- Distanced from Current Events: The BBC provided a content warning when the episode involving the air attack on the Guide offices (a giant H-shaped skyscraper) was aired shortly after 9/11. To their credit, they didn't postpone the broadcast altogether.
- Edited for Syndication:
- In the original broadcast of episode 4, Trillian sings two lines of "A Day in the Life". Paul McCartney's lawyers promptly sued for royalties. So all subsequent releases have left the line out.note
- On the planet Magrathea, the background music at the start of one scene ("Shine on You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd) ends up being diagetic, as it's Marvin singing. Then he sings some Rock and Roll, and finally there's a Letting the Air out of the Band joke involving Also Sprach Zarathustra. It's cut out of the taped version, presumably because of the Pink Floyd clip.
- Re-runs of the series on BBC Radio 4 Extra shave off a few minutes to fit the shows into a half an hour slot, usually just leaving out some of the jokes, though in the case of the third series they also managed to completely excise Trillian explaining a rather vital plot point.
- Fake American: Ray Hassett, Jeremy S.R. Browne, Jonathan Adams and Jim Broadbent all assume American accents as the Magratheans, which is a bit weird, since Deep Thought has an English accent.
- Hypothetical Casting: When choosing the voice of the Guide, Douglas Adams wanted someone with a "Peter Jonesy sort of voice". After several rejections, he simply asked Peter Jones himself.
- In Memoriam: The first episode of the Hexagonal Phase is dedicated to Susan Sheridan, who had voiced Trillian in the previous radio series.
- Milestone Celebration: The first episode of the Hexagonal Phase was broadcast on 8 March, 2018 — exactly 40 years after the broadcast of the first episode of the Primary Phase.
- The Other Darrin:
- Between the Secondary and Tertiary Phases, Peter Jones (the Guide), Richard Vernon (Slartibartfast) and David Tate (Eddie) all passed away, leaving William Franklyn, Roger Gregg, and Richard Griffiths taking over their respective roles. For the Hexagonal Phase, the deceased William Franklyn was replaced with Douglas Adams' friend and co-author, John Lloyd.
- Bill Wallis, who played Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz and Mr. Prosser in the original two series, was replaced with Toby Longworth for the third, fourth, and sixth series due to being unavailable.
- Real Song Theme Tune: The theme for the radio show was a snatch of the Eagles' "Journey of the Sorceror", an instrumental from their 1975 album One of These Nights. It would be re-orchestrated for the Radio LPs, and that arrangement was later used for the TV series.
- Sequel Gap: There was a 24-year gap between the end of the Secondary Phase in 1980 and the beginning of the Tertiary Phase in 2004. After a brief flurry of activity, there was then a further gap of 13 years between the Quintessential Phase (2005) and the Hexagonal Phase (2018).
- Trolling Creator: Slartibartfast is not named for the majority of the episode he first appears in. Word of God explained that it was a joke at the expense of the woman who had to type the scripts — that after she'd typed this name a dozen times he simply says, "My name is not important".
- What Could Have Been:
- Michael Palin was the original choice to voice the Guide, but he turned it down.
- The seventh episode was originally considered to be a stand-alone Christmas Special (owing to both episode six tying up many plot threads and the broadcast date, 24 December 1978) in which Marvin would have been both figuratively and literally the star (of Bethlehem), and by participating in a nativity scene would be cured of his depression. In the end, it was a normal episode devoted to untying enough plot threads for the series to continue.
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