British television science fiction fiction was "Star Cops" (1987), which ran for only nine episodes to poor viewing figures on the corporation's second channel, BBC2. It was written by Chris Boucher, who had contributed scripts to "Doctor Who" and "Blake's 7", and was script editor for the later series entire run. The 1980s also saw the arrival on the BBC of two science fiction comedy series both of which had their origins on radio. The first was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1981) by Douglas Adams which amalgamated aspects of the original radio series with that of the subsequent novel. The second was
Profanity in science fiction series, in order to make it, literally, a four-letter word; the word appears in several Black Library novels before then, most notably the Ciaphas Cain series. It has escaped, in both forms, from the series to a whole variety of other contexts, from a "Dilbert" cartoon strip where Dilbert mutters it, through other television shows including "The Office", "Gossip Girl", "Veronica Mars", "30 Rock", and "Scrubs", and Robert Crais' Elvis Cole novel "Chasing Darkness", to everyday spoken use. The BBC Two science fiction television series "Red Dwarf" replaces most of its characters' profanities with invented terms, mainly "smeg" (possibly a