Ten years ago Douglas Adams wrote a story about the world being unexpectedly demolished by hideous creatures from another planet. It was meant as a joke.
Now, animal by animal, tree by tree, the world is being demolished around us and the hideous joke is that we are doing it ourselves.
After years of reflecting on the absurdities of life on other planets Douglas Adams decided it was time to think about life on this planet, and the absurdities of what we are doing to it.
Since this was a job he was almost hopelessly unqualified to do, he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine, and together they set off round the world with a succession of different BBC sound engineers to find some of the world's rarest and most endangered animals. Mark provided the knowledge, the experience and the expertise, and Douglas provided the ability to point at things in trees and say "Gosh, what's that?" a lot.
They went
* to Indonesia to find the man-eating dragons of Komodo
* to New Zealand to find the world's largest, fattest, and least-able-to-fly parrot
* to China to find the blinded and deafened river dolphins of the Yangtze
* to Mauritius to find the world's rarest and most sexually confused kestrel
* to Zaïre to find some of man's closest living relatives, the gorillas, the world's most endangered rhinos, and some customs officials who ought to be endangered but seem not to be.