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The drunk/water line has always been my absolute favourite Adams joke.
I’m pretty sure I got this one early, even though I’d never heard of the ford prefect as a specific ford model. (And there probably weren’t any here in Canada.) Just kind of ‘Oh, that must be an extremely old/English/both car model name. hee hee’
I got it. (But then I like classic cars, especially British ones. Now if only I could get a yellow Anglia with a flame job and an amputated leg…)
I am on the last Phase (season) of the radio shows and there is at least one joke I just got now. In the story Arthur tells Fenchurch about someone eating his biscuits while he was waiting for a train and then finding them under his newspaper afterwards. I had apparently misread it that the guy didn’t actually eat them, but had snuck them under the paper, like a magic trick. I just realized that it was his whole packet that had been under the newspaper and he had been eating the other guy’s biscuits, not vice versa. I need to go back and reread the episode to see how stupid I was. In my defense, though, it is in the fourth book which I have only read a dozen or so times, rather than the others which I can pretty well recite in their entirety.
Speaking of the new radio broadcasts, I don’t particularly recommend them. The first two phases, the orginals, are a lot of a fun, and a few of the jokes come off funnier when the voice actor nails it (which is not entirely common). On the whole the books hang together and the absurd jumps in plot are more whimsical eccentricity than wtf moments like they are over the radio. The last three were done after Adams’s death and are not nearly as good. The production values are astronomically higher than the originals, but they suffer from the transition in format.
In moving from radio to novel, as was done with the first two phases, he was able to rearrange the action and make the plot hold together much tighter. He was also able to expand a great deal and add a lot of humor. In moving from the books to the radio, as was done with the last three phases, they tried to keep too much from the books. As they were written originally as novels there is a whole lot of Adams talking directly to the reader. This would have resulted in too much narration for radio (making it pretty much an audio book) so they made a lot of it into dialogue. This doesn’t make any sense in context and takes away all the characters’ voices making them all sound like Adams himself.
I highly recommend getting the original radio broadcasts from Amazon UK (the ones available over here are in mp3 format and of terrible sound quality), but get the backage that has the originals and a lot of extras, not the one with the originals and the new broadcasts.
I gotta say, I really liked them, particularly the slightly-revised ending for the last phase. But then, I’m one of those freaks who liked all five books of the series a lot. 
Also, in the new series we get to hear Douglas Adams as Agrajag. I mean, how can you beat that?!
So did I. Way back when, too. Not all Americans are unaware of the rest of the world, you know.
Make that three of us 'mericans that got it.
Hell I have even worked on one.
This is a true story. Adams describes it happening to him in Salmon of a Doubt, but feeling lucky because both he and the other guy left the train station with the same story, only he came away with the punchline.
Although Adams had often claimed the “stolen biscuits” story happened to him, it’s a common legend that predates both his claim and its appearance in So Long.
Is it true that it began to vibrate violently whenever you went over 50mph?
Grim
Heh, I thought it would be funny to rename myself Austin Healey, hearing the rugby player of that name mentioned on TV was a bit of a let down 
Ford Escort would have sufficed for English and American audiences alike as both nations got an Escort IIRC, but Prefect seems quirkier. Better an older car you may remember your parents having than one you drive yourself perhaps.
I only caught a glance during the film, but IIRC Ford really is nearly knocked over by a Ford Prefect, which is a nice touch if correct 
Totally agree with you on the Tertiary, Quandary, and Quintissential Phase radio series- they’re easily as good as the Primary and Secondary phases, and well worth getting on CD!
Not sure what you mean about there being five books in the series, though…
You’d also need a hamster named Special Patrol Group to go with it, you realise… 
Now, the question is; which one puts out more hot air? 
I didn’t get the joke until I saw the movie. I assumed it had to do with the Ford car company and English school Prefects… I shrugged and let it go, not everything English is funny 
Hm, you could swallow him live, or materialize him as a whale above the atmosphere of a planet, or you could give him a heart attack by making something interesting happen at a cricket match, or…
Seems to me there’s lots of ways you could beat that.
You could even use his face as the last image when the Heart of Gold activates the infinite improbability drive at the end of the movie.
Just to let you know young whippersnapper, I had an Escort, it was my first car and I thought the world of it. Except when you drove up a hill in the rain. Those vacuum driven windscreen wipers would just grind to a halt.
On another note, if you get the Dove recordings, you can hear Douglas as everybody in all of the books, and narrating them, etcetera. Completely unabridged - I really reccomend them - he has a voice that sets off the humor of his writing perfectly somehow.
Not that the new radio plays aren’t great too, in their own way.