I just heard the BBC tape *Guide to the Guide* - extended version of the 20th anniversary documentary. Pretty good, apart from Debbie Barham's gushing script that has to crowbar quotes in left, right & centre, stuff that anyone interested enough to listen to the thing will find irritating. Peter Jones sounds like it was recorded on his deathbed, poor guy.

But the interview with DNA on the 2nd tape is ace, with some stuff I've never heard before about the influence on Tolstoy on his writing. Anyone heard it?

I'd like to - is it part of the BBC audio collection?

Yeah. I just bought it today. Some great stuff about how the final ep of the 2nd radio series nearly didn't make it on air. And (the trainspotter in me notes) yet another arrangement of the sig tune, very close to the original Eagles version.

Does anyone know if *Last Chance to See* is available on cassette?

I thought it was the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe episode (ep4 series1) that nearly didn't get broadcast because they were editing it right up to the last hour. One of the last from s1 anyway.

Was "Golgafrincham" the name of an obscure village that Adams re-used, in a "Meaning Of Liff" kinda way? Always wondered ever since I saw the book.

Best line from MOL: "Ainderby Quernhow = someone who constantly laments the 'loss' of the word 'gay' from the English language, even though they never had a use for it before, and only use it now in lamenting its 'loss'." Sharp.

No it was definitely the final ep of series 2, as Geoffery Perkins states in the BBC *Guide to the Guide* tape. The anecdote also appears in the Hitch-Hiker script book.

Anyone remember a schools TV prog featuring behind the scenes stuff from ep 9 of the radio show? The same prog also featured behind the scenes of NTNOCN and Blankety Blank.

Bits of this stuff were re-used for the excellent South Bank Show on Douglas Adams.

>Does anyone know if *Last Chance to See* is available on cassette?

Yes. But I can't remember what label. Sorry.

I'm not really Paddy Kingsland. I just posted this message cos I was sick no-one else had any info on this thread.

Douglas Adams ripped off everything I ever wrote, the bastard.

Having said that I think this whole Jim Youkum / 'Out Of The Trees' debacle is a disgrace.

So, who did he rip it off?

no, really. if he's ripped it off from someone, i wish to read the works of genius from this someone's pen.

Sheckley is the guy Adams supposedly ripped off. I've never read any but I heard it's good stuff. Someone once lent me a book by Vonnegut under his Kilgore Trout pseudonym and that is supposed to be a big influence on Douglas Adams too. It was quite funny, but I think HHGTTG is better.

If we're gonig to carry this to its logical conclusion, War & Peace was ripped off from the first proto-humanid to put charred stick to dusty patch of ground.

And even *that* was better on the radio.

Red Dwarf and Terry Pratchet are quite obvious Hitch Hiker rip-offs, so it all goes on and on like an ever flowing thing.

Also have you seen that h2g2 website Adams has started? What a crock of shit! Write a fucking book, you fat bullshitter!

Yeah! Stop writng comedy websites and go out into the industry and do it!


...hang on.

It's not a comedy website he's written. It's so poor and meaningless it defies description.

Hang on. Where is it? I do believe I may have encountered it and thought it "quite good".

http://www.h2g2.com

The idea is that "ordinary people like you and me" are called "researchers" and they can submit articles.

Then (very, very slowly) some special people called "editors" decide whether or not to "approve" each article. But you are free to read the unapproved ones as well, which you can do a full text search for.

i.e. it's identical to the Web as a whole. Approved articles are just like pages that have got into Yahoo, and the others are just like those indexed automatically by a search engine. So there's very little point to it other than creating a "brand."

I anticipate two ripostes to this argument:

1. "You should try it out more before judging it." I did give it a good go, even going as far as submitting an article. But what's the point, really, when all the other articles are either gibberish or terrible attempts to rip off Adams's style?

2. "Ahhh! I bet they didn't approve your article, thus turning you into a bitter old fool!" No, they did approve the article. But I suspect this is because they will approve anything that at least makes grammatical sense and isn't embarrassingly unfunny.

One highly amusing thing about it is that they are very concerned with being globally politically correct, which is an almost impossible goal. Hence my article has had the phrase "in the UK" inserted into it at apparently random locations to stop it being UK-centric.

On the subject of Adams's political correctness, it's interesting to note the removal of "Agglethorpe" - 'a dispute between two pooves in a boutique' from the revised version of The Meaning of Liff.

Even though the idea of 'pooves' being the plural of 'poof' is actually quite a funny idea in itself... One can imagine a pissed up skinhead bellowing 'Oi! POOF!' but 'Oi! POOVES!' just doesn't have the same impact.