In 1981, viewers were distracted from their digital wristwatches by the hugely improbable adventures of an ape descendant called Arthur Dent, his friend Ford Prefect (who was not, as it turned out, from Guildford), and the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox. Oh, and a paranoid android. Along the way, the Earth got demolished to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. But that was fine because Arthur discovered that the planet had been specially built so that mice could run a multi-millennia-long computer program to discover the real ultimate question (to which the answer is, obviously, 42). If none of this makes sense, shove a Babel fish in your ear. Sadly, the pitch-perfect casting of all the main characters, the sublime animation of the Guide's contents, and the genuinely funny jokes were not enough to earn a return to TV for the hitchhiking gang. Douglas Adams, the writer, wanted to make a second TV series using ideas from an aborted Doctor Who script but his plans fell apart for reasons not entirely clear to this day. However, these story ideas were, in the end, used as the basis for the third Hitchhiker's book: Life, The Universe And Everything. So, as the Guide itself would advise, don't panic.