Arthur Dent’s having a more troublesome Thursday than usual. For one thing, the local council has decided to demolish his house and several others with as little warning as possible, all to make way for a new bypass. To protest this, Arthur lays down in front of a bulldozer which would, without his presence, destroy his home completely. And while that’s stressful enough, Arthur’s somewhat odd friend Ford Prefect chooses this very moment to come along and insist that Arhur must come to the pub with him and imbibe heavily, and somehow – according to Ford – the end of the world figures into the proceedings. Arthur reluctantly agrees, but regrets it soon afterward when he hears, from the cozy confines of the pub, the destruction of his house. But before Arthur can exact his revenge on the bureaucrats who made this all possible, he becomes one of the only surviving witnesses, from the not-so-cozy confines of a Vogon Constructor ship, to the destruction of the entire Earth – and the slightly bewildered recipient of a babel fish, courtesy of Ford. As it happens, Ford isn’t from Earth at all, and is a roving researcher for an encyclopedic electronic book known as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The spaceship which Ford has managed to use to escape from Earth, with Arthur in tow, has a crew which isn’t from Earth either…and they’re none too pleased to discover that they have hitchhikers aboard.
written by Douglas Adams
directed by Alick Hale-Munro
music by Paddy KingslandCast: Peter Jones (The Voice of the Book), Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Geoffrey McGivern (Ford Prefect), Bill Wallis (Prosser/Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz), Jo Kendall (Lady Cynthia Fitzmelon), David Gooderson (Barman)
Notes: If you can imagine David Gooderson quite a bit more angry and strident, and you happen to be a Doctor Who fan, you might remember him as Davros from the 1979 Doctor Who story Destiny Of The Daleks.