The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase. Fit the Thirteenth through Eighteenth (i.e., 6 episodes). Above the Title Productions, broadcast on BBC-Radio 4 weekly (with repetition) from 21 September to 26 October 2004. Based on Douglas Adams's Life, the Universe[,] and Everything (1983). Adapted by Dirk Maggs, "following instructions left by Adams" (Wikipedia). For a somewhat-distubringly full information, see the Wikipedia entry , 24 June 2006. Available augemented and uncensored as a BBC Audiobook three-CD set (2004), from Audio Partners, 35469, which comes with a booklet of information on the show (and a too-brief glossary of cricket terms).

In addition to the usual mechanical and cybernetic paraphernalia of the Hitchhiker's series, note the following conceits. A cloaking device based on the "Somebody Else's Problem field," which works on the tendency of sentient beings to perceive something problematic as Sombody Else's Problem" and immediately stop perceiving it entirely. A "Bistromathic drive" powering a space ship, controlled by what seem to be rather random activities in an Italian bistro in a restaurant-style control room.  The centrality to the threat to the galaxy and, indeed, the universe, based in, initially, eleven robots dressed and equipped as cricket players, except that they are killer war robots and use their augmented equipment accordingly.  The back- and front-stories have cricket-central devices as it turns out that the threat to the univese is from the Krikkitmen (sic), who undergo an experience like that in Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" (1941), but decide to resolve the existential crisis that comes from learning of the rest of a vast universe, by destroying it, i.e., the universe. The potential destruction involves a supercomputer, the depressed robot Marvin linked to a computer, a supernova bomb or two, one of which would probably work, and the salvation of the universe in Arthur Dent's incompetence as a cricket bowler. For those not brought up on cricket and who may find (as Tertiary Phase cheerfully allows), the game incomprehensible and painfully boring, Tertiary provides an answer to the question of what might make the game actually almost interesting: rest upon it the fate of life, the universe, and everything. (RDE, 24-25/06/06)