my life - this joke was introduced to me really only in the last 10 years, probably.

Nemo · 39:19 Right. I think that’s actually pretty common. So, sorry, just regarding Ford Prefect: they were sold in Australia, and I wasn’t aware of them either. I discovered that was the joke years after I first read it, when I was on the forums, probably in the mid- to late ’90s, and it was pointed out: ‘Oh yeah, Ford Prefect, the car.’ I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’ I assumed Ford was just a generic-sounding name that the character picked out of a hat, effectively, and Prefect was a reference to, like, a school prefect - a word denoting a person. And that’s what I thought the joke was, like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a generic name of a notable person.’ So, yeah, it completely passed me by as well.

Srihari · 40:12 So going back to Douglas Adams seeing himself in Arthur Dent, there is obviously Trillian who is at the very beginning of course the girl Arthur Dent really liked, or rather describes as the really nice girl he once met at a really nice party in Islington. Christian. This sort of mirrors a part of Douglas Adams’s real-life story, doesn’t it?

Christian · 40:43 In a way, yeah. I want to say this doesn’t make it where the Trillian-Arthur story was based on a real-life event. Instead, what we found out - and one of his good friends, Richard Dawkins, really gives us the best account of this - was that he [Douglas] held a party later on in his life. I believe it was a birthday party. He invited Dawkins and, oddly enough, we had already talked about Romana: actress Lalla Ward was also invited to the party, and Douglas introduced the two of them to each other. They hit it off, end up leaving the party together, he didn’t see them for the rest of the night, and later that year they became married. So he writes about things and then they tend to happen around him anyways. Christian · 41:30 So he isn’t exactly Arthur in that story where he was pining after her, I don’t think, because this was probably his 40th birthday party, but he, you know, might have envisioned Dawkins whisking away the girl. He also, he did see himself as Arthur, but when he wrote Arthur originally, he was thinking of other people specifically. And I think he later related himself to Arthur the more he thought about it. But it wasn’t that idea in the beginning. He was thinking of Simon Jones.

Srihari · 42:05 So that’s when Arthur Dent meets Zaphod Beeblebrox on the Heart of Gold, and he recognizes him and says, ‘Oh, we’ve met,’ you know, ‘Should I say Phil rather than Zaphod?’ And he describes him as somebody who just drags Trillian away from Arthur while he was mid-conversation with her. Which is funny enough because there’s also some chatter amongst us about Douglas Adams being known as something of a ladies’ man, if that has any kind of weight to it. Anyway, lastly, something that’s highly debated even now: the real-life comparison to Zaphod Beeblebrox. The first thing people say is Donald Trump. Nemo, is this just a reductionist, lazy comparison? Is there some truth to it? Or is there more?

Nemo · 43:11 Yeah, I understand why people say that. He’s a fictional, very famous president who was a narcissist and, among a list of descriptions, was described as a crook. Donald Trump is a president who is a narcissist and is a crook. I think where it falls down is that Zaphod Beeblebrox was also described as an adventurer, an ex-hippie and a good-timer

[Cut out overtalk]

Nemo · 43:44 He’s inventive and charismatic.

Davorin · 43:49 And then the inventor of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters as well.

Nemo · 43:52 So, he’s inventive and adventurous. He was described by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the best bang since the Big One. Compare that with how Stormy Daniels described Donald Trump and, okay, they’ve both got descriptions from a famous whore.

Nemo · 44:15 They’re very different directions. Zaphod was also described as having been voted the worst-dressed sentient being in the known universe for the seventh time. We don’t have a record of what Zaphod thought of that. But visually, in the TV series for instance, his outfit is not stylish. He doesn’t feel like somebody who takes himself overly seriously. He’s got a sense of humor about himself, which ties in with being an adventurer ex-hippie in his personal past, as well as inventive and so on. So while I can see why people make that comparison of Zaphod to Trump - president, narcissist, crook - I think that’s a very reductive and limited view of who Zaphod is. The other thing about Zaphod is that he comes across in the books as stupid.

Nemo · 45:07 Trillian specifically addresses that in a piece where she notes that he’s clearly clever, but he pretends to be stupid for multiple reasons. He would prefer to appear stupid all the time rather than appear clever some of the time and ignorant other parts of the time. He’d rather just be seen as stupid all the time. I think that’s also where it gets misconstrued, with this idea: ‘Oh yeah, Zaphod, he’s the idiot president.’ It’s like, no, he’s the very clever president who puts on an idiot face. It’s subtle: he’s actually clever behind the scenes and it’s a mask. That’s not an impression I get of Trump.

Srihari · 46:06 Yeah, there’s one other thing. Zaphod is being chased by the police, while, at least for some time, he was the President, Donald Trump is, well, a convict and he’s still in the Oval Office. So I guess there’s one parallel between the two there.

[Cut out overtalk]

Nemo · 46:33 In terms of that parallel, Zaphod is described as serving several of his years in office from jail, which is quite different to the reality of Trump. I mean, the legal system would mean he couldn’t continue to be president in that situation now. So the galactic laws around this are quite interestingly different anyway.

Davorin · 47:01 Yeah, I was just thinking, while we compared Zaphod and Mr. Trump and whatever we’ve got, it still feels like an insult to the character of Zaphod Beeblebrox if he’s compared to the current President of the United States.

Srihari I can’t disagree with that either. I don’t think anyone would in this troop.

Nemo · 47:32 Yeah, it’s not a good comparison for anyone. My final thought on it is that there was a Hitchhiker’s short story, there was a prequel to the series, called Young Zaphod Plays It Safe. In that story, there’s a character who is described as being the most dangerous creature in the universe because they’re able to do things that are absolutely horrific and terrible, but they don’t trigger those warning signs in other sentient beings, so they get away with doing all those terrible, horrible things because nobody stops them. That character, in the original version of Young Zaphod Plays It Safe - sorry if this is a spoiler for anybody who hasn’t read it -

Nemo · 48:20 In the original version, it was implied that that character was Ronald Reagan, and in a later revision, Douglas actually made it explicit that it was Reagan. Like, that was one of the few times where Douglas’s politics was so clearly written that he was not impressed by Reagan, basically thought that he was a dangerous person who had this like, oh, he looks such a kindly old man. And clearly he’s getting away with doing crazy things because he looks so lovely.

Srihari · 48:59 I guess it was also with dogs in a way in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I mean, I guess the American here would have something to say about that. Christian, if you’d like to add something.

Christian · 49:04 Yeah, I agree with everything as far as the comparison goes. There are some parallels, sure, but it is reductionist. Zaphod was based on a few different people that Douglas specifically mentioned. None of them were politicians. They were actors and friends around his life who were aloof and fluffy. And despite Donald Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2, where he leaves a child alone in a hotel in New York, he doesn’t have a whole lot of acting credits. So Douglas wouldn’t have been thinking of Donald Trump when he originally wrote it. He was thinking of other politicians at the time, but he was also in the UK he wasn’t really concerned with what was happening in US politics at any given time. Zaphod’s descriptions are more generally applied to bureaucracies and politicians in general.

Christian · 49:54 The only other time I had heard Douglas talk about politics was a radio interview he had done in Chicago. This was around the Clinton/Gore/Bush era. He had put himself on the side of Clinton Gore. So that tells us maybe a little bit about where he fell on the political spectrum. But again, it’s not really relevant, and it wasn’t something he publicly voiced opinions on all the time. He was more concerned with technology and how society deals with ecological issues. Politics would intertwine, maybe, but it wasn’t at the forefront of what he wanted to do with his life. It was something he could beat up, just like the Pythons would beat up.

Srihari · 50:34 Right. So, moving into the final segment of this particular episode, I think the best way to close it is by briefly breaking down the chronology of the various adaptations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It began as a BBC radio series in 1978, then it was written into a novel in 1979. In 1981 it became a BBC TV series, which Douglas wasn’t a big fan of. And lastly, there was the text-based adventure game in 1984. There’s a short archive clip on YouTube uploaded by the BBC where Douglas talks you through it - worth watching for anybody who hasn’t yet. So my first question in this last segment is once again to Nemo. There are overlaps and contradictions across adaptations. Is there any particular reason why he did that?

Srihari · 51:36 Was it to encourage people to consume one type of media over the other because he didn’t consider one to be superior to another?

Nemo · 51:47 I think, really, he changed things because he didn’t consider there to be one sacrosanct story that was adhered to. He was rewriting it from scratch, effectively, to suit each format. In terms of adaptations, actually, there are a few others that are more obscure, but they’re relevant here. Between the radio series and the novel, there were multiple stage shows in 1979. There was also an LP record released in ‘79, all before the novel. And there were other adaptations as well - comic books, which are pretty straightforward adaptations, for instance. The stage addition is relevant as an example because that’s the first version of Hitchhiker’s that introduced the cow at Milliways that wants to be eaten. And that scene made it into the novels.

Nemo · 52:51 I can’t remember if it made it into the LP records. It did make it into the TV series, quite famously played by Peter Davison, who went on to be the Fifth Doctor. If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, I think he’d been announced as the Fifth Doctor at the time of filming, but he had yet to start playing the role. Peter Davison was married to the actress who played Trillian in the TV series - I’ve forgotten her name [Sandra Dickinson]. But in terms of the adaptations, I’ve seen it written in a way that implies that Douglas’s intention was to deliberately write different versions each time. And I feel that actually puts the cart before the horse a little bit.

Nemo · 53:39 I think his priority was taking the story and making it work for each new format, whether it be novel or TV or computer game and so on. Things that worked, they carried over, and things that could be made better got changed. A good example of that is when Prosser is convinced to let Arthur go to the pub. In the original radio version, it was Arthur who did that convincing.

[general group agreement noises]

Nemo · 54:17 Arthur was smart. Arthur was the guy who was like, ‘Yo, I’m going to sit in front of the bulldozer and stop them.’ He was very forthright. He had much more of a spine in those opening scenes than he’s really shown to have later on. And there’s an argument that Arthur Dent was Flanderized, basically, by Douglas himself and became a reductionist version of just those tropes that were exaggerated. But, yeah, in terms of that argument with Prosser, in every later version the dialogue was shifted to Ford, where it makes much more sense. It’s a very alien type of argument where you’re just like, ‘What the hell is this guy thinking?’ and Prosser gets bamboozled into it. So, yeah, I think it makes an example of - I don’t think he changed it for the sake of change.

Nemo · 55:08 He changed it because there was a way of making it better. The way I see it, that’s his priority: how do I make it better? How do I make it fit this version of events, this format, whether it’s a novel, whether it’s a TV series or whether it’s a text adventure game? Apparently he wasn’t too interested in the comic books [DC]. The specific writer and visual artist who did the drawings apparently wanted to be collaborative with Douglas. Douglas wrote a letter saying, ‘Look, don’t Americanize it too much,’ but otherwise was pretty hands-off with it. He also made some interesting comments about doing an IMAX movie adaptation.

Nemo · 55:59 He had some ideas that were mentioned in an interview that show how he was thinking outside the box and doing things very differently from what was expected. He’d come up with the question: how can I do Hitchhiker’s on an IMAX screen? A massive screen which, at the time, was not being used for theatrical fictional films; IMAX was very much just nature documentaries. Douglas had this idea that, because it’s such a big screen, you could have different parts of the story in different parts of the screen, which would have been - and still would be - revolutionary on a true IMAX-sized screen. So, to me, that’s Douglas thinking: how can I make the story work for this format? That’s why there are differences.

Srihari · 56:51 To allude to that a little bit: Douglas himself talked about why the first book ended where it ended, as opposed to the Primary Phase - or somewhere at some point in the Primary Phase. I think there were six Fits in the Primary Phase; I keep getting confused with the four or six. But obviously there was a very different ending to both. The reason for that, according to Douglas at least, was that he was under pressure to wrap up the book from his publisher. So I’d like to put this question to all of you, if you could just chip in and then we could call it a day. Is there some truth to it, or is this again just a trivialized account? I guess part of it was answered already by Nemo.

Srihari · 57:41 But what do you think? Was this the entire truth or was there maybe more to it?

Davorin · 57:46 Yeah, I think it’s probably something along those lines because he was under pressure when he wrote the Primary Phase, because he was working on Doctor Who as well. Afterwards he was pressured by the agent/publishing company, and he was also tinkering with and upgrading the writing, the jokes, everything. So it seems only natural that if he came up with a great joke, such as the cow that wants to be eaten, he would put it in whenever it came from the universe into his writing, you know. So I’m not really surprised that the story differentiates/evolves. I think it evolves from medium to medium, and it’s only for the better.

Srihari · 58:47 Yeah, I mean Douglas famously disliked writing, so maybe that’s part of the bigger picture as well.

Christian · 58:57 I would say, too, Douglas, besides the pressure for the radio show, he had a co-writer for those last two episodes of the radio show, John Lloyd, who he had worked with on The Meaning of Liff and other things across his career. But they were also friends in the Adams Smith Adams Smith Adams era, which isn’t really something we discussed. Again, people in Douglas’s life were around him and helping him, and over time those people tend to get forgotten about. But John Lloyd wrote a lot of stuff, and I think the stuff that Douglas cut from the book gives us a good clue as to what was John Lloyd versus what was Adams when he continued forward. Stuff like Arthur’s brother getting nibbled to death by an okapi never made it out of the radio series into the books.

Christian · 59:45 So I would think that might be a John Lloyd original joke. I’m not sure, though, because Douglas having a brother, not having a brother seems like a very big thing in Arthur’s life, but, you know, it gets lost. So a lot of this stuff, we don’t have clear notes on who did what.

Nemo · 01:00:05 We don’t, from memory. I think the John Lloyd contribution is relevant because Douglas quite famously told John Lloyd, after they’d agreed to do the book together, that in fact he wanted to do the book alone. He wrote a letter to John Lloyd and delivered it through the BBC internal mail system, despite them working in offices right next to each other. John Lloyd felt that was very impersonal and quite rude, and they had a little bit of a falling out over that. Because Douglas was pushing John Lloyd out of co-writing the novel and doing it himself, as Christian said, he was removing the John Lloyd stuff.

Nemo · 01:01:00 The primary plot element that John Lloyd contributed was the Haggunenons. They only exist in the radio series. In every other version - I think some stage versions still keep the Haggunenons. There was a stage version of Hitchhiker’s that was performed in Brisbane, where I live in Australia, in 1983, and that still had the Haggunenons. And that stage version was based on one of the earliest stage versions from the late ’70s. But the records, the novels and so on all use Disaster Area. Douglas had to rewrite that, or reinvent a new plot point from scratch, to explain how they get from Milliways to prehistoric Earth. And if it’s not the Haggunenons, then it has to be something else.

Nemo · 01:01:51 So that’s extra creative pressure, and with everything else that was happening, he didn’t necessarily have time. The idea that he removed every bit of John Lloyd’s writing and every joke isn’t the case. There are things in the novels that we think of as very Hitchhikery that came from John Lloyd. The one I remember as an example is the demographics of the universe that were written on the back of a cereal box: the population of the universe, zero, because only a finite number of planets are populated compared with an infinite number of total planets. Not actually sensical logic, but it makes for a great joke. And apparently that is a John Lloyd joke. So Douglas Adams removed the John Lloyd plot points, but he still kept some of John Lloyd’s individual jokes.

Nemo · 01:02:50 But all of that, really, the summary is: John Lloyd contributed stuff to episodes five and six, and that was the stuff where Douglas was going to have to put more creative effort into writing brand-new plot elements. I think that would have slowed him down.

Srihari · 01:03:06 [Question about fits] I just wanted to clarify whether you’re referring to the TV series or the radio series.[crosstalk]

Nemo · 01:03:14 Yeah. So that would have meant more creative effort for Douglas. At that time he was pretty busy doing a lot of creative work. He was working on Doctor Who, there were stage shows, he was inventing stuff and writing stuff. It was a very busy time. Christian probably has the details better than I do offhand, but the exact timeline would involve when he was adapting the novel, what he was doing in the Doctor Who world, and what he was doing with the alternate Hitchhiker’s stage shows and other series. Fit the Seventh was probably also being written around that time.

Nemo · 01:04:04 This is one of those bits of trivia that might not be immediately obvious from our future perspective, but the radio series is these days often thought of as Fits the First through the Sixth as the Primary Phase, then the Seventh through the Twelfth as the Secondary Phase. In the timeline, the First through the Sixth were the Primary Phase, and that was early 1978, March and April. Then Fit the Seventh was in December ‘78, a Christmas special broadcast on December 24th. Then Fits the Eighth through the Twelfth were in January 1980, just a little bit over a year later - about 13 months later. So those five episodes were the Secondary Phase, and the Christmas special has kind of been lumped into the Secondary Phase because it’s a nice, neat grouping: these six episodes, then these six episodes.

Nemo · 01:05:05 The timeline was six, then one, then a gap during which there were stage shows, the record and the novel, then the next five episodes, then more stage shows and another record, then the second novel and so on.

Srihari · 01:05:25 For just the first episode, there’s quite a bit that we’ve unpacked now that we’ve come to the conclusion. And I must say, I’m quite pleased with the way this has turned out. It was something that was just an idea at the back of my mind, and I didn’t even think it would come in to fruition the way it did. The moment I formulated the group, not only did I have growing interest from members wanting to join, but we also have a dedicated Discord server for the show. We have members absolutely flooding the text channels with a lot of information, which makes my job both easier and tougher.

Srihari · 01:06:07 My role basically here is being the fetus, trying to have my knowledge base grow by means of having these conversations with people who have been enthusiasts for far longer than I have been. That being said, we come to the end of the pilot episode. I’d like to thank the guests for today, which are Nemo, Davorin and Christian. We’ll see you again shortly.