Author: Ben

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 Brazeneck College 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 its home town. In Unseen Academicals, Brazeneck is referred to as both a College and a University, and is explicitly located in Psuedopolis. 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 be 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”. His fear of exams there is somewhat at odds with his later presentation as an all-round genius.
• 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, we 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.)
• Fast & Furious is a long-running franchise of action films, beginning with The Fast and the Furious (2001; dir. Rob Cohen), about a tightly-knit crew of street racers and thieves who carry out their crimes in high-speed cars. In the first film, the Toretto family are hunted by the police; by the end of the film the undercover officer investigating them is well on the way to becoming part of the family. As Liz mentions, the cops never do anything to stop the street racing in the films, though they do turn up at the end of a race or two. As of this episode (January 2025), there have been ten films in the main series, a spin-off film, an animated TV series, and still more in the works. Each film has pushed the franchise more into fantasy: by the sixth film (Fast & Furious 6, 2013, dir Justin Lin) the street racing crew are being offered an amnesty to work with the police to take on mercenaries; in the seventh (Furious 7, 2015, dir. James Wan), they’re recruited by secret agents to take on terrorists. The spin-off Hobbs & Shaw (2019, dir. David Leitch) is a buddy cop film about a cop and mercenary from the series teaming up to take on a “cyber-genetically enhanced” terrorist threatening the world with a “programmable supervirus”. You get the gist.
• 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 relates the experience of watching an Arsenal game and how it connected 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. (”Tight end” is an offensive playing position – i.e. one that helps score. The innuendo would make Pepe proud.) 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 shots 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 a modern Roundworld equivalent, but it is very similar to the way crowds would gather in the “mob football” played in medieval times. (Indeed the Audible audio drama adaptation of Unseen Academicals renames “foot the ball” to “mob ball”; more about that below.) Mob or medieval football seems to have had few rules and often didn’t involve kicking; but not much detail of the game (or games; there would have been many local versions) survives for us to know how it was played.
• In modern times, the closest thing to the violence of the Shove have been the disastrous “crowd crushes” at football matches (and other gatherings) where fans are shoved against the barriers of the pitch, resulting 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 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 are 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. (We’ve previously mentioned Warhammer 40,000 in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”)
• 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.
• Scream 3 (2000; dir. Wes Craven) is, as the name suggests, the third film in the Scream franchise of slasher horror films. The series is famous for having characters who know and use the conventions of slasher films. Scream 3 is about the killer, nicknamed “Ghostface” because of the mask they wear, targeting the cast and crew of the film-within-a-film Stab 3, based on the Ghostface murders. A subplot involves the main character Sidney (who survived the first two films) discovering that her mother had worked as an actor in the 1970s and was sexually assaulted by the producer who is now making the Stab movies. The film has many references to real Hollywood, including the names of the actor characters (e.g. Jennifer Jolie, Angelina Tyler and Tom Prinze),
• “The beautiful game” is one of many nicknames given to association football. It dates back to the 1950s, and was popularised by the Brazilian player Pelé, one of the most famous footballs of the 1960s and 70s, but its origins aren’t entirely clear. It now usually refers to the sport as a whole, though it used to also mean a specific style of play popular in Brazil, the jogo bonito; that style is now called art football (futebol-arte). The Beautiful Game is also the title of a 2000 West End musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton revolving around a local football team in 1969 Belfast; a 2012 film documentary about African football; and a 2024 Netflix drama starring Bill Nighy about the English team in the Homeless World Cup. Because there are many different kinds of football (or codes, as we call them in Australia), and most are just called “football” where they’re most popular, most end up with multiple nicknames. A similar name for association football in Australia was “the world game”, popularised by the SBS TV series of the same name (2002-2019) hosted by commentator Les Murray.
• Diego Maradona (1960-2020) was an Argentine football player and later manager, often regarded as one of the best players in the history of the game. He rose to fame in the 1980s playing for Barcelona and Napoli, and set records for how much he was paid to transfer between teams. He is still revered in Argentina, especially for his performance in the 1986 world cup, where he scored two goals in the quarter-final against England and ultimately led the team to victory.
• “Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” is a reference to a famous comment given by eccentric Country Party MP Bob Katter from Queensland in response to a media question about his opinion on same-sex marriage in 2017. This was only days after the results were revealed of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, a non-binding postal vote held in Australia over whether to amend the marriage act to allow same-sex couples the right to marry. His answer takes an odd turn almost immediately; we won’t spoil it, because you can watch the whole 20 second clip on YouTube.
• The furies in the book are the “Little Sisters of Perpetual Velocity”, and they come from Ephebe, the Discworld equivalent of Greece. The name is inspired by the names of orders of Catholic nuns, something Pratchett has played with before, most famously with “the Chattering Order of St. Beryl” in Good Omens.
• Light Emitting Diodes – LEDs for short – are basically tiny light bulbs. Old-fashioned light globes produce light by passing current through a filament, a conducting material that heats up so that it glows, producing light and heat. LEDs produce light from the movement of electrons and positive charges (called “holes”) through the diode, which is a kind of semiconductor – a device that only conducts electricity in one direction. As the charges interact, they emit photons – the particle of light – in a specific wavelength. This process doesn’t produce (much) heat or significantly degrade the diode, and requires less energy than a traditional incandescent bulb. Red, green, amber and infrared LEDs were relatively cheap and easy to make, but the blue LED was the holy grail – blue could combine with amber, or with red and green, to make LEDs which were white, or any other colour! The different colours are produced by using different materials for the crystal, which is then “doped” by adding impurities of specific materials to add holes and turn the crystal into a semiconductor. This produces different “gaps” between the energy of the holes and electrons, and the size of the gap determines the wavelength of light emitted. Blue was theoretically possible by growing gallium nitride crystals, but this was difficult and expensive because it needed a much higher temperature than the materials used for existing LED colours. In 1993, engineer Shuji Nakamura cracked the problem by creating a new kind of reactor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014, alongside Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, who were the first to grow large gallium nitride crystals using similar techniques in the 1980s. The first blue LEDs were inefficient, producing heat and only a dim light. Nakamura also solved this problem, by adding a lot more dopant – in this case, magnesium – than usual. Why gallium nitride needed so much magnesium was only solved in 2015, when British researchers used quantum modelling techniques to discover the processes going on inside the crystal. In the early 2000s, LED production became much cheaper, and it wasn’t long before they were being used to produce full-colour displays, light globes and even programmable stage lights, though blue LEDs remained less efficient and more expensive to make for some time afterwards, though they’ve been improved in the last few years.
• Nobby Nobbs’ relationship with erotic dancer Tawnee is portrayed in Thud!, which we discussed in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”.
• Liz notes the line “My fare, lady?”, which is one of many references in the book to My Fair Lady, the 1956 Broadway musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Both versions are the story of a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who’s taught to speak like an upper class lady by academic Henry Higgins, as an experiment to see if she can pass as a lady. The musical ends quite differently from the play… It’s best known today via the 1964 film version starring original Broadway star Rex Harrison as Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. We previously discussed it way back in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”.
• A litter is a kind of vehicle without wheels, in which a platform or in an enclosed compartment is carried by human beings. Ancient Roman cities did indeed ban or at least restrict wheeled vehicles, then as now because they get stuck easily – you can’t turn them around quickly when a road is blocked, but a litter can easily move in any direction.
• There have been four audio versions of Unseen Academicals:
  • Three are standard audiobooks: the abridged Corgi audiobook read by Tony Robinson; the unabridged Isis audiobook, read by Stephen Briggs (which is no longer available); and the most recent one, the Penguin unabridged audiobook, read by Colin Morgan and featuring Peter Serafinowicz as Death, and Bill Nighy as the “voice of the author” (he reads the footnotes). This is the one Tansy listened to, and Colin Morgan reads all of the Wizards books in this series – typecasting, perhaps, since he is best known for starring as the titular young wizard in the BBC television series Merlin between 2008 and 2012. Morgan also played Newton Pulsifer in Dirk Maggs’ 2014 radio version of Good Omens, which featured a cameo by Terry and Neil Gaiman as two policemen, recorded only a few months before Pratchett’s death.
  • Dirk Maggs also directed the fourth audio version of Unseen Academicals, mentioned by Ben: the Audible Original full-cast adaptation released in July 2018. This version is heavily abridged – split into ten chapters, it’s about four and a half hours long in total (compared with 14 hours for the unabridged audiobook). It’s also very much its own thing, and changes a lot to fit the shorter run time and reach a more general audience, including names, condensed plots and combined characters. For example, the University’s stakes are higher: the “Weatherwax bequest” (one of many overt references to the rest of Discworld) requires it to win a game of “mob ball” once a century, or lose 87% of its total budget and be forced to shut down. And the characters are less subtle – most notably Trev, who is more or less combined with Smeems and becomes much less likeable, and Mr Nutt, whose rage is barely under control compared to the Nutt of the book. David Jason, who played Albert and later Rincewind in the TV adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, is the narrator, who provides a lot of context – including a cosmic turtle intro (sorry Liz). The rest of the cast includes the likes of Matthew Horne (Gavin from Gavin & Stacy) as Trev Likely, comedian Josie Lawrence (who was Agnes Nutter in the radio and television Good Omens adaptations) as Glenda Sugarbean, Jon Culshaw (of Dead Ringers and the Penguin City Watch audiobooks) as William de Worde, Stephen Briggs as Drumknott (aiding Ray Fearon as Vetinari), and, of note to Baldur’s Gate III fans, Samantha Béart (yes, Karlach herself) as Madame Sharn! Ben recommends not listening to it directly after reading the novel, and suggests it was not made with established Discworld fans in mind.
• There’s no definitive account of the origins of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but in Middle-Earth only the supreme god Ilúvatar could truly create life. Thus all the orc origins – and there are seven suggested in Tolkien’s letters and further writings, mostly in-universe speculation – involve the evil Valar Morgoth, once Ilúvatar’s second, corrupting existing beings one way or another. Tolkien’s later writings seem to favour the idea that orcs are corrupted men, rather than elves or other beings, and he even seems to have revised the timeline of Middle-Earth to make this possible (in earlier versions orcs appeared before men).
• As for regretting making orcs irredeemable, Tolkien seems to have been torn on the subject. Here are three major examples, including from his letters. These have been catalogued, and many published in the 1981 collection The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • Letter 153 is an unsent draft reply to Peter Hastings from 1954, who had written with theological concerns about The Lord of the Rings, including the nature of evil in Middle-Earth. There Tolkien described the orcs as “creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad” but then adds in parentheses: “(I nearly wrote ’irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.)”
  • Letter 269 is a reply to W. H. Auden in 1965, who had written to ask whether the idea of orcs being irredeemable was heretical; Tolkien wrote that he wasn’t sure about that, but also that he didn’t “feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”. This, he said, was backed up in “Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable…..” (See Pratchett’s thoughts along similar lines below.) So characters in the books don’t think they are naturally evil, despite the fact that they are portrayed as so.
  • In Morgoth’s Ring, one of the later volumes of The History of Middle-Earth by J.R.R.’s son Christopher, there’s an essay by the elder Tolkien simply titled “Orcs” in which he says: “…the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law.” He goes on to say that this means orcs would be treated with the same dignity in capture as men or elves or dwarves, and also mentions in a footnote that orcs never ask for mercy because Melkor and Sauron had done such a good job convincing them that elves and men were vile, evil creatures, not to be trusted.
• Pratchett’s thoughts on orcs are much easier to discern, because he wrote about them at the time Unseen Academicals was published. In an article for Guardian book club in December 2009, Pratchett wrote: “Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.
  This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn’t flat.”
• More notes to come!

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