Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Radioplay (1980)
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
So begins The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, part two of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the reason why May 25th has been decreed Towel Day, in tribute to author Douglas Adams, whose BBC radioplays were later edited into several essential novels and this 1980 LP.
Ironically, the anecdote explaining why a towel is the single most important item that a hitchhiker can carry (“if they want to see the galaxy on less than thirty Altairian dollars a day”) is ironically omitted here, along with numerous memorable gags, leaving something to be desired vs. the first album.
Said album had left our heroes -- earthlings Arthur Dent and Trillian, aliens Ford prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox -- facing certain death on planet Magathrea, prior to escaping far into the future, to the titular Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Perched in a time-bubble at the end of time itself, the eatery obviously contradicted all kinds of space/time conventions, but then, this is why it’s been called “One of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering”.
Once there, our friends reconnect with characters both new (e.g. Hotblack Desiato, frontman with plutonium rock band Disaster Area) and old (Marvin the paranoid android, who has waited millennia for their return, lately parking cars), before absconding with the former’s sun-crashing stunt ship and being selflessly teleported to safety by the latter.
Alas, as I mentioned above, multiple tasty storylines from the book and BBC special had to be excised for brevity, so the rest of the program centers on Arthur and Ford’s encounter with Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, whose tale now seems strangely pertinent to our post-COVID-19 experience.
It tells of the clever way in which planet Golgafrinchan managed to efficiently rid itself of a full 1/3 of its useless population -- insurance salesmen, telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, marketing executives (hey, wait a minute!) -- by telling them their planet was doomed, then staying put after blasting them off to crash-land on a distant planet ... which turns out to be prehistoric Earth.
I don’t know about you, but if I could place all of the Trump-influenced anti-vaxxers into a space ship, and blast them off to another galaxy (or the heart of the sun), I’d, uh, strongly consider it.
This LP of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe concludes in another cliff-hanger, with Arthur and Ford trapped on the ancient planet/supercomputer (you’ll have to listen to the first album for that explanation) while native neanderthals die off and the Golgafrinchans take over, inadvertently subverting the ten-million-year program meant to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
That, you’ll have to read about in book number three (entitled, uh, Life, the Universe and Everything), or listen to the original teleplays, because I’m not aware of an abridged version of the book trilogy’s final chapter on record ... something as incongruous as Adams’ subsequent decision to write a fourth book.
Anyway, R.I.P., Douglas Adams, and long may we celebrate Towel Day!
More Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.