Fit the Twentieth is the twentieth episode or 'fit' of the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the second in the Quandary Phase.
Story summary[]
Arthur Dent finds his house undemolished and with the phone ringing. He lets himself in, but fails to reach the phone in time. Everything in the house is exactly as he left it, with the exception of a large pile of junk mail just inside the front door and a strange bowl with the message "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish." He phones his boss to explain that he hadn't been coming into work because had gone mad, but he would be returning soon after hedgehogs stopped hibernating.
Whilst driving, he suddenly sees Fenchurch. He stops and gives her a lift to the train station, saying that there is something terribly important he has to tell her. At a pub near the station, he attempts to tell her, but they are constantly interrupted by a woman selling raffle tickets. Fenchurch leaves to catch her train, leaving Arthur her phone number on one of the raffle tickets, with which he wins the raffle and leaves the ticket in the pub by mistake.
With no way to contact her, Arthur decides to instead find the location of the cave in Islington that he lived in two million years earlier. On his way he drops in to Friends of the World. He tries to donate some money to save the dolphins, on the grounds that amongst the junk mail were several leaflets asking him to do this, but the Ecological Man gets very angry at him, and chases him out of the shop with a plastic rhinoceros.
The next door he knocks on is Fenchurch's. She is surprised that he didn't call first, then shows him his lost Guide, and tells him that they need to talk.
Ford Prefect is on a spaceship in the Pleiades system, talking to a BT operator on Earth and trying to get her to connect him to the Speaking Clock, in order to bankrupt the owner of the ship, who works for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
A Zirzla spaceship lands on Earth. Robots emerge from within, demanding to be taken to the lizards.
Cast and characters[]
- The Book and narrator - William Franklyn
- Arthur Dent - Simon Jones
- Ford Prefect - Geoffrey McGivern
- Rob McKenna - Bill Paterson
- Fenchurch - Jane Horrocks
- Raffle woman - June Whitfield
- BT operator/Barmaid/News Anchor 2 - Ann Bryson
- Jim (Bartender)/News Anchor 1 - Simon Greenall
- Speaking Clock - Brian Cobby
- Ecological Man/Zirzla Robot - David Dixon
- Arthur's boss - Geoffrey Perkins
- Announcer - John Marsh