Slartibartfast: Well, the Earth Mark II, in fact. We're making a copy from our original blueprints.
Arthur Dent: Are you telling me you originally made the Earth?
Slartibartfast: Oh, yes. Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway?
Arthur Dent: No. No, I didn't.
Slartibartfast: Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges
"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (TV Series)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[1] is a BBC television adaptation of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy broadcast in January and February 1981 on UK television station BBC Two. The adaptation follows the original radio series in 1978 and 1980, the first novel and double LP, in 1979, and the stage shows, in 1979 and 1980, making it the fifth iteration of the guide.
The series stars Simon Jones as Arthur Dent, David Dixon as Ford Prefect, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox and Sandra Dickinson as Trillian. The voice of the guide is by Peter Jones. Simon Jones, Peter Jones, Stephen Moore and Mark Wing-Davey had already provided the voices for their characters in the original radio series in 1978/80. In addition, the series features a number of notable cameo roles, including Adams himself on several occasions.
Although initially thought by BBC executives to be unfilmable, the series was successfully produced and directed by Alan J. W. Bell and went on to win a Royal Television Society award as Most Original Programme of 1981, as well as several BAFTA awards for its graphics and editing.[2]
We got up early yesterday to catch a train to Bergen - one of the only early starts on this tip, and gee it was hard, but worth it. The train departed just after 8am and arrived in Bergen on Norway's west cost just before 3pm. A long journey, but the scenery was worth every minute.
The train traverses rural scenery, passing through small towns, past farms, holiday houses, through beech and pine forests, hugging lakes and rivers. Initially the scenery is so typically Norwegian, almost stereotypically Scandinavian, that you'd almost think you were in a Norsca deodorant commercial.
Then the train starts to climb into mountains, and despite the cloudless, blue sky and warm weather, there are smudges of snow on the hilltops. Then as we climb higher, there are larger patches of snow, growing so that when we reach the highest station on the line, Finse, at 1222 metres above sea level, the snow is everywhere, banked up against the wooden tunnels. The snow is melting everywhere though, creating waterfalls running down the mountain sides, and rapids in the rivers.
Words don't do the scenery justice - it was simply breathtaking - better than expected or advertised on the NSB's website at
http://www.nsb.no/our-destinations/the-bergen-railway-article37778-4384.html. Bear in mind too, that this is not a tourist train like the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada, but a normal passenger train that takes everyday Norwegians from Oslo to Bergen and places in between.
Bergen was very pretty too, and surprisingly, it was not raining. (It rains very frequently in Bergen.) We had fish and chips at the old fish market, where they still sell fish, and somewhat disturbingly, whale, before flying back to Oslo with SAS. The flight was a quick 50 minutes in an old Boeing 737 - so old that it still had ashtrays in the seat arms, and no TV screens, so we got an in-person safety demonstration.