Beware of the Leopard: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy podcast

Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the S section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Saquo-Pilia Hensha

King Antwelm made a famous assumption that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire personal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it. Now, the people of Saquo-Pilia Hensha hold an annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm.

Sass

Sass means “to know, meet, have sex with”.

Science

“Let’s be straight here”, says an earth scientist, at a press conference discussings Rob Mckenna. “If we find something we can’t understand we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that.

No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is.”

Scrabble

Arthur tries to get the indigenous people of Earth to play Scrabble, and then discovers he can pull letters out of his homemade Scrabble bag to find the answer to the Ultimate Question. He pulls out the question “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”

Séance

Zaphod, Ford and Arthur hold a séance – you see? – to speak to Zaphod’s great-grandfather. One of the great gags you get in the radio series is an actual dial tone followed by a bunch of bleeps as the call connects.

Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha

Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha is, as its name suggests, a plural zone. It’s also where the Earth lives – sometimes – and anyone born here is advised not to travel via hyperspace. It’s also the name of a big Hitchhiker’s fan club.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they finish up the R section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and make a move on the Ss.

Rula Lenska

Rula Lenska plays Lintilla and her clones, and the Guide in bird form in the radio series.

Russell

Russell is Fenchurch’s brother. To Arthur’s mind, the name Russell always suggested burly men with blond moustaches and blow-dried hair, who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirtfronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on snooker matches.

RW6

The RW6 is a sexy and beautiful ship, and the sort of thing you only saw in the sort of magazines that were designed to provoke civil unrest. Jon Bounds, what sort of magazine is that?

Rymplon™

Rymplon™ is a new synthetic fabric which was terrific for space travel because it looked its absolute best when it was all creased and sweaty.

Sandwiches

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. “Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.”

Santraginus V

Santraginus V is a marble-beached planet where you get seawater for a pangalactic gargleblaster, and where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in. “Oh, that Santraginean seawater” says the Guide. “Oh, those Santraginean fish!”

The drummer for Disaster Area went mad and made friends with a rock there.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they traverse the R section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Reverse temporal engineering

Reverse temporal engineering is a new technology of “unfiltered perception”, which is a marvellous way of making anything you want to have happen, happen, without all that tedious mucking about with probability drives or Italian waiters.

Danny, is there a name for the kind of thing you add to a sci-fi or fantasy universe that can just solve any problem? Is it a deus ex machina or is that something else? [I know it’s something else, but I’m assuming you know what I mean! I also wanted to not give this one to Jon for a change]

Richard Vernon

Richard Vernon played Slarti in the radio and TV series. He was born on the same day I was, and if he were still alive, he’d be celebrating his 94th birthday. But he died 21 years ago.

River Moth

The river Moth is, well, a river. It is, as previously described, slow and heavy, and if you make a raft to sail down it, you can use a towel as a, well, sail. And that’s about all we know of the River Moth.

Satire

The panel discusses the Hitchhiker’s Guide ’s place in the pantheon of sature.

Rob McKenna

Rob McKenna is a rain god, with 231 different categorisations of rain documented in his little book. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him. He’s played by Bill Paterson in the radio series, and he’s a rather dreary chap.

Room of Informational Illusions

The Room of Informational Illusions is a deck on the Starship Bistromath that basically equates to another version of VR, like the Sense-o-Tapes from the original book.

Roosta

Roosta rescued Zaphod from Ursa Minor Beta during the bombing of Megadodo Publications. He’s played by Alan Ford in the radio series, which probably makes him the galaxy’s resident wideboy. He has a towel which contains a number of flavourings, chemicals and other substances that you can ingest by sucking a particular end.

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Mark and Jon Hickman welcome Danny back to the Leopard with an episode in which we pull out random letters from the Scrabble bag. Warning: your mother would not approve of you listening to this episode.

We discuss feedback from Twitter and email, educate Danny on the Baby Shark phenomenon, learn more about the Mandela effect, and Jon continues to make fun of Mark for liking heavily-detailed Swedish crime-fiction.

We also look into staffing and casting a hypothetical Random Dent TV series, Jon reads some spam and Mark talks about being scared by VR.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they continue through the R section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Radiophonic Workshop

The Radiopohinc Workshop was a BBC department that mae music and noises for BBC programmes, originally for radio and then for TV too. Arguably their most famous contribution is the Doctor Who theme. They were formed in 1958 and carried on for another 40 years until John Birt, the then Director General shut them down as they weren’t profitable enough.

Random Dent

Random Dent is Arthur’s daughter, mothered by Trillian from sperm donated by Arthur in order to travel around the Galaxy.

She’d been born in a spaceship that had been going from somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to somewhere else, somewhere else had only turned out to be another somewhere that you had to get to somewhere else again from, and so on.

Ratchet screwdriver fruit

Once picked, ratchet screwdriver fruit needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin which crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

The ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal is a mind-bogglingly stupid animal with a gaping mass of slavering fangs. You can easily fool it by putting your hands over your eyes, because it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.

The Reason

One night, a spaceship appeared in the sky of the planet Dalforsas, which had never seen one before. The tribesmen who saw it swore that they’d seen a sign from their gods which meant that they must now arise and slay the evil Princes of the Plains, who likewise had seen the sign and assumed it to be an order to kill the tribesmen. This sort of thing happened a lot, as pretty much eeryone on the planet took everything that happened as some sort of sign.

This was mainly a problem for the forest dwellers who lived where the battle would inevitably and repeatedly take place. Whenever the forest dwellers complained and asked why their forest needed to be destroyed yet again, someone from either side would tell them the Reason, in very calm and rational tones. The forest messenger would nod dumbly and walk back to his tribe, where he’d try to explain this very sensible Reason, only to have completely forgotten it.

Reg Nullify

Reg Nullify leads the Cataclysmic Combo band at Milliways. He can be a little proactive on the drums, if Max Quordlepleen is any judge.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they finish up the P section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and get into some Rs.

President Yooden Vranx

President Yooden Vranx was Zaphod’s predecessor. It was his idea to steal the Heart of Gold. but… was it?

Probability

The guide says that if you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds, but the chances of getting picked up by another ship within that timeframe are two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand seven-hundred=and-nine to one against.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz is the commander of the Vogon Constructor Fleet, who uses the new Guide - equipped with reverse temporal engineering - to find a way of destroying all the Earths in existence along the probability axis. He is a fairly typical Vogon, in that he is thoroughly vile.

Qualactin Hypermint

Float a measure of Qualactin hypermint extract when mixing a pangalactic gargleblaster, over the back of a silver spoon. It’s redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones: subtle, sweet and mystic.

R

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor.

Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda

The Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda were a site of battles between the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax and the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, both of which I think we’ll be covering later.

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Join Mark and the Jons as they traverse the P section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Politics

The Jons explain why David Icke is like a British Rail sandwich, and that lizards eat babies.

Pondermatic

The Pondermatic is another computer not as smart as Deep Thought, who in fact called it a “cybernetic simpleton”.

Poodoo

Poodoo is an executive from the company that built the cloning machines that created the hundreds of millions of Lintilla clones we meet on Brontitall, in the second radio series.

He draws up agreements to cease to be, which are disguised as marriage licenses. Two of the three Allitnils - clones designed to be irresistibly attractive to Lintilla and her clones - “marry” two of the Lintilla clones, and thus the Lintillas are destroyed.

Population

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, but not every one of them is inhabited. So there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero.

From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

Practical Parenting in a Fractally Demented Universe

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, “Oh, hi Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?” involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, OK?”

Prak

Prak is a little man with scraggly hair, given too much of a truth drug, after the Krikkit robots stole the Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice and jogged the surgeon’s arm while the drug was being administered. When asked to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, he begins to tell the court the entire history and present of the universe.

Pralite monks

Ford learns how to skin animals on Earth from an ex-Pralite monk. The galaxy is littered with them apparently, all on the make, because the mental control techniques the Order have evolved as a form of devotional discipline are, frankly, sensational - and extraordinary numbers of monks leave the Order just after they have finished their devotional training and just before they take their final vows to stay locked in small metal boxes for the rest of their lives.

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Jon Bounds, Jon Hickman, Danny Smith and Mark Steadman meetup in real life to discuss their favourite characters, put the Guide on shuffle mode and drink a homemade pangalactic gargleblaster.

Huge thanks to everyone who came to see us record, to Elle for holding the mic for Danny, and to the Mockingbird Cinema for having us.

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Join Mark, Jon and Danny as they continue traversing the P section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Philip Pope

Philip Pope recorded a character voice in the Starship Titanic video game, wrote the Krikkit song and voiced one of the masters of Krikkit in the radio series. He’s also partly-responsible - along with Richard Curtis - for a pitch-perfect BeeGees parody.

Photon-ajuitar

The photon-ajuitar is a musical instrument, with a keyboard.

Pikka birds

Pikka birds live on Lamuella, and they’re very distracting to Perfectly Normal Beasts.

Pintleton Alpha

On Pintleton Alpha can be found the Resettlement Advice Centre, which Arthur visits in Mostly Harmless to try and find a home that’s a bit like Earth.

Pizpot Gargravarr

Pizpot Gargravarr is the custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex. Or at least, his mind is. His body is probably off having a far better time of it, going to parties and that sort of thing.

Playbeing

Playbeing is a magazine, devoted in roughly equal parts to galactic politics, rock music, and gynaecology.

Poghril

Poghril is an impoverished planet in the Pansel system, whose entire population got wiped out through food poisoning, apart from one man who ate the 239,000 fried eggs that had appeared thanks to a trip with the Improbability Drive. He later died of cholesterol poisoning.

They were already a pretty pesimistic race to begin with, having a popular riddle that goes “Why is life like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket of hyena-offal?” to which the other would reply “I don’t know either; wretched, isn’t it?”

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Join Mark, Danny and Jon Bounds as they play through as much of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game as they could. Spoiler: it’s still not much.

This was recorded live on Friday 25th May 2018, for Towel Day.

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