These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, with guests Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics).
Iconographic Evidence
Notes and Errata
- The episode title plays on the official song of the 2010 World Cup, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. The song also features South African band Freshlyground, and was a big hit in both Europe and Africa. But it wasn’t without controversy: there were claims of plagiarism, though these were dismissed by the supposed victims, and some criticism of having a Colombian artist perform the song for the first (and so far only) World Cup held in Africa.
- Tansy was previously a guest for both of our live shows: “A Troll New World” from June 2019, and “Unalive from Überwald” from August 2024. Fun fact: you add both of those episodes together, they’re still shorter than this one! (But they’re both around an hour and a half long.)
- “Likely lad” has a couple of meanings, but the most common is derived from Geordie slang, meaning “likely to succeed”. It seems to have originated from boxing, but has expanded to mean someone with potential. In some places, it’s also used to mean “likely to cause trouble”. The phrase was popularised by the BBC sitcom The Likely Lads in the 1960s. This featured the misadventures of two young men in the Northeast of England, Bob and Terry, who like football, beer and girls.
- The new faculty member Ben couldn’t remember was the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. “Recondite” means obscure, or hidden, leading Ben to wonder if this is really a new character, or just a new and broader title for the Reader in Invisible Writings… But the Reader in Invisible Writings is Ponder Stibbons, who is present in the same scene, referred to by one of his more recently acquired titles, the Master of Traditions. So no; a new character, it would seem.
- We have confirmed that there have been multiple Megapodes that attend Discworld conventions, carried by various fans. We’re currently hoping to contact the Australian fan we met doing it to find out more about her Megapode! We think it was either a custom job or a repurposed generic weird bird toy. We’ll let you know the score when we do!
- Hunting the Megapode is almost certainly inspired by the “Mallard Song” (not to be confused with the Duck Song, or indeed the separate English folk song “The Mallard”) of Oxford’s All Souls College. All Souls is made up only of Fellows – there are no student members of the College, and recent graduates (usually in law or history) can apply to join via an examination and interview. The Mallard Song is the College’s official song, and it’s sung every year at the Bursar’s dinner, complete with a refrain of “Ho, the Bloud”. More importantly for this book, it’s also sung once a century during a ceremony that recreates a moment from the building of the college, when supposedly a large mallard flew out of the foundations. The last ceremony was in 2001, so unfortunately most of us won’t be around for the next one. But you can read the original lyrics of the song, and learn more about the ceremony – which includes carrying around a “Lord Mallard” in a sedan chair, following a wooden duck on a pole – at this 2018 blog post from The History Girls.
- The University tradition of the Ceremony of the Keys appears near the start of The Last Continent, where it’s revealed that it happens around 2 AM every morning when a group of three bledlows present the Archchancellor’s Keys to the bledlow on gate duty. The whole business is very clearly a pisstake of the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, which also happens every evening. We found this whole playlist on YouTube of the Ceremony over the years. It’s said to date back to the 14th century, though it’s current form is probably no more than a couple of centuries old.
- We’ve previous discussed Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. An English author best known for his humorous novels, especially Jeeves and Wooster, his name should actually be pronounced “Woodhouse”. He came to a bit of an ignominious end, effectively exiled from the UK, but his work is still seen as quintessentially British comedy. Wodehouse is very definitely one of Pratchett’s influences; both biographies mention him reading Wodehouse’s work at an early age, especially in the pages of Punch magazine.
- Brazeneck College is first mentioned during a faculty meeting at the start of The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory”), published in May 2005. There it’s spelled “Braseneck”, but as it’s Unseen University’s rival in the building of Very Big Things, seems clearly to be a school of magic of some sort; it’s location is not mentioned. It becomes Brazeneck in it’s very next appearance, “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devlish Devices” (see #Pratchat63, “Decline by Committee”), published almost at the same time as The Science of Discworld III. In this short story, it’s held up as an example against which UU is being measured by A. E. Pessimal. Brazeneck College publishes papers, and attracts many new students, which is said to be “to the benefit of the city”. Many readers have assumed this means Brazneck is based in Ankh-Morpork, but we feel bound to mention that the text does not say which city. Pessimal could be arguing that UU needs to be a benefit to Ankh-Morpork in the same way Brazeneck is to it’s home town. In Unseen Academicals, Brazeneck is referred to as both a College and a University, and is explicitly in Psuedopolis. Afterwards it isn’t mentioned by name again; in The Science of Discworld IV (see #Pratchat71, “It Belongs in a University”) the Dean is said to Archchancellor at Pseudopolis University, perhaps implying that Brazeneck College has changed names, or is now part of a bigger institution.
- As mentioned, Ponder Stibbons is introduced as a student wizard in Moving Pictures, which you can hear more about in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
- Ponder’s memory of his first magic comes when Ridcully organises the first football game amongst the wizards and has two captains pick teams. The “fat kid” was off limits since his father owned a sweet shop, leaving Ponder the bullies’ main target: ‘which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder’s fingers and Martin Sogger’s pants caught fire. He could smell them now. Best days of your life be buggered’.
- British comedy in the 70s and 80s frequently featured sketches and gags about football. The most famous example is probably Monty Python’s “Philosophy Football” sketch, in which Ancient Greek philosophers play German ones. But Ben was most influenced by The Goodies. The 1975 episode “Wacky Wales” featured a Welsh minister (played by Jon Pertwee) who turns out to be leading a coven of rugby-worshipping druids, resulting in an “ecclesiastical rugby sevens” tournament. But the big one for association football was the 1982 episode “Football Crazy” from their final season, in which the Goodies try to solve the problem of violence at football matches by first changing the game to make it less sexy, and then banning spectators, leading football fans to turn their attention to ballet instead. While the concepts of the jokes hold up well, won’t link a clip here, mostly because they use the kind of homophobic language common for football hooligan taunts of the time. (And thankfully less common now.)
- Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby’s second book, first published in 1992, and now a Penguin Modern Classic. The memoir is split into chapters, each of which relating the experience of watching an Arsenal game and how it related to Hornby’s life at the time, especially his romantic relationships, and his relationship with his Dad. It’s been fictionalised and turned into a romantic comedy film twice: 1997’s Fever Pitch starred Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell, with a screenplay by Hornby. A 2005 American version, directed by the Farrelly Brothers, changed the story to be about baseball, and starred Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. This version was retitled The Perfect Catch outside America.
- Tansy mentions two sport-based comics by American comic artist and writer Ngozi Ukazu. Her webcomic Check, Please! ran from 2017 to 2020, and tells the story of a young queer figure skater who joins his college’s ice hockey team. It’s still available online, and has also been collected into two print volumes. The new graphic novel Bunt: Striking Out on Financial Aid, published in 2024, is the story of an arts college freshman who learns her scholarship is no longer valid – but if she can field a softball team and win at least one game, then all nine players will get an athletic scholarship. Classic stuff! Ukazu also published her first work for DC Comics in 2024: Barda, about the warrior Big Barda, raised on the hell-like world of Apokolips, ruled by one of the biggest villains in the entire DC Universe. It’s all about her finding love in adversity, and also sounds like a great read.
- We’ve talked about Pratchett’s addiction to fat jokes many times, but our deepest discussion is in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, where we talk about Agnes with guest Myfanwy Coghill.
- The acronym WAGs – “Wives and Girlfriends”, or “Wife and/or Girlfriend” in the singular – was popularised with the British tabloid press in the 1990s. They were then writing so much sexist drivel about the female partners of footballers – mostly those who were already celebrities in their own right – that they needed a shorthand. It really took off in the early 2000s with coverage of Victoria Beckham (more on her in a moment) and then Cheryl Cole, a singer with British pop group Girls Aloud who married footballer Ashley Cole in 2006. The term persisted into the mid 2010s, and spawned television series like the ITV drama Footballer’s Wives (2002-2006) and reality TV shows like WAGs Boutique (2007) and the Australian WAG Nation (2012). Despite being flagged as sexist by the Equalities and Rights Commission in 2010, it still pops up from time to time. A number of related acronyms have also been created; the best one is “Celebritity’s Husbands and Partners”, or CHAPs.
- In 2023, country-pop crossover megastar Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, a pro American Football player who’s been a “tight end” with the Kansas City Chiefs team since 2013. Their relationship was highly publicised, but in a turnaround for this sort of interaction it was clear far more people knew who Swift was than Kelce. Taylor Swift fans began to take an interest in the game and the team, helping it to break all kinds of ticketing and merch records, but also sparking stupid social media exchanges complaining about the football coverage including footage of her in the stands. As of January 2025 they’re still together, and the two fandoms seem to have settled down (not that the Swift fans ever seemed bothered about her going to games, except for the fact that she would use a private jet to get to them while on her international Eras tour).
- Posh and Becks is the nickname given to celebrity power-couple David and Victoria Beckham. Victoria “Posh” Beckham, née Adams, found fame when she was cast in the Spice Girls as “Posh Spice” in 1994. In 1997 she married David Beckham, then a star player for Manchester United. The tabloids went crazy for them. They remain celebrities; Posh has a solo musical career, reunited with the Spice Girls, worked as a model, and started her own fashion and beauty brands, though those have not been financially successful. Becks moved on from the Premier League to the World Cup, playing for Real Madrid, and then LA Galaxy for the American Major League, before retiring from the sport in 2013.
- The Shove doesn’t have an exact Roundworld equivalent, but there have been several instances of “crowd crushes” at football matches (and other gatherings) where fans are shoved against the barriers of the pitch, relating in multiple injuries and deaths. The worst crush in British football was the Hillborough disaster in 1989, where 94 people died on the day and three more in the days and years after from injuries sustained in the crush. It resurfaced in 2016 when a second inquiry into the events found that both the design of the stadium, and the negligence of police and ambulance officers, were responsible for the disaster, not the fans themselves. This resulted in charges against six people in 2017, though charges against one of them was dropped.
- Elle McPherson is an Australian model and actress best known for magazine covers in the 1980s and 1990s – she holds the record for the most appearances on Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. In recent years she’s come under fire for her non-scientific views about medicine, especially after she recovered from breast cancer. She also dated notorious anti-vaccine activist and medical fraud Andrew Wakefield from 2017-2019. Appropriately for this episode, she also has a football connection (though the wrong kind of football): her father, Peter Gow, was a longtime President of Ben’s hometown rugby team, the Cronulla Sharks.
- There are eleven foot-the-ball “sides” named in the book. The main ones we mention by name in the episode: Unseen Academicals, Ankh-Morpork United, Dimwell Old Pals and Dolly Sisters Football Club. The others are mostly named after locations in Ankh-Morpork: The Angels, Treacle Mine Tuesday (aka the Miners), the Cockbill Boars, Pigsty Hill Pork Packers, Naphill United, Whopping Street Wanderers (aka the Whoppers) and Lobbin Clout.
- When discussing the team colours, we mix up the teams: Trev supports Dimwell Old Pals, who wear pink and green. Dolly Sisters wear black and white, so Ben was pretty close with blue and white.
- We’ve been unable to find any examples of Dimwell hats (again, not Dolly Sisters), or other Discworld football memorabilia (aside from a set of football cards created to publicise the book, the text from which is collected in A Blink of the Screen.) Certainly it doesn’t seem there’s been any official apparel, so if you know of any fan-made scarves or hats etc, please let us know!
- While a human named Igor works in Biers (as seen in various books, but especially Feet of Clay and Hogfather), the first proper Igor appeared in Carpe Jugulum, working for Count Magpyr. There have since been many throughout the later Discworld novels.
- Liz mentions midi-chlorians in response to Ben’s suggestion that Mr. Nutt’s “Little Brother” might be microbes in his bloodstream. We’ve previously talked about them twice, way back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World” (Tansy’s first appearance). In brief, they’re microscopic organisms introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menance to provide a scientific explanation for why some Star Wars characters are stronger in the Force than others. Despite being an idea George Lucas had during the development of the original film, this more clinical reason for the Force was not popular with fans.
- Ben notes a couple of other fantasy and sci-fi species with fantastic powers of recuperation. In Star Trek it’s established that Klingons have multiple redundancies built-in, including extra and more complicated organs, so they can survive grievous injuries. In the “grim dark future” of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, orks aren’t actually fungus themselves, but their symbiotic relationship with a species of fungus means that they feel little pain, and can regenerate from all but the most brutal injuries, requiring only fairly rudimentary surgical assistance. Warhammer Fantasy orcs, on the other hand, are pretty much the standard evil monsters of Tolkien-style high fantasy.
- The idea that under capitalism, the police serve as “protectors of capital”, is a simple overview of a more complex critique. While there are instances where this might be literally true, in most cases what it means is that the police force as an institution protects the interests of the capitalist class, not the workers. This includes not just capitalists and their property, but also the social relationships and structures that benefit capitalism – thus it is police who arrest protesters, but other bodies that shut down corrupt businesses.
- We skip over this in the episode, but when Glenda discovers someone has eaten lots of her pies, she asks Trev “Who ate all the pies?” This is a reference to a popular (though body-shaming and fatphobic) British football chant thrown at players considered to have put on weight or otherwise be out of shape. There’s a spurious claim that the chant dates all the way back to the 1890s, but it’s most likely a more recent invention; it was certainly at the height of popularity in the 80s and 90s, when it was used against players like Paul Gascoigne and the phrase “who ate all the pies?” made its way into popular culture, even outside of the UK. The chant is usually sung to the tune of “Knees Up Mother Brown” (written in 1918), and the reworked lyrics include a refrain of “you fat bastard”, which has been adopted (ironically or otherwise) by various comedians and musicians (and may be the inspiration for the infamous Austin Powers character). The chant also been used by the Barmy Army – UK cricket supporters who travel abroad to cheer on their national team – against Australian cricket players, including Shane Warne. Thankfully it seems to have faded away since around the time Unseen Academicals was written. (Thanks to listener Metal Nurse on Bluesky for pointing out that not everyone would know this one.)
- Glenda’s pie with the crispy onions is a “Ploughman’s Pie”, a variation on the “ploughman’s lunch”. This is a traditional pub meal, whose essential elements are bread, cheese and pickled onions, though modern variations add other things too. Glenda’s pie version has “cheese pastry” and a “hot pickle layer”, making it likely that it’s a meat pie with added ploughman’s ingredients, but it seems at least possible that Glenda’s genius could result in a vegetarian version.
- Cyrano de Bergerac (1615-1695) was a real person, a French writer, libertine and duellist, but he’s better known as a fictionalised version from the play Cyrano de Bergerac. Written by Edmond Rostand in 1897, the play’s version of Cyrano is a nobleman and gifted poet, scholar and solder in the French Army. He loves his cousin Roxanne, his intellectual equal, but considers that she could never love him back because of his enormous nose, which makes him “ugly”. Just as he’s persuaded to tell her of his feelings anyway, she announces that she’s fallen in love with a handsome but dim soldier, Christian, who is being sent to join Cyrano’s regiment. Initially against his better judgement, Cyrano is persuaded to help Christian speak and write poetically to Roxanne to woo her. The original story ends badly: Roxanne and Christian are married, but another nobleman who wanted Roxanne for himself spitefully sends Cyrano’s regiment to a dangerous battle. Christian dies in battle, but not before he realises Cyrano has been writing letters to Roxanne on his behalf, and that he loves her. Cyrano returns home and says nothing to Roxanne, who goes into a long period of mourning and joins a convent. Years later, Cyrano is fatally wounded by his enemies while on one of his regular visits to Roxanne, but while concealing his injury he accidentally gives away that he wrote Christian’s letters and loved her all along. She says she loves him, too, and he gives one last delirious speech before he dies in her arms. Ben loves the original, but recognises it’s not a modern love story. It’s one of the great French classics, though, and has been adapted many times; Ben’s favourite versions are the 1990 film version starring Gerard Depardieu, and Steve Martin’s weird 1987 American happy ending version, Roxanne. There’s also a 2019 musical version, Cyrano, which starred Peter Dinklage, that was itself adapted into a film in 2021; Ben’s yet to see that one.
- Lady Margolotta is introduced in The Fifth Elephant, so for more about her, see #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”. This is her first major appearance since then, and she’ll return once more, but she is also mentioned in several other novels, including The Truth, Going Postal and Making Money. While she doesn’t rule Überwald or any of the smaller countries nearby, she is clearly wields formidable influence. She’s a founding member of the Überwald League of Temperance, the “black ribboner” vampires who replace blood with another obsession; in Margolotta’s case, the obsession is not explicitly named, but the passage about her meeting of the League suggests it may be “control” – something rather less concrete than the other black ribboners we meet.
- The book Tansy mentions about Churchill’s cook, Georgina Landemare, is Victory in the Kitchen by Annie Gray, first published by Profile Books in 2020.
- The book Liz mentions about the fashion industry is le plus beau métier du monde by French anthropologist and ethnographer Giulia Mensitieri, translated into English by Natasha Lehrer as The Most Beautiful Job in the World for Melbourne University Press in 2020.
- More notes to come!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.