The 'live' version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This was broadcast on R4 recently. It's a lot better than the film (what isn't?!) but it shows just how good the original scripts were, because lots of the changes they've made to the stuff that hasn't been edited for time isn't as good.

Sample: in this, the Vogon captain isn't reading his own poetry, but Paula etc Jennings'. Why? What does that bring to it? You'd save a couple of seconds by not mentioning it and wouldn't need to change his 'So I write poetry..' to 'So I read poetry..'.

Sample loss: the reply to "I'd notice the difference (to having my brain removed and replaced with a simple computer)!", "No you wouldn't, you'd be programmed not to."

This entry was originally posted at http://lovingboth.dreamwidth.org/519188.html, because despite having a permanent account, I have had enough of LJ's current owners trying to be evil. Please comment there using OpenID - have and if you have an LJ account, you can use it for your OpenID account. Or just join Dreamwidth! It only took a couple of minutes to copy all my entries here to there.