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

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.

Links

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.

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?”

Links

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.

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

Paul McCartney

In Life, the Universe and Everything, we’re treated to Adams’ thoughts on Paul McCartney. One of his little one-liners, in reference to a tune being sung on Krikkit is “Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds”.

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings is from Essex, and is the worst poet in the universe. She is not to be confused with Paul Neil Milne Johnstone who died in 2004 but hailed from the same county and was an actual poet of some success. He was referred to by his real name in the radio series but all subsequent versions used a different one.

Peanuts

Peanuts are very good for replacing salts and proteins lost from travel via matter transference.

Perfectly Normal Beasts

No one knew where the Perfectly Normal Beasts came from, or where they go. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Arthur and Ford destract one with a pikka bird presented by Old Thrashbarg, and ride it to the Domain of the King.

Persephone

Persephone is a new planet discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, which was nicknamed Rupert, after the parrot belongong to one of the astronomers that discovered it. It has a dark and sombre landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars on the mind of an abandoned child.

Peter Jones

Peter Jones is the voice of the Guide in the first two radio series, and the TV series. He purportedly had trouble saying the word “encyclopaedia” (as I think we’ve discussed before), so they ended up splicing two different recordings of the word together. Keen listeners to this podcast and the original series might notice that I tend to slip into Jones’ pattern of speech when I’m reading Adams’ words, and that’s mainly because I’ve heard them so many times that his delivery is almost baked into my brain. And for that, he deserves our love and respect.

Phargilor Kangaroo Relocation Drive

The Phargilor Kangaroo Relocation Drive is a means of travel by which a ship may be ejected suddenly through the fabric of the spacetime continuum and come to rest far from its starting point. This is however an emergency device and there is rarely time to plot where the ship will land.

Links

Join Mark and the Jons as they traverse the P section of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and take a sneaky pitstop at O.

Oolon Colluphid

Oolon Colluphid is the author of heretical works of non-fiction. We’ve covered many of his books already, but titles include Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

Orion Beta

Orion Beta is noted for its madronite mining belts, where Ford learned to play a drinking game involving telekenesis and obsene forfeits.

Pangalactic garbleblaster

The Pangalactic Garbleblaster is the best drink in existence, according to the Guide.

Parallel Universes

Now, the Guide has had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God.

The first thing to realise about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel, because being parallel doesn’t mean anything. It’s all part of the Whole Sort of General Mishmash, but I thought it worth bringing up since it’s sort of noteable by its absencen.

Paralys-o-Matic

The Paralyse-o-Matic is a bomb of some sort. Zaphod throws one into the crowd that comes to watch the uneiling of the Heart of Gold.

Parties

In the third book, Arthur gets hit in the small of the back by a party that’s into its fourth generation, and has taken to conducting raiding parties of nearby planets, depleating them of stocks of cheesey snacks and booze.

Links