The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy President; the depressed robot Marvin the Paranoid Android; and Trillian, formerly known as Tricia McMillan, a woman Arthur once met at a party in Islington and the only other human survivor of Earth's destruction thanks to Beeblebrox' intervention. The first radio series comes from a proposal called "The Ends of the Earth": six self-contained episodes, all ending with Earth's being destroyed in a different way. While writing the first episode, Adams realized that he needed someone on the planet who was an alien to provide some context, and that this alien needed a reason to be there. Adams finally settled
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on making the alien a roving researcher for a "wholly remarkable book" named "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". As the first radio episode's writing progressed, the "Guide" became the centre of his story, and he decided to focus the series on it, with the destruction of Earth being the only hold-over. Adams claimed that the title came from a 1971 incident while he was hitchhiking around Europe as a young man with a copy of the "Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe" book: while lying drunk in a field near Innsbruck with a copy of the book and looking up at