AWESOME DAY

Work has been OK this week - the backup system has returned to I think something resembling normality, which is good. Last night was a charity badminton meal where instead of going out for a meal, one of the women there cooks food and we pay what we would have to a charity. It works well and she is an ace cook, but Rob, Em and I all over ate.

Was woken up this morning at 4:30am by ludicrous rain, and didn't get much extra sleep, so spent most of the day being tired. It was nasty rain too, which Andrea in work said was very wet rain. A strange statement but described it perfectly.

Tonight was the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live. I took my Dad for his birthday, and Amy, Huw, Andrea, Dave and Robert from work all went too. It was simply incredible, they took many elements from all five of the radio shows and mixed them up to make a whole new thing, that was brilliantly done. It was a little odd how they did it, there was a row of microphones at the front of the stage, which the cast used randomly, a guy in the corner making sound effects with all sorts of things (just like the original show) a live band at the back, and Christopher Timothy in an armchair in the other corner, narrating the Book. They were all reading directly from scripts much of the time too. Strange, but it worked so well, and it was really good fun.

Christopher Timothy had some trouble with his lines since the script he was reading from had too small a print so they had to find him some decent reading glasses, but fortunately he managed to make a joke out of it and so it was absolutey hilarious when he stopped. Marvin in particular was very well done with someone walking round with a life size puppet, and Stephen Moore's voice coming over the PA, but with synchronised mouth lights which made it really convincing. The rest of the cast were great, Simon Jones captured Arther Dent perfectly, Geoffrey McGivern was ace as Ford Prefect and Susan Sheridan and Mark Wing-Davey were great as well. It was just a little odd hearing those so familiar voices coming out of those aged faces. The new people they had got in to play other roles were good as well, in particular the guy who played Slartibartfast. There was also quite a poignant moment at the end when they projected an image of Douglas Adams when the cast were taking their bows.

Afterwards we hung around the stage door and we were able to get stuff signed - I had taken my original 1985 book of the radio scripts in the hope of this and got it signed by all the main cast, which is amazing. I grew up reading that book before I even heard the radio series, so it was already a pretty treasured possession but now I think I'm going to have to put it away in a sealed bag and get another one to read.

What an amazing day. I'd almost forgotten about this coming up and I went into the show knowing absolutely nothing about it, so to be so completely blown away by it was great. Fantastic.