The joke that gets lost is Ford Prefect named himself after the make/model of a car because he perceived that cars are the dominant life form on Earth.
The central joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a race of dipshits building a planet-sized computer to answer the question of "life, the universe, and everything" and then a million years later it says the answer is 42, and somehow that has taken on a William Gibson level of prescience
Yes, and a lovely, whimsical metaphor for the creative process. Gotta through yourself at it knowing you could get hurt, and allow distraction to get you accidentally airborne.
no one in the UK who was of the age to read the books or listen to the radio series had heard of the Ford Prefect either; we just heard or read the joke and appreciated it - I always assumed Adams made up the model name like Aaronvitch calling the car in Rivers of London a Ford Asbo
You might not have heard of them - they were out of production by then - but I had. They weren't as common as the Anglia, but people who used second hand cars did drive them
I always enjoy the Monty Python references that Adams used. It's a brilliant bit of writing. 'You'll have a national philosophers strike!' 'And whom will that inconvenience?'
