Ben McKenzie

#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.

#Pratchat51 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, featuring guest Garth Nix, discussing the 2006 Discworld novel Wintersmith.

Iconographic Evidence

Here are some photos of Ben’s office of the time of this episode’s recording, to accompany the visual section about video meeting boffo.

The posters on the mirrored wardrobe behind Ben’s desk
The one-page RPGs on the bookshelf; you can also see the kakapo on the top shelf
The dragon made by Ben’s Mum – with bonus tortoise and Babel fish!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title references not only Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but more specifically Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a long-running Buffy recap and discussion podcast hosted by musician Jenny Owen Youngs and writer Kristin Russo. Each episode of the podcast covers a single episode, and includes an original song about the show; they have a whole album’s worth of new songs dedicated to the Buffy musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling”! (One of several things referenced in the title of #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future”.)
  • As mentioned in the footnote, “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix” was a public appearance by Terry at the Sydney Opera House on 17 April, 2011. As of March 2025, it’s still available as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast; you can find it via Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”
  • The Colour of Magic, Pratchett’s fourth novel, was first published in the UK by Colin Smythe on November the 24th, 1983. As we noted for Richard Watts, our guest in #Pratchat49, who also read it when it was first available, In Australia this was probably in 1985, the year of the first Corgi paperback edition.
  • Pratchett’s first novel, The Carpet People, was first published by Colin Smythe on November 16th, 1971. This was a fairly small print run of 3,000 copies, which is why any that come up for sale routinely go for huge prices. (Garth did well to get a hold of one when it came out!) The later version – rewritten and edited by the older Pratchett – was first published by Corgi on the 30th of June, 1992. The original short stories from 1965 can be found in the collection The Dragons of Crumbling Castle, first published on the 11th of September 2014.
  • The Good Wife and The Good Fight are CBS legal dramas set in Chicago. The Good Wife follows Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her husband, a State’s Attorney, is jailed in a corruption scandal. A major theme of the show is what women are expected to give up to be “good wives” to influential husbands. The Good Wife ran for seven seasons from 2009 to 2016, and was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a sequel and spin-off that follows the character of Diane Lockhart (played by Christine Baranski). A year after the end of the earlier show, Lockhart – a named partner at Alicia’s law firm – is forced out when her life savings are lost in a financial scam that dupes her protege and god-daughter. The pair move to another Chicago law firm, where another former employee of the original firm now works, and take on cases with political and social justice angles. The Good Fight was still running at the time of this episode, but finished after six seasons in 2022.
  • Tiffany is 9 years old in The Wee Free Men – not 6, 7 or 8, as guessed by Garth and Ben. Everyone was wrong! In A Hat Full of Sky she is 11, and as discussed she turns 13 during Wintersmith. By the next book, I Shall Wear Midnight, she is nearly 16 (see #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No-Eyes is Back”).
  • You’ll find most of Liz’s complaints about Wentworth in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”, discussing the first Tiffany book The Wee Free Men. There might also be one or two in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, about A Hat Full of Sky.
  • “This is where you came in” is named “How We Got Here” by trope-listing websites. A famous example of Ben’s phrase for it is in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir mystery Sunset Boulevard.
  • We previously mentioned the film Mean Girls (2004, dir. Mark Waters) in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem”. Written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, it follows new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from an isolated life in Africa to the social jungle of of an American high school.
  • Bilbo Baggins’ age is a plot point in The Lord of the Rings, when he chooses the occasion of his eleventy-first birthday to literally disappear by using the magic ring he stole from Gollum during the events of The Hobbit. It is noted that Bilbo has not aged normally for a hobbit, who usually live for around 100 years – a bit longer than the humans of Middle Earth.
  • One Pratchett interview in which he discusses Tolkien’s influence is his 2006 chat on Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, a production of the Seattle Channel, a community cable channel run by the City of Seattle. Appropriately enough it was during the promotional tour for Wintersmith! You can find the main Tolkien quote in his answer at around the 3:30 mark, which also includes his classic story about how and when he first read the books. An earlier – possibly the original – version of the same thought appears in Pratchett’s 1999 essay “Magic Kingdoms” for the Sunday Times, prompted by the publication of the third Harry Potter novel. It’s collected in A Slip of the Keyboard, and this version has been circulated in image form recently, so we include it here as text:

J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of a mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way Mt Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt Fuji.

Terry Pratchett, “Magic Kingdoms”, 1999
  • Pratchett’s other Tolkien references include a lot of stuff about dwarfs (and indeed the use of the plural “dwarfs”), the Gollum sequence in Witches Abroad, Mustrum Ridcully, aka “Ridcully the Brown” (a very different take on a Brown wizard who is close to nature), and his deliberately non-Tolkienistic takes on elves, orcs and goblins. In several interviews – including the one linked above – he also describes Discworld “in the short form” as “Middle Earth 500 years on, when everyone’s actually got to settle down and deal with one another.” This idea is most explicit in his short story “Troll Bridge”, which we discussed in #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”.
  • Lady Justice is the modern incarnation of Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, introduced by Emperor Augustus. Justitia herself is likely inspired by Dike, the Greek goddess of moral order and fair judgement, who also held a pair of scales, possibly influenced by earlier Egyptian gods like Maat and Isis. (Dike’s mother, Themis, is also described as a goddess of justice.) Justicia was also depicted holding a sword, but the blindfold worn by the modern version of Lady Justice seems to have been introduced in the sixteenth century. The earliest depiction of Lady Justice with all three elements seems to be the statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) in Bern, Switzerland, which was sculpted by Hans Gieng in 1543. Not all famous depictions of Lady Justice have the blindfold – for example the statue of her on the Old Bailey courthouse in London.
  • As Ben mentions, not everyone can or does visualise things in their imagination – in fact the ability to do so exists on a continuum, across all senses, not just sight. This kind of “blind” imagination is described as “aphantasia”, and around 3-5% of humans are estimated to think this way. This 2017 article from The Conversation does a pretty good job of explaining aphantasia, but there’s also a worldwide Aphantasia Network, established in 2020.
  • Not only are personifications of fate often depicted as weavers – see previous episodes #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires” and #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang” – but the moirai, the Greek fates, are the children of Themis, and sisters to Dike!
  • To be clear, we don’t hate any of the story teaching terms we groan about in this episode – Ben uses them in his teaching work a lot! – but they do take us back to school days we’re happy to have left behind us. In case you’re not familiar with any of them:
    • The “inciting incident” is modern writing jargon for the moment in a story where the protagonist’s regular world is disturbed. While it’s used etensively by those who write about writing (who often define it as having anywhere between three and seven defining characteristics), it can be fairly directly traced back to the work of story scholars like Gustav Freytag and Joseph Campbell.
    • A “story graph” or “story arc” is a curved line meant to show time progressing in the story from left to right, and tension, excitement or some other measure of the story’s intensity going up and down. It demonstrates the same basic principles as Freytag’s Pyramid, which is to say the most tension or excitement etc goes somewhere in the middle, at least in standard Western story structures. In primary school creative writing it is sometimes called the “story mountain”.
    • A “topic sentence” is a device taught in essay writing in which an early sentence in a paragraph – often the first one – gives the reader an expectation of what the paragraph will be about.
  • The Dark Morris is first mentioned – though not by name – at the very start of Reaper Man (see #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door”). Pratchett tells us that while all inhabited worlds of the multiverse have a Morris dance, only on the Discworld in one small village in the Ramtops is it danced it properly. Their secret is “the other dance”, which is described in more detail at the end of the book: that dance it’s danced without music, while dressed in black and wearing bells made of octiron, which make “the opposite of noise”. The award-winning Lancre Morris Men, led by Jason Ogg, appear in Lords and Ladies, but they don’t seem to be the ones who dance the Dark Morris; they mention that the Morris is “for every day”, whereas the dancers of the Dark Morris dance only once a year. This also correlates with the fact that Miss Treason’s steading is near, but not in, Lancre, which is well served by both Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax.
  • In Joe Dante’s 1984 horror comedy Gremlins, teenager Billy Peltzer (Zach Gallagher) is given a mysterious Christmas present bought by his travelling salesman/inventor father from a weird little shop (you know the sort). It’s a strange, intelligent and very cute creature called a mogwai (the name is derived from the Cantonese word for devil, 魔怪), and it comes with three rules: keep it away from bright light, especially sunlight, which will kill it; do not let it come into contact with water; and – most famously – “never, no matter how much he pleads, no matter how much he begs, never ever feed him after midnight”. By the end of the film, of course, all three rules are broken. We previously discussed the film’s 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind” (currently unavailable).
  • For more about the Scots language, see the episode notes for #Pratchat36, the afore-mentioned “Home Alone, But Vampires”. In short it’s a Germanic language which, like modern English, derives from a dialect of Middle English. If you’d like to hear some Scots spoken and learn a few words, we highly recommend following poet Len Pennie on Twitter (@Lenniesaurus) or TikTok (@misspunnypennie). Len posts a “Scots word of the day”, recites her own poyums, and is all around excellent.
  • A showie (a shortened – and happily gender neutral – form of “showman”) is a worker in a travelling show; it’s the Australian equivalent of the US term “carnie”, which is derived from the word carnival. Carnie dates back to the 1930s, but it’s possible “showie” might be a little older. In Australia, such workers operate rides, games and concessions at agricultural shows, open markets and cultural festivals, and many operate family businesses that have been around for three or four generations or more. Many showies do not like the term carnie.
  • On Roundworld, the word “boffo” dates back to at least the era of vaudeville, and was used in showbiz circles as a noun to mean a hit show, act or film. We’ve not had much luck in finding a more specific origin; if you have a lead, let us know!
  • For more on Hyancinth Bucket – the lead character in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, who insists her surname is pronounced “Bouquet” – see #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”.
  • When Ben talks about “the heart and soul of witchcraft”, he means “the soul and centre”; as Granny Weatherwax would readily admit, there’s not always room for heart to enter into it. (For more on this, see #Pratchat43.)
  • As mentioned this episode, Pratchett’s short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” introduces many things important in the Tiffany novels, including Mrs Earwig, the Witch Trials and Zakzak Stronginthearm and his magic shop. We discussed it with Marc Burrows in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”.
  • Tir Nani Ogg is a pune, or play on words, referencing Tír na nÓg, the Irish “Otherworld” (or part of it) and home to the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. As discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders”, Tír na nÓg was often said to be accessed via underground passages, much like the Long Man’s barrow in Lords and Ladies. Of note for the Tiffany stories: another name for the Otherworld – or perhaps a different part of it – is Tír fo Thuinn: “Land Under the Wave”! For more on how this relates to Pratchett’s version of elves, see the episode notes for #Pratchat17.
  • Anoia, Goddess of Things that get Stuck in Drawers, is introduced in chapter ten of Going Postal, as one of the gods to whom Moist prays for deliverance. (For more on this, see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”.) Moist prays to her again in Making Money, with surprising results. As discussed, in Wintersmith Anoia reveals she was once a volcano goddess, always smoking because the storm god rained on her lava. This is a clear callback to Going Postal, in which Anghammarad says that Adorable Dearheart reminds him of “Lela The Volcano Goddess, Who Smokes All The Time Because The God Of Rain Has Rained On Her Lava”.
  • The state of witchcraft has changed considerably over the course of the books. At the start of Witches Abroad, Granny and Nanny attend a sabbat of Ramtops witches at which only four witches are present – Nanny, Granny, Gammer Brevis and Old Mother Dismass. They bemoan the “increasing shortage of witches”, which is so bad there’s no-one available to take the place of Desiderata Hollow, and discuss “moving the boundaries” so they can cover her patch. They are scandalised that a nearby township has brought in a wizard, and Granny also rejects the idea that Desiderata might have named her own successor, since – as we see in Wintersmith – that’s not how they do things in the Ramtops. By the time of Lords and Ladies, the young coven led by Lucy “Diamanda” Tockley has revived interest among the younger Ramtops folk about witchcraft.
  • In Roundworld mythology, the Cornucopia – from the Latin for “Horn of Abundance”, and usually translated as the “Horn of Plenty” – is associated primarily with the Greek and Roman pantheons, and there are multiple accounts of its origin, though it is usually the broken horn of some kind of nature god or similar creature. In one account, infant Zeus, hidden in a cave so he wouldn’t be destroyed by his father Cronus, accidentally broke the horn off of the magical goat which fed him milk. Many gods and goddesses in both Greek and Roman pantheons have held the cornucopia, though few are associated with Summer – rather they are mostly gods of riches, prosperity, the harvest or even fate. It’s now also associated with Thanksgiving in North America, and via that becomes a major motif in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian series The Hunger Games.
  • The language on the cornucopia does seem to be ancient rather than modern Greek. The translation by the memory of Dr Bustle is accurate, as far as we can tell.
  • The universal translator pre-dates Star Trek by a little over twenty years, first appearing in the 1945 novella “First Contact” by American writer William Fitzgerald Jenkins (writing under the pseudonym Murray Leinster), which probably also coined the titular phrase. Versions of a universal translator are used in many science fiction programs to avoid having to deal with frequent language barriers in stories about meeting other cultures. Notable examples include the TARDIS telepathic circuits in Doctor Who (not explained until more than a decade into the show’s history), the “translator microbes” of Farscape and – perhaps most famously – Douglas Adams’ invention of the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
  • Hivers are described in A Hat Full of Sky, where the writings of Dr Bustle explain that they are not demons, but a form of bodiless, mindless not-truly-alive consciousness which drifts through space, and which were formed in the first moments after the creation of the Universe. As the Hiver that inhabited Dr Bustle and Tiffany later admits, it seeks refuge in human minds in order to hide from “everything” – Hivers consciousness has no filter between itself and the entirety of existence, so they are constantly overwhelmed and afraid. Steeleye Span took this as inspiration for the song “Hiver” on the Wintersmith album (more on that below).
  • If like Liz you’re daunted by the amount of Star Trek available, Ben recommends Max Temkin’s articles: “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours“, and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in in 82.5 Hours“. They recommend the essential episodes you need to watch to follow and get the gist of those two beloved Star Trek shows from the 1990s.
  • Moist von Lipwig is an (ex?) con-man and the last major new protagonist introduced by Pratchett to the Discworld. Caught for his various crimes in Ankh-Morpork, the Patrician offers him an honest job revitalising the post office in Going Postal. (See #Pratchat38.) In the television adaptation, he is played by Richard Coyle, best known from Coupling and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Moist later becomes master of the Royal Bank and Royal Mint in Making Money, and in Raising Steam is made the city’s representative overseeing the creation of a new railway system. As for tax auditing, Pratchett had mentioned that he was considering a book starring Moist von Lipwig titled Raising Taxes, in which he would take over as Ankh-Morpork’s head auditor. It was expected to be the next book after I Shall Wear Midnight, but that was instead followed by Snuff and then the rather different Lipwig story, Raising Steam. (For more on other hints of Pratchett’s planned books that never saw the light of day, see the episode notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.)
  • Stories about a fish that has swallowed something thrown away go back a long way. The Greek historian Herodotus recounted a story about Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, who was advised by Egyptian king Amasis to rid himself of some of his many possessions in order that he know some hardship, or else expect a tragic end. He threw his prized emerald ring into the sea, and regretted it, but he was later brought a fish as tribute which, when gutted, contained the ring. The best-known fairytale with this motif is usually called something like “The Fish and the Ring”, and some sources say it is of Norwegian origin. It’s a story of ATU type 930, “The Prediction”, or more specifically 930D, “Fated Bride’s Ring in the Sea”. The story recounts a wealthy or noble man who learns he, or his son, is fated to marry the daughter of a peasant; he tries to dispose of her in several ways, but she is repeatedly saved by fate, eventually having a gold ring taken from her and thrown into the sea, being told by the nobleman not to come to him without the ring. It’s found inside a fish, and this is usually the point at which the nobleman accepts fate cannot be cheated. It can also be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since without the prophecy and his intervention the man would never have even met the woman.
  • “Bluebeard’s Bride” – or just “Bluebeard” – is a French folktale about a notorious nobleman – often later described as a sea captain – whose many wives have mysteriously vanished. When he asks a neighbour to marry one of his daughters, they are frightened, but the youngest eventually agrees. Bluebeard gives his new bride the keys to his enormous house and tells her she may go anywhere except the basement. While he is away she invites her sisters for a party, but is overcome with curiosity and sneaks into the basement…to find the bloody corpses of Bluebeard’s previous brides. She drops the keys, which become stained with blood, and on his return Bluebeard discovers she has found his secret; however she is saved by her brothers, who kill him, and she inherits his wealth, which she uses to bury his other wives before moving on. The tale is ATU type 312, which is known as “The Bluebeard” or “The Maiden-Killer”.
  • The 2007 Doctor Who episode “Blink” by Steven Moffat introduces the Weeping Angels, creatures who (typically) appear to be statues of angels covering their eyes. But this part of their ultimate defence, in which they become “quantum locked” when observed, unable to move but also very difficult to be hurt, as they transform into stone. (They cover their eyes so as not to observe each other.) As soon as they are not observed – for example, if someone watching them blinks – they are able to move incredibly quickly and silently. Their touch while unobserved transports a victim back in time to before the time of their birth, and they feed off the energy created by this possibly paradoxical change to history.
  • We’ve talked before about the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and the Lovecraftian parody in Pratchett’s earlier work; see particularly #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, for discussion of Cthulhu and the other Lovecraftian entities who clearly inspired the Things. Pratchett most directly parodies the Lovecraftian style in “Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”, the non-Discworld short story we discussed in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“.
  • The “Phantom of the Opera book” is Maskerade, the penultimate book starring the original Discworld witches. We discussed it back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • Tolliver Groat was introduced in Going Postal (see #Pratchat38) as the oldest ever Junior Postman, but by the end of the book was promoted to Assistant Postmaster. During the events of Making Money, presumably set shortly after Wintersmith as it was published next, he will (at least briefly) rise to the position of Acting Postmaster. In the television adaptation of Going Postal, he is played by Andrew Sachs of Fawlty Towers fame.
  • Steeleye Span are one of the best known British folk rock bands, formed in 1969 at the height of the British folk revival by bass player Ashley Hutchings, who left the other big folk rock band of the time, Fairport Convention, following a car accident. The initial lineup also featured vocalist Maddy Prior, her duo partner Tim Hart on guitars and vocals, and husband and wife team, guitarist and vocalist Terry Woods (later a member of The Pogues) and vocalist and strings player Gay Woods. Their success and fame were secured by early hits: in 1973 they made it nearly to the top 10 with “Gaudete”, an a cappella recording of a traditional Latin Christmas carol from the 17th century, and in 1975 “All Around My Hat”, a traditional 19th century song about a sailor who goes to sea and returns to find their lover about to marry another man. sold like hotcakes and got them to number 5 in the charts. Their signature style is traditional folk songs set to modern instrumentation, with electric guitars and a rock beat, including popular songs like “Thomas the Rhymer”, “Black Jack Davey” and “Alison Gross”. They’ve also written many original songs – including the tracks on Wintersmith (see below). They are still performing, and released fiftieth anniversary greatest hits and live albums in 2019.
  • The album Wintersmith was released in October 2013, with a deluxe 2-disc version featuring four extra tracks and a live performance following in 2014 (this is the version Ben has). The story goes that Terry discovered folk music when a friend made him listen to the Steeleye Span track “Thomas the Rhymer”, and immediately wanted to find and listen to everything they’d ever done. Some sources name Maddy Prior as Terry’s favourite singer. Prior in turn is a big Pratchett fan. It’s not clear when they first met, but Steeleye Span played at Terry’s 60th birthday party in 2008, and a few years later Terry approached the band with the idea of making an album based on Wintersmith. Most of the sixteen songs are inspired directly by the novel, but there are also tracks drawing on The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and I Shall Wear Midnight. Pratchett himself appears delivering a spoken word performance on the track “A Good Witch”, and was directly involved in the project, working with the band on the lyrics. Guitarist (and actor) Julian Littman, who joined the band in 2010 and wrote some of the songs for the album, noted that when appearing on stage with the band a year or so before his death Pratchett told the audience: “If I’d known it was going to be that good I’d have written a better book.” Ben loves it too, and as a fellow Steeleye Span fan, hopes to discuss it more fully on a future episode of the podcast, perhaps after we’ve covered I Shall Wear Midnight.
  • For more on Steeleye Span’s Wintersmith album, check out this 2024 article from Louder, “How a Terry Pratchett novel became a Steeleye Span album”.
  • When Ben says “What You Witch Is What You Get“, he is invoking the phrase WYSIWYG, an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”. It was used mostly in the 80s and 90s in computing, to describe interfaces which showed you on the screen what the computer would produce on the printed page (or other non-digital output) – something which seemed miraculous at the time. Ben probably should have said “Witch You See Is Witch You Get”, but you can’t have ’em all. Pratchett made fun of the phrase in The Science of Discworld (see #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“) when, at the end of chapter five, Ridcully invokes “the ancient principle of WYGIWYGAINGW”: “What You Get Is What You’re Given And It’s No Good Whining”.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about Nanny Ogg being more powerful than she appears in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, about Wyrd Sisters. He mentions that book being “the first one”, i.e. the first in the witches series; that title might more properly belong to Equal Rites, though as only Granny Weatherwax appears, it’s certainly not the first book about the Lancre coven.
  • Terry’s favoured hat was a black, wide-brimmed Louisiana, often mistaken for a fedora. He wrote about his love of hats – including the specific brands and types he’s bought over the years – in the 2001 article “A Word About Hats” for the Sunday Telegraph Reveiw, which is collected in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • The new Tooth Fairy is appointed in Hogfather. See #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, for more on that book, but we won’t spoil their identity here.
  • Both versions of the personification (or avatar) of Time appear in Thief of Time, discussed in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • Old Man Trouble is mentioned in Soul Music, Hogfather, Feet of Clay and Thief of Time. The Discworld Companion describes him as the personification of Murphy’s Law (i.e. “Whatever can go wrong, will.”) but he’s a reference to the Roundworld “Old Man Trouble”, a personification of problems or bad luck, thought by some to be a polite way of referring to the devil. He is best known from his appearance in American songs, especially the George and Ira Gershwin classic “I Got Rhythm” – the reason for Lord Downey thinking being able to carry a tune would keep him safe from Old Man Trouble – and the Fats Domino song “Old Man Trouble”.
  • Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is a board game originally designed by Robert Harris and published by UK games giant Games Workshop in 1983. In the game, players choose from a variety of fantasy hero characters, and roll dice to travel through a fantasy kingdom, encountering various dangers while attempting to find a Talisman which will allow them to travel into the centre of the board. If they can make it there and reach the Crown of Command, their character becomes ruler of the kingdom and they win the game. Apparently the original design wasn’t fantasy themed at all, but had the players take the roles of boys at a boarding school attempting to be prefects! The fourth edition, first released in 2008, is currently published by Pegasus Spiele. It’s one of those games most beloved by those with nostalgic memories of playing it as a teenager; Ben prefers games which aren’t quite so heavily reliant on the luck of the dice, but it continues to be be popular.
  • Honey Heist is one of Grant Howitt’s many one-page RPGs. It gained popularity in online RPG forums and then a bigger boost in fame when it was played by the cast of hugely popular roleplaying YouTube show Critical Role. You can get Honey Heist on the Rowan, Rook and Decard website, offered via a pay what you want (including nothing) model.
  • As depicted in the photo above, Ben’s handmade kakapo – the endangered ground parrot of New Zealand – was crafted by Sayraphim Lothian as part of their Journey project in 2014. You can find out more about the project on Sayraphim’s website.
  • We don’t have a photo of Garth’s Disreputable Dog and Mogett, but we can tell you these are animal characters from the Old Kingdom books, magical creatures who travel with their wizard masters. It is important that their collars remain “safely on”, but we won’t spoil the reasons why here.
  • A “Lazy Susan” is a turntable designed for use in the middle of a table to help serve food. Similar devices predate the name, which seems to first appear in the World War I period, though exactly where the name comes from is unclear.
  • Terciel and Elinor is, as Garth explains, a prequel to the Old Kingdom books; the titular characters are the parents of original protagonist Sabriel, who appears in the first novel Sabriel and its sequels Lirael and Abhorsen. Please note that when Garth says “this year”, we recorded this episode in December 2021.
  • Frogkisser is Garth’s funny 2017 novel aimed at a middle grade or young adult audience about the Princess Anya, who has the power to break curses with a kiss. She goes on the run when her evil step-parents want to take over the kingdom for good. On a Quest to save the kingdom, she is aided by “a loyal talking dog, a boy thief trapped in the body of a newt, and some extraordinarily mischievous wizards”…yes, I think we can see the Pratchett influence here.
  • Newt’s Emerald is Garth’s 2015 novel of Regency romance, spiced up with a bit of “fantasy of manners” – i.e. a magical take on the “comedy of manners” style of Restoration comedy novels. It follows the adventures of Lady “Newt” Truthful, who dresses as a man in order to recover the stolen jewel in her family’s collection: the Newington Emerald.
  • Who Watches The Watch is, in their own words, “A fun (but highly intellectual) podcast in which four pals read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, talk about left-wing politics and have a riotous good time while they’re about it.” It began in May 2020 and episodes are generally released every week or two. The original plan was to read the Watch books as a lead-in to discussing The Watch TV show, but after reading Guards! Guards! they decided to cover the Discworld more broadly. They also have a spin-off show, Immortal Incantations: Heartspell, in which the hosts – Chaz, Lucy, János and George – are writing their own fantasy novel. You can find out more about both shows on their Patreon page.

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

#Pratchat51 – Boffoing the Winter Slayer

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Welcome to the Year of the Lachrymating Leveret! Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy author Garth Nix joins Liz and Ben up in the Ramtops, where Tiffany Aching dances a forbidden dance and gets into more trouble in the thirty-fifth Discworld novel, 2006’s Wintersmith.

Two years after her first Witch Trial, Tiffany Aching is nearly a teenager and two months into her stint with her latest mentor – terrifying Miss Treason, the 113-year-old deaf and blind justice witch. In the dead of night Miss Treason takes her to witness the “dark dance”, but against the rules she is given, Tiffany does more than observe – after all, what good is a dance you can only watch? But Tiffany’s been noticed: the spirit of Winter himself has his eye on her now. There’s something different about Tiffany, too…but that might have to wait. The Nac Mac Feegle are back, there’s a witch’s cottage up for grabs, the boy she’s been writing went to a party with someone else, and if she can’t figure out how to fend off the Wintersmith, it might be an uncomfortably long Winter…

Published in one of Pratchett’s rare one-book years, Wintersmith advances Tiffany Aching into adolescence – and appropriately enough deals with themes of unwanted attention, uncontrollable urges, the perils of teenage and adult politics, and hordes of tiny blue men. Plus it’s full of favourite characters, both old and new.

Do you think Tiffany could have chosen not to enter the dance? Have the Feegles been to our world – and do they belong in this book, or has Tiffany outgrown them? What’s the most ridiculous thing someone has done to try and impress you? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat51 on social media.

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Guest Garth Nix is a bestselling and award-winning Australian author, best known for his young adult fantasy series “The Old Kingdom”, which began with Sabriel in 1995. In November 2021 he published the prequel Terciel and Elinor, about the parents of the original novel’s protagonist. He’s also written dozens of other novels and short stories, including the Seventh Tower and Keys to the Kingdom series of novels, 2015’s Newt’s Emerald, 2017’s Frogkisser, and 2020’s The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, which recently won the Ditmar Award for best novel. You can find Garth on Twitter as @garthnix, and info about his books on his website at garthnix.com

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

Next month we’re not reading a book or a short story; instead we’re getting in front of the television and checking out the somewhat divisive BBC America series The Watch, “based on characters created by Terry Pratchett”. Is it a bold new punk direction for the Disc, or a travesty born from years in development hell and too much distance from the source material? We’re going to find out! Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat52, 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.

#Oggswatch2021 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat’s special Oggswatch Feast episode for 2021, featuring guests Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Anna Ahveninen and the hosts of the podcasts Wyrd Sisters, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography. All of them cook dishes from the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add some more images of other recipes – or links to where you can find them – soon.

Bananana Soup Surprise

Bananana Soup Surprise in the pot.
Served as Nanny Ogg intended!
A few moments from the video we made of this disgusting odyssey.

Celery Astonishment

Are you astonished? We certainly are.

CMOT Dibbler’s Sausage Inna Bun

As promised, the Wyrd Sisters shared some pictures of their sausages!

Figgins

Figgin pastry and filling ready for assembly.
Aaron’s resident big wee hag helping out. (Picture used with permission.)
Figgins ready for the oven!
The figginshed result!

Dwarf Bread

All the ingredients ready for dwarf baking!
It certainly looks like gravel…
…especially close up!
Not much like the illustration…
Pounded flat and ready for the oven!
It really did look like a slab of asphalt at this point…
Finished dwarf bread!
Looks the part, and actually pretty good.
Proof that Anna was still enjoying it the next day.
Anna and Ben’s first adventure in dwarf bakery!

Notes and Errata

  • A huge shoutout to the ever-amazing David Ashton for the Hogswatch version of our theme tune!
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat” from December 2021.
  • We previously discussed Paul Kelly’s 1996 Christmas hit “How to Make Gravy” back in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“. Perhaps we should compile a Fourecksian cookbook and include a gravy recipe?
  • While Kelly’s description of writing “How to Make Gravy” suggests it was written fairly quickly, Ben is exaggerating when he says the song was written in an afternoon.
  • The “Paul Kelly Cinematic Universe” does exist, but the protagonist of “How to Make Gravy” is not the same person from his hit single “Dumb Things”. Instead Joe appears in Kelly’s earlier songs “To Her Door” (1987) and “Love Never Runs on Time” (1994).
  • Whamageddon is a folk game in which players try to avoid hearing “Last Christmas”, the 1984 Christmas single by Wham!, between December 1st and 24th. (No shade on the song – it’s just still very popular in the UK, where the game originates, and so gets played a lot.) The game dates back to an online forum in 2010, though it didn’t get the name until 2016, when the Facebook page took it to new heights of fame. You can find the rules at whamageddon.com.
  • Names suggested for Ben’s proposed Australian variant of Whamageddon have included “Gravygeddon”, “Armagravy”, “Paullkellypse” and “Catastophgravy”.
  • Peppers or bell peppers are indeed what we Australians and New Zealanders call a capsicum. This differentiates it from the other kinds of peppers, which all have specific names. Capsicum is the genus of plants in the pepper family, but that includes most varieties of chilli as well.
  • ASMR is an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a well-documented sensation of physical tingling and low-level euphoria felt by some in response to certain sounds. ASMR is a form of paresthesia, a term for sensations felt on the skin which do not have (or at least don’t match) a physical cause; “pins and needles” is the most common form. The tingling of ASMR is most often experienced in the scalp and the back of the neck, and can be triggered by a variety of things, though whispering is most common. The phenomenon is fairly widespread, and ASMR videos and audio recordings are all over the Internet. (If you go searching, be aware that while ASMR is not inherently sexual, there’s a fairly large subset of videos that mix in erotica.)
  • Schitt’s Creek is a Canadian sitcom created by father-and-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy, starring the pair of them, Catherine O’Hara and Annie Murphy as a rich family who lose their fortune and are forced to live in a motel in a town they once bought as a joke. It ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020 on CBC, and is available internationally on Netflix. You can find the “fold in the cheese” scene on YouTube; it’s from the second episode of the second season, “Family Dinner”.
  • “How the sausage gets made” is a common idiom, meaning to discover the perhaps unpleasant process behind something on enjoys, which one might prefer not to know. It’s also a line in the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the second act of Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit broadway musical Hamilton. It describes the Compromise of 1790, in which at a private meeting Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agree to build a new capital city for the United States in the South (rather than making New York the capital), perhaps in return for using Hamilton’s proposed financial system. The song is from the perspective of Hamilton’s friend/rival Aaron Burr, who laments that no-one really knows what was agreed in “the room where it happens”:
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens
  • American sausages are not all like Frankfurts! They have more English-like ones as well. As the Wyrd Sisters themselves explain: “They’re a fairly common breakfast food, usually as part of a larger meal. The main difference is that they’re smaller and a little drier than what you get in the UK and Australia – if your sausages are grapes, ours are raisins.” Smaller breakfast sausages are also very popular in the UK, but not often seen in Australia, at least on the East coast.
  • There have been several separate chains of supermarkets in the US named Market Basket. Manning is talking about the New England Market Basket, which has stores in the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. It was founded in 1917 by Greek immigrants as DeMoulas Market in Lowell, Massachusetts. Over the years there’s been a few disputes between branches of the DeMoulas family, which still owns the chain, but these were mostly settled in court in 2014, when Arthur T. Demoulas was fired and, after mass worker protests, reinstated as the company President. The workforce is not unionised, but employees who work 1,000 hours or more a year are entitled to enter a profit sharing arrangement, and the chain does not use automated checkouts.
  • “Freedom units” is a satirical way to refer to the imperial measurements still widely used in everyday American life, though it’s worth mentioning that this may be preferable to the weird mix of metric and imperial that you find in the UK and Canada… As Manning mentions, the “cup” is particularly confusing: a US cup is 240mL (that’s millilitres, thousandths of a litre), or 8.45 imperial fluid ounces. A metric cup – as used in Australia – is 250mL, handily one quarter of a litre. But they’re obviously very close, so you probably won’t go too far wrong.
  • We discussed Maskerade in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, back in September 2019. The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret discussed it over three episodes in September 2021: “Chekhov’s Chandelier“, “As the Actress Said to the Bishop” and “Climbing Into Box 8“.
  • A sous-chef is the second most senior chef in a professional kitchen. The full title is sous-chef de cuisine, French for “under-chief of the kitchen”.
  • Jo and Francine eat scones in their third Equal Rites episode, “Crumbs All Up In There“, from January 2020.
  • Nigel Slater is an English food writer, best known as the head food writer for Marie Clare magazine from 1988 to 1993, and afterwards as the chief writer for The Observer Food monthly supplement. He’s also written an autobiographical column for The Observer for more than a decade; a popular memoir, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, in 2003, which was later adapted for television and the stage; and numerous cookbooks, mostly concentrating on simple comfort food. His 2007 book Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table sounds like a great resource for those looking to learn more about the influences on Nanny Ogg’s cookery.
  • Tannins are biological molecules which bind to proteins and other organic compounds and cause them to precipitate, ie solidify out of a solution. They are naturally found in most berries, some unripe fruits, nuts, wine, tea and cannabis, and as the name might suggest are also used in tanning, the process of making leather. Wine acquires tannin both from the varieties of grapes used to make it, and through the aging process, from the wood of the barrels, giving wine it’s astringent taste. Tannins occur naturally in tea as well.
  • There’s a bit of confusion about books adapted into films featuring magical cooking with chocolate in the title, so to clarify:
    • Ben is talking about Mexican author Lara Esquivel’s 1989 magical realism novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), about a young woman forbidden to marry the love of her life, who magically (and unwittingly) infuses the food she cooks with her emotions. It was filmed in Mexico in 1992, adapted by Esquivel, directed by Alfonso Arau, and starring Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi and Regina Torné. Both novel and film include authentic Mexican recipes. A companion work, Tita’s Diary, was published in 2016.
    • Everyone else is talking about Chocolat, a 1999 magical realism novel by English-French author Joanne Harris. It’s about a witchy single mother, Vianne, who arrives in a small French village at Lent and opens a chocolaterie, leading her into conflict with the village’s priest. It was followed by two sequels, The Lollipop Shoes (2007) and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (2012). It was filmed in 2000, directed by Lasse Hallström with a cast featuring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Carrie-Anne Moss.
  • The media tie-in cookbooks mentioned by Joanne are:
    • The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook (2019) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, for the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and it’s many predecessors).
    • A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook (2012), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones television series, plus the companion book From the Sands of Dorne (2017). (There’s also an unofficial one, published in 2012, The Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook: From Direwolf Ale to Auroch Stew, by Alan Kistler.)
    • World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook (2017), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, based on the MMORPG video game World of Warcraft. (Joanne wasn’t kidding about this being a lucrative gig for some authors; Monroe-Cassel also has books out or on the way for Star Trek, Overwatch, Firefly, Star Wars and more.)
    • Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook (2020) by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer, inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
  • While we’re talking about these books, if you’re looking for them, be wary of imitations! It seems since 2020 there’s been a rash of cheap self-published unofficial ebooks of similar collections of recipes, especially where the expiry of a license means the official one is no longer available, or where it was never offered as an ebook in the first place. It’s not clear if these are any good or even actually full of appropriate recipes, so try and save your money for the people who’ve put in the real work.
  • Gilmore Girls is an American dramedy series about young independent mother Lorelai Gilmour and her daughter Rory, who moved away from Lorelai’s rich parents to live in the small town of Stars Hollow. The show ran for seven seasons on The WB and The CW between 2000 and 2007, with a revival mini-series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix in 2016. The show has inspired more than one cookbook, which is unsurprising given how Lorelai and Rory’s lives – personal and professional – revolve around food…
    • Eat Like a Gilmore: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of Gilmore Girls (2016) and Eat Like a Gilmore: Seasons: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of the Gilmore Girls Revival (2021) are both by Kristi Carlson, and seem to have been the first and most popular of the bunch. They’re also available in a box set of both books, which together contain two hundred recipes!
    • Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook, by Elena Craig and Kristen Mulrooney, will be the first official one, and is coming in 2022.
  • The “Gas mark” is a scale for oven temperature used mostly in the UK and Ireland. It dates back to the 1930s, when many gas ovens were produced using a standard gas regulator, in most recorded cases a “Regulo” brand one, which had “marks” from 1 up to 9, as well as ½ and ¼, to indicate various levels of heat. Their instruction manuals, along with recipe books given away with some ovens, used the marks rather than a specific temperature, in the form “Gas: Regulo Mark 7”. Eventually this became widespread enough that other brand regulators used the same numbers and by the 1950s the brand name was no longer used, with recipe books referring to “gas mark 8” and so on. Gas marks correspond to temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit: gas mark 1 is 275 °F, and each mark above that adds 25 °F (or subtracts it, in the case of ½ and ¼). Similar scales exist in other countries, notably France (labelled “Th”, short for thermostats) and Germany (“Stufe“, German for “step”); those scales are, of course, different to the gas mark and to each other. But modern cookbooks will generally include a temperature, as well as the mark, Th or Stufe.
  • It’s not surprising Ben hasn’t heard barberries, the fruit of the Berberis plant; turns out they grow all over the world except in Australia! The European species is Berberis vulgaris, which grows wild, but has fallen out of use in many countries. It’s still popular in Iran; the Persian name for it is zereshk (زرشک), and in Europe at least most commercially available barberries are grown there. The berries are tart and tangy, and when dried are around the size of a currant, though red in colour.
  • Figjam is the 2005 single released by Brisbane hip-hop band Butterfingers, from their 2006 album The Deeper You Dig… It reached number 11 in the Triple J Hottest 100 that year, but only around 50 in the mainstream charts. In the song, the acronym is “Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me” rather than Great.
  • Figgins are indeed mentioned in Guards! Guards!; the master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night uses the term repeatedly as a vague threat, mentioning that interlopers will “have their figgin put on a spike”, and noting to himself that his followers have never asked what a figgin is. A footnote explains that in The Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words, a figgin is defined as “a small short-crust pastry containing raisins”, and provides several other obscure culinary delights that could have made it into the Master’s speeches. CMOT Dibbler is later seen selling figgins from his tray alongside his sausages, and it’s a repeated joke that the Elucidated Brethren assume anything said about figgins describes a horrifying form of torture. Figgins also score a minor mention in Men At Arms, when Vimes imagines his fate if he were to stay in the watch to an old age with no family.
  • The Discworld cookery masterpost on Tumblr is a delight. Thank you, user toooldforthisbutstill, and to the major contributor, fantasyfeasts, who also makes stuff from other worlds.

We’ll add a few more notes soon.

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

Oggswatch Feast 2021

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Ho ho ho, Merry Hogswatch! To celebrate the festive season, and our own fiftieth episode, we’ve brought together a bunch of guests of Hogswatch Past, Present and Future – including the hosts no fewer than three other Discworld podcasts – for a special feast of additional recipes from Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Be warned: this podcast contains bananana!

Got comments on our efforts – or want to share your own? Do you want us to do this again next year? Please, join the conversation using the hashtag #Oggswatch2021 on social media.

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Our guests this episode are:

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site; it might take a few days to fully appear, but we’ll be adding photos of many of the dishes cooked for this episode!

While our January episode is already in the can, in February we’ll be discussing BBC America’s series “based on characters created by Terry Pratchett” – The Watch! So have a watch yourself over the holidays, and send us questions by tagging us on social media and using the hashtag #Pratchat52, or by sending us an 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.

#Pratchat50 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, featuring guest Cal Wilson, discussing the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

To prove we really did cook these things, here are some photos! Be warned: the last one is not for the faint of heart…

  • Stage one of Rincewind’s Potato Cakes: mashing the potatoes!
  • The potato mixture with sage and fried onions added. (It’s already delicious.)
  • Frying up the cakes – these ones are waaaaay too big.
  • A couple of more reasonably-sized potato cakes. They turned out great!
  • The “brinner” meal with scrambled eggs made in the same pan.
  • Liz’s Wow-Wow sauce, artfully drizzled on a plate!
  • You can use it on an omelette…
  • …or on meat!
  • We apologise for this highly upsetting image…but we think you’ll agree Cal did an amazing job of making Sticky Toffee Rat Onna Stick.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is reference to the famous 2017 cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by American chef Samin Nosrat. Nosrat also had a Netflix cooking show of the same name, which appeared in 2018. We’re sure you’ll work out how the rat comes into it, but we may not have mentioned Lord Downey’s contribution to the book: a recipe for mint humbugs which includes the ingredient “arsenic to taste”…
  • Cal’s previous episodes were #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” from November 2017 and #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind” from January 2018.
  • Cal’s Tiktok username is @calbowilson; look for the hashtag #baristacats.
  • To avoid any confusion:
    • The “Baristacats” are Cal’s cats, Pirate and Barnacle, who like to sit on top of the coffee machine in her kitchen, leading her to create a series of videos in which she tries and fails to get them to serve her coffee.
    • The Aristocats (1970, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman) is a Disney animated musical about a family of aristocratic cats who get into trouble and must turn to an alley cat and his friends for help.
    • “The Aristocrats” is a famous dirty joke in which a family of performers try to get a job by describing to a theatre manager the incredibly depraved and taboo-breaking things they do in their performance – usually a long list, improvised by the comedian – before being asked the name of the act; they respond with “The Aristocrats!” While it dates back to the vaudeville era, it continues to be popular in private among American comedians, with the point being to improvise the most transgressive and offensive description of the act. It was the subject of a documentary film in 2005, The Aristocrats, directed by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza.
  • Liz’s cats are named after Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley. There have been recent prestige television adaptations of their best-known works: Asimov’s Foundation for Apple TV+ in 2021, and Huxley’s Brave New World for the NBC streaming service Peacock in 2020. Brave New World was cancelled after the first season, but Foundation is getting a second season.
  • The Great British Bake Off – known as The Great British Baking Show in the US – is an extremely wholesome reality television show that started in 2010. Contestants are (usually amateur) bakers, who compete in a series of challenges to impress a panel of judges, all for the glory of being crowned the best baker (there’s no prize money). It’s produced by Love Productions, originally for the BBC, where it grew to be so successful on BBC Two that it was moved to BBC One. Despite commissioning Love Productions to make other shows about sewing and pottery using the same format, the BBC made an in-house program about hair styling, Hair, in 2014. This led to a legal dispute over copyright that eventually led to Love Productions taking the show to Channel 4, where it’s been since 2017. Many countries have their own version, including Australia.
  • Bridgerton is a 2021 Regency-era period drama made for Netflix, adapted from the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn. It’s known for its racy sex scenes. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • J H C Goatberger – publisher of the Disc-famous Almanack – and his chief printer Mr Cropper both appear in Maskerade. We discussed it in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Encyclopædia Britannica is probably the most famous English-language encyclopaedia, which is a compendium of knowledge. The Britannica was first printed in 1768 in the United Kingdom, and most of its editions span multiple large volumes. In 1901 it was taken over by American managers, who shortened and simplified its language and began selling it via door-to-door salesmen. It still exists, though the last print edition was published in 2012; it’s now exclusively online at britannica.com.
  • Where Did I Come From? is the 1973 classic children’s book about sex and reproduction. It was originally subtitled “The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations”, and is the first of many similar books by Peter Mayle, an English businessman who became an advertising copywriter and then author. Mayle went on to write the Wicked Willie series of risqué cartoon books about a talking penis, which might sound familiar: they were illustrated by Gray Joliffe, the same person who drew the cats for Pratchett’s The Unadulterated Cat! More about that in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • We’re pretty sure the “sexy origami” book mentioned by Cal is 2015’s The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made, by Australian cartoonist and illustrator Fiona Katauskas. She was inspired to create it because when having the talk with her own son, she found she was using the same book her parents had used – Where Did I Come From? – and thought it could use an update.
  • If you’d like to know about Ken’s underpants area, we recommend this delightful piece from Jezebel, “The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll’s Crotch” from 2019, by Rich Juzwiak.
  • In Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma, Alan Rickman does indeed play Metatron, the angel who is the voice of God. If you’re curious to know what his underpants area looks like, there’s a great photo of him showing it off while holding a Ken doll in this piece for Digital Spy in which Kevin Smith pays tribute to Rickman after his death in 2016.
  • Ben’s very silly quip here is a reference to Patrick Stewart’s appearance in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras. Like all the other big name actors who appeared in cameo roles, he plays a weird parody of himself, who tells Gervais’ main character about his idea for a facial comedy film in which he has the power to make women’s clothes fall off. His refrain is that by the time they put them back on, “It’s too late, I’ve seen everything.“
  • The recipe book plagiarism scandal we discuss is about Elizabeth Haigh’s book Makan. Singaporean-born Haigh was a contestant on the 2011 series of reality cooking show MasterChef in the UK; while she didn’t win, the experience cemented her love of cooking and she went on to great success as a chef, even opening her own restaurants, one of which – Pidgin – was awarded a Michelin star in 2017. Her book Makan was published in October 2021, but soon Sharon Wee, author of Growing Up in a Nona Kitchen, made allegations that many passages relating stories of learning to cook from a grandmother were paraphrased or directly taken from her book. Comparisons of passages where posted online by New Zealand cookbook store Cook the Books, and other authors discovered Makan seemed to “borrow” from other other books and recipe blogs too – both in the anecdotes and personal stories, and some of the recipes. You can read more detail about the scandal in this piece from Eater magazine by James Hansen, though it seems no further information has been officially disclosed, pending the outcome of legal action.
  • The introductory text that Ben reads at around the 14:30 mark is for the entire fictional book, not just the cookery section as he suggests.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • Ben mentioned some cookbooks for other fictional worlds, specifically 2012’s A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook, 1999’s Star Trek Cookbook – co-written by Ethan Philips in the persona of Neelix, the character he played on Star Trek: Voyager! – and two cookbooks based on Doctor Who. Ben was thinking of the original one from 1985, The Doctor Who Cookbook, but a newer one inspired by the revived series was published in 2016: Doctor Who: The Official Cookbook. It’s worth noting there are plenty of unofficial cookbooks for recipes based on various fictional worlds, too.
  • The character Liz mentions from Game of Thrones is Hot Pie, who appears in the second and third novels in the series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, and the first four seasons of the television show.
  • Schnapps – from the German schnaps – isn’t a specific kind of alcohol. The original German word is used generically for any kind of strong alcoholic drink. In English it usually means one that is flavoured and sweetened with fruit, but there aren’t any rules – it’s sort of the opposite of Champagne.
  • The famous English Twitter user who grows big vegetables is 72-year-old ex-butcher Gerald Stratford (@geraldstratfor3). He’s not a farmer, but an avid vegetable gardener, and after amassing a huge following on social media published a book in 2021, Big Veg. You can read of Gerald’s rise to fame in this lovely article from Eater magazine by Jenny G Zhang. [We promise we’re not sponsored by Eater, they just seem to write the best articles about English food-related stuff! – Ben]
  • Ben would just like to clarify that when he says Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is “a real fan’s book” (at around 23:40), he means it’s really a book for fans, not a book that’s for “real fans”. We don’t go in for that sort of gatekeeping around here – and neither did Pratchett, as evidenced by the way that he expressly tells readers where to find out more if they’re lacking context. There’s no wrong way to be a fan, except for hurting other folks with how you go about it.
  • Bergholdt Stuttley “Bloody Stupid” Johnson is first mentioned in Men at Arms, as the designer of the gardens surrounding the Patrician’s Palace, which are said to be the “high spot” of his career. His proper given names are revealed in Maskerade, in a footnote about the organs used by the Opera House and University.
  • Speaking of B S Johnson, the “pie bird” is indeed a real thing. They’re an evolution of the originally quite dull ceramic pie funnels stuck into pies to allow some of the steam to vent, preventing fruit pies from bubbling over and helping to ensure a crispy crust. In the earlier twentieth century manufacturers started making them in all kinds of animal shapes, though birds were most popular. Read all about the history of pie birds in this article by Baileyberg at Food52. (See? Not all our sources are Eater this month…)
  • We also discussed the “humour” genre of books in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, in relation to The Unadulterated Cat. The primer example mentioned by Ben was Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, though there are thousands to choose from, and they continue to be published, if in smaller numbers. Modern such books are often compilations of social media accounts, like The Midnight Society, the (entirely fictional) minutes of the meetings of of club made up of famous horror, fantasy and sci-fi authors.
  • Spotted dick is indeed a real dish, also known as “spotted dog” and “railway cake” (the latter name especially common in Ireland). The English version is a baked pudding made from suet and dried fruit – most often plums, sultanas or raisins – which are the eponymous “spots”. (For more about this, see the Hogswatch Feast bonus episode.)
  • Ben did indeed research the various kinds of fat mined in Überwald for #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“. You can find his list of them in the episode notes for #Pratchat40.
  • Vegetable suet is made from refined vegetable oils. Like animal suet it’s only readily available in the UK, and not all varieties are gluten free, so check the fine print if you’re buying some and that’s a consideration for you. Nigella Lawson’s website also recommends grated vegetable shortening as a substitute; the most easily found form of this in Australia is Copha, which is made from coconut oil. (See the link for instructions on how to grate it.)
  • As it turns out, the difference between lamb and mutton varies depending on where you’re from. In the UK sheep meat (and indeed the sheep) is called lamb in its first year, and mutton if the sheep is two or more years old. In Australia, a sheep’s age is measured instead by how many teeth – specifically permanent incisors – it has (or rather had): Australian lamb comes from a sheep with no permanent incisors; mutton is from a sheep with more than two. (Sheep usually grow a pair of new ones each year, so it works out mostly the same.) Meat from sheep in between lamb and mutton age is called “hogget”, though apparently in the UK plenty of “lamb” is actually hogget in disguise – a step down from mutton dressed as lamb, we suppose. Organic and rare breed farmers in England’s North are known to sell hogget, though. Sheep typically live for around ten to twelve years (when not eaten by foxes, wolves or humans), so seventeen year old mutton isn’t something you need to worry about.
  • The Discworld mainstay “sausage-inna-bun” first appears alongside its most famous vendor, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, in Guards! Guards!, discussed in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“. He shows up to hawk food to the crowd watching the hero attempt to slay the dragon, though he never says “sausage-inna-bun”; instead he describes them as “hot sausages”, and shouts “inna bun!” as one of their many attributes. On this occasion he is also selling peanuts and figgins alongside the sausages, all cooked in a tiny frying pan on his tray.
  • We previously discussed Bunnings sausages in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“. In brief: a “sausage sizzle” is a traditional way to raise money for charity by selling cheap (and possibly donated) sausages cooked on a barbecue in slices of bread, usually with fried onions and tomato sauce or mustard. It’s common – or it was, in pre-pandemic times – for ubiquitous hardware store chain Bunnings Warehouse to have a sausage sizzle outside its stores, usually in a carpark.
  • Roundworld drop scones are not siege ammunition, but rather small pancakes made by dropping a dollop of batter onto a frying pan. Depending on where you grew up in Australia, drop scones might be better known as pikelets. We won’t get into the discussion of what constitutes a “regular” scone, as this varies considerably around the world. (Australian ones are generally similar to English ones, though we have pumpkin and date varieties less popular elsewhere.)
  • The French word for bread is indeed pain, but Ben does not pronounce it remotely correctly. The French word uses a neutral vowel sound, not either of the “a” sounds Ben uses. Sorry French speakers.
  • We were unable to confirm it, but it does seem that Paul Kidby’s illustrations for Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook are all originals, done for this book. Certainly the ones of the imps and the various dishes don’t appear anywhere else that we know of.
  • Malicious compliance is when someone follows instructions given to them to the letter, knowing that it will cause harm or problems. It’s often described as a form of passive-aggression, though it is sometimes used as an effective form of protest against ridiculous or draconian demands from managers or officials.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is the third of five published Discworld short stories. We discussed it in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” While it does introduce the Witch Trials, and names the scarecrow used for the Cursing “for several hundred years”, no further information about Unlucky Charlie is given; this section is mostly new.
  • Carved wooden lovespoons are a tradition that dates back to at least the seventeenth century. Welsh ones may be the most well known, but they’re also found in Germany, Scandanavia and Eastern Europe. While the “Lancre Loveseat” may well be inspired by them, it should also be noted that Nanny lists “Llamedosian spoon” as the appropriate gift for a fifteenth anniversary.
  • The tweet advising that women may be “fascinated” by giving them cheese was an image of a page from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen. You can read more about the history of cheese in witchcraft in this article from The Conversation, inspired by the original tweet by Gavin Wren, which we’ve included below. (Pratchat would like to note that we do not condone the use of witchcraft or any other kind of coercion when making advances toward folks of any gender.)
  • We’ll learn more about the Discworld’s Moon – and Leonard da Quirm – when we cover The Last Hero, but it is considerably closer to the Disc than our Moon is to the Earth. It has to be, as it appears about the same size, but is only about eighty miles (or 130km) across. The Earth’s Moon is over 2,150 miles across (3,475km), and about 238,855 miles (or 384,400km) away, so for the Disc’s Moon to appear about the same size, it must be a bit under 9,000 miles from the surface of the Disc. (For simplicity we’re going to ignore the likely difference in lensing effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and the Disc’s intense magical field.) For context, that’s a bit more than a third of the distance around the Earth! The Disc’s Moon likely passes much closer to the Rim, so a supermoon is probably a weekly event for places like Krull.
  • The Moon being a giant egg was a weird plot used by Doctor Who in the 2014 episode Kill the Moon.
  • Branston Pickle is a chunky, pickled chutney that’s made from diced vegetables pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomatoes, apples, sugar and spices. It’s been made since 1922 and continues to be hugely popular in the UK. In March 2020, manufacturer Mizkan Euro recalled some of their products as they may have been contaminated with pieces of plastic packaging. This recall affected jars with use-by dates of 2022; you can check if you have any affected jars here, but any you find in stores now will be fine.
  • Massel is an Australian brand which makes vegan stock and other vegetable-based food products. They’ve been around since 1982. Ben only ever buys the vegetable kind, but now realises that their other flavours are labelled “Chicken Style” and “Beef Style”, so they’re a good vegetarian substitute for the real deal.
  • Marzipan is made from honey, sugar and almond meal. There are different kinds but they don’t seem radically different, though when its used on fruit cakes it is usually glazed and, as Cal says, more traditional icing goes on top.
  • The Overlondon Project’s question with the emojis was as follows:
    Most practically edible and least edibly practical… 🧙‍♀️🍆🥕🍌🥒🍑🥭 and possibly 🦑
  • The restaurant in Going Postal is Le Foie Heureux – “the happy liver” in Quirmian. There isn’t a description of the food beyond how much it costs, sadly, but we can dream. The restaurant in Hogfather isn’t named, but its dishes include Mousse de la Boue dans une Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures (“mud mousse in a basket of shoe pastry”) and, as featured in this cookbook, Brodeuin Rôti Façon Ombres (“man’s boots in mud”).
  • Biers is the Ankh-Morpork bar where nobody asks your name; it’s frequented by the undead and other creatures of the night who want a place where they can escape the pressures of being normal. It makes its most notable appearances in Feet of Clay (see #Pratchat24) and Hogfather (see #Pratchat26).
  • It turns out that while you can make alcohol from cabbages, it doesn’t seem a popular choice – partly because cabbages don’t contain much sugar, so they don’t ferment into alcohol on their own. Cabbages are more usually fermented into the non-alcoholic food sauerkraut. There is, though, a cabbage wine made in Narusawa prefecture in Japan, an area which like the Sto Plains grows mainly cabbages. (Narusawa wine is also 40% grapes, though.)
  • You can buy commercial beef spreads, but the brands Ben names are beef-extract based drinks, sold in paste form similar to yeast extracts like Vegemite and Marmite. Bovril has been made in the UK since the 1870s, while Bonox is Australian, first sold in 1919 by the same company who invented Vegemite. (For more on that, see the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.)
  • Fairy bread is an Australian children’s party staple: buttered white bread sprinkled with small bits of sugar confectionary, usually spherical “hundreds and thousands” (in Ben’s opinion the superior option), or sprinkles.
  • For more on the great potato cakes vs potato scallops debate, see this survey of regional variation in Australian language conducted by the the Linguistics Roadshow in 2015. (It’s the first response.) For the record, “potato cake” won the bigger vote, but neither cake nor scallop had a clear majority.
  • You can hear an extract from Sven’s podcard in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“. Note though that the bit Ben describes about the ads for Maggi noodles only appears in the full podcard, which is included in the fourth episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, from April 2020.
  • The Australian SF (“Ditmar”) Awards, or just Ditmar Awards for short, are the Australian national awards for achievement in speculative fiction and fandom. Any eligible works can be nominated by members of the Australian fan community; the awards are then voted on by members of the Australian National SF Convention (or “NatCon”) for that year. The established Australian cons take it in turns to be the NatCon; in 2021, it was Conflux in Canberra. You can see a list of all the 2021 Ditmar nominees and winners in Locus Magazine. Pratchat was also nominated for the “Best Fan Publication in Any Medium” award in 2019.
  • The Coode Street Podcast, the winner in our category this year, is a long-running bi-weekly show which describes itself as “an ongoing casual conversation between two friends about the nature of science fiction (among other things).” It launched in 2010. The two friends who host it are publisher and editor Jonathan Strahan, and editor, critic and humanities Professor Gary K. Wolfe. Prior to this win, The Coode Street Podcast had been nominated for seven Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award, and six Ditmar Awards…but not won any of them! (Sounds like we have a few more award nominations to rack up before we win anything…)
  • You can find out more about the cancellation of the 2022 Australian Discworld Convention on the official website at ausdwcon.org.
  • Ben is correct: Garth Nix won the Ditmar for Best Novel for his 2020 book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. It also won the 2020 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for the 2021 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

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

#Pratchat50 – Salt Rat Arsenic Heat

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Happy fiftieth episode to us! We’re celebrating with the return of our very first guest, comedian and author Cal Wilson! Cal joins Liz and Ben in the kitchen to brave the recipes within the 1999 Discworld side project Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, co-authored by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, with illustrations by Paul Kidby.

After his latest books are forcibly withdrawn from sale, J H C Goatberger reluctantly decides to publish another manuscript sent to him by Nanny Ogg. He hires a few editors to “put in the spelling, grammar and punctuation” and has his wife vet it for anything objectionable enough to get the book banned. The result is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a collection of Nanny’s own recipes, others she’s collected from around the Disc, and some of her wit, wisdom and advice – in particular when it comes to etiquette.

Published alongside The Fifth Elephant (see #Pratchat40), Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is one of several “in-universe artefact” books for the Discworld. It collects around fifty or so recipes – minus a dozen or so joke ones – devised by Hannan. Pratchett and Briggs round out the book with Nanny’s advice on matters of life, death, flowers and everything in between. Paul Kidby provides some great illustrations of various characters, dishes and other glimpses of Discworld life.

What do you think of books like this, that bring a bit of a fictional world into the real one? Which of Nanny’s recipes would you try? How do her observations match up with your own experiences of life, love and…um..toilet seats? Do you want a sausage-inna-Bunnings T-shirt? And are you ready to see pictures of our efforts? (Probably not…) Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat50 on social media.

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) was one of Australia and New Zealand’s most beloved comedians. She passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023, and is sorely missed. GNU Cal Wilson.

Cal previously guested in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, talking about Men at Arms and Sourcery, respectively. In between she published two children’s books – George and the Great Bum Stampede and George and the Great Brain Swappery. Cal was also no stranger to podcasts; she guested on dozens, including StoryKids reading a young listener’s story, “The Gloomy Mist”. She was also co-host of Money Power Freedom with journalist Santilla Chingaipe for the Victorian Women’s Trust.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site – including some photos of our culinary efforts! (Viewer discretion is advised.) And you can also find some more recipes from this book in our special “Oggswatch Feast” episode for 2021! (We might even do this again some day.)

December is a busy time for us! To further celebrate reaching fifty episodes, we’ve invited a bunch of great folks, including past guests, fellow Pratchett podcasters and more to cook a few more recipes for a special Hogswatch Feast episode! Watch out for it on Hogswatch day (i.e. December 25, Australian time).

We’re also recording our next episode very soon – December 17 in fact – and we’ll be discussing the next adventure for Tiffany Aching, 2006’s Wintersmith, with Australian fantasy author Garth Nix! So if you have questions, get them in “toot sweet”, as Nanny might say, using the hashtag #Pratchat51, 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.

#Pratchat49 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 49, “Once More, With Future“, featuring guest Richard Watts, discussing the 1995 short story “Once and Future“, originally published in the anthology Camelot.

  • The episode title is a on Pratchett’s original short story collection Once More* *with footnotes (more about that below) parodying the musical director’s cliche, “Once more, with feeling!” While it’s best known now as the title of the celebrated musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the phrase’s first use as a title was for the 1958 British play One More, with Feeling!, about an egomaniacal orchestra conductor and a harpist who have a terrible relationship. The play was filmed in 1960, starring Yul Brynner and Kay Kendall. (It’s billed as a comedy, but by modern standards it mostly sounds kind of gross.)
  • The Colour of Magic was first published by Colin Smythe on 24 November, 1983. Depending on the edition he managed to get hold of, Richard might indeed have read it in 1984, but it’s perhaps more likely he’d have read it in 1985, when the first Corgi paperback edition was published in a much larger print run. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“, for more on The Colour of Magic.)
  • As we do on our About page, it’s considered respectful to acknowledge the traditional owners or custodians of the places where we live and work in Australia. As Richard mentions, he’s lived on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung Peoples (which includes the city of Bendigo), the Gunaikurnai people (Gippsland), and the Wurundjeri (Narrm/Melbourne). Pratchat is made on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurung People, who like the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung are part of the Kulin Nation. We encourage all our listeners to research the local people of wherever you live, even outside Australia, especially if you live in a colonised place.
  • Little penguins – also called fairy penguins in Australia, and kororā in New Zealand – are the world’s smallest penguin species. A large colony of the penguins famously walk in a “parade” every night along the beach on Philip Island, which is located in Port Philip Bay south of Melbourne.
  • ArtsHub is Australia’s biggest professional arts industry resource website, established about twenty years ago. As well as industry news, it is also a primary source for listing and finding arts jobs in Australia. It makes money primarily through selling listings and ads, and paid memberships to industry professionals. It has expanded into a network of four main websites: ArtsHub, ArtsHub UK, ScreenHub (for the Australian screen industry) and GamesHub (for the videogame industry).
  • 3RRR community radio started as 3RMT, a student station at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1976. In 1979 it moved to Fitzroy and became 3RRR, and though the 70s, 80s and 90s picked up a significant following, especially among lovers of post punk and new wave music. In 2004 it moved to its present (and hopefully permanent) home in Brunswick East. While primarily a music station, it also broadcasts special and local interest programs about everything from science and technology to gardening and speculative fiction. Its morning show, The Breakfasters, It’s funded by sponsorships from local community businesses, and memberships purchased by listeners, mostly during an annual subscription drive. You can find the station at rrr.org.au, via various streaming apps or – if you’re in Melbourne – by tuning your radio to 102.7 FM.
  • Richard’s radio program SmartArts is broadcast on 3RRR every Thursday morning from 9 AM to Noon, and is also available as a podcast after the fact.
  • The Melbourne Fringe Festival is an open-access multi-arts festival held in Spring each year since 1982. Originally run by the Fringe Art Network, formed to preserve independent art after the closing of the alternative theatre venue Pram Factory, that organisation has since evolved into Melbourne Fringe. They now also operate a venue, the Fringe Common Rooms, at the Victorian Trades Hall.
  • We previously discussed the Matter of Britain thanks to an excellent pun in A Hat Full of Sky; see #Pratchat43 for more.
  • The Green Knight is a 2021 film directed by directed, written, edited and produced by American filmmaker David Lowery. It is an adaptation of the 14th century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which combined earlier folk tales into a story of one of Arthur’s knights, Gawain – played in the film by English actor Dev Patel. In Australia, it’s currently available to stream via Amazon Prime Video.
  • Pendragon is an Arthurian themed tabletop roleplaying game by Greg Stafford originally published in 1985 by Chaosium, the company behind Call of Cthulhu (see below). It’s based primarily on Le Morte d’Arthur (more about this later). Characters go on relatively few quests and adventures, spending most of their time pursuing courtly love, marrying and running a noble household, including siring heirs; Pendragon was notable for popularising generational play, in which players pay attention to their primary character’s family and eventually retire them, continuing play as the heir. Pendragon has had five editions, published by multiple companies including White Wolf (of Vampire: The Masquerade fame), but returned to Chaosium in 2018. A sixth edition is due to be released in 2021.
  • Chaosium is one of the earliest roleplaying game companies, formed in 1975. It’s best known for The Call of Cthulhu, a horror game based on the works of H P Lovecraft, first published in 1981 and currently in its seventh edition. Other notable Chaosium games include the fantasy game RuneQuest, occult mystery game Nephilim, and the Basic Roleplaying System, a generalised version of the rules used for many of their other games. They also now publish the swashbuckling fantasy 7th Sea (a favourite of Ben’s) and the chivalric romance Pendragon (see above).
  • Ernest Shackleton was one of many notable Antarctic explorers in the early twentieth century. In 1914, his ship the Endurance became trapped in ice and eventually destroyed, forcing his crew to abandon it. They were stranded in Antarctica for over 18 months, and amazingly Shackleton kept them all alive and got them rescued. Like fellow explorer and rival Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton kept a diary, and published an edited version of it. Both men’s diaries established the now well-known Shackleton’s diary style of recording hardship and hope in extreme conditions. For example: “Though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope, we are alive and have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us…”
  • Thor’s hammer – named Mjölnir, which translates to “the grinder” or “foe-grinder” – is important both to the original mythological figure (as much as there is a single original), and the Marvel comics superhero. The film and one version of the comic book story tell us that the hammer was forged from the magical metal uru in the heart of a star, and enchanted by Thor’s father, Odin, with various magical powers and properties, most famously the restriction that none may wield it unless they are “worthy” (the interpretation of which leads to some interesting storylines). In the early comics, Thor was enchanted such that he had a mortal persona, Dr Donald Blake, who was physically weak and required a cane to walk; the cane was actually Mjolnir in disguise, and he had to bang it on the ground to transform it and himself when Thor was needed. Some versions of the comics repeat the mythological origin of the hammer, which date back to at least the 11th century, and it appears in both the Prose and Poetic Edda, the main sources for stories of the Norse gods. In those stories, Mjölnir was forged by the dwarf Eitri as part of a bet, but Loki – who would lose if Eitri forged a superior treasure – turned into a fly and bothered Eitri such that he was distracted from his forge, causing the hammer to be made with a shorter than intended handle. Its powers in the mythology are more limited, but are possessed by both versions – it will strike as hard as Thor wishes; it can be thrown, and never miss its target; it will return to its owner; and it may be concealed inside a shirt. Unfortunately, like many major symbols of Norse mythology, the traditional depiction of Mjölnir has been appropriated as a symbol by racist and neo-nazi organisations, but those uses are still in a minority, and actively opposed by many modern pagan groups.
  • While the version of the Mjölnir electromagnet Ben discusses was not feasible – the hammer was meant to be normal so it could be taken away by whoever bought it – the trick has been done with a different scheme! Allen Pan devised a version for his YouTube channel Sufficiently Advanced made from a commercially available toy version of the movie Mjölnir, using an electromagnet made from microwave oven parts and using a thumbprint scanner in the handle, though to use it in public he needed to find a handy metal plate or sewer entrance cover.
  • Le Morte d’Arthur (“The Death of Arthur”; changed by the publisher from the original title, The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table) is the famous 15th century book remixing the folklore around King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was written by English nobleman and criminal Sir Thomas Malory during a stint in prison (assuming modern historians have his identity correct), and first published by William Caxton in 1485. Its vision of Arthur has influenced nearly every major new version in the centuries since, including most of the novels and films we mention during this episode. Of note, Malory based it on earlier French and Middle English versions of the stories, though exactly which sources are unclear.
  • The sword in the stone dates back to the early 13th century, where it appears stuck in an anvil atop a stone in a churchyard on Christmas Eve, either in Londinium (London) or Logres, an old name derived from the Welsh Lloegyr, describing the region of southern and eastern England ruled by Arthur. Later versions have placed the stone in various more specific places, and often leave out the anvil, placing the sword directly in the stone itself.
  • Once More* with footnotes was a collection of Pratchett’s shorter writings – fiction and non-fiction – published by the New England Science Fiction Association to mark Pratchett’s attendance as Guest of Honour at Noreascon Four, the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention. (There’s no separate World SF Convention; pre-existing conventions around the world take turns to host it, a bit like cities hosting the Olympics.) Nearly everything in Once More* with footnotes shows up in the later (and still in print) books A Blink of the Screen (short fiction) and A Slip of the Keyboard (non-fiction), which also include stuff written after 2004. But there are a small number of unique things in the earlier collection, and since the original had only three limited print runs (and a much better title), it’s still sought after by Pratchett collectors. We’ll have to track down a copy so we can share with you the few goodies inside that didn’t make it into the later books.
  • We’ve previously mentioned that, as per the conditions of his will, Terry’s hard drives containing his unfinished books were all destroyed by being crushed under a steam roller. Presumably his floppy discs would have suffered a similar fate, otherwise there’s a bit of a get out clause in which the hard drives’ contents could have been backed up beforehand…
  • The Long Earth (not The Long World, but look, it’s been a long few lockdowns) is Terry’s sci-fi series co-written with Stephen Baxter. We’ve already covered the first two books: The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, and The Long War in #Pratchat46.
  • While this episode of Pratchat comes in between Thief of Time (#Pratchat48) and Night Watch (watch out for it early in 2022), both books were written several years after “Once and Future”. The later books were published in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
  • Ben didn’t have much luck finding the tweet about what you should take back in time; given the answer to the question, possibly the search was complicated by the recent release of a certain big budget film about the intergalactic spice trade… (That, and the tweet we think it was has since been deleted by the author.)
  • As Richard reveals later in the podcast, the historical Merlin is thought to be the poet and seer Myrddin Wyllt (“Myrddin the Wild”) from “the Old North” of England, the bit near Scottish lands. Myrddin is a Welsh name, anglicised into “Merlin” by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th century British Catholic priest who lived in Wales and wrote Historia regum Britanniae, a history of British Kings which mixes real history with stories, and one of the oldest sources for King Arthur. (Richard has more to say about the historical Merlin at around the 39:53 mark.)
  • As Richard notes, the sword in the stone is not always Excalibur. In earlier stories they are usually the same sword. When Arthur is dying, he tasks one of his knights to throw the sword into a lake, where a hand rises from the water to catch it. Later versions move this event to earlier, and Arthur is given back the sword by the Lady of the Lake. In still later versions, the sword from the stone is broken, and Arthur gets a new one – Excalibur – from the Lady (aka Nimue etc; see below). Nice one, Arthur Two-Swords. (This will all become relevant again when we talk about The Watch.)
  • In the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Arthur (Graham Chapman) accidentally insults a peasant named Dennis, who claims to be part of an “anarchs-syndicalist commune” and derides Arthur’s claim to the divine right to rule:

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Arthur: Shut up!

Dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones)
  • The idea of an historical Roman-era Arthur comes from the earliest surviving source which mentions him: the Historia Brittonum (History of Britain) from the early ninth century CE, attributed to the Welsh priest Nennius. It describes a leader of warriors named Arthur who fought with the kings of the Britons; only later sources name him as a king as well. These battles supposedly happened three hundred years earlier, and do agree with earlier sub-Roman British sources from the 6th century, notably De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae by Gildas the Wise, which includes a British victory against the Saxons. Gildas, however, doesn’t name Arthur or any other military commanders or kings, and modern historians are generally in agreement that he is a mythical figure, even if he was inspired by the stories of several historical people. (For more on the archaeological evidence, see our note about Leslie Alcock below.)
  • Ben refers to several events where Mervin might have ended up in the modern day that we’ll quickly explain:
    • “Ren-Fair” is short for “Renaissance Fair”, a popular form of medieval re-enactment of varying levels of historical accuracy that is popular in the United States.
    • LARP is an acronym for “Live Action Role Play”, and describes a particular style of roleplaying game in which players dress in costumes and act in character, often in an outdoor setting, and sometimes with mock combat using props and safe weaponry. Note that not all LARP games are medieval, or violent; many styles of LARP are quite rules-light and are more like an immersive form of improvised theatre.
    • Ben uses the term “conference” when describing a roleplaying con; usually such an event – where players gather to play a number of shorter games over a weekend – is called a “convention”.
  • Pratchett first mentions the “trousers of time” in Guards! Guards! (we talked about it in #Pratchat7A). For more on possible influences and origins for the phrase, see the episode notes for #Pratchat27 (about Jingo).
  • Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin – better known as Enya – is an Irish musician famous for her distinctive and multi-tracked vocals and Celtic influence. Her song “Orinoco Flow”, from her 1988 second album Watermark, was a global hit and helped make her the second-best selling Irish artist of all time, behind U2.
  • Nimue and Viviane are two of the traditional names for the Lady of the Lake, though there are many, many variations. Her origins are not certain, but she is likely drawn from one or several stories from Irish or Welsh traditions. The sorceress Morgan Le Fay, who has a complicated relationship with Merlin and Arthur, is usually a separate figure, but in some later stories is conflated with or said to be close to the Lady.
  • Mary Stewart (1916-2014) is the British author of the Merlin novels, which began with The Crystal Cave, first published in 1970. It was followed by The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979), the three books forming a trilogy telling the story of Merlin from the age of six through to his retirement after trying to help Arthur avoid the schemes of Morgause, mother of Mordred. Stewart later added two more novels: The Wicked Day (1983), which continues the story without Merlin using Mordred as the main character, and the much later The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995), which is a standalone novel set during Arthur’s reign in the earlier books, focussing on a pair of new protagonists.
  • The 1998 Merlin miniseries, made for US network NBC, stars Sam Neill as the titular wizard. He is not trapped in a crystal cave, but at the start of the (sort-of) sequel, 2006’s Merlin’s Apprentice, he decides to sleep for a while to rejuvenate, and does so in a cave that does indeed seem to have crystals. He’s not trapped, but he doesn’t set his alarm, and so accidentally wakes fifty years later to find Camelot in ruins.
  • “The one with the young Merlin” is the 2008 BBC TV series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan as Merlin, a young “warlock” who comes to Camelot under the rule of the magic-hating king Uther Pendragon (played by Anthony Head of Buffy fame), and befriends his son, the knight Arthur, and his love, servant Guinevere (known as Gwen). He is mentored by Gaius, Uther’s court physician, and the Great Dragon (voiced by John Hurt!), the last of his kind after Uther killed all his kin and imprisoned him under the castle. He’s not imprisoned in the Crystal Cave, but does visit it a couple of times. Nimueh also appears, but this version of the character is a human witch, a High Priestess of the Old Religion outlawed along with magic by Uther. She and Merlin did not get along.
  • Pratchett did indeed live near places associated with Arthur. From Broad Chalke, where he lived from 1993 until his death in 2015, it’s only 40km (25 miles) west to Cadbury Castle, a famous site of archaeological work related to Arthur (see the note about Leslie Alcock below), and 55km (about 34 miles) to the northwest to Glastonbury. Glastonbury Abbey is said to be the resting place of Arthur and Guinevere – tombstones bearing their names were found within, as were the bones of two people, though this seems likely to have been a scam by 12th century monks hoping to attract pilgrims. Glastonbury Abbey was also originally on an island in a lake – now dried up – and so is also given as the location of the Isle of Avalon. A bit further afield, around 200km (125 miles) to the west of Broad Chalke on the coast of Cornwall, lies Tintagel Castle, the most popular choice of location for Camelot itself. A sea cave underneath is known as Merlin’s Cave.
  • We found this very interesting 2018 article about the rise of salt and pepper as the key Western spices on NPR’s Gnawing Questions column.
  • Ben is thinking of the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution, which was most famously championed by fantasy author Ursula Le Guin in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in 1986. She refers to Carrier Bag Theory as the work of Elizabeth Fisher, from Fisher’s 1979 book Women’s Creation (though Le Guin cites it as being published in 1975), and quotes’ Fisher’s claim that “the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.” Sadly Fisher’s sources for this are not listed, her book has been out of print for twenty years, and it’s not easy to find much information about her. This might be partly explained by the essay, in which Le Guin makes the point that our patriarchal view of stories preferences the traditional “man’s first tools were clubs and spears” narrative, since it has excitement and violence (and is about men). For more on her essay, see this great 2019 article at The Outline, which makes a compelling argument that we should all read more of Le Guin’s explicitly feminist work. (If you want to get started, you can find the original essay online at The Anarchist Library.)
  • Romans did indeed have running water and heating, available – at least in wealthy homes – as early as 200 BCE, when they discovered lead was a cheap and easy to work material from which to make water pipes, which connected to the aqueducts for which they were famous. Aqueducts are elevated water courses which use a slight downward gradient to transport water over large distances using just the force of gravity. There’s a theory that the lead piping would have lead to widespread lead poisoning, and contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, but this is contested. As for heating, they used an underfloor heating system called a hypocaust, in which a fire heated air ducted into the room above; this seems to have been mainly used in baths and large common buildings, and only the most lavish private homes.
  • Ben’s essay about silk and potatoes was largely based on the 1998 book Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy, by British writer Adam Roberts. Roberts, it turns out, went on to be an award-winning novelist, best known for his sci-fi novels like Salt (2000), Gradisil (2006) and Jack Glass (2012), and for writing numerous short but broad parodies of popular sci-fi and fantasy works including The Soddit, Star Warped and The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo. He is still a scholar of mythology and fantasy, and some of his novels and short stories are pastiches of Arthur, Jules Verne and others.
  • It’s impossible to know how many knights of the round table there were, on account of them not being real and there being so many different accounts! Wikipedia lists more than fifty significant Arthurian knights worthy of their own articles, though Ben’s guess that Arthur and his knights are “fourteen people” is probably reasonable for a “pub test” of how many most people could name.
  • The time travel business with Shakespeare in Jasper Fforde’s books is a minor event in the first of the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair. (The time traveller in question is Thursday’s mysterious father, Colonel Next.)
  • A bootstrap paradox – more formally a “causal loop”, but also called a predestination paradox in fiction – is one in which something causes itself to happen through the use of time travel, making the actual cause seemingly non-existent. For example, if a time traveller constructs a time machine using plans they have found, then goes back in time to hide the plans where their past self found them…where did the plans originally come from? Who created them? The Twelfth Doctor explains the bootstrap paradox with a musical example in a prelude to the Doctor Who episode “Before the Flood”.
  • Richard is spot on with his details about Michael Moorcock’s time travel story Behold the Man. The novella version, published in New Worlds magazine, won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1967.
  • For more about Moorcock publishing Pratchett, see the notes for our previous short story episodes #Pratchat39 and #Pratchat45.
  • Sir Ector first appears by that name in versions of the story from around the 12th century. His son Kay goes back to the Welsh versions, where his father was known as Cynyr.
  • The Sword in the Stone is the first of four short novels written by T H White, which were revised and expanded into a series (and collected into a single book) as The Once and Future King in 1958. The four books are:
    • The Sword in the Stone (1938), which covers Arthur’s youth, and was adapted into the famous Disney animated film in 1963.
    • The Witch in the Wood (1939), in which Arthur grows up, creates the Round Table and secures his kingship; it was renamed The Queen of Air and Darkness and heavily rewritten for the Once and Future King version.
    • The Ill-Made Knight (1940), mostly about Lancelot – the knight of the title – but also the quest for the Holy Grail.
    • The Candle in the Wind (1958), which covers the end of Arthur’s reign and his death. It was first published in the collected edition of the books. This book and the previous one were adapted into the stage musical Camelot in 1960, which was then turned into a 1967 film starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave as Arthur and Guinevere.
  • As hinted in the story itself, both Arthur and Ursula are names associated with words for “bear”, though as usual with etymology of old names and words its not simple. “Arthur” is certainly an old Welsh name, but it has become so linked to the Arthurian legend that it’s hard to find early sources that don’t reference the stories. It may come from Roman or Welsh origins, though for complex linguistic reasons not directly from the Welsh word for bear, which is arth. Mervin refers to him as “Artos the Bear”, which is the name given to a Roman-era, Celtic, “real” version of Arthur in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s 1963 novel Sword at Sunset. Ursula, meanwhile, is straightforward: while popular across Europe, it is a diminutive form of the Latin word for bear, ursa, as in the constellations of Ursa Minor and Ursa Major.
  • Johnny Lee Miller is an English actor best known for his (vastly different) roles in Trainspotting as “Sick Boy” and a modern Sherlock Holmes, working in New York, in Elementary. Elementary ran for seven seasons on CBS between 2012 and 2019, and is possibly our favourite version of Holmes, certainly for television. It also stars Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson, plus Aidan Quinn as Captain Gregson and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell, members of the NTPD who engage Holmes and Watson as consultants. Miller’s next major television project is the upcoming fifth season of The Crown, in which he will play UK Prime Minister John Major.
  • The Arhurian films we mention are:
    • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017, dir. Guy Ritchie), starring Charlie Hunnam as Arthur and Jude Law as Vortigern;
    • King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua), “the Bronze Age one”, starring Clive Owen as Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot and Keira Knightley as Guinevere;
    • First Knight (1995, dir. Jerry Zucker), the one with Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Julia Ormond – “the gauntlet scene” features Gere’s Lancelot navigating an obstacle course in order to win a kiss from Guinevere.
    • Excalibur (1981, dir. John Boorman), the good one, though it’s forty years old and hasn’t aged well in some respects. It features many actors in supporting roles who’d go on to be much more famous than its stars, including Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne. Nicol Williamson’s Merlin and Helen Mirren’s Morgana Le Fay are especially brilliant, though.
    • The Kid Who Would Be King (2019, dir. Joe Cornish) stars Louis Ashbourne Serkis (son of Andy “Gollum” Serkis) as Alex, the modern-day who finds Excalibur. It also features Patrick Stewart as an older version of Merlin, though most of the time he’s played by Angus Imrie in a younger form (he ages backwards, as in many versions of the myth).
    • The Green Knight (2021, dir. David Lowery) – see the earlier note above.
  • Peter Jackson, while best known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, had been a filmmaker in New Zealand for many years beforehand. After his early cult horror-comedy films Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989) – see also #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles” – and Braindead (1992), he found international acclaim with his 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, also the feature film debut of Kate Winslet. His 1996 film The Frighteners, a dark supernatural comedy starring Michael J Fox, was his first for a Hollywood studio. In 1999 he adapted Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, about a teenage girl who is murdered and resists entering Heaven so she can watch over her family. His most feature was Mortal Engines, which he produced but did not direct; it’s also an adaptation of a novel, in this case the 2001 steampunk-is YA fantasy by Philip Reeve. It had a huge budget but was also not a success. Jackson’s first “documentary” was Forgotten Silver, actually a mockumentary telling the story of a forgotten New Zealand pioneer in filmmaking, Colin McKenzie, who never really existed. Jackson has a fascination with World War I, and in 2018 released the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old to general acclaim; the film uses modern animation and reconstruction techniques to bring archival film and photographs of the war to life. His next work is indeed a documentary: The Beatles: Get Back is a three part series using the same techniques as They Shall Not Grow Old to tell the story of the making of the Beatles album Let It Be. Ben is cautiously excited. (The documentary West of Memphis, about Elvis, was produced by Jackson, but not directed by him.)
  • Marty McFly has to avoid meeting himself towards the end of Back to the Future Part II, when he and Doc Brown travel back to 1955 and interact with events from the first film.
  • Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court follows the story of Hank Morgan, an engineer from Hartford, Connecticut who gets hit on the head and wakes up in King Arthur’s court. He sets about using his superior technical knowledge to gain power and influence, earning him the ire of Merlin. It has been adapted for the screen many times; the first one was a silent film in 1921.
  • Disney’s run of sci-fi and fantasy films occurred mostly in the 1970s. Ben mentions The Cat from Outer Space (1978, dir. Norman Tokar) and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975, dir. John Hough); others include the Witch Mountain sequel Return from Witch Mountain (1978, dir. John Hough), The Island at the Top of the World (1974, dir. Robert Stevenson) and The Black Hole (1979, dir. Gary Nelson).
  • Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979, dir. Russ Mayberry), aka The Spaceman and King Arthur and A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court, starred Dennis Dugan as Tom Trimble and the android Hermes. Dugan later went into directing, specialising in whacky comedies, and has worked frequently with Adam Sandler; his films include Problem Child (1900), Brain Donors (1992), Happy Gilmore (1996), Jack and Jill (2011) and most recently Love, Weddings and Other Disasters (2020). Meanwhile Unidentified Flying Oddball co-stars many actors famous in the UK, including Jim Dale (of Carry On fame) as Mordred, Ron Moody (best known as Fagin in Oliver!) as Merlin and Dad’s Army star John Le Mesurier as Sir Gawain. It’s available on streaming services, including Disney+.
  • The Mists of Avalon is Marion Zimmer-Bradley’s retelling of the Arthurian story from the perspective of its women, most notably Morgaine, who is trying to prevent her pagan religion from being ousted by Christianity. It was first published in 1983, and eventually followed by seven sequels. In 2001 it was adapted for television as a mini-series for American cable network TNT, starring Julianna Margulies as Morgaine and featuring Anjelica Huston as Viviane, the Lady of the Lake.
  • Etrigan the Demon is a superhero character created by Jack Kirby for DC Comics, first appearing in his own series The Demon in 1972. In the origin version, Etrigan – a large, yellow and powerful demon – is summoned by Merlin, who is his half-brother via the demon Belial. (This is in line with many myths, which call Merlin a “cambion” or half-demon, citing this as the source of his power.) When Etrigan refuses to tell Merlin what he wants to know, he binds the demon’s soul to that of Jason Blood, one of Arthur’s knights, making Blood immortal. Blood lives into the modern day, where he is a noted demonologist; on a trip to Gotham City he discovers a poem which can cause him to transform into Etrigan (they effectively swap places), and develops an uneasy friendship with the demon, working together to fight against greater evils. Etrigan’s dialogue is usually written in rhyming verse, something of a tradition for demons in DC comics. A revision of this story in later comics has Blood and Etrigan working together from soon after the bonding, leading a medieval superhero team known as the Demon Knights. While a lesser-known DC character, Etrigan is nonetheless quite popular, and continues to appear in comics today.
  • Jabberwocky is Terry Gilliam’s 1971 comedy film, his first as solo director. It’s very loosely based on the Lewis Carroll poem, which appears in Through the Looking Glass. Jabberwocky stars Michael Palin as Dennis, a cooper’s apprentice, who tries to find his fortune while the titular monster terrifies the local population. The combination of ridiculous gore, filth, slapstick comedy and period griminess give it look and tone similar to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though it’s not nearly as funny.
  • The “Dorito flavour would overwhelm someone from centuries ago” tweet that Liz mention is this one, from Matt Crowley, a staff writer for The Onion:
  • The “pub test” is a phrase used often in recent Australian media and political discussions to mean something the average Australian person – such as the folks drinking in your local pub – would understand or agree with. It’s been a subject of some debate, particularly amongst conservatives who don’t like the idea that it might show they’re out of touch, but it is analogous to ideas in law of what a “reasonable person” would think – especially in terms of understanding a risk. In old-fashion UK legal terminology, this was often phrased as “the man on the Clapham Omnibus”, or in Australian terms, “the man on the Bondi tram”.
  • The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) was founded in 1966, at the University of California Berkley. The name was coined by fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was an early member. It still exists, with tens of thousands of members and participants worldwide, administered by various “Kingdoms” “ruled” by a King and Queen. The SCA is pretty upfront that they have a variable approach to historical accuracy, selecting the fun and interesting aspects of pre-seventeenth century culture – i.e. they don’t let the meat get rotten, but do try to use the cooking techniques and ingredients of the time. The idea is to learn about this period by actively participating in activities, rather than just reading about them. Members choose names appropriate to the period and have a lot of fun. You can find out more about them at sca.org.
  • Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, usually known as Nikolai Tolstoy, is a British historian and current head of the House of Tolstoy, a Russian noble family, and a distant cousin to “the other Tolstoy” – Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace. As well as the scholarly book Richard mentions, The Quest for Merlin (1985), Nikolai Tolstoy has written an Arthurian novel, The Coming of the King (1988). His non-Arthurian work is largely about World War II and historical and political issues around Russia – unsurprising as his father fled the country in 1920 in the aftermath of the revolution. He is also an outspoken monarchist and a member of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, which championed Brexit, though while he has run for office has never been elected.
  • Leslie Alcock OBE FSA FSA Scot FRSE (1925 – 2006) was a prominent archaeologist and expert in Early Medieval Britain. Born in Manchester, he was Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University and the University of Glasgow, and is best known for his excavations in the late 1960s at Cadbury Castle – a site long associated with King Arthur. He made the most of this famous association, attracting the attention of the media. This attention popularised the open excavation style now employed by most archaeologists, including those on Time Team. His book Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology was published in 1971, and popularised the idea of an historical Arthur as a war leader in sub-Roman Britain who led fights against the Saxons, agreeing with this historical sources mentioned above. Later scholars have increasingly questioned if an historical Arthur existed at all – the stories are more likely an amalgamation of several real people, where they have any basis in reality – but many live in hope.
  • On that note, Richard’s pick for a possible historical Arthur is Riothamus, a Romano-British military leader from around 470 CE. His name comes from the old British Celtic language, Brythonic, and either means “the most kingly” or “freest”; he was described by sixth-century historian Jordanes as “King of the Britons”, though what that would have meant in the late 5th century isn’t entirely clear. Regardless, he’s a good choice.
  • The Disney animated film Robin Hood – the one with the fox – was released in 1973. As well as translating the characters into animals, it takes a few liberties with the traditional story – most notably, none of the Merry Men appear other than Little John and Friar Tuck. It remains a favourite, though critically has had mixed reviews; the most notable voice actor is Peter Ustinov as both Prince John and King Richard.
  • Robin of Sherwood was an ITV series which ran for three series between 1984 and 1986. Michael Praed played Robin of Loxley, the first Robin Hood, for the first two series, but is replaced in series three by Jason Connery – yes, son of Sean – as his successor, Robert of Huntingdon, chosen by the shamanic figure Herne (named for the Celtic god of the hunt, Herne the Hunter – parodying in Pratchett’s Lord and Ladies as Herne the Hunted). Other notable actors to appear were John Rhys-Davies as King Richard, Ray Winstone as Will Scarlett, and Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame as a sorcerer.
  • Ben brings up Cary Elwes, and we continue to talk about his famous go at being Robin Hood, but somehow no-one mentions that the film in question is Mel Brooks’ 1993 parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The “character with the mole” mentioned by Liz is Prince John, played in the film by American comedian Richard Lewis.
  • Modern jeans date back to 1871, when Jacob W. Davis added rivets to the pockets of blue denim jeans for the Levi Strauss company. But the term “jeans” dates back to at least 1795, and denim dyed blue with indigo is older still. While Jack Kerouac and the beats did wear jeans – working class clothing was common for them – blue jeans’ big cultural moment was when James Dean wore them in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, associating them with rebellious youth. For a really great history of blue jeans, we recommend “Blue Jeans“, episode five of Avery Trufelman’s Articles of Interest, a podcast mini-series about clothing released as part of Ben’s favourite design podcast, 99% Invisible.
  • The ångström (Å) is a metric unit of length, with 1Å equivalent to 1×10-10 metres (or one ten-billionth of a metre). It is not part of the standard System Internationale (SI) of units, but still sees use in physics and other natural sciences where there is a need to describe the size of atoms and sub-atomic structures. It’s named for 19th-century Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, though we note that Pratchett uses the unusual spelling “Ångstrom”, which preserves only one of the Swedish characters.
  • The Chinese story of the archer who shot down the extra suns is the story of Hou Yi (后裔), also known as Shen Yi or just Yi. There are many versions of his story, but he is nearly always married to Chang’e (嫦娥), who is – or becomes – goddess of the Moon.
  • We’ve previously talked about Journey to the West (西遊記), by Wu Cheng’en – and especially the 1980s Japanese television adaptation, Monkey, which was very popular in Australia – in #Pratchat18 (The Dark Side of the Sun). We also talked about various versions of the story in episode six of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club. The standard English translation of the original novel has long been the abridged version by Arthur Waley, published in 1942. The new translation is Monkey King: Journey to the West, by Julia Lovell, published in 2021; it’s received some glowing reviews, including this one from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • We covered Eric back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“. Rincewind’s psuedo-Odysseus ancestor is Lavaeolus, whose name is roughly Latin (or Latatian, the Discworld equivalent) for “Rinser of Winds”.
  • The Hercules movie with the Rock is Hercules (2014, dir. Brett Ratner), based on a graphic novel by Steve Moore, though Moore received no payment for the eventual film and was subsequently very reasonably upset that his name was used prominently in marketing the film. Other notable cast include Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell and John Hurt.
  • Agatha Christie’s The Labours of Hercules was published in 1947 and the mysteries within all star her least favourite creation, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The stories had all been previously published in periodicals. Poirot prefaces the collection, saying that he has chosen these cases to fit the theme, and hopes to close his career as a detective with their account, though Christie did not get her way and several more collections of stories and novels were published after this one. Eleven of his mysteries come chronologically after, so Poirot didn’t get his way either; his final case is Curtain, written by Christie during World War II, but not published until 1975 – the last of her works published before her death in January 1976.
  • C S Lewis and his take on schools?
  • The tweet comparing C S Lewis and Tolkien’s attitudes to their allegories is (probably) this one:
  • Ophelia is a 2018 film directed by Claire McCarthy, adapted by Semi Chellas from the novel Ophelia by Lisa Klein. Alongside Daisy Ridley as Ophelia the cast features Naomi Watts as Gertrude, Clive Owen as Claudius, and Tom Felton as Laertes.
  • Ben mentions Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which he also talked about in a bit cut from #Pratchat46 and featured in our most recent Ook Club episode as a bit of bonus content. Novik’s other novel is a similar vein is Spinning Silver, which is loosely based on the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
  • The series Richard discusses is A Fairy Tale Revolution from Penguin Books. Aimed at younger readers, it comprises Hansel and Greta by Jeanette Winterson, Blueblood by Malorie Blackman, Duckling by Kamila Shamsie (all illustrated by Laura Barrett) and Cinderella Liberator by Rebecca Solnit (illustrated by Arthur Rackham).
  • Nullus Anxietas 7A, the one-before-the-ninth Australian Discworld Convention, is happening in Sydney from the 8th to the 10th of April, 2022. Get all the details via ausdwcon.org.
  • “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” are the famous words uttered by Oz, the Great and Terrible, when his giant magical face is exposed as a sham by the drawing of the curtain where the actual Oz, a regular human from Dorothy’s world, is operating the head’s controls.
  • A Slip of the Keyboard, as mentioned in the note about Once More* with footnotes above, is the 2014 collection of Pratchett’s non-fiction writings. We’ll try and fit it in somewhere, though many of its works are so short that they probably wouldn’t work as individual episodes…
  • We discussed Pratchett’s standalone Dickins pastiche Dodger way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
  • We’re not sure if the world is ready for a photo of the weird brick mouse thing, but we’ll see if Liz can find one.
  • The “Lovecraft Circle” was a group of “weird fiction” writers who, though they never met him in person, regularly corresponded with Lovecraft, sharing and using motifs and ideas which appear in their collective writings. As well as Clark Ashton-Smith, the Circle’s most well-known members included August Derleth, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long. Robert W Chambers was not a member of the Circle; he was active significantly earlier, having written The King in Yellow in 1895, when Lovecraft himself was only five years old.
  • Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrman released The Great Gatsby in 2013. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki (soon to be seen as Princess Diana in The Crown). There was huge buzz around the film, generated by a trailer released a year in advance, but its critical reception on release was lukewarm at best.

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