I've Got This Terrible Pain In All The Diodes Down My Left Side!

I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side

This is another comic installment from one of our Vintage & Antiques Community on G+ vintage bloggers, Steve from Mullard Magic. Steve, correctly identifies the vintage audio & radio components, making up ‘Marvin The Paranoid Android,’ in the current BBC radio 4 version of  ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.’ 

“I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side”, good old Marvin and, doesn’t the symbol for an indirectly heated thermionic diode look similar to Marvin 1.0’s face?

The original Marvin

Who can forget those fateful words by the laconic and lugubrious Marvin, the Paranoid Android from The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy who was also described as having a brain the size of the planet as the video embedded below will remind you.

 Of course, Marvin featured large in my formative years, because when I met the yet to be Mrs Mullard Magic, when she was a pert PhD student complete with tight perm and an even tighter pristine white lab coat (phwoarrr!), I described her to my oldest and best friend Jeff as “having a brain the size of a planet.”   Indeed, this description must have left its mark as it appeared in his best man’s speech some years later, anyhow, I digress…..

I am sure some of you may be aware that  the “Hitchikers Guide” has recently enjoyed a resurgence some forty years on from the first ever radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Douglas Adams’s space travellers returned to BBC Radio 4 to be thrown back into the Whole General Mish Mash on Thursdays at 6.30pm in The Hexagonal Phase.

Enjoyable though this series is,  I take issue with the redesign of Marvin though, not that I mind Jim Broadbent playing him, its just his appearance, Marvin that is, not Jim!!!!: –

Jim Broadbent with the new Marvin

And all of you vintage technology affectionados looking at the photo above will understand why, first of all, I am not sure I approve of Marvin 2.0’s head, crafted from a discarded Ultra Coronation Twin radio from 1953:-

Then there’s his torso, wrought from a jazzed up Brenell Mk 5 spooled and laced up with 7 inch tape reels with four cutouts – could these be doctored Maxell spools?

As if this isn’t enough his shoulder joints are crafted from two Shure 55S microphones borrowed from Graceland!!!!!

There again, who am I to bemoan the changes of appearance with the passage of time, although I still retain (in my own mind) my 10 stone 7, 28 inch waist of yore, Mrs Mullard no longer has the tight lab coat or the perm – no comment could possibly be made on the subject of pertness though…………

Old Steve can even make this non robot girl think she may have missed something by not tuning in to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!  No matter your little area of the Galaxy, you find the show here... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yfqst  and catch up on episodes.

Read more of Steve’s blogs by clicking on the following link:

Blog:- https://mullard.org/blogs/news

Click on the following link to Mullard Magic’s shop

Shop: https://mullard.org

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The other contributors to our series of Vintage and Antique Related Guest Blogs are:-

• mullardantiques.co.uk
• romaarellano.com
• stolenattic
• whimsicalvintage