Author: Ben

#Pratchat69 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 69, “Long Fall Sally”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s penultimate collaboration with Stephen Baxter, 2015’s The Long Utopia, with returning guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns on the song “Long Tall Sally”, written and originally recorded by Little Richard (with Robert “Bumps” Blackwell and Enotris Johnson) in 1956. Fittingly for The Long Earth, “Long Tall Sally” was famously covered by both The Kinks and The Beatles in 1964. Why call it that? Well…it’s a bit of a spoiler, but it’s obviously a reference to Long Earth supporting protagonist Sally Linsay, and you’ll understand if you’ve read the book (or when you get to the end of the episode).
  • We’ve previously discussed the The Long Earth:
  • The Long Utopia adds a lot of new events to the Long Earth timeline; here’s a short(ish) reference to put them in context with some years from the previous books.
    • 1848 – Luis Valienté is recruited by Oswald Hackett into the Knights of Discorporea.
    • 1852 – Luis and the other Knights, including Fraser Burdon, assist the Underground Railroad in America, then get rich by plundering other Earths’ gold veins.
    • 1871 – the Knights go on their final mission in Berlin before Mr Radcliffe tries to murder them. They go into hiding.
    • 1895 – Hackett meets with Luis and Burdon and they form “the Fund” to set up marriages between stepping families and ensure more steppers are born.
    • 1916 (or 1917) – Percy Blakeney accidentally steps to a nearby Earth in the prelude to The Long Earth.
    • 2001 – Freddie Burdon is contacted by the Fund and given Maria Valienté’s details.
    • 2002 – Maria, now 15, gives birth to Joshua in stepwise Madison.
    • 2015 – “Step Day”, when humanity at large learns of the Long Earth. Joshua is thirteen.
    • 2026 – 117 pioneers, including the Green family, arrive on Earth West 101,754 and found the town of Reboot.
    • 2028 – Helen’s mother, Tilda Green, dies sometime between this year and 2030.
    • 2030 – “The Journey”, Lobsang and Joshua’s trip from The Long Earth. Rod Green (Helen’s brother) blows up Datum Madison this year, around the same time as Joshua (aged 28) meets Helen Green (aged 17).
    • 2031 – Joshua and Helen get married.
    • 2036 – Cassie Poulson is the first human to encounter the “silver beetles” in New Springfield on Earth West 1,217,756.
    • 2040 – Maggie’s mission captaining The Benjamin Franklin, Roberta’s trip with the Chinese East Twenty Million mission, and most of the rest of The Long War. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. Stan Berg is born.
    • 2045 – Maggie’s mission as captain of the Neil Armstrong II, and Sally’s trip to Mars with Willis and Frank. Lobsang dies in late fall this year, and his funeral is in December.
    • 2052 – Joshua turns 50 and does his 100,000 steps walk. Nikos finds the Gallery and meets the silver beetles.
    • 2054 – “George”, Agnes and Ben settle in New Springfield.
    • 2056 – Agnes realises something is wrong with the world and discovers the beetles. Stan is approached by Roberta Golding to join the Next in the Grange and declines.
    • 2058 – Lobsang and Joshua investigate Earth West 1,217,756 and uncover the beetles’ plans. Six months later in Fall, Joshua finds Sally and they retrieve the old Lobsang from Earth West 174,827,918, the home of the Traversers.
    • 2059 – Early in the year, Stan, “George” and Sally “cauterise” Earth West 1,217,756 just before it is destroyed by the beetles.
  • The new English translation of Journey to the West, the Chinese folk novel by Wu Chen’en, is Julia Lovell’s from 2021, titled Monkey King. The titular Monkey is a trouble-making immortal recruited to aid a Buddhist monk in fetching scriptures from a monastery in India. This is meant to redeem Monkey for his previous misdeeds, including upsetting the order of Heaven, but he refuses to behave. The monk, Tripitaka, tricks Monkey into putting on a cap that conceals a metal band, which he is able to tighten around Monkey’s head with a secret spell (referred to as the “headache sutra” in the famous Japanese television version of the story). This doesn’t injure Monkey – he is made of stone, it’s a whole thing – but it does cause him intense headaches which Tripitaka uses to rein in his violent impulses.
  • Joshua was 13 on Step Day, not 14 as Ben guesses. He was born in 2002, not 2001.
  • While we’re working out how to pronounce Nikos, Liz mentions “Nikolaj”, Charles Boyle’s adopted son in the police sitcom Brooklyn-99. The precise pronunciation of Nikolaj’s name is a repeated gag and character moment between Boyle and his partner, best friend and idol, Jake Peralta.
  • As we’ll mention next episode, the Valhalla Belt references Strata as the main characters live in an alternate universe where Erik Leifsson made it to the Americas, united with its indigenous peoples and formed a nation called Valhalla, which dominated the world through superior technology.
  • Joshua is eleven years older than Helen, and first met her when she was 17. They got married in 2031, when he was 29 and she was 18. Freddie was 17 when he had sex with Maria, who was 14; she was actually 15 by the time she gives birth in May 2002, though this doesn’t change our opinions much.
  • The “10,000 steps” Ben mentions are actually the “Seven Thousand Steps”, a paved path that winds around the mountain known as The Throat of the World in the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Climbing the steps is an early part of the main quest; they lead to the monastery of High Hrothgar, where the Greybeards await the arrival of the player character, who is the Dragonborn – a prophesied hero with the power of the Voice, able to speak the magical language of dragons.
  • We put some of the dates in the timeline above, but Ben is correct about the history of the Green family, especially about her mother, Tilda, being the driving force behind their migration. They first tried settling in Madison West 2, but it wasn’t far enough away; they then invested heavily in the development of Madison West 5, but didn’t make enough money to leave their Datum jobs behind. Tilda wanted her own dream, not someone else’s, and convinced the family to head out into the further Long Earth, abandoning Rod and all their other ties to the Datum to join the group who founded Reboot in 2026. She died of cancer between 2028 and 2030, and no-one told Rod; he seemed to think she was still alive when he was captured by Monica, minutes before the bomb went off.
  • Liz compares Willis Linsay to Tom Wambsgans from Succession, a character in the popular HBO series about a wealthy family, headed by Logan Roy (Brian Cox), who owns the global media empire Waystar. As the title suggests, a large part of the drama revolves around who will succeed the ailing Logan as head of the company. Tom (Matthew Macfayden) is a Waystar executive who marries Logan’s youngest child, Shiv (Sarah Snook); he is thus close to, but not truly part of, the family’s inner circle. The series ran for four seasons between 2018 and 2023.
  • Ben makes a joke about “love languages”, which we’ve mentioned before; in brief they’re a highly reductive, heteronormative and traditional theory about the ways in which people like to show and be shown affection. In the original version, invented by an American pastor, there are five, but really the useful thing to take from the concept is that different folks like to show and receive love in different ways.
  • The short story “The High Meggas”, Pratchett’s original exploration of the ideas behind The Long Earth, was written in the 1980s; he gives the year 1986, though that conflicts with some accounts of what else he was working on at the time. Ben compares Sally Linsay to Larry Linsay, the protagonist of that story, who is more or less a combination of Sally and her father Willis: one of the inventors of the “moving belt” (the story’s equivalent of the Stepper Box) who ends up living far from other humans in the High Meggers (which are spelt with an “a” in the story). We discussed the short story in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon”.
  • As we’ve mentioned in our previous Long Earth episodes, complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013, and were full collaborations up to that point. It is true that Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking after that, with only minimal involvement from Pratchett, who had moved on to Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown. Relevant to this episode’s discussion, they did plan the series as a five-book arc right at the start, probably in 2010 or 2011. Thanks again to Marc Burrows, author of The Magic of Terry Pratchett, from which most of this information is drawn. (There’s surprisingly little about The Long Earth in A Life With Footnotes.)
  • Liz’s reference to Nelson Azikiwe’s “sex barge” is his trip with Lobsang to meet Second Person Singular, a Traverser off the coast of New Zealand somewhere around Earth West 700. The society of islanders there has some things in common with the community of the Next in the Grange, included them being quite relaxed about casual sex. His encounter with Cassie for “a little wiggle” is recounted (subtly) in Chapter 60 of The Long War.
  • The Knights of Discorporea use their own terms for stepping, since no global consensus has been reached. Luis Valienté doesn’t have a name for stepping, but uses “dexter” and “sinister” for the directions, Latin words for right and left respectively (a clue to Luis’ more educated early life). Hackett calls stepping “Waltzing”, and uses “widdershins” and “deiseal” for the directions. Pratchett fans will be well familiar with widdershins, which as discussed in the episode notes for #Pratchat30 is an old English word (not an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. Deiseal comes from Irish and means movement “to the right”, or clockwise, making it a good if oddly chosen opposite to widdershins. (A variant word, deasil, just means clockwise.) We presume widdershins and sinister map to “West”, and deiseal and dexter to “East”, since that’s how those compass directions appear on a European map in the usual orientation.
  • X-Men: First Class is the 2011 prequel film showing the origins of the X-Men, a group of mutant superheroes recruited as teenagers by powerful mutant telepath Charles Xavier in his quest to appease the humans who hate and fear them. (That’s possibly a bit harsh, but we’ve been thinking about the superhero as upholder of the status quo recently.) The film was originally intended as a reboot of the X-Men film franchise, but the next film, X-Men: Days of Future Past linked it to the existing X-Men films and established it as a prequel.
  • The Chartists were a working class movement for political reform in the UK, founded in 1838. They demanded a number of changes to improve British democracy, including an expansion of suffrage (though not to women), secret ballots, and less restrictive requirements for who could stand for the House of Commons. The reforms were supported by millions of working class folks, who presented petitions to parliament, but they didn’t see any of their desired changes adopted until after the movement died out in 1857. The “uprising” of April 1848 was part of a renewed interest in Chartism following the French Revolution, and was really a peaceful meeting when a new petition was intended to be brought to parliament by a procession of Chartists. But the government, who strongly opposed the reforms, enacted old and new laws to make the procession illegal, and had huge numbers of police in attendance (including 100,000 special constables!). In the end the meeting ended without the planned procession, though it is true that many were moved to violently oppose the oppression of the government, and presumably those would have been the “agents” removed by the Knights. They are still working for the government agains the common folk, though.
  • When Liz says that “in Doctor Who, Queen Victoria is a werewolf”, she is referring to the episode “Tooth and Claw” from season two of the revived series, when the Tenth Doctor and Rose encounter a recently bereaved Queen Victoria on a trip across the Scottish highlands where she is attacked by an alien werewolf. It is suggested that she may have been bitten by the wolf, and as Rose and the Doctor depart they wonder if this means the Royal Family are indeed all werewolves.
  • Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, German Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, was a noted small-L liberal with great influence over the Queen. He had an interest in many progressive ideas and social reforms, including support of emancipation (as seen in The Long Utopia), technology, education, science and the welfare of the working class, including raising the working age. While this makes him sound pretty great, it’s important to remember this was all from a fairly paternalistic “we must care for those less fortunate than us” perspective, and he had no desire to lessen his own power or position, but his heart does seem to have been in the right place. His European ambitions seem to stem at least in part from a fear for his royal relatives, especially in the mid 19th century in the wake of the many revolutions in continental Europe. He’s perhaps best remembered for championing the Royal Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was built, and which probably wouldn’t have happened without his campaigning.
  • Queen Charlotte is the monarch in the alternate reality “Regency”-era of the Bridgerton television series, based on the series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. The story of her marriage to King George III is told in the spin-off mini-series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, released in May 2023. Ben edits a Bridgerton podcast, What Would Danbury Do?, who covered Queen Charlotte in episode 40, “Sorrows, Prayers and Enduring Love”, with guest Maxine Beneba Clarke.
  • There’s no directly Biblical evidence for Mary’s age at the time of Jesus’s birth, but based on marriage customs many historians have said she was likely to be a teenager. Sources we’ve found have suggested she was maybe 14 when Gabriel appeared to her to give her the news, but 15 or even 16 when Jesus was actually born. But there’s no official answer, and she is most often depicted as an adult woman, as she would have been in any case at the time of Jesus’ crucifiction.
  • Liz mentions Joshua’s Tree, a reference to U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree, which itself is named after an actual species of tree native to the Mojave Desert in America. It was named by Mormon settlers, who thought it looked like Joshua raising his hands in prayer. It’s first three tracks are three of U2’s biggest hits: “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You”.
  • Bill Chambers’ story about the Cueball is, in fact, word for word the same in The Long War chapter 58, and The Long Utopia chapter 1, save that in this book there are a couple of asides to remind us about the history of the Long Earth. The Cueball was first mentioned, very briefly, in chapter 28 of The Long Earth.
  • The Southern Vampire series – not to be confused with the Vampire Chronicles, which is a whole other thing – are a series of books written by American author Charlaine Harris. Also known as the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, they follow protagonist Sookie, a telepathic waitress living in the town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, in a world where vampires have made themselves public knowledge following the development of a blood substitute called “Tru Blood”. (Oh yes – it’s the series that spawned the TV show True Blood, though it’s a loose adaptation.)
  • The Book of Matthew pretty unambigiously states that Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s twelve close disciples, did betray Jesus, identifying him to soldiers with a kiss in exchange for a bribe of thirty pieces of silver. Other Biblical writings say Judas was influenced by the Devil to do this, rather than the money being his motivation, and some say Jesus foresaw his betrayal and allowed it since it was part of God’s plan. This has led to something of a contradiction; was he following God’s plan, controlled by Satan, or exercising free will? Bertrand Russell and other philosophers have written about this.
  • Thomas Moore’s Utopia was first published in 1516, originally in Latin. The title is derived from Greek and literally translates to “nowhere” or “no place”.
  • The band that would become The Beatles first formed in 1956 as The Quarrymen, named after their school, Quarry Bank High School, and specifically the start of the school song, “Quarry men old before our birth”. Throughout their early career that went through several names, including in 1960 the Beatals, The Silver Beetles, and for the first time, The Beatles. They were also known for a brief time in 1961 as The Savage Young Beatles, hence Ben’s mash-up of “The Savage Silver Beatles”.
  • Ben mentions Star Trek being set “150 years in the future”, which would place it in the mid-23rd century. That’s about right for the original series of Star Trek, in which James Kirk becomes captain of the USS Enterprise from around the year 2265. However Ben is more thinking of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place 100 years later in the 24th century: Jean-Luc Picard takes command of the newly launched USS Enterprise D in 2364.
  • The Cavern Club was a jazz club in Liverpool which opened in 1957, inspired by jazz clubs in Paris. As rock and roll began to take off in London, it became one of the central venues, and the Beatles played many of their early important gigs there as early as 1958, when they were still called The Quarrymen. The club is still open, though it closed for a time in the 1970s and 80s during the construction of an underground train route. There may well have been clubs called The Gallery or The Observatory, but they don’t seem to have played a big part in rock and roll history if so.
  • We mention a few other von Neumann replicators in fiction include:
    • The alien Replicators in Stargate: SG-1, who initially appear as insect-like robots made of multiple identical pieces. They first appear in the season 3 episode “Nemesis”, where they are the great enemy being fought in a war by the advanced alien Asgardians. They return many times in multiple forms in both SG1 and its spin-off Stargate: Atlantis. As Liz mentions, their origins are later explored, most notably in the fifth season episode of Stargate: SG-1, “Menace”.
    • The Slylandro Probes appear in the 1992 videogame Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, recently re-released as Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. The probes seem to be working for someone, though exactly who – and why they are so hostile – is one of many mysteries the player can choose to solve in the game.
    • Another example we didn’t mention comes from the weird 1990s sci-fi series Lexx, in which drones resembling flying robotic arms also act like von Neumann replicators.
  • Freeman Dyson (1923-2020; no relation to the dude who invents vacuum cleaners) was a British-American physicist who contributed a lot of enduring ideas to science and science fiction. (One of them, thankfully, was not his skepticism of climate change.) The two here are:
    • The Dyson Sphere was a thought experiment about how a super-advanced species might efficiently capture all the energy it could need from its own sun. The basic idea – a huge spherical construction around a star – pre-dates Dyson, first appearing in the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, and also J. D. Bernal’s 1929 nonfiction book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry Into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Both of these were inspirations for Dyson, who wrote about the idea of a sphere in his paper ‘Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation’ for Science in 1959. He didn’t call it a Dyson sphere himself, and indeed didn’t imagine an actual sphere, but instead a spherical group of independent solar collectors. The idea took many sci-fi writers imaginations, with variations appearing in novels like Ringworld throughout the 1970s and beyond. Dyson thought the popular sci-fi depiction – of a literal solid sphere, as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Relics’ – impossible.
    • The Dyson planetary spin motor seems to come from Dyson’s 1966 essay ‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology’, published in Perspectives in Modern Physics. The beetles use exactly his method, including how to accelerate the planet’s rotation.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg Collective are faction of cybernetic organisms first encountered in the second season episode ‘Q Who’. The possess (more or less) a group consciousness and superior technology, and seek to “assimilate” all other forms of life into the Collective, mostly by infecting other humanoids with nanites which transform them into more Borg. Like the Silver Beetles, they generally ignore beings they do not consider a threat, prioritising their current tasks. The Cybermen in Doctor Who are a similar concept, though they are not often written as well.
  • Taskmaster is a British comedy gameshow in which guest comedians compete to complete ridiculous “tasks” set by the hosts, Greg Davies, the taskmaster who judges the winner, and show creator Alex Horne, who acts as a meeker referee to make sure contestants follow the rules of each task. It debuted in 2015 on UK digital channel Dave, moving to Channel 4 in 2020, and has run so far (as of mid-2024) for 17 series and more than 150 episodes. Local versions have been created in many countries, including one for Australia and New Zealand on Channel 10 in 2023, hosted by taskmaster Tom Gleeson and referee Tom Cashman.
  • The trope of someone being eaten alive by tiny creatures – often until there’s nothing left, except maybe bones – appears in lots of places:
    • The X-Files episode Liz remembers with the glowing green bugs is “Darkness Falls” from the show’s first season in 1994.
    • The tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are “compys”, short for Procompsognathus; they appear in the first novel, and then become one of several unused elements from that novel used in the sequels, in this case Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
    • In the 1999 film The Mummy (a guilty favourite of this podcast), one of the terrors in the Mummy’s tomb is a hoard of scarabs that can devour you in seconds.
  • Defying Doomsday is a 2016 anthology from Australian publisher Twelfth Planet Press. It’s a collection of post-apocalyptic fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, and won a Ditmar Award for Best Anthology; it includes the story “Did We Break the End of the World?” by friend of the show Tansy Rayner-Roberts, which also won a Ditmar for best novelette or novella. It was followed in 2020 by Rebuilding Tomorrow, a similar anthology with a more hopeful theme, which won an Aurealis Award for Best Anthology in 2021. (It’s not clear if these are still in print.)
  • Deanne recommended the The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, a series beginning with All Systems Red.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#PratchatElsewhere Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “We’re on a Road to Elsewhere“, in which Ben discusses recent Pratchett news, and interviews guest Danny Sag from the Australian Discworld Convention.

Iconographic Evidence

The opening sequence to Good Omens 2 – and handily, the still image for this video is the poster Ben also mentioned!
Here’s the official trailer for Good Omens 2!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a riff on the chorus lyric from the Talking Heads son “Road to Nowhere”. It might have made a good title for the Strata episode, but Ben will have to think of another one now! (Elsewhere is the equivalent of hyperspace in Strata, traversed through the use of a “Matrix drive”.)
  • You can see the new narrators and covers for the Penguin Discworld audiobooks at their official website.
  • As well as the intro sequence above, you might find these Good Omens links handy:
  • “Cute aggression”, originally “playful aggression”, was popularised around 2013 by the work of psychologists Rebecca Dyer and Aragón. Note that it refers to superficial aggression; folks who express their feelings about cute things this way are not actually violent or aggressive.
  • A Stroke of the Pen was announced on the 28th of February 2023. You can read about how the stories were rediscovered in this article at LoveReading. The blurb available on several bookstore listings has this to say about the stories within: “Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.”
  • Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was announced on the 12th of May 2023, with more details revealed on the 1st of June. There’s an official page for the book at terrypratchett.com, and an article in The Bookseller magazine which includes some of Rhianna’s thoughts about writing for Discworld.
  • You can find out more about Gabrielle Kent on her website, gabriellekent.com. The books about a boy who inherits a magic castle are the Alfie Bloom series, beginning with Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle, published in 2015. Rani Reports is the series about the young journalist, beginning with Rani Reports on the Missing Millions, which was published in May this year.
  • Knights and Bikes (2019) is the first videogame from indie UK developer Foam Sword Games. It was created by Rex Crowle and Moo Yu, who you might know from their work on games like Tearaway, Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank, Ring Fling and MonstrosCity. Crowle is also the brain behind the roleplaying game inspired to-do list app Epic Win. The game is available on most platforms.
  • There are several Discworld books specifically credited to the Discworld Emporium, but most of them do include Terry’s name in one way or another! The credit on The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas is “Terry Pratchett aided and abetted by the Discworld Emporium”. (The copyright has Terry Pratchett and the Emporium as a partnership as the officially credited authors, with Emporium identified as Isobel Pearson, Reb Voyce, Bernard Pearson and Ian Mitchell in that order.) Earlier books produced by the Emporium like The World of Poo and Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook are credited on the cover only as “Terry Pratchett presents”, with the Handbook “aided and abetted” credit on the inside, while for the earlier World of Poo fictional author Miss Felicity Beadle was “assisted by Bernard and Isobel Pearson”. Only The Nac Mac Feegles’ Big Wee Alphabet Book uses the credit “by the Discworld Emporium”, separately including the same “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” identifier seen on Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (The description on the website says the Feegle book was “lovingly produced by Ian Mitchell”.) Earlier books worked on by Bernard Pearson, like the Discworld Almanack, have him as a co-author with Terry.
    So the new Tiffany book is not the first to identify specific people as the author without Terry being one of them, but it is the first to do so on the front cover. Ben is wrong, but it still feels like a big deal to him.
  • You can see Colleen Doran‘s impressive list of comic book credits, and some of her amazing artwork, at colleendoran.com. You can get notified about the crowdfunding campaign for the Good Omens graphic novel by signing up at Kickstarter.
  • You can see a list of the books published by Dunmanifestin on the company website. They don’t yet list the Good Omens Kickstarter, but “The Terry Pratchett Estate” is listed as the campaign owner, and their username is “dunmanifestin”, so that seems pretty clear. The campaign has been mentioned by the official Good Omens Twitter account, which is @GoodOmensHQ.
  • There are currently eight other active Pratchett podcasts by Ben’s count. He keeps track of them via the Pratchat side-project wiki, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
  • Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show starring Jason Sudeikis as the title character, a college football coach from Kansas who is hired to manage Richmond AFC by the ex-wife of its previous owner, who took it in her divorce. It’s a beautiful and heartwarming show that has just finished up its third and (supposedly) final season, and as so many people have said about Unseen Academicals, “the important thing about football is that it’s not about football.” Ben highly recommends the show.
  • As well as Nullus Anxietas, which you can find at ausdwcon.org, we mention lots of Discworld conventions this episode, but missed out a few. Here’s a run-down:
    • The original Discworld Convention, now known as the International Discworld Convention, started in the UK in 1996, as Danny mentions, and runs every two years. Thanks to Rachel Rowlands of Discworld Monthly for pointing out that it has missed two of those years: 2000 and 2020. The next one is in Birmingham in August 2024, and you can find out more at dwcon.org.
    • The Irish Discworld Convention began in 2009 and also runs every two years, though not in 2021. The next one is in Cork in October 2023; find out more at idwcon.org.
    • The North American Discworld Convention also started in 2009, and has run five times since then, most recently (as per Ben’s footnote) in 2019. Their website, nadwcon.org, is offline as of the publication of this episode, but Rachel Rowlands informs us that a team is working on putting together another convention in the US, so keep an eye out for information about it in the near future.
    • Die Scheibenwelt Convention, aka the German Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, most recently in May 2023 – and they hold it in a castle! (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s Joanna Hagan went this year; keep on eye on their social media for her video diary if you want to know more about what that was like.) They’re planning the next one for 2025. Find out more at discworld-convention.de (the website is in German and English).
    • Cabbagecon, the Dutch Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, and most recently in 2022. The next one will be in October 2024; find out more at dutchdwcon.nl (they also have info available in English).
    • The Ineffable Con is not a Discworld convention, but as it’s name suggests a celebration of Good Omens, specifically the television series. It’s run three times in the UK since 2019, and a fourth online-only convention is coming in October 2023. Find out more at theineffablecon.org.uk.
    • The Llamedos Holiday Camp is the newest fan event, which has run in Wales since 2020. It’s organised by the folks behind Discworld Monthly (hello again Rachel – thanks for the reminder!), and rather than being a traditional convention, describes itself as an “Interactive Immersive Discworld Experience” – it’s presented as if the event is taking place in Llamedos as the Discworld equivalent of an old-school British holiday camp. It will next appear in 2024 with a “Scout Jamboree” theme, and you can find out more at llamedosholidaycamp.com.
  • The special convention episodes we’ve released in conjunction with Nullus Anxietas are:
    • #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, recorded live at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.
    • #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”, recorded for The Lost Con online event in 2021.
    • A special Hogswatch video for the con’s 2021 Christmas event; it’s available to Pratchat subscribers on YouTube.
    • “A Tale of Two Carpets”, recorded for the Discworld Virtual Fun Day in June 2022; the title is from a special version released to Pratchat subscribers with extra footnotes, but you can see the original that played at the event at this link.
  • Blow Up is a 2023 Australian reality television show made by Channel 7 in which contestants compete to make the biggest and best balloon sculptures. It’s based on a Dutch show, also called Blow Up, from 2022. You can watch Blow Up via 7Plus, which is the channel’s catch-up streaming service, though it may not be available to viewers outside Australia. We won’t spoil the results in case you want to watch it for yourself, but don’t get your hopes up for a second season; Blow Up was moved from Channel 7 to one of their digital-only channels, 7flix, after two episodes, thanks to disappointing ratings.
  • Werewolf is a social deduction party game. Players are secretly assigned a role as a werewolf or villager, and play in alternating day and night turns. The werewolves, who know who each other are, eliminate one villager player each night turn, while during the day turns the villagers must debate who are the werewolves and vote to eliminate players they suspect. Either team wins if they eliminate all of the other players. The game was invented in Russia as Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986, but didn’t take off in America until it was re-themed to be about werewolves by Andy Plotkin in around 1997. It is often treated like a folk game, even though it’s origin can be traced, and there are many, many published and free versions available, many with large numbers of unique roles for the villagers which grant them various special abilities and win or lose conditions. Personally Ben considers it inferior to newer social deduction games that don’t rely so heavily on player elimination, but he’s developed a couple of variations of his own, including Spy Catcher and Smuggletown.
  • For more about the Australian Discworld Convention, visit their website or Facebook page, join their Facebook group, or follow them on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#EeekClub2023 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2023“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

The “I’m not an actor” scene from My Favourite Year, starring not Laurence Olivier, but Peter O’Toole.

Notes and Errata

  • If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
  • This is our third Eeek Club special; the other two are (predictably) Eeek Club 2021 and Eeek Club 2022.
  • The Pratcats are the cat owners of your two human hosts. They are Asimov and Huxley, who live with Liz, and Kaos, who lives with Ben. Kaos lived up to his name this episode when he unplugged Ben’s microphone near the end of the recording; if you notice any decline in audio quality towards the end, that’d be why.
  • We mention a lot of actors and shows in our casting discussion:
    • Brian Blessed has been suggested as a Mustrum Ridcully by many, many fans, if you go looking, so it’s a little surprising Ben hasn’t seen anyone do it before. Ben lists many of his famous screen roles, but Blessed wasn’t in Excalibur; in Ben’s defence, as he says, everyone else was. One role Ben neglected to mention is that Blessed was in the 1995 television adaptation of Johnny and the Dead, playing William “Bill” Stickers. A dream come true for Pratchett if he did base Ridcully on him!
    • Elisabeth Moss is an American actor best known for her starring role as June (aka Offred) in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but has also been in the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man, the television adaptation of time travel horror Shining Girls, and the upcoming Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins. Liz also mentions The Square, a 2017 Swedish satirical film directed by Ruben Östlund, in which Moss plays a journalist named Anne.
    • Richard Ayoade’s more recent screen roles have included voice acting in The Lego Movie 2, The Mandalorian, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys and Pixar’s Soul, as well hosting the television shows Gadget Man and Question Team and frequently appearing as a guest on panel shows. He was also in the other The Watch, a terrible 2012 movie about a group of idiot neighbourhood watch members who stumble across an alien invasion. (It was discussed by our sibling podcast, Who Watches the Watch, in the episode “Who Watches ’The Watch’ (2012)”.)
    • Taika Waititi is now best known as a director of big Hollywood films, but we still fondly remember him as Viago in the original What We Do in the Shadows, which also features his Our Flag Means Death co-star Rhys Darby, the third member of Flight of the Conchords. If you’re not familiar with Our Flag Means Death, it’s a heartwarming, comic, queer retelling of the story of Stede Bonnet, a real merchant turned pirate from the golden age of piracy, who did indeed cross paths with Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
    • Charles Dance is now most famous for playing Tywin Lannister, the scheming patriarch of House Lannister, in Game of Thrones, but his turn as Vetinari in Going Postal was just the year before! He’s also known for Alien3, The Crown and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where he appears as Roderick Burgess, the man who summons and traps Dream and sets the plot of the series in motion.
    • Yeun Sang-yeop, or Steven Yuen as he’s usually credited, does indeed play Glenn in The Walking Dead; he played the character for a little over six seasons. You may also have seen him in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix film Okja, Jordan Peele’s recent sci-fi spectacle Nope, or as the voice of the title character in the animated Amazon superhero adaptation Invincible. He’s also in Love Me, a sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2024 and apparently not related to the TV series.
    • Ivor Novello was a Welsh singer and actor, who gained fame not only in silent films but also on the stage. He was a successful composer and writer too, with many hit films and stage musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.
    • Melissa Jaffer has had a long career in Australian television, but you probably know her from the gloriously weird US/Australian sci-fi series Farscape, where she played Utu-Noranti Pralatong in the show’s final seasons. The ABC’s Swap Shop, which ran for a single season of 52 episodes in 1988 (and managed to so impress itself on a young Ben’s brain), featured Jaffer as Mimi, the proprietor of the tiitular shop where anyone could swap something new for something in the shop. It’s not related to the earlier BBC series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a live Saturday morning show for kids hosted by Noel Edmonds, or the reboot of that Swap Shop with puppet fox Basil Brush, Basil’s Swap Shop, in 2008.
    • Bob Morley is an Australian actor best known, as Liz mentions, from teen sci-fi drama The 100, which she’s mentioned on the show before. As well as roles in both of the major Australian soaps, Home and Away and Neighbours, he’s recently appeared in episodes of Nathan Fillion’s police drama The Rookie and the Australian series Love Me for streaming service Binge, an adaptation of the Swedish series Älska mig.
  • In Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the television adaptation of the Phyne Fisher books written by Kerry Greenwood, the titular detective is played by Essie Davis, who was . Davis’ version of the character seems to be somewhere in her 30s or early 40s, but in the novels Phryne is 28.
  • Guest Andy Matthews joined us in #Pratchat64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, to discuss the short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”.
  • It is indeed Ponder who, with the help of Ridcully and the other wizards of the High Energy Magic Building, traps sound in a string in a box in Soul Music. More on the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
  • The “Machete Order” for Star Wars is named after the blog on which it first appeared, “No Machete Juggling”, written by film fan Rob Hilton in 2011. The basic idea is to avoid spoiling the big reveal near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which comes as no surprise if you’ve already watched the prequel movies. The original recommendation is to watch Episodes IV, V, II, III and VI in that order, leaving out Episode I entirely. Others have gone deeper, suggested specific moments when you stop one of the films to watch others before returning to the film you paused, or including only specific scenes from certain films, and so on. You can read the original blog post on Rob Hilton’s current website, alongside an update which answers questions and adds the sequel films (the short answer is anything after Episode VI is just watched in chronological order).
  • As we’ve noted in our episodes about them, Tiffany ages 1-3 years between most of her books, whereas the gap between other Discworld novels usually seems shorter, but also is never stated as clearly. There are therefore two different attempts to assemble a timeline of the series just on the L-Space wiki; for the record, Ben prefers the original. In shorthand, though, most of the books take place in chronological order, with the notable exception of Small Gods (most of which happens about a century before everything else), and possibly Pyramids, though the discrepancy over this is happily waved aside in Thief of Time.
  • Catfishing refers to using a fake identity, including using photos of someone else, to interact with other people via social media. The term was coined by the 2010 documentary Catfish, which documents an online relationship begun by the brother of one of the filmmakers which turns out to be with a fictional person. There’s some controversy over how early the creators knew about the deception, and whether they pretended not to catch on in as part of making the film, but the false persona and the person behind it were real. The term comes from a story told by a person in the film about how catfish were sometimes shipped with cod to keep them alert and active, even though the cod were the marketable fish.
  • Byron Baes is a 2022 Netflix reality series set in the beach town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, following the lives of several social media stars. Byron is a hotbed of dubious wellness and hippie culture and has become hugely commercialised over the past few decades, so it’s no surprise influencers spend a lot of time there.
  • We’re sure we’ve linked to the British man who greeted his farm animals on social media before, but we’ve so far been unable to find him (it’s not easy searching through nearly seventy previous episodes’ worth of notes). If you know who he is, let us know!
  • For those who missed the Maggi Noodles reference, Pratchett famously cancelled his contract with his original German publisher Heyne Verlag when he discovered they were inserting ads into the middle of their sci-fi books – including ads for Maggi Soups (not noodles) in their translations of Pyramids, Sourcery and others. It wasn’t just an inserted extra page, either – they added text to the book to give context to the Maggi logo! This post on the Stuffed Crocodile blog has a good summary of the whole palaver, including a picture of an affected copy of Sourcery. Pratchett wasn’t singled out for this nonsense; author Diane Duane has also written about this, including some images of Heyne’s altered translations of her Star Trek novels, and the story of how Pratchett found out about it. Diane noticed this link and blogged about it briefly again on Tumblr. (Hello to Diane, and to any listeners who found us via that link!)
  • Liz’s short story about women transforming into mops is “Call Him Al”, published in Meanjin in 2017. You can read it online.
  • We discussed the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.
  • We discussed the concept of Ankh-Morpork elections in last year’s Eeek Club 2022, and it was indeed Karl’s question. (It’s right at the end.)
  • Thanks to subscribers Sally and Danny, who pointed out that we haven’t yet read the last important book which involves Nobby and Colon. Ben clearly doesn’t remember Snuff as well as he thought! (But no further spoilers, please.)
  • For more on Teppic, Ptraci, Djelybeybi and You Bastard the camel listen to our Pyramids episode, #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”.
  • Victor Tugelbend and Theda “Ginger” Withel are protagonists in Moving Pictures, which we discussed in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
  • It’s not Laurence Olivier but Peter O’Toole who utters the line “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” It’s from the 1982 film My Favourite Year; see the iconographic evidence section above for the clip.
  • Liz mentioned the “AI Influencer” Lil Miquela, who is entirely artificial. You can find her as @lilmiquela on Instagram, where her bio reads “🤖 19-year-old robot living in LA 💖”. Be warned, she’s a bit uncanny valley.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times; he’s most famously the author of the Thursday Next series of novels in which the titular heroine lives in a world where fiction and reality are blurred, and investigates literary crimes. We are eagerly awaiting Red Side Story, the follow-up to his weird sci-fi novel Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron to differentiate it from that other book), about a world where humans have mostly lost the ability to see colour.
  • Ben mentions a “Yesterday-style scenario”, referring to the 2019 film Yesterday in which a man is struck by a bus and awakes to find himself in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one who can remember their music. The world is annoyingly otherwise exactly the same as the one with the Beatles in it.
  • Susannah Clarke is the British author of the enormous (and excellent) Regency fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the much shorter (and also excellent) Piranesi, as well as a number of short stories set in the Jonathan Strange universe.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat67 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 67, “The Three-Elf Problem“, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2013 Discworld board game, The Witches, with returning guest Steve Lamattina.

Iconographic Evidence

As promised, here are some photos of the game.

A photo of the board, components, rules and box of The Witches board game.
The board, components and the box.
An annotated photo of the box for The Witches board game, showing the names of each of the characters on it.
Which witch is which? Get your answers here!
A photo of the board, cards and other components of The Witches board game.
A pile of components. The pink tokens featuring townsfolk are Crisis tokens; the yellow ones featuring a witch with crazy eyes are Cackle tokens; and the larger square ones are Black Aliss tokens. The green square tiles are Easy Problems, and the purple ones are Hard Problems.
A photo of The Witches board game during play.
Ben’s hand during his first, four-player game of The Witches.
A photo of four cards depicting more obscure characters.
A photo of the cards from The Witches board game we mentioned as our favourites in the episode.
Some of our favourite cards, as discussed in the questions section near the end.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title takes inspiration from the 2008 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The novel in turn takes it’s title from the three-body problem of physics, which refers to the difficulty of calculating the relative motion of three bodies whose masses will interact thanks to gravitational force. In the game, three elves are a problem because they cause everyone to immediately lose.
  • Steve last appeared on Pratchat for Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, discussing Only You Can Save Mankind, back in February 2020 – the second-last time we recorded regularly in person.
  • The last in-person episode was #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”, with Fury. We moved to remote recording from episode 30 (“Looking Widdershins”), though Ben did record in person for “The Troll’s Gambit” with Melissa Rogerson, in November 2022.
  • Dimity Hubbub is not actually known for being talkative, but rather being clumsy; in her first appearance she has set fire to her own hat, and steps on a piece of Annagramma’s occult jewellery. Dimity appears in A Hat Full of Sky (where she appears in two scenes), Wintersmith (in which she gets a whole two lines of dialogue) and The Shepherd’s Crown (again, only very briefly).
  • Tiffany’s time in Lancre is covered in A Hat Full of Sky (#Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home”) and Wintersmith (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“).
  • Lancre Gorge features fairly prominently in Wyrd Sisters, and is where Lord Felmet eventually ends up. In Lords and Ladies, its described like this: “Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.” (A footnote admits that “Lancrastians did not consider geography to be a very original science.”)
  • Garth Nix, who was our guest for #Pratchat51 a bit over a year ago, is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Old Kingdom series of young adult fantasy novels. In the books, the “Old Kingdom” is a place of sorcery and monsters, separated from its neighbour Ancelstierre by a wall which keeps the magic out. The first book is 1995’s Sabriel, while the latest is the prequel Terciel and Elinor, published in late 2021.
  • The various editions of The Witches (which is called The Witches: A Discworld Game on BoardGameGeek) include:
    • The Treefrog Games’ Collector’s Edition, published in an edition of 2,000 copies, featuring the pewter miniatures and a cloth bag to keep them in, an A1 poster of artwork from the game, different artwork on the box cover, a different shaped box, and a larger map. (We presume this just means physically larger, not that there are any additional locations.) While you can’t buyt the minatures separately, you did used to be able to buy a set of coloured plastic miniatures for the game from Micro Art Studio in Poland, who still produce a line of Discworld miniatures – though the young witches are no longer available.
    • The Mayfair Games Standard Edition, the one we played. It has wooden witch’s hat pieces for the players.
    • The game has also been published in several other languages: German, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech and Spanish. These all appear to use the same art, with only the text translated.
  • Mayfair Games was
  • Martin Wallace is an English game designer who now lives in Australia. After getting his start in wargames in the 1990s, he became a very well-known game designer. His games include the heavy train games Brass: Lancashire (originally just Brass) and it’s successor Brass: Birmingham; two quite different editions of A Study in Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up based on the short story by Neil Gaiman; and most recently the fantasy war game Bloodstones. (Ben is mistaken, however, about Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which were designed by the entirely different (if similarly named) James Wallis. Sorry James!) Martin’s company Treefrog Games was active until 2016, when he closed it down to focus on working as a designer. Bloodstones was his first new venture in self-publishing since then, this time under the name “Wallace Designs”.
  • The very brief Martin Wallace interview about The Witches can be found in the BoardGameGeek forums for The Witches. Read the interview here.
  • When Nanny visits the Long Man in Lords and Ladies, she takes Casanunda along with her. His mind is boggled both by the Long Man, and the resemblance of the King of the Elves within to “his picture”.
  • The Felmets appear in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”), and they do indeed both die by the end of the book. Lord Felmet plunges to his death in Lancre Gorge, while Lady Felmet is cast into the woods, where the woodland creatures, acting as the soul of the country itself, er…take care of her.
  • Ben hasn’t been able to think of any other games that split a dice roll in half, though there are many that use a “push-your-luck” mechanic. This is usually achieved by allowing a player to re-roll one or more of their dice with an escalating level of risk and reward.
  • Melbourne’s public transport network, created by the “Octopus Act” in the late eighteenth century, has a large number of train and tram lines radiating out from the Central Business District. While there used to be two “circle lines” that connected stations on these lines to each other, nowadays to change from one to the other you generally have to travel into the city and back out again. Only buses travel in alternate directions, but they are generally less frequent and less reliable, thanks to traffic.
  • Agnes Nitt and Perdita X Dream appear briefly in Lords and Ladies, but are best known from Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”).
  • Ben’s favourite board game Pandemic was designed by Matt Leacock and first published in 2008. It’s a fully co-operative game (see below) in which players are members of the Centre for Disease Control, trying to keep four global pandemics in check while they find cures for them all. The current edition of the game is published by Z-Man Games.
  • Fully cooperative games are ones in which players do not compete, but instead win or lose (and sometimes score) together. Board game examples include Pandemic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Spirit Island. Semi-cooperative games feature some cooperation, but the players also compete against each other in some way. In Ben’s experience, most such games feature strong player cooperation, usual through a high chance of everyone losing, but add in secret personal goals that might put them into conflict. This is a feature of “hidden traitor” and social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter, though these might also be considered team games. The Witches is different in that the competitive side of the game dominates; the cooperative element is relatively light, with the threat of losing fairly slight.
  • Solo board games are very popular in the “print and play” scene – cheap games you can download and print on paper yourself. They include Bargain Basement Bathysphere (since published as a boxed game), Utopia Engine and RATS: High Tea at Sea. Nemo’s War is at the other end of the scale: it’s a large game with a big board, hundreds of components and several expansions. Other boxed solo games include Under Falling Skies (which started life as a print and play game), Final Girl, Coffee Roaster and Deep Space D-6.
  • We discussed Good Omens back in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
  • The Discworld Emporium is the most famous officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise which grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who started doing Discworld miniatures in the early 1990s. We most recently talked about them in #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”. They are credited as the author of many of the more recent spin-off books, like The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Nac Mac Feegle Big Wee Alphabet Book, so you’ll no doubt here some more about them before we’re done.
  • The fans whose likenesses were used for the box art witches were Kate Oldroyd (Tiffany Aching), Victoria Lear (Petulia Gristle) and Pam Gower (Granny Weatherwax). As we mentioned, Pam sadly passed away in January 2023. She wasn’t just the inspiration for this box art, but also Paul Kidby’s bust of Granny Weatherwax. You can read Bernard Pearson’s thoughts about Pam in his Cunning Artificer blog in 2015, including an anecdote about her meeting with Terry which also appears in the biography.
  • Rowlf the Dog was one of the original muppet characters, originally performed by Jim Henson. He notably achieved solo fame in the early 1960s as a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show, before becoming the piano player in The Muppet Show and subsequent movies. His big number in The Muppet Movie is a duet with Kermit, “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.
  • Wilfred is the title character of a short film and two television series, all created by Australian comic actors Adam Zwar and Jason Gann, and starring Gann (in a costume) as “Wilfred”, an anthropomorphic dog, who is suspicious and jealous of his owner’s new partner. The original short won awards at Tropfest, Australia’s biggest short film festival, in 2007, and became a series on SBS which ran for two seasons in 2010. It was then adapted for the US market, starring Gann as Wilfred and Elijah Wood as Ryan, a depressed man who befriends Wilfred when his neighbour asks him to look after the dog. In this version the question of whether Wilfred can truly speak, or even really exists, is much more present. The American Wilfred ran for four seasons on FX between 2011 and 2014. There was also a Russian adaptation, retitled Charlie.
  • The board games we recommended are:

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat66 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 66, “Ol’ No Eyes Is Back“, discussing the 2010 Discworld novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, with returning guest Amie Kaufman.

Iconographic Evidence

We refer a few times to Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby lecture, “Shaking Hands With Death”. It was published in 2012, and then collected in A Slip of the Keyboard in 2014, and we’ll have an episode on it in due course. You can watch the whole thing below, as the lecture is televised on BBC One, though the YouTube clip is not an official upload. Pratchett was unable to read it himself on the night, and gave the gig to Tony Robinson.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title riffs on the classic 1973 Frank Sinatra album Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. It’s also, because we’re big nerds, a reference to Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, the 1991 album by Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Brent Spiner, whose android character Data has golden eyes. Ben was delighted to discover another riff on the title while looking up these details: Old Brown Ears Is Back, a 1993 album by noted muppet pianist and singer, Rowlf the Dog!
  • Guest Amie Kaufman was last on way back in July 2018 for #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, discussing Truckers. Her most recent books at the time were Ice Wolves, the first in the Elementals trilogy, and Obsidio, the final book in the Illuminae Files trilogy with Jay Kristoff. Since then she’s published the two other Elementals books, Scorch Dragons and Battle Born; another YA sci-fi trilogy with Kristoff, the Aurora Cycle; the Illuminae Files novella Memento (a hard to get publisher exclusive); two duologies with Meagan Spooner, The Other Side of the Sky and Beyond the End of the World, and Unearthed and Undying; and two books with Ryan Graudin, The World Between Blinks and Rebellion of the Lost. So by our count, that’s actually eleven novels and one novella!
  • The blurb Amie reads seems to be from an American edition of the book, but we’re not sure which one. If you know, please tell us! A new edition is on the way in June, with a new cover matching the other recent paperback editions, and it uses a blurb very similar to, though shorter than, the one Amie reads. The old blurb was:
    A man with no eyes. No eyes at all. Two tunnels in his head… It’s not easy being a witch, and it’s certainly not all whizzing about on broomsticks, but Tiffany Aching – teen witch – is doing her best. Until something evil wakes up, something that stirs up all the old stories about nasty old witches, so that just wearing a pointy hat suddenly seems a very bad idea. Worse still, this evil ghost from the past is hunting down one witch in particular. He’s hunting for Tiffany. And he’s found her…
  • Pratchett mentions that I Shall Wear Midnight is the last Tiffany Aching book is at least a few places, but you can find it mentioned in this interview with book blogger the Bookwitch, and in this Guardian piece about I Shall Wear Midnight, both from 2010.
  • Pratchett doesn’t say in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture that he gives the death he describes for his father to the Baron, but the Guardian piece mentioned above draws the same conclusion.
  • On the subject of Boffo, Wintersmith pretty directly tells us it isn’t a common practice for witches to buy stuff from there, at least not in the Ramtops. In chapter 3, “The Secret of Boffo”, Tiffany asks Miss Treason directly:

‘Do all witches buy from Boffo?’ said TIffany.
‘Only me, at least around here. Oh, and I believe Old Mistress Breathless over in Two Falls used to buy warts from there.’

  • Granny previously visited Ankh-Morpork in Equal Rites (see #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes”), and again with Nanny Ogg in Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”).
    • In Equal Rites there’s exactly one mention of city witches: they’ve left “witch marks” on the outside of the rear doors of Unseen University, advising any witches who visit that they are welcome and that the housekeeper Mrs Whitlow is “gullible and foolish”; Granny notes that “city witches didn’t seem that bright themselves”, though she doesn’t meet any or mention that any live in Ankh-Morpork. After spending some time with Mrs Whitlow, who at the time considered herself a psychic medium and put on posh airs, Granny wonders if she isn’t a “born witch who somehow missed her training”. She also does some witchery for folks while staying in the city, including brewing potions with the excitingly cheap glassware available.
    • In Maskerade, when she arranges lodgings in the Shades, Granny describes Mrs Palm as “an old friend. Practic’ly a witch.” But there’s no mention of any actual city witches.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat65 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 65, “Let There Be Gaimans“, discussing several pieces from the “Scribbling Intruder” section of Pratchett’s 2014 nonfiction anthology, A Slip of the Keyboard, with special guest Peter M Ball.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ve mentioned it before a few times, but here again is Michael Williams’ interview with Terry Pratchett from 2013, during his tour to promote Snuff, titled “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.” (It used to be available as an audio recording, but now it’s only available via YouTube.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is probably not Ben’s best work, but it was there…
  • GenreCon is a writing conference in Meanjin (aka Brisbane) specifically for genre writers that tries to cover as many genres as possible: science fiction, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and more. It just ran its eighth conference from 17-19 February 2023, with this year’s guests including friends of this podcast Garth Nix (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“) and Will Kostakis (#Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“).
  • The Queensland Writers Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation supporting local writers of all kinds. It was established in January 1990, and as well as GenreCon runs workshops and other events, and provides various services including consulting, mentorship and manuscript assessment and editing.
  • The Author is the quarterly journal of The Society of Authors, established in 1884, and is the UK’s union for writers, illustrators and literary translators – not just for authors any more! Terry was Chair of their Management Committee from 1994 to 1995, helping to shape their policy and strategy. His time in those meetings inspired the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, which we discussed in #Pratchat63. He was also elected as a member of the Society’s Council. Philip Pullman was President of the Society from 2013 until early 2022, when he resigned following some controversy around a memoir. The current Chair is Joanne Harris, best known for her novel Chocolat. Notably both Harris and Pullman were some of the more level-headed voices speaking up about the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy (see below), with Harris in favour of the changes, and Pullman advocating letting Dahl’s books fade away without being republished.
  • Ben is wrong about one thing in his FAQ footnote: the Pratchett newsgroups (see below) did have an FAQ! You can still find it at lspace.org here. We think this was the last version, updated in 2005; like the Annotated Pratchett File (also see below), it was maintained by Leo Breebaart, who also created the L-Space web.
  • We’ve previously talked about newsgroups in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat42, but for context: the Usenet system was created in 1980 as an Internet-based alternative to local Bulletin Board Systems. Setting standards that would later be used by web-based internet forums, they organised posts by users into conversation-like “threads” of messages, which were themselves organised into “newsgroups” under hierarchical categories, similar to (but distinct from) domain names. There were three newsgroups of primary interest to Pratchett fans: alt.books.pratchett for discussion of the books themselves; alt.fan.pratchett (the big one) for general fan chit-chat (though this often included the books); and alt.fan.pratchett.announce, a moderated group for announcements of signings and other events of interest to fans. Pratchett was active on the first two.
  • Peter says Pratchett started publishing Discworld in about ’88, but we suspect he meant that the Discworld really took off around then, with the publication of the fourth and fifth books, Sourcery and his first really big hit, Wyrd Sisters. The Colour of Magic was first published in November 1983.
  • Pratchett’s fifth and tenth books (including the three pre-Discworld ones) were The Light Fantastic in 1985, and Pyramids in 1989. The gap in between contained the first big growth spurts of the Internet, but to put them in perspective, Tim Berners Lee only created the first version of the World Wide Web in 1989, and the first widely available web browser, Mosaic, didn’t launch until 1993 – by which time Pratchett was onto his twenty-fourth book, Johnny and the Dead! If you wanted to chat to people on the internet, newsgroups and mailing lists were the go in the 1990s…
  • In Benjamin Partridge’s monthly comedy podcast, The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, Partridge plays the unnamed host of the fictional industry body’s podcast. Through mostly unscripted interviews with characters played by various guest actors and comedians, Partridge slowly builds up a bizarre alternate reality over many years. One of the recurring characters is disgraced “Bovine Poet Laureate” Michael Banyan (played by comedian Henry Paker), author of a book of cow poetry titled Crab of the Land, who often tells outrageous stories about partying with Jonathan Franzen.
  • ChatGPT is an “AI chatbot” created by the company OpenAI and publicly launched in a prototype state in November 2022. It’s capable of producing sophisticated text responses to prompts using the GPT 3 large language model previously created by OpenAI, and as a result has become hugely popular and controversial. It’s not actually intelligent; rather it uses statistical models based on a huge corpus of text (i.e. large parts of the internet up to 2021) to assemble sentences, poems or lines of code which are drawn from that corpus. We’ll probably talk about it some more in the next episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club.
  • Pratchett told alt.fan.pratchett he was leaving for the reasons outlined in “this piece”Wyrd Ideas” on the 3rd February 1999, after a user speculated about Sam and Sybil having children (he was writing The Fifth Elephant at the time). This was despite other users in the group (and possibly the version of the FAQ available at the time) asking people not to do this sort of thing. You can see his post here – and thanks to Jo and Francine of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, who saved Ben the trouble of searching for this by linking to it from their own episode notes! Pratchett didn’t leave newsgroups altogether; he continues to “lurk” (i.e. read without posting much) on alt.books.pratchett and other newsgroups (mostly about videogames) until around 2008.
  • We mention several famous writers who published their works in serial form, usually in magazines. But we could have mentioned many more! As well as French authors Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, there’s also Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson and many, many more.
  • Speaking of Alexandre Dumas, his surname is pronounced “Doo-ma”. He was indeed paid by the line by some of the newspapers who published his stories, though others paid him by episode, leading to very long books rather than very short dialogue. According to some accounts, his publishers eventually caught on to his writing style, and insisted that a line had to fill half a newspaper column to count, supposedly forcing him to kill off a monosyllabic character he’d invented to extend his dialogue. Charles Dickens, by contrast, is said to have written verbosely as he was paid by the word, but in fact he was paid for instalments which had a very specific page count (32 pages in some accounts). Like a first year arts student, he may have used more words to fill the pages faster…a style emulated by Pratchett in Dodger (discussed in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“).
  • Watch this space for a brief history of fanfic, but in the meantime you can check out Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) for yourself – and yes, there’s an extensive Discworld collection there!
  • The Nanny (not Nanny Ogg) was a hugely popular American sitcom which ran from 1993 to 1999 – coincidentally the period between “Kevins” and “Wyrd Ideas” – on the CBS network. It starred co-creator Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a down on her luck Jewish woman from Queens who tries selling makeup door-to-door. She’s hired by high class English Broadway producer and widower Maxwell Sheffield to be the new nanny to his three children, and the two have a will-they or won’t-they relationship aided by Sheffield’s butler Niles and opposed by Sheffield’s business partner C.C. Babcock.
  • You can find the second edition of the Turkey City Lexicon on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association website.
  • The Neil Gaiman Masterclass on “The Art of Storytelling” is offered as part of the Masterclass streaming video service, which features hundreds of tutorials from famous leaders in their fields covering everything from acting to philosphy, personal style and astronomy. The BBC has a similar series of videos, BBC Maestro, with a class on Storytelling hosted by Alan Moore.
  • Pratchett used the term “figgin” for the kind of joke Peter describes because he used the word for exactly that kind of joke in Guards! Guards! In that novel, figgin is used by the Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night in one of the order’s oaths, secure in the knowledge that none of his flock knows what it means. (In this instance Pratchett doesn’t make us wait until the very end to discover the truth for ourselves; it’s defined in a footnote. In fact he only uses the word eight times in the novel, and three of those are callbacks made after the footnote.)
  • To avoid confusion, Ben would like to explain that the “sherbert lemon” kind of joke is not an example of shelving, which is when a comedian mentions a concept seemingly in passing so that they can come back to it later in a new context once the audience has forgotten about it and helping the comedy work through surprising recognition. (There’s a reason explaining how comedy works is described as “dissecting the frog”.)
  • Pratchett is on record (in the APF, of course) that there’s no pun in Twoflower:
    “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”
  • Andrew Harman is the English author of eleven pun-filled comic fantasy novels, published between 1993 and 2000. Most of them are set in the medieval fantasy kingdom of Rhyngill and surrounds, and five, beginning with The Sorcerer’s Appendix and ending with One Hundred and One Damnations, form a loose series following the adventures of the peasant Firkin and his friends. Harman went on to find more creative success as a game designer, founding his own publisher, YAY Games, which specialises in “gateway games” – ones that work well for introducing new people to hobby boardgames.
  • Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s classic sitcom farce about long-suffering but obnoxious hotel manager Basil Fawlty, ran for two series in 1975 and 1979 on BBC Two. It is often cited amongst the greatest sitcoms ever made, though its characters and many of the episodes’ premises rely heavily on ethnic and gender stereotypes. The titular hotel is located in the resort town of Torquay in the coastal “English Rivieria” region of Devon. Cleese was inspired to create the setting and main character for the show after an experience with the manager of a real Torquay hotel where the Monty Python crew stayed while filming on location in 1971.
  • For some perspective on the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy, you could do worse than these pieces from The Conversation:

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#Pratchat64 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, discussing the 1973 short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, with special guest Andy Matthews.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the Two Ronnies sketch mentioned by Andy in which they use letters (and numbers) instead of words. It’s framed as “Swedish Made Simple”, a “Swedish lesson in Norwegian”, in which the subtitles use only single letters and numbers to represent words. It seems to be from the second episode of the fourth series of the show, broadcast on BBC Two in January 1975 – and please be warned that the sensibility of the sketch reflects the state of comedy in that era, especially in the way it’s ended.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a play on the “GNU Terry Pratchett”, which many websites – including this one, if our plugin is working correctly – add to a special “Clacks overhead” bit of information. This is a reference to Going Postal, in which a message prefixed GNU is sent up and down the Clacks system forever. John Dearheart’s name is preserved this way, in accordance with the idea in Pratchett’s writing that “a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”. GNU is also a reference to the Roundworld GNU Project, a cornerstone of the free software movement which set out to create a free Unix-like operating system. In this context, GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”
  • We mention a lot of Terry’s other books this episode; here’s a list with our episodes:
    • Feet of Clay – discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“
    • Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes – Terry’s official biography written by Rob Wilkins, which we’ve not yet covered.
  • In the 1999 film The Matrix, future humanity is enslaved by sentient machines, who use the humans as living batteries after environmental disaster prevents traditional methods of power generation. They keep the humans subjugated by plugging them into an artificial reality known as “The Matrix”, but there are some free humans who present the imprisoned ones with the truth. Famously one of them – Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne – does so by offering a prospective recruit two pills. The red one will allow them to see the truth of their situation, exiting the Matrix, never to return. The Wachowskis, who wrote and directed the film, turned it into a trilogy by making two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, in 2003. A fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, was released in 2021.
  • Owls are indeed mentioned in the Bromeliad – Granny Morkie describes them in Diggers while attempting to “cheer up” the Nomes who’ve gone outside at night to try and rescue Dorcas. In her words: “Cunning’ devils, owls. You never hear ‘em till they’re almost on top of you.” The Nomes who grew up in the Store are terrified.
  • The four books collecting Pratchett’s early stories are Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (which contains this story), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and The Time-traveling Caveman. Most of the stories are from the Bucks Free Press, but Father Christmas’s Fake Beard also contains a number of Christmas-themed stories from other points in Pratchett’s career.
  • The origins of the name Rincewind are actually known: it comes from the long-running humour column “By the Way” in the Daily Express newspaper. Written by various writers under the pen name “Beachcomber”, “By the Way” was a broad spoof of society news, with short snippets of nonsense about various fictional characters. One group of frequently recurring characters were “twelve red-bearded dwarfs” who were highly litigious, and who were at one point given individual names – one of which was “Churm Rincewind”. As mentioned in the Annotated Pratchett File entry for The Colour of Magic, Terry read a lot of the columns in published collections when he was 13, but didn’t realise that’s where he’d picked up the name until his friend Dave Langford pointed it out many years later. So Ben’s dramatic recreation wasn’t too far off the mark…
  • “Fishing from the same stream” is mentioned in the L-Space wiki, though the specific quote about it is not sourced. Pratchett is said to have invoked this when saying its ridiculous that anyone would suggest a certain famous author had plagiarised him just because they both had schools of magic in their books, since it was an old concept that both had drawn on. “That’s how genres work,” he says, and indeed sites like TV Tropes and All the Tropes would agree.
  • In the film Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant and his young friends escape a Tyrannosaurus rex in part because Grant advises them its vision is “based on movement” – much as Rincemangle advises his fellow gnomes. But Rincemangle is partially correct – cats are ambush predators and while they have excellent night vision are relatively short-sighted. While it’s not true that stationary objects or mice are invisible to them, they are instinctively drawn to movement and use it to identify prey when laying in wait. To see why this is probably a silly assumption to make about T. rex, try to imagine the dinosaur as it appears in the film hiding in the grass and waiting to ambush its prey… Modern thought is that T. rex probably had great eyesight, just like many modern predatory birds, making it able to see prey from quite a long distance and chase it down. The assumption also appears in Crighton’s original 1990 novel, though in that case Grant makes the observation after seeing the live dinosaurs, though this is backtracked in the sequel, The Lost World.
  • For more on how cats see, here’s the MYSTERIOUS FELINE VISION article from catveteran.com shared with us by subscriber Ian Banks.
  • Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, and one of the most influential Spanish-language writers in the world. While he’s most famous for his short stories, which came to the attention of English-language readers in the 1970s, he also wrote novels, poetry and nonfiction, and perpetrated a great number of literary hoaxes. His most famous stories were mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, and include “The Library of Babel”, about a library that contains every possible book that could ever exist, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges discovers that a secret society invented a country and the world of its legends, and by doing so conjured them into being.

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#Pratchat63 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 63, “Decline by Committee“, discussing the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices”, plus some extra discussion of the novel Thud!, with special guest Matt Roden.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the “Explaining a Board Game” sketch from Australian sketch group Aunty Donna, which Ben has indeed been sent many, many times – including by Matt, shortly after we recorded this episode.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on the phrase “Design by Committee”, which refers to a situation where no-one is in charge of the design of a product, leading to a lack of direction.
  • “Trilogy in four parts” is borrowed from Douglas Adams, who described The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book series this way after publishing the fourth novel, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. It later became “The Increasingly Innacurately Named Hitchhikers Trilogy” with the publication of the fifth book Mostly Harmless.
  • You can find the first three parts of our trilogy here:
    • #PratchatPlaysThud – “The Troll’s Gambit”, about Thud the board game, with Dr Melissa Rogerson
    • #Pratchat61 – “What Terry Wrote”, about Thud!, with Matt Roden.
    • #Pratchat62 – “There’s a Cow in There“, about Where’s My Cow?, with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
  • “Nepo baby” was a buzz-term in late 2022. It’s short for “nepotism baby”, a new name for the concept of getting a leg up via a family connection. That’s as old as…well, a very old thing, but discussion of it really took off as younger social media users learned to their surprise that many Hollywood stars and influencers have parents or other relatives they’d never heard of who are also in show business. Matt asks Ben if he read “the article” – Ben hadn’t, but we think Matt meant “What is a Nepotism Baby, Anyway? How a ‘Nepo Baby’ is Born” by Nate Jones for Vulture, which was also a cover story for New York magazine.
  • Ridcully’s snooker table covered in paperwork appears not in Lords and Ladies, but in Soul Music. A footnote reveals that a wizard’s trick shots can include temporal spin, and that Ridcully once bounced a ball off the Bursar’s head “last Tuesday”.
  • We’ve listed below the senior faculty members of Unseen University who appear in most of the Wizards books. (We’ve tried to avoid any spoilers here for books not yet covered on the podcast.)
    • Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor
    • Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, Reader in Invisible Writings, and Praelector. (He later acquired more titles, including Reader in Non-Volatile Intelligence, Cantoride Speaker in Slood Refurgance and at least one it would be a spoiler to reveal here.)
    • A. A. Dinwiddie (aka “The Bursar”), Bursar. His name is revealed in The Truth.
    • Henry (last name not revealed), the Dean of Pentacles, known as “the Dean”. (His name is revealed in a later book.)
    • The Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    • The Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    • The Senior Wrangler.
  • Ponder Stibbons and Victor Tugelbend were students taking final exams at the time of the rediscovery of Holy Wood, as chronicled in Moving Pictures. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.) This was indeed also the first appearance of Archchancellor Ridcully, though he doesn’t play a major part in a novel until Reaper Man, which also introduces the rest of the faculty we know best.
  • We discussed our theories about Rincewind’s entry into Unseen University in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • The “National Interest Test” (NIT) was a requirement added to the grant application process for the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2018 by the previous Liberal/National coalition government. The ARC is the independent body which assesses university grant applications for research, and recommends which projects should get grants to the Minister, who generally approves all of them. But the NIT was part of an increasingly commercial agenda of the conservative government to restrict research, and in 2021 further recommendations were given to the ARC to make this more stringent. In late December 2021, Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert rejected six grants which had been approved and recommended by the ARC on the grounds that they were not “good value for taxpayers’ money” or in the national interest. The timing of the announcement – just before Christmas – and the nature of the projects removed (which included subjects like climate change and political activism in China) suggested a political motive for the rejections, which was met with .
  • The wizard who knows about stories is most likely Ladislav Pelc, Prehumous Professor of Morbid Bibliomancy, whom Moist goes consults about the Post Office’s letters in Going Postal. He has very large ears and no beard, but out of deference to wizarding tradition he wears a false one when in view of the public.
  • The incident with Windle Poons is in Reaper Man; the other wizards attempt to bury him at the corner of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, described as two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork.
  • There are many schools in Ankh-Morpork, aside from Unseen University itself:
    • The Assassin’s Guild school appears most prominently in Pyramids and Night Watch.
    • The Clockmaker’s Guild – which seems to provide more of an apprenticeship – appears in Thief of Time. It’s implied the Thieves’ Guild has a school or apprenticeship program as well.
    • The Fool’s Guild school is important in Wyrd Sisters and Men at Arms.
    • The Musician’s Guild may also offer more of an apprenticeship, but they raised and taught Keith, Maurice’s “dumb kid”, as he mentions in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
    • By the time of Thief of Time, Susan (who herself went to Quirm College for Young Ladies) is teaching at Madam Frout’s Learning Through Play School.
  • We previously brought up the issue of copaganda – the bias towards showing police in a positive light in news media and popular culture – in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”, though we never quite got around to discussing it. Ben’s not sure we’ve done the discussion justice here, either – he’s had more thoughts since the episode – but the concept pre-dates the word, going back to at least the 1950s and the publicity stunt puff pieces in newspapers about police officers rescuing cats and early friendly neighbourhood policemen characters on television. Indeed, the concept has been used to criticise exactly the friendly English bobby image we talk about in this episode, so perhaps we have some more thinking to do. The origins of the word aren’t easily traceable, and probably it was coined more than once; it definitely dates back to before 2015, but has seen a resurgence in use and popularity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased public awareness of the failings of the police system.
  • We mention quite a few cop shows this episode, though Ben would like to say he realises we may have been unconsciously cherry picking to support our idea about the difference in pop cultural depictions of cops in the UK and Australia compared to the US (and see also the note above about copaganda). Here are the police films and television shows we mentioned:
    • The Bill was a British police drama about the life and work of beat officers at the fictional Sun Hill Police Station in metropolitan London. It was broadcast on ITV for 26 series between 1983 and 2010, and was also popular in Australia. A reboot is apparently in the works. The show’s title comes from the slang term for police, “the Old Bill” or just “the Bill”.
    • Blue Heelers was an Australian drama about the fictional rural Victorian town of Mount Thomas, told from the perspective of the local police officers. It ran for twelve years on Channel 7 from 1994 to 2006, and made stars out of Australian actors Lisa McCune (who left after the seventh series) and John Wood (who was the lead character for all twelve years). Blue heelers are an Australian breed of working dog, and also slang in some parts of Australian for a police officer or the police in general (Australian police uniforms are generally blue).
    • Police Rescue was an Australian police drama which began life as a 1989 feature film before spawning a television series which ran for five series between 1991 and 1996. It focused on the NSW Police Rescue Squad, who travelled all over the city and the state attending accidents, disasters and other emergencies. It starred Gary Sweet and Sonia Todd.
    • Water Rats was an Australian police drama focussed on the Sydney Water Police, whose bear is Sydney Harbour. It ran for six seasons on Channel 9 between 1996 and 2001, and featured Colin Friels, Gary Bisley, Aaron Pederson and Jay Laga’aia (who soon after appeared in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as Captain Typho).
    • Hot Fuzz (2007) is the second of Edgar Wright’s “cornetto trilogy” of comedy action films which began with Shaun of the Dead. It stars Simon Pegg as Sgt. Nick Angel, a hotshot London police officer whose colleagues resent his success and get him reassigned to a small town in Gloucestershire, where he is initially bored before a series of bizarre murders begins. The film also stars Nick Frost as local constable Danny Butterman.
    • Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010 on ITV. It was based on the “Constable” novels written by ex-cop Peter N Walker (using the pseudonym Nicholas Rhea). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, and had a number of main characters over its run, but is probably best known for the original pair: young police officer Nick (played by ex-EastEnders heartthrob Nick Berry) and his wife Kate (Niamh Cusack), the town doctor. Other notable characters were Sergeant Blaketon (Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds), older constable Alf Ventriss (William Simons), a war veteran – partial inspiration for Fred Colon, perhaps? – and local “lovable rogue” Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard).
  • Bernard “The Cunning Artificer” Pearson, of Clarecraft and The Discworld Emporium fame, was indeed a police officer in his youth. He was also one of Pratchett’s closest friends and often consulted on various matters, including “his policing “the more arcane policing arts”, as Rob Wilkins puts it in Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes.
  • Regarding Pratchett’s attitude towards Agatha Christie, Ben mentions this interview for the Bookwitch blog from 2010. (Interestingly he mentions several times that he’s working on I Shall Wear Midnight, and insists it will be the last Tiffany Aching book…) On Agatha Christie, he says: “Well, Agatha Christie; you have to get her out of your system sooner or later. Same with James Bond. And then you realise that not all murders happen in one house containing seven people.” He also describes her work as fantasy in his pieces “Whose Fantasy Are You?” (1991) and “Let There Be Dragons (1993)”, which can be found in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • You can find A’Tuin Sneezed’s great, long Twitter thread about Thud! by starting with this tweet:
  • Thomas the Tank Engine is an anthropomorphic steam locomotive – basically a regular train, but with a human-like face on the front – who is the star of the Railway Series books by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry, written between 1945 and 1972. While the books were very successful, it was the television series adaptation Thomas & Friends that really cemented Thomas’ popularity. The series ran from 1984 to 2021, and used live-action model train versions of Thomas and his friends with narration by Ringo Starr. The human characters – including the “Fat Controller”, who was in charge of the railway system on Thomas’ home, the Island of Sondor – were portrayed by wooden models.

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#Pratchat62 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 62, “There’s a Cow in There“, discussing the Discworld picture book, 2005‘s Where’s My Cow? with special guests, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

Iconographic Evidence

  • We’re sourcing a good video of a hippo – watch this space!
  • We might also add some partial images from the book; we apologise this episode was so visual!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme song of the Australian version of Play School, a children’s educational and entertainment programme produced by the ABC since July 1966. The first line of the song is “There’s a bear in there”, referring to one of the two staple toys from the show, Little Ted or Big Ted. (See below for more about them.)
  • The other children’s book to make its way from Discworld to Roundworld is another favourite of Young Sam’s: Miss Felicity Beadle’s The World of Poo. It appears in Snuff, and was published alongside the Corgi paperback edition of the novel. We’ll cover it when we get to Snuff, but it stays much more in-universe than Where’s My Cow?
  • The rock song that might have inspired Detritus’ line in the book is actually the poetic opening to the Moody Blues’ 1969 album On The Threshold of a Dream. The first words heard are: “I am, I think I am. Therefore I must be. (pause, then uncertainly) I think…”
  • Ben likens the Sams’ flying chair to the music video for the UK’s 2022 Eurovision song; specifically that’s Sam Ryder’s “Space Man”.
  • Blackboard is one of the puppet characters from the long-running Australian children’s program Mr Squiggle; we previously referred to him in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • The Abominable Snow Baby is a 2021 animated adaptation of Pratchett’s early short story of the same name, produced for Channel 4. It was narrated by David Harewood, and starred Hugh Dancy as Albert, and Julie Walters as his Granny; the picture of Terry Pratchett appears in Albert’s flat, though it’s not clear if he’s meant to be Albert’s grandad or not.
  • The children’s book about death mentioned by Liz is Duck, Death and the Tulip by German children’s author and illustrator Wolf Erlbruch, first published in English in 2011.
  • You can find Terry’s official answers about the cow on the L-Space web.
  • The Amazing Maurice opens in Australian cinemas on 12 January 2023, but if you’ve looked this up very soon after our episode was published, you can get tickets for the 10 December preview screening in Adelaide from the Australian Discworld Convention. Head to ausdwcon.org/amazing for tickets and more info!

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#Pratchat61 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 61, “What Terry Wrote“, discussing the 24th Discworld novel, 2005‘s Thud! with guest Matt Roden.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays with “What Tak wrote”, the creation myth of the dwarfs, as featured at the start of Thud!
  • For those interested, here’s the Pratchat intro script as it appears in our episode notes template. Ben updates it when creating the notes for a new episode, inserting the book’s title and the details for the guest.
LIZ: I’m Elizabeth Flux.
BEN: I’m Ben McKenzie.
LIZ: Welcome to Pratchat, the monthly Terry Pratchett book club podcast.
BEN: Each month we discuss one of Terry Pratchett’s books with a special guest.
LIZ: This month we’re reading Book Title, [pun/joke about the book].
BEN: And our [returning] guest is [descriptors], [guest name] - welcome [guest]!
  • 100 Story Building and Story Factory are not-for-profit creative writing centres for children and young people which run workshops centred around storytelling, literacy and writing, mostly in schools. Both were inspired in large part by 826 Valencia, a creative writing centre for established in San Francisco in 2002 by educator Ninive Caligari and novelist Dave Eggers (of McSweeney’s fame). Other similar organisations exist in many countries, including The Ministry of Stories in London (with which Matt was involved) and Fighting Words in Dublin.
  • A geode is a hollow, rounded sedimentary or igneous rock (and we’ll come back to that term) which has minerals on the inside of the hard outer shell. Those minerals often include crystals, like quartz or amethyst. Igneous geodes are often formed when there is a bubble of gas inside a flow of magma or lava. They’re very popular as jewellery and ornaments, and are often cut in half for display, with the flat edge of the shell polished to show off its formations too. They’re not to be confused with thunder eggs, which are similar but distinct spherical structures also formed in lava.
  • Octarine – the eighth colour, the colour of magic – is last definitely mentioned before Thud! in The Last Continent, back in 1998. (It might also be mentioned in The Last Hero, though this is harder to verify without re-reading the whole book.) It does get a passing mention in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch, but only in a non-fiction chapter.
  • Detritus and Cuddy, the Watch’s first troll and dwarf recruits, argue – and become fast friends – in Men at Arms. We discussed the book all the way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, and revisited in the live special #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
  • The “dwarf and the troll in the rock band together” are hornblower Glod Glodsson and percussionist Lias Bluestone who form a band with Imp y Celyn’s in Soul Music. We discussed the novel in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Rush Hour is a 1998 action comedy directed by Brett Ratner and starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as Detective Inspector Lee from Hong Kong and Detective James Carter of the LAPD. Lee is summoned to Los Angeles to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of his former boss, and Carter is assigned to “babysit” him as punishment, making him determined to solve the case. It was a big hit, spawning two sequels: Rush Hour 2 in 2001, which moved the action to Hong Kong, and Rush Hour 3 in 2007, which took both officers away from home to Paris. There have been rumours of a fourth film for years, and in this era of legacy sequels who knows – it could still happen.
  • The Wire is an American crime television series created for HBO by David Simon, an American author and former crime reporter. It’s set in the city of Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, and each season explores a different group connected to crime and law enforcement, though drug gangs and the police appear in all five seasons, which were first broadcast between 2002 and 2008. Season four, the one specifically mentioned by Matt, deals with the education system and the mayor’s office. The Wire notably stars Wendell Pierce as William “The Bunk” Moreland, a homicide detective who features in all five seasons; you might know him as the voice of Death in BBC America’s The Watch. (See #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.)
  • We’ll mention the earlier Watch novel, The Fifth Elephant, quite a few times this episode. It introduced the idea of the Deep Downers and is the origin of a lot of Discworld dwarf culture, previous books having mostly stuck to a parody of Tolkien’s dwarfs. It also announced the impending arrival of Young Sam We discussed it in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, back in February 2021.
  • Fizz, the political cartoonist for The Ankh-Morpork Times, is named for Phiz, the pen name of popular Huguenot illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882). His inclusion here (and in Monstrous Regiment) reflects that he contributed cartoons for the British satricial magazine Punch in very much the same style, but Browne was also known for illustrating novels and serialised stories in more reputable publications, most notably for Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which started with the pseudonym Nemo before changing it to Phiz. “Phiz”, by the way, is short for “Phizzog”, an English slang term for face which is derived from the word “physiognomy”, which means “a person’s facial features or expression”. (We’re not sure which came first, the cartoonist’s tag or the slang term, but its a fun word all the same.)
  • The Good Wife is a CBS legal drama set in Chicago, which ran for seven seasons between 2009 and 2016. It stars Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her State’s Attorney husband is jailed for corruption. It was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a spin-off starring Christine Baranski as her The Good Wife character Diane Lockhart, a senior lawyer at Florrick’s firm who has to start over at a new one after her daughter is scammed, resulting in financial disaster. It ran for six seasons between 2017 and 2022. We previously mentioned both shows in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. The Good Dwarf could deal with similar themes of what women are expected to give up for men, but adding in the unique species and gender angles of Discworld dwarfs. Don’t forget to tell us which characters you think should be in it!
  • Code-switching is originally a linguistic term for when a multi-lingual speaker changes between languages (or varieties of the same language) in the same conversation. This usage dates back to 1951 with the book Language of the Sierra Miwok by Lucy Shepard Freeland, when she notes it in the context of Californian First Nations people. Code-switching involves a great deal of mental energy as different languages have very different structures, idioms and modes of speech, and multilingual speakers often have to switch for their own needs as well those of the people they’re speaking to. The term has seen expanded use to mean switching between any two different modes of speaking (or thinking), especially when it comes to different levels of privilege, expected gender roles, and neurodiversity.
  • The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s smash hit novel from 2003 (two years before Thud!), the second to star Robert Langdon, a university professor who specialises in religious iconography and “symbology”. Langdon, who was introduced in Brown’s 2000 novel Angels & Demons, would appear in four more books. The Da Vinci Code‘s plot uses ideas from earlier writings about the Holy Grail and the Templars, and kicks off when professor is murdered to protect a secret about Christ which was uncovered by Leonardo da Vinci, who left clues in his paintings – most notably The Last Supper. It was controversial for its portrayal of the Catholic Church (who employ assassins in the book) and Christianity in general, as well as for its cavalier attitude to religion, history and art – Brown claimed in interviews that the background history he used for the book was “all” or “99%” true, including the existence of secret societies generally considered fictitious. In 2005, the same year as Thud!, Tony Robinson – comic actor, Discworld audiobook narrator and presenter of Time Team – produced The Real Da Vinci Code for Channel 4, in which he debunked many of the supposed historical facts mentioned in the book. This didn’t hamper the book’s immense popularity, though, and in 2006 it was adapted for film by Ron Howard, with a script by Akiva Goldman and starring Tom Hanks as Langdon. The film was followed by adaptations of Angels & Demons and the fourth Langdon novel, Inferno.
  • A cyclorama (not “cyclodrama” as Matt says, though we’re all for drama in the round) is the Roundworld equivalent of Ransom’s painting in the book: a panoramic painting intended to be displayed on the inside of a cylindrical platform, surrounding the viewer. The term is also used for the building or room designed to hold such a painting. They were apparently very popular in the late 19th century. These days “cyclorama” is more commonly used to refer to the all-white backdrops used on stages, or in photography studios, where they are curved to give the illusion of there being no background at all.
  • Mr Sheen is an Australian brand of cleaning products – specifically an aerosol-based surface polish – created in the 1950s. They were popular well into the 1990s, remembered for their mascot, a small Mr Magoo-like cartoon figure with a large shiny forehead and glasses, and his catchy advertising jingle. He found success in other markets, too, notably the UK, where the Australian mascot was replaced by a moustached flying ace who flew around the house on a can of the product. “Mr Shine” has also been used as a name by many cleaning companies and products, though none of them seem famous enough to be a direct reference.
  • The city of Dis appears in Inferno, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, where it encompasses Lower or Nether Hell – which are the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth circles, housing those souls whose sins were willing or “obdurate” (i.e. unrepentant) – in order, those of heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. The city’s outer walls are surrounded by the River Styx, which forms a moat. Its name is derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, which refers to the Underworld as “the realms of Dis”, and mentions its “mighty walls”. “Dis Pater”, Latin for “Father of Dis”, was also the ruler of the Underworld in Roman mythology.
  • The Gooseberry is most obviously a pun on the Blackberry, the early smartphone which was a little ahead of its time, but nonetheless popular with high-powered business folks in the 1990s and 2000s, before the advent of touch-screen smartphones with the iPhone and its competitors. It might also be a reference to UK slang, in which a “gooseberry” is like a “third wheel” – someone who feels a bit unnecessary or left out in company, usually a couple.
  • “Unrelenting standards” is a psychological term for internal pressure to perform well, manifesting as perfectionism, difficulty in gauging one’s own performance compared to what’s generally considered acceptable, a desire to avoid criticism or mistakes, and an obsession with productivity and efficiency. It’s often said to be a product of growing up being valued primarily for your achievements, or in an atmosphere of frequent criticism and little praise.
  • We’ve previously mentioned the Love Languages in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“. They originate in the 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, which was written by Gary Chapman, a Baptist pastor and radio host. The book was phenomenally successful, selling more than 11 million copies and spawning many sequels and imitators. Ben is not a fan because the idea is very reductive; psychologists and counsellors have criticised Chapman’s work for over-simplifying and homogenising human experiences of love and communication, even where they appreciate the metaphor and have tried to expand it. Other critics note that Chapman is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, and based his book on his experience with a fairly narrow sample of his parishioners. He also rejects any expansion of the idea. perhaps because its made him a great deal of money… For the record, his original five love languages are “Acts of Service”, “Words of Affirmation”, “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch” – which you can probably see already leaves out a lot.
  • For more about Moving Pictures as a horror story, see our discussion in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Stephen King’s “Tak” appears in his 1996 novels Desperation and The Regulators, the latter of which was published under King’s outed pen name Richard Bachman, claiming to be a novel Bachman had written years earlier. Instead, it’s intentionally a story set in a parallel universe to Desperation, with alternate versions of many of the same characters – including the author!. Like the Summoning Dark, King’s Tak comes out of a deep mine in the desert and inhabits a human host – in Desperation it is a police officer who becomes a sort of berserker. We won’t say too much more, but as Ben mentions in the episode, the similarities don’t go much further than that, but it might be a deliberate reference.
  • The HBO miniseries starring Ben Mendelsohn is the 2020 adaptation of another Stephen King book, 2018’s The Outsider, which does indeed have a similar plot.
  • “And then the car ate a person I guess?” is a reference to Stephen King’s Christine, a 1983 novel about a seemingly possessed, jealous and violent classic car named “Christine”. It was adapted the same year into a film by John Carpenter, with some details – notably the source of the car’s demonic presence – changed considerably. Carpenter directed it as a career-saving move after his previous labour-of-love film, The Thing, didn’t do well at the box office, but both films are now cult classics. A remake of Christine is rumoured to be in production.
  • A “cryptex” is a small container with a secure, complex lock, intended to carry secret messages. The term – a portmanteau of “cryptic” and “codex” – was invented by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, though there’s nothing about the device itself that requires the use of cryptology to use. The original version in the novel is a hollow cylinder made of stone and brass with five rotating sections, each containing every letter of the alphabet (though whether it’s the Latin or modern English alphabet is unclear). This makes it basically a letter-based combination lock with between 280,000 and 11 million possible combinations, depending on some details not given in the novel. Physical reproductions of the cryptex have become widely available since the release of the Da Vinci Code film; Ben has even used one as part of an escape room experience he designed.
  • We mention that on the Discworld, werewolves are classified as undead, something which dates back to Angua’s first appearance in Men at Arms. We’ve never really agreed; see above for our episodes about the book, where we decide they are, if anything, “twice as alive”.
  • “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” is the fifth and final Discworld short story, first published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in May 2005, just four months before Thud! We’ll be discussing it in #Pratchat63, coming in January 2023.
  • “Fracas“, along with “rumpus”, are both used by William de Worde during a meeting with Lord Vetinari in The Truth. A footnote describes them as the word equivalent of rare fish, claiming that they are “found only in certain kinds of newspapers” and “never used in normal conversation.” For more on this, see #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • Liz mentions “Incepting The Wire“; she’s invoking the concept of “inception” from Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception. The film is about a crew of criminals who use technology to enter the dreams of others, stealing important secrets from their subconscious. The plot of the film involves the crew being hired for the more difficult crime of “inception”: inserting an idea into the mind of the target.
  • We Own This City is a 2022 television mini-seres created by David Simon for HBO. Like The Wire, it’s set in Baltimore and is about law enforcement – in this case, corrupt members of the Gun Trace Task Force, based on real-life events which occurred between 2015 and 2019.
  • The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. Ben doesn’t necessarily recommend it, especially if, like him, you’re not really a horror fan – it’s pretty full on. Ben prefers the director’s previous film, the 2002 black werewolf comedy Dog Soldiers, but The Descent was pretty successful. A sequel, The Descent Part 2, was released in 2009, though it was directed by Jon Harris, who edited the original. It’s considered to be…not as good.
  • When Detritus is in the desert of Klatch in Jingo, he initially has a lot of trouble in the heat, especially as his helmet conks out. Later, at night when the desert is very cold, his brain cools and becomes more efficient, as he puts it. Sadly he doesn’t say anything about the apparent demise of his helmet; the relevant passage is quoted below, and the helmet isn’t mentioned again. See also our discussion of the novel in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, and our next episode, #Pratchat62, “There’s a Cow in There“, when we mention the helmet again.

The troll was standing with his knuckles on the ground. The motor of his cooling helmet sounded harsh for a moment in the dry air, and then stopped as the sand got into the mechanism.

Jingo – Terry Pratchett, 1997
  • Matt mentions Brick’s stream-of-consciousness passages read like “an excerpt from an Irvine Welsh novel“. Welsh is a Scottish author, most famously of Trainspotting, the 1993 novel about a group of addicts – of heroin or other things – that was adapted into film by Danny Boyle in 1996. Both book and film are considered classics.
  • Matt’s “dribbling dragon” is an allusion to “Chekhov’s gun” (originally “Чеховское ружьё”, or “Chekhov’s rifle” in Russian), advice given by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in several letters to younger writers in the early twentieth century. It’s basically the idea that you should only include necessary details in your story – the usual example being that if you include a gun in the first act of your story, it should be used to shoot someone before the end of the play or else taken out of the story entirely.
  • Reg Shoe, revolutionary-turned-zombie-turned-activist-turned-police detective, is not at all mentioned in Thud!, despite having a prominent supporting role in the two preceding Watch novels, The Fifth Elephant and Night Watch. Angua does mention in passing to Sally that “no-one cares if you’re a troll or a gnome or a zombie or a vampire”, but that’s as close as it comes. Vimes doesn’t even think of Reg during the flashback to his meeting with the Patrician about Sally, when he mentally lists the weirder members of the Watch: he thinks only of trolls, dwarfs, golems, a werewolf, an Igor and Nobby.
  • We’ve mentioned the British drama Downton Abbey a few times before on the podcast, most notably in #Pratchat36. The series was created and co-written by English actor, writer, director and actual aristocrat and member of the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. It follows the inhabitants of the titular manor house: the aristocratic Crawley family, led by Lord Grantham, and their servants. It’s set between 1912 and 1925 and features many significant historical events, including the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War, and the Spanish Flu epidemic. (Of note: Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of Lord Grantham, is played by Susan Dockery, known to Discworld fans as Susan in the television adaptation of Hogfather.) It ran for six series on ITV between 2010 and 2015, and became a worldwide phenomenon, especially after it was added to the streaming service Netflix. The story has since been continued in two films: Downton Abbey in 2019, set during a visit by the royal family to Downton in 1927, and Downton Abbey: A New Era in 2022, set in 1928 and involving a film crew hiring the Abbey as a location, and the family going on a trip to France to visit a villa the Dowager Countess (played by Maggie Smith) is bequeathing to one of her great granddaughters. Fellowes also created the HBO series The Gilded Age, set in 1880s America, and there’s been talk of potentially featuring a younger version of Smith’s character in that show.
  • When Ben mentions “the witch in that Tiffany Aching book“, he’s referring to Miss Level, the witch with two bodies – kind of the opposite of Miss Pickles and Miss Pointer – who mentors Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. For more on that, listen to #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • The Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme is an image of the actor character Rick Dalton pointing at a movie screen when he sees himself, taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino). It’s often used in conjunction with a quote, retweet or another image to show the poster self-identifies with it. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, and #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben hasn’t yet confirmed whether its Mr Shine or Grag Bashfulsson who warns Vimes he might have to rein in his anger more than usual, but he’ll keep looking.
  • Vetinari worries he’s pushed Vimes too far in Men at Arms, though Ben has the reasoning backwards – he’s worried because, as he mentions to Leonard da Quirm, Vimes didn’t punch the wall.
  • Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her personal, confessional works in a variety of media, and was considered an enfant terrible of the Young British Artists (or YBAs) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her most famous piece is probably Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of all her sexual partners, which was destroyed in a fire in a storage facility in 2004. The “modern” artworks mentioned in the book are by Daniella Pouter, and include Don’t Talk to Me About Mondays, described as a pile of rags, which might be a reference to Emin’s famous 1998 work My Bed, literally the artist’s bed piled with items from her bedroom in disarray.
  • “The Peaky Blinders thing” is a reference to the flat caps with sharpened pennies sewn into the brim, used as concealed weapons by Willikins street gang. The real “Peaky Blinders” were a street gang in Birmingham in the 1880s through to the 1910s; there’s a story that they used caps with razor blades sewn into them as weapons, leading to the gang’s name, but the name pre-dates disposable razor blades so this is probably apocryphal. A more sound theory is it referred to their sartorial style: they did wear flat caps, but also dressed rather well for a street gang, so the name probably referred to the hats and that they were fancy, as “blinder” is Birmingham slang for “dapper”. Another possibility is their technique of grabbing a robbery victim’s hat from behind and pulling it down over their eyes, so they wouldn’t be seen and couldn’t be identified. The term has become popular again since the BBC series Peaky Blinders gained popularity, though it’s a heavily fictionalised version of the real gang. It ran for six series between 2013 and 2022.
  • We heard the story of Michael Williams’ 2014 interview with Pratchett during the recording of #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, and we included his story in the third episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. You can hear the full discussion as “Imagination, Not Intelligence, Made Us Human” on the Wheeler Centre website…or you could. Now, instead, we direct you to the video of the discussion on YouTube. There’s a lot of good stuff in it!
  • If you’re interested in a full count of who dies in the Discworld books, you’re in luck: The L-Space Web fan site has just such a record! Like a lot of things on L-Space, “The Death Lists” wasn’t maintained all the way to the end of the series, but peters out around the time newsgroups and static websites were being replaced by social media and wikis. But, in this case, it only goes up to Thud! so happily (if that’s the right word) it covers most of the books we’ve discussed on the podcast up to this point. Though you might want to take it with a grain of salt – we note the Thud! entry doesn’t seem to include the four mining dwarfs left to die under Ankh-Morpork after hearing what the Cube had to say…
  • Ben would like to apologise for being needlessly pedantic about the two Discworld books which don’t feature Death, and his roasting at Matt’s hands is well deserved. Despite that, we can confirm he remembered correctly that they are The Wee Free Men (which we covered in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”) and Snuff. The Reaper Man thing is absolutely not true, do not go back and check or listen to #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door”.
  • The Thing appears in the Bromeliad, mostly the first and final books Truckers (see #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”) and Wings (see #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings”). In those books the Thing is a small, seemingly indestructible black cube passed down through generations of Nomes to Old Torrit and then Masklin, which used to occasionally speak and provide advice. When Masklin brings it to Arnold Bros, it recharges itself using the Store’s electricity and reveals that it is “Flight Recorder and Navigation Computer of the Starship Swan”, helping Masklin with a lot of his plans to get the Nomes out of the Store and eventually back to their home planet. Cube-shaped computers and recording devices also appear in other media, most notably in Star Wars, where both the Jedi and the Sith store holographic recordings on “holocrons” which are commonly cube-shaped.
  • The main mentions of school projects in Pratchett’s work occur in the Johnny books. In Chapter 5 of Johnny and the Dead, Johnny uses the excuse of a school project to ask about the surviving member of the Blackbury Pals, claiming that “You could get away with anything if you said you were doing a project.” He uses this trick again in Johnny and the Dead in order to speak to Mrs Tachyon when she’s in hospital, and his legit history project comes in handy when the kids have to disguise themselves for a trip back in time to the 1940s.
  • Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) is a Disney musical blending live-action and animation, much like Mary Poppins. Also like Mary Poppins, its based on novels for children by an English author, in this case Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The protagonist, Ms Eglantine Price (played by Angela Lansbury in the film, in her screen musical debut), is a single woman living in a coastal village in Dorset during World War II who is, against her will, saddled with some children evacuated from London. They discover Ms Price is learning witchcraft by correspondence, and end up joining her on an adventure to complete her education and locate a powerful spell she believes can aid in the war effort. It’s not specifically included in the list of Pratchett Family Movies (or PFMs) mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 9 of A Life With Footnotes, but it wouldn’t look out of place next to the likes of Time Bandits, The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke.
  • Irish, British and American actor Angela Lansbury (1925-2022) had a long and distinguished career on stage and screen. She is best remembered as Jessica Fletcher, the crime writer protagonist of the popular American cosy mystery TV series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons between 1984 and 1996, followed by four TV movies up until 2003. But she was also an accomplished singer, and played many famous roles in stage musicals including being the original Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Potts in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast. Her last role being a cameo appearance as herself in Ryan Johnson’s Glass Onion in 2022, and she died on 11 October, 2022, not long before we recorded this episode.
  • In Thud!, while complaining to Cheery about the announcement in the Times that the post office is issuing memorial Koom Valley stamps, Vimes says “Remember the cabbage-scented stamp last month?” This is an unusually direct reference to the events of the immediately previous Discworld novel, Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”). In Chapter 12, once stamp collecting has started to take off, Junior Postman Stanley Howler presents his own design to Moist for a stamp depicting a cabbage, printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli: “A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains”. This directly links the two books as being closer in time than the gap between their publication, and reinforces the basic idea that the Discworld books more or less happen in the order in which they’re published, with a couple of notable exceptions.
  • Ridcully certainly has a busy month. The above link suggests that there is less than a month between Ridcully overseeing Moist’s race against the Clacks in Going Postal and tricking out Vimes’ coaches in Thud! Ridcully also appears at an important meeting near the end of Making Money, and also has his head printed on the fee-dollar note when Moist introduces paper money in the final chapter. Of note: The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59) and the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” (see #Pratchat63) were also published the same year as Thud!, so Ridcully may also be dealing with A. E. Pessimal’s inspection and an invasion of Auditors into Roundworld at around the same time. A busy month indeed!
  • Brian Blessed (b. 1936) is an English actor from Yorkshire who is known for his booming voice. His best-known roles include King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder, Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen in the 1981 film version of Flash Gordon, and the voice of Boss Nass in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But he’s been a fixture of British television, stage and film for years, popping up in memorable guest roles in Space: 1999, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who and many more. As well as many cult films of the 1980s, he’s been in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare films Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996). Of note to Terry Pratchett fans, he appears as William “Bill” Stickers, deceased communist, in ITV’s 1995 adaptation of Johnny and the Dead.
  • Lord Melchett, played by Stephen Fry, is another character from the British sitcom Blackadder. He appears in the second series, Blackadder II, as an obsequious member of the royal court and Lord Edmund Blackadder’s rival for the favour of Queen Elizabeth I. In this instance, though, Ben is really thinking more of Lord Melchett’s descendent, the Blackadder Goes Forth character General Melchett (also played by Fry), who is more over-the-top eccentric and dangerously in charge of British soldiers on the front line during World War I.
  • We’ve mentioned Back to the Future before, most recently in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our discussion of Night Watch. In the film, eccentric scientist Doc Brown creates a time machine using a DeLorean sports car. Its time travel device, the “flux capacitor”, requires the vehicle to travel at 88 miles per hour (about 142 kilometres per hour); when it hits that speed the car and its occupants are instantly transported to the destination point in time, leaving behind flaming tyre tracks. At the end of the first film, Doc returns from a trip to the future to take his young friend Marty “back to the future”; Marty worries they don’t have enough road to get up to 88mph, to which Doc famously replies “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” The DeLorean then begins to fly… Pratchett was a fan of the film – the biography A Life With Footnotes recounts the story of the time he almost bought a replica of the DeLorean time machine – and he previously referenced it in Soul Music, in which Binky leaves flaming hoof prints behind when he travels time-bendingly fast.
  • George R. R. Martin is the bestselling author of the A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of books that begins with A Game of Thrones. The series was famously adapted for television by HBO as Game of Thrones. The novels are very long, but don’t all cover the same amount of time; by some estimates, the narrative time that passes varies between as little as a few months to more than a year. And then you have to factor in that the seasons of the world of the book are also irregular, for undisclosed fantastical reasons…
  • Listener Graeme Kay sent us in his tip that he thinks Koom Valley might be based on a place in Far North Queensland, not least because Pratchett is known to have spent plenty of time on holiday in that part of Australia. The specific place Graeme was thinking of is at Babinda Boulders on the land of the Yidindji people south of Cairns. Graeme mentioned “The Devil’s Pool”, but it’s one of several specific spots at Babinda which are connected by rushing water (the others are “The Chute” and “The Washing Machine”). Despite warning signs and local oral traditions about Siren-like dangers, younger tourists continue to visit those parts of the Boulders. More than twenty people have died there in the last century or so, largely because of underwater hazards that make it very difficult to survive being dragged under by the current. Those hazards do sound very similar to the ones encountered by Vimes in Koom Valley, and which would have surely killed him if not for the influence of the Summoning Dark. Sadly this is not a phenomenon of the past; the latest death occurred in December 2021, and a recent safety review completed in January 2023 recommended better signage to try and prevent more deaths. You can read about that, and see pictures of the location and diagrams of the hazards there, in this ABC news article.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum, the last of the witches books, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”.
  • Granny Weatherwax battles with her sister Lily in Witches Abroad. It’s never stated clearly, but it’s suggested that Lily is older than Granny, though her use of magic makes her look younger. She’s never described as her twin.
  • Granny doesn’t say anything about it, but in Carpe Jugulum when she is fighting the influence of Count de Magpyr, she has to choose between the darkness and the light to escape the lands of Death. In the end, she faces the light…and steps backwards. A very Granny Weatherwax solution, and reminiscent of her dilemma in the mirror dimension in Witches Abroad.
  • Liz says “Revved up like a deuce”, which is a lyric from “Blinded by the Light”, a song by Bruce Springsteen released on first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. It was famously covered by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on the 1976 album The Roaring Silence, and that version was a top ten hit in several countries.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Sophie’s Choice, the 1979 final novel by American author William Styron, which was adapted into a film in 1981 starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. While it’s meant to be a surprise revelation in the story, it’s now famous for Sophie – a Polish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany – having to choose which of her two children would be killed when she was sent to Auschwitz, with both of them being killed if she refused to choose. It’s since entered popular culture as a shorthand for an impossible (or at least very difficult) choice.
  • We mention a few famous fictional butlers this episode, including Alfred Pennyworth (Batman), Mr Butler (Miss FIsher’s Murder Mysteries), Alfred Pennyworth (not to be confused with Pennywise the Clown), and Jeeves (of Jeeves and Wooster fame). We previously talked about Willikins and the “battle butler” trope in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”, when discussing Jingo.
  • The line about a god of policemen does not actually appear in Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24), and Vimes doesn’t say it – though it is attributed to him. In The Last Hero (#Pratchat55), when Carrot arrives in Dunmanifestin, chief god of the Disc Blind Io asks Carrot if there’s a god of policemen. ‘No, sir,’ Carrot replies. ‘Coppers would be far too suspicious of anyone calling themselves a god of policemen to believe in one.’ There’s also this line from near the start of Night Watch (#Pratchat54), which explains why most Watch members are buried in the Cemetery of Small Gods: “Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.”
  • Despite his self-doubt, Ben is right: igneous rock is indeed formed by volcanoes. Specifically, igneous rock is formed from cooled magma or lava, forms of molten rock that naturally occur beneath the Earth’s crust but come nearer the surface in volcanos (magma) or are released during an eruption (lava).
  • Liz and Ben are both sort of right about the difference between concrete and cement. Cement is the binding agent used to make concrete, mortar, stucco and grout. It’s a combination of limestone, clay, shells and silica sand, which is mixed with water and then sets hard when it dries out. It’s not often used on its own, but instead combined with aggregate (a mixture of gravel and sand) to make concrete, which is the hard substance used for footpaths, driveways and structures. Most cement today is “Portland cement”, a fine grey powder developed in the 19th century by father and son Joseph and William Aspdin, who named it for its resemblance to Portland stone from the island of Portland in Dorset in the south of England. It mostly replaced the use of hydraulic lime, or “quicklime”. Cement is also combined with sand to make mortar, the “glue” that holds bricks together, and stucco, also known as render, used as a wall covering and to fashion ornamentations; and grout, used to fill the gaps between tiles. While all three use the same basic ingredients, they use different recipes, techniques and additives to achieve different consistencies suited to each use.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.