This article is part of a series about the 50 greatest fictional deaths of all time. It has been reprinted with permission of the Douglas Adams estate from The Original Hitchhiker’s Radio Scripts.
Ah yes, the whale. Well, this came about as a result of watching an episode of a dangerously insane TV detective show called Cannon in which people got shot the whole time for incredibly little reason. They would just happen to be walking across the street, and they would simply get killed, regardless of what their own plans for the rest of the day might have been.
I began to find the sheer arbitrariness of this rather upsetting, not just because characters were getting killed, but because nobody ever seemed to care about it one way or another. Anybody who might have cared about any of these people—family, friends, even the postman—was kept firmly offstage. There was never any “Good night sweet Prince” or “She should have died thereafter” or even “Look you bastard, I was meant to be playing squash with this guy tonight,” just bang, clear them out of the way, on to the next. They were merely, excuse me, Cannonfodder.
I thought I’d have a go at this. I’d write in a character whose sole function was to be killed for the sake of a small detail in the plot, and then damn well make the audience care about it, even if none of the other characters in the story did. I suppose I must have succeeded because I received quite a number of letters saying how cruel and callous this section was—letters I certainly would not have received if I had simply mentioned the whale’s fate incidentally and passed on. I probably wouldn’t have received them if it had been a human, either.
