Another indication of the relentless march of time:
In 1978 I was a grad student in England listening to the first episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide on the radio. I thought it hilarious. My landlady was annoyed I was laughing so loudly in my top floor bed-sit. She was famously humor-deficient- rather like Margot in Good Neighbours but without the dress sense.
On this day in 1978, the first episode of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC radio. It was science fiction comedy, from a writer named Douglas Adams, (books by this author) who was also a writer for the show Dr. Who. The Hitchhiker radio series became popular right away, and so it was turned into a British television series, a movie, and five books: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992).
The idea for the series came to Adams while he was lying in a field in Austria, drunk and considering the vastness of the cosmos. He imagined a roving reporter who was an alien assigned to write about an "insignificant planet at the unfashionable end of the universe" — Earth — which is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. The story goes from there.
In 1978 I was a grad student in England listening to the first episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide on the radio. I thought it hilarious. My landlady was annoyed I was laughing so loudly in my top floor bed-sit. She was famously humor-deficient- rather like Margot in Good Neighbours but without the dress sense.
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