Ben McKenzie

#Pratchat28 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, featuring guest Steve Lamattina, discussing the 1992 novel Only You Can Save Mankind.

  • This episode’s title is a play on the famous meme “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”. The phrase is from the intro sequence of Japanese shoot-’em-up game Zero Wing. The English version was produced for the Sega Megadrive in 1992, and the questionable translation was discovered and popularised as a meme, then celebrated in a song and accompanying music video posted on the web site NewGrounds in 2001. The video shows the phrase photoshopped into a variety of real world locations. You can watch the video on YouTube here.
  • The vampire series mentioned by Steve is Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire, also known as Thirst, consisting of nine books published between 1994 and 2013. It chronicles the life of Sita, a vampire born 5,000 years ago in India. Ben mentions The Last Werewolf (2011), the first in a trilogy of books by Glen Duncan. Neither series is appropriate for children.
  • The vampires of Middle-Earth are only mentioned briefly in Tolkien’s writings, but we never learn much about them. Barrow-wights are evil spirits that fear the sun and possess and animate human corpses. The origins of orcs are not entirely clear. Tolkien supplied several partial explanations, all the opinions of characters in the fiction, which are variations on them being corrupted versions of existing beings, because Morgorth could not create life – only Eru Ilúvatar, the ultimate god of Middle-Earth, could do that. In his later life Tolkien seems to have settled on the idea that orcs were corrupted from men, and even worked on changes to the history of Middle-Earth to make this make sense (originally orcs appeared before the first men did). This will all come up again in #Pratchat83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”.
  • There are many stories revolving around “games coming to life”, or in which people are trapped inside games, wittingly or not. We mention a few videogame ones: the Disney film TRON (and it’s sequel and some spin-offs); the novel Space Demons and its sequels Skymaze and Shinkei, by Gillian Rubenstein; and the Gamer’s Quest series of books by George Ivanoff. There’s also the films Jumanji and Zathura, about magical board games, which started as books by Chris Van Allsburg. You can find a list of other examples on the All the Tropes page for “the game come to life”.
  • As Ben mentions, The Last Starfighter (1984) blurs the line of the trope a bit – the video game isn’t real, but it is a training program for starfighters in a real space war.
  • In Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), based on his 1977 short story and revised in 1991, Ender is one of many children trained to fight from a young age in an orbital Battle School, using a series of games. This is supposedly to prepare them for future conflicts with the alien Formics, and Ender turns out to be a tactical genius, eventually given more and more difficult mission simulations. The film version in 2013 starred Asa Butterfield as Ender and also features Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.
  • Rhianna Pratchett has worked on many games, including the humorous Lord of the Rings parody series Overlord, the modern iteration of Tomb Raider and its first sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Mirror’s Edge, among many others. She is also co-director of Narrativia, the company that holds and manages licensing rights to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. You can find out more at Rhianna’s website, rhiannapratchett.com, and you can follow her on social media, including Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. (We do!)
  • The Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq – who had invaded its neighbour Kuwait over land and oil disputes – and a coalition of forces primarily from the US, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Egypt, though many other allied countries (including Australia) also participated. The war lasted for six months, beginning on 2 August 1990, and ending on 28 February 1991 with the defeat of Iraq. The US military named the operation “Desert Shield”, then “Desert Storm”, and it was commanded by General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf. It was extraordinary at the time for the extensive news footage of front-line fighting; some journalists and political commentators nicknamed it “the videogame war”, no doubt part of Pratchett’s inspiration for the novel. Towards the end of the war, an uprising against Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein failed when promised US support was not delivered. Hussein remained the country’s ruler until his death during the later Iraq War (referenced in Pratchett’s later foreword to the novel), which began in 2003 over claims – later found to be false – that the country was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction”.
  • Wing Commander (1990; released in 1994) is probably the main inspiration for the game Only You Can Save Mankind. It contains many elements seen in the book, including the (then) graphically impressive image of the starfighter cockpit, a variety of weapons, and a higher degree of “realism” (for a given value of realism). The player is a pilot in the 27th Century Terran Confederation, fighting the aggressively expansionist lion-like species, the Kilrathi. It was a huge hit and spawned numerous expansion packs and multiple sequels. The series became famous for its use of cutscenes to advance the plot; from the third instalment these included full-motion video and many famous Hollywood actors including Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Clive Owen and John Hurt. The Kilrathi were originally very one-dimensional villains, but were given a more complex and sometimes sympathetic portrayal in later games. There were also novels, an animated television series in 1996, and a (very unsuccessful) live action film in 1999 starring Freddie Prinze Junior, Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tchéky Karyo, Jürgen Prochnow and David Warner.
  • Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters is a space adventure game created by developer Toys For Bob in 1992. The player captains a ship constructed from advanced alien technology and discovers the alien Ur-Quan have come to Earth’s part of the galaxy, destroying or enslaving every species they meet. The player is tasked with recruiting alien cultures to join the Earth in an alliance to defeat the Ur-Quan. The game is a cult classic remembered for its huge story, resource management, space battles, weird aliens and sense of humour, though its representation of women is problematic. There was one sequel, Star Control 3 (not by the original developers), and recently a prequel, Star Control: Origins (also not by the original developers). There’s an official free version of the Star Control II, originally as just The Ur-Quan Masters and later Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters for copyright reasons. It includes new music and the voice-acting files from a later console version of the game. In 2024, the original creators, through their new company Pistol Shrimp, crowdfunded a new sequel, Free Stars: Children of Infinity, expected to release in May 2025.
  • Text adventure games, also known as “interactive fiction” or “interactive novels”, were a popular game genre in which the player types commands to perform various actions, with feedback supplied as prose. One of the biggest publishers was Infocom, whose break-out hit was the fantasy spoof Zork and its many sequels – there are hints in his works that Pratchett was a fan. Another fan was Douglas Adams, who himself penned an interactive fiction version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for Infocom and loved the form so much he used a sophisticated version of it for his one original video game, Starship Titanic. You can play the Hitchhikers text adventure online: the BBC hosts fancy, updated 20th anniversary and 30th anniversary editions of it. Another significant text adventure was The Hobbit, written in large part by Dr. Veronika Megler for Australian publisher Melbourne House in 1982, but there are literally thousands of them – including all the far too difficult ones described by Steve.
  • The text adventure Twitter account Ben refers to is the bot “Frustrated Quests”, which you can find at @verbquests. It’s also on Mastodon at @verbquests@llull.club.
  • “The Hero with the Thousand Extra Lives” is a nod to “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Campbell’s book in which he describes the “mono-myth” – a story which can be found in thousands of variations across many cultures. Pratchett is clearly familiar with the work as he subverts and references its tropes many times throughout the Discworld books.
  • We talked with Amie Kaufman about Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • ICQ was an early live chat program created by the company Mirabilis in 1996, though it was soon bought by AOL and later the Russian internet company Mail.Ru. Its name is not an acronym, but a short version of “I Seek You”. As early 2020 ICQ is still available, including on smartphones, though its popularity has sharply declined since its heyday of over 100 million users every day.
  • IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, an early chat service in which users could log on to a server and then join channels to chat live with other users. It’s notable for being the birthplace of many of the text abbreviations now commonly used on mobile phones and across the Internet, including LOL, ROFL, IMHO, AFK and many others. It’s also where the convention of naming channels with a leading hash comes from (e.g. #general or #project-omega), now used by Slack and Discord.
  • Gmail (originally Google Mail) started with a testing phase in 2004, and you could only join by being invited by another user. This ended in 2009 – as did the ability to get a gmail address that resembled your actual name.
  • Mavis Beacon, of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing fame, is not a real person. She was a fictional character created to make the program feel more personable. In early versions of the software she was only represented by a photo of Renée L’Espérance, a perfume counter worker discovered by an employee of Software Toolworks.
  • The letters Steve’s Scottish teacher was reciting – properly ASDF, JKL; – are the “home row”, the keys on which a trained typist’s fingers are supposed to rest on a QWERTY keyboard. Most keyboards still have raised dots or bars on the F and J keys to allow typists to find the home row keys without looking.
  • The Typing of the Dead is a 1999 typing game based on The House of the Dead 2 (1998). The original was an arcade game “rail shooter” – the character’s movement was controlled by the game, and the player used a light gun (or mouse or other controller in home versions) to shoot zombies in each new area as they investigated a creepy house. Typing of the Dead – originally released as an arcade game as well! – swapped out the light gun for a keyboard; words appear over each zombie, and the player (or players – you could have two at once) had to quickly type the matching word before the zombies reached them. The player characters in the game are even altered to be wearing computers like backpacks, with a keyboard on wearable shelf at around torso height. The game was later released on home consoles and computers.
  • Johnny and the Dead was adapted in 1995 as a four-part television series by London Weekend Television for ITV, featuring George Baker and Brian Blessed as two of the prominent ghosts, with Johnny played by Andrew Falvey (whose best-known role is probably the voice of Fiver in the late 90s series of Watership Down). Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part series in 2006 by Child’s Play Television for CBBC, featuring Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon and starring a young George MacKay – recently seen in big budget war film 1917 – as Johnny. Neither are easy to get hold of now, as they only had limited release on VHS and DVD.
  • After a workshop season in 2000, the musical version of Only You Can Save Mankind debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, with music by Leighton James House a book and lyrics by Shaun McKenna, who also wrote the musical version of The Lord of the Rings and many other theatre, television and radio programs. You can find information about the 2009 album version of the show, featuring six songs (we don’t know if that’s all of them), at ifnotyouthenwho.com. The composer’s Twitter account suggests that the musical might return in the near future!
  • We should note that Johnny and the Bomb has also been adapted into a musical, available for schools to perform, as has The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Johnny and the Dead has also been adapted for the stage, though not as a musical.
  • Liz really loves The Shawshank Redemption. You can hear her speak about it in several previous episodes.
  • Naomi Alderman’s The Power is an award-winning science fiction novel which describes a future matriarchy, created after women all over the world develop the supernatural power to emit electricity from their hands to protect, attack and heal. It was adapted as a television series for Amazon Prime Video in 2023.
  • Alien Nation was a 1988 American sci-fi film set in the near future, a few years after a ship of alien refugees crash-lands in the American desert. The refugee occupants are a human-like species, the Tenctonese; they have been accepted as “Newcomers” in American society, but face prejudice from the humans they live with. The plot follows a human detective (James Caan in the film) and his Newcomer partner (Mandy Patinkin), the first to become a detective, as they solve crimes. The film was quite serious, but successful enough to be adapted into a television series in 1989. The series was also titled Alien Nation, but had a lighter tone and a new cast. It only lasted one full season, ending on a cliffhanger, but the story was concluded a few years later in five television movies featuring the same cast.
  • The original V was an American sci-fi television show which began as a two-part mini-series in 1983. This was followed by another mini-series in 1984 and a full season of episodes from 1984 to 1985. The plot involved a seemingly human-like species of aliens, known only as “Visitors”, who arrive on Earth seemingly in peace. The original series starred Jane Badler as Diana, glamorous deputy leader of the Visitors, who memorably unhinged her jaw to swallow a rat whole in a scene where a journalist discovers the truth: the Visitors are lizard-like creatures disguised as humans, and are working to conquer the planet. (The title “V” comes from the shorthand graffiti used by the resistance against the Visitors.) A remake television series ran for two seasons from 2009 to 2011, starring Morena Baccarin as Anna, leader of the Visitors. Jane Badler appears as Anna’s mother, named Diana after her character in the original series. In both series, some of the Visitors are shown to be sympathetic to the humans.
  • The Tomorrow People was an ITV sci-fi series about a group of teenagers who developed psychic powers, and sought each other out to protect themselves from governments and aliens. The original series ran from 1973 to 1979, but after reruns of the original proved popular in America, a remake was made in 1992 with a new cast and the same basic premise.
  • Pokémon is a series of videogames developed for Nintendo by developer Game Freak. In the game, the player is a budding trainer of Pokémon (a name derived from “Pocket Monster”). Pokémon are creatures with a variety of special powers which can be captured and trained for battle against other Pokémon. The goal of the game is to become the greatest trainer by defeating the leaders of various Pokémon gyms and the mysterious “Elite Four” trainers, and to capture an example of every different species of Pokémon – hence the catchphrase “Gotta catch ‘em all!” The first two games were Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (Pokémon Blue in English speaking markets) for the Nintendo GameBoy in 1996. Between them the games featured 151 unique Pokemon species, but each version had some that were unique, requiring players to trade with each other to complete their collection. Professor Oak is a character in the game, a researcher who gives the player their first Pokémon, allowing them to choose one of three. He provides some guidance and information at various parts of the game, and also became a character in the popular anime series spawned from the games’ massive success. As of 2020 there have been seven more generations of the games, each one adding a new region to the game’s world (usually modelled on a real world location) filled with new species of Pokémon. There have also been card games, films, toys and many spin-off games, including the hugely popular mobile game Pokémon GO.
  • Pokémon Yeah and Pokémon Nah are spoof designs for a pair of Pokémon games set in a new “Straya” region, resembling Australia. Complete with several new Pokemon designs, the art is elaborate and amazing; it’s the work of artist Liz, aka @VivInkArt on Twitter, and you can find the designs in a thread starting with this tweet. The earlier collection of Australian Pokemon is a full Pokédex worth – 151 pixel-art designs by Australian artist Paul Robertson, aka Probzz. The easiest place to find them is probably on his Instagram; start with this post.
  • Braveheart (1995) is an historical war film directed by and starring Mel Gibson as William Wallace, a Scottish knight and major leader in the First War of Scottish Independence (1296-1328). While it was a tremendous box office success, it has been criticised for being highly inaccurate. A sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019 with Angus MacFayden reprising the role of Robert, another historical character and King of Scotland, whom many felt was misrepresented in the original film. (We’ll talk about Braveheart again in the context of the Nac Mac Feegle in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.)
  • The Illuminae Files are trilogy of YA sci-fi novels – Illuminae, Gemina and Obsidio – by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Set centuries in the future, mega-corporation Beitech Industries launches an attack on a corporate rival’s illegal mining operation on a backwater planet. The books follow the fleeing survivors, especially a small group of teenage protagonists, as they try to outrun their pursuers, who want no witnesses. The story is presented as a series of first-hand documents compiled by the mysterious “Illuminae Group”, delivered as evidence to a trial of senior BeiTech officials.
  • Gaston is the antagonist of Disney’s 1991 animated musical version of Beauty and the Beast (and its 2017 live-action remake). Presented as a traditionally brave, strong and handsome hero-type, Gaston is also vain, arrogant, anti-intellectual and blind to his own faults. When he learns Belle loves the Beast, he attempts to kill him. His sidekick Le Fou spurs him to sing his own praises in the song “Gaston”, which includes lines like “No-one’s slick as Gaston / No-one’s quick as Gaston / No-one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as Gaston”.
  • At the end of Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), protagonist Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) brings the girl Newt back to the rescue ship piloted by her android ally Bishop (Lance Henrikson)…only to find the Alien Queen has snuck on board, and announces her presence by impaling Bishop with her barbed tail. This leads some fans to shout “Queen takes Bishop!” when watching the scene.
  • Billy Elliot (2000) is a “dance drama” film set in the North of England during the 1985 miner’s strike. Billy, the youngest in a family of striking miners, discovers a love for ballet, but is forbidden from attending lessons by his traditionally masculine father. Kirsty’s comment when she invites Johnny into her bedroom is a tamer version of Debbie, Billy’s teacher’s daughter, who invites him into her bedroom and also offers to show him her fanny.
  • Wobbler’s game Journey to Alpha Centauri inspired a real game, Journey to Alpha Centauri (In Real Time), written by Julian Fleetwood in 1998 using the interactive fiction language Inform. It doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere, but you probably don’t have a spare 3,000 years to finish it anyway.
  • Johnny’s nickname, “Rubber”, is surprisingly rude for a middle-grade book: it comes from “rubber johnnies”, a common slang term for condoms in the UK.
  • Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 computer-animated Disney film in which the title character grows tired of being a video game villain and tries to be a hero in other games, causing glitches which might get his arcade machine shut down permanently. It’s wonderful and you should definitely watch it. The 2019 sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, is also pretty good.
  • Cacodemons are one of the common demonic enemies in the Doom videogames, unleashed by human experiments in dimensional travel on Mars. They resemble a floating ball covered in spikes, with a single eye and a huge mouth full of sharp teeth – not dissimilar to the Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons (though with spikes instead of extra eyes on stalks). They appear as the mascot and icon for the first game in the series. The name comes from the Greek κακοδαίμων (kakodaimon), “evil spirit”, and is the original term from which the modern English meaning of “demon” is derived.
  • The shoot-‘em-up Ben mentioned was Xenon 2 Megablast, released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1989, and later ported to other computers and consoles.
  • The old-school videogames mentioned by Steve are probably Dig Dug and Burger Time, both of which were originally arcade games.
  • The Witness is a 2016 exploration/puzzle game by Jonathan Blow, in which the player wanders an abandoned island complex solving a variety of puzzles with minimal instructions.
  • Goodnight Mister Tom is a 1981 novel by English author Michelle Magorian. The protagonist, Willie, is evacuated from 1939 London to the countryside, where he begins to bond with his elderly guardian Mister Tom and understand that his mother had been abusing him.
  • Who Killed Kennedy is long out of print, but you can download a twentieth anniversary edition – with a new ending and commentary from the author – from the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
  • Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) is the first in a series of hugely successful novels by John Marsden which depict the invasion of Australia by a coalition of South Asian nations, and a small group of teenagers who escape initial capture and try to fight back. It was followed by six sequels. The first book has been adapted into a 2010 film and a 2016 television series for ABC3. Marsden died in 2024.

#Pratchat22 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“, discussing Pratchett and cartoonist Gray Joliffe‘s non-fiction humour book, The Unadulterated Cat, with guest Asimov (an actual cat).

  • This episode’s title is a reference to the famous Dr Seuss children’s book The Cat in the Hat (but definitely not the 2003 film adaptation).
  • A new edition of The Unadulterated Cat was published by Orion in November 2022 to tie-in with the animated film The Amazing Maurice. This edition is styled The Unadulterated Maurice, and notably Joliffe’s name does not appear on the cover – his cartoons are replaced with illustrations of the film version of Maurice and other artwork by the artists who worked on the film. This edition also has a new introduction written by Rhianna Pratchett.
  • Best-selling humorous cat books include How to Tell if Your Cat is Planning to Kill You, several volumes dedicated to Internet sensations Grumpy Cat and the “LOLcats” of I Can Has Cheezburger?, and other books that draw on similar themes to The Unadulterated Cat, including Cats Are the Worst and Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed.
  • Eric Ernest Jolliffe – the wrong Jolliffe – was an Australian cartoonist and illustrator who led an adventurous life, including work all over Australia and serving as a camouflage officer with the RAAF in World War II. He is best remembered for his magazine and newspaper strips Saltbush Bill and Sandy Blight, and his own magazine, Jolliffe’s Outback.
  • Gray Jolliffe’s anthropomorphic penis character, Wicked Willie, was the star of both a series of comic books and also a straight-to-video series of animated shorts. These were directed by Australian Bob Godfrey, best remembered for his work on the children’s animated series Roobarb and Henry’s Cat.
  • Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche is a satire of masculinity, originally subtitled “A Guidebook to All That Is Traditionally Masculine”. It was written in 1982 by American humorist and screenwriter Bruce Feirstein and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Localised adaptations were subsequently written for the UK and Australia, the latter by Australian playwright and author Alex Buzo. Solidifying Ben’s connection between the two books is his discovery in December 2021 (thanks to listener Sven) that the German translation of The Unadaulterated Cat was titled Echte Katzen tragen niemals Schleifen – “Real Cats Don’t Wear Ribbons”!
  • Nathan W. Pyle’s strange planet series of comics about aliens trying to understand life on Earth is available at his web site, nathanwpyle.art, and on his Instagram at @nathanwpyle. Pyle experienced some controversy in April 2019 over an old tweet, but his cartoons remain a delightful commentary on the absurdities of our world. Both the cat name cartoon and the vibrating cat cartoon are still on Instagram.
  • Operant conditioning is a form of learning where a behaviour becomes more or less frequent because of positive or negative consequences of the behaviour – a reward or punishment. This is different to classical or Pavlovian conditioning, where a seperate stimulus is associated with the behaviour – the classic ringing of a bell when feeding Pavlov’s dogs.
  • You can read all about the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) at their web site, camra.org.uk.
  • The UK cat documentary mentioned by Liz is “The Secret Life of the Cat: the Science of Tracking Our Cats”, an episode of the BBC series Horizon from 2013. Fifty “cat residents” from the village of Shamley in Surrey were fitted with GPS trackers and cameras over 24 hours.
  • My Fair Lady (1964, dir. George Cukor) is a film version of the 1956 musical, itself an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (though the ending of the musical is quite different). In the story, academic Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle to speak with an upper class accent to see if she can pass as a lady. The film stars Rex Harrison as Higgins, a role he originated on the West End, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza, a controversial choice over Harrison’s stage partner Julie Andrews, who at the time had no film experience and was not thought famous enough to carry the film. The movie won eight Academy Awards. We’ll mention it again in #Pratchat83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”.
  • There are plenty of fainting goat videos on YouTube; here’s a National Geographic one to get you started.
  • Cats can’t spit like humans do, but they can spray saliva when hissing. One of the main things that triggers allergic reactions from cats is a protein present in their saliva.
  • The Famous Five are Enid Blyton’s team of four teenage crime fighters – Julian, Dick, Anne and George – and their dog, Timmy. They first featured in a series of novels published between 1942 and 1963. The books were also adapted into a popular television series in 1978 – and included friend of the Splendid Chaps, Gary Russell, as Dick. Blyton really did use the paper key-retrieval trick often in her books, and not only for The Famous Five. This sort of adventure is revisited in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents; see #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids”.
  • Ben’s explanation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is basically correct, but the main idea tested by it is quantum superposition. This is the concept that subatomic particles exist in all possible states until observed. There are plenty of good write-ups and videos explaining it in more detail online.
  • We previously mentioned Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall (2018) in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”. There’s also a Seafurrers blog maintained by Bart the cat.
  • Summer Bay is the fictional New South Wales town where popular Australian soap opera Home & Away is set. Some of the beach houses inhabited by its characters have elaborate staircases.
  • The cane toad, Rhinella marina, is a species of toad native to Central and Southern America. It was introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 to control two species of native Australian beetle whose adults eat sugar cane leaves, and larvae eat sugar cane roots. The documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) – followed by a sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) – is a great intro to the toad’s impact on Australian farming, wildlife and culture.
  • The original video of Fenton the labrador – titled “JESUS CHRIST IN RICHMOND PARK” – is pretty great. At the height of his fame in 2012, Fenton had merch including the book Find Fenton, a Where’s Wally? style work inviting you to do what it says in the title.
  • Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov had a famous rivalry which lasted for fifteen years of insults both public and private, though it seems likely this was mostly for their entertainment, and that they let go of any actual animosity in their later years. One famous story has it that Clarke learned a passenger who died in a plane crash was reading one of his own novels; he sent the news to Asimov, suggesting that the passenger would have been better off with one of Isaac’s books, since they would have died in their sleep. Asimov replied that the crash probably came as a “merciful release” from the pain of having to read one of Clarke’s novels.
  • The microrganism Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that reproduces in the bloodstream of cats, and exits their systems in their faeces. The parasite can infect any mammal, causing a disease known as Toxoplasmosis. It is often symptomless but can cause neurological problems in people with compromised immune systems. Some studies have suggested possible links between cat ownership as a child with adult schizophrenia, and one scientist thinks that it affects human behaviour, causing irrational attachment to cats, though this is far from a mainstream theory. You can read about Jaroslav Flegr’s theories about cat parasites affecting human brains in this 2012 article from The Atlantic.
  • Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is T S Eliot’s 1939 collection of cat poems in which he reveals many secrets about cat psychology and society, including how they name and organise themselves. As mentioned, you can find Eliot reading it on Spotify. It was rather improbably adapted into a hugely popular stage musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Weber in 1981. The musical itself was adapted as a Hollywood film in 2019, which despite director Tom Hooper’s previous success adapting Les Miserables, was universally panned – including by Lloyd Weber. In the book and early versions of the musical, Growltiger is a piratical cat who lives on a barge on the River Thames, and as Lachlan suggests, he’s definitely a real cat. He was played by Ray Winstone in the film. Be aware that the poem “Growltiger’s Last Stand” uses a slur to refer to the Chinese cats fought by Growltiger – not the only instance of racist sentiment in Eliot’s works. The poem was adapted as one of the original songs in the musical, including the slur, but it was later rewritten. After criticism of non-Asian actor’s portrayal of the enemy cats, the song was dropped altogether.
  • Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is a series of young adult dystopian novels, later adapted into four popular films starring Jennifer Lawrence. The series is set in a future America which has devolved into a corrupt wealthy Capitol and twelve districts of poor, exploited workers. Each year two young “tributes” from each district are sent to take part in the “Hunger Games”: a battle royale style fight to the death meant to remind the population that they cannot fight the state. Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist and hero of District 12, has a hate-hate relationship with Buttercup, her sister’s “hideous-looking” ginger cat. Buttercup is described as a good mouser who enjoys eating entrails from the animals Katniss illegally hunts to help feed her family.
  • Jonesy is another ginger cat who belongs to Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist of the Alien films, and features most prominently in Ridley Scott’s original 1979 film Alien. He and Ripley were the only survivors of the Nostromo when the alien creature killed the rest of the crew; he was left behind on Earth when Ripley returned to the planet where the alien was found, 57 years later. In 2018 Jonesy became the subject of his own cute cat book, Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from his point of view.
  • We previously talked about Horse and Footrot Flats way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”, with Elly Squire.
  • Garfield is the famous creation of cartoonist Jim Davis. A fat ginger cat, Garfield was originally the star of a newspaper comic strip that began in 1978 and is still syndicated in many papers today. He has since been become a star of television, film and millions of plush toys. Garfield is definitely not a real cat: he loves fancy human food (especially lasagna), hates Mondays for some reason, and has a beloved teddy bear named Pooky. Garfield’s popularity despite its bland, inoffensive content has led many third parties to produce alternate versions of the strip. Realfield replaced Garfield with a more realistic cat (this reddit post has plenty of examples), while Garfield Minus Garfield imagines a world in which Garfield doesn’t exist, and his owner Jon appears to be talking to himself. A similar take is De-Garfed, which leaves Garfield in but takes out all his dialogue, leaving Jon talking to a cat who doesn’t talk back. There’s also The Garfield Randomizer, which creates Garfield cartoons by combining individual panels from existing strips at random, and Garkov, which replaces the dialogue with new text generated by a Markov chain, a popular (pre-GPT) method for remixing existing text into new forms. (For a Pratchett-related Markov generator, check out Scrambled Pratchett (@ScramPratchett) on Twitter; it stopped posting in February 2023, but you can read some interesting analysis on the blog of the creator, Scrambled Oracle. The same person also created bots which scrambled Shakespeare and Douglas Adams.)
  • In the Doctor Who New Adventures novels published by Virgin in the 1990s, the Seventh Doctor is given a cat named Wolsey during the time he was temporarily transformed into a human. When the Doctor regenerated he gave Wolsey to his previous companion Benny Summerfield, an archaeologist from the 26th century. Wolsey stayed with her for many adventures, including one in which alien technology warped reality into something resembling a pantomime. In an echo of some of Greebo’s later adventures, this transformed Wolsey into a humanoid cat who referred to Benny as “servant woman” – definitely real cat behaviour! In the audio adventures created by Big Finish Productions, the Fifth Doctor’s companion Erimem from ancient Egypt brought aboard a stray cat named Antranak, who was also pretty real, though the Doctor didn’t like him much. Antranak eventually sacrificed himself to save the Doctor and his friends, though this may have been the influence of an alien intelligence which had been absorbed into his mind. Because Doctor Who.
  • Throgmorten is a cat (another ginger!) who appears in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), a book in her Chrestomanci series detailing the earliest adventures of magician protagonist Christopher Chant. Throgmorten is a magical cat stolen by Christopher from a temple for use in a magical experiment, but Christopher’s uncle proposes to kill and then sell bits of Throgmorten. Christopher instead takes the cat home and sets him free, earning a grudging respect which helps him in his later adventures.
  • Only Forward is the debut novel of Michael Marshall, written under his original pseudonym Michael Marshall Smith. He wrote many sci-fi and horror novels and short stories under that name before switching to Michael Marshall for crime fiction, and more recently Michael Rutger, under which name he writes paranormal thrillers.
  • The Maquis de Carabas in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is not based on Puss in Boots himself, but rather sprang from Gaiman asking himself “What kind of person would own a cat like that?” The folk tale is classified as type 545B in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index, a specific subset of type 545, “Cat as Helper”. In the original, it’s a miller’s third son who inherits the cat, rather than the mill or his father’s money. The cat requests boots, then serves his master well, gaining him favour with the King and eventually a title, partly by claiming his master is the fictional “Maquis de Carabas”. The miller’s son himself is not especially bright or brave, so Gaiman’s Maquis certainly feels like he has some of the cat in him. Gaiman’s other cats include those of the Sandman comic story “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”, in which cats share a secret story about their history, and The Cat, Coraline’s ally in Coraline, who is able to walk between worlds and speak when in The Other Place.

#Pratchat18 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the 1976 novel The Dark Side of the Sun.

  • Since the 1990s many have claimed that if you play Pink Floyd’s hit 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon while watching MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), the songs supposedly sync up with the vision. Fans of “Dark Side of the Rainbow” (as it’s known) suggest hitting play when the lion roars for the second or third time, and claim the experience is profound, but the band and producers say any synchronicity between them is just a coincidence.
  • Terry Pratchett’s first published novel was The Carpet People in 1971, five years before The Dark Side of the Sun. He was 23 at the time, but had started work on the book considerably earlier; the revised 1992 edition is described as being “co-written by Terry Pratchett, aged seventeen, and master storyteller, Terry Pratchett, aged forty-three”.
  • “Galaxy Song” was written and performed by Eric Idle for the 1983 film Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. In a Python reunion live show which toured in 2015, Brian Cox appeared in a filmed insert nitpicking the song’s accuracy. It’s mostly close enough for rock and roll; in one of it’s most accurate lines, it actually says the galaxy is “100,000 light years side-to-side”, not 30,000. (Ben also made this mistake in an episode of re:Discovery.)
  • Gilpin’s Space is a 1986 novel by Russian-born American sci-fi author Reginald Bretnor. It paints a dystopian authoritarian future in which “eccentric genius” Saul Gilpin steals a submarine and uses it to successfully test his new hyperdrive engine. The novel follows a group of his friends who follow his instructions to steal another submarine and escape the oppressive regime at home for other worlds. It’s…probably not going to stand up to a second read.
  • The Dark Side of the Sun was first published (with a cover drawn by Terry!) in 1976 by Colin Smythe Ltd, who also published the original editions of The Carpet People and Strata. It was republished with cover art by prolific sci-fi artist Tim White, and then again by Pratchett’s later publisher Corgi in 1988, after the Discworld series had proven a hit. They used a new cover by Josh Kirby; Kirby also painted a second cover when another edition was printed by Doubleday in around 1993, which was also used for later Corgi editions.
  • The trope of the ancient, all-powerful “Precursors” crops up in just about everything, as Ben mentions, but he forgot that Star Wars does have them – just not in the films. The Knights of the Old Republic videogame introduced the Rakata, an ancient culture whose advanced technology is important to the game’s plot.
  • We previously covered the “E.T. is in Star Wars and Yoda is in E.T.” thing in our Guards! Guards! episode.
  • Emperor Ptarmigan is definitely not Emperor Parmigiana, but for the uninitiated: “parmigiana” is an Italian dish made with crumbed fried eggplant, tomato sauce and cheese. In Australia the original only became popular fairly recently, but for many years a “chicken parmigiana” – which replaces the eggplant with a chicken schnitzel – has been a pub food staple for decades. It’s known variously as a “parma”, “parmo” or “parmi”, depending on where you’re from.
  • The “Dom/Sub” joke that threatens to derail the podcast refers to dominance and submission – sexual play in which one or more parties are explicitly submissive to others. This can take many forms; we recommend you don’t learn about it through Fifty Shades of Grey, which many professionals say models an abusive relationship.
  • In the original Star Wars films it’s established that a mystical “Force” permeates the Universe, and that some people – Jedi and Sith, mostly – are able to use it to perform various physical and mental feats. In the 1999 prequel The Phantom Menance, George Lucas introduced the idea that a person’s ability to use the Force relies on the concentration of microscopic lifeforms called “Midi-chlorians” in their blood. Fans did not like it. In his defence, Lucas originally had the idea back when he made the first film, but it’s still made the magic feel more mundane and opened up a lot of stupid questions about how it works.
  • The “Bacta tank” is the big round jar Luke is in at the end of The Empire Strikes Back as he recovers from his injuries. “Bacta” is the name of the synthetic restorative liquid inside. Old Republic era stories establish that such tanks previously used Kolto, a naturally occurring liquid from the planet Manaan, but it was replaced by bacta a long time before the rise of the Galactic Empire.
  • Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine, is a prolific American children’s horror author, best known for the hugely popular Goosebumps series of more than sixty books. The series has been adapted for both television and film, the latter with Stine appearing as a character, played by Jack Black.
  • Plasmo is a shape-shifting alien “polybop” created by Australian animator Andrew Lawrence. Plasmo originally came to fame in the half-hour stop-motion animated film Happy Hatchday to Plasmo (1989), in which he is hunted by incompetent intergalactic mercenaries Coredor and Brucho. The film was screened repeatedly on the ABC for around five years in the early 1990s, and was eventually followed by Plasmo, a series of 13 5-minute episodes with higher production values. In the series, Coredor and Brucho have team up with Plasmo and his friends, and go on adventures together.
  • In case the jargon left you confused, “MVP” is short for “Most Valuable Player”, and to “stan” someone is to be an obsessive fan of them. The former is originally a sports term, but has been extended to many other areas. The latter is both a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”, and a reference to the single “Stan”, about a murderously obsessive fan, from Eminem’s 2000 album The Marshall Mathers EP.
  • In the 1997 Luc Besson sci-fi film The Fifth Element, an ancient “divine being” named Leeloo (played by Mila Jovovich) is blown up, and future Earth scientists use a sophisticated device to reconstruct her from her severed arm.
  • The Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, originally published in short story form in the 1940s, introduce the idea of “psychohistory”: a mathematical science that can predict the future. Unlike p-math, it only works at the level of human society as a whole, and over very long periods of time. The fictional inventor of psychohistory, Harry Seldon, records messages for future generations of humans many centuries after his own death to help guide the titular Foundation.
  • It’s true: in the videogame Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Shelob the giant spider can turn into an attractive human woman. This supposedly explains how she was able to talk to Gollum.
  • In the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts films, Ezra Miller plays Credence Barebone, a young man with a dark secret. It’s…pretty grim.
  • The Ringworld books by Larry Niven, starting with 1970’s Ringworld, explore a vast, ring-shaped artefact created by – you guessed it – a mysterious and supposedly vanished unknown alien species.
  • 2008’s Quantum of Solace was the twenty-second James Bond film, and the second to star Daniel Craig. It’s a direct sequel to Casino Royale, with Bond seeking revenge for the death of a friend and thereby uncovering the Quantum Group, who plan to stage a coup for commercial gain. They communicate in secret by means of earpieces during an opera performance.
  • Monkey is a 1978 Japanese television series, adapting the Chinese folk novel Journey to the West. In the story, the priest Tripitaka is sent on a pilgrimage to India to fetch new Buddhist scriptures. As penance for past misdeeds, the immortal stone Monkey – along with the demons Pigsy and Sandy – is sent to be Tripitaka’s guardian. Monkey is forced to wear a golden headband, and Tripitaka is taught a special sutra which makes it constrict, causing Monkey considerable pain; this helps prevent him from fighting and killing everyone they meet. It’s a unique series in that it was dubbed by English actors who often did not have a complete script and improvised wildly based on synopses of each episode. It was fairly popular in Japan, but reached cult status in Australia and Canada. Some of the choices of accent and phrasing made by the (primarily white) voice cast we’d now consider problematic, at best.
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a 1967 post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror story written by Harlan Ellison. Considering its super dark and fatalistic tone, it was rather surprising when Ellison adapted into an adventure videogame in 1995.
  • A Knight’s Tale was written, produced, and directed by Brian Helgeland in 2001. It stars Heath Ledger as a peasant who pretends to be a knight, and has basically nothing to do with the Chaucer tale from which it takes its name. (Paul Bettany does play Chaucer in the film, though.)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 film written by Arthur C Clarke (who also wrote a novelisation) and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The plot involves human astronauts travelling to Jupiter to investigate a monolith left behind by – you guessed it – a race of mysterious all-powerful aliens, though the star of the show is really the sinister intelligent computer, HAL.
  • This note is for Sven: we’re sorry we forgot the second part of your question about which authors we think are most consistent in tone and quality of writing. We were really tired.
  • Go Set A Watchman is a novel written by Harper Lee, published in 2015, fifty-five years after her classic To Kill a Mockingbird. She died the following year. While it was promoted as a sequel to Mockingbird, it was actually written first, and is considered by many to actually be an inferior first draft of her beloved first novel.

#Pratchat83 – This Time for Ankh-Morpork

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Liz and Ben are joined by guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) to chat about fashion, faith, food…oh, and football. Yes, join us for an episode that goes well into extra time (i.e. it’s over 3 hours long) as we discuss Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals.

The Wizards of Unseen University are still recovering from the Dean’s defection to become Archchancellor of rival Brazeneck College, but they have a bigger problem: if they don’t field a foot-the-ball team, they’ll lose the bequest that supplies most of their dinners. But the sport has become lawless and violent – a game of the streets in which matches last long into the night and players die. And then there’s the fans… But something’s in the air. The game’s about to change, and at the centre of it are an unlikely quartet of junior University staff: Glenda the sensible baker; beautiful and fashion-conscious Juliet; Trev, son of the game’s greatest player; and Mr Nutt, a goblin who’s good at everything – except explaining who and what he is…

The last of the Discworld books to “star” the wizards, and the longest in the series by a fair margin, Unseen Academicals repeatedly says that it isn’t really about football. And, indeed, there’s a lot else going on: new ways for both dwarfs and trolls to express their femininity; the internal voices which hold us back from reaching our potential; the struggle between progress and fairness, of power and the people. And at the heart of it, four brand new characters who represent a side of Ankh-Morpork we don’t usually see in our protagonists: the regular people, caught up in the Shove.

What did you think of Unseen Academicals? Does it have enough football in it, or too much? What are your favourite takes on orcs? What other sports would you like to see come to the Discworld? And do you know where we can get a megapode? Shout out from the Shove using the hashtag #Pratchat83!

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Guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy and cosy crime. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Tansy recently reprinted her “Teacup Magic” series of cosy mysteries, and her newest novel is the time travel comedy Time of the Cat. You can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media; you’ll also find her in our previous live episodes: “A Troll New World” (from Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019) and “Unalive from Überwald” (from Nullus Anxietas IX in 2024).

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we’re looking at a stack of Discworld ephemera – namely both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! If you’ve read any of those, please send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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

#Pratchat82 – Clack Go the Gears

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Puzzlers and previous guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung return to play and discuss Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw’s 2015 board game Clacks, based on Terry Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal.

Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig has come up with a plan to prove the Ankh-Morpork postal service is still relevant – a race against the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company! The Grand Trunk has a monopoly on the “Clacks”, a system of optical telegraph towers which transmit messages using patterns formed by a grid of six lights – surely they can beat a man on a horse? But the Grand Trunk knows Moist has something up his sleeve, and they’re taking no chances – the fastest and best new Clacks operators will have to prove they’re worthy of the job by racing each other first…

The fifth (and so far final) Discworld board game, Clacks is the second Discworld design by Boyd and Brashaw’s BackSpindle games (following Guards! Guards!). Clacks turns the race at the climax of Going Postal into a logic puzzle where up to four players must use punch cards to turn patterns of lights on and off in a grid, hoping to form another pattern which equates to a letter in Clacks code. It’s a race to finish your word (or words) first, either against each other, or as a team against Moist von Lipwig – but sharing the same grid of lights makes this puzzle very unpredictable.

Is it Discworldy enough? Does it feel like the Clacks technology of the books? Do you find it fun or funny, and do you prefer it collaborative or cooperative? And what else would you play to get your logic puzzle fix? Oh, and if you want to try making the longest sentence you can out of our Clacks words, the ones we drew were SHINE, SONKY, MAGIC, URIKA, ADORA, TOMAS, GUILD, QUIRM, RUFUS, GROAT, MONKS, GNOME, PIXIE, TROLL, TURVY, ANDRE, AHMED, CELYN, THIEF and KLOTZ. Let us know how you went using the hashtag #Pratchat82.

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Guest Nicholas J Johnson is an author, magician, educator and expert in deception, who goes by the nickname “Australia’s Honest Con-Man”. You can find details of Nick’s shows and workshops, including his upcoming magic show for children at the 2025 Melbourne Comedy Festival, at conman.com.au, or follow him on Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook as @honestconman.

Guest Lawrence Leung is a comedian, screenwriter and actor, known to Australian audiences for live and screen comedy, including the 2015 feature film Sucker, and more recently appearances in My Life is Murder, Aunty Donna’s Comedy Cafe and Time Bandits. For all the latest about Lawrence, including his upcoming research into seances and mediums in Victorian Melbourne, visit lawrenceleung.com, or follow him on Instagram at @mrlawrenceleung.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site. One quick correction: Marc Burrows’ one man show The Magic of Terry Pratchett is on in Adelaide from 21 February to 7 March. See the full notes for details.

We’ll be kicking off the new year with one of the few Discworld novels we have left – and why not go large with the longest Pratchett novel of all, Unseen Academicals? We’ll be lacing up our football boots and dusting off our mortarboards alongside returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts! Send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat83.

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

#Pratchat82 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 82, “Clack Go the Gears”, discussing Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw’s 2015 board game Clacks, based on Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, with guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung.

Iconographic Evidence

A photograph of the Clacks board game components laid out on a small table in front of the box. These include the board; square wooden lamp tokens; small wooden “meeples” - humanoid playing pieces - for one player and for the Post Office; a cardboard “Deep Dwarf” token; wooden Clacks tower pieces; the game manual; the large Clacks code reference card; a cloth bag filled with square jacquards; an egg timer; and the cards for Clacks message words, fault and incident reports, and operator’s logs.
The original edition of Clacks with all the components for a solo game laid out.
The box art for the original edition of Clacks.
The, set up with lamp tiles, one player meeple, and some Clacks tower markers.
The Clacks manual, made to look like a techincal manual for a Clacks tower.
Example Clacks message cards.
Some of the jacquards, with the patterns of lights they can affect.
Two of the three types of cards: Fault Reports, used in the competitive game, and Incident Reports, used in cooperative and solo games.
A competitive game in progress – note this is before Ben fell behind everyone else…
The end of Ben’s solo game – pipped at the post by Moist von Lipwig!
Ben’s words for the solo game.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title repurposes “Click Go the Shears”, a popular Australian folk song about sheep shearers. The song’s lyrics were first published as “The Bare-Belled Ewe” in 1891, though the original author is known only as “C. C.”. It’s set to the American Civil War tune “Ring the Bell, Watchman” by Henry Clay Work from 1865, and the first verse parodies the lyrics of the original. It wasn’t widely popular until it was republished and recorded in the 1950s, but is now very well known. Ben used “gears” for the rhyme in the title, but of course it’s the shutters that make the clacking noise in the towers. Ben had a go at a full Clacks-based chorus:
    Clack go the shutters, boys, clack clack clack!
    Quick eye and hands as you send a signal back
    Check it twice for errors and then add it to the queue
    And watch the drop so you don’t end up as a GNU!
  • Nick and Lawrence were previously guests to discuss Going Postal in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”, back in December 2020. We also have notes for that episode, which include quite a bit about the real-world precedents for the Clacks.
  • Ben’s had a look but so far hasn’t been able to identify the craft book that showed him how to make a zither. We’ll add it if he does! A zither, by the way, is a wooden stringed instrument with no neck. It looks and sounds a bit like a cross between a harp and a guitar.
  • The correct name for the “craw” of a zither or other wooden string instrument is, in fact…sound hole! Who’d have thought. Holes with specific shapes can have more specific names, like the “f-holes” in violins.
  • The Collector’s Edition of Clacks was released in 2021. While Ben is correct in his footnote that it was originally planned for the 5th anniversary in 2020, its official name is “Collector’s Edition”; it just also has “5th Anniversary” written in the top left corner of the box’s cover.
  • Mousetrap is a classic board game for children first published in 1963. Like many games of this era, it has a great gimmick, but is otherwise…not very good. In Mouse Trap’s case, the gimmick is a set of small plastic buckets, see-saws, ladders, balls, pipes and other household objects. As players roll dice and move their mice pieces around the path on the board, they gain and lose wedges or cards representing pieces of cheese, and assemble the toys into a Rube Goldberg-style contraption with a cage suspended over a final space. In the original design (including the 1986 Milton Bradley edition that Ben played as a child), the game ends with the players continuing to circle a final loop in the path on the board. One of these final spaces allows a player to rotate the crank that might set off the trap and capture a mouse, and the game ends when only one mouse is left. The original version includes a diver and a bathtub, though its been revised a few times – including getting rid of the final loop, and making the objective to collect the most cheese. A new version, first published in 2001, has a new trap design which replaces the bathtub with a toilet, but the original is still in print.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, the warning beacons of Gondor are bonfires on mountaintops used to signal alarm in the kingdom of Gondor. They are lit during The Return of the King; in the book there are seven, and they’re lit when news of the invading fleet of ships is received. In the film, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, refuses to call for aid, but Gandalf has Pippin light the beacon in Minas Tirith. There are nearly twice as many beacons in the film, which light up one by one until they are visible in Edoras, where Aragorn is trying to convince King Théoden to come to Gondor’s aid.
  • Wikisneaks, designed by Ben McKenzie and Jess Kilby, was played outside on the lawn of the State Library of Victoria as part of the playful program at the 2013 Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Not only could teams negate or steal other teams’ points, the number of points you scored determined how many pieces of a final puzzle you received! Much like in our game of Clacks, though, in the end the players all helped each other. You can find a description and photos of Wikisneaks on the old Pop Up Playground website.
  • Binary – in the computing sense – refers to systems which, at their simplest, are based on “bits” of data which can contain one of two pieces of information, usually rendered as zero or one. These bits are combined in larger groups to store more complex information; for example a byte stores eight bits, and is the basis of most modern computing systems. In old-school text encoding, each character – a letter, number or punctuation mark etc – is stored as a byte. In modern computing, the unicode standard – which attempts to store character information for every language – has versions that use 8, 16 and 32 bits, among others – though not a 6-bit one like the Clacks use.
  • Braille is a touch-based alphabet intended for use by blind and vision-impaired people. It uses patterns of raised dots in a two-by-three grid to represent letters and numbers, and it can be printed using embossing, or dynamically rendered using refreshable displays (which handily maps onto binary bits since each dot in the grid can be raised or flat). Notably the Clacks codes do not match Braille patterns, which should come as no surprise since they are intended to visually resemble the letters they represent. Braille was created by Louis Braille in 1824, originally in French, and intended as an improvement on a previous “night writing” alphabet. It is now used for writing more than a hundred languages around the world.
  • Pictionary is a party game first published in 1985, and was a massive hit at the time. It takes the parlour game of charades and translates the play-acting to drawing, while also providing a simple structure through the use of a board and prompt cards.
  • Klotz is not, as Ben mistakenly thought during the game, the name of a golem, but rather a place – probably in Überwald – mentioned in passing in Carpe Jugulum. It’s where vampires can be dispatched by having a lemon shoved into their mouth before being decapitated.
  • Many successful board games, especially simple and family friendly ones, have licensed variations tying in with all kinds of other brands. The undisputed king of this is Monopoly, which has had hundreds of versions tying in to everything from The Simpsons and Doctor Who, to the Olympics, the AFL (including specific teams), Harley Davison motorcycles and many many more. Monopoly almost never changes anything significantly – it just replaces the names and art on the board, and the design (and sometimes names) of the cards and money. Cluedo (or Clue in the US) is another popular one, though the original murder is often translated into another kind of mystery to suit the tone of the license; for example, in Friends Cluedo, the players are trying to discover which of the friends is keeping a secret, and what that secret is. Love Letter (see below) and Pandemic have also had this treatment, though the Star Wars and World of Warcraft versions of Pandemic are changed enough that they feel like distinct (though closely related) games.
  • Speaking of Pandemic, it’s a great example of action points in games. This is a mechanic (or kind of rule) in which a player has a limited number of points each turn to spend on taking specific actions. In a simple system, each action costs one point, but in some games – like Clacks – some actions will cost more points, further constraining the player’s choices. Often these choices are fixed, but Clacks attaches most of them to the jacquards; sometimes you can afford to play more than one, and sometimes you can’t.
  • We discussed The Witches board game in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. It’s a semi-cooperative game, and uses the most common version of that setup: the players have to work together to avoid losing as a team, but they are still competing to be the single winner at the end of the game.
  • Love Letter is a 2012 microgame designed by Seiji Kanai. It uses a deck of just sixteen cards (in the original version), each representing a person at court to whom a player is giving the love letter they want passed on to the Princess. While the theme is cute, the play is quite cutthroat, with players usually winning by eliminating their rivals; if there is more than one left at the end of a round, then the one with the highest-ranking member of court wins. It’s been reimplemented with many altered themes, including versions about writing to Santa, capturing Batman villains and – like every game at some stage, it seems – investigating the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Most alternate versions include at least a couple of extra or modified cards, and there are also multiple versions of the original with varying numbers of extra cards to accomodate more players. A second edition released in 2022 expanded the size of the deck to twenty-eight cards, but the original version and its main variations remain the most popular.
  • Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 2014 board game designed by Ted Alspach. Players try to build a castle that will please the random desires of a King loosely based on Ludwig II of Bavaria, who built a lot of fancy fairytale castles in the nineteenth century. As one of the only five board games Liz has ever played, we’ve previously mentioned it in #Pratchat21 “Memoirs of Agatea” (about Interesting Times), #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem” (about The Witches board game), and #Pratchat75, “…And That Spells Trouble”, (about the Guards! Guards! board game).
  • Wingspan is a hugely popular, multi award winning 2019 board game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. Players try to attract birds to their three habitats, in an “engine-building” style of game play where you try to pick combinations of bird powers that will work well together to generate the most points by the end of the game. It’s very successful, not least because of the delightful theme and gorgeous watercolour bird art on the cards, and there have been multiple expansions adding birds from other parts of the world to the North American birds in the original. A more recent spin-off, Wyrmspan, swaps the birds for dragons and adds a bit more complexity.
  • Parasite is a 2019 comedy thriller South Korean film, written and directed by Bong Joon-Ho. It depicts the struggling Kim family, who scam their way into a number of jobs for the wealthy Park family.
  • Squid Game is a 2021 South Korean black comedy series made for Netflix, created by Hwang Dong-hyuk. In the series, poor Koreans are offered a chance to win massive cash prize by competing in a secret tournament of deadly versions of children’s games.
  • We previously talked about Mahjong way back in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumkinmobiles”, where we compared it to Cripple Mr Onion. It’s a Chinese game, usually for four players, which uses a set of 144 or more big clacky tiles, mostly “simples” numbered 1 to 9 in three suits, plus some “honours” and unique bonus tiles. Players begin with a hand of thirteen tiles, and take turns to discard ones they don’t want, draw new ones, and sometimes steal tiles discarded by other players. The aim is to collect and declare (by calling “Mahjong”) a named sets of tiles which meets a minimum number of points, decided in advance; the overall winner is the player with the highest cumulative score over several games. But it’s also important to know that there are as many (likely many more) variations on Mahjong as there are of poker, so you’ll want to learn the version your local community plays. To learn more, one place to start might be episode #211 of the Shut Up & Sit Down podcast about how they tried and failed to make a video review of Mahjong.
  • For more on how Leonard and David created Guards! Guards! and Clacks, we recommend listening to David Brashaw’s interview with our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret. You’ll find it in the episode “Picture Books and Board Games with Pratchat and David Brashaw” from 20 November 2023; David’s interview starts at around the 1 hour, 8 minutes and 45 seconds mark, after a discussion with Liz and Ben about Where’s My Cow?
  • We discussed Thud, the 2002 board game designed by Trevor Truran, back in #PratchatPlaysThud, “The Troll’s Gambit”; and Thud! the book in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”. There’s some commentary in both episodes, and their accompanying notes, about the way the game came about and inspired the novel.
  • BoardGameGeek, or BGG for short, is a fan-run board game database, very much the equivalent of the Internet Movie Database for games. It was created in 2000, and is still running strong. Its an excellent place to find details, photos and rules clarifications for board games of nearly any vintage; we’ve linked games mentioned in these notes to their entries on the site. You can find Ben on there under the username beejay.
  • The BGG rating system has been consistent for a long time. Any user with an account can rate any game with a score between 1 and 10, and given a weighted average score, which is what you see on the main page for a game. The official descriptions of what each rating mean relate not just to how much a player enjoyed the game, but how willing they are to play it again; for example, 10 is “Outstanding. Always want to play, expect this will never change.” and 1 is “Defies description of a game. You won’t catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.” Clacks currently has a score of 6.2, where 6 means: “Fair. Some fun or challenge at least, will play occasionally if in the right mood.” Ben’s definition for 7 is actually closer to that of 8; 7 is “Good. Usually willing to play.” while 8 is “Very good. Like to play, will probably suggest it, will never turn it down.”
  • A Fake Artist Goes to New York is the English translation of Jun Sasaki’s 2011 game エセ芸術家ニューヨークへ行く, one of a series of games in very small boxes from the company Oink Games. In the game, the players are all artists drawing a picture together, each adding one line at a time, without saying what they’re trying to draw. When the cards with the thing to be drawn are handed out, one random player gets a card that instead just says “fake” – so they don’t know! Their job is to guess what they’re drawing, while the other players have to try and guess which one of them was the fake artist. A similar game is Alexandr Ushan’s Spyfall from 2015, in which one player is a double agent who doesn’t know where the other spies are meeting. Players take it in turns to ask each other questions, hoping to either find out where they are, or identify the double agent.
  • The Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test, or UMAT, was a test used in Australia and New Zealand from the 1990s to the 2010s as a mandatory part of the selection process for medical students. Part 3 of the test dealt with “non-verbal reasoning”. The UMAT – along with a graduate equivalent, the GAMSAT – was created by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), but was eventually found to be a poor predictor of who would succeed in a medical degree. In 2019 it was replaced by the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT), an updated version of a test used in the UK since 2006.
  • Exploding Kittens is a 2015 card game created Matthew Inman, Elan Lee and Shane Small, the first to be published under the banner of Inman’s popular web comic The Oatmeal. The game involves drawing cards representing various kittens with different powers and abilities; if you draw the exploding kitten you lose the game, but the other kittens let you avoid this by putting the kitten back in the draw pile, forcing other players to draw cards, peeking at the top cards in the deck and so on. It was notable at the time for being the biggest Kickstarter game project ever, raising more than eight million dollars; it’s still the fourth biggest game crowdfunding campaign ever, and there have been many expansions, spin-offs and other games from the same studio. The official website includes the original instructional video on how to play.
  • Ticket to Ride, designed by Alan R. Moon and originally published by Days of Wonder in 2004, is a classic train game. Players collect train cards and play coloured sets of these cards to claim routes between cities on a map. This scores points, but the real kicker is at the end of the game, when players reveal the secret route ticket cards they collected at the start; if they connected the cities on the card, they score bonus points, but if they didn’t, they lose that many points. The original uses a map of the USA in the nineteenth century, but there have been many other versions with maps of other countries and regions, and most recently a “legacy” version of the game which adds additional rules as it progresses.
  • Sagrada is a 2017 game by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews. Players are artisans, and draft colourful translucent dice to place on a grid to create a stained glass window. The numbers rolled on the dice indicates the shade of the colour, and players score points based on how they’ve placed their dice and secret bonus objectives. The name comes from the Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, which has been under construction in Barcelona since 1882.
  • The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is actually the sixth podcast to have read and discussed every Discworld novel. The first five, in order, were Radio Morpork, The Death of Podcasts, Wyrd Sisters, The Compleat Discography and Desert Island Discworld. The next one is likely to be the first broader book podcast to do it, Fiction Fans. (You can find indexes of these shows and of their episodes for individual books at our side project, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.)
  • Marc Burrows’ one man show The Magic of Terry Pratchett will play at the Adelaide Fringe Festival from 21 February to 7 March, 6 PM on the main stage at the Arthur Arthouse. Tickets are $28 and there’s a group from local fan club City of Small Gods going on 28 February if you want to meet some fellow fans (and Pratchat listeners). Get all the info and book tickets on the Adelaide Fringe website.

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

#Pratchat38 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 38, “Moisten to Steal“, featuring guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung, discussing the 33rd Discworld novel, and the first to feature Moist von Lipwig, 2004’s Going Postal.

Iconographic Evidence

  • David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune is famous for many things. One of them is British singer Sting’s supporting role as Feyd-Rautha, sadistic nephew of the evil Baron Harkonnen. He is introduced stepping out from jets of steam wearing only a pair of winged metal underpants, as captured in this gif:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the phrase used to refer to envelopes you have to lick in order to seal them – “moisten to seal”.
  • Ben is actually thinking of the music video (or “film clip” as he calls it) for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”, the third single from Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller. The dance fight in question takes place during the guitar solo, and you can see it on YouTube here. (You can also see a parody of it in the music video for Weird Al Yankovic’s “Eat It”.)
  • Though the first editions of The Colour of Magic were published by Colin Smythe in 1983, it likely wasn’t available in Australia until the release of the Corgi paperback edition in 1985. This isn’t easy to verify though, so if you have any information on this, let us know!
  • We’ve previously discussed all three books in the Book of the Nomes trilogy, aka “The Bromeliad”: Truckers, Diggers and Wings.
  • We’ve also covered all three of the Johnny Maxwell books: Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb.
  • We discussed Guards! Guards! with Aimee Nichols back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • We discussed Mort all the way back in our second episode, #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
  • The Terminator is the titular protagonist of James Cameron’s 1984 science fiction film The Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as the Terminator, a cyborg sent back in time by the artificial intelligence Skynet to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). By doing so it hopes to alter the future in which her unborn son leads a resistance movement against Skynet’s machine army. The film was a success, and its direct sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) even more so, resulting in a franchise of comics, novels, games, a TV series (The Sarah Connor Chronicles starring Lena Heady) and three further feature films. Cameron himself was only directly involved with the most recent film sequel, 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, which while getting the best critical response of the later films made the least money. Schwarzenegger appears in nearly all of the films as a version of the Terminator, creating an iconic character with his deadpan delivery.
  • Several news outlets, including The Guardian, reported in September 2020 that Australia Post management asked its office workers to volunteer to deliver mail – in their own cars – to help clear a backlog of deliveries.
  • The Clacks first appear in 1999’s The Fifth Elephant (discussed in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“), forming an important part of the plot. By the time of that book, semaphore towers have proliferated across Ankh-Morpork. The Watch seem to have their own system, but the Clacks stretches as far as Überwald and has caught on quickly since its invention. The Grand Trunk company does not yet have a monopoly on the system, though a trunk to Genua is being planned. It may also be the Dearheart system was just so superior that it outperformed all rivals, though it is more likely from the description of Gilt and his cronies’ business tactics that they bought up any competitors after they took over the company.
  • On Roundworld (i.e. our world), the earliest kind of semaphore tower first appeared around the 4th century BCE in Greece. Rather than a symbolic system of flags or lights, they used vessels of water which were emptied for an amount of time indicated by the sender through torch signals. The water would run out until it reached the level marked with the message the sender wanted to transmit. The more modern kind of tower, which resembles the Clacks, was the optical telegraph, inspired by military semaphore of the time – see the note below.
  • Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (in English, The Count of Monte Cristo) is a French serialised adventure novel written by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) and first published between 1844 and 1846. The hero, honest sailor Edmond Dantès, is on his way home to marry his fiancée in 1815 when he is framed as a traitor and sentenced to imprisonment in an island fortress. There he is mentored by a fellow prisoner, who helps him identify the three men who betrayed him. Dantès escapes, and secures the hidden treasure belonging to his mentor, but ignores his advice and uses it to seek revenge, disguised as “the Count of Monte Cristo”. One of his revenge plots includes Dantès bribing the poorly paid operator of an optical telegraph tower to send a false message, which is picked up by an official and passed indirectly to the Count’s victim.
  • There have been multiple versions of the optical telegraph. The best-known is the French system created by engineer Claude Chappe for the Revolutionary government in 1793, which is the one appearing in Dumas’ novel. Inspired by naval semaphore flags, Chappe created a system of pulleys that moved one large beam with a smaller rotating beam on each end; these could be quickly moved into many different shapes. He also devised the code used by the telegraph, and a set of rules for its operation, so he would likely have got along well with the crackers of the Smoking Gnu! The Clacks grid of shutters is probably mostly based on the system invented by Lord George Murray for the British admiralty in 1795, though this was superseded in 1816 by the simpler and easier to see system invented by Sir Home Popham.
  • Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd is set in the IT department of Reynholm Industries, where nerds Moss (Richard Ayoade) and Roy (Chris O’Dowd) end up with a new manager, Jen (Katherine Parkinson), who knows nothing about computers. It ran for four series from 2006 to 2010, plus a double-length finale in 2013. In the episode “The Speech” from series 3, Jen makes Roy and Moss write her an acceptance speech for an award; they decide to embarrass her by convincing her that a small black box with a blinking light is “the Internet”.
  • ADSL is a type of Digital Subscriber Line, a technology allowing fast transfer of digital information over old copper telephone lines by using frequencies not used by standard voice communication. The A stands for Asymmetric – ADSL provides a much faster speed for downloads than for uploads. Because there may be a great deal of noise on the line, depending on the gauge and quality of the copper network, ADSL is not suited to long-distance use so it is only deployed for up to a few kilometres from an exchange – and you are likely to get less noise over shorter distances, so if you’re closer to the exchange your signal will be clearer and consequently your speeds will be faster.
  • The Sting is a 1973 film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It won a slew of Oscars in 1973 and was so influential that according to Nick, there are two kinds of con artist films: those made before The Sting, and those made after! We don’t want to give anything away here, but if you want to know more, check out episode 21 of Nick’s old podcast Scamapalooza, in which he discusses the film with American author Matthew Specktor.
  • We’ve talked before about The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont’s 1994 adaptation of the Steven King short story starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. It’s one of Liz’s favourite films; you can find some of the biggest mentions in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28.
  • Lawrence Leung’s Sucker began life as an award-winning solo comedy show in 2001, but was adapted into a feature film in 2015, starring John Luc as young Lawrence, Timothy Spall as a conman known as “the Professor”, and Lily Sullivan as his daughter, Sarah. It’s narrated by Lawrence as “The Real Lawrence Leung”.
  • Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins presents a bit of a departure from the standard origin story of Bruce Wayne; his parents’ murderer Joe Chill is caught and goes to prison, but is paroled when he testifies against mob boss Carmine Falcone. Now a young adult, Bruce plans to murder him but is beaten to it by a hitman working for the mob. It’s a conversation with Falcone himself that convinces Bruce to become a symbol of fear to criminals, but even after his return to Gotham he faces significant setbacks on the road to becoming Batman.
  • In the 2008 Bond film Quantum of Solace – referred to rather rudely by certain people on this podcast as “the shit one” – Bond is driving an investigation into a secret criminal organisation known as Quantum. They successfully frame him for murder and he is cut off from MI6, forced to go it alone.
  • Frank Abagnale Jr was a notorious conman of the 1960s who spent six years between the ages of 15 and 21 scamming banks, stealing money through elaborate schemes, and pretending to be a doctor, a lawyer and even an airline pilot. After he left prison he helped the FBI catch other conmen and eventually became a security consultant to banks and other organisations, helping them avoid being scammed. His 1980 autobiography Catch Me If You Can was adapted into a 2002 Hollywood film directed by Steven Spielberg, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank and Tom Hanks as an FBI agent trying to catch him. It was also adapted into a Broadway musical in 2011.
  • Ferdinand Waldo “Fred” Demara (1921-1982) was another impostor who not only pretended to be a doctor but also a school teacher, a psychology professor and a Christian Brother. He was caught several times but continued to assume new roles until he began to make money from his fame; television appearances on game shows made it more difficult for him to pretend to be someone else. In his later years he apparently tried to go straight, but was dogged by his past actions. He still managed to be friends with many high profile people, including the actor Steve McQueen. His life story was adapted into the 1961 film The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis.
  • We’ve previously talked about Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) and his Discworld dwarfish counterpart Casanunda in our episodes about Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum. The real Casanova left an indelible mark on Western culture by publishing a no holds barred autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), which as well as giving us an accurate idea of 18th century European society made his name synonymous with “womaniser”.
  • The “Jedi mind trick” first appears in the original Star Wars (1977). Obi-Wan Kenobi uses the Force to convince some Stormtroopers that C-3PO and R2-D2 “aren’t the droids you’re looking for”, and explains to an impressed Luke Skywalker that “the Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.” Luke, Qui-Gon Jinn and Rey all use similar mind tricks in later films, but they don’t always work. It was first referred to as a “mind trick” by Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

These show notes were delayed by Ben moving house in December, but he’s catching up!

#Pratchat38 – Moisten to Steal

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Writers, comedians, magicians and con-men experts Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung join us as we meet the distressingly named Moist von Lipwig in his 2004 debut, Terry Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal!

Con-man Moist von Lipwig (aka Albert Spangler) thinks he’s come to the end of the line when he’s hanged by order of Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. But while the world believes him hanged, the city’s tyrant has actually saved him for something bigger: he wants Moist to revitalise the city’s derelict post office. It seems like a hopeless task with no chance of success or escape, what with the mountains of mail, unsatisfactory staff, golem parole officer, and the communications monopoly of the Grand Trunk Sempahore Company, run by the piratical Reacher Gilt. But every con-man needs a challenge…

Pratchett’s first Moist book is a great in to the Discworld at large, with a gripping self-contained story of new technology vs old, capitalism vs the public good, and one man’s lifetime of criminal habits vs his better nature. As well as Moist himself, it introduces such memorable characters as Mr Pump, Stanley the pin collector, and the one and only Adorabelle Dearheart. (Everyone in this book has an amazing name.) It’s not a short book, and we struggle to cover all its themes, twists and turns. Do you love Moist von Lipwig? Could you get over his name? Could you operate a Clacks tower? And just how deep did Vetinari’s plan go, anyway? Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat38.

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Guest Nicholas J Johnson is an author, magician and expert in scams and swindles, earning himself the nickname “Australia’s Honest Con-Man”. His new children’s book, the “autobiographical” Tricky Nick, features magic and time travel and all sorts, and is available now from Pan Macmillan. Find out more about Nick’s live performances and workshops at conman.com.au, or follow him on Twitter at @countlustig.

Guest Lawrence Leung is a comedian, screenwriter and actor, known to Australian audiences from his roles in Offspring and Top of the Lake, and his own shows including Lawrence Leung’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Maximum Choppage, and the feature film Sucker. Find out all the latest about Lawrence, including when you can catch his live-streamed comedy shows, at lawrenceleung.com, or you can follow him on Twitter at @Lawrence_Leung.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Our plan to cover Sir Terry’s short fiction was via live shows, but since that hasn’t worked out for us this year, in January we’re going to discuss 1998’s short witches story, The Sea and Little Fishes. We’ll also be welcoming our first international guest: Marc Burrows, author of the Pratchett biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett! Send us your questions via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat39.

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

#Pratchat81 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 81, “Only Fowls and Horses”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1990 short story “Hollywood Chickens”, and 1972 short story “From the Horse’s Mouth”, with guest Dr Laura Jean McKay.

Iconographic Evidence

We’re hoping to find the illustration from the original version of “Hollywood Chickens” from More Tales From the Forbidden Planet; if you have access to a copy, please let us know!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on Only Fools and Horses, a popular BBC sitcom which originally ran between 1981 and 1991, and continued to show up in the form of Christmas specials until 2006. It starred David Jason (known to Discworld fans for playing Albert and later Rincewind in The Mob’s adaptations for Sky Television) and Nicholas Lyndhurst as “Del Boy” and Rodney Trotter, two half brothers living in south-east London. The show revolves around their various get rich schemes, mostly to do with buying and selling dodgy goods. It holds the record for the highest ratings for a UK sitcom, with 24 million people tuning in to watch the supposed last ever episode in 1996.
  • If The Animals in That Country sounds familiar it may be because it’s won many awards, including the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Fiction, being named a Slate and Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title might also be familiar – it’s named after a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.
  • Thelma & Louise – the regular one, without a dingo – is a beloved 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott (yes, the Alien guy) and written by Callie Khouri. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the titular friends, whose holiday road trip goes horribly wrong…which isn’t a great description of the film, but it’s considered a modern feminist classic for good reason. David and Sarandon were both nominated for Academy Awards, and it was also nominated for several others, winning for Best Screenplay. A musical version is currently in development.
  • Pratchett’s most prolific year was, in fact, 1990 – the same year he wrote “Hollywood Chickens”. That year he published five novels: Diggers (#Pratchat13), Good Omens (#Pratchat15), Wings (#Pratchat20), Eric (#Pratchat7) and Moving Pictures (#Pratchat10).
  • Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-American writer best known for her prolific personal journals, which she started writing at the age of 11.
  • Pratchett actually says that “short stories cost me blood” twice – and in the same book! In A Blink of the Screen, he says this in the author’s note for “Turntables of the Night” (see #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”) and “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”).
  • Pratchett’s meeting with Arthur C. Clarke is detailed in Chapter 3 of A Life With Footnotes. It did indeed happen in the toilet.
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award for the year’s best science fiction novel. It was established in 1987 via a grant from Clarke; the winner is chosen by a panel made up of members of three prominent British science fiction organisations. The Animals in That Country won in 2021; the most recent winner is Martin McInnes for his novel In Ascension.
  • Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, best known for the Young Wizards series of fantasy novels, as well as decades of work on Star Trek as a novelist, screenwriter and more. But that’s just scratching the surface of her work. As Diane was kind enough to point out to us in a comment below (when this note was sadly left very unfinished), she was also a long-time friend of Pratchett’s. We’ve previously linked to Diane’s blog post about the Maggi soup ads incident, as well as this post about it on the Stuffed Crocodile blog; both of them have pictures of the affected books. The previous mention of the soup story was in Eeek Club 2023.
  • The Hollywood Freeway Chickens are absolutely real, though their origins are a mystery. The original colony lives near the exit to Vineland Avenue, and they seem to have been there since 1969 (so a bit earlier than Diane’s story). There’s also a second colony, the “New Freeway Chickens”, a couple of miles away. Several people have come forward over the years claiming to have put them there (via truck accident or otherwise), but none of these stories have been verified. Attempts to remove the chickens have never managed to catch them all, so while we couldn’t find definite confirmation of this, it seems likely that they’re still there now. Listener Natalie was kind enough to ask Diane Duane about it via Tumblr on our behalf; and Diane was a good sport and gave a lovely answer. You can read the original discussion on Tumblr, but in brief: Diane had seen the chickens “often”, and mentioned that “when the subject came up in some convention bar or other, (a) we were in Telling Another Writer About A Cool if Unlikely-Sounding Thing mode—at which time you do not “pull the long bow,” just lay out the facts as known to you—and (b) I knew quite well Terry’d later do his fact-checking and possibly find out more about the story than I knew: which would be fun. …Thus (eventually/accidentally) leaving me with one of the greatest blurb slugs ever seen. 😄”
  • The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-2018) is a classic sci-fi crime drama. It follows two FBI agents, weirdo Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptical Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned weird unsolved cases – the “X-Files” – which usually (but not always) have a supernatural explanation. We’ve previously mentioned the show in #Pratchat35, #Pratchat36, #Prachat42 and #Pratchat69.
  • The Ursula Le Guin story about ants Laura mentions is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, first published in the 1974 anthology Fellowship of the Stars. The phrase being debated in the story is indeed “Up with the Queen!”
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#EeekClub2023 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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