Ankh-Morpork

#Pratchat53 – A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner

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Surprise! In an emergency substitution, Liz and Ben get a glimpse of everyday life in Ankh-Morpork as they dive into three very small bits of Discworld ephemera collected in A Blink of the Screen.

The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem captures the experience of those forced to sing patriotic songs everywhere – but even the single complete verse tells us quite a lot about the character of the city. Meanwhile the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Barber-Surgeons have put together a few Medical Notes to keep the population informed about a few diseases peculiar to the city. And, on the occasion of Ankh-Morpork being “twinned” with a small city on Roundworld, we read A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari to mark the occasion…

We picked these three “Discworld Shorter Writings” as they are both about Ankh-Morpork, whose history is explored in Night Watch (our next book), and written around the same time as that book – the anthem is from 1999 (though it its based on jokes from Moving Pictures, published in 1990) while the others are from 2002, the year Night Watch was published.

How do you feel about your national anthem? Does anyone know the second verse? What weird “diseases” are particular to the place where you live? Would you like to live in a town twinned with Ankh-Morpork – or somewhere else from the vast universe of fiction? And does anyone want a “sausoboros” T-shirt? We’d love to hear your answers! Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat53.

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As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next month we’re back on track to talk about 2002’s Night Watch with guest Nadia Bailey! It’s a fan favourite and we already have an absolute tonne of questions, but if you have one you’re burning to have us answer, you can send it via the hashtag #Pratchat54, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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#Pratchat53 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, discussing the short Discworld pieces “The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem” (1999), “Medical Notes” (2002) and “A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari” (2002), all available in the collection A Blink of the Screen (2012).

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title mashes up two of the three things we’re reading this week, though we have of course not forgotten who wrote these words. “Hner ner hner” is how Pratchett represents the “forgotten” lyrics in the anthem.
  • The book with the “When shall we three meet again?” gag is Wyrd Sisters, whose opening scene concludes with one of the witches answering: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.” For more on Wyrd Sisters, see #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • Black Ribboners are members of the League of Temperance, a society for vampires who want to swear off drinking “the B-word”. It has chapters in Überwald and Ankh-Morpork, and notable members include Lady Margolotta (see The Fifth Elephant and #Pratchat40), Otto Schriek (see The Truth and #Pratchat42) and…another one we’ll meet in a future episode. (No spoilers!)
  • Discworld vampires are indeed incredibly resilient; while they can be turned to ash in the traditional ways – beheading, stake through the heart, (sometimes) sunlight etc – none of these methods kill them permanently, and they can be reconstituted using just a drop of blood. This is discussed in Carpe Jugulum (and #Pratchat36), but see also The Truth, where Otto works out an ingenious way to protect himself from the perils of his trade as a photographer using flash salamanders…
  • Ben does a reasonable job of explaining the two Discworld calendars. The main ones with Gregorian-style years are the Ankh-Morpork Calendar (AM), which measures full 800-day years since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which measures 400-day common years since the founding of the University by Alberto Malich. They’re not used entirely consistently in the books – another reason why Ben is right to say that you can’t solve continuity problems that way!
  • On the subject of centuries, the earlier books are generally set towards the end of the Century of the Fruitbat. In The Truth the century has turned, and it’s now the Century of the Anchovy. To complicate matters, which don’t know which kind of year they count one hundred of, and there’s no guarantee they line up with the ticking over of a round number in either calendar – the centuries seem to be an older way of marking time than either of the calendars used in Ankh-Morpork.
  • Ben will get into some more of the details towards the end of the podcast, but here’s a timeline of the Australian national anthem:
    • Since the 1788 invasion, English colonies in Australia used the national anthem of the United Kingdom, “God Save the Queen”. (That song has a whole history of its own, including the fact that it’s sort of not technically an official anthem, and England has no anthem of its own, unlike Wales or Scotland.)
    • “Advance Australia Fair” was written in 1878 by Peter Dodds McCormick, and first performed the same year. It became a popular “national song”, and performed – with some revised lyrics – by a huge choir to mark the Federation of Australia on January 1, 1901.
    • In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam initiated a competition to select a new anthem for Australia, run by the Australia Council of the Arts. None of the original songs submitted were considered good enough, though, so in 1974 they conducted a national survey to choose between “Advance Australia Fair”, “Waltzing Matilda” and “The Song of Australia”. (See below for more on this one.) The winner was “Advance Australia Fair”, which Whitlam’s government made the new anthem, though this wasn’t entirely official.
    • In 1975, Whitlam was dismissed as Prime Minister by the Governor General – it’s a whole thing in Australian history, look it up – and famously said “Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General.” His replacement, Malcolm Fraser, reinstated “God Save the King” as the official anthem for many formal occasions, though several songs were allowed to be sung as alternatives at other events.
    • In 1977, during a referendum on various topics, an optional question asked which national song the public preferred, and Advance Australia Fair was chosen again.
    • In 1984, this was made official, though using a revised, two-verse version altered by the National Australia Day Council. At the same time, “God Save the Queen” was made the “Royal Anthem” of Australia, to be played during royal visits.
  • “The Song of Australia” isn’t a song we’d heard, but it does have something of the character of Ankh-Morpork’s anthem! Thanks to listener Joy, who let us know it was written in response to a competition run by the Gawler Institute in South Australia – and was sung in schools in that state into the 1960s! It was also sung in some parts of Western Australia and Tasmania. The lyrics were written in 1859 by Caroline Carleton, an English Australian poet, who – as per the rules – submitted them to the competition under a “motto” to be anonymous to the judges, choosing “Nil Desperandum” (Latin for “do not despair”). After being selected as the winning poem, a second competition was held for music to which they could be sung; this was won by German Australian composer Carl Linger, who entered under the pseudonym “One of the Quantity”. The most famous early performer of the song was once world-famous Australian baritone Peter Dawson (1882-1961); you can hear his recording on YouTube. While it never became the official anthem of Australia – and that’s probably for the best, given its fixation on colonial additions to the landscape – the official anthem of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, “My Bougainville”, uses the same tune.
  • Sing! was a book of songs for the classroom produced by Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC. It was produced annually from 1975 until at least 2014. During that time, Ringo Starr’s “Octopus’s Garden” – from The Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road – appeared in Sing! twice, in 1981 and 1988. Since most songs only appeared once, that might count as frequently…
  • The first mention of the Ankh-Morpork national anthem was indeed in Moving Pictures, first published in 1990 – about as “early nineties” as you can get. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, for more.)
  • Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was first published in April 1966. It tells the story of Douglas Quail, an office worker who – unable to afford a real trip to Mars – goes to a company called Rekall to get a false memory of a holiday. Things do not go according to plan… It was adapted twice into films titled Total Recall: the famous 1990 version, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzenggar and Sharon Stone, deviates wildly from the original after the main character’s trip to Rekall. A remake in 2012 starred Colin Farrell and was based more closely on the original, but still changed quite a bit.
  • For more on erudite thugs Mr Tulip and Mr Pin, and the inspiration behind them, see #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • There are a few recordings of “We Can Rule You Wholesale” online, but we probably only recommend listening to the official one. Luckily some…er…”cheeky bugger” has uploaded the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Claire Rutter version to YouTube.
  • Claire Rutter is an English soprano who’s had quite an illustrious international opera career, performing in major roles with the English National Opera, Sydney Opera House, Opéra National du Rhin in France, the Icelandic Opera, and in the US with the Dallas Opera and Santa Fe Opera.
  • “My Saint Helena Island”, the unofficial “national” song of Saint Helena, was written by American country singer Dave Mitchell in 1975. You can read all about it on the official Saint Helena website, or listen to the original song on YouTube.
  • How old is the Ankh-Morpork national anthem? It’s hard to be sure. No year is given in the preamble, though the vampire who wrote it lived – or rather, undied – between 1703 and 1872 by the University Calendar, so it was presumably in between those years. How long ago was that? More than thirty years, certainly, since the bits of Night Watch that happen in the past include Reg Shoe singing it. And while the current year is never explicitly given for any of the Discworld books – Pratchett clearly never thought that kind of stuff was that important – fan theories based on dates given in Mort, Moving Pictures and Feet of Clay put the “present” events of Night Watch at around 1998, so it’s probably at least a century old.
  • As Ben will mention in a footnote, the convention for which the “Medical Notes” were written was at the time the only Discworld Convention, and thus had no other name. It’s now known as the International Discworld Convention, or DWCon for short, even though it’s always held in the UK. (Not to be confused with IDWCon – that’s the Irish Discworld Convention.) The (mostly) biannual convention began in 1996, and the 2002 convention was something of a big deal – the 2000 con, which was to be subtitled “Millennicon Hand and Shrimp”, was cancelled due to record low number of attendees booking rooms to stay at the convention venue. (This guarantee of hotel bookings is one of the things that secures a reasonable price for a fan convention.) It has only been held twice since Pratchett’s death, in 2016 and 2018, since the 2020 convention was scuppered by COVID. The next DWCon is scheduled for August 2022, and memberships have sold out, but there is a waiting list if you’re keen! And who knows – perhaps in 2024, Pratchat will get to go… If you’re keen on getting to a convention, there are many around the world, including in Ireland, North America, Australia (see below), the Netherlands, Germany and Wales. The L-Space wiki has a handy list on their fandom page.
  • The Australian Discworld Convention, “Nullus Anxietas”, was founded in 2007, and scheduled to occur biannually in the off years for the UK convention. It’s run every two years since until 2021, when the 7Ath convention was postponed and then cancelled due to COVID uncertainty. Here’s hoping it’s back in 2023 or whenever large gatherings in small convention conference rooms feel like a good idea again. Pratchat was a guest of the 2019 convention, where we recorded our first (and to date, only) live episode, #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World“, with fellow convention guest Tansy Rayner Roberts. We were also pleased to participate in the online event “The Lost Con” – see #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive” – and the convention’s 2021 Hogswatch festivities.
  • Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is an older name for what is now Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The former “disorder” – which existed alongside the new one as two different diagnoses for a while – was folded into the latter in 1994, when doctors decided the two were not meaningfully different and that the latter name was more accurate. It’s considered neurological, and thus is a form of neurodiversity, and had a long history – various names for similar behaviours go back a century or two at least. ADHD is classically characterised by difficulty focussing attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, and sometimes hyperfocus – sustained and intense attention given to certain subjects of interest. It’s a well-established condition, and often treated with stimulants and psychotherapy or counselling. Note that many people may have traits similar to these; it’s only considered a disorder when these behaviours are disruptive and inappropriate.
  • Liz and Ben’s histories with Lord of the Flies were first explored in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, and #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“. The subject most recently resurfaced in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • Liz has spoken of The Shawshank Redemption in many episodes, most significantly in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, and most recently in #Pratchat38 and #Pratchat47.
  • Tourette Syndrome is characterised by physical and vocal tics: sudden, brief movements of small groups of muscles, often in the face or vocal apparatus. Most people’s tics are subtle or pass unnoticed, and most vocal tics are not full words, but brief sounds. As usual, Hollywood likes to show only the rarest and most extreme forms of a relatively common condition.
  • For more on “The Them“, see our episode on Good Omens, #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Zener cards were created in the early 1930s by American psychologist Karl Zener, whose experiments were widely discredited. Indeed the deck is a terrible way to test psychic ability, since a default set contains only 25 cards (five of each symbol), and blind guessing should result in about a 20% success rate or better!
  • The Bursar develops Planets in The Last Continent when the faculty land on Fourecks, and they are exposed to the high build-up of magical energies there. For more, see #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.
  • The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy videogame was a text adventure, or interactive novel, published by Infocom in 1984. It was adapted from previous versions of the story by Douglas Adams and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky. Like many of these games, it was considered fiendishly difficult, since you had a lot of freedom in the instructions you could type in, but each scene or location generally only had one very specific “correct” sequence of actions that would avoid getting you killed. As well as the microscopic space fleet, the game came with several other “feelies” – tactile extras included with many Infocom games. These included a “Don’t Panic!” button badge, a packet of “pocket fluff”, several documents, a pair of cardboard “peril sensitive” sunglasses, and “no tea”. Several online versions of the game have been released; here’s the 30th anniversary version, hosted by the BBC, which adds visuals, and some sound effects based on the 1980 television version.
  • English doctor Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) is known to us because in 1807 he published The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated (i.e. abridged or edited) collection of twenty of the Bard’s plays. They were based on Bowdler’s father’s readings of the plays to the family, in which he left out things “unsuitable” for his wife and children. The first volume of The Family Shakespeare was actually edited by Thomas’s sister, Henrietta Bowdler, something that only came to light two centuries later – Thomas is listed as the sole editor. He did take over for the second and third volumes, and later revisions, which added more plays. They are both remembered through the verb “bowdlerise”, meaning to edit out things “unsuitable for children” from a work, usually unnecessarily. The first edition removes about ten percent of the original, including removing any mentions of sex workers or brothels, blasphemous exclamations like “God!”, and bawdy songs and jokes. Notably, while the subtitle claims “nothing is added”, they do include substitutions for many key words.
  • Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook includes a section on “The Language of Flowers” towards the end of the Etiquette section. Like the rest of the book, this is said to have been largely cribbed from other author’s work, in this case probably Gardening in Difficult Conditions.
  • Ben has been unable to find the quote about Pratchett “preferring to hang out with fans in a pub to hanging out with literary authors at a writing festival” – if you know the quote, let us know! (Ben’s looked through A Slip of the Keyboard, A Blink of the Screen and Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett, to no avail…)
  • We’ve been unable to substantiate reports that a portion of Twilight Canyons was read out at the Discworld Convention in 2016, but surely one of you listening was there! We’re not asking for you to tell us anything you’re not allowed to, but we’d love to know if it actually happened!
  • YouTube was indeed launched in 2005 – on Valentine’s Day! It was bought by Google eighteen months later for more than $1.5 billion US.
  • MySpace was launched in 2003, and you might be surprised to know it definitely still exists, and has at least a few million users.
  • Wincanton is about 33km (21 miles) from Pratchett’s home in Broad Chalk. It’s about a 48km (30 mile) trip to the West by road.
  • The Discworld Emporium is an officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise, and an online store selling their own and other official Discworld stuff. It grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who were one of the first to gain a Discworld license; they contacted Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe in 1990, and once Pratchett was impressed by their version of the Luggage, he sent them sketches of Rincewind and Granny Weatherwax as references for further pieces. (Some of Ben’s earliest fannish merchandise purchases were the Clarecraft figures of Rincewind, Death and Detritus.) They worked closely with Pratchett over many years, and while they don’t make as many figurines as they once did, they do still produce unique merchandise, including a wide selection of official Discworld stamps. The Pearsons, and especially Bernard, became fast friends with Terry; you can hear him sharing a few stories about Pratchett in his short-run podcast “And he said to me”, released in two episodes in December 2019 and April 2020.
  • As far as we know, yes, Wincanton and Ankh-Morpork were the first twinning of a real and fictional town. We haven’t been able to find any others, so it might also be the only such twinning! (Let us know if you know of any others.) As for whether or not it’s official, the answer seems to be: as official as Pratchett wanted it to be.
  • Cities can indeed have multiple sisters – including being “triple towns”. (For the alliteration, cities are usually “sister cities”, which is also the more common term in the US; towns are “twin towns”, which is the more commonly used term in the UK and Australia. Especially in America, “twin cities” are usually two separate cities which are located very close together.) Indeed many major cities will have lots of sister cities around the world – Melbourne, for example, has five sisters: Boston, Milan, Osaka, Thessaloniki and Tianjin.
  • The English city of Swindon is also in Wiltshire, about 80km (50 miles) north of Practhett’s home in Broad Chalk. In Thursday Next’s world, as depicted in the novels by Jasper Fforde, it is Next’s own home town. Fforde has published an entire page about the city, blurring the line between the fictional and real worlds; you can still find his Swindon page online – including a photo of the sign for the famous magic roundabout!
  • Walt Disney World, as mentioned in the footnote, is the second Disney theme park and resort, located in Bay Lake, Florida – though its administrative address is in the city of Lake Beuna Vista (for which the Disney-owned film company was named). It was planned by Walt Disney himself, but finished – in a substantially less ambitious form – at the insistence of his brother Roy in the 1960s, after Walt’s death. Roy also added his brother’s first name to the park to properly commemorate him.
  • Stephen Briggs contacted Pratchett in 1990 about adapting Wyrd Sisters for the stage. He met Pratchett when he attended the first production in Abingdon, and the two became friends. As he adapted more and more of the books for the stage – in later years from advance copies, so the play opened the same month the book was published – Briggs became an expert on Discworld lore, and joined a couple of other Discworld superfine as people Pratchett would consult when he had questions about details he couldn’t remember himself. This was how he got involved in the writing of the Discworld Companion, the maps and various other compilations of Discworld minutiae. It was reportedly Pratchett who thought Briggs looked like Vetinari – and also Pratchett who recommended Briggs as the replacement to record Isis Books’ unabridged audiobook of The Fifth Elephant, when previous reader Nigel Planer was unavailable. He recorded the unabridged version of every subsequent Discworld novel, and a fair few of Pratchett’s other works too.
  • Walter Charles Dance (1946-), better known as Charles Dance, is an English actor who played Lord Vetinari in Going Postal, the second of The Mob’s three live-action Discworld adaptations, broadcast in 2010. Dance scored his most famous role the following year: that of the cold-hearted Tywin Lannister, head of House Lannister, in the HBO series Game of Thrones.
  • David Jude Heyworth Law (1972-), better known as Jude Law, is an English actor whose break-out film role was probably Jerome in the 1997 sci-fi drama Gattaca. He’s had a bunch of high profile Hollywood roles, including playing Dr Watson opposite Robert Downey Jr in the two Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. His recent work includes a starring role in The Young Pope and its sequel The New Pope, a drama about a young cardinal and ex-Archbishop of New York who ends up being made pope. He also plays a younger version of Albus Dumbledore in the Fantastic Beasts series of Harry Potter prequel films. He’s currently 50, which probably makes him a good candidate for Vetinari in an ongoing series of films…
  • Vetinari and Vimes are both around fifty years old, at least around the time of Night Watch. In that book, Vimes goes back in time about thirty years and meets his younger self, aged about seventeen; in the same sequences set in the past, Vetinari is a senior student at the Assassin’s Guild, and thus probably a few years older (though likely still under twenty). That’d make them both around fifty in the “present”, though the Patrician often acts as if he’s considerably older. Note that this timeline also makes it seem unlikely that Vetinari could be the Patrician of The Colour of Magic, but most fans think that’s unlikely anyway – despite Terry himself saying he is the same person, just “written by a worse author”.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s short Arthurian time travel story, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future” – including the question of whether it would make a good novel.
  • “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor” is one of Pratchett’s earlier short stories, and the origin of many ideas that would eventually make their way into Truckers and its sequels. We’ll be covering it in a future episode.
  • Doughnut Jimmy is a horse surgeon used by Vimes in Feet of Clay to treat the poisoned Vetinari, mostly because he is usually employed by very serious men who don’t give him the option of not saving horses worth thousands of dollars. He is also mentioned in Jingo and The Last Continent, though in all his appearances he tends to treat his patients – no matter their species – as though they were thoroughbred racehorses.
  • Dr John “Mossy” Lawn – a character we’ll properly meet next episode – is gifted the money to found a hospital at the end of Night Watch. This becomes the Lady Sybil Free Hospital, which we first see in Going Postal when Dr Lawn treats Assistant Postmaster Groat. Lawn and the hospital also appear in Unseen Academicals and The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • When Liz says the old Australian anthem sounds like a “Burn Book“, she’s making a reference to the film Mean Girls. The titular clique of popular but mean high school girls keep a secret scrapbook, called the Burn Book, in which they stick photos of other students at school, about whom they write horrible things.
  • In January 2022, Australian Minister for Defence Peter Dutton announced that the Australian Army would be ordering 120 new tanks and other armoured vehicles. This was back in the news in February 2022 when a visiting US Army general endorsed the plan. Many commentators are very dubious about this plan.
  • Federation was process of the six separate British colonies in Australia becoming a single nation (at least from a European perspective). The Commonwealth of Australia was officially formed on January 1, 1901, following referendums in 1898 and 1899/1900. New Zealand and Fiji were also to be included, at least in early discussions, but opted out early on. Prior to the European invasion, Australia was home to hundreds of different mobs of people; today around 250 survive.
  • Robert Rankin (1949-) is a British comic fantasy author whose most famous books form the “Brentford trilogy”, which began in 1981 with The Antipope (no relation to The Young Pope, as far as we know). Despite the name, the series actually consists of eleven novels, the most recent (and possibly final) being 2019’s The Chronicles of Banarnia. They’re only a series in fairly loose terms – the books in this series mostly feature the same protagonists (Irishman John Omally and his best friend Jim Pooley), and are mostly set in Brentford, a suburban town in West London. Brentford is indeed a real place, as pointed out by a few listeners, including Simon and Craig! Ben did know this was the case, but the real Brentford has noticeably fewer resurrected popes, alien invasions and demonic incursions than the one in the books, so it seems fair to count Rankin’s version as a fictional place. Rankin’s style has some crossover with Pratchett, but is definitely not the same – and his books are mostly comic urban fantasy, and so most similar in content to Good Omens.
  • St. Mary Meade is the fictional home village of Miss Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s elderly detective. It’s been described as being in a few different fictional counties, but is generally thought to be in Southwest England, about 40km (25 miles) away from London. It was first mentioned by Christie in a Poirot novel, and like the homes of many famous detectives, it is unusually rife with violent crime, especially murder.
  • Sunnydale is the Californian city where Buffy Summers lives in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer television show. It is constantly beset by vampires and other demons because it is located above a “Hellmouth” – a portal to the other dimensions from which demons come. While it’s not a real place, various clues point to it being located northwest of Los Angeles.
  • There are several lists of the world’s most liveable cities, most compiled by lifestyle magazines or finance companies. The most famous such list is the “Global Livability Rating”, which has been published annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit (the research and analysis arm of The Economist magazine and media company) since at least 2002. Melbourne has often been near the top of these lists, and in the Global Livability Rating was ranked number one for seven years in a row, between 2011 and 2017. This list, like the others, is said to be based on “quality of life” factors, though it famously doesn’t take into account affordability, or say for whom the cities are so liveable.
  • You can find the Pratchat Reading Challenge for 2022 on our website, and on The Storygraph. The books Ben mentioned reading for it are:
    • Gideon the Ninth (and its sequel, Harrow the Ninth) by Tamsyn Muir
    • The Bees by Laline Paull
    • Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
    • The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner
  • Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey was published in 2012. It’s sequel, Red Side Story, is scheduled for release either this year or next, depending on which website you trust.
  • Ben’s promise near the end of the podcast is a riff on the phrase “That’s our promise to you, from Big W“, a slogan used in ads for Big W in the late 1990s and/or early 2000s (like this one we found on YouTube). Big W is a chain of discount department stores owned by Woolworths Australia – they’re basically the Woolworths version of K-Mart. (The Australian K-Mart is owned by the other massive supermarket chain in Australia, Coles, part of the Coles Myer group.)

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

#Pratchat52 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 52, “A Near-Watch Experience“, featuring guests Fury and Patrick Lenton, discussing BBC America’s 2021 television series The Watch.

Iconographic Evidence

This is the best still we’ve found of the assassin Karen from Finance:

Karen from Finance in her distinctive headwear on the left; on the right is Sex Party Ben (no relation).

The Watch cast and crew

As mentioned in the footnote, we are not good at naming the cast and crew of the show this episode. Here are the key creative folks:

Crew

Head Writer and Executive Producer
Simon Allen

Writers
Joy Wilkinson (“Twilight Canyons”)
Catherine Tregenna (“Not On My Watch”)
Amrou Al-Kadhi (“The Dark in the Dark”)
Ed Hime (“Nowhere in the Multiverse”)

Directors
Craig Viveiros (episodes 1-2)
Brian Kelly (episodes 3-5)
Emma Sullivan (episodes 6-8)

Cast

Richard Dormer (Vimes)
Lara Rossi (Sybil)
Adam Hugill (Carrot)
Marama Corlett (Angua)
Joni Ayton-Kent (Cheery)
Samuel Adewunmi (Carcer)
Bianca Simone Mannie (Wonse)
Anna Chancellor (Vetinari)
Wendell Pierce (voice of Death)
Ralph Ineson (voice of Detritus)
Craig Macrae (Death/Detritus)
Matt Berry (voice of Gawain)
Ingrid Oliver (Dr Cruces)
Natalie Walsh (Karen From Finance/Goblin #4)
Ruth Madeley (Throat)
James Fleet (Archchancellor)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is pretty obvious this month, right?
  • The other podcast which covered The Watch episode by episode – yes, we’ve heard you and we’re going to do it too – is Who Watches the Watch. Their discussion of the show starts with the podcast episode “WE WATCH THE WATCH“, which covers the first two episodes of The Watch. (We’ve not listened to these, to remain fresh for this episode and also the episode-by-episode proper recap, so do let us know if you listen and enjoy them. Watch the website for details on our mini-series!)
  • Fury previously joined us in May 2019 for #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“, discussing Soul Music; and in March 2020 for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, to discuss The Last Continent.
  • Patrick’s roles at Junkee included Entertainment Editor, Deputy Editor and then proper, capital E, he’s the boss of what people write Editor. (That’s not how he described it.) He’s also written for the publication; here’s a page listing all his work for the site.
  • All the heterosexual nonsense I was forced to endure started out as a series of recaps by Patrick and Bec Shaw (aka @Brocklesnitch) of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette for Junkee. They’ve since taken it independent; you can find it on the newsletter platform substack. They have also branched out to cover various Netflix Christmas films and now Married At First Sight (though this latter experiment was cut short as the show proved too horrible to continue with – see below).
  • Married at First Sight (aka MAFS) is an Australian version of the Danish reality television show Gift ved første blik (er…”Married at First Sight”) in which contestants who’ve not previously met are paired up by “experts” and carry out the “social experiment” of being “married”. Those last scare quotes are especially warranted in the Australian version, as contestants can’t legally be married – the Australian Marriage Act 1961 requires a minimum of 28 days’ notice before a wedding. (Contestants have a non-binding commitment ceremony instead.) The original and its clones – which have appeared in fourteen countries around the world – are depressingly popular (the Australian MAFS is in its ninth season), even though they often showcase the worst traditional heterosexual gender roles have to offer. Another contributing factor to the tone of the show is that the contestants are often older and seemingly genuinely desperate in their search for love – as opposed to contestants on lighter shows like The Bachelor, where many of them are more interested in becoming a reality television star or increasing their reach as an influencer.
  • Below is the logo for The Watch; as you can see from the poster, Ben’s wrong – it’s not the same as the lettering on the Watch House in the show! The same font is used on the Watch badge, though, which is displayed as part of the title card, so that might be where he got confused (though the logo is also shown there).
The Watch promotional poster
  • Black Books is a Channel 4 sitcom about misanthropic drunken bookshop owner Bernard Black (co-creator Dylan Moran) and his friends, the naive and optimistic Manny Bianco (Bill Bailey) and neurotic Fran Katzenjammer (Tamsin Greig). It ran for three series between 2000 and 2004.
  • Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace was a 2004 spoof horror television series created for Channel 4 by by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness. The titular show is treated as a classic 1980s series – largely a spoof of the work of Steven King and other popular horror of the 80s – which was never broadcast. Scenes from the original show (made to look as though shot on cheap video) are played alongside modern day interviews with its writer and star, Garth Merenghi (played by Holness) and his agent, Dean Learner (played by Ayoade). The show was inspired by the pair’s prior stage shows Garth Merenghi’s Fright Knight and Garth Merenghi’s Netherhead, the latter of which one the Perrier Award at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe. The television series also features Matt Berry (more about him below), and was followed up by the spin-off Man to Man with Dean Learner, a chat show in which Ayoade’s character interviewed various fictional characters played by Holness, including Merenghi.
  • “A near-Vimes experience” is indeed from one of the books – specifically Thud! But as we’ve not covered it yet, we won’t say any more.
  • A “ring light” is used in photography and film as a way to provide even illumination to a subject fairly close to the camera, which is placed in the middle of the ring. Modern ring lights, which use LEDs and can operate without using much power at a variety of intensities and levels of warmth, are an inexpensive way to light yourself when taking your own photos, and so have become popular with influencers, cosplayers and Instagram users. When the subject is close, a reflection of the ring light often appears in their pupils – and effect seen on Vimes in the opening moments of A Near Vimes Experience.
  • The Wire was a critically acclaimed crime drama produced by HBO between 2002 and 2008. Set in Baltimore, each of its five seasons focusses on a different group and their relationship to the police, who appeared in all five seasons. Wendell Pierce was the first actor to be cast for the show, as homicide detective William “The Bunk” Moreland, who like many of the characters was based on a real person.
  • The original “second-hand set of dimensions” are the very first words of the Discworld series, appearing at the start of The Colour of Magic. Of note: the early trailers for The Watch, including the New York Comic-Con teaser, used the more verbatim version “In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions”; it was truncated to “Somewhere in a secondhand dimension” for broadcast.
  • The best article to read about the the development of show is Marc Burrows’ “Calling time on The Watch? What went wrong (and right) with the latest Terry Pratchett adaptation” for the pop culture website heyuguys.com. You might also be interested in this timeline researched by Discworld Monthly, though note it was mostly compiled before the show was released.
  • SyFy is a cable channel owned by NBC Universal, specialising in (yes) science fiction. It was launched in 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, dropped the “Channel” in 1999, and changed the spelling in 2009. Before the rise of streaming services, SyFy often picked up sci-fi and fantasy shows which were cancelled by other networks, including Sliders and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. They are also noted for making lower budget sci-fi series.
  • Killjoys is a 2015 sci-fi series following the adventures of three interplanetary bounty hunters, made for the Canadian channel Space (now known as the CTV Sci-Fi Channel) and SyFy. It ran for five ten-episode seasons, and starred Hannah John-Kamen, Aaron Ashmore and Luke Macfarlane.
  • Sucker Punch is a 2011 action film directed and co-written by Zack Snyder. It stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens as young women committed to an insane asylum in the 1960s who retreat into a fantasy world of guns, aliens and robots, which represents their attempt to escape before they are lobotomised. Snyder described it as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”, which is…look, not entirely inaccurate.
  • Torchwood was a 2007 spin-off from Doctor Who in which the Doctor’s immortal companion Captain Jack Harkness leads the Cardiff team of Torchwood, a secret organisation who protect Earth against extraterrestrial threats. It was meant to be a more adult show, and that’s more or less true if you assume “adult” means swearing and fucking. Torchwood had its moments, but like The Watch suffered from a wildly fluctuating tone and a seeming lack of knowing what kind of show it wanted to be, especially in its first season. (The third season is basically a different show altogether, and very good (if very grim); the fourth season was an American co-production that isn’t as good, but is still interesting.) Only Catherine Tregenna worked as a writer on both shows, but in Fury’s defence she does represent 20% of The Watch’s writing team. In addition, Ed Himes and Joy Wilkinson have both written for Doctor Who under its current showrunner, Chris Chibnall, who was also the man in charge of Torchwood for its first two seasons, so there’s some of the same DNA there.
  • The extremely faithful adaptation of Good Omens, made for Amazon Prime in 2019, was written by Neil Gaiman, who also served as the show runner alongside a production team headed by Terry’s assistant Rob Wilkins (who also has an executive producer credit on The Watch) and Rob Brown (who was one of the original producers for The Watch, working on it from the early days of the project until around 2015). Fury describes it as “so bad”; we’ll cover it eventually and let you know what we think. A second season is currently in production, based on ideas Neil and Terry had back in the day for a potential sequel – as explained in this post on Neil’s blog.
  • The Wheel of Time is a 2021 Amazon Prime TV series based on Robert Jordan’s best-selling fantasy book series, which began in 1990 with The Eye of the World. The full series comprises fourteen novels, the last three of which were finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death in 2007. There’s also a prequel, New Spring, which was originally published as a novella in the 1998 collection Legends – which you might remember was where Terry Pratchett first published “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39).
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is another Amazon Prime TV series, set to be released in 2022. It is set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings novels; Bilbo and Frodo’s adventures take place in the Third Age of Middle-earth, while The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, a period only loosely detailed by Tolkien. (The Silmarillion, which tells of the history and mythology of Middle-earth, mostly deals with the First Age, with only one of its five parts detailing the Second Age.) Based on the deal struck by Amazon to secure the rights to The Lord of the Rings, it will run for five seasons and have a total budget of $US1 billion, making it the most expensive television series ever made.
  • Ben says a few times that we’ll talk about the issue of “copaganda” and the “police as resistance” theme of The Watch, but we didn’t get there in the end. We’ll be sure to talk more about it in the episode by episode mini-series, and probably also in our episode about Night Watch. But in brief, “copaganda” – a Portmanteau of “cop” and “propaganda” – is the tendency for media outlets to run stories of heroism and bravery in the police force over stories of corruption, incompetence or systemic prejudice. In recent years, as the problems with policing grow worse (especially, but not only, in America), this has been extended to the kinds of fictional shows that promote police officers in an always-friendly light. The lighthearted comedy Brooklyn-99, set in a police precinct in New York, wrapped up its last season trying to deal with some of the real issues with American policing, with mixed results. In this context, the idea of police being “the resistance” when in reality they are part of the oppressive system is a bit…off. (Even if it is true to the spirit of the Watch in the books, especially Night Watch.)
  • Ben’s got things a bit mixed up around when we first see Carcer, condensing the flashbacksa bit, but the first twenty years ago sequence ends with Captain Keel walking out to confront Carcer at about the 2:40 mark. Vimes then spots Carcer in the Drum at around 10 minutes, prompting the flashback of him shooting Keel. So that’s about seven and a half minutes later. (We don’t see the chase that ends with him falling from the University tower until Vimes is tracking Carcer via the iconographs at around the 18 minute mark.)
  • There are eight books featuring the Ankh-Morpork City Watch (or mostly just Vimes, in some of the later ones): Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud! and Snuff. They also star in the short story “Theatre of Cruelty”, set between Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, and – in additional to cameos in many books set in Ankh-Morpork – make significant appearances in The Truth and Monstrous Regiment.
  • The episode where Vimes goes off into the desert is episode five, “Not on My Watch”; Vimes is heading off to destroy Wayne by throwing him in the lake which destroys magical artefacts. The sequence starts at around the 7:53 mark. The “Miami Vice music” plays until he falls down a sand dune around 30 seconds later. Miami Vice was an American crime drama that ran on NBC between 1984 and 1990, produced by Michael Mann and telling stories of vice cops who used the confiscated belongings of drug dealers to go undercover. It drew heavily on the New Wave – a cultural movement that followed the punk era, but more quirky and weird than post-punk, with an emphasis on stylised visuals. The show was also famous for its synthesised soundtrack; the title music was by Czech-American composer Jan Hammer, and Vimes’ accompaniment definitely has a similar vibe, though it’s not the actual song.
  • Wingspan is published by Stonemeier Games (in English) and designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. The gorgeous art of the birds is by a number of artists including Beth Sobel, Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez. Two expansions for the game add European and Oceanic birds into the mix – the original game is mostly North American species.
  • New Girl is an American sitcom that aired on Fox for seven seasons between 2011 and 2018. It stars Zoey Deschanel as Jess Day, a quirky teacher who after coming home to find her boyfriend teaching on her immediately moves out into a New York apartment with three guys.
  • Oath: Chronicles of Exile and Empire is published by Leder Games (in English) and designed by Cole Wehrle, with very distinctive art by Kyle Ferrin. The pair previous worked on the hit looks-cute-but-is-actually-cutthroat game Root, about cats, birds, foxes, bunnies, mice and other cute critters warring over their woodland home.
  • Disney isn’t just considering making a live-action Snow White and Seven Dwarves – it’s in pre-production and has cast West Side Story‘s Rachel Zegler as Snow White, and Gal “Wonder Woman” Gadot as the Evil Queen. The news was met in late January with outrage by disability activists, including actor Peter Dinklage – both for the treatment of dwarf characters in the film, and the plans that they would be CGI characters, presumably voiced by famous able-bodied actors. This opinion piece on MSNBC by Eric Garcia sums up where things are at.
  • The scene in which Carrot calms down a tavern full of dwarfs occurs in Guards! Guards!, though he doesn’t sing – he merely speaks to them in dwarfish and chastises them, wondering what their mothers – “who first showed you how to use a pickaxe” – would think of their behaviour.
  • Matt Berry (Gawain/Wayne, the sword) is an English actor and comedian who gained fame for supporting roles in The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd before starring in his own shows including dark weird sitcom Snuff Box, showbiz spoof Toast of London (and its recent sequel, Toast of Tinseltown) and landing on of the main roles in the US television version of What We Do in the Shadows. He’s no stranger to voice work, appearing as a recurring character in Matt Groening’s fantasy animated show Disenchantment and as the voice of the dried 8D8 in Disney’s latest Star Wars show, The Book of Boba Fett.
  • We’ll see if we can source that clip of the New Zealand LARP golem costume from Fury, but it’s worth noting in case of any confusion that Detritus is not CGI – he’s entirely a practical effect, a costume using stilts and arm extensions worn by performer Craig Macrae, who also plays the physical form of Death. (LARP, by the way, is short for live-action roleplay – a form of roleplaying game in which people dress up as and physically act out their character’s adventures, rather than sitting down around a table and imagining them.)
  • Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal was an adaptation made by The Mob for Sky One in 2010, following their adaptations of Hogfather in 2006 and The Colour of Magic in 2008. Mr Pump, the golem tasked by the Patrician with keeping an eye on Moist von Lipwig, is portrayed physically by Dutch actor and stuntman Marnix Van Den Broeke in a pretty awesome costume that looks like its made from terracotta. (Van Den Broeke also wore the Death costume in The Mob’s other adaptations.) Mr Pump’s voice is provided by English actor Nicholas Farrell.
  • Danger 5 is a 2012 Australian action-comedy produced for SBS by Dinosaur, a production company formed by the team behind hit web series Italian Spiderman, a spoof of 1960s Italian action films. Danger 5 is a campy spoof of “boy’s own” and spy adventure serials of the 1960s, like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Danger Man. The first season sees the “Danger 5” team of World War II Allied agents thwarting a number of Adolf Hitler’s schemes, though Hitler himself always escapes via the same footage of him jumping through a window. The second season, broadcast in 2015, gets more absurd and moves the characters into the 1980s, though Hitler is still their nemesis.
  • Boromir is a human, a military commander from Gondor who accompanies Frodo and his companions on their quest in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. As Ben mentions, he dies after being shot by three arrows, and in the film version is played by Sean Bean; this role and a few others in which his character dies prompted the frequently quoted bit of lore that he has died more on-screen deaths than any other actor, though that isn’t true. (At one point the actual winner of that title was said to be John Hurt, but Ben thinks Christopher Lee probably has a better claim.)
  • Fury likens carrying the rocky bit of Detritus around to the famous scene in Hamlet, Act V Scene i, in which Hamlet comes across the skull of Yorick, the king’s Fool, whom he knew as a boy.
  • The games Ben is talking about are Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, part of the original World of Darkness from White Wolf Games. In Vampire, each character has been turned into one of the undead and must fight a nightly struggle between the animal desires of the “Beast Within”, learning how to feed it enough to sate it without becoming monstrous. The tagline of Vampire: The Masquerade is “A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror”, with the in-character motto “A Beast I am, lest a Beast I become.” Werewolf: The Apocalypse’s tagline was the slightly different “A Storytelling Game of Savage Horror”, but this was dropped from later editions; werewolves had to balance their human and wolf sides, the latter represented by their supernatural Rage.
  • CCTV – short for Closed-circuit Television, meaning a camera that transmits a single signal to a specific and usually small number of monitors – has become the shorthand term for video surveillance. In most precedural crime dramas, as well as older police dramas like The Bill, it’s common for police to request CCTV from the area where a crime was committed. This mirrors real life, where police in many countries have the power to request footage from the owners of security cameras, which are primarily private businesses and individuals.
  • Various estimates put the number of CCTV cameras in London at around half a million, though only around 25,000 or fewer of those are operated by government authorities. They were first introduced in large numbers in the late 1980s, so Ben’s estimate that London has been one of the most heavily camera-monitored cities for 30 years is probably about right.
  • The writers of The Watch are indeed all British.
  • Miranda Hart is an English comedian and actor best known for her television work, including her brilliant self-titled BBC sitcom Miranda. (On a side note, Miranda co-stars Tom Ellis, now better known for playing the title role in the Netflix series Lucifer, based on Neil Gaiman’s version of the character.) She’s also played dramatic roles with a bit of comedy in them, including in the hit medical drama Call the Midwife, and Autumn de Wilde’s 2021 film adaptation Emma. starring Anna Taylor-Joy. We previously talked about her playing Lady Sybil in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“.
  • It’s true that in television programs – and especially American ones, both dramas and comedies – the majority of characters are upper-middle-class, professional people. They are usually lawyers, doctors, advertising executives, police officers, writers, broadcasters and so on. While this has changed in the last decade or so, there’s still an imbalance – perhaps more so than the improved (but still not great) situation for characters who aren’t straight white men.
  • There have been many “generic fantasy world maps” like the ones Ben mentions; one of the fancier ones is “Clichéa” by DeviantArt map maker Sarithus. You can also find a much earlier version of the same idea in a book we’ve mentioned before: Diana Wynne-Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
  • “Tulip and Pin” is a reference to the characters Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, who appear in The Truth (see #Pratchat42, “Truth, The Printing Press and Every -ing“). The poster appears about twenty minutes into the episode, and reads:

Pin & Tulip’s Goblin Labour
Enquire at the docks for an immediate quote
Cheap, Reliable, Disposable

  • The character of Throat is indeed credited as “Throat Dibbler”. She never says “And that’s cuttin’ me own throat,” but the character’s catchphrase does appear on a poster in episode two.
  • Blindspotting is a 2021 American comedy-drama television series on the Starz network, which forms a sequel to the 2018 film Blindspotting. It’s set in Oakland, California, and stars Jasmine Cephas Jones as Ashley, a supporting character from the film, who is forced to move in with her mother in law when her partner Miles is sent to prison. It was created by Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame) and Rafael Casal, who also appear as their characters from the film (Casal plays Miles).
  • On the question of whether the writers have written comedy before, the answer does appear to be no. Mostly they have previous credits on drama and fantasy shows. (We don’t think no-one should be allowed to work on comedy without prior experience, but The Watch‘s mix of absurdism, satire and farce might have benefitted from some; it’s a tricky assignment!) Though it’s worth noting is that showrunner Simon Allen wrote for both New Tricks and M. I. High, both shows with a mix of action and comedy.
  • See the top of this discussion for a photo of the fictional Karen From Finance, but the real life version is the drag persona of Richard Chadwick. This more famous Karen – in Australia at any rate – has been around since at least 2017, and has toured internationally with her shows Death Drop and Out of Office. You can find out more about her at karenfromfinance.com.
  • Karen From Finance was indeed a contestant on the first season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race Down Under in 2021. Various commentators criticised the show, not least for its choice of contestants. Past photos of Scarlet Adams showed her performer appearing on stage in blackface in a parody of Aboriginal Australians, and Karen From Finance was revealed to have a tattoo of a golliwog, a type of doll based on (or at very least associated with) racist depictions of Black people. Both gave seemingly sincere apologies for their past actions, but it highlighted the majority white cast of the show – especially after both non-white contestants were eliminated, while one of the eliminated white contestants was allowed to return with little explanation. It’s generally seen by Drag Race fans as a low-point, but perhaps they’ll do better in season two, which is coming in 2022.
  • The “a wizard did it” trope is when something that doesn’t makes sense in a fantasy show is explained away by saying it’s the result of magic, which supposedly doesn’t have to make normal logical sense. (Pratchett’s magic, at least in the Discworld, specifically doesn’t work like this and always makes at least narrative sense. In many books – especially the early ones – it relies on principles of conservation of energy similar to physics, which gives it many limitations.)
  • Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was the debut film from English director Guy Ritchie. It’s a crime caper film in which a number of plots start separately and converge at the end on a pair of expensive antique shotguns. We last mentioned it in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”, and used it as inspiration for the title of #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“.
  • In Guards! Guards!, Lupine Wonse was Lord Vetinari’s secretary, and the author of the plot to summon the Noble Dragon and depose him in favour of a King. One detail we neglected to mention is that in the novel, Wonse is a childhood friend of Vimes – something seemingly missing from The Watch version, even though they were both members of Carcer’s gang. (Though presumably this Wonse was much younger than Vimes, as we discuss regarding the potential age gap between Wonse and Carcer.) We discussed Wonse, and the resemblance of his cult, the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, to modern-day members of the “manosphere”, back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • Jocasta Wiggs appears as a minor character in one of the opening scenes of Night Watch – so expect to hear more about her in our Night Watch episode!
  • If you want to learn more about punk, you could watch the documentary Punk Attitude, or – for more on the visual style – listen to episode six of the podcast series Articles of Interest, “Punk Style“. In brief, punk rock was a DIY counter-culture response to 1970s rock music, which was perceived as having sold out for money. It drew on 1960s garage rock as a musical influence, and was explicitly anti-establishment and provocative.
  • The “Rule of Three” (not usually the “rule of threes” plural) in comedy and writing is basically the idea that a collection of three things is usually the funniest. The reason for this is that three is the minimum number of things that can establish and then break a pattern, one of the basic premises of joke writing.
  • Simon Allen is credited as an associate producer of the 2012 BBC spy drama Hunted (starring Australia’s own Melissa George), and the 2018 German war drama Das Boot for Sky One, which forms a sequel to the 1981 film of the same name. His credit on The Musketeers is as executive producer for the third and final season in 2016. Whether he was the show runner on any of these is a little hard to discern, since it’s not a specific credit in the UK, but the executive producer title makes it likely for at least The Musketeers, and this is corroborated by info we found elsewhere.
  • The BBC’s 2014 series The Musketeers is not actually very steampunk at all, though its first season does feature Peter Capaldi as Cardinal Richelieu. (He was unable to return in later seasons as during filming on the first one in 2013 he accepted the role of the Twelfth Doctor, a dream of his since childhood.) Ben is really thinking of the 2011 film version, The Three Musketeers, which stars Orlando Bloom, Milla Jovovich and Mads Mikkelsen (though not as the musketeers, who are played by Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans and Logan Lerman).
  • Dan Harmon is the creator of the television series Community and Rick & Morty. We couldn’t find a specific essay in which he talks about characters needing to have one core trait that doesn’t change, but he’s mentioned similar advice many times in blogs and interviews.
  • Ben mentions the Summoning Dark, which is the concept from the novel Thud! on which “the Dark in the Dark” is based. It has a very different nature and story in the book, so we’ll leave that for our future Thud! episode.
  • The 2016 Netflix series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is very loosely based on Douglas Adams’ 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was itself largely a mash-up of Adams’ two Doctor Who scripts, City of Death (from which he takes a plot about an alien spacecraft exploding in the distant past and sparking the creation of life on Earth) and Shada (from which he takes the idea of an alien time traveller hiding out as a professor in an obscure Oxbridge college). The series uses almost none of the characters or situations from the novel or its sequels The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul and the unfinished Salmon of Doubt, though there are little Easter eggs and nods to all of them. Dirk in the TV show (played brilliantly by Samuel Barnett) is much younger and the product of a government conspiracy, but somehow the essential spirit of the original remains while being welded to a bunch of new supporting characters and the infrastructure required to sustain two seasons of episodic television. Tonally and stylistically it has a few things in common with The Watch, especially in the second season, but it’s based in a real world with an extra layer of very weird stuff, which helps ground everything. Ben kind of loved it, and to be honest preferred it to the earlier English adaptation Dirk Gently (2010-2012), which starred Stephen Mangan and was much more similar to original novel.
  • Pratchett’s first few Discworld books – in which, as Fury puts it, he “set up a bunch of shit, flails a bit, and finds his feet” – include the early Rincewind books, which are still largely based in parody of the fantasy genre as a whole, and Equal Rites, in which we get an early and mostly fully-formed version of Granny Weatherwax and another witch who seems like a prototype of Nanny Ogg. There’s also a huge shift in the series in which the fantasy fades into the background to support the stories about stuff like war, class, racism and violence, rather than being the point.
  • The exclusive Narrativia deal was announced on the 28th of April, 2020. It’s with distributor Endeavour Content and production company Motive Pictures, the latter of which was launched in 2019 by Simon Maxwell, backed by Endeavour. Maxwell was previously Head of International Drama at Channel 4 Television, while the Motive Pictures team also includes Executive Producer Sam Lavender of Film4, who worked on The Favourite and The Lobster. It’s not clear if that definitely means no more of The Watch – the licensing deal between BBC Studios and Narrativia isn’t exactly public knowledge – but it’s possible, as Marc Burrows suggests in the article we linked earlier, that the screen rights to the Watch books specifically might still belong to them.
  • Ben will share as many Easter eggs as he can when we make the episode-by-episode mini-series podcast, but here’s a quick list of a few of his favourites:
    • Carcer’s surname is never mentioned in the published version of Night Watch, but “Carcer Dun” is his full name in an earlier preview of the book.
    • Lady Sybil’s “school” is called “The Sunshine Rescue Centre for Broken Bedraggled Things”, a variation on the various “Sunshine Sanctuaries” Sybil runs in the books.
    • Vimes drinking Bearhugger’s whiskey (we never see the label up close, but the design is cool).
    • The song “Gold”, and the number of words in dwarfish for kinds of gold and rock, are mentioned several times in the books. (Ben also loved the brief moment when Carrot and Cheery bond over the song, one of the few times Carrot’s dwarfish heritage comes out.)
    • Twilight Canyons is named after an idea Pratchett had for a story about retired heroes who were losing their memories, mentioned in the afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown.

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

#Pratchat52 – A Near-Watch Experience

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This month, we’ve put down the books and picked up the remote control! Guests Patrick Lenton and Fury join us to discuss a show “based on characters created by Sir Terry Pratchett”: 2021’s The Watch.

Sam Vimes was a street kid in Ankh-Morpork who joined the Watch to kill its Captain and free the imprisoned members of his gang. But he had a change of heart. Twenty years later, he’s still there – a washed-up drunk of a Captain, whose force of misfits have almost nothing to police since the criminal Guilds were all legalised. But during his latest assignment – to find a missing library book – he sees someone who died twenty years ago. Soon the Watch is up to their necks in dragons, ancient artefacts and magical experiments gone wrong, and it’ll take all their cunning and heart to get to the bottom of it…plus a little help from noblewoman-turned-vigilante, Lady Sybil Ramkin.

After a long road through development hell, initially with Pratchett himself at the helm, The Watch eventually emerged as a surprisingly “punk rock police procedural”; a brightly-coloured Dungeon-punk explosion which wears its queerness on its sleeve. The Watch remixes characters and concepts from the books into something so different that fans and friends of Pratchett quickly disowned it. The critical reaction was middling at best, and it took six months for it to be released on Pratchett’s home soil.

But is it any good?

Could you divorce yourself from the source material? If so, does The Watch work on its own terms? Is it funny? Is it comprehensible? Is watching it a good time? Which bits got up your nose, and which did you love? Who was your favourite character, and why was it Cheery? And given we barely scratched the surface of talking about it this episode – should we do a bonus mini-series, discussing it episode by episode? Let us know by joining the conversation, using the hashtag #Pratchat52.

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Guest Patrick Lenton is currently Deputy Editor: Arts + Culture for The Conversation, and was previously a senior editor at Junkee. He is also a freelance writer whose work has spanned journalism, theatre, fiction and comedy. His most recent short story collection is Sexy Tales of Palaeontology from Subbed In, and he writes the newsletter All the Hetereosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure with Rebecca Shaw. You can find Patrick on Twitter as @PatrickLenton, and his handy LinkTree will help you find his other stuff.

Guest Fury is a writer, illustrator and performer who previously appeared on Pratchat in #Pratchat19 (Soul Music) and #Pratchat29 (The Last Continent) – our last in-person episode, recorded in the before times! Their live multi-disciplinary show Gender Euphoria toured Australia in 2019 and 2020, and their book I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work is (probably) still available. You can find out more about them at furywrites.com, or follow them on Twitter as @fury_writes. Their first TV show, Crazy Fun Park, is currently in production and scheduled to premiere on ABC ME and ABC iview in late 2022.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next month we’re heading to one of the books that (sort of) provided a big chunk of inspiration for The Watch, and a fan favourite, frequently topping rankings of the Discworld series: Night Watch! Meet the original Carcer Dun, Jocasta Wiggs, young Sam Vimes, and – eventually – Young Sam Vimes… Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat53, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat48 – Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang

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Freelance writer and journalist Ben Riley joins Liz and Ben for a magical history tour as Susan Sto Helit teams up with a couple of monks to stop time…er…stopping in Terry Pratchett’s twenty-sixth Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.

In Ankh-Morpork, a mystery woman tasks the odd but talented Jeremy Clockson to build a clock so accurate it can measure the tick of the Universe. In mountain monastery of Oi Dong, Lu-Tze, sweeper of the History Monks, gains a new apprentice: the unmotivated but gifted Newgate “Lobsang” Ludd. And in his domain, Death senses that the Auditors of Reality, grey entities who count every atom, are once again seeking to curb the chaos of life. He recruits his granddaughter Susan to help find the son of Time. If they can’t, he’ll have to get the old band back together and ride out for the end of the world – at precisely one o’clock, this Wednesday…

Pratchett brings back a string of old favourites for this action-packed romp through…well, not quite through time, but it’s certainly “about” time. It’s the last book to properly star Susan Sto Helit, and for that matter Death; it brings back Lu-Tze, the sweeper who nudged Brutha in the right direction back in Small Gods; and Nanny Ogg is here too, in her first major appearance since the last Witches book, Carpe Jugulum. Oh, and there’s a main character named Lobsang, and we know all about that name…

Is this what you were hoping for in a third outing for Susan? How do you feel about the fate(s) of Lobsang and Jeremy? Where do you land on having an in-universe excuse for continuity errors in Discworld? And are the monkish wisdom jokes okay because they’re based more on kung fu movie tropes than actual Tibetan culture, or is it still a bit on the nose? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat48 on social media!

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Guest Benjamin Riley (he/him) – not to be confused with Spider-Man clone Ben Reilly – is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist. He’s written for Junkee, SBS Online, PopMatters, Overland, the Star Observer and many other publications. Ben also works in AIDS research and in HIV and sexual health policy, organises queer community events, and co-hosted and produced the queer political podcast Queers with Simon Copland from 2015 to 2019. (You can still find old episodes in most podcast directories and via the Queers acast page.) For more on what Ben’s up to, follow him at @bencriley on Twitter or hit up his website at benjaminriley.com.au.

In other Ben news, the videogame Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown, written by Ben McKenzie (yes, this one), is now available on Steam!

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode we take another little breather – it’s been a long lockdown here in Melbourne, folks – to read a Pratchett short story: his take on Arthurian myth, “Once and Future”! It was originally published in 1995 in the collection Camelot, but like most of his short fiction you can find it in A Blink of the Screen. Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat49, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

And yes, we are planning something a little different and special for our fiftieth episode in December – watch our website and social media for news on that soon!

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat48 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”, featuring guest Benjamin Riley, discussing the 26th Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.

(To avoid any confusion, in these notes we’ve referred to our guest this episode as “Guest Ben”, and our co-host as “our Ben”, which has the delightful side effect of making it sound like he’s part of the Ogg clan.)

  • The episode title is a riff on the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, featured on their 1967 concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While long rumoured to be about hallucinations brought on by the use of psychotropic drugs – in large part because the title coincidentally includes the acronym LSD – it was actually inspired by an illustration made by John’s young son, Julian Lennon, which he described using the phrase.
  • Guest Ben and Liz used to have “Time Travel Wednesdays” when they worked together, but our Ben’s brain immediately time travels to Tuesdays, presumably for the sake of alliteration. We apologise for any confusion caused.
  • Craig Hildebrand-Burke was indeed our guest when we discussed Jingo back in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“. (This is one we’d like to revisit with a bit more sensitivity to some things in our blindspot last time.)
  • Guest Ben’s favourite Discworld period (which he points out is the same as previous guest Craig’s) runs from Jingo (the twenty-first Discworld novel, published in November 1997; see #Pratchat27) to Thud (the thirty-fourth, published in September 2005; probably coming in 2022). This period also includes the first three Science of Discworld books, the first three younger readers books (The Amazing Maurice and the first two Tiffany Aching books), and the introduction of Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal. It’s also notable that Pratchett didn’t publish any non-Discworld books during this period. (Our Ben feels that thematically and tonally this run begins slightly earlier, with either Maskerade or Feet of Clay, meaning it also includes Hogfather.)
  • Cigars are most associated with His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch and Duke of Ankh, though in Guards! Guards!, when he was still just the low-paid Captain of the disregarded Night Watch, he rolls his own cigarettes. By Men at Arms he has moved on to “cheap” cigars, and in Feet of Clay “thin” ones which he carries in a case (or at least he did until Nobby stole the case). He sometimes lights them using swamp dragons, a habit which annoys Sybil. He’s not the only cigar smoker; Nobby is plied with cigars in Feet of Clay, and Nanny Ogg also indulges, though this is only seen briefly in Wyrd Sisters when she’s also drinking in the pub.
  • “That X-Men movie that fixes that crap X-Men movie” is X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014; dir. Bryan Singer), a film adaptation of the epic comic book time travel story which turned the intended reboot film X-Men: First Class (2011; dir. Matthew Vaughn) into a prequel of the original X-Men movie trilogy. The film opens in a future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction, so Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is psychically sent back in time to prevent the murder which sent history down that leg of the trousers of time. He is successful, and when he returns to the present, the timeline resembles that of the original trilogy – except that the events of the near-universally hated X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, dir. Brett Ratner) haven’t happened, as quickly established by the inclusion of characters either only appearing or killed off in that film.
  • The idea of the white face and the red nose – named after two styles of clown makeup, and expounded upon in Eric Idle’s sci-fi novel The Road to Mars – is a characterisation of comedic duos in which one, the “white face”, is serious and has (or assumes) a higher level or importance than the other, the buffoon or “red nose”. As well as the obvious surface level, comedy is often derived from the red nose puncturing the white face’s pompous attitude. Colon and Nobby are in some ways the archetypal Discworld example, but there are many others. In theatre terms, the white face is said to be a “high status” character, while the red nose is “low status”.
  • There are two kinds of big wheel that circus performers roll around in, but the one our Ben is thinking of is a German wheel: two big metal hoops connected by metal struts with stirrups and handholds. They were invented for – and are still used in – gymnastics. (The other kind of circus wheel is a single metal hoop called a Cyr wheel.)
  • Wallace and Gromit are the stop-motion animated stars several short and feature films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Wallace (voiced primarily by Peter Sallis) is a well-meaning, eccentric and talented inventor with a passion for cheese, while Gromit is his supremely competent and loyal dog. The success of their first film, 1989’s A Grand Day Out, led to several sequels and spin-offs, including the television and film series Shaun the Sheep.
  • We’re afraid you’ll have to get used to the term “timey-wimey” during this episode, since it just feels so apt for a book with little in the way of actual time travel, but much in the way of time-related weirdness. Its origin is Doctor Who, specifically the Tenth Doctor’s explanation of causality in the third season episode “Blink”. We gave the full quote in our notes for #Pratchat35, but here we’ll add that in the fiftieth anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, when the Eleventh Doctor uses the phrase and the War Doctor (an earlier, grumpier incarnation) finds it preposterous, the Tenth Doctor pretends he’s never heard it.
  • Jeremy Clarkson started out as a journalist, but is best known now as a television personality. He was one of many hosts of the original version of Top Gear, the BBC Two motoring show which ran from 1977 to 2001, and after it was cancelled devised a new format for the show which debuted in 2002 – the year after Thief of Time was published, so he was considerably less famous then (though still pretty well-known in the UK). He was one of the new version’s original hosts, alongside Richard Hammond; they were joined by James May from the second series and remained the main hosting team for over a decade. Even before the new Top Gear, Clarkson attracted criticism for making bigoted remarks, but these only increased in frequency as he grew more famous, with a series of controversies over comments on- and off-air that ran the gamut of anti-environmentalism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and racism. (There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to controversies on Top Gear, most of them involving Clarkson.) Clarkson generally dismisses these criticisms, but also seems to court controversy deliberately to increase his fame, stating on multiple occasions that he may not believe all the things he says. By 2014, however, he was on a “final warning” from the BBC, and in 2015, after he verbally abused and then physically assaulted one of the show’s producers while on location (ostensibly because he wasn’t served the meal he wanted), the BBC cut the show’s season short and declined to renew Clarkson’s contract, despite a petition from fans with a million signatures. Hammond and May left the show with him, which continued with various new presenters, including Friends and Episodes star Matt leBlanc. Clarkson’s new show with Hammond and May, The Grand Tour, was basically Top Gear in all but name, and began on Amazon Prime in 2016, where he now also hosts Clarkson’s Farm, a show about the farm he owns in the Cotswolds, not far from Pratchett’s home in Wiltshire. He’s still very famous in the UK, where he has hosted their version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? since 2018 and makes various other television appearances – though not on the BBC.
  • Lobsang is a favourite name of Pratchett’s, used most prominently here and as the name of a major character in The Long Earth books, though it crops up many times in the novels. The earliest Lobsang is the Abbott Mort deals with on his first solo round as Death in Mort, though his name is only mentioned once – the rest of the time he’s just “the Abbott” – so don’t feel bad if you missed it. Another early appearance is near the end of Guards! Guards! (See also the note below about knowledge coming from a long way away.) The name is a fairly specific reference to “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa”, author of several books about the spiritual and paranormal, most famously The Third Eye in 1956. He was later revealed to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber from Devon. For more on his weird story, listen to our discussion of The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, or look him up yourself; you’ll be amazed.
  • The tick of the Universe more or less exists in the real world in the concept of Planck time, the “briefest physically meaningful span of time”, which is about 5.39×10−44 seconds. According to an article from 2020, the briefest time so far measured is 247 zeptoseconds (or 10-21 seconds), so even the most accurate atomic clocks can’t duplicate Jeremy’s feat. (Assuming the same length of tick in Discworld space is dubious, but if true, the glass clock is approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more accurate than the best atomic clock.)
  • Susan Sto-Helit is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sto-Helit – Death’s one-time apprentice Mort and adopted daughter Ysabell. Their story is told in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort (see #Pratchat2), while Susan first appeared as a teenager in Soul Music (#Pratchat19) before returning at more-or-less the same age she is here in Hogfather (#Pratchat26). In the animated Soul Music she was voiced by Debra J Gillet (who also provided the voice of Grimma in the stop-motion version of Truckers), and in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, she was played by Michelle Dockery (now best known for her starring role as Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey).
  • Montessori and Steiner schools are two different alternative models for educating children and young people.
    • Montessori education, developed by Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952) around the turn of the twentieth century, focuses on self-directed learning based on natural human development. Its basis is that children naturally want to learn, but formal education prevents them from doing so in the way that’s best for them; Montessori schools are usually primary schools and allow students to pursue the activities and subjects they find most interesting, usually through playful means. Many aspects of Montessori’s work have been adopted into mainstream teaching as well.
    • Steiner education, also known as Waldorf education, is based on the work of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher (among many other things). Steiner’s “anthroposophy” teaches that humans can better understand the spiritual world through personal development, though the spiritual aspects of the philosophy are not always emphasised in Steiner education. Its main focus is holistic teaching, believing that students will do best if they develop their intellectual skills alongside artistic and practical ones. Steiner schools use a developmental model that runs from infancy through to secondary education, and have become increasingly popular; they are now the largest independent educational movement in the world, and have forty-five schools across Australia.
  • Professor Valerie Felicity Frizzle, PhD, originally known as Ms Frizzle or “the Frizz”, is the teacher in The Magic School Bus books by Joanna Cole, later developed into television series and videogames. The titular bus could travel safely to just about anywhere in time and space, allowing Ms Frizzle to teach her students about various scientific concepts. Cole died in 2020, the year a Netflix continuation, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, debuted. In the sequel, the original Ms Frizzle gets her doctorate and passes the school bus on to her younger sister, Miss Fiona Felicity Frizzle. In both the television and Netflix series, Valerie Frizzle is played by Lily Tomlin; Fiona was played by Kate McKinnon (of Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters fame).
  • Lu-Tze and the History Monks first appear in 1992’s Small Gods (discussed in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“). They are described as the caretakers of history, keepers of the “the books from which history is derived”. Lu-Tze is sent by the 493rd Abbot – the same one recently reincarnated in this book – to Omnia, where “things must be…carefully observed“. Lu-Tze mentions in Small Gods that he hasn’t been to Omnia in seven hundred years, which almost agrees with his age of eight hundred in this book, set about a century later. By the end of that book he has “patched up” history such that Brutha does not die, avoiding a century of terrible warfare; Brutha instead lives for most of the intervening century and reforms Omnianism. This suggests Lu-Tze’s mission to Omnia was one of the things that needed fixing as a result of the first glass clock; Igors are long-lived enough that this Igor’s grandfather could certainly have built the previous clock a century earlier, though it also seems that the History Monks are able to leave their valley at just about any point in history they choose. Lu-Tze will return in Night Watch.
  • Lu-Tze’s name is derived from Loazi (老子), author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism, who lived in the 6th century BCE. Loazi – also romanised as Lao Tze or Loa Tzu – is actually an honorific title meaning “venerable master”, and there is some debate about who he was, or even if such a single person truly existed, or was just a pen name for multiple authors of the Tao Te Ching. Listener Felix let us known that Lu-Tze might be an intentional bilingual pun, as Lǔ is a Mandarin word meaning “foolish” or “crude”, making Lu-Tze a “Foolish/Crude Master”.
  • While we may not have been able to spot many references to specific kung fu movies, there’s at least one clear reference to the 1972 American TV series Kung Fu. When Lu-Tze takes on Lobsang as an apprentice, he tells him: ‘Word One is, you don’t call me “master” and I don’t name you after some damn insect.’ In Kung Fu, the main character Caine – played by white American actor David Carradine, who was cast over a host of potential Asian American actors, including Bruce Lee – is a Shaolin monk wandering the Old West looking for his brother. In flashbacks to his training, he refers to he teacher as “Master”, who calls Caine “Grasshopper”.
  • We previously talked about The Karate Kid (1984, dir. John G Avildsen) in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Mr Miyagi is the elderly Japanese neighbour of Danny LaRusso, who asks him to teach him karate so he can protect himself from the bullies at his new school. Miyagi sets Danny chores which are revealed to have taught him some basic movements essential to karate.
  • We’ve not yet nailed down which kung fu movie with the famous moving shot Liz is thinking about; suffice to say it’s not called The Tenth Dojo. If you know the one, please get in touch!
  • If you want to get a handle on the history of martial arts films, The Conversation recently published a great article by Joyleen Christensen: “From Bruce Lee to Shang-Chi: a short history of the Kung Fu film in cinema”.
  • Speaking of kung fu cinema, one of the many things that inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars was the Master-Apprentice relationship in such films. Thus Jedi ideally begin training at a young age, and when they reach the rank of “Padawan” they are apprenticed to a Jedi Master, travelling with them and learning from them until the Jedi Council deems them worthy of the rank of Jedi Knight, at which point they have finished their apprenticeship.
  • The previous joke about people thinking wisdom has to come from far away appears in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12), where Magrat is reading The Path of the Scorpion, a book of which she is suspicious partly because the author – “Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler” – has an address in Ankh-Morpork. (The author is clearly CMOT Dibbler, leading us to wonder why the name “Lobsang” is apparently well-known on the Disc – and why Newgate Ludd ends up with it…) The full quote of the joke appears below (though see also the following note):

It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.*

Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)
  • Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite appears in Moving Pictures, where she is a “little old lady” seamstress in Ankh-Morpork who becomes a costume designer in Holy Wood for Century of the Fruitbat Moving Pictures. She is also mentioned in the footnote to the quote above from Witches Abroad, which contains the first appearance of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, in which monks travel from the Hub mountains to hear her wisdom, though they can’t understand her. It would seem Lu-Tze was the first of these monks, since by the time others come to visit her she is hitting them with a broom and telling them to push off, rather than taking them in as lodgers. Her address is consistently given in all the books as 3 Quirm Street, an unusually specific bit of continuity that leads us to wonder if she is an obscure reference of some sort? (Despite that attention to detail, her surname is spelt “Cosmopolite” in all the books except Thief of Time, where its spelt “Cosmopilite”; the reasons for this are a mystery.)
  • Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time”, and thus experiences his life somewhat out of order. We previously discussed it in #Pratchat26. A film adaptation was made in 1972; Vonnegut was very happy with it.
  • Monstrous Regiment is the thirty-first Discworld novel, published in 2003. We’ll cover it in a future episode, but listener Steavie urged Guest Ben (and the rest of us) to listen to Pratchett’s interview for the Wheeler Centre in 2014 (now available only YouTube), which we previously linked to in #Pratchat26 when the interviewer, Michael Williams, was our guest. Pratchett talks (from around the 31:30 mark) about researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”. (In The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Marc Burrows identifies this research as taking place in “queer-focussed bookshops”, though no specific ones are named.) This seems a pretty good indication that he knew what he was writing, at least on some level.
  • The gay character in Unseen Academicals, Pepe the dwarf fashion designer, was quite definitely intended by Pratchett to be gay; in the same 2014 interview linked above, Pratchett describes Pepe being “as gay as a tree full of monkeys”. (The question and answer where he says this starts at around 16m30s.)
  • Of course there’s no way for us to know if Pratchett had many out gay friends, but he certainly met a great number of queer and trans fans, many of whom have shared stories via social media that show him to have been kind and empathetic towards them.
  • Many of the stories from the note above were reported in response to the “gender critical” incident, which we won’t give too much oxygen. (If you need some background on what “trans” means, guest Fury gives a little 101 in #Pratchat29.) The short version is that a couple of vocal anti-trans commentators, angry that Maragret Atwood had identified herself as a trans ally, got fed up with Neil Gaiman also being clearly pro-trans. So they suggested on Twitter that Terry Pratchett was more “acquainted with reality” than Gaiman and that the Witches books showed Pratchett knew “what female is and means in the world”. Twitter’s considerable number of Terry fans – including his daughter Rhianna – of course found this absurd, given the way he writes about gender roles in books like Equal Rites, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant and Monstrous Regiment. That didn’t stop commentators claiming that we “couldn’t know” what he thinks as he wasn’t around to ask…though we reckon his closest friends and family might have a pretty good idea?
  • The idea of consensual reality is that the universe conforms to people’s beliefs. Wikiality is sort of the opposite idea – that people have a common idea of what’s true that might not align with objective reality. The word was coined by Stephen Colbert on the July 6, 2006 episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report; his right-wing persona, in his “The Wørd” segment, praised Wikipedia for being editable, meaning that it could be changed to reflect “truthiness”, Colbert’s parody of terms used by conservative politicians to deny facts they found inconvenient. He defined the word “wikiality” to mean “truth by consensus”, and encouraged his viewers to edit Wikipedia to change “facts”, making people believe things that weren’t true. This resulted in a whole thing where people edited multiple articles on Wikipedia to suggest the world’s elephant population had tripled…
  • We’ve previously mentioned alt.fan.pratchett, the newsgroup from the 1990s where Pratchett occasionally answered fan questions; see the notes for #Pratchat42 for more information.
  • Listener Vlad pointed out to us that there is indeed an aviator on the Discworld – Hamish, of the Nac Mac Feegle, is referred to as “Hamish the aviator” by Tiffany in Chapter 7 of The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32). While Tiffany presumably learned the word from her cover-to-cover read of the dictionary, in our Ben’s defence, it’s a bit weird that it’s in the dictionary if it’s a term invented by or for the Feegles – though as it comes from the same root word as “Avian”, it certainly makes sense for Hamish to use it, since he does his flying on birds! (We’ve since realised that this also applies to Corporal Buggy Swires, gnome recruit in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, who rides a heron in Night Watch.) All that said, in the same chapter Tiffany tells Hamish about a paratrooper toy she had as a younger child, so perhaps we just have to accept that things which were singular oddities before powered flight on Roundworld have somehow gained enough notice to become talked of frequently and affect language on the Disc…
  • Despite it being generally believed that he did, Terry did not cover nuclear reactors as a journalist; a case of wikiality in action! As Marc Burrows clarifies in his biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Terry quit journalism in 1979 (before he sold his first big novel) and took a job – mostly for the money – in public relations, specifically for the South-West office of the Central Electricity Generating Board (or CEGB). The job wasn’t meant to revolve around nuclear power, but the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US – causing the evacuation of 140,000 people – happened three weeks before he started, and the region covered by his office of the CEGB included three of Britain’s nuclear power plants. So of course he spent most of his time responding to public and media fears of meltdowns.
  • Lifetimers, mentioned only in passing in this book, are the hourglass-like devices which Death uses to determine when people on the Disc will die. Everyone has one, even the gods and – in Reaper Man at least – Death himself. While Death doesn’t always seem to need one – they’re not often referred to in his cameos to collect souls – Mort is taught to take with him the lifetimers of those he needs to visit in Mort, so our speculation that they’re required might be correct. (Death clearly has somewhere in his robe where he can hide them…)
  • Q – with the help of his department, Q Branch – is the boffin responsible for James Bond’s famous gadgets, like the car that could turn into a submarine, various watches with electromagnets, lasers and knockout gas, and a tiny rocket launcher disguised as a cigarette (no really) – plus of course dozens of different things that could explode. The character’s codename is short for “Quartermaster”, a military term which in the army refers to a senior soldier in charge of equipment and supplies. Q is mentioned but never appears in the original novels; the closest equivalent is Major Boothroyd, an armourer who appears in Dr. No, the sixth novel. Desmond Llewellyn appeared as Boothroyd in the film version of Dr. No, and the producers decided to keep him on as Q in subsequent films, merging the two characters together (or at least making audiences think they’re the same person). Llewellyn’s Q appears in seventeen of the Bond films, in scenes where he would show off gadgets to Bond and often have to remark “Oh do pay attention, 007”. He announced his plans to retire in 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which also introduced his assistant “R”, played by John Cleese, who took over as Q in the following film, 2002’s Die Another Day. The Daniel Craig Bond films feature a new younger Q, played by Ben Wishaw, who appears in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
  • Desmond Llewellyn died in a car accident in December 1999, a few weeks after the release of The World is Not Enough, while on his way to a book signing. Thief of Time was published about eighteen months later, in May 2001, so Pratchett may have started writing it while Llewellyn was still alive. Terry’s quote on the matter from the Annotated Pratchett File is: “As I wrote it I could [hear Llewellyn’s voice], too. Qu will be back — unlike, alas, Desmond Llewellyn.” (Qu did come back, in Night Watch.)
  • The boffin with the exploding gadgets in Night Terrace – the time travel radio comedy co-produced, co-written and co-starring Ben – is Horatio Gray (played by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen). He appears primarily in the second season episode “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”, and is the creation of Night Terrace co-creator Lee Zachariah. (You can find out more about the show at nightterrace.com.)
  • Guest Ben’s summary of the theory of relativity is pretty much spot on: special relativity was Einstein’s explanation for the speed of light, which had been observed in experiments to always be the same, even under conditions where you’d expect it to be different. The theory tells us that time and distance are not fixed, but are relative, in the same way we already though of motion as being relative. “History” – in this case, our personal perception of time – has to “give” to keep the speed of light constant in those circumstances. (General relativity, which came later, explained how special relativity interacted with gravity by combining space and time into a single set of dimensions we now know as “spacetime”. It describes gravity as a curving of spacetime near massive objects.) Of note is that the idea of time and distance being relative had already been worked out mathematically by Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, ten years before Einstein, but he thought this was an abstract mathematical model, not a description of the way the physical universe worked. (This is why the equations involved in translating time and location information between frames of reference – between you on the surface of the Earth and a satellite in orbit, for example – are called Lorentz transformations.)
  • We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s love of videogames in #Pratchat28 (about Only You Can Save Mankind) and #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum, which includes a pretty blatant reference to Tomb Raider). Of note: he was a big fan of roleplaying games too; his special favourite for a long time was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, largely because of the modding community of fans who create “mods” (modifications) that add in extra stuff, like being able to make a living from crafting, more realistic weather, even rainbows. You can read an out-take from a radio interview where he talked about this stuff on The Author Hour in 2009.
  • “Man not of woman born” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Lord Macbeth is given a prophecy by three witches that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”. It later turns out that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” – i.e. born via Caesarean section – which apparently doesn’t count as being “of woman born”. Bit of a long bow, if you ask us. Probably a closer analogue to what we were talking about was the prophecy in The Lord of the Rings, in which it is said of the mighty Witch-king, the Lord of the Nazgūl (the Ring-wraiths who serve Sauron), that “not by the hand of man shall he fall”. He ends up being killed instead by Merry (a hobbit) and Éowyn (a woman) at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. (This is the big fight between orcs and men at the city of Minas Tirith; it appears in the third book and film, The Return of the King.)
  • Reservoir Dogs (1992) was the first feature film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. In the film, six men participating in a bank heist refer to each other only by the pseudonyms Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink. In the scene where they get their aliases, they argue about the allocation of names, which are given out by the organiser. (Content warning for the clip: it’s not gentle language, and the crims are casually homophobic.)
  • Guest Ben talks about Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, likening the incarnated Auditors to monsters from his era (perhaps the Whispermen from The Name of the Doctor), and the time in the museum to the the end of Matt Smith’s first season – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.
  • Was Pratchett a Doctor Who fan? Not really…though he did enjoy the show. Writing for SFX magazine in 2010, he complained that it “breaks most of the laws of narrative”, and he derided the modern show as being powered by “makeitupasyougoalongeum”, a sentiment he repeated when writing the introduction to Behind the Sofa, a 2012 collection of celebrity reminiscences about the program published to raise money for Alzheimers research. (It was updated and expanded in 2013.) He did confess, in the SFX article, that despite his misgivings he continued to watch: “After all, when you’ve had your moan you have to admit that it is very, very entertaining, with its heart in the right place, even if its head is often in orbit around Jupiter.” (You can find some excerpts from the SFX article in this piece at The Guardian; Behind the Sofa is still available as an eBook.)
  • Both Death and the Doctor having a granddaughter named Susan is likely a deliberate decision on Pratchett’s part, given that in the introduction to Behind the Sofa (see above) he starts by saying “I was there in the beginning,” and refers to “that strange grandchild and rare teachers who took everything in their stride”. This is Susan, and her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the first humans to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS.
  • The Horsemen of Good Omens are much more closely based on the Biblical account, inasmuch as that’s possible – Revelations doesn’t actually have that much to say about them, beyond the signature items that identify each of them, and the colours of their horses. Notably in these global pandemic times, the Pestilence of Good Omens quit the position in 1936, “muttering about penicillin”, though in the same paragraph his successor Pollution seems to think that was premature: “If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…” (For more on all this, see #Pratchat15.)
  • The Horsemen of the Apocralypse previously rode out – or at least tried to – in Sourcery, when the magic unleashed by Coin, the Disc’s first sourcerer in millennia, released the ice giants from their prison and they rode towards Dunmanifestin to end the world, in a cataclysm more inspired by Norse mythology than the Bible. On that occasion, a certain amateur hairdresser, her barbarian sidekick, and the Seriph of Al Khali stole War, Pestilence and Famine’s horses, rather putting the kibosh on the whole thing. (See #Pratchat3 for more on Sourcery.)
  • There are still many thousands of deaths in hospitals caused by lack of hand washing. As recently as 2018 the World Health Organisation put the figure at up to 30,000 women and 400,000 babies every year from preventable infections, such as puerperal sepsis, though those numbers also include deaths due to lack of sanitation or clean water. It’s easy to forget that in the majority world (i.e. most of it outside the relatively affluent nations in places like North America, Western Europe and Oceania), those things aren’t guaranteed even in hospital facilities, and even health workers without consistent access to clean water and soap need to work at getting into the habit. Cleanliness in general was championed by many before the germ model of disease was accepted, including Florence Nightingale, though she apparently fudged her stats to push her case. The generally accepted pioneer of hand-washing in particular, though, was Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 briefly convinced doctors working with pregnant women to wash their hands after conducting autopsies. It didn’t last…and his story has a sad ending. But you can learn more about the history of hand washing via this episode of NPR’s Short Wave podcast.
  • When our Ben mentions Dirk Gently, he is referring to the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ novels Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Dirk claims to solve mysteries via the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, one manifestation of which is that when he doesn’t know where to go, he follows someone who looks like they know where they’re going. Through this method he claims that, while he might not end up where he wanted to go, he frequently ended up somewhere he needed to be.
  • 100 Story Building is a creative writing centre for young people based in Footscray in Melbourne. Ben has been one of their workshop facilitators since 2016. They primarily work with schools; you can find out more at 100storybuilding.org.au.
  • The Matrix: Resurrections is the upcoming 2021 sequel to the original Matrix trilogy, written and directed by half of the original Matrix creative duo, Lana Wachowski, with Lily’s blessing. In the first teaser trailer, there’s a shot of Keanu Reeves in the bath with a rubber duck on his head – and dedicated listener A’Tuin Sneezed beat our Ben to the punch with this tweet:
  • When Liz says “For Star Wars reasons we’re sending you to different places”, she’s referring to the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in which twins Luke and Leia are sent into “hiding” from their father, Darth Vader. We used scare quotes there because they send Luke to Tattooine (his father’s home planet) to be cared for by his Uncle and Aunt through marriage (on his mother’s side), and Leia to Alderaan, where she’s adopted by Bail Organa, a galactic Senator (and secret Rebellion leader) well-known to Vader’s master, the Emperor. I mean…where else would you send them? Somewhere with no connection to the people trying to protect them, or their actual parents?
  • There are several “fifth Beatles”, but the best known is drummer Pete Best. He was indeed the fifth member of the band then called “The Silver Beatles” (though there had been others in John’s previous band, The Quarrymen). Pete joined John, Paul, George and Stuart (Sutcliffe), four guitarists in need of a drummer, in 1960. After Sutcliffe left, Best remained with the group until he was fired and replaced by Ringo Starr (whom, we’d like to point out, is never referred to as “the sixth Beatle”, which seems a little unfair). We previously talked about Pete in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”. Ronnie Soak, having left under his own steam over “creative differences”, seems to have had the better treatment.
  • The fifth horseman doesn’t appear in a previous footnote, but there are a number of other groups of “four horsemen” of lesser disasters listed in Interesting Times, and Good Omens features “the Other Horsemen” – a bunch of bikies who ride out with the real four, arguing with each other over what their names should be.
  • There are many angels in the book of Revelations of the Christian Bible, though the one most resembling the angel mentioned in Thief of Time is probably the one from chapter 10, in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets. This angel appears to John of Patmos carrying “a little scroll”, and cries out with a lion’s roar; in response, seven thunders utter mysteries to John which he is not allowed to write down (and given what he is allowed to write down, must be pretty wild). The angel then gives the scroll to John and has him eat it, leading to a further vision in chapter 11 before the final trumpet sounds. Note that this is well after the four horsemen, who are introduced upon the opening of the first four of the seven seals, which is before the first trumpet. Revelations is a lot.
  • We’ve previously talked about the cosmic battle of Law versus Chaos in the work of Michael Moorcock in #Pratchat14, #Pratchat29, #Pratchat44 and #Pratchat45. While we don’t know if Pratchett ever corresponded with Moorcock, Moorcock was the editor who published Pratchett’s first professionally published story. See the notes for #Pratchat45 for more info.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, alignment is a declaration of where a character stands in the opposition of the forces of good and evil, and law and chaos. It was much more significant and restrictive in older editions, where it was expected to dictate (or at least match) your character’s behaviour, and where magic could detect what your alignment was: Paladins – holy warriors who had to be on the side of lawful good to be granted their powers – could cast detect evil and determine straight up if someone was evil or not. In modern editions, it’s been described more as a guideline for actions, and the ability to detect alignments has been removed from the game; for example the equivalent spell is now detect evil and good, and it detects only beings that are intrinsically linked to forces of positive and negative energy, like angels, demons and the undead.
  • The Thunderdome – clear inspiration for the Iron Dome dojo in Oi Dong – is the gladiatorial arena featured in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985, dir. George Miller). It is used in the post-apocalyptic settlement of Bartertown to settle disagreements via a battle to the death – “two men enter, one man leaves”, as the crowd chants.
  • Albert is Death’s manservant, a major character in Mort and Hogfather, and a supporting character in Reaper Man and Soul Music, but who is mentioned exactly once in this book. Following the events of Soul Music, Albert has very little real life left to him, so while it’s not surprising he doesn’t take part in Thief of Time, it’s weird not to at least see him briefly in the opening scenes set in Death’s Domain.
  • Ysabell is Susan’s mother, a sixteen-year-old girl rescued and adopted by Death for reasons that are never fully explained. She appears in Mort, and briefly – during scenes set in the past – Soul Music.
  • The other characters we mention towards the end of the podcast are:
    • Angua von Überwald, werewolf member of the watch introduced in Men at Arms (#Pratchat1) and a major supporting character in most subsequent Watch books, especially The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40);
    • Agnes Nitt, a younger witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (#Pratchat17) but is a major character in Maskerade (#Pratchat23) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36); and
    • Adorabelle Dearheart, who runs the Golem Trust in Ankh-Morpork, a major character in the Moist von Lipwig books starting with Going Postal (#Pratchat38).
  • The concept of “substition” also appears in Jingo (see #Pratchat27). Pratchett writes of 71-Hour Ahmed: “He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless were untrue. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.” Rather appropriately for Thief of Time, among the examples of substitions he gives in Jingo is “It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it”.
  • The Doctor’s “pull the trigger, end my life” speech to the sniper occurs in part 2 of the 1988 story The Happiness Patrol. You can find the scene on YouTube.
  • In The Matrix films, “the machines” have enslaved humanity in a simulated reality – a 1999 megacity which forms the titular Matrix. Agents are the machines’ troubleshooting programs which hunt down humans who are resisting the Matrix program; they look like men in black and are stronger and faster than humans. Agent Smith is the main antagonist of the first film; during the sequels he becomes a virus-like entity who threatens to destroy the Matrix itself, something neither machines or humans want. The films also feature other “rogue programs”, intelligent bits of software who escape the machines’ mainframe and live in the Matrix, where they take on the forms of humans or human-like creatures.
  • You can find out more about the OverLondon Project (not to be confused with London Above, London Below or Fallen London) at overlondon.net.
  • The software toy Mountain was developed by Irish artist David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions, the games company founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Monkey Island fame. Originally released in 2014, it received a major 2.0 update in 2018 (at no additional cost). It’s still available on Steam (for Windows and Mac) and for smartphones and tablets. (This discussion has prompted our Ben to reinstall it and have another play with it; while working on these notes, a brain and a bomb embedded themselves in the side of his mountain! Let us know if you check it out too.) The 2017 follow up was Everything, which simulates an entire universe – a bit like Roundworld Project!
  • The main staff of The Ankh-Morpork Times are William de Word, Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto von Schriek, all introduced in The Truth (#Pratchat42). Sacharissa and Otto especially appear in cameo roles in several later books.
  • Pteppic is the protagonist of Pyramids (see #Pratchat5).
  • The 2019 TV show Pennyworth tells the story of how ex-British special forces officer Alfred Pennyworth ends up working for the wealthy Wayne family in America, and is set in an alternate universe in which the Nazis won World War II. (Sigh…there are other alternate universes, right?) Two seasons have been made for the US cable channel ePix, and there’s talk of a third, perhaps for HBO Max. Reports are that it’s…okay, actually?
  • The fates of Greek mythology are the Moirai, last mentioned in #Pratchat36. The version in which they number three is best known; those three are Clotho (spinner in ancient Greek), who spins new threads; Lachesis (alotter), who measures the threads; and Atropos (inevitable), who cuts the threads. Our Ben’s idea of a recycler might be named Nostos, which is Ancient Greek for “returner”.
  • While the cat doesn’t appear in the Chinese “zodiac”, it does appear as the fourth sign in the Vietnamese equivalent, replacing the Chinese rabbit. There are multiple versions of the story Liz mentions; several involve Cat being tricked by Rat, or even Rat just not waking Cat up as requested, explaining their modern day relationship.

#PratchatNALC Notes and Errata

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These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “Twice as Alive“, revisiting #Pratchat1 and the 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms.

  • The episode title is a reference to the teaser at the start of #Pratchat1, in which both guest Cal Wilson and Liz declared that they didn’t think of werewolves as undead, but rather “twice as alive”.
  • The Lost Con was intended “as an 8 hour taster for the non-virtual convention in Sydney next year” – the Australian Discworld convention, Nullus Anxietas 7a (NA7a). The Lost Con was free to all members of the 2022 convention, whether full or supporting, and ran from 4 PM to midnight on Saturday, July 3rd – the original weekend planned for NA7a, which was last year postponed from 2021 to 2022. The move was prudent – Sydney is currently experiencing a serious outbreak of the Delta strain of COVID-19 and has been in lockdown since 26 June, with several stages of local restrictions imposed before that. This is the first major lockdown experienced by Sydney since the nation-wide lockdown in early 2020. From your hosts in Melbourne – we really hope you can get out of it faster than we did last year. Our thoughts are with you all.
  • The theme of Nullus Anxietas 7a will be “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousand Surprises”. (The theme of NA7 was “Going Postal”.)
  • We discussed the vote for the first book preview episode in #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and in Liz’s blog post “Let’s Start From The Very Beginning (but not actually)“.
  • #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, was released on the 7Ath of November, 2017 – three years and eight months ago in real time, or 237 years ago in COVID time, at release of this podcast.
  • Members of The Lost Con Zoom chat were split over whose pronunciations they preferred. The folks from Discworld Monthly informed us that according to Stephen Briggs, there were definitely disagreements over pronunciation for the audiobooks. You can find his guides for some pronunciation in the front of some of his play adaptations; for example in Jingo he specifies that Angua’s name should be pronounced with a hard “g”, but either “Angwa” or “Ang-you-ah” is listed as acceptable.
  • One of the perils of not actually having time to re-read the book (or even re-listen to the entire previous episode) is that we forget little details. Like the fact that Carrot does indeed pick up the gonne, and after a brief look smashes it against a wall, destroying it. As he says when Vimes warns him not to touch it: “Why not? It’s only a device.” Of note: he leaves the broken bits in the clocktower of the Assassin’s Guild.
  • The western roleplaying videogame with the spittoons that Ben mentions is West of Loathing, a spin-off from the online game Kingdom of Loathing.
  • You can read more about the Yarra river in the episode notes for #Pratchat1.
  • Liz’s Detritus pun, which Ben didn’t pick up on at the time, was “inflammation of the d’être“, as in raison d’être, a French term meaning “reason to be”. It’s commonly used by English speakers as an alternate way of referring to something so important if gives them a reason to be alive. Note that in French it’s not really pronounced in such a way that makes the pun work, but English speakers often say it that way.
  • Detritus’ brain-cooling helmet makes later appearances in Jingo (where it breaks down trying to keep his brain cool in the desert) and The Truth, where he switches it on in order to think clearly about how to deal with William de Worde asking journalistic questions.
  • The two-player roleplaying game Ben is discussing is Tin Star Games’ Partners, released in digital form in 2021 following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
  • We discussed Feet of Clay in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“, released in October 2019.
  • We discussed Jingo in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, released in January 2020.
  • Hitchcock and Scully are the two rusted-on detectives who serve in the 99th precinct of the New York Police Department on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, portrayed by Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller respectively. They are notoriously incompetent, unhealthy and lazy, concerned primarily with snacks and other food. Originally supporting characters, they became a staple of the show and feature in the opening credits as of season six, the second episode of which (titled “Hitchcock & Scully”) explored their backstory as hotshot detectives in the 1980s.
  • The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Vol. 2 was published on the 29th of October, 2020, collecting material from the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999, the Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001, the Discworld (Reformed) Vampyres’ Diary 2003 and Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008. Ben is right that the City Watch diary, published in September 1998, came out after Jingo (November 1997) and before The Fifth Elephant (November 1999).
  • We discussed The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, released in February 2021.
  • Asimov is one of Liz’s cats, who along with her other cat Huxley and Ben’s cat Kaos are collectively known as the “Pratcats”. Huxley and Kaos are relative newcomers, but Asimov has been around since the beginning; as well as hearing his bell jingling in the background of many episodes, he was featured as a guest on #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • The cult in Guards! Guards! are the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night (not to be mistaken for the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee). We discussed their similarity with incels and other “alt-right” groups in #Pratchat7A (see the next point).
  • We discussed Guards! Guards! in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, released in June 2018 and The Truth in #Pratchat42, “The Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, released in April 2021. The other book in which there’s a plot to dispose Vetinari is Feet of Clay, which as mentioned above was discussed in #Pratchat24.
  • As per the excerpt from #Pratchat1, our original suggestion was that Vetinari become a vampire, but we have previously discussed the idea of a zombie Vetinari…though we’re not entirely sure when! Possibly it was in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, which is also where we first discussed the possibility of Moist Von Lipwig being groomed as the next Patrician (as suggested by listener Luke Jimenez).
  • The “critical Black Mass” joke in The Light Fantastic, as discussed in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, refers to a collection of “books that leak magic”.
  • Ben and Liz both discuss their Pratchett origin stories in #Pratchat9, “And the Winner is…“. Liz realised her first was not in fact The Fifth Elephant just after recording #Pratchat7A, as discussed near the start of #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“.
  • We discussed the Johnny Maxwell books in 2020: Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, released in February; Johnny and the Dead in Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“, released in August; and Johnny and the Bomb in Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“, released in November.
  • Early versions of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” go back to as early as 1913, in press releases in various American magazines from a lobby group aligned with gun manufacturer Colt. These were designed to counter growing public concern about the availability of cheap mass-produced firearms, especially pistols, and the resulting escalation in deaths by shooting, which even back then were leading to calls for more regulation and control of guns. While earlier versions included things like “it’s not the gun, it’s the man behind the gun”, the current version is the most recognisable, and seems to have first arisen in the 1950s or 1960s. It’s nonsense, of course; no-one ever suggested that a gun could kill someone on its own. The point of the phrase is to make guns themselves seem neutral, neither good nor evil, but also to paint the perpetrators of gun deaths as obsessed murderers: killers who will use any means necessary, whether they have a gun or not. This ignores the fact that guns are deadlier than other weapons, and indeed the fact that guns even are weapons, i.e. devices designed only to harm living creatures. If you want to know more, the phrase is also the title of a very useful 2016 book on the subject: “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” and Other Myths About Guns and Gun Control, by Dennis A. Henigan.
  • The gonne influences Vimes by telling him that All that you hate, all that is wrong, I can put right, and Vimes finds it difficult to resist. He also remembers it pulling its trigger by itself, dragging his finger along with it, and only ends up putting it down and not shooting the villain because Carrot orders him to attention.

#PratchatNALC – Twice as Alive

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With the ei- the twice-fourth Australian Discworld Convention postponed until next year, Liz and Ben fired up their crystal balls to project themselves live for the one-day online event, Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con! In this special one-hour mini-episode, we revisit the very first Terry Pratchett book discussed on the podcast: the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms!

You can of course listen to #Pratchat1 again if you like, though we’ve included a few important excerpts in this revisit episode. As well as discussing the book in the light of everything we’ve read (and everything that’s happened) since, we reminisce about figuring out how the podcast would work, and answer some questions posed by the live online audience. Has your opinion of Carrot/Angua changed over time? Is Cuddy’s death still too upsetting to think about? What other names and Discworld-specific words are we pronouncing wrong? We’d love to know! (Except maybe that last one.) Use the hashtag #PratchatNALC on social media to join the conversation.

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Intrigued by the idea of a Discworld fan convention? You should be! Old-school fan conventions are few and far between, and we’d love you to support one of the few left in Australia. Find out more about Nullus Anxietas, the Australian Discworld Convention, and get a convention membership (attending or supporting) at ausdwcon.org. You can also follow Nullus Anxietas on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Huge thanks to everyone who attended the convention, those who listened to us live and asked questions, and to the other panelists – there were some amazing discussions and great fun to be had by all! Especially big thanks once again to the massive team of hard-working volunteers and committee members at Nullus Anxietas, especially “the Man with the Vote”, Steve Lewis, and question wrangler Danny Sag. While Nullus Anxietas 7A was sadly cancelled in the end, the Australian Discworld Convention returns to life in 2024 with Nullus Anxietas IX: Come ALIVE in Überwald! in Adelaide. We hope to see you there.

This is the closest thing we’ve done to a live show since our appearance at the last Nullus Anxietas convention, but the online format seemed to work pretty well. We’ll look into the possibility of doing our more online live events in future – let us know if that’s something you’d like to see!

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2nd Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic.

Iconographic Evidence

You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

The ridiculous fight between Xander and cheerleader-turned-vampire Harmony, occurs in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer‘s fourth season, in the seventh episode “The Initiative”. But you can see it on YouTube:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is references Joel’s comments that this book is the “primordial soup” of the Discworld books yet to come, the analogy of the “cosmic ocean” put forward by Carl Sagan in his book and television series Cosmos, and of course Great A’Tuin the World Turtle himself.
  • The term “hat-trick” does indeed originate with cricket, where it means taking three wickets (i.e. getting the batter out) on three consecutive deliveries (i.e. a single bowl of the ball). It has since spread to other sports and to mean more generally three successful attempts in a row. (In football, it specifically refers to a player scoring three goals in one game.) The term dates back to 1858, when English cricketer Heathfield Harman Stephenson performed the first recorded hat-trick; fans collected up money for him and used it to buy a hat, which they presented to him to commemorate the achievement. While this story seems well-documented, if Helen Zaltzman (see below) has taught Ben anything, it’s to be suspicious of neat etymological explanations…
  • The custom of throwing hats in the air to celebrate a victory or achievement is said by multiple sources to be a military tradition: cadets graduating to officer status would be given new hats, or at least no longer need to wear their old cadet ones, and they would symbolically throw them away. At least one story says this started specifically at the US Naval Academy with the class of 1912.
  • Helen Zaltzman is a comedian, writer and podcaster best known for the long-running comedy podcast Answer Me This? with fellow comedian Olly Mann, and her more recent show, The Allusionist, which explores language in as many different ways as possible. The Allusionist started out as part of the Radiotopia Network, but went fully independent in 2020 as part of Helen putting her money where her mouth was in backing diversity and inclusion in podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting The Allusionist via Patreon. Oh, and we nearly forgot: Helen also makes a Veronica Mars recap podcast called Veronica Mars Investigations! Helen is the best.
  • “Commitment to the bit“, or “commit to the bit“, is a common phrase in comedy circles. It means to stick with a joke or comic premise all the way to the end, rather than shy away from it because it it doesn’t immediately work, or is impractical or uncomfortable. It’s obviously not always a good tactic, as seen recently during Eurovision 2021. Iceland employed actor Hannes Óli Ágústsson to relay their jury’s points in character as Olaf Yohansson from the comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Olaf’s whole shtick is that he only likes one song, “Ja Ja Ding Dong”, which he awkwardly and angrily demands at every opportunity. At the contest, he tried to give Iceland’s 12 points to the song – twice. Few things are as hated at Eurovision as a country’s jury announcer talking too long before delivering the points, so this over-commitment to the bit did not go down well.
  • The Colour of Magic was first published on the 24th of November, 1983 (one day after the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who!), and so its 35th anniversary was two weeks before #Pratchat14, published on December 8, 2018. It originally had cover art of Great A’Tuin swimming through space painted by Alan Smith; the Josh Kirby art first appeared on the first UK paperback edition, published in March 1985. The Light Fantastic was first published on the 2nd of June, 1986, so we’re a bit closer to the anniversary this time around!
  • Liz’s “double book” is the combined edition of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic published in 2008, to tie in with The Mob’s two-part television adaptation The Colour of Magic, which also combined both books. They had previously been collected as a single volume in 1999 as The First Discworld Novels.
  • Liz’s annoyance with the “cosmic turtle business” at the start of many of the earlier Discworld books is well documented in many previous episodes.
  • In The Colour of Magic, Krull’s spaceship the Potent Voyager is only vaguely described as being made of bronze and looking “like a great flying fish”. The graphic novel depicts it as fish shaped, but without the wing-fins of a flying fish.
  • The Rocket Clock is one of the clocks used by the Australian version of Playschool to help tell the time in the 1980s. (The other famous one is the Flower Clock.) As you might expect, it resembles a space rocket, with a clock on the top section, and a bottom section which rotates to reveal a small diorama connected to a theme explored in that episode. The original version of the clock, used from 1966 to at least the 1980s, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
  • Mr Squiggle was a long-running Australian children’s program starring puppet character Mr Squiggle, “the Man in the Moon”. It ran for forty years between 1959 and 1999. Mr Squiggle, who would arrive in “Rocket“, his smoke-belching impatient rocket ship, had a pencil for a nose. He would use it to turn “squiggles” – scribbles sent in by children – into pictures. Because he was a marionette, puppeteer Norman Heatherington was watching upside down from above, so a lot of his drawings were upside down. This led to him having to tell his assistant, who was holding the puppet’s hand to keep him still, that “Everything’s upside down, Miss Jane”. He would later inspire the title of #Pratchat55: “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters whose power is measured in “levels”. As they accumulate experience, they gain levels of power and new abilities. In the current edition all characters can reach up to level 20, with wizards learning more and more powerful spells as they level up. Ben has mentioned Dungeons & Dragons many times, as far back as #Pratchat4; his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” is a good primer for the novice, though note it’s a little sweary.
  • The Necrotelicomnicon is mentioned in several books, including The Colour of Magic, Sourcery and Moving Pictures. It’s a pun on the Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil magic written by the “Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” that appears in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
  • “Vancian magic” is the sort used in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, in which a wizard must study their spell book and memorise a spell, fixing it in their mind, before they can cast it. Once cast, the spell leaves their mind entirely, and they must memorise it anew to cast it again. The name comes from the source that inspired this form of spellcasting, the “Dying Earth” books by American writer Jack Vance.
  • The comic with several different Joker origin stories is probably 2020’s Three Jokers, by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok, which reveals that three of the stories are correct – there have been more than one Joker all along. But he’s had many other origin stories; this article from Screen Rant runs through many of them.
  • In case the pun is lost on you, timber is wood that’s been prepared for building, usually by being sawn into planks. Timbre is the quality of tone of a sound, especially a voice or musical instrument. You can think of it as all the things that distinguish two sounds of the same frequency from each other.
  • The Tooth Fairy – well, one of them at least – plays a major part in Hogfather (#Pratchat24). Buggy Swires is a gnome exterminator living in Ankh-Morpork; he returns in several books, starting with Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24). The pictsies known as the Nac Mac Feegle first appear in Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36).
  • Toadstool houses are the traditional homes of Smurfs, small blue creatures invented in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, about Pratchett’s second tiny people book, Truckers; and in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”, about the book that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle, Carpe Jugulum. (There’s more detail about the Smurfs in the show notes for #Pratchat36.)
  • Lonely Planet is a prominent publisher of travel guides for tourists on a budget. In the pre-smartphone days every backpacker bought a Lonely Planet guide to the country where they were headed, but in recent years – especially since the global pandemic – their business has waned. The company was started in Australia by Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 1972, but was later sold to the BBC and is now owned by Red Media, the company behind CNET, Metacritic and GameSpot, among other prominent online media outlets.
  • Pratchett writes about tiny people many times, including in his first novel The Carpet People, the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and the various tiny denizens of the Discworld, most prominently gnomes and pictsies.
  • While houses made of food or confectionary date back further, the gingerbread cottage appears in the fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel”, collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. “Hansel and Gretel” is the archetypal story of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. Pratchett returns to the idea in the witches books, especially Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4). The witches refer to Aliss Demurrage, aka “Black Aliss”, as a witch who worked some of the greatest magic, but also as a cautionary tale: she built a gingerbread cottage, a sure sign she’d gone to the bad, and by the end was making poisoned apples before she was pushed into her own oven by children she was trying to eat. (Her cottage is also said to be in Skund, leading some Pratchett fans to suggest that Granny Whitlow was an alias she used to lure children.)
  • The Rite of AshkEnte is performed here, and also in Mort (when it summons Mort as well as Death), Reaper Man, and Soul Music (where it summons Susan). Death tends to show up without needing to be asked in later books.
  • We have a play with the famous “you have my sword” sequence from the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn’t appear in the book. (Frodo does say “I will take the Ring to Mordor!” and then “Though I do not know the way” in the book, but Elrond decides who will accompany him after the council is over.) Here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Frodo: I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though… I do not know the way.
Gandalf: I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear.
Aragorn: If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my axe!

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson)
  • You can find Fury’s drawing of the Luggage as Trunkie from The Last Continent in the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • The Last Continent was published twelve years after The Light Fantastic, in 1998, so Liz was pretty close with her guess of ten years.
  • Liz suggests the Luggage might have “a chamber full of pigs?” in reference to the “having your enemies’ corpses eaten by pigs” method of getting away with murder. This features prominently in the television series Deadwood, and also Guy Richie’s film Snatch. You can find a list of uses as the “Fed to Pigs” trope on TV Tropes. Ben also mentions a bath full of (Hollywood style) acid, most famously used by Walter White in Breaking Bad.
  • Pratchett uses the Megalith pun in Lords and Ladies: “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” This is a pun on MegaHertz (MHz), the unit used to measure the clock speed or clock rate of computer processors – in simple terms, how many instructions they execute per second. In the 1980s, home computers used chips like Intel’s 386, which had speeds of between 16 and 40 MHz. While it was used heavily in marketing, clock speed was not a sure measure of computer performance.
  • Pratchett moved to Broad Chalke in Wiltshire in 1993, seven years after The Light Fantastic was published. Before that he lived in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, about 67 kilometres (or about 42 miles) to the northwest. He was never very far from many sites of ancient interest, but Broad Chalke was only a stone’s throw (sorry) from Stonehenge.
  • There are several stone circles better than Stonehenge, depending on who you ask and how you define “better”, but the one at Avebury is about 30km to the north and much, much bigger. Longtime British YouTuber Tom Scott made this video about it.
  • The Small Faint Group of Boring Stars is mentioned again in The Last Continent; the wizards travel quite far back in time, to an age when the stars were much closer and less faint (though possibly just as boring).  
  • The Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán is one of the 52 states of Mexico. There are several theories behind its name, and there are two versions of the “Your Finger You Fool” type: one involves the Mayan phrase Ma’anaatik ka t’ann, or “I do not understand you”, and the other uh yu ka t’ann, or “hear how they talk”. Another involves the casava plant, known locally as yuca (see #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl” for more on this plant) which was cultivated in the area, the name Yucatá meaning “land of yucas”. A third one suggests the name comes from the local Chontal Maya people, who call themselves the Yokot’anob or Yokot’an, meaning “the speakers of Yoko ochoco”.
  • Cohen is not in fact mentioned in The Colour of Magic; this is the first time we meet him.
  • The famous “What is best in life?” dialogue was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, based on the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. The lines in full are below; they don’t appear in Robert E Howard’s stories, but are instead inspired by words attributed to Genghis Khan himself…

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good but what is best in life?
Mongol Soldier: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982, dir. John Milius)
  • The people around the breakfast table in The Truth are Mr Windling and the other lodgers at Mars Arcanum’s guest house, where William de Worde lives. He doesn’t tell them he’s the editor of The Ankh-Morpork Times. (We covered The Truth in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing”.
  • The cover art we’re talking about is the Josh Kirby art for the Corgi edition, still used for the Corgi edition (though the one currently in print uses a zoomed in subset of the image). You can find it on the official Josh Kirby website.
  • The “uncanny valley” describes the discomfort felt at seeing an artificial creature that is very like, but not mistakable for, the real thing. It can apply to anything living but is strongest – and most often used – to refer to the effect produced by androids and computer-generated representations of faces. There are many theories that try and account for why these things creep it out.
  • In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, a pair of creepy twins appear as ghosts. The “Grady twins” are not twins in the book, but sisters aged 8 and 10, and are only mentioned, rather than appearing as ghosts. In the film, they appear to the young psychic Danny Torrance, dressed identically and speaking to him in unison saying “Come and play with us” – now a famous classic line of horror cinema. Though Kubrick denied it was intentional, many have pointed out that the look of the twins in the film resembles the photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by American photographer Diane Arbus.
  • Mort was published in November 1987, so about seventeen months after The Light Fantastic. Liz’s guess of seven months is spot on for the third Discworld book, though – Equal Rites was published in January 1987!
  • It was announced on the 28th of April, 2020 that Narrativia had made an exclusive new deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content to produce “definitive” and “absolutely faithful” Discworld adaptations for the screen. So far no actual productions have been announced, but the Narrativia website now has sections for all of the major Discworld screen projects of the last decade or so. The page about the new Discworld deal still lists only the initial agreement.
  • The extra space in Death’s House is described near the start of Soul Music, when Death watches Albert flit from the edge of his impossibly large office to the edge of the carpet around his desk:

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…

Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)
  • By season three of The Good Place, the humans who are at the centre of the show have been exposed to a lot of the weirdness that exists beyond the mortal, material world. Near the end of the season, an accident in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes” sends Chidi briefly to another realm, and when he returns he describes it like this:

Chidi Anagonye: I… I just saw a trillion different realities folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal forming… a single blade.

Michael: Yeah yeah, the Time-Knife. We’ve all seen it.

The Good Place, season 3 episode 12, “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” (2019)
  • The Untempered Schism is “a gap in the fabric of reality from which can be seen the whole of the Vortex” of space and time. It’s introduced at the end of the third season of the revived Doctor Who in the penultimate episode, “The Sound of Drums”. The Doctor explains that it’s an initiation rite for young Gallifreyans, who at the age of eight must stare into it; according to him, “some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” He says he ran away; the Master instead went mad, constantly hearing “the drumming”, though this is later revealed to be more than it seems.
  • The Doctor Who universe influencer jokes refer to the city of New New York, as introduced in the episode “New Earth”; the “EarPods” used by alternate universe Cybermen to control and convert humans, as seen in the two-part season two story “Rise of the Cyberman”/”The Age of Steel”; and the Adipose, a species of creatures whose cute babies could be incubated in a human body by accumulating fat tissue, under the guise of a diet pill, as seen in the season four opening episode “Partners in Crime”. The idea of influencers in the Whoniverse isn’t a million miles away from the later BBC fiction podcast Doctor Who: Redacted, published in April 2022, which features a gang of podcasters who follow a conspiracy theory about a blue box associated with mysteries throughout human history.
  • Icelandic names are subject to some fairly strict conventions, overseen by the Icelandic Naming Committee. There’s a list of around 4,000 traditional Icelandic names which can be used freely, but new names must be approved by the committee. In addition, by convention Icelandic people take either their father’s or mother’s name as a surname, appended with -son, –dottir or (since 2019) –bur for son, daughter or child, respectively. Episode 87 of The Allusionist podcast, “Name v. Law”, covers some of this in detail, though note it was released in 2018, before the change allowing non-gendered suffixes. The Allusionist returned to Icelandic names in December 2021 for episode 147, the second of the two-part story, “Survival: Today, Tomorrow” about trying to change the Icelandic language.
  • “That bit in The Hobbit” is Chapter II, “Roast Mutton”, when Bilbo is scouting ahead of the company of dwarves and comes upon three trolls named William, Bert and Tom. Bilbo is caught picking a troll’s pocket (Tolkien trolls wear trousers!), and he and the dwarves are caught. Gandalf manages to keep all three trolls arguing with each other, distracting them until the sun comes up and turns them to stone.
  • 5G, short for fifth-generation, is the name given to the newest mobile communications network technology being rolled out around the world. 5G is capable of far greater data transfer speeds than its predecessor 4G, at least at short range. It has been the subject of many conspiracy theories that claim it causes health problems in humans, despite a lack of any evidence that this is true. These theories mutated during 2020 to suggest that 5G caused or spread COVID-19, and they were believed enough that 5G towers in several countries were vandalised.
  • Lackjaw does indeed describe himself as “of the dwarfish persuasion“.
  • The magic shop trope can be traced back as far as H. G. Wells’ stories The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903). TV Tropes lists it as “The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday” and has many other examples. Pratchett revisits it in a more traditional way in Soul Music (discussed by us in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Rocks In”), where Buddy buys his guitar. It’s not the same shop, though – the proprietor is an old woman who seems quite happy with her lot, and she seems to sell only musical instruments.
  • We keep mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle, so it’s probably a good idea for us to do that Diana Wynne Jones episode we keep talking about. Previous episodes where this book have been mentioned include #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30 and #Pratchat43. In a nutshell: Howl is a wizard who lives as a recluse in a castle that not only can move from place to place, but has a magical front door that can open in one of several fixed locations.
  • Cane toads, Rhinella marina, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 for purposes of pest control on sugar cane farms. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, where we recommended in the episode notes the documentaries Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and its sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). You can indeed still get various souvenirs made from dead toads; you can see examples at the website Souvenirs Australia (though it’s not a pretty sight).
  • The “critical Black Mass” pun is not about wizards or gods, but rather books of magic. It comes up in a description of the library as Trymon heads there to bribe the Librarian while the wizards are still speaking to Death.
  • Bethan is not mentioned in Interesting Times. Rincewind does mention in Sourcery that he was a guest at Cohen’s wedding to “a girl of about Conina’s age”, but Bethan isn’t mentioned by name and Rincewind gives no indication that he knows how the marriage went.
  • We looked up Echidna penises for #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“.
  • Rincewind will return in The Last Hero, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgment Day. He’s also a minor character in Unseen Academicals, and mentioned briefly in Raising Steam.
  • Michael Moorcock’s “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy” is less an essay, and more of a book, first published in 1987. An expanded edition, now 206 pages long, was released in 2004.
  • Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game written and designed by John Harper and published in 2015. It’s set in an “industrial-fantasy” world, and players form a company of criminals who try to stake a claim for themselves in the inescapable city of Duskvol, surrounded by horror and haunted by deadly ghosts. Among its distinctive features are a system of retroactively planning heists and packing gear, which gets you into the action quicker. If industrial-fantasy isn’t your thing the system has also been used to make several other games in other genres.
  • Campaign settings are the various fantasy worlds used for Dungeons & Dragons and other games which aren’t tied too much to a specific universe. D&D has a large number of these covering various sub-genres of fantasy, from the post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery of Dark Sun to the gothic horror of Ravenloft. There are too many to list them all, since aside from the dozens of official ones there are many more published independently. (Ben’s favourite is probably Planescape, which both ties together all the others in a weird multiverse, and introduces an interdimensional hub city on the inside of a ring in the theoretical centre of everything.)
  • Mage: The Ascension, first published in 1993, was the third game in the World of Darkness series of modern horror roleplaying games, following Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Mage is also effectively a sequel to the earlier game about medieval wizards, Ars Magicka, but in the modern world the rise of science and rational thought means magic doesn’t work like it used to.
  • Cavaliers of Mars by Rose Bailey is the latest in a fine tradition of games that seek to emulate the “planetary romance” genre of fiction. These were science fiction or fantasy stories from around the turn of the twentieth century in which the fantastic adventures take place on other worlds – either in our own solar system as in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (adapted as the hugely underrated film John Carter), or in other galaxies entirely – for example, James Herbert’s Dune is sometimes classified as a planetary romance.
  • The Old-School Renaissance or Revival – usually abbreviated to OSR – is a movement in roleplaying game communities which prefers the early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and similar games from the 1970s and 1980s. There are now many games that seek to recapture the feel of those games, either by re-implementing the original rules (a genre known as “retro-clones”) or writing games with more modern rules but the old-school philosophy in mind. Exactly what that philosophy is varies according to who you ask, but it usually means a smaller set of rules, and more reliance on both player skill (as opposed to rules which emulate the skill of the characters being played) and rulings by the Game Master (who OSR games often call the referee). Famous examples include Torchbearer, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) and Old-School Essentials. Dungeon World isn’t usually counted as an OSR game, but it has many similarities. (It’s a translation of D&D-like fantasy into the now super popular “Powered by the Apocalypse” framework, created by Meguey & Vincent Baker for their post-apocalyptic RPG Apocalypse World.)
  • The six flavours of quarks are up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom. “Flavour” is the name given to unique combinations of other characteristics like spin and charge; it’s sometimes also called “species”. Quarks form other particles, like neutrons and protons, when three of them are combined in different flavour combinations.
  • The World War II realtime Twitter account is @RealTimeWWII. It tweets “on this day” war events from the years 1939 to 1945, and is currently up to 1943 on its second time around.
  • In Chinese numerology, four – 四 (Anglicised as sì or sei) – is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for “death”, 死 (sǐ or séi). This causes as serious an aversion as Europeans traditionally have to the number thirteen, and just as some might have triskaidekaphobia, in China and other parts of East Asia, tetraphobia is common enough that buildings do not number floors using the digit 4.

#EeekClub2021 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus episode Eeek Club 2021, answering questions from our Eeek tier subscribers.

  • In Ankh-Morpork, the “Glorious 25th of May” is the date of the “Glorious Revolution”, commemorated only by a small number of people who were there. They wear lilac in memory of those who died. It is covered in much detail in Night Watch, which we’ll be reading for our December 2021 episode. On Roundworld, Pratchett fans have adopted the date as a celebration of Discworld and Terry Pratchett, often wearing lilac (the flower or the colour), and sometimes raising money for Alzheimer’s research. May 25th is also Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams, which began two weeks after his death in 2001, and “Geek Pride Day”, which was started in Spain in 2006. That the Ankh-Morpork revolution shares a date with the former may not be a coincidence, since Night Watch was published in 2002.
  • We did indeed start offering subscriptions in January 2019; we announced them in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Our big open slather questions episode was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, released on the 8th of April, 2020.
  • James Spader provides the voice of robot protector-turned-exterminator Ultron in the 2015 Marvel superhero film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • The lockdown-related Discworld questions in #Pratchat30 begin around 1 hour, 5 minutes and 41 seconds in.
  • The first lockdown in Melbourne – and the rest of Australia – began on March 29, 2020. Melbourne had subsequent lockdowns from July 9 to October 26 2020, February 12 to 17 2021, and from May 27 until – at the time of last update – at least June 10, 2021.
  • Dragon King of Arms appears in Feet of Clay, which we discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.
  • We also discussed the difference between vaccination and variolation in the notes for #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben says The Truth, but means The Times, as in The Ankh-Morpork Times, the first newspaper on the Discworld. It features in the novel The Truth, which we discussed in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • The Sto Plains – which occupy the area directly hubwards of Ankh-Morpork, on the opposite side to the Circle Sea – include many city-states, like the kingdom of Sto Lat (ruled by Queen Keli), the Duchy of Sto Helit (as in Duchess Susan Sto Helit), and the protectorate of Sto Kerrig. Sto Lat is probably closest, only about 20 miles from the Hubwards Gate of Ankh-Morpork. Their populations aren’t known, but it seems likely the plains’ residents don’t outnumber the million people who live in Ankh-Morpork. The various kingdoms and smaller towns and cities of the plains are all independent of the city, but most of them use Ankh-Morpork dollars as their currency, and certainly look to Ankh for guidance in matters of culture, technology and commerce.
  • The Trans-Tasman Bubble is the quarantine-free travel arrangement between Australia and New Zealand, countries with similarly low COVID-19 cases, separated by the Tasman Sea. It was announced as a possibility early on in the pandemic, but officially took affect on April 19, 2021. The day this episode was released (May 25, 2021), new cases were announced in Melbourne, leading to the reinstatement of some restrictions and a 72-hour pause on the bubble for travel from Melbourne.
  • “Young Igor” is our affectionate name for the Igor who joins the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in The Fifth Elephant; he is the nephew of the Igor who worked for the Morporkian embassy in Überwald. We last saw him in The Truth, where he was tending to the wounds suffered by the Patrician and his clerk, Drumknott.
  • Rincewind’s age isn’t definite, but a good guess is that he was 32 during the events of The Colour of Magic, and 57 by the time of The Last Hero, so Ben is probably right about him “pushing 60”.
  • Melbourne’s second lockdown lasted 112 days, from July 7 to October 28, 2020. During most of that time, residents were only allowed to leave their homes under very limited conditions, and restricted in how far they could travel from home. It’s probably stretching it a bit to say these were some of the harshest lockdown conditions in the world, but it was reported that way at the time.
  • Liz’s comment about “trips to Aspen” refers to multiple incidents from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when wealthy Australians returning from a skiing holiday in Apsen, Colorado tested positive for the virus but did not self-isolate, causing a cluster of new cases.
  • Though he does walk with a cane, the Patrician is not as old as he seems; clues from various books (primarily Night Watch) place him as somewhere between 50 and 55, but it seems the assassination attempts of Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and The Truth have taken their toll and he’s not as strong as he used to be. Or at least, that’s what he’d like his opponents to think…
  • The Bubonic plague is a disease caused by infection of the lymphatic system with the bacteria Yersinia pestis. Usually a human is infected by a flea bite; several flea species can carry the bacteria, and spread among human populations via rats. The plague is responsible for three major pandemics: the plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed around 25 million people; the Black Death of the 14th century, which may have killed as many as 200 million people in Europe – about a third of the population; and the plague of the mid-19th century, which caused the deaths of around 15 million people in mainland Asia. (For comparison, as of May 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has officially caused 3.6 million deaths, though the estimated total death toll is 7.7 million.) Untreated, Bubonic plague is very deadly, killing half or more of those infected. Thankfully it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, reducing its mortality rate to 15% or much lower. These days cases are very rare, though the disease has not been entirely eradicated.
  • Here are some links to the very excellent The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret head canon Twitter threads:
  • Aunty Donna are an absurdist sketch comedy group based in Melbourne and formed in 2011. Their latest work is the Netflix series Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. You can find out more about them at auntydonna.com.
  • Equal Rites is the third Discworld novel, and the first to feature Granny Weatherwax. It tells the story of Eskarina Smith, a girl based in (large) part on Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, who becomes the Disc’s first female wizard. We discussed it in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. The subject of the gender split in magical society comes back in the later Tiffany Aching books.
  • Ben mentions VCAL, which is the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is a more practical alternative to the standard Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), a qualification which is more likely to lead to a university degree; VCAL is instead intended to prepare students for an apprenticeship, TAFE course or similar directly vocational training.
  • Most of the captains depicted in the numerous Star Trek television series go on “away missions“, i.e. missions in which they leave their ship (or equivalent). This is especially true of Captain James T Kirk of the original Star Trek, though it’s hinted that this practice is frowned upon by the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard’s first officer, Riker, leads most away missions. Mind you, Picard’s contemporary captains Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager) and Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) go on plenty of missions too…
  • Speaking of Star Trek, the episode Ben is thinking of is indeed called “The Measure of a Man“. It’s the ninth episode of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally broadcast in February 1989. It’s frequently cited as one of the show’s early greats, even if the legal proceedings are a bit suspect. The book The Metaphysics of Star Trek, which uses Star Trek scenarios to illustrate various metaphysical concepts, was later republished as Is Data Human?, as one of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of “personhood”.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld back in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Final Death is the term used in the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (and its cousin, Vampire: The Requiem) for the ultimate destruction of a vampire, who is already undead. They are not nearly as impossible to kill as the vampires of the Discworld; see for example our discussion of Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The Sesame Street song about being alive – or at least the one Ben is thinking of – is “You’re Alive“, first broadcast in 1980. It’s not quite how Ben remembered it, but Sesame Street has tackled the topic several times, always using the measures of eating, breathing and growing.
  • Alan Alda, best known for his years playing trauma surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, established the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in 2009. The Flame Challenge launched in 2012, with the aim of answering the question “What is flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old could understand, as judged by actual 11-year-olds – all because Alda himself received an uninspiring answer from his sixth grade teacher when he was eleven. The winner was announced at the World Science Festival, and the competition was successful enough to inspire several more over the next few years. Each answered a new question picked by 11-year-olds, including “What is time?” and “What is colour?” Sadly the websites for the challenge and the Alan Alda Center no longer exist, but you can find the winners on YouTube with a bit of effort.
  • We’ve previously talked about Beauty and the Beast villain Gaston and his fate, perhaps most significantly in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • The Beast’s age can be worked out from two bits of evidence. First, the enchanted rose, which will only bloom “until his 21st year”; this implies he is aging during his curse, and the rose is wilting during the events of the film. Second, Lumiere – the maître d’ of the house, transformed into a candelabra – says that they’ve been waiting for “ten years” since being cursed. Why the curse affected the servants is not clear, but muddying the waters is the portrait Belle finds of the Beast, in which he looks exactly like his 21-year-old self. Regardless of the Beast’s true age, Chip’s birth remains a mystery.
  • The original Beauty and the Beast was written in 1740 by Parisian novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her version is long, detailed and contains and many characters, including Belle being one of twelve children. Most later retellings are based on a greatly pared back version rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and first published in 1756. These originals draw on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and do not include an equivalent of Gaston, who was added in some later versions. Assuming the Disney version happens around the time the oldest stories were written, Liz is right that they would have lived to see the French Revolution in 1789.
  • Anti-racism is is active opposition to racism, and can take many forms. While the idea has gained more visibility in recent years, with books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and renewed momentum behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s certainly not a new idea.
  • The Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness appears in Men at Arms, which we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited Men at Arms in #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“, a live appearance at The Lost Con online event run by the Australian Discworld Convention.
  • Diggers is the second of the three books of the Bromeliad, Pratchett’s trilogy about the diminutive Nomes. We covered Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, Diggers in #Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and Wings in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • We discussed The Long Earth and (briefly) The High Meggas in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
  • Thanks to listener Steve Leahy, who reminded us that there is at least one alien on the Discworld: Tethys, the sea troll, who crash-landed there after falling off his own watery world of Bathys. He appears in The Colour of Magic, which we discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation.” (We discuss the sequel, The Light Fantastic, in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“.)
  • “Literary fiction” is basically a synonym for “high brow”, “serious literature” or “worthy of awards”, and is used to distinguish supposedly more sophisticated and “important” writing from so-called “genre fiction”. As we discuss, it can get in the bin.
  • Ben finally found a source for the story of the student with the Terry Pratchett book who was dismissed by a lecturer, only to turn things around by revealing they’d written a thesis on his work. It was related on Tumblr by the user thebibliosphere in a comment on this post about “people I still want to stab more than a decade later”. We’ve embedded that exchange below.
https://fistinginferno.tumblr.com/post/187226941007/people-i-still-want-to-stab-over-a-decade-later