The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series) instance of radio drama series
Development
Early development
Douglas Adams had contributed comedy sketches for BBC radio programmes produced by Simon Brett (including The Burkiss Way and Week Ending), and was asked to pitch a radio sitcom in February 1977. Adams initially "came up with various ideas and various permutations of people living in bedsits and this sort of thing" as this "seemed to be what most situation comedies tended to be about." Adams said in an interview that when Brett proposed a radio science fiction comedy series, he "fell off his chair...because it was what I'd been fighting for all these years". Adams wrote his first outlines the same month.Originally to be called "The Ends of the Earth", each episode would have ended with the planet Earth meeting its demise in a different way. While writing the first episode, Adams realised that he needed a character who knew what was going to happen to Earth before the other characters, and therefore made this character an alien. Adams remembered a title he came up with had while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria in 1971, and decided that this character would be a "roving reporter" for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pan-galactic encyclopaedia and travel guide. Recollections by his friends at the time indicate that Adams first spoke of the idea of "hitchhiking around the galaxy" while on holiday in Greece in 1973.As the first episode's writing progressed, the Guide became the central focus of his story, and Adams decided to base the whole series around it, with the initial destruction of Earth being the only holdover from the "Ends of the Earth" proposal. In Adams' outline, the character of Arthur Dent was called "Aleric B", the joke being that the audience initially assume the character is also an alien rather than a human. Adams renamed the character for the pilot to "Arthur Dent". Adams' biographer M. J. Simpson suggested that the character was almost certainly named after the 17th century puritan writer Arthur Dent, author of The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven first published in 1601, although Adams himself claimed no recollection of consciously choosing the name.
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