Ben McKenzie – Page 18

#Pratchat10 Notes and Errata

8 August 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, featuring guest Dan Golding, discussing the 1990 book Truckers – the first of the Bromeliad trilogy.

The episode title riffs on Roy Scheider’s famous line in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws. Out on the sea in shark hunter Quint’s small fishing vessel, the Orca, police chief Marcus Brody unexpectedly gets a close-up look at the killer shark while throwing bait overboard. Brody backs away into the cabin, stunned, and tells Quint: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The line was ad-libbed by Schneider during shooting. The scene was extended in the final cut to give more of a pause between the shark’s appearance and the one-liner, as test audiences were still screaming and missed the gag. You can watch this part of the scene on YouTube.
To hear Dan talk about Star Wars music, check out the five Star Wars episodes of Art of the Score (the original film actually gets three episodes!), or watch the video he made for the ABC explaining why the theme is so great.
The previous book that kicked off with Death overseeing the passing of a previously unmet character was Sourcery, in which Ipslore the Red dies but tricks Death, passing his soul into his staff. We almost get this sort of beginning in Pyramids, but Pteppic’s father only dies after the school days flashback section of the book, and again in Guards! Guards!, though Gaskin dies before the book starts and we instead join Vimes after the funeral.
In the real world, cellulose is an organic compound vital to the structure of cells in green plants, while celluloid (eventually a trademark name) was the first kind of thermoplastic, made from cellulose nitrate, used to replace ivory in billiard balls (as discussed in episode one) and widely as a filmstock before the development of safer, cheaper and easier to make acetate film in the 1950s.
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in which multiple (fictional) plots to kill nazi leaders during World War II converge on a Paris cinema at the premiere of a new propaganda film.
Liz refers to the 1903 film Electrocuting an Elephant, produced by the Edison Film Company, in which Topsy the circus elephant, who had killed several people, was executed via electrocution on Coney Island. The film was distributed but thankfully doesn’t seem to have been as popular as the company’s other films, though it still exists. It’s sometimes claimed to have been funded by Thomas Edison in an effort to discredit Nicola Tesla’s alternating current as unsafe during the War of the Currents, but the timeline of events makes that unlikely.
“Play it again, Sam” is probably the most famous mis-quote in cinema history, and is not from the 1942 film Casablanca. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) supposedly says it to the piano player in his bar, but what he actually says is “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.”
Listener Ian Banks let us know on Twitter that Victor’s arrangement with his income is a nod to the character Grimsdike from Richard Gordon’s Doctor novels, who receives a generous stipend as long as he’s a medical student. The series began with 1952’s Doctor in the House, lasted for 18 books, and was adapted many times for film and television. The early television versions in the 70s were adapted by members of Monty Python and the Goodies, including actual doctors Graham Chapman and Graeme Garden.
Victor’s single exam question may be a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When the Arthurian knights reach the ominous Bridge of Death, its keeper tells them they must answer his three questions before they can cross his bridge. His first question: “What…is your name?”
You can see the dance from 1951’s Royal Wedding on YouTube here – or, if you like to know how the sausage-inna-bun is made, you can watch this version that shows what Astaire’s experience on set was like.
Disney’s Snow White was released in 1937, but as Dan pointed out in a bit that hit our cutting room floor, Steamboat Willie – the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, and the first animated film with synchronised sound – was released almost a decade earlier in 1928.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), directed by animator and cartoonist Winsor McCay, wasn’t the first animated film, but was the first to use several important animation techniques including keyframes and animation loops. It was originally used by McCay as part of a live vaudeville act in which he commanded Gertie to perform tricks, but was eventually released with a live action introduction. Gertie was also the first animated dinosaur on film. You can watch it on YouTube here (we’ve skipped the live part).
Also cut for time: Dan mentioned that other pioneers of anthropomorphic animation included Felix the Cat and the singing, swaying trees of early Merry Melodies.
George Méliès was a French film director whose most famous work is probably A Trip to the Moon (1902), based loosely on two of Jules Verne’s novels and widely considered the world’s first science fiction film. You can watch the hand-painted colour version on YouTube here.
Dan’s version of the book is the Collector’s Library edition, and you can see its beautiful cover at the Discworld Emporium. Liz has the modern paperback (also available at the Discworld Emporium), but you can see Josh Kirby’s full original cover illustration – as featured on Ben’s early paperback – at this Cultured Vultures review of the book. The original hardcover with the Superman/Ben-Hur styled title can be found in this Gizmodo collection of the best Discworld covers.
Wikimedia has a great photo of the Han dynasty seismograph from 132 CE. Well…a recreation of it, anyway. No-one’s quite sure how the internal mechanism worked but historical records indicate it was accurate.
The “Odium” is a pun on Odeon Cinemas, a chain of movie theatres in the UK, Ireland and Norway, the first one opening in 1928. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word for various buildings built for musical purposes. (The Rhoxie, the Seriph of Al-Khali’s fabulous palace featured in Sourcery, is mentioned as a possible better name; both are references to the famous Roxie Theatre in San Francisco, the longest continually-operating movie theatre in the US.)
The roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu was first released in 1981 (seven years after Dungeons & Dragons), and is named after a Lovecraft short story. It’s currently in its seventh edition.
The Necronomicon by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred is a fictional book of evil magic mentioned in many of Lovecraft’s stories. Its contents mainly concern the “Great Old Ones”, ancient cosmic beings beyond the understanding of mortal minds, and ways in which to summon them. Doing so is always a terrible idea.
The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets are a nerdy Canadian rock band whose lyrics are largely inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Their albums include faux-soundtrack Spaceship Zero, rock opera The Shadow Out of Tim (a loose retelling of one of Lovecraft’s last stories, The Shadow Out of Time) and of course The Dukes of Alhazred. You can find them all on the Thickets’ BandCamp page.
Multiple online sources cite the origin of “that’s not a thing” as a 2001 episode of That 70’s Show (“Donna’s Panties”) or a 2003 episode of Friends (“The One Where Rachel’s Sister Babysits”). Moving Pictures predates both by more than a decade.
Several fan-invented rulesets exist for Cripple Mr Onion; Andrew C. Millard and Terry Tao invented one for a deck with eight suits (a standard poker deck plus an Italian/Tarot suited deck) and posted it to newsgroups in the 1990s, where Pterry apparently approved. Those rules were later adapted by Stephen Briggs into a version using only a complete tarot deck, published as an appendix in Turtle Recall, the fourth revision of The Discworld Companion.
North by Northwest (1959) starred Cary Grant as Roger O Thornhill, an advertising executive who is mistaken for a spy, and Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman he meets as he tries to evade capture. In addition to the middle initial, the opening sequence of Thornhill dictating a memo to a secretary while they travel through New York is also supposedly a dig at David O Selznick, who reportedly did this frequently. (It’s worth mentioning that Selznick had produced his final film, A Farewell to Arms, two years earlier, and had not produced a Hitchcock film since 1947’s The Paradine Case.)
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a 1958 science fiction film about a wealthy heiress who grows to a height of 50 feet after an encounter with a giant alien. It was remade for HBO in 1992 by Christopher Guest with Darryl Hanna in the lead role.
Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World imagines a 26th century America in which the human population has been genetically engineered into castes; the more intelligent castes are kept peaceful and compliant through various entertainments, including the happiness-inducing drug soma, and “feelies” – films that induce physical sensations through metal knobs grasped by viewers.
The “Penfield Mood Organ” appears in the opening pages of the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the film Blade Runner. By dialling a number a person’s mood can be set to any one of hundreds of specific states, including 481, “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future”, and 888, “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”.
“If it bleeds, we can kill it” is a famous line of dialogue from the 1987 sci-fi action film Predator, delivered by paramilitary team leader Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) after his team finds the bright green blood of the alien hunter who’s been killing them off.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the direct sequel to Frankenstein (1931), both starring Boris Karloff as “The Monster” and directed by James Whale. At the conclusion of the second film, the Monster is rejected by the Bride made for him; he tells the Bride and her creator “we belong dead” before he tearfully destroys the lab, killing all three.
There have been a lot of King Kong films, but Dan recommends the 1933 original, which he informed us birthed leitmotif in Hollywood film music! Ben once wrote an absolutely scathing review of the 2005 Peter Jackson remake featuring Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody, but Dan reckons 2017’s Kong: Skull Island starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman is actually pretty good, if very self-aware.
The Rank Organisation was a British entertainment company, its assets now owned by The Rank Group. It’s famous logo and filmed intro sequence, known as “Gongman”, is a buff shirtless man hitting a huge gong. Four different performers struck the gong in Rank’s heyday, most filming it at least twice to replace deteriorating film stock. The gong itself was a prop made of papier-mâché; the sound of a (much smaller) Chau gong or tam-tam was recorded separately.
Rankin/Bass Productions, by contrast, was an American production company best known for it’s stop-motion animated holiday programs, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969), though we especially recommend Mad Monster Party? (1967), which features Boris Karloff’s only performance in a musical.
Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is the only male actor to have won three Best Actor Oscars. For our universe’s sake, we thank Sir Daniel for retiring from the acting life. However if Liz’s theory is correct, Katherine Hepburn was a greater threat to reality, having won four Best Actress Oscars.
Jurassic Park (and, later, Jurassic World) is built on Isla Nublar (Spanish for “Clouded Island”), a fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica. “Site B”, featured in the sequels The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, is located on another island further west, Isla Sorna (which is sort of Spanish for “Sarcasm Island”).
“Jumping the shark” has become a modern euphemism for the moment when a television series or other long work of popular culture loses its relevance and starts going downhill. The phrase is a reference to the 1977 Happy Days episode “Hollywood: Part 3” in which Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli literally jumps a shark on waterskis, considered the point where the show left behind its relatable roots. (It’s worth noting that Happy Days continued for seven more years after this stunt.)
119 twelve-minute films of The Hazards of Helen were released between November 1914 and February 1917. They initially starred Helen Holmes, though she left to form her own company with her husband after 26 of the films, remaining one of the most famous silent era serial stars. Holmes was replaced by Elsie McLeod for about six months before Rose Wenger Gibson (credited as Helen Gibson) took over; Gibson filmed the final 70 and became as famous as Holmes. All the Helens did most of their own stunts, though Gibson made a name for herself as the first female stunt performer in Hollywood before moving into acting, and continued to appear in Hollywood films until the 1950s. You can watch clips from Leap from the Water Tower starring Holmes and The Governor’s Special starring Gibson at the Internet Archive.
Beyond the Valley of the Trolls is a reference to Russ Meyer’s 1970 exploitation film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It was the first of several written with Meyer by famous film critic Roger Ebert.
The other parody film names we mention are references to the Marx Brothers films A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races (two of which are also the titles of Queen albums). There are plenty of Marx Brothers references in Pratchett’s work, so it seems likely he was a fan.
According to the IMDb, Ennio Morricone has composed music for over 500 films. He probably remains most famous for his work in Westerns, especially The Good the Bad and the Ugly, but has worked in many different styles. His soundtrack for Space: 1999 was for an Italian theatrical film edited together from three episodes of the original UK television series; the Space: 1999 television theme (and most of the incidental music) was composed by Barry Gray.

#Pratchat9 Notes and Errata

8 July 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode nine, “Upscalator to Heaven“, featuring guest Amie Kaufman, discussing the 1989 book Truckers – the first of the Bromeliad trilogy.

Ents are the tree-people of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. They are the oldest living things in Middle-Earth, and live long slow lives, considering a three-day deliberation over a question to be “hasty”.
The stop-motion animated television series of Truckers was made for ITV in 1992 by Cosgrove Hall, a UK animation studio whose huge canon of work includes Danger Mouse, Wind in the Willows and – five years after Truckers – two traditionally animated Discworld adaptations: Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music. Truckers was split into thirteen 10-minute episodes, and mixed stop-motion with live-action footage of the humans with whom the Nomes interacted. The cast includes many well-known voices:
- Edward Kelsey as The Thing (who is also the narrator). Kelsey was a long-time star of radio serial The Archers, and played the Danger Mouse characters Baron Silas Greenback and Colonel K.
- Joe McGann as Masklin. As well as starring in 90s TV comedy The Upper Hand, Joe is also the brother of Eighth Doctor Paul McGann.
- Debra J Gillett as Grimma. Gillett later played Susan Sto Helit in Cosgrove Hall’s Soul Music.
- Rosalie Williams as Granny Morkie. Williams’ best-known role was as Mrs Hudson in the long-running The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes television series starring Jeremy Brett.
- Brian Trueman as Dorcas Del Icatessan. Trueman is a long-time Cosgrove Hall writer who adapted Truckers for television; his most notable acting roles on other animated shows include Stilletto in Danger Mouse and Nanny in Count Duckula.
- Sir Michael Hordern as the Abbott. Amongst his long and distinguished career, Hordern is beloved by children for playing the gruff Badger in Cosgrove Hall’s The Wind in the Willows.
- Jimmy Hibbert as Vinto Pimmie (amongst others). Another regular Cosgrove Hall writer and actor, Hibbert later played the late King Verence I in Wyrd Sisters.
Amie’s nerdy joke references “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs“, a psychological theory proposed by Abraham Maslow in a 1943 and his 1953 book Motivation and Personality. The hierarchy presents human needs as a pyramid, with the most fundamental at the bottom; a person needs the lowest needs met before they can consider the higher ones, progressing up the pyramid. In order from bottom to top, the categories of needs are Physiological (basic physical survival), Safety (a feeling of security), Belonging (social connections), Esteem (respect and status), Self-actualisation (fulfilling one’s potential) and – as a later addition – Self-transcendence (altruism and spirituality). While it has become popular as part of broader culture, the theory has been frequently criticised by psychologists, in particular for presenting what many see as a very Western set of values as universal.
For our international (and non-drinking) listeners, Bintang is an Indonesian beer produced by the Heineken company, availably comparatively cheaply in Australia. To “smash” a beer in Australian slang is to drink it quickly.
Amie refers to The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, a 2017 Amazon period comedy set in 1958. The title character turns to stand-up comedy after her husband leaves her, and gets a day job in a B. Altman department store as a cosmetic sales clerk.
Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise or The Ladies’ Delight) is an 1883 novel by Émile Zola, the eleventh in his “Rougon-Macquart” series about the lives of two related families living in the Second French Empire during the latter half of the 19th century. The store in the book is modelled after the 1852 version of Le Bon Marché (“The Good Deal”), often regarded as the first modern department store. (It originally opened with four departments in 1838.)
Are You Being Served? was a British sit-com about the staff in the clothing department of fictional department store Grace Brothers. It originally ran from 1972 to 1985, and was famous for it’s high-camp, innuendo-laden style, not dissimilar to the Carry On films. It had a large cast, but the five characters who lasted the entire ten season run were exceedingly camp menswear salesman Mr Humphries (John Inman), officious floorwalker (supervisor) and supposedly ex-military man “Captain” Peacock (Frank Thornton), head of department Cuthbert Rumbold (Nicholas Smith), Womenswear assistant Shirley Brahms (Wendy Richard) and head of Womenswear Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden), who frequently told stories about her “pussy”. (We’re not making this up.) The show was so popular it spawned a stage play, a film, a 1990s sequel – Grace & Favour, in which the five main characters run an inn – and a reunion special in 2016. There were also three remakes for other countries: the US one didn’t get past a pilot, the Singaporean version dropped the filthy jokes, and the Australian one featured Mr Humphries moving to Australian store Bone Brothers. The store’s name was changed because there’s a real Australian store named Grace Bros, which is probably why Ben couldn’t remember the name…
The Smurfs are small (“three apples high”) magical blue-skinned creatures who live in a secret village of toadstool houses in a medieval wood, invented by Belgian artist Peyo in 1958 for a comic strip. They have expanded in worldwide popularity with cartoons, toys and most recently a CGI/live-action film franchise. Each smurf has a name describing their personality or profession: Handy Smurf is a builder and handyman, Brainy Smurf an arrogant know-it-all, Hefty Smurf a strong gym junkie and so on. The Smurfs are led by Papa Smurf, a wise older smurf with a beard, and there were originally 99 male smurfs and just one female smurf, Smurfette. She was created by Gargamel, the smurfs main enemy; he is an evil but incompetent wizard who needs a smurf as the final ingredient in an alchemical formula to transform lead into gold. Over the years many other smurfs have been added, notably Baby Smurf, Nanny Smurf, Grandpa Smurf and the “smurflings”, a group of teenage smurfs.
Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat is a stage musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, based loosely on the story of Joseph and his “coat of many colours” from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Joseph is a dreamer and the favourite of his father’s dozen sons; his jealous brothers sell him into slavery and tell their father he is dead, but eventually his skill at interpreting dreams sees him triumph and reunite with his family.
Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was a famous and successful commander of British naval forces during the American War of Independence and the subsequent Wars of the First, Second and Third Coalition with France. During the last of these, his ship Victory was engaged with three French vessels at the Battle of Trafalgar when a sniper in the rigging of the French ship Redoubtable spotted him and shot him through the shoulder, fatally wounding him. It’s said his officers asked him to change his dress, or at least cover up the numerous stars and other honours which were sewn into his coat, to make him less identifiable to the enemy. His coat is displayed in the National Maritime Museum in London, and this blog discusses it in detail.
“The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers” features in Homer the Great, the twelfth episode of the sixth season of The Simpsons. Homer joins the secretive Stonecutters (a parody of the Freemasons), but annoys the other members when he first destroys a sacred relic, then is made their leader when it’s discovered during his punishment that he bears a prophesied birthmark. His efforts to help the community at Lisa’s request are the final straw, and the other members all quit and form the “No Homers” club, leaving Homer to go back to his family.
Some of the Departments in Arnold Bros have old-fashioned names:
- Delicatessen – traditionally sells imported or unusual prepared foods, typically meats, cheeses and foreign fruits and vegetables. Still used in supermarkets, though usually abbreviated to “Deli”.
- Haberdashery – small items used in sewing, like needles, thread, buttons, ribbons and zippers.
- Ironmongery – originally meant any items made of iron, but expanded to mean similar objects (e.g. utensils, pots, doorknobs etc.) made of other metals and also plastic.
See the note in our previous episode about Liz and Ben’s differing feelings about Lord of the Flies, but for quick reference: in William Golding’s novel about schoolboys stranded on a desert island, protagonists Piggy and Ralph find a large conch shell on the beach and blow it like a horn to summon the other boys for a meeting. From then on when they meet, someone must be holding the conch to be allowed to speak.
Catweazle was a London Weekend Television children’s series about a ragged 11th century wizard, the titular Catweazle played wonderfully by Geoffrey Bayldon, who accidentally travels forward in time, initially to the year 1969, then again in the second season to the 1970s. He interprets all modern technology as magic, most famously describing electricity as “elec-trickery” and a telephone as “the telling bone”. In the first season, the young boy who befriends and hides Catweazle on his farm is nicknamed Carrot!
The first working escalator was built in 1896 on Coney Island, though patents for various designs go back as far as 1859! The first one built in Europe was for the Harrods department store in Knightsbridge in 1898 – so it’s possible, if unlikely, that the escalators were installed when Arnold Bros (est 1905) was first constructed. (The television series shows a clearly more modern escalator, though a sign next to it also clearly says it goes up to the second floor, rather than the fourth or fifth floor described in the book.)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a 1966 absurdist play, probably the best known work by Tom Stoppard. It follows two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, giving their perspective of events in the original story, as they are first tasked to discover why their old school friend Hamlet has apparently gone mad, and then to accompany him to England, bearing a letter for the English King commanding Hamlet’s death. Hamlet alters it and they are killed instead. The pair have many interactions with the Tragedians from Hamlet who present the play-within-a-play The Murder of Gonzago, and there are many musings about fate, language and existence. Stoppard adapted and directed a film version in 1990 which features a stellar cast.
The plan to build windowless aeroplanes that display video of the outside view on screens was announced by the airline Emirates in early June 2018. Their newest planes have already removed windows in their first class suites.
Rick and Morty is an animated sci-fi comedy series created by Justin Roiland (who also voices both title characters) and Dan Harmon. It began life as a parody of the Back to the Future characters Doc and Marty, and follows Rick, an alcoholic, amoral genius scientist who drags his grandson Morty into dangerous adventures across time, space and multiple alternate realities. The episode Liz refers to is The Ricks Must Be Crazy from the second season, in which it is revealed Rick’s flying car is powered by an entire mini universe contained within its battery – and a scientist there has built his own mini universe.
The scene in which our universe is shown to exist within a locker in an alien train station occurs at the end of Men In Black II, and parallels the ending of the first Men in Black film in which the Milky Way is contained inside a marble (though it’s not actually the same “galaxy” jewel being sought during the rest of the film).
While it’s not technically true that you can’t fold paper more than seven times, it does become increasingly harder to fold as the strength of the paper increases with it’s thickness – which increases exponentially with each fold. Most people can’t fold an average-sized piece of paper more than five or six times. In 2002, Californian Britney Gallivan folded a 1.2km long piece of toilet paper in half twelve times, and derived an equation which could determine how long a piece would need to be to allow a given number of folds. So what about Masklin? Being much smaller than the piece of paper might make it easier for him to get leverage, and even if he only managed to fold the A4 letter six times, it’d end up about 1.5 x 2 inches – large, but cartable for a Nome.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a “Star Wars Anthology” film, set immediately before the events of the original Star Wars (aka Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope). It tells the previously untold story of the group of rebels who steal the plans revealing the fatal flaw in the Death Star – plans that are handed to Princess Leia at the end of the movie, and are the ones she passes on to R2-D2 at the beginning of Star Wars.
Angels & Demons is the novel by (in)famous Catholic mystery thriller author Dan Brown which focuses on the election of a new pope. It also introduces Robert Langdon, a university professor who specialises in religious iconography and “symbology” and is an “expert on the Illuminati”. Langdon goes on to appear in four more of Brown’s novels, including the international bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and is played by Tom Hanks in the film adaptations. (Incidentally, Tony Robinson – who we also mentioned in this episode – produced The Real Da Vinci Code for Channel 4 in 2005, in which he debunked many of the supposed historical facts mentioned in the book.)
The 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels was conceived by Jonathan Swift as a biting, broad satire on many aspects of Irish and British society. The first part is the most famous: English sailor Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island Lilliput, home to six-inch-tall people (the same size as Nomes!), and becomes embroiled in their quasi-religious war with nearby Blefuscu over egg etiquette. In the other three parts he visits many other lands, encountering giants, scientists, sorcerers, brutish deformed humans and intelligent (if ethically questionable) horses. Generally only the first and sometimes second (giant) parts are included in the many children’s retellings.
Lieutenant commander Montgomery “Scotty” Scott was the head engineer and second officer aboard the starship Enterprise in the original 1966 Star Trek television series. Often described as a “miracle worker”, he was often able to effect emergency repairs or modifications in short time, though when he later appeared in sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation he admitted to overestimating the amount of time required to complete a given task.
For non-Australian listeners: “smoko” is common Australian slang for a break from work to smoke a cigarette. It was recently immortalised in the song “Smoko” by Queensland band The Chats.
You can watch Mr Bean (played by Rowan Atkinson) jury-rig a driving mechanism for his car out of a mop, a broom, a bucket of paint and some ropes at the start of this compilation of some of his finest travelling moments. The sequence Ben remembered involves him running late for a dentist appointment and getting changed during the drive.
Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was a beloved children’s author who wrote both fantasy – including Noddy, The Magic Faraway Tree and Adventures of the Wishing Chair – and adventure books, most famously the Famous Five and Secret Seven books. Criticism of the books isn’t new; they have been critiqued since the 1950s. You can can still read Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” at Lip Magazine.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is the original 1971 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Charlie Bucket and four other children win the chance to tour reclusive sweet maker Willy Wonka’s fantastic factory. At the beginning of the film, Charlie’s four grandparents have been “bedridden for twenty years”, but Grandpa Joe is able to get up to accompany Charlie to the factory without too much trouble as soon as he finds his golden ticket…
A Current Affair (ACA) is a long-running Australian current affairs television program. It is generally regarded as “sensationalist journalism”, and a stereotypical story exposes “dole cheats” (people fraudulently claiming social benefit payments). The format and content of ACA and similar programs like Today Tonight were thoroughly satirised in the 1990s by the ABC sit-com Frontline.
“Potted shrimp” is a traditional English delicacy in which small shrimp are boiled, shelled and then mixed into spiced clarified butter.
Graham crackers are a semi-sweet American biscuit made from “graham flour”, a type of coarse-ground, unsifted whole wheat flour. The flour is named after Sylvester Graham, an 19th century Presbyterian minister who criticised the changes in the American diet resulting from the industrial revolution. There’s no real equivalent in Australia, though English-style digestive biscuits can be used in baking. “S’mores” are traditional American treats made while camping by sandwiching a roasted marshmallow and some chocolate between two graham crackers.
Animal crackers are another kind of sweet biscuit, originally from England but still popular in the United States. In the two-part second season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “What’s My Line?”, Oz and Willow flirt while discussing animal crackers, in particular the fact that usually the monkey is the only animal depicted wearing pants. The line “I mock you with my monkey pants”, delivered in a French accent by Oz, was supposedly taken from a dream experienced by Willow actor Alyson Hannigan.
We found a version of Kristy Kruger’s story about believing unicorns were real in Act 1 of Episode 293: A Little Bit of Knowledge of long-running NPR podcast This American Life, along with other folk with weird bits of childhood belief that survived into adulthood.

#Pratchat4 Notes and Errata

8 February 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 4, “Enter Three Wytches“, featuring guest Ell Squires (aka Clara Cupcakes) discussing the 1988 Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters.

Footrot Flats is as much remembered for the 1986 animated movie Footrot Flats: The Dog’s ~~Tail~~ Tale, which was a box office smash in New Zealand and Australia and gave the world Dave Dobbyn’s number one hit single “Slice of Heaven”.
Alice in The Vicar of Dibley was portrayed by Emma Chambers, also known for her role as Honey in Notting Hill. Sadly, Emma died at the age of 53 only a couple of weeks after this episode was released, on February 21st 2018.
Maggie Smith famously played Hogwarts professor Minerva McGonagall in all eight Harry Potter films, while Tilda Swinton was the villainous White Witch in three films based on C S Lewis’ Narnia books. Anjelica Huston played the Grand High Witch in 1990’s film version of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Miriam Margoyles is also a Hogwarts alumnus, playing Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the Potter films.
Willow meets the disappointingly non-magical “Daughters of Gaea” in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” – previously mentioned in our second episode!
While we couldn’t confirm the existence of a town named Fuck, there are places in the UK named Marsh Gibbon, Lickfold, Great Snoring, Crapstone and Shitterton. There is a town named Fucking in Lower Austria; their street signs were stolen so often by English-speaking tourists they had to start bolting them down.
“The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All”, usually referred to as “The Hedgehog Song“, is the infamous folk song sung by Nanny Ogg whenever she’s had a few. Wyrd Sisters is the first time it is mentioned.
For those playing at home, the name of the demon summoned in Nanny Ogg’s wash basin is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz. The Superman character Ben mentions is Mister Mxyzptlk, an “imp from the fifth dimension”. Ben did not pronounce his name correctly either.
The woman who gives Poirot his pin in the television series is Mme. Vergine Mesnard, who appears in only one Poirot case, set at a very early point in his career, when he was still a policeman in Belgium. She does not give him a pin in the original short story.
If you’re interested in the story behind Dutton’s remarks about African gangs, here’s a good article from The Big Smoke Australia. (“The Big Smoke” is Australian slang for city.)
Our musings about the Librarian disagree with fan consensus, which is that his status as a member of the Unseen University faculty means he must be a wizard (and, quite possibly, the Wizard Formerly Known As Horace Worblehat). We’re sticking with our assessment for now, but we may revisit this in future episodes.
You can hear examples of the “real Shakespearean accent“, known as the Original Pronunciation (OP), in this video from the Open University featuring father and son duo David and Ben Crystal.
History records that Rasputin survived being poisoned and shot, but was then shot again before his body was dumped in the river. He didn’t get out. (Anastasia trumps history, of course.)

#Pratchat14 Notes and Errata

8 December 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, featuring guest Joel Martin discussing the 1990 novel Good Omens.

A note on this episode’s title: we’ve opted to parody a parody in order to name a discussion of a parody. (Does that make it a parodyox?) The film in question is National Lampoon’s Vacation, which was released in 1983 – the same year The Colour of Magic was published! (Though you might argue our title is closer to the sequel, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, from 1985.)
The Morning Bell is recorded live at the Brunswick Street Bookstore. Liz has been a guest a few times, most recently on episode 46 (February 2017), while Ben has been on just the once, for episode 63 (November 2017).
Joel is director of Melbourne’s new speculative fiction writing festival Speculate, returning in 2019 for its second year; Liz and Ben were guests the first time around and will be again in 2019. You can see both of them in the short film made for the 2018 festival here, or visit specfic.com.au to find out more about what’s in store for 2019.
Liz’s comment about eye anatomy refers to the fact that as well as the structures found in regular human eyes which are sensitive to light – rods for dim light, and cones for bright light and (normal) colour vision – wizards also have octagons, which can detect octarine. This suggests that there is a genetic (or otherwise biological) component to being a wizard, and since Rincewind can see octarine, it seems inarguable that he really is a wizard.
Time Team began in 1994, making it much younger than The Black Adder, the first of the four series of Blackadder sit-coms, which was produced in 1983 (there’s that year again!). It also comes slightly later than Tony Robinson’s abridged audiobooks, the first of which – The Colour of Magic, of course – was first released on cassette in 1993. The unabridged versions, initially read by Nigel Planer, are harder to pin down, but seem to have begun a little later in 1997.
The ethos that “every issue could be someone’s first” is said to be the reason that Marvel comics had so much dialogue explaining stuff the characters already knew – often with accompanying editor’s notes (the asterisked, comic book equivalent of a footnote) pointing the reader to the previous issue in which the thing being explained took place!
ABBA is a Swedish pop group comprising two couples: Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the band’s name is an acronym of their first names). They shot to world-wide fame in 1974 after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, but the band and their marriages broke up by 1982, as their staggering popularity caused their personal lives to suffer. They remain incredibly popular in Australia and around the world, with their music being adapted into the hit musical Mama Mia! and its filmic sequel. They announced in April that they had recorded their first new music in more than 35 years, and the new single, “I Still Have Faith in You”, is due to be released this month (December 2018)!
Japanese avant-garde artist, peace activist, musician and filmmaker Yoko Ono was long blamed by disappointed fans for the break-up of The Beatles in 1969 because of her marriage to John Lennon. These days this is generally recognised as a grossly unfair and simplistic explanation, but her name is still synonymous with the idea of an outside relationship catalysing the end of a creative partnership.
In cosmology, the steady state model is an alternative to the now generally accepted Big Bang theory. It states that the universe would continue to expand forever, but remain in a “steady state” of density as new matter is constantly created. By contrast, in the Big Bang model, the amount of matter is fixed, and the universe becomes less dense as it expands, so the expansion will slow down either to the point where it reverses and matter contracts into another singularity – the Big Crunch – or keep going long enough for all the stars to burn out and leave nothing behind but black holes – the Big Freeze. Feel free to write your own pun versions of these for Great A’Tuin, but they’ll probably be more depressing than Pratchett’s originals.
The story about translating Pratchett’s puns appears in various editions of The Discworld Companion, and definitely in the most recent (as of this writing), Turtle Recall. Ruurd Groot, who translated Pratchett into Dutch, ended up tweaking an alternate name for the Big Bang theory so that it could be interpreted as “the Making Love Outwards Model”, a name Terry loved!
As Ben mentions, the film Krull is one of a crop of cheap Star Wars rip-offs, and it was released the same year as Return of the Jedi – 1983 again! Critics were not kind to Krull, and it was a huge financial flop (the massive budget blowout caused by huge alterations to the sets didn’t help), but it’s found a cult audience of fans who appreciate its weird mix of fantasy, swashbuckling and sci-fi, outlandish ideas, and ambitious production, as well as early film roles for Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson. (Ben had a lot more to say about it, but the episode was already running long!)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the author of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot, also wrote the Pellucidar series of novels set inside a hollow Earth full of dinosaurs and psychic pterodacyl-men. The first book, At the Earth’s Core, was adapted into another favourite film from Ben’s youth, starring Doug McClure and Peter Cushing.
You too can enjoy the video posted to Twitter of “Inside Earth Girl“.
The Monty Python sketch starring John Cleese and a hovercraft full of eels (mentioned only) is usually referred to as “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook”. It first appeared in the twelfth episode of the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, and was adapted as part of the film And Now for Something Completely Different the following year.
While continuity among Discworld books is generally pretty good, Terry’s “don’t worry about it too much” attitude has produced a surprisingly difficult to pin down chronology – in no small part because of the time travel magic employed by Granny Weatherwax halfway through Wyrd Sisters. The most widely-accepted timeline puts the events of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic about two years before those in Equal Rites, three years before Mort, nine years before Sourcery, twelve years before Pyramids and twenty-one years before Guards! Guards!. Assuming Rincewind is 33 when we first meet him, which seems the most likely age, this means he is 41 when he is cast into the Dungeon Dimensions in Sourcery, and that three years pass on the Disc before he escapes in Eric!, though it’s unclear how much he’d have aged in that time. By the time we’ll meet him again in Interesting Times, the timeline has him wandering the Disc for another six years, making him at least 47, and possibly as old as 50 – but still considerably younger than David Jason, who was 68 when he played Rincewind at the beginning of his adventures in The Colour of Magic.
The Great Fire of London started in a bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed most of the City of London over four days in September 1666, burning down over 13,000 houses and hundreds of larger structures, including St Paul’s Cathedral. Many older buildings survived the fire, including the Tower of London and several pubs and churches.
The idea of going on holiday goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire, where wealthy citizens would travel for as long as two years at a time. The more modern version dates back to the “Grand Tours” undertaken by wealthy young European men from the 17th century onwards. By the late 19th century, the innovations of the industrial revolution like steam trains and ocean liners made travel for pleasure more affordable for workers, but just like the other things he brought from the Agatean Empire, Twoflower’s brand of tourism seems a twentieth century idea, rooted in the culture of the 1950s and 60s.
It’s amazing we didn’t mention this, but Rincewind appears without his signature pointy hat. Well…he has one, of some sort, but he quickly loses it and it’s clearly not the one with “WIZZARD” written on it sequins which is later so dear to him. (It might also seem odd that someone with such a talent for languages is unable to spell his own job description in his mother tongue, but then again spelling on the Discworld is at best described as “informal”.)
Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné – Elric of Melniboné for short – is the most famous creation of fantasy author Michael Moorcock. Physically frail and sickly, Elric is an anti-hero, reluctant ruler of his people and the only one among them to have a conscience. He is also an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a doomed pawn in the battle between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos across the multiverse. Early in his adventures he finds the magical black sword Stormbringer – a clear inspiration for Kring – which gives him strength, but consumes the souls of others – including many of those for whom Elric cares most.
To clarify Ben’s description of who’s keeping Twoflower alive, the Boy Emperor of the Agatean Empire sent the message asking for protection for Twoflower; the message calling for his assassination is from the Emperor’s Vizier. Both of them appear briefly in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort.
Pratchett had published three novels – and numerous short stories – prior to The Colour of Magic. The Carpet People (1971), for younger audiences, was originally written when he was 17; he later revised it, describing it as a collaboration with his younger self. The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) are comedy sci-fi novels, and contain the first appearances of a disc-shaped world – no turtle though! – and Hogswatch.
A mimic is one of a number of classic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons which appears as something innocuous – in the mimic’s case, it can change shape to resemble an inanimate object, most commonly a treasure chest. It first appeared in the original edition of the Monster Manual in 1977, and so was almost certainly an inspiration for the Luggage.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont) is an award-winning film based on a novella by Stephen King. It stars Tim Robbins as a banker who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and forced to use his accountancy skills to aid the corrupt prison warden’s money laundering scheme.
The Kanes mentioned by Joel are Solomon Kane, a Puritan witch hunter created by Robert E Howard, and Kane, Karl Edward Wagner’s reimagining of the Biblical Caine, red-headed son of Adam and his first wife Lilith who is cursed by God to walk the Earth for eternity as punishment for committing the first murder. Neither are traditional sword and sorcery heroes, and Wagner’s Kane has much in common with Moorcock’s Elric. As far as we can tell, there’s no-one named Kane on the Discworld.
If you want to know more about the Winchester Mystery House, episode 162 of the 99% Invisible podcast is a great place to start.
Australian spiders – and other deadly venomous animals like snakes and jellyfish, in Australia and elsewhere – probably got so deadly because they need to guarantee a kill when they use their venom. As in so many areas of evolution, there’d be an arms race between predator and prey, forcing venom to become more and more deadly over time. And that’s a race we humans aren’t even in, since we’re so rarely killed by venomous creatures that we’ve not evolved any kind of immunity to them. Evolution thus overcompensated on its potency, because it’s better to expend more energy than strictly necessary on creating super venom to make sure 100% of predators or prey to die, than it is to make a weaker venom which might leave some victims alive, meaning they leave the creature hungry, and also gives the victim a chance to pass on their resistance to their offspring. The BBC article “Why some animals have venoms so lethal, they can’t use them” by Josh Gabbatiss from 2016 is a great exploration of all of these ideas.
Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazzetta, best known for his comic book, book cover and album cover art – including a version of Conan the Barbarian which redefined the character from the 1960s on. The film used the rotoscoping technique, in which actors were filmed and then traced to lend realistic movement to the animated characters; Bakshi also used this technique for his other films, Wizards and Lord of the Rings. Fire and Ice was released in – surprise! – 1983.
The other movie that Ben thought Joel was talking about was The Flight of Dragons, a Rankin/Bass production based on a book by Peter Dickinson, which deals largely with the question of whether magic and science are compatible. It was released in 1982, though, so clearly it was the wrong film.
The Doctor Who story with people who are naked under their holograms is the 2013 Christmas special The Time of the Doctor, in which the Church of the Papal Mainframe requests that visitors do not wear clothes while visiting. It’s the final story for Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, and occurs soon after the events of the fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.
Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live-action Disney musical in which a young boy, Pete, escapes an abusive foster family with the help of Elliott, a friendly, animated fire-breathing green dragon who can make himself invisible. He befriends a lighthouse keeper and his daughter while pursued by his cruel foster parents, and a travelling snake oil salesman plots to capture Elliott and use his organs for potions that might actually work. It was remade in 2016, though in the new version Pete is orphaned in a car crash in the woods and survives there for six years with Elliott’s help before being found by a park ranger. The new one has a fancy CGI dragon that probably resembles Twoflower’s, but no songs.
Death by the Books is a fortnightly podcast about mystery, crime and other someone-dies books. In episode 9, Death by Pratchett, hosts Kirsti and Lianne out themselves as massive fans of you know who. It’s a great introduction to Pratchett and the Discworld as a whole, and they might cover some of the individual books in the future – after all, someone dies in most of them… They’re also on Twitter at @deathbythebooks.
Zweiblumen is, in fact, German, and literally translates as “Two Flowers”. (Twoflower would be “Zweiblume”, but presumably Pratchett thought Zweiblumen sounded better.)
Rincewind is clearly channelling an inspiration particle when he says “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” though as usual the particles have got it slightly wrong: the famous catchphrase of Hardy, the larger half of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was actually “this is another nice mess you’ve gotten us into”, though the confusion is understandable since they titled one of their films Another Fine Mess.
CW’s The Flash, now in its fifth season, is itself a spin-off of Arrow, both shows based on superhero characters from DC Comics. Along with later addition Supergirl, they started out with just the one main superhero character but have since brought many fan favourites from the comics to the small screen, albeit often with a twist. Case in point: the Elongated Man, who shows up in The Flash’s fourth season, is a lesser known superhero with stretching powers, though the television version draws more on Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask than anything from the comics.
A “backronym” is a phrase crafted to turn a specific word into an acronym, as opposed to a real acronym in which the phrase comes first. They are often associated with words that are not normally acronyms, e.g. “Something Posing As Meat” is a backronym for Spam.
In Greek mythology, Tethys is a Titan, a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and – as is the way with Greek myths – sister and wife of the sea Titan Oceanus. One of the moons of Saturn is named for her, which makes more sense when we recall that Saturn is the Roman equivalent of Kronos, one of Tethys’ brother Titans.
Waterworld is a famously terribly 1995 post-apocalyptic action film starring Kevin Costner as the Mariner, a mutant uniquely suited to life on a future Earth drowned under the melted polar ice caps. A trader played by Kim Coates offers the Mariner a paper page from a book as a valuable commodity, repeating the word “paper” over and over; the scene has been parodied and recreated many times as one of many things people find ridiculous about the film.
The contestants from each district in The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins (and their film adaptations) are given lavish quarters before being forced to fight each other to the death; the winner is also treated to a luxurious lifestyle when the games are over.
When he says we never meet wizards who aren’t inept, Ben means as major protagonists; The Light Fantastic contains numerous wizards who are extremely ept, but most of them are out to kill Rincewind (and each other). Ipslore the Red in Sourcery is likewise an antagonist, and few of the faculty of Unseen University in that book are trustworthy.

#Pratchat20 Notes and Errata

8 June 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings” featuring guest Dr Lili Wilkinson, discussing the third and final book of the Bromeliad, Wings.

The episode title puns the song “Wind Beneath My Wings”, best known from the Bette Midler version released in 1988 for the soundtrack to her film Beaches. It was written by American songwriters Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley in 1982 and recorded many times. Australian singer Kamahl was the first to record it in 1982, but didn’t release it as he felt it wasn’t right for the country and western album he recorded it for!
The supersonic passenger aircraft Concorde was a joint project of the United Kingdom and France, and operated between 1976 and 2003 by Air France and British Airways. With a top speed of over twice the speed of sound, it could cross the Atlantic in half the time of other airlines, and boasted luxury service for its passengers. But it was loud, environmentally unsound, and very expensive, so it was never adopted by other airlines, and the planes were eventually decommissioned. The thing about the gap in the plane was mostly true: due to the heat generated by the extreme speeds, the fuselage would expand by as much as 30 centimetres at top speeds. The design accommodated this, manifesting in a gap in the inner wall between segments of the cockpit. One pilot left his hat in the gap deliberately during the final flight of one of the aircraft.
The Concorde did indeed have a very safe operational record for most of its history, with only one fatal accident in the year 2000. In May of that year, an Air France Concorde hit debris on the runway during takeoff; its fuel tank was punctured and the aircraft crashed into a hotel not far from the airport, killing more than 100 people, including everyone on board. The entire Concorde fleet was grounded for over a year following the crash, though they weren’t the only aircraft found at fault: the debris had fallen off a Continental Airlines DC-10 which had been shoddily repaired, and the airline ended up paying a large portion of the compensation.
Lindsay Lohan stars in the 1998 version of The Parent Trap, a remake of the 1961 original, in turn based on the novel Das doppelte Lottchen by German author Erich Kästner. Lohan plays a pair of identical twins separated soon after birth, who discover each other when coincidentally sent to the same camp. They decide their parents are still in love with each other and plot to get them back together. The Concorde is an important plot device near the end of the film.
Time-Flight was a story in Peter Davison’s first season as the Doctor, and immediately followed Earthshock, the story in which a major character died. While it was reasonably popular at the time, with record viewing figures for its first episode, it has become loathed among fans, often featuring in the bottom five in poll rankings of every Doctor Who story. No doubt it’ll feature on Lucas Testro’s podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death any day now…
Concorde had 17 separate fuel tanks, only four of which were in the fuselage; most were in the wings, with a few more at the front and back. It was unique in that it pumped fuel between the tanks during flight to shift the aircraft’s centre of gravity during supersonic flight. The engines were created by Bristol Siddeley Engines and French aerospace company Snecma; Bristol Siddeley was acquired by Rolls Royce during the development of Concorde.
The UK didn’t ban smoking on international flights until 1997, so for most of Concorde’s operational life smoking would have been allowed on board. Australia was in fact the first country to ban smoking on all domestic flights, in 1987; smoking on international flights to and from Australia was banned in 1990, a year after the US banned smoking on domestic flights. (They banned smoking on international flights in 2000.) Major pressure for the ban came from the flight attendants unions, who first campaigned for it in the 1960s.
The dessert Ben is trying to think of is junket, also known as curds and whey, which is made with milk and rennet. A powdered form, coloured and flavoured, used to be available; you just had to add milk.
It’s actually Angalo who was getting into The Spy With No Trousers; we hope he sees our Twitter version, which we hope to release soon under the hashtag #thespywithnotrousers. (We’ll compile it and post it on the web site, too.)
You can find out more about the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s in the first episode of Let’s Talk About Sects, Lili’s YouTube series about cults and new religious movements.
Scott Westefield is an author, most famously of the YA series Uglies and Leviathan.
As previously mentioned in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar the alien Na’vi have a tendril-like organ which allows them to to “plug in” to various animals on their planet, including the pterodactyl-like ikran, and…er…control them? It’s weird and gross, and not the sort of things Nomes – or Pratchett – would be into.
Vatican II, more formally known as the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, is the most recent ecumenical council – a convening of senior church officials to discuss church doctrine and practice. It actually occurred much earlier than the 1980s, from 1962 to 1965, and resulted in many changes meant to help the church fit in with the modern world.
In 2006 – well after the publication of Wings in 1990 – then Senator for Alaska, Republican Ted Stevens, was arguing against the idea of net neutrality. He was trying to explain his position that some commercial network traffic should have reserved bandwidth on the Internet, but didn’t do the best job. He said: “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material…” He was widely mocked for this clumsy (if not entirely inaccurate) analogy, and “a series of tubes” became a popular meme.
The West Wing Weekly, part of the Radiotopia podcast network, is an episode-by-episode discussion of the political drama The West Wing. It’s hosted by Joshua Malina (who played Will Bailey in the show) and Hrishikesh Hirway (host of the Song Exploder music podcast), and has featured many actors and crew from the series, including creator Aaron Sorkin. As of recording, they were approaching the end of the show’s penultimate sixth season.
The Quentin Blake-esque covers of the current edition of the Bromeliad books are by Mark Beech, who also did the internal art for the hardback illustrated edition of Truckers (this is the one Ben likes a lot). Beech also did covers for the most recent editions of The Carpet People and the Johnny Maxwell books, and covers and internal illustrations for the collections of Pratchett’s early short stories for children: Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and (released in 2020) The Time-Travelling Caveman.
The Care Bears started out as characters on greeting cards, and became a hugely successful line of plush toys and animated characters in television (originally from 1985 to 1988) and film (beginning with The Care Bears Movie in 1985). They are magical beings who personify various emotions, with each bearing (sorry) a symbol on their belly representing their feeling. They live in “the Kingdom of Caring”, hidden amongst the clouds, which contains their home, Care-a-lot, and the Forest of Feelings, home to the Care Bear Cousins (similar characters who aren’t bears). The Care Bears and Cousins try to guide children to be their best and deal with challenging emotions, while also defeating villains like Professor Coldheart who seek to eliminate caring from the world. Their main magical power is the “Care Bear Stare”, which manifests as coloured beams of light from their belly symbols that infuse their target with warm feelings.
The animated film Ben was remembering was GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, aka Machine Men Movie: Battle of the Rock Lords. (The toys on which the film is based, originally Machine Robo (マシンロボ) in Japan, were known as “Machine Men” in Australia; in the US, they were incorporated into the broader GoBots line of toys from Tonka.) While its voice cast wasn’t quite up to the standard of Transformers: The Movie – which featured Leonard Nimoy and Orson Wells – it did star Roddy McDowall, Telly Savalas and Margot Kidder! Both films were released in 1986, though only to very limited cinemas in Australia, so Ben was lucky to see it.

#Pratchat19 Notes and Errata

8 May 2019 by Elizabeth Flux Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In” featuring guest Fury, discussing the sixteenth Discsworld novel, 1994’s Soul Music.

The episode title puns the title of Duke Ellington’s 1931 jazz standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”, which has been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times over the last 90 years.
The Valhalla Cinema was a cinema in Melbourne which specialised in audience participation films – and in its early days you had to bring your own seats. Opening in 1976, it later relocated to Westgarth and changed names. The Wikipedia entry has a charming story about a rather eventful screening of The Blues Brothers – though we doubt that this was the one that Pterry attended (if, indeed, he attended at all).
Look, the French Foreign Legion have a long and storied history, but in popular culture they are the go-to reference for the group you join when you want to get well away from your old life. Brendan Fraser’s character in The Mummy? French Foreign Legion.
Why are denim trousers called jeans? They’re named after the city of Genua, where the original fabric was manufactured. Read more about their history here. We know; we hoped they would be named after Gene Wilder too.
Rebel Without a Cause is one of James Dean’s most famous films and is often credited with kicking off the idea of the teenager.
Arthur Daley is a character from Minder, a British comedy-drama series that ran from 1979 to 1994.
Animorphs, first a book series, later adapted into a TV show, followed the adventures of a group of friends who had been given the power to morph into different animal shapes in an attempt to fight back against a secret alien invasion on Earth. Their enemy were the Yeerks – a parasitic species which would occupy the body of a host and control them.
Is Sioni bod da real Welsh? According to the Annotated Pratchett File: “‘Bod Da‘ is Welsh for ‘be good’. Ergo, ‘Sioni Bod Da‘ = ‘Johnny B. Goode’.”
“The Day the Music Died” is the name given to the tragic day where musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “The Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson were killed in a light aircraft accident. Both Holly’s wife and mother heard the news from media rather than authorities (his wife, Maria Elena, via a TV report and his mother via the radio). His mother collapsed at the news, and Maria Elena shortly afterwards had a miscarriage. This series of events led to the development of a policy for proper notification of victims’ families. The events of the day also inspired Don McLean’s song “American Pie”.
There have been at least two Dalek invasions of contemporary Earth in Doctor Who.
The natural human preference for length of day is a subject of much debate. Some studies showed that the human circadian rhythm, when absent of outside stimuli like light and knowledge of time skewed more towards 25 hours, but later studies dispute this. Need more people to volunteer to sleep whenever they want for further study? We’re available!
Two-up is a traditional Australian gambling game. A designated “spinner” throws two coins into the air from a special paddle or board called a “kip”, which has recesses to hold the coins. Players bet on which way the coins will land: obverse (both heads), reverse (both tails) or “Ewan” (one of each). It’s often played on ANZAC Day, when it is officially legal (at least in NSW), as it was very popular among soldiers during World War I. Modern games still often use old pre-decimalisation pennies from a significant year like 1915, the year of the Gallipoli campaign.
According to the Stratocaster Guide, Keith Richards once said “The Strat is as sturdy and strong as a mule, yet it has the elegance of a racehorse. It’s got everything you need, and that’s rare to find in anything.” Basically? They’re the quintessential cool guitar.
In the TV series Gilmore Girls, Dean and Jesse are, respectively, Rory Gilmore’s first and second boyfriends. Dean is an absolute garbage heap of a human being which only becomes more apparent as the show progresses. Jesse is marginally better, but improves. In the end it doesn’t actually matter though as the re-boot proves that Rory herself is actually the worst of them all.
Popular Scottish indie group Belle & Sebastian got their name from tbe book and television series with the same title. The story of a boy and his dog, their namesake is about as charming as the music they produce.

These are the show notes and errata for episode 16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, featuring guest, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones, discussing the thirteen Discworld novel, 1992’s Small Goods.

The episode title plays on the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, probably more famous these days for being punned in popular culture than for the song itself! The best known version was recorded by the Hollies in 1969, though it’s also been recorded by Neil Diamond. A charity version featuring many UK artists was the UK number one Christmas single in 2012, supporting charities associated with the Hillsborough disaster – a disaster at a football stadium in 1989, where nearly 100 people were killed after a gate was opened and allowed more fans into a section of the grounds that was already dangerously crowded. The charity supported victims and their families through a new investigation into who was responsible, following the failure to prosecute police officers in charge of security and safety during the match.
The film Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, the titular highlander, who discovers he is one of the immortals – seemingly ordinary humans who cannot die unless decapitated, and who are drawn to fight each other, stealing the magical power of other immortals whom they defeat until only one remains to collect “the Prize”. As well as being very 1980s, it has a killer soundtrack by Queen, songs from which can be found on their 1986 album It’s a Kind of Magic.
We’re pretty sure the cake Liz is thinking of is Breudher, a delicious buttery Sri Lankan cake with a Dutch influence.
Teen Power Inc. is a series of thirty books written by Australian author Emily Rodda (and others), first published in the 1990s. They feature six teenaged protagonists who create the titular agency to make some extra cash, and end up solving various mysteries. The series was republished in the US in the mid 2000s as The Raven Hill Mysteries.
Johnson and Friends (1990) was an Australian television program for children under 5 about Johnson, a stuffed elephant, and the other toys who live under the bed of a young boy and come to life when he’s asleep. It predates Toy Story by five years, but the “secret life of toys” genre has a much longer history than that anyway.
We’ll leave you to work out the coarse pun in Brother Nhumrod’s name for yourself, but the Biblical Nimrod was a king, a “mighty hunter”, and a great-grandson of Noah mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Chronicles and Micah. Tradition says he was leader of the kings who built the Tower of Babel, though this is not written in the Bible. Because of this folly, Dante placed him in the Circle of Treachery in Hell. “Nimrod” has also become an insult meaning a dim-witted person, popularised by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, who use it as a taunt for Elmer Fudd, presumably mocking him for not being a “mighty hunter”.
A Royal Commission is a type of formal public inquiry carried out in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and began in 2013. It investigated evidence of widespread protection of child abusers in a variety of community, sporting, religious and other institutions throughout Australia. The commission heard evidence from tens of thousands of people and handed down its final report in 2017.
After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007, rumours circulated that Sir Terry had “found God”. He answered with this piece in The Daily Mail, in which he revealed he was “brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.” He went on to say that while religion was never really discussed at home, and he was never a believer, he never disliked it.
The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – meaning to move debt from one place to another, rather than paying it off – is a pretty old phrase. Big thanks to listener Zoe, who linked us to entries from the Oxford and Brewer’s Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable. They tell us that the phrase has been around since at least the 14th century, and that the names were likely picked just because they were alliterative, though the phrase later acquired connections to the Saints.
The 2003 American musical Avenue Q explores adult concepts in a world inspired by Sesame Street – a city neighbourhood where humans, puppet people and furry monsters live side-by-side. The original production won three major Tony Awards. The song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” features the neighbourhood – including their superintendent Gary Coleman (“yes, that Gary Coleman“) – agreeing to the premise of the title.
“White privilege” is the concept that in many Western cultures, people with white skin have a number of privileges they may not even be aware of, that are not extended to people of colour. At a basic level it manifests as a cultural idea of white as default or normal, but – like all forms of privilege – it also influences social status, freedom and opportunity. While it has been written about in some form since the 1930s, and given its current name in the mid 60s, it was brought to mainstream attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to have succumbed to belief in an extreme dogma, without understanding the consequences. The phrase is a reference to the Jonestown Massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones had his followers drink cordial (which may or may not have been Kool-Aid brand – this is still being disputed) poisoned with cyanide and prescription drugs.
Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall was published in 2018. We highly recommend checking out the Seafurrers blog – maintained by Bart the cat – for even more tales of nautical cats! It has several entries describing the exploits of Trim, who accompanied English explorer Matthew Flinders. And yes, despite what the current Australian government might think or spend 7 million dollars on, James Cook never circumnavigated Australia.
Jonah was commanded by God to delivery a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, warning them they must repent for their wicked ways, but Jonah instead tries to flee from God on a ship. When a clearly unnatural storm brews, the sailors work out by casting lots that Jonah is to blame; he offers to be thrown overboard, but they refuse until it becomes clear there’s no other way to survive the storm. Jonah is saved from drowning by a giant fish, which swallows him whole; he prays to God and after three days is vomited up on shore, and this time obeys God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh. He gets his nose bent out of shape when God shows the city mercy following their repentance, so God teaches him a lesson by growing a plant to give him shade in the desert, then having a worm bite the plant to kill it.
Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered in 1996, was Lloyd Webber’s 14th major stage musical, and the second musical adaptation of the 1961 British film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills. (You might know her from several Disney films of the 1960s, including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap.) The film was based on the 1959 novel by Mills’ mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Mills was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. Elizabeth’s recollection of the play she saw at the age of 7 is…vaguely correct. In the parts that matter.
Prosperity theology is the belief that God rewards an individual for their faith – often expressed through donations to the church – with blessings of material wealth and miracles of healing. In the United States its popularity dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it really rose to prominence through televangelism in the 1960s to 1980s with influential figures like Oral Roberts (yes, that’s his real name) and Jim Bakker. It was adopted more widely by some Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s, by which time it was estimated more than 15% of American Christians believed in some form of prosperity theology. It is criticised by many Christians for, among other things, a reliance on non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report was originally published in the magazine Fantastic Universe. The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise changes many things about the original story, including the ending. A sequel television series, in which one of the precogs helps a detective solve crimes about a decade after the events of the film, aired on Fox in 2015 but was cancelled after one season of ten episodes.
While Ben remembers both names correctly, he fails to remember that Constable Washpot is Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets. “Washpot” is a somewhat derogatory nickname given to him by other members of the Watch. He goes on rounds with his friend Smite-the-Ungodly-with-Cunning-Arguments.
Many religions believe that only people who meet certain criteria will enter Heaven – various Christian denominations require the faithful to be baptised, for example. But the most famous example of a very small number who will be saved are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are often said to believe that only 144,000 people will enter Heaven. This is based on a fairly literal interpretation of chapter 14 of the Book of Revelation, but while they do indeed believe only 144,000 people will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the other faithful will live on in an Earthly paradise of God’s making. Which is just as well, as there are now more than 20 million members of the church worldwide.
Liz’s talk about “the gourd” is a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman), a man born at the same time as Jesus Christ, is mistaken for the Messiah. His followers willingly drink a Kool-Aid of their own devising and despite his protests interpret his every act as holy, seizing on things he drops as relics – including, briefly, “the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem”.
“Fake news” traditionally referred to deliberately misleading or fabricated information spread in the form of seemingly legitimate journalism. The phrase was co-opted by Donald Trump (among others) to describe any news story or media outlet which he dislikes, regardless of their accuracy. This increasingly popular usage caused the British Parliament to abandon use of the term in official documents. “Fake News” was selected as Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, though they disputed Trump’s claim that he invented it.
Steptoe and Son and Open All Hours are British sit-coms about a scrap merchant and his son, and a gormless shop keeper, respectively. Neither are really that close a match for Didactylos and Urn’s discussions of the philosophy market, but the sentiment is in there.
The educational programming language Logo was invented in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and intended to teach principles of the functional language LISP. Robot turtles pre-date Logo by nearly 20 years, but the language is credited with the popularity of turtle graphics and turtles equipped with pens. The first Logo turtle was named “Irving”.
Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future dystopia in which books are banned and squads of “firemen” are sent to burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist – a disillusioned fireman named Guy Montag – meets a resistance group whose members each preserve a work of literature by memorising the entire text, reciting it on request.
There are many examples of lost works throughout the history of literature. Shakespeare supposedly wrote many plays which have not survived, most famously Love’s Labors Won, though its existence is disputed. Jane Austen left behind several unfinished works, including the novels Sandition and The Watsons. Emily Bronte had supposedly begun work on a second novel after Wuthering Heights, but no evidence of it has ever been found. On a similar note, all of Sir Terry’s unfinished works and notes were destroyed, as per the instructions in his will, by having his hard drives crushed under an antique steam roller.
Up until the late 1970s it was common practice for the BBC to junk archive recordings of old programs, as pre-digital storage took up a lot of space and it was not common to rebroadcast old material. As a result, nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who made between 1966 and 1969 are missing, though audio recordings do exist. Copies have occasionally been located outside of the UK, and since 2013 there have been persistent rumours that most of the missing episodes had been located by a fan, but they have yet to materialise…
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, dir. Gareth Edwards) was the first of the Star Wars anthology films – new stories set in the universe established by George Lucas’ films, but not part of the main “Skywalker saga” series. It is set immediately before the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), and shows how a small team of rebel soldiers steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the first Death Star. In the third of the original Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, the Empire has built a second Death Star; rebel leader Mon Mothma famously proclaims that “many Bothans died” to steal its plans.
A hagiography is a biography of a saint or other important spiritual person.
The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II in which many high-ranking Nazi officers were tried for war crimes, including their participation in the Holocaust. It had a major effect on international law, including the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
“Spirits of place” are local gods or spirits who watch over a specific place. They are a staple of many religions and folk beliefs, but are probably best known from classical Roman religion, where they were known as genius loci. They are also popular in fiction; Ben’s favourite examples are the gods of the River Thames and its tributaries in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and its sequels.
The modern Santa Claus is mostly derived from the English figure Father Christmas and the Dutch character Sinterklaas, as well as tales of the historical Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the Greek city of Myra in the fourth century CE. As well as the lesser known exploits cited by Avril, he is said to have secretly given gifts to the faithful, the aspect most associated with Santa. There are also theories that Santa Claus co-opts pagan beliefs and the Germanic god Wodan, but we’ll leave those ideas for Hogfather.
UHF (1989; dir. Jay Levey) – known outside America as The Vidiot from UHF – was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first and only feature film. He plays George Newman, a man whose overactive imagination gets him fired from many jobs, but when he ends up in charge of a low-budget local television station his bizarre program ideas make the channel a hit. It features a slew of film and television parodies, and co-starred Fran Drescher (The Nanny) and Michael Richards (Seinfeld).
The Peter Capaldi moment discussed by Avril and Ben is his speech from 2015’s The Zygon Inversion, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. He and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart both say “this is not a game”, and at a key moment the Doctor offers the villain forgiveness. The podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death – on which Ben and Avril have both been guests – uses an excerpt from the speech in its introduction. You can watch the whole speech on YouTube here.
On the social media platform Twitter, whose logo is a stylised bird, new user accounts are represented by an icon of an egg.
“Doublethink” describes the act of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It was coined by George Orwell as part of the government-created language Nuspeak, which he invented for his dystopian novel 1984.
Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and popular science writer, especially on the subject of evolution. His 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker explains and gives evidence for biological evolution. In the last decade or two Dawkins has spent as much time criticising religion as explaining science, and is considered a major influence on several atheist movements, but has been criticised for making inflammatory remarks, especially via Twitter. In 2018, a study regarding scientists’ attitudes – including those about religion and atheism – interviewed 137 UK scientists, and though no specific questions were asked about Dawkins, 48 participants mentioned him, most because they disliked him. He wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998, before his anti-religious obsession really took over.
“Bin Chicken” is the most popular (and cruel) nickname given to the Australian White Ibis, the reasons for which are chronicled in “AUSTRALIAN SONG ABOUT BIRDS” by Christian Van Vuuren, co-creator of the web series Bondi Hipsters and television comedy Soul Mates. This Gizmodo article presents a rather more positive view.
Aside from Lester del Rey’s short story “The Pipes of Pan”, first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction in 1940, early examples of gods requiring human belief to survive in fiction include Lord Dunsany’s short story Poseidon from 1941, Belgian author Jean Ray’s 1943 novel Malpertuis, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera, “Thespis”, written in 1871. More recent examples include Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Sandman.
The original Clash of the Titans from 1981, directed by Desmond Davis, was the last film to feature stop-motion animation by famous movie magician Ray Harryhausen. It retells the Greek myth of Perseus (played by Harry Hamlin, later to star in the first season of Veronica Mars), the hero who slew Medusa and the Kraken (or Cetus, in the original myth), and features the Greek gods (including Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis) playing a game very similar to the one seen in The Colour of Magic. The 3D 2010 remake stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and is surprisingly not awful. The sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012) specifically deals with the waning of the gods thanks to a lack of belief.
The Absent-Minded Professor (1961; dir. Robert Stevenson) is a Disney romantic comedy based loosely on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor. It stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard (no, really), a brilliant but forgetful scientist who invents a substance which absorbs energy when it strikes a hard surface, allowing it to bounce higher and higher, which Prof Brainard calls “flubber”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was remade by Disney in 1997 as Flubber starring Robin Williams. The original was so popular it became the first ever Disney film to have a sequel: 1963’s Son of Flubber. The title of the film lends it’s name to the stock character of an academically gifted (or obsessed) individual who neglects the more practical and/or emotional parts of life.

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

8 March 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders” with guest author Nadia Bailey discussing the fourteenth Discworld novel, 1992’s Lords and Ladies.

The episode title references the long-running, much beloved and extremely twee crime drama Midsomer Murders, which debuted on ITV in 1997 and is still running, 21 series later. It’s based on the Chief Inspector Barnaby books by Caroline Graham in which first Tom Barnaby, and later his cousin John Barnaby, solve murders in the fictional, sleepy English county of Midsomer, which after 124 episodes is now often joked to be the murder capital of Great Britain.
There are two examples of Steven Moffat writing women who marry men who follow them around in Doctor Who – first in his most famous episode, Blink, and then in the Christmas special The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. There are similar behaviours in his other work, going all the way back to Press Gang.
We previously mentioned The Craft in our Witches Abroad episode, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of its stars, Fairuza Balk, made her major screen debut in another film referenced this episode: Return to Oz (see below).
The Last Unicorn (1982) is an adaptation of the 1968 fantasy novel by American writer Peter S. Beagle, and has a pretty star-studded voice cast including René Auberjonois, Alan Arkin (who plays the incompetent magician Schmendrick), Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow (who plays the titular unicorn), Angela Lansbury and Death himself, Christopher Lee! It has music written by Jimmy Webb, including songs performed by the band America.
Narnia is a fantasy world invented by English writer C S Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia books. The White Queen first appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where it is revealed she has trapped Narnia in an endless Winter. Her origins are explored in the prequel The Magician’s Nephew (1955).
The Tuatha Dé Danann (TOO-a day DONNan; Ben butchers this and is very sorry) are the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. They reside in Tír na nÓg, often translated into English as the “Otherworld”, which could be accessed (among other ways) via “passage tombs” under the earth – much like the Long Man’s barrow. They have some things in common with elves, but a closer analogue are the aos sí (“ays SHEE”) or Sidhe (“SHEE”, as popularised by William Butler Yeats and, much later, the fantasy roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming). The Sidhe appear in both Irish and Scottish mythology, and take many forms and roles – “banshee” is an English form of bean sidhe, for example. They are often said to live in another world (or underground in barrows, or across the sea – it’s mythology after all), but this is not usually considered to be Tír na nÓg.
If the plot of Maurice Sendak’s award-winning Outside Over There (1981) sounds familiar, that might be because it served as partial inspiration for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) – Sendak is thanked in the credits. The book forms part of a “trilogy” following a child’s psychological development, following his better-known books In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are.
The very long dining table appears not only in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) but also in a whole host of films, TV shows and other media. TV Tropes calls this cliche “table space“.
This is indeed the first appearance of “millennium hand and shrimp“, later used by the beggar Foul Ole Ron (from Soul Music onwards) and bag lady Mrs Tachyon (in the Johnny Maxwell books). Terry apparently generated it using a gibberish computer program, into which he fed a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song, “Particle Man”, one line of which is “Millennium hand and an aeon hand”. (Ben was very excited to discover while researching this episode that Terry, like Ben, was a big TMBG fan!)
A lot has been written on mental health in academia; a good place to start if you’re interested might be this Guardian series on the subject, which spans three years.
Howl’s Moving Castle, originally a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, was fairly loosely adapted into an animated film by Studio Ghibli in 2004. Both are wonderful.
Return to Oz is a 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz, loosely adapting two of the later Oz books by Frank L Baum. As mentioned above it stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale, who after returning from her trip to Oz is seen as mad by her guardians and is sent for psychiatric treatment – including turn-of-the-century style electro-shock therapy. While it was not a big success at the time it has become a cult hit, in no small part because of its creepy imagery and for-the-time amazing practical and stop-motion effects. (The film also inspired the final track on the eponymous debut album, which uses Dorothy’s experiences as a metaphor to describe drug use in the queer community.)
The “Jesus picture” meme is also known as “potato Jesus“, and you’ve almost certainly seen it.
The game Jason Ogg plays with his Binky-iron horseshoe is not quoits, but…er…horseshoes. They both involve tossing a round object at a peg, but quoits is specifically played with circular “quoits”, these days usually made from rope or rubber.
Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga aimed at teenage girls, which launched in 1991. It’s best known in English speaking countries via the 1995 anime adaptation, which ran for 200 episodes. It follows the adventures of Tokyo middle-school student Usagi Tsukino, who is given the power to transform into “Sailor Moon”, a soldier with magical powers who is destined to save the Earth. Sailor Moon’s main love interest is “Tuxedo Mask”, a hero whose disguise is…er…a tuxedo and a mask. However the high school student who transforms into him is for a long time unaware of his secret identity, so they can only meet when in costume. Sailor Moon remains hugely popular, especially in cosplay circles, where you will often see the whole gang of “sailor scouts”.
If you’ve seen the 1987 film The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 novel by William Goldman), you can revisit the “to the pain” speech on YouTube here. It really is quite similar to the Elf Queen’s threat to Esme, but it’s worth noting that in the film the speech is given by the hero! (If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, the scene is quite near the end of the film and is a bit of a spoiler.)
The Doctor Who story with the Morris Dancers is 1971’s The Daemons, starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It also features a white witch named Olive Hawthorne as a supporting character, and she has quite a few things in common with a certain ex-member of the Lancre coven…
We previously mentioned Get Smart in our Guards! Guards! episode, but the specific running joke mentioned here is Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, encountering an enormous version of something and remarking: “Why, that’s the second biggest [thing] I’ve ever seen!” This joke is also used in one of Ben’s favourite videogames, The Secret of Monkey Island, in a scene he recently recreated in his Instagram feed.
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, often cited as his first tragedy. It’s a graphically violent story about (fictional) Roman general Titus, who angers the Goth queen Tamora, setting off a vicious cycle of revenge. If you’re going to look it up, we’d just like to give you a content warning for murder, torture, mutilation and rape. It’s…not gentle.
The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who have lived on an isolated island ever since Prospero was deposed as the Duke of Milan. The play begins with a tempest summoned by Prospero to wreck a ship carrying he betrayers onto his island, but it’s not a revenge story; it’s usually classified these days as a romance.
The club started by Reg Shoe for the “vitally challenged”, and first seen in Reaper Man, is the Fresh Start Club, not the “Second Chance Club” as Ben misremembers.
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies; while the central plot is serious – a villain slandering a young woman, Hero, to ruin her wedding to the dashing Claudio – it is feisty verbal fencers Benedick and Beatrice, who are tricked into revealing their mutual love, who always steal the show. Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version starred him as Benedick and Emma Thompson – to whom he was still married at the time – as Beatrice, and is a traditional but wonderful adaptation with grand music and a cast including Denzel Washington, Imelda Staunton, Keanu Reeves, Robert Sean Leonard, Richard Briers, Michael Keaton, Ben Elton, Brian Blessed and – in her film debut – Kate Beckinsale. Joss Whedon’s black and white 2013 film has a contemporary setting and stars faces familiar to fans of Whedon’s work: Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof as Beatrice and Benedick, plus Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and Jillian Morgese.
Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue, super-fast hedgehog and Sega’s biggest videogame franchise, starring in a tonne of games beginning with 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive (aka the Sega Genesis), and also appearing in a short-lived animated television series, also called Sonic the Hedgehog, which ran from 1993 to 1994. In case Liz’s pun on his name is too blue (sorry) for you, he was also briefly spoofed in one of Ben’s favourite childhood shows, Tony Robinson’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, as “Chronic the Hedgehog”.
Pet Sematary is one of Steven King’s most famous novels, published in 1983. It involves an ancient burial ground, hidden behind the children’s “pet sematary”, where the dead don’t stay buried. It was adapted into a successful film in 1989, and a new adaptation comes out this year.
The Milgram Experiment, named for psychologist Stanley Milgram, was a 1961 social experiment supposedly showing that ordinary people will obey an authority figure even when instructed to do things beyond their personal ethical boundaries. The experiment was considered unethical, and prompted significant changes in the way psychological testing was approved. In 2012 the validity of the original study was called into question when evidence was uncovered suggesting Milgram had manipulated or misrepresented the results.

#Pratchat2 Notes and Errata

8 December 2017 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery discussing the fourth Discworld novel, 1988’s Mort.

Sir Terry’s own thoughts on where to start reading the Discworld are most clearly outlined in the essay “Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin”, which is most easily found in the 2014 non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard.
“Mort” does mean death, but it’s not Latin – it’s French (or in Discworld terms, Quirmian).
A “squib” in the world of Harry Potter is the rare child of a magical person who is not magical themselves.
The lead Gentleman in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Hush was played by Doug Jones, now famous for playing Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, and Saru in Star Trek Discovery. He plays Count Orlok, the titular vampire, in the upcoming remake of Nosferatu. And he’d make a great Death.
Christopher Lee was the voice of Death in both Cosgrove Hall animated adaptations (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music), and The Mob’s live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic, following Ian Richardson’s death. And his Death. (Richardson played Death in The Mob’s first Discworld adaptation, Hogfather.) The body of Death was played by Marnix Van Den Broeke, who also played the golem Mr Pump in Going Postal.
The horse that plays Bucephalus in Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is, unfairly, not named in the credits of the film.

#Pratchat21 Notes and Errata

8 July 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea” featuring guest David Ryding, discussing the seventeenth Discworld novel Interesting Times.

The episode title puns Memoirs of a Geisha, a 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg in 2005. The film was criticised for casting Chinese actors as some of the Japanese characters, while Golden was criticised for his portrayal of geishas and sued by Mineko Iwasaki, one of the ex-geishas he interviewed for the book, as he named her in the acknowledgments despite her requesting anonymity. She later went on to write her own autobiography, Geisha, A Life, which corrects many misconceptions she saw in Golden’s book.
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, published in 1993. We covered it in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, with guest Cal Wilson.
“Inscrutable” is a word long associated with stereotypical depictions of Asian cultures, especially the Chinese. It stems from a lack of effort to understand the differing cultural conventions encountered by Europeans, and seems to have reached a height in Victorian literature.
Bill Bryson is an American-British non-fiction author whose work covers language, travel, history and science. His best known works include Notes From a Small Island, The Mother Tongue and A Short History of Nearly Everything.
The white saviour is a trope in which non-white characters are unable to save themselves, and are rescued from disaster by a heroic white character. The Wikipedia article lists a large number of examples.
“Eurogames” are a tradition of modern boardgames with their roots in post-war Germany. Such games often focus on strategic depth and a balance of luck and skill. The Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995, was one of the first such games to become popular in America, and features players trying to build the most successful settlement by gathering and spending various resources on a fictional island with limited space. Ted Alspach’s The Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a more recent example, first published in 2014, but there are many, many more great ones. Some of Ben’s favourites include Carcassonne, Cyclades, Inis and Ticket to Ride.
One of the editorial directions popularised by Stan Lee during his time at Marvel Comics was the idea that “any issue could be someone’s first“. This mostly manifested as in-character expository dialogue, but also as footnotes from the editor pointing readers to previous issues for backstory.
Potatoes often appear in fantasy fiction as a staple of medieval Europe-like worlds – but they weren’t brought to Europe from the Americas until the 16th century. This is explored in Adam Roberts’ academic work about Arthurian fiction, Silk and Potatoes, and also in the “Fantastical Feasts” episode of the podcast Imaginary Worlds (though the latter is now only available via paid subscription).
We’ve previously noted the possible influence on Pratchett of Mel Brooks’ 1960s spy sit-com Get Smart in Guards! Guards!, Good Omens and Lords and Ladies.
Gunpowder was invented in 9th-century China, and was first seen in Europe 400 years later, around the same time the first cannons were invented – also in China.
Bob Hawke was the extremely popular Labor Prime Minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He died in May 2019. He is remembered both for the many achievements of his government, and for being a larger-than-life figure who embodied the “larrikin” Australian stereotype while at the same time showing great compassion and emotion. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 (see below), he extended temporary permits and offered permanent visas to tens of thousands of Chinese students so they could stay in Australia rather than return to the violence at home.
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square, the main public square in Beijing, to suppress the hundreds of thousands of students gathered there to protest for a variety of democratic reforms. Many were killed, with the death toll estimated in the thousands, and there were also reports of torture and mass arrests. A famous photo was taken the following day of a lone “Tank Man“, standing in front of a column of tanks to slow down their progress.
The Golden Horde was a khanate – an empire ruled by a Khan – that succeeded the Mongol Empire. It lasted for about 250 years from the mid 13th century, though some remnants of it survived into the 19th century. The Horde was founded by Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan.
The members of the Silver Horde are:
- Genghiz Cohen – aka Cohen the Barbarian, age unknown
- Boy Willie – the youngest one, aged 80; his name references Billy the Kid
- Caleb the Ripper – aged 85, source of most of the unfortunate jokes
- Ronald “Teach” Saveloy – our favourite
- Truckle the Uncivil – the sweary one
- Old Vincent – aged 87; doesn’t talk much, presumably the second oldest (though Cohen might be older)
- Mad Hamish – the oldest one; uses a wheelchair
Three Men in a Boat is an 1889 comic novel written by English author Jerome K Jerome, following the titular three men on a holiday they take on the Thames River.
We previously explained chicken parmigiana in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, but in short, it’s an Australian perversion of an Italian dish in which a chicken schnitzel is covered in tomato sauce and cheese (among other things). The original Italian version uses eggplant, and is distinct from its Australian offspring.
Bunnings sausages may be the most Australian thing we’ve ever referenced on the show. Bunnings Warehouse is a chain of large hardware supply stores found across Australia and also in New Zealand, now owned by Wesfarmers, who also own the Australian versions of Kmart and Target. Many Bunnings stores hold a “sausage sizzle” in their carparks on weekends. This is a common Australian fundraising activity, in which cheap sausages are cooked on a barbecue and sold in slices of white bread with tomato or BBQ sauce and fried onions. The proceeds are donated to a local charity or other cause. (Sausage sizzles are also commonly held at polling stations on election days, giving rise to the “democracy sausage” meme.)
Lisa McCune is an Australian actor best known for her portrayal of Senior Constable Maggie Doyle during the first six years of the long-running and popular early 2000s cop drama Blue Heelers. Doyle was famously killed off in front of her fiancee, fellow cop PJ, while waiting to enter a witness protection program at the beginning of season seven. McCune went on to star as naval lieutenant Kate McGregor in Sea Patrol from 2007 to 2011, and also has a highly successful career on stage, including Australian productions of many big musicals.
Horror novelist Anne Rice, best known for writing Interview with a Vampire and its sequels, wrote a widely circulated Facebook post which began “After the publication of The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments.”
Ben is correct in that the distinction between turtles, tortoises and terrapins is not a definitive, scientific one, and the usage of the terms varies a bit depending on where you live. Land-based chelonians – the group that includes all turtles and tortoises – are called tortoises everywhere; aquatic chelonians are generally known as turtles, but if they live in fresh water may be known as terrapins in the UK. Similarly there are three families of pinnipeds – mammals with flippered feet. These are the true or earless seals; sea-lions and fur seals (who have ears); and walruses. True seals can’t walk on land or balance a ball on their nose; only sea-lions and fur seals can do that.
Zen buddhism originated in China, but the “zen garden” is a Japanese tradition.
Twoflower’s boss (and later, his imaginary dragon friend) is actually named Ninereeds; Nine Turning Mirrors was a previous Grand Vizier, killed by the boy emperor during a poisoning attempt in Mort.
Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thick crust and a sweet filling usually made of red bean or lotus seed paste. Folk tales say that the revolt of the Han Chinese against the rule of the Mongols was coordinated by messages either hidden in mooncakes, or printed on their surface in parts. Their distribution was supposedly ensured through rumours of a plague that could only be warded off by the consumption of mooncakes.
“Fridging” in narrative is the act of killing off or otherwise harming a woman to provide a male protagonist with motivation for their story, without treating the woman as a character in her own right. The term “women in refrigerators” was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, who noticed the prevalence of this trope in superhero comics; it references the fate of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in Green Lantern #54 (coincidentally published the same year as Interesting Times). The term was popularised by a web site of the same name which documented instances of the trope in comics.
My Little Pony: The Movie was released in 1986 with an extraordinary voice cast including Hollywood stars Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman. Leachman plays Hydia, an evil witch who creates the “Smooze”, a gross purple ooze that will destroy the ponies’ home of Dream Castle. Several of the ponies go on a search for the Flutter Ponies, magical winged ponies who may be able to help, and yes, they do destroy the Smooze by flapping their wings and creating a magical wind.
A persistent rumour has done the rounds of the Internet for years that American comedian Sinbad played a genie in a comedy movie titled Shazaam. Despite the fact that the movie never existed, many people swear they remember it, and deny they are thinking of the genie film Kazaam, which really did exist and starred basketball player Shaquille O’Neil. Shazaam is considered by some to be an example of the “Mandela Effect”, where some people have developed erroneous memories of which they are so certain, they believe them to be evidence of time travel having changed history. The name comes from a similar phenomenon in which people claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s.
The 2019 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, or NGV, was “Terracotta Warriors and Cai Guo-Qiang“. It features a collection of artefacts from ancient China, including a large number of Terracotta Warriors, as well as specially-commisioned works by contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose art incorporates the ignition of gunpowder. Liz wrote about the exhibition for The Saturday Paper.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was the third in the series starring Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell. It also starred Jet Li as the Emperor, and features both yetis and and army of animated terracotta warriors. It’s…well, let’s just say there’s a reason we usually only talk about the first Brendan Fraser Mummy movie.
Lemmings is a popular series of videogames originally published by Psygnosis, the first of which was released in 1991 for home computers like the Amiga 500, and later ported to a variety of game consoles and computer platforms. The titular Lemmings are green-haired, pink-skinned bipedal creatures who are dropped into a variety of landscapes and walk mindlessly into danger. The player must assign individual lemmings to dig holes, build stairs and redirect their fellows to help guide them safely to the exit.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a fantasy novel for children, the debut novel of English author Alan Garner. It’s set in Cheshire and follows the adventures of two children as they attempt to keep the weird stone of the title safe from the evil spirit Nastrond, meeting a variety of witches, wizards and magical creatures along the way.
The Simpsons episode “Bart vs. Australia“, from the show’s sixth season in 1995, is one of the broadest parodies of Australia ever created. In the episode, Bart makes a collect call to an Australian number to find out if water spirals in the opposite direction in toilets in the southern hemisphere (it doesn’t), leading to him being indicted for fraud. While the episode has had a mixed reaction in Australia, some elements of it are still popular, notably the use of the term “dollarydoos” to refer to Australian currency and a spoof of the famous “that’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee.
American actress Lucy Liu rose to fame as cold-hearted lawyer Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, at the time one of the only female Asian characters on American television. Liu went on to star in a number of hit films including Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill before being cast as Dr Joan Watson in the modern take on Sherlock Holmes, Elementary (one of Ben’s favourite television shows).
B D Wong played psychiatrist and profiler Dr George Huang on nearly 250 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Father Ray Makuda on prison drama Oz, but many will know him best as scientist Henry Wu from Jurassic Park and its sequels Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He’s also been in Mr. Robot, The Flash and more recently Gotham, where he plays a wonderful version of the character Hugo Strange. He’s also an award-winning theatre and musical actor, and the author of a memoir about he and his partner’s experience having a child with the help of a surrogate mother.
Masayori “Masi” Oka is best known as the time travelling Hiro Nakamura on the superhero show Heroes and its sequel, Heroes Reborn, though you’ll also find him in the reboot of tropical cop drama Hawaii Five-0 and a number of films including the 2008 version of Get Smart. He used to work as a digital effects artist for Industrial Light and Magic, and worked on all three Star Wars prequels!