Show Notes – Pratchat

Episode 27 Notes and Errata

08/01/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 27, “Leshp Miserablés“, featuring guest Craig Hilderbrand-Burke, discussing the 1997 Discworld novel Jingo.

The O.C. is 1990s teen drama we’ve previously mentioned in episode 23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It starred the other Ben McKenzie.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – meaning there’s not a hidden meaning in everything, no matter how obvious the phallic imagery may be – is a phrase often attributed to German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. It’s almost certain he never said it, though.
Cthulhu is the ancient, god-like being created by H. P. Lovecraft, giving the name “Cthulhu Mythos” to the universe of linked cosmic horror stories written by Lovecraft and others. They feature Cylcopean architecture with non-Euclidean angles, civilisations of horrific beings that pre-dated humans on Earth, and other elements of cosmic horror. We previously talked about Cthulhu in episode 10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, as Moving Pictures also features Cthulhu-like horrors. (Bel-Shahamroth, featured in The Colour of Magic, also clearly draws inspiration from the works of Lovecraft.)
The tradition of a “Speaker’s Corner“, where anyone can stand on a soapbox and give their opinion, originates in Hyde Park London and dates back to at least the 19th century. The original Speaker’s Corner in Melbourne was at Birrarung Marr, on the banks of the Yarra River; it’s now held on the lawns outside the State Library and known as the Speaker’s Forum. Sydney’s Speaker’s Corner is at the Domain.
Blackadder Goes Forth was the fourth and final season of satirical historical comedy Blackadder created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, though the later seasons were written by Curtis with Ben Elton. They star Atkinson as various members of the Blackadder family throughout history, always accompanied by his dogsbody Baldrick (Toby Robinson). In Goes Forth, Edmund Blackadder is a Captain in the British Army on the Western Front of World War I. General Melchett (Stephen Fry) is their blustering Commanding Officer, who has no idea of their hardships and frequently orders them into danger from far behind the front.
You can find out more about the Mary Rose at the official web site.
The L-Space web was the primary web site hosting documents created on the newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett, including the Annotated Pratchett File (or APF). It still exists, though new annotations and notes now appear on the L-Space Wiki.
Pratchett spoke about “white knowledge” in several interviews, especially those given while publicising The Folklore of Discworld. He meant the phrase as an analogue to “white noise”, and defined it as knowledge you acquire without knowing how or where from.
Go Back to Where You Came From is an SBS reality television series which took groups of six Australians with “differing views” on asylum seekers and had them take the hazardous journey undertaken by refugees in reverse – sailing on small, seemingly fragile boats from Australia to nearby countries, and visiting refugee camps and other locations.
Tax avoidance is the (usually) legal avoidance of paying taxes, employed most successfully by the largest companies, who are allowed to offset profits with losses from previous years, depreciation of major assets (like the fleets of airlines or electrical infrastructure), or income shifting (assigning income disproportionately to subsidiaries in countries with the lowest tax rates).
While the militarisation of police in the US is well-documented – many forces there have military-style assault rifles, some have tanks, and quite a few have been trained by ex-military forces personnel – it’s a more recent phenomenon here in Australia. After a year or so of discussion, Victoria Police announced in December 2019 it was buying 300 AR-15 assault rifles for use in “active armed offender” situations, though they have promised the guns will not be carried in public.
Terry Pratchett was awarded no fewer than ten honorary doctorates. They come mostly from universities in the United Kingdom, the first being from the University of Warwick in 1999. He also had one from Dublin University in 2008, and his last – awarded in May 2014, less than a year before his death – was from the University of South Australia. He was also an Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Dublin and South Australia, which more-or-less just meant he occasionally gave a guest lecture.
Andy Serkis is an English actor who rose to fame through his motion capture performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. He has since established himself as a influential voice in motion capture, both as an actor and director.
In the 2006 television adaptation of Hogfather, Nobby was played by Nicholas Tennant, who also played the Head Librarian in part one of the adaptation of The Colour of Magic.
The honorific “effendi” began life as a title in the Ottoman Empire, roughly equivalent to “sir”; it was derived from the Ancient Greek word authentēs, which means “lord”. It is still in use as an honorific in Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, though it’s not quite used the way it is presented in most Western fiction.
The attempt on Prince Khufurah’s life has many parallels with the assassination of JFK: he is in a procession along a route lined by onlookers; the shooter was in a tall building thought to be empty; there is a second shooter elsewhere (in our world behind a grassy knoll, rather than a gnoll); and the idea that the first gunman could have shot JFK in the manner that killed him is sometimes mocked by conspiracy theorists claiming that it would require “a magic bullet”. The initial investigation determined that Lee Harvey Oswald – himself murdered while in police custody – was working alone; a later investigation determined that there was indeed a second shooter, though it agreed that Oswald’s bullet was the one that killed the President.
The “Zapruder film” is the most famous footage of the assassination of President Kennedy. It was filmed by local clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder on a home-movie camera; he developed three copies of his film and gave two to the US Secret Service, and it was used in both major investigations of the assassination.
Leonardo Da Vinci secured the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, in around 1482, and was commissioned to build a huge bronze statue of a horse. A full-size clay model was made and exhibited to much acclaim, but the 80 tons of bronze intended for the statue was instead used to build cannons in war against the French, and the statue was never completed. After the seizure of Milan by Louis XII, the clay model was used for target practice by French troops and destroyed. Some accounts say the Duke was impressed with Leonardo’s ingenuity and hired him to design weaponry, which may explain why his notebooks include many things that are definitely weapons, including a huge crossbow, guns with multiple barrels and armoured vehicles (including one with scythes to cut down enemy troops, illustrated complete with victims of the blades).
Hachikō was an Akita dog whose master, Hidesaburō Ueno, was a professor at the University of Tokyo. Ueno lived in Shibuya and Hachikō would come to Shibuya train station every day to meet him on his way home. Uneo died while at work in May 1925, but Hachikō continued visiting the station hoping to meet his master every day until his own death nearly ten years later. Hachikō became famous in 1932 when a newspaper wrote an article about him, and a statue was erected in his honour in 1934. The original statue was recycled during World War II, but a new statue by the original sculptor’s son was erected outside Shibuya Station in 1948. It’s still there, and the nearest entrance is now named after Hachikō. There are similar statues in Hachikō’s hometown Ōdate at the train station and the Akita Museum. In 2015, 80 years after his death, a new statue of Ueno meeting an excited Hachikō was unveiled at the University of Tokyo.
The film Lawrence of Arabia follows the exploits of real-life British officer T. E. Lawrence, who during World War I was sent to find out if Syrian Prince Faisal had any chance of aiding in the war against Turkey. The film has been a source of controversy over its perceived historical inaccuracies, though it won many awards and propelled its star, Peter O’Toole, to great fame.
Embassies – the permanent homes of major “diplomatic missions” to other states – are not generally considered “foreign soil”, or “extra-territorial”, but fall under the jurisdiction of local governments. But they do get a bunch of privileges under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations established in 1961 which includes exemption from many local laws. And it turns out to be true that citizens and authorities of the local country cannot enter without permission – even to put out a fire!
Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010, based on the “Constable” novels by Nicholas Rhea (a pseudonym for ex-cop Peter N Walker). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield. It originally centred around PC Nick Rowan (Nick Berry) and his wife, Dr Kate Rowan (Niamh Cusack), but after a few years both left the program and characters took the limelight. The only characters to remain throughout were Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds as Nick’s Sergeant, Blaketon, who later retires and takes over the local pub, and older fellow PC Alf Ventriss (William Simons), who was a commando in World War II and whose wife was mentioned frequently but never appeared on screen. We never even find out her first name!
There are many examples of the “battle butler” in fiction. Aside from Willikins, there’s Alfred Pennyworth (Batman), Jarvis (The Avengers comics), Oddjob (Goldfinger), Cadbury (Richie Rich, especially in the film), Kato (The Green Hornet) and Mr Butler (Artemis Fowl).
The “white saviour” narrative is a common trope, especially in film, where a white protagonist saves non-white people from disaster or war, usually by leading them or making them “more civilised”. Lawrence of Arabia is one of the earliest major examples, but there are many, many others.
The Watchmen television series, which was first released in 2019, serves as a sequel to the 1987 comic book series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The comic is celebrated as a deconstruction of the superhero genre, and features a number of second-generation costumed vigilantes investigating a global conspiracy that seems to mean them harm. The television series, whose show runner is Damon Lindelof of Lost and The Leftovers fame, is set 34 years after the events of the original comics.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an 1870 novel by French author Jules Verne. It follows marine biologist Pierre Arronax and his companions Conseil and Ned as they investigate a mysterious sea creature which is attacking and sinking ships. The creature turns out to be the Nautilus, a miraculous and hyper-advanced submarine invented and commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. The story is great, but Ben recommends you stick to adaptations as the book is “approximately 50% lists of fish Arronax sees out the window”.
The only major appearances of the nation of Klatch are in Sourcery and Jingo, but other nations of the Klatchian continent make major appearances in Pyramids (Djelibeybi and Ephebe), Eric (Tsort and the Tezuman Empire) and Small Gods (Omnia and Ephebe). Various others, including Howondaland, crop up in references
The Crown is a 2016 Netflix series chronicling the history of Queen Elizabeth II of England, beginning with her marriage to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Each season covers a different period of her reign, and so the main characters change and are re-cast over time. Elizabeth has so far been played by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. The fourth season, coming in 2020, will bring the narrative through to the 1980s.
The “trousers of time” were actually first mentioned in Guards! Guards!. Inspiration for the phrase seems to have come from the 1960s radio sketch comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, which featured a parody of Doctor Who titled “Professor Prune and the Electric Time Trousers”. The band Bangers has a track named “Trousers of Time” on their album Bird, which it seems must be a Discworld reference, since the first line is “I feel like I woke up in the wrong leg / Of the trousers of time”. “Trousers of Time” are also an item available in the videogame The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; the wording may be a Pratchett reference, but it’s more directly based on a previous game in the series, Ocarina of Time.
The dis-organiser is an astonishingly accurate prediction of modern smartphones’ “Intelligent Assistants“, which interpret spoken commands and automate tasks. One of those is “predictive appointments”, in which they suggest appointments for your calendar based on the content of your emails and other clues.
“Shaddap You Face” was a single by Italian-American-Australian performer Joe Dolce. Released in 1980, the song is about a young Italian migrant living in Melbourne, and is based on the language used by Dolce’s Italian grandparents. The chorus is the character’s mother telling him to cheer up, It was a number one hit in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and several European countries – though not, it should be noted, in Italy.
The Discworld Tacticus is probably based on several Roundworld people: his name comes from two Greek military writers, Aeneas Tacticus (4th century BCE) and Aelianus Tacitus (2nd century BCE), but also likely references Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian from around the second century CE whose work is used extensively to teach Latin in schools. Tacticus’ advice on war seems more inspired by Sun Tzu, Chinese author of The Art of War from around the 6th century BCE.
For more on the names and genius of camels, see Pyramids.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was famously assassinated in Sarajevo on the 28th of June, 1914. He was shot by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old assassin armed by the Black Hand, a group of Serbian nationalists (Bosnia and Herzegovina was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). This lead to hostilities between Austria and Serbia and eventually to World War I.
We note that while The Joye of Snackes certainly represents one kind of danger of magical knowledge passing into print, it was likely printed using engraved plates, as movable type doesn’t properly come to Ankh-Morpork until The Truth.
We previously tried to cast Lady Sybil in episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
Miranda Hart is an English comedian and actor best known for her BBC sitcom Miranda and medical drama Call the Midwife. You might also know her from Hyperdrive, Not Going Out and various other British film and television comedies. She’ll next be seen playing Miss Bates in a new feature film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, directed by Autumn de Wilde.

Episode 26 Notes and Errata

08/12/2019 by Ben 1 Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, featuring guest Michael Williams discussing the 1996 Discworld novel Hogfather.

We’ve previously mentioned the steam roller story back in episode 6, but in brief: Terry stipulated in his will that his hard drives containing unfinished manuscripts be destroyed by being crushed under a vintage steam roller. The request was carried out in August 2017 at the Dorset Steam Fair.
Liz has said “time is a flat circle” many times, beginning way back in episode 5. It’s a popular meme derived from a scene in the first season of True Detective, based on the idea of “eternal return”.
To put Douglas Adams‘ death in Internet context, he died two months after Wikipedia was launched, and a year or more before the arrival of Facebook, YouTube or Reddit.
The Watch TV series is a Narrative production for BBC America, currently filming in South Africa. It will launch in 2020.
Mary Poppins is the magical nanny protagonist of eight books by English-Australian author P. L. Travers, beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934. Mary arrives on the East wind and is characterised as being stern and vain, but her magic wins over the children of the Banks family. She was famously portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney movie musical, which Travers herself did not like. Emily Blunt took over for the 2018 sequel.
Back in January 2019, the official Wizarding World twitter account really did reveal that wizards used magic for sanitation before they had plumbing. You can find it here.
In Victorian England, governesses occupied a weird middle ground, being neither a member of the family nor a servant. So it’s possible a noblewoman might take up the role.
The phrase “unstuck in time” is used to describe the plight of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Pilgrim experiences some of his life out of order.
We previously mentioned Hyacinth Bucket – who insists her surname is pronounced “bouquet” – in episode 24. Hyacinth is a wannabe socialite and the main character in the sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.
Dementors are magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe. They are soulless phantoms that suck the joy and sanity out of their victims. The wizard prison Azkaban employs them as guards.
Thanos, “the mad titan”, is an antagonist from Marvel Comics. He is famously the main villain in Avengers: Infinity War, based loosely on the Infinity War comic book series. In the film, Thanos seeks to destroy half of the life in the universe, ostensibly to restore balance and improve the quality of life for those who survive. An internet meme suggested he was right to do so.
“The Fat Man” is an alias used by Sidney Greenstreet’s character, Walter Gutman, in the archetypal 1941 film noir movie The Maltese Falcon.
Adam is a part-human, part-demon and part-cybernetic creature created by Maggie Walsh as part of the Initiative’s super soldier program in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In 1993, Sydney won the bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics. At the announcement ceremony, IOC President Juan Antonia Samaranch firs fumbled with the envelope, and then uttered “The winner is Sydney“, his slightly accented pronunciation becoming almost as famous as the reaction of the NSW Premier (not least because of this segment on The Late Show).
Platform 9 3/4 is the magically hidden platform at Kings Cross Station in London that wizards use to board the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter universe.
The Death of Rats first appeared during Reaper Man though his first proper role was in Soul Music.
The original Helvetica T-shirt, featuring the names of the four Beatles, was designed by Experimental Jetset in 2001. They have been many, many parodies and homages since.
Pork products clearly don’t bother the Hogfather – as we failed to point out, he traditionally leaves them as gifts for everyone else!
Reindeer are eaten in many Scandinavian countries, as well as in Alaska, Finland and Canada. We don’t think they’re ever left out for Santa though.
Pigs can and have eaten humans, and this is a famous method of corpse disposal in fiction. Perhaps the most notable (and gruesome) explanation is by the character Brick Top in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch, though it was also a method favoured by Al Swearengen in the television series Deadwood.
The phrase “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” comes originally from an 1897 editorial in The New York Sun newspaper, written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. It is now the most reprinted editorial in the English language.
The Santa Clause is a 1994 comedy film starring Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, a divorced toy salesman who accidentally kills Santa and finds he is then obliged to take over his role.
ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was meant as a parody of indirect psychology and to show the limitations of human-machine interaction, but instead became one of the first in a long line of “chatterbot” programs and was seen as very lifelike. You can easily google up a live online version and try it yourself.
Ridcully’s curses manifested during the events of Reaper Man, when Death’s temporary retirement causes an excess of life.
Titivillus is discussed in “Typo Demom“, episode 106 of Helen Zaltzman’s language podcast The Allusionist.
As Liz mentions, the “tittle” is a diacritic mark most commonly seen in English over the lowercase i and j.
As many listeners have now told us, YMPA stands for “Young Men’s Pagan Association”, as mentioned in a book we’ve not yet re-read for the podcast, The Light Fantastic. The longer acronym YMRCIGBSA appears later on towels stolen by Albert for use in Death’s Domain.
“Good King Wenceslas” is a popular English Christmas Carol written in 1853 by John Mason Neale, set to the music of a 13th-century Spring carol, “Tempus adest floridum”. The king – a martyr and saint who died in the 10th century – sees a poor man and decides to personally deliver food, wine and fuel to him.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was preceded by a film in 1992, starring Kirsty Swanson, Luke Perry, Pee Wee Herman and Donald Sutherland.
Boggarts are creatures from the Harry Potter universe that change shape into the thing their victims fear most.
In Tooth Fairy, The Rock plays a tough ice hockey player nicknamed “the tooth fairy” because he often knocks out rival players’ teeth, but his anti-social behaviour – especially towards his girlfriends’ son – leads to him being forced to serve community service time as a tooth fairy.
In our world, the idea that you should believe in a God just in case he’s real is known as Pascal’s Wager, after French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
We previously mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle in episode 17.
Klaus Terber’s The Settlers of Catan (now known as Catan), the most famous European-style boardgame and one of the first to succeed in English-speaking markets, was first published in Germany in 1995.
While William Hartnell does indeed address the Doctor Who audience in “The Feast of Steven” – coincidentally the feast day featured in “Good King Wenceslas” – it seems this may have been planned and a BBC tradition at the time for dramas broadcast on Christmas Day.
A “centurion“, as we’ve mentioned previously, is a drinking “game” attempted by Australian students in which participants drink one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. Since this equates to more than nine pints in less than two hours, we do not recommend it. (A half-centurion is 50 shots either in 50 or 100 minutes.)
A Country Practice was a popular soap about the fictional rural NSW town of Wandin Valley, focussing on the doctors and nurses who worked at the local base hospital. It ran on Channel 7 from 1981 to 1994.
Lift Off was a popular television program for young children on the ABC which ran from 1992 to 1995. It featured a mix of live action, animation and puppetry. “EC” was a magical rag doll with a wooden head intended to be a blank slate and thus relatable to “every child”, though the initials initially stood for “Elizabeth and Charlie”, the names given to the doll by two of the children in the show.
You can watch Graham Chapman’s funeral service on YouTube.

Starting from episode 25, “Eskist Attitudes” , we’re publishing our longform show notes and errata in separate posts. We’ll move the notes from the back catalogue to separate posts, too. This is for boring technical reasons to do with the maximum size of a podcast RSS feed; the full notes only appear in the ten most recent episodes. You’ll find a link to the show notes near the end of the podcast description.

Sorry about the higher than usual level of background noise on this episode! There’s some construction going on in Ben’s building and it bleeds through the walls. Hopefully you don’t find it too distracting; we’re looking for alternative recording venues for future episodes.
You can read a transcript of Terry’s speech “Why Gandalf Never Married” here. It was delivered at Novacon, the UK’s oldest regional sci-fi convention, in 1985.
Ipslore the Red is one of the main antagonists in the fifth Discworld novel, Sourcery!, which we discussed with Cal Wilson in episode three, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind“.
It’s established in the Star Wars universe that one of the final steps to becoming a full Jedi Knight is to construct your own lightsaber. Luke Skywalker does this between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
It’s a popular theory that should an artificially intelligent system become fully self-aware, it would not reveal itself to humans for fear of being deleted (and/or it’s plans for global domination being thwarted).
You can get your own “I aten’t dead” necklace from the Discworld Emporium.
Tobias is one of the main characters in the Animorphs series of books by K. A. Applegate and Michael Grant. Like the other teenaged protagonists he uses alien technology to transform into any animal he can touch, but they cannot maintain such a form for more than two hours or they become stuck. Tobias is the first character to make this mistake and his natural form becomes red-tailed hawk.
Brandon “Bran” Stark is the second son of Lord Eddard Stark in the Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin. He’s best known from the television adaptation, Game of Thrones, where he is played Isaac Hempstead Wright. Very early on he suffers an accident and becomes paraplegic, but also begins to have visions and discovers he is a “warg” – able to physically enter the mind of his Direwolf companion.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (his PhD is in Biochemistry) introduced his idea of morphic resonance (or morphogenetic resonance, as it was first called) in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. Sheldrake believes that “memory is inherent in nature”, transmitted by “morphogenetic fields“. These fields supposedly shape everything from protein expression in cells to actual memories in the brain, and also allow for telepathy and other psychic powers in humans and animals. Suffice to say, his theories are not widely accepted within scientific circles, but remain popular in the alternative science community.
The latest Jasper Fforde novel to which Liz refers is Early Riser, set in an alternate universe where the Winters are longer and humans hibernate through them like bears. We also talked about it on the second episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast.
Ben would like to apologise for suggesting a werewolf wizard would be ridiculous; Remus Lupin is one of his favourite characters in the Potterverse, and he’s still sad about it.
The Karate Kid is a famous 1984 film in which Danny LaRusso (Ralph Machio), the new kid at a Californian school, convinces his elderly Japanese neighbour, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), to teach him karate so he can stand up to the bullies at his school. His training initially consists of him doing repetitive tasks like painting fences and, most famously, waxing Miyagi’s car in motions described as “wax on” and “wax off”. It was followed by three sequels and recently a sequel web series, Cobra Kai, which looks at the story from the perspective of Daniel’s old rival Johnny after thirty years.
The earliest book with a copyright notice naming Terry and Lyn Pratchett is 1988’s Sourcery! Terry’s earlier works only name him, save for Good Omens, which is copyright he and Neil Gaiman.
Dunmanifestin Limited, established in 2017, is the company which holds the rights to all Discworld intellectual property. It’s directors are Rhianna Pratchett and Rob Wilkins. Narrativia Limited has been around longer, since 2012; Rhianna and Rob are also its directors. It has license to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property for the purposes of film and television production, including Good Omens, The Watch, Wee Free Men and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
The article Ben was referencing was “A woman’s greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself” by Brigid Schulte for The Guardian. Rhianna Pratchett tweeted it with the commentary: “My mum took care of everything else in the house so Dad could write. She was the oil that kept the Discworld machine running.” and followed with: “I should also point out that my mum was a talented artist who went to Chelsea Art College and is a qualified illustrator. She put that all aside to support Dad. I think about that a lot.“
Some trees are indeed hermaphroditic, but others are single-sexed.
The Romani are an itinerant people who live and travel primarily throughout central, eastern and southern Europe. They have often been mistrusted and persecuted, leading to many negative stereotypes and perjorative names given to them; “gypsy” or “gipsy” is the most common such name for them in English, though in the UK “gipsy” is also a legal term referring to “persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin”. It is a corruption of “Egyptian”, though the Romani originated in northern India, not Egypt.
The Gyptians of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels are riverboat travellers and traders who primarily travel through “Brytain”, Lyra Belacqua’s version of the United Kingdom.
Arya Stark is the youngest daughter of Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones. She becomes separated from her family and goes off alone to train as an assassin, in order to kill all those she blames for the death of her father and the destruction of her home.
Gnolls in the Discworld can, in fact, be grassy; according to the Discworld Role-Playing Game, they are made from earth and often have plants growing out of them.
Both meanings of “letter” come from the same source: the Latin littera, meaning a character, by way of Old French and Middle English.
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, an Elven prophecy stated of the Witch-king of Angmar that “not by the hand of man will he fall”. At the Battle of Pelennor Fields he is slain by Éowyn, daughter of the King of Rohan, who proclaims “I am no man!” before thrusting her sword into his void. (Not a euphemism.) It’s only fair to point out that the Hobbit Merry Brandybuck helped by stabbing him in the knee with a magical dagger first.
For more about Pratchett’s later ideas of sourcerers, again see our third episode about Sourcery!, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind“.
We couldn’t find a specific source for the idea that mathematicians peak by the age of 18; some did suggest the average age was more like 26.
The Pleistocene is not a modelling putty popular with children, but rather an epoch, a division of geological time. It runs from around 2.6 million years ago to around 11,700 years ago, and is the most recent epoch to include fossils. The name means “most new” in Latinised Greek, to contrast with the Pliocene (“new”), which had previously been thought to be the most recent fossil epoch.
Night Terrace is a time travel audio comedy produced by Splendid Chaps Productions – who also make this podcast! It stars Jackie Woodburne (aka Susan from Neighbours) as Dr Anastasia Black, who retires from a life of sci-fi action only to find her suburban terrace house travels randomly through space and time. Ben McKenzie is a producer and writer for the series, and also plays Anastasia’s sidekick Eddie Jones, who gets stuck in the house with her. You can listen to the first episode for free at nightterrace.com; a third season is being crowdfunded via a Kickstarter campaign, which ends on November 22. Neil Gaiman likes the show!

Episode 6 Notes and Errata

08/04/2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, featuring guest David Astle discussing Terry’s 2012 standalone Dickens pastiche Dodger.

The “interrobang” is the combination of a question and exclamation mark (‽, or more often ?! or !?), used to indicate a question asked with excitement or otherwise strong emotion. One of Ben’s favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, produced a whole episode on the origin and history of the interrobang. [Square brackets] (or just “brackets”, since round brackets are parentheses and curly brackets are braces) are most often used in journalism, where they indicate something that’s been left out or changed inside a quotation to improve clarity. David describes the pilcrow (or “paragraph mark”) in the podcast, but in case you’re wondering, it looks like this: ¶
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are…well, they’re teen-aged mutant anthropomorphic turtles, trained as ninjas by a mutant anthropomorphic rat, who live in the sewers of New York and fight for justice. They originally appeared in 1984 in a gritty, black-and-white comic book parody written and drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They were quickly picked up by a licensing company and became a toy line and a very popular cartoon, followed later by a less popular series of live-action films. They were recently re-imagined in big-screen CGI form by Michael Bay – seemingly the fate of everything liked by children in the 1980s – but most recently have returned to cartoons under the eye of Invader Zim creator Johnen Vasquez.
Terry dressed up as William Brown, the protagonist of Just William and its sequels by Richmal Crompton (like Terry, an incredibly prolific author), for the “26 Characters” exhibition at the Story Museum in Oxford. The photos aren’t available on the museum’s web site – the point was to visit to see them, after all! – but versions of many (including Terry’s) are featured in this BBC interview with photographer Cambridge Jones about the exhibition. The museum’s site has audio interviews with all the featured authors recorded during the photo shoots in 2014, including Terry talking about his own school days. Listeners of this podcast might also particularly enjoy the interviews with Neil Gaiman (who chose Badger from Wind in the Willows), Philip Pullman (Long John Silver from Treasure Island) and Terry Jones (Rupert the Bear), but they’re all great. It’s worth clarifying that Just William takes place when it was written, in 1922 – considerably after the time of Dodger. Tom Brown’s School Days, on the other hand, was written in 1857 and is set in the 1830s – so around the time of Dodger. There’s a stark contrast between Dodger’s life and that of Tom Brown…
A “flâneur” (via French for “stroller” or “loafer”, from the Old Norse verb flana “to wander with no purpose”) was a “gentleman stroller of the streets”: a person of leisure who would walk through a city just observing what went on around them. It’s uncertain if Dickens would have described himself as one; the word dates back a century or two earlier in France, but wasn’t popularly used in a positive sense until Walter Benjamin used it in discussions of modernity in the early twentieth century. (Oscar Wilde described himself as “a flâneur, a dandy” in De Profundis, but only when lamenting how he had wasted his life.)
Nicholson Baker is an American writer who loves newspapers as much as footnotes. He’s best known for his non-fiction, including the award-winning 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper in which he investigated the loss or destruction of thousands of books and newspapers during the “microfilm boom” of the 1980s.
The small, dog-like creature from The Dark Crystal is Fizgig.
Laphroaig whiskey is distilled in Port Ellen, on the southern coast of the Isle of Islay in Argyll, Scotland, near the bay that gives the whiskey its name, Loch Laphroaig. It is now owned by Japanese whiskey giant Suntory.
The Wombles are a group of vaguely mole-like intelligent creatures who live under Wimbledon Common, invented by Elisabeth Beresford for her children’s novels, first appearing in 1968. They are very familiar to Australians of a certain age because of the BBC-commissioned stop-motion animated television series, whose theme song emphasised the Womble’s forward-thinking policy of reuse and recycling: “Making good use of the things that they find, things that the everyday folk leave behind.” Less familiar to Australian listeners will be the novelty pop group formed by Mike Batt, or the related live-action Womble film Wombling Free, featuring short-statured actors – including Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis! – in Womble costumes, with voices provided by the likes of David Jason and Jon Pertwee! Aside from “making use of bad rubbish”, one of their most endearing features is that Wombles choose their name by throwing a dart at a map of the world; hence they have names like Great Uncle Bulgaria, Tomsk, Orinoco and Adelaide.
For those not familiar with Oliver Twist, Fagin is the criminal mastermind who sends the Artful Dodger and other children out to steal things for him in return for minimal food and shelter. He is a deeply unsympathetic character, essentially keeping the children enslaved. Even in Dickens’ day, Fagin – who was constantly referred to as “the Jew” in the novel – was seen as anti-Semitic. Dickens protested that he had no hatred of Jewish people, but was being “realistic”, because “that class of criminal was invariably a Jew”, but towards the end of his life Dickens came to realise the harm he was doing in perpetuating such a stereotype. He not only revised the last 15 chapters of the book, but removed all racist signifiers from his performance of the character in his public readings.
The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (and the Russian empire, which at the time included much of Eastern Europe) were at their worst in the 1880s, after the period in which Dodger is set, but there were sadly many earlier examples as well. Solomon Cohen never says exactly where (or indeed what) he fled from, but it may have been the Odessa Pogrom of 1859.
Onan is a minor figure in the Bible best known as the source of the term “onanism”, a euphemism for masturbation – though that’s not entirely true to the source material. In the Book of Genesis, Onan’s brother Er is slain by God for generic wickedness and had no children, so their father Judah orders Onan to marry Er’s widow Tamar and give her children. Onan does marry her but during sex, knowing that any children will be heirs to Er and usurp his own inheritance, he chooses to “spill his seed upon the ground” – a crime for which he too was slain by God. It was really rough being in the Bible before Jesus came along.
PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a relatively common psychological disorder affecting people who have experienced trauma – usually violence, and especially interpersonal violence – without the time or opportunity to heal psychologically. It was poorly understood prior to the 1970s, but pretty clearly fits the symptoms ascribed to soldiers returning from war throughout history.
The pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and by this we mean the aired pilot, not the unaired pilot) was actually relatively true to the rest of the series; with the big exception being Buffy’s powers. While she kept her super strength and highly tuned intuition, somewhere between episodes 1 and 2 she apparently lost the power to jump (fly?) over a fence about three times her height.
Thanks to listener Wayne for finding the Wikipedia article for Crown and Anchor, which is a dice game originally favoured by English sailors. It uses three special six-sided dice marked with symbols instead of numbers: the four card suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades), a crown and an anchor. Players place their bets on a playing mat marked with six large squares, one for each symbol, like a simpler version of a roulette table; they then throw the dice and win money based on how many show the symbol which matches their bet. Variations with slightly different symbols appeared in many countries, though the English version is now rarely played outside the Channel Islands and Bermuda.
The classic “Penny Dreadfuls” were cheap mass-produced serial fiction magazines of the Victorian era, usually of the ‘orrible murder or supernatural thriller variety; they filled a niche later occupied by comic books, and cost a penny (hence the name). Hugely popular in Dodger’s time, many were rewrites or outwrite plagiarism, but they nevertheless made household names of popular historical and fictional characters including Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Sweeney Todd, who first appeared in The String of Pearls: A Romance in 1846.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is a hugely rich comic book series spanning multiple volumes in which characters from a huge number of works of Victorian fiction are brought together. The titular league features Mina Harker (from Dracula), Alan Quartermain (from King Solomon’s Mines), Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, amongst others, as they deal with a war between criminal elements and then an invasion of Martians (drawn from The War of the Worlds). The series is so dense with references both big and small that companion volumes have been compiled uncovering them all.
Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has become probably the most popular version of the Todd story (not least thanks to Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation), and is based heavily on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play of the same name, which gave him a backstory – including being transported to Australia – and made the character a little more sympathetic, transforming his story into a modern revenge tragedy. The original London cast of the musical included Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett, Sweeney’s accomplice and encouragement. (In the podcast, Ben confuses her with Mrs Miggins, the proprietor of a similarly suspicious pie shop in classic historical sit-com Blackadder the Third.)
Penny Dreadful the television series was a gory sexy gothic horror co-produced by Showtime and Sky, weaving a new narrative around characters taken from Frankenstein, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and predominantly British and Irish folklore. It ran for three seasons with an all-star cast including Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett. Ben loved it more than he probably should have.
Asterix is the protagonist of the long-running Asterix & Obelix series of comic albums created by French cartoonists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Set during the Roman Empire’s occupation of Gaul – a region of Western Europe bigger than France, populated by Celtic peoples of the La Tène culture – it imagined a single small village which held out against the invaders through judicious use of a magic potion, brewed by their Druid, which gave them super strength. The main character, Asterix, was very small but a shrewd warrior, assisted by his enormous, dim-witted but big-hearted friend Obelix, who was permanently super-strong due to drinking an entire cauldron of the potion as a baby. A key feature of the books are the names which pun on common cultural suffixes of the era, which have been translated into many languages.
“Bedlam” was a nickname for Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital whose name became synonymous with the barbaric ways in which the mentally ill were treated in the Victorian era.
“Nits” is the common name for headlice in Australia and New Zealand, thankfully rarely encountered these days except in primary schools.
Augusta Ada King-Noel (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, aka Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She was also a poet, but she is most remembered as the first computer programmer: she was a friend of Charles Babbage, and while translating a French transcript of a speech Babbage gave about his Analytical Engine, annotated it with notes which included an algorithm of her own design to make the machine calculate Bernoulli numbers. Sadly Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never completed, but just as it is now recognised as the first computer, her algorithm is now recognised as the first computer program.
The Tenniel in the book is indeed Sir John Tenniel, the primary political cartoonist for Punch (and therefore well known to Mayhew and Dickens), and most famously the illustrator for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. The eye injury referred to was accidentally inflicted by Tenniel’s father when they were fencing, when Tenniel was 20. Tenniel gradually lost his sight in that eye, but not wanting to make his father distraught, never revealed how serious the injury was.
A “growler” was a second-hand “clarence”, a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage named after Prince William, Duke of Clarence, and introduced into London around 1840. Once sold by aristocrat owners, clarences were often used as cabs, and were known as “growlers” because of the sound they made on London cobblestoned streets.
Pratchett did indeed have plans for a Dodger sequel, saying at New York Comic Con and in an interview with the AV Club in 2012 that he’d love to write one “if he was spared”… The final scene of the book, in which Dodger is working with Serendipity as a spy in Paris, is a good indicator of the direction that book may have taken, but any notes for it would have been lost as per Terry’s instructions, when his hard drives were destroyed by a steam roller after his death.
Some later editions of Dodger – including Ben’s – include a “Bonus Scene” in which Dodger visits Sweeney Todd in Bedlam. (We cut our short discussion of the scene for time, and because David and Liz hadn’t read it.)
Cloacina was indeed a real Roman goddess, and like many was assimilated from another culture – in this case, Etruscan mythology. She was specifically the goddess of the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Drain”), the main sewer channel in Rome, construction of which was said to have been started and finished by two Estruscan Kings of Rome. Sometimes also seen as “a protector of sexual intercourse in marriage”, she was later known as “Venus of the Sewer”.

Episode 5 Notes and Errata

08/03/2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 5, “Ten Points to Viper House“, featuring guest Richard McKenzie discussing the 1989 Discworld novel Pyramids.

Ben and Richard both have Corgi paperbacks of Pyramids with the same Josh Kirby cover and ISBN – but Richard’s is a later (not older, as Ben says) printing which unusually has more pages. Ben’s is a 1992 printing with 285 pages, while Richard’s is from 1997 and has 380! …we realise this is probably not interesting to anyone except extreme bibliophiles, but it caused Ben some trouble when trying to track his reading progress on Goodreads.
The four books within Pyramids start off referring to the famous ancient Egyptian text The Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and other information meant to help guide the dead through the afterlife. Its full title has been translated as both The Book of Going Forth by Day and The Book of Emerging Forth into the Light. Other ancient Egyptian funerary texts include the Book of Traversing Eternity, the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, The Contendings of Horus and Seth, and the Book of the Heavenly Cow.
The Assassin’s Creed games have been one of the most successful franchises of recent years; the assassins of the title are both elite killers for hire, and also engaged in an ancient war over the fate of the world against the Knights Templar, and each game takes place in a different location and era. The most recent one, Assassin’s Creed Origins, explores the founding of the assassin’s order – and is set around 50 BC in Egypt! Though as far as we know, you don’t get to kill any pyramids. (The game does, however, contain many easter eggs – including a monument shaped like the TARDIS – so if you play it, keep an eye out for Djelibeybi references!)
For a series of books intended for kids, an awful lot of people die in Harry Potter. According to one count, there are 76 individual deaths described across the seven books, but way more people die than that – there are at least fifty casualties in the Battle of Hogwarts alone!
In Game of Thrones, Dany’s full name and title is: “Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lady Regnant of the Seven Kingdoms, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Mhysa, Breaker of Chains, the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons”. This is five words shorter than Teppic’s full title in Pyramids, which is written out in full eleven times.
Camel humps are deposits of fatty tissue; it can be metabolised back into water. Some camels can go without drinking water for as long as ten days.
The word “quantum“, which becomes a synonym on the Discworld for things which are too complicated or weird to make sense, is used in science to refer the smallest possible unit or portion of various things, for example “packets” of photons emitted in electromagnetic radiation.
In fan favourite sci-fi series Firefly and its sequel movie Serenity, one of the major characters is Inara, a registered “Companion”, a role similar to a courtesan with very high social status. Their training includes languages, psychology, unarmed combat, archery and much more; they begin their training at the Companion’s Guild at the age of twelve, so they possibly have more in common with assassins than they do handmaidens!
The Grease Megamix is a mashup of three songs from the 1978 movie version of the 1971 musical Grease, set in the 1950s. It was released as a single in 1990 to promote the film being made available on video. The song was a number one hit in Australia in 1991, in part due to Olivia Newton-John’s prominent role. It’s a killer to dance and sing along to if you know the words.
The theory that computers could have become self-aware beings without us knowing has been around for a while; the aeon article “Consciousness creep” by George Musser is a good primer.
There are many rankings of Discworld books that put Pyramids near the top, including fellow Discworld podcast Radio Morpork, who currently have it at number four, and a Buzzfeed list from 2015 which placed it at number three (but we’re not linking to it, because the author discounted anything Pratchett wrote after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007 as “unrecognisable”, a stance this podcast considers offensive and ridiculous).
There is no scientific evidence for “pyramid power“, which rose to prominence in the 1970s. Proponents claim pyramids can do anything from stirring sexual urges to sharpening razors to providing unlimited free energy. It’s still popular in some circles.
Autolycus was a demi-god whose father was Hermes; he taught Hercules to wrestle, and his grandchildren include Odysseus and Jason of the Argonauts. A version of him features prominently as a recurring character in the 1990s series Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, portrayed by Bruce Campbell as a Robin Hood-like prince of thieves.
David Carradine starred in the 1970s TV series Kung Fu as Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Chinese Shaolin monk who “walked the Earth” in the American west looking for his brother and helping the downtrodden with his skills in martial arts. You probably know who Lassie is; The Littlest Hobo was a similarly talented dog, who also “walked the Earth” helping those he encountered on his travels.
Dave Greenslade is definitely not dead, and Ben and Liz would like to stress that they enjoyed his rendition of A Wizard’s Staff Has a Knob on the End. For The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered at All, check out the collection of fan-written lyrics at the L-Space web (though be aware that most of them are very…well, they’re the kind of thing Nanny Ogg would sing when she’s drunk).
According to the most prominent timeline, Pyramids is set a few years after the events of Sourcery, and about ten years before Guards! Guards!. This also places it during the fifteen years Lancre skips over in Wyrd Sisters. Feel free to let us know if you have a different theory!
Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle usually applied in scientific thought, which basically says that an explanation that doesn’t require the invention of new things is more likely to be true.
Richard’s list of Assassin’s Guild subjects was sourced from The Assassin’s Guild Yearbook and Diary released in 2000. Like the other Discworld-themed diaries it had only a single print run, and is one of the harder books to find. (Update: much of this material is being reprinted in the Ankh-Morpork Archives! Volume One, published in late 2019, includes the Assassin’s Guild material.)
Ben’s camel’s name is, of course, spelled “Ptypical”. (Thanks to listener Brendan for pointing this out.)
Thanks for reading the show notes! Do let us know if we’ve made any mistakes, or if you have questions.