So how would such a mistake arise? I remembered when I used to hitchhike through Europe and would often find that the information or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it, of course, just came from stories of other peoples travel experiences.
At that point the title The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it had been hiding all this time. Ford, I decided, would be a researcher who collected data for the Guide. As soon as I started to develop this particular notion, it moved inexorably to the center of the story, and the rest, as the creator of the original Ford Prefect would say, is bunk.
The story grew in the most convoluted way, as many people will be surprised to learn. Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.
I think that the BBCs attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering peopleinitial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. Reports that Geoffrey and I and the sound engineers were buried in a subterranean studio for weeks on end, taking as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series (and stealing everybody elses studio time in which to do so), were all vigorously denied but absolutely true.
The budget of the series escalated to the point that it could have practically paid for a few seconds of Dallas. If the show hadnt worked
The first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked.
After a couple of weeks a letter or two trickled in. Sosomeone out there had listened. People I talked to seemed to like Marvin the Paranoid Android, whom I had written in as a one-scene joke and had only developed further at Geoffreys insistence.
Then some publishers became interested, and I was commissioned by Pan Books in England to write up the series in book form. After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two-thirds of it done. At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.
Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and script editing the TV series Dr. Who, because while it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didnt exactly buy you lunch.
So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was published in England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market best-seller list at number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.
This is where things start getting complicated, and this is what I was asked, in writing this Introduction, to explain. The Guide has appeared in so many formsbooks, radio, a television series, records and soon to be a major motion pictureeach time with a different story line that even its most acute followers have become baffled at times.
Here then
is a breakdown of the different versionsnot including the various stage versions, which havent been seen in the States and only complicate the matter further.
The radio series began in England in March 1978. The first series consisted of six programs, or fits as they were called. Fits 1 thru 6. Easy. Later that year, one more episode was recorded and broadcast, commonly known as the Christmas episode. It contained no reference of any kind to Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on December 24, which is not Christmas Day. After this, things began to get increasingly complicated.
In the fall of 1979, the first Hitchhiker book was published in England, called The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy . It was a substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series, in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but saves rewriting the dialogue.
At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was, by contrast, a slightly contracted version of the first four episodes of the radio series. These were not the recordings that were originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of substantially the same scripts. This was done because we had used music off gramophone records as incidental music for the series, which is fine on radio, but makes commercial release impossible.