Hitchhikers Tour hits financial barrier and quotes God

The tour of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show, which I had previously tweeted had  been pulled from coming to Belfast, hit the final buffers today. Last night it showed before a full house, somewhat ironically in Kingston, the town that the first UK researcher on H2G2.com to reach 100 solo entries [i.e. me] went to university.

Part of the message from the producers echoes God's last message to mankind

***SPOILER ALERT***

"We're sorry for the inconvenience."

The full message was:

"The Radio Theatre Company deeply regret to announce the immediate cancellation of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Radio Show 2013 Tour. Tonight's performance at The Hawth, Crawley and tomorrow's at the Watford Colosseum will not take place, nor will any of the remaining scheduled shows in October and November.  Ticket holders are being contacted and should contact venues for refunds.

"Although a well-loved show, Hitchhiker's Live has been subject to the same extreme economic pressures as many productions touring the UK this autumn. Ticket sales across the board have been lower than average and we have not escaped this trend. A difficult financial environment for such a large and technical show means that covering operating costs has become impossible. As a result in the last 24 hours we have had no option but make the extremely hard and painful decision to stop the tour.

"We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and share the extreme disappointment and frustration felt by many who were looking forward to seeing the show. we sincerely hope that it can be brought back in the future."

While it makes the rumours that us in Belfast heard that the reason for not coming to Belfast was financial turn out to be true, even though 10 days later than being upfront would have been appreciated.

There is on the Facebook page a personal message from the star Simon Jones (Arthur Dent) and director Dirk Maggs:

A PERSONAL NOTE FROM SIMON JONES AND DIRK MAGGS

"With infinite regret, despite happy audiences and 5 star reviews, we have been forced to curtail this tour ahead of schedule due to economic adversity. Having worked so hard to put on a show worthy of Douglas Adams and his devoted fans, we are utterly devastated.

"It has been a pleasure to be a part of a company, band and crew who have become a close knit family. We know people hoping to see the show will be as horribly disappointed as we are, and offer our heartfelt apologies for any inconvenience this has caused."

 As well as the numerous fans who like me had found out that the show they had wanted to see was not longer an option, now of course the actors are also out of work.

As Mitch Benn (Zaphod Beeblebrox) tweeted:

 

with a follow up...

 

I'm hoping Mitch's home is a little more secure than that. If not he might be stealing a spaceship near you and going on the run.

Of course the tour was to go on until the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who and Doctor 6 was to have played the book next month. Here is what Colin Baker tweeted:

Sadly not even prayers to the Prophet Zarquon could turn this show into a success in the current situation. It is a rather sad day when top class touring productions cannot manage to reach the regions. We cannot allow top class theatre to end up only being shown in the West End, or maybe in the few major centres around the country.

Being dumped by a dear old friend

Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 80s I was used to disappointment. Every week I would scan through the tour lists in the back of Smash Hits and see if any of my favourites were about to tour. By in large when I scanned the list of dates there was often one omission:

Belfast

It wasn't because of a lack of suitable venue, we had that it was bands being scared to come here.

Thankfully in recent years things here have gotten better. Bands do come here and we have an even better and more accessible stadium venue that they can perform in now.

As many of my close friends will know for 35 years of my life I have had an obsession with a radio show, that became a TV series, then a computer game, then an online font of knowledge B.W.* (Before Wikipedia) and then a film, before becoming a touring production. Rather an odd progression, but then it is rather fitting for an extraordinary tale which is the story of a rather remarkable book.

You see last Summer the Hitchhiker's  Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live Tour took place in June and July, it was only a short run and Northern Ireland was no included, and I couldn't consider going anywhere else to see it. 

This year when the dates were announced I was trying to work out my itinery to see if it would be best to see it in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dunfermline or somewhere else. But then I ended up back in Northern Ireland so Belfast it was. A friend of mine, a fellow fan and contributor to h2g2.com was going to celebrate her birthday with a trip to see it and invited me along on the same night. So tickets booked we were starting to look forward to it next Wednesday.

Then on Friday, not Thursday, but then I never did get the hang of Thursday's I received the following email, from the Royal Opera House in Belfast.

Thank you for booking tickets with us for Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live - unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, this production has now been cancelled. Please contact our Box Office on 028 9024 1919 to obtain a full refund for your tickets.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience or disappointment caused by this cancellation.

Inconvenience! Disappointment! The only thing worse would have been if my planet had been demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass. 

Later on the Facebook page for the live show said the following:

The producers of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Live are very sorry that they will be unable to present the tour in Belfast at this time. They sincerely apologise for the disappointment and inconvenience caused and hope that they will be able to bring the production to the many fans in the North of Ireland at some stage in the future.

If you had bought a ticket we'd like to offer you a free audio download of one of our other shows. Before you return your ticket for a refund, just send a scan or photo of it to sales@hitchhikerslive.com and we'll contact you within a few days.

Now if I really want to listen to a recording of the original radio scripts I can do that, by pulling out my tapes or CDs of them. And the first two series have the bonus of having actual Peter Jones as The Book. Although I was rather looking forward to having Rula Lenska (Lintilla for series two) filling that role.

I hope that they do rearrange dates for Belfast. And I hope that they contact all of us who have bought tickets for something a little special, maybe a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster after the show with the cast or something. Reading some of the comments yesterday on the page and from friends it is rather a disappointment. But also the not knowing why is even worse.

You see we do wonder if having eleven security alerts and two fatal shootings might just have had a little something to do with the sudden cancellation of this shows. We all hope it does not, but being Northern Irish in the back of your mind that sort of thing always does cause concern.

As it is next Wednesday I may be pouring Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters by myself, raising a glass to absent friends not just Douglas Adams but most of the original cast who should have been there in front of me.

I may not know where, or if I'll ever get to see the show, but I know where my towel is.

* Indeed so much so that I was one of the first two researchers to write 100 solo entries for the Guide.

H2G2 reopened and under new management

Last night was finally the time that H2G2 completed its trip through the etha and landed after testing from a dedicated team of, well put honestly, friends. The doors were flung open at the new, old address of www.h2g2.com easy to remember.

After 10 years with the BBC the collaborative effort (how very h2g2) of Robbie Stamp, Aly and Brian Larholm, and the h2g2 Community Consortium. Robbie was a close friend of Douglas Adams and helped set up the site back in 1999 as well as producing the Hitchhikers' movie. Aly and Brian have a decade of social media expertise and wanted to bring that to an already existing community site and the Community Consortium were just a bunch of guys you know, and guyesses who didn't want to see the place they had known for up to 12 years disappear without a fight once the BBC decided to sell it off.

In the end all three banded together and offered the BBC a deal that would maintain the integrity of the site which had existed before the BBC lifeboat came along to rescue it from the Digital Village, after the period known to researchers as Rupert.

The much shorter transport phase has been far easier for researchers to deal with, they knew the site was coming back after the BBC shut the doors and turned out the lights at the end of September. Rupert really was a period of the unknown, with little cells of researchers setting up all sorts of groups to keep each other informed of what was going on. This time we  moved en masse aware of where we thought we were heading and hoping that when the switch was pressed to turn the lights back on, that well. It would work.

Well it has, and the researchers are already gathering to start once more on yet another new home. Not so much journey of the sorcerer but at least journey of H2G2.

Time to Save the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy #SaveH2G2 #H2G2

 PEOPLE OF EARTH YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE

 Don't Panic there is not a Vogon constructor fleet poised above us in the ionosphere, at least I hope not. But there is axe axe being wielded by the BBC over some of its online content. One of those sites is a quite remarkable site, it is a social media that was popular before Facebook reared it's head, it was an online encyclopedia of Life, the Universe and Everything before Wikipedia became the de facto font of all knowledge. It is a place where people have made friendships, many have then taken that online relationship offline into real friendships at meet up, some have fallen in love and even produced small people as a result of sexual co-joining. After all as Douglas Adams once wrote, most of the rest of the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy is full of sex.

This is story of one of that Guide's researchers.

Back in December 1999 a fan of a the books, Radio and TV series (there was no film back then) of Douglas Adams's opus saw a link from the online edition to The Times to a site that purported to be the online edition of the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy. He was hooked, he started to write articles about things he knew, get involved in the community, write for the community news paper. He was mildly dyslexic and the people around him helped him overcome the embarrassment of the occasional mistakes in what he wrote, correcting it with love.

He eventually became one of the first researchers to write 100 solo approved entries for the guide, under the nom de plume of Demon Drawer. He also wrote for over 100 collaborative entries and 100 articles for the H2G2 Post. He certainly gained an confidence in getting his written words out there on public display. However, in recent years his contributions to the guide have been less frequent, he still has works on progress that he revisits from time to time, but that doesn't mean that he has not been writing.

You are currently reading the words from the same person, one of the over 3,000 online pieces that he has written in various formats and on various sites including almost 2,700 blog posts on here.

H2G2 was difficulty once before, in the early days of this millennium when the Internet bubble started to burst. The lifeboat was picked up by the BBC. But on 24 January the BBC announced that it was making radical cuts to its online presence, the community, especially the old hands, felt here we go again. The result however is that the BBC is prepared to set H2G2 adrift again rather than merely turn it off at the switch, but it needs someone else to come by in the 'virtual' sense like the Heart of Gold and pluck us from the etha. The Community has set up its own Community Consortium to look after the needs of the community in that transaction, as one of the ancients (although not quite a 5 figure user number*) I wholeheartedly back this campaign and will do what I can to help Save Our Site.

It has changed my life not only through the confidence in my writing, but it was through finding love with a fellow researcher that I ended up in Scotland, it was through that I became so heavily involved in politics once more, it is through the site that a lot of who I am today has bizarrely come to be. H2G2 is more than just a mangle of words on a screen it is a community, it has a heart, it has a soul, it is a family.

Long may it continue.

(Aside) Can someone check, are the dolphins still around? (Pause) Good.

Yes it is too early for so longs, even the Delphinidae and Platanistoidea agree on that. There must be plenty more fish in the sea ready to keep H2G2 alive.

Your normally Hoopy Frood Demon Drawer

* A sign of great seniority in the early days, which us young upstarts having a six figure user number, mine is all the even number 104268.

It's Friday....So Patricia Neal Sood Still

Well it is Friday so I'm going to let you in on some of what I got up to this week and linked into what happened last weekend.

As Patricia Neal, who died during the week, starred in The Day the Earth Stood Still it is just cause to show you this which mentions her co-star Michael Rennie in the opening line.



As Mat Bowles who gets my hat tip says it isn't perfect in places but good none the less. But hey as it was the tenth anniversary of H2G2's Scottish Researchers Group last Saturday it is also an excuse to link to something I wrote earlier in another place.

Of course as well as H2G2 last weekend I also combined it with Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, of course not for the first time. His jazzed up performance of the song that merges the two doesn't have the visuals but here is the opening version of the song that goes with the immortal toast.



In my post earlier this week I did mention that the Skye Boat Song was something that Rupert Murdoch didn't own, so I was considering posting a version of it here. After all, Edinburgh's Tattoo is on at the moment, you can hardly move on the High Street and if you are trying to get around at the wrong time of the evening at the top of the Royal Mile or thereabouts forget it. But I thought of something a little more upbeat was appropriate.

SEXY MAC 2010^

^Scottish Edinburgh 10 Year Meet And Curry

Ten years ago (on Thursday*) the inaugural H2G2 (Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) Scottish Researchers Group meet up happened. We met under the Scott Monument although I was a little late having come the whole way from Northern Ireland that morning to be there.



A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. SRG members have fallen in love with each other, fallen out of love, there have been weddings, handknottings and bairns. However, we at least are re-enacting that first contact by meeting in the same place, under the Scott Monument with at least five of the original attendees towels in hand.

From then only two things will be the same as from that first day. A volatile, clear liquid will be partaken in various forms and a log, the tradition first started on a scrap of paper in that first meeting will be kept, added to by anyone and later be deciphered. As tradition dictates if it is in the log IT HAPPENED.

However, there will also be a hashtag and I may be taking live into my hands by putting the live feed up here.



* Though then it was a Saturday.