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Radio 4 Extra celebrates the 40th anniversary of Douglas Adams’s cult science fiction comedy.

The global multi-media success story that is “Hitchhiker’s” started life as a Radio 4 series in March 1978. The original scripts by the late Douglas Adams then went on to spawn a series of novels, a feature film, at least three stage shows, a TV series, a computer game, a collection of comic books – and a towel.

Arthur Dent is the last human alive, but in many ways he’s much less than that.

Forty years on from the first ever radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’s space travellers return to Radio 4 to be thrown back into the Whole General Mish Mash on Thursday 8 March 2018 at 6.30pm.

Grab your DON’T PANIC towel and enjoy the broadcasts.

The countdown for Christmas shopping is running. But DON’T PANIC, the perfect Christmas gift is ready for shipping: The DON’T PANIC Towel

‘A Towel – Just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitchhiker can carry.’*

For all hitchhiker’s and fans of Douglas Adams, the author of the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ we have the right companion for your life, the Universe and Everything. A beautiful bath towel, with the smart advice: DON’T PANIC.

Of course, you can use it just right after you have taken a shower or bath, but there are a lot of more things to do with a lovely towel:

‘Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough’*

Here you can get it: DON’T PANIC Towel Shop

Shipping worldwide – Even Lenin got one.

* Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 3

Time to relax, roll out your towel and pop a fish in your ear. Today, is Towel Day.
As a tribute to Douglas Adams on may 25th, carry a towel with you. The Towel Day, a wonderful tribute to Adams and a sign in public to identify other Hitchhiker :)

Shopping is a pleasure at the DON’T PANIC Towel Shop

The DON’T PANIC Towel Shop sells just one product, a towel as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams and his ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’.

The original quotation that explained the importance of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams’ work The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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