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Ben McKenzie

#Pratchat85 Notes and Errata

8 March 2025 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 85, “AT LAST, SIR TERRY”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”, with guest Myfanwy Coghill.

Iconographic Evidence

The full televised speech, as mostly read by Tony Robinson, is currently available on YouTube.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is taken from the first line of the tweets sent out by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett to publicly announce Pratchett’s death, which is still (as of March 2025) available:

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

— Terry Pratchett 🖤 🤍 (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015
  • Myf last appeared as a guest for #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, discussing Maskerade, in September 2019.
  • Avocation comes from the same Latin root as vocation, but rather than meaning “called to”, it means “called away”. It is used these days to refer to something which is not someone’s main occupation, but their true passion outside of work.
  • Mortuary work refers to work done on the body of a deceased person, including embalming and other forms of preservation or restoration to make the body suitable for viewing.
  • The 10th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death will be on the 12th of March, 2025. In the first published version of this episode, Ben incorrectly gives the date of his death as the 15th of March in a footnote; it turns out there’s a mistake in the proof copy of the official biography, A Life With Footnotes*, which he used to double check! (It might be a deliberate mistake, to help detect piracy – in the vein of trap-streets in street directories.) A corrected episode should be out by the time you read this, but apologies if you got the incorrect version.
  • Pratchett’s documentary about assisted dying was Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, produced in 2011 for BBC Scotland. It was broadcast in the UK on the 13 June 2011, and had its American premiere at the 2011 North American Discworld Convention in Madison, Wisconsin (yes, that Madison). The film won several television awards, including a Scottish BAFTA, a Royal Television Society award, and an Emmy for Best Documentary.
  • We’ve so far been unable to determine if “Shaking Hands with Death” or any of Pratchett’s documentaries were broadcast in Australia, though we have heard anecdotally that a couple of the BBC ones were. If you know, please let us know!
  • “Space Pilot 3000”, the first episode of Futurama which features a suicide booth, was first broadcast on 28 March, 1999 on Fox. The show follows Fry, a pizza delivery boy who is accidentally frozen in suspended animation for a thousand years on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and wakes in the year 3000, heavily inspired by retro-futuristic cartoons. Matt Groening says the inspiration for the suicide booth was a Donald Duck cartoon from 1937, Modern Inventions, in which Donald is nearly killed by a variety of devices in a “Museum of the Future”. They appear in a further ten Futurama episodes (and telemovies), an in-universe appear to have been around for a very long time – since at least 2008! In fiction, there are examples of similar devices dating back to the 1890s, including the 1895 short story “The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert W. Chambers. In his speech, Pratchett refers to Martin Amis’ facetious mention of suicide booths in a 2010 interview with The Times (no longer available online), in which an elderly user would also be given “a martini and a medal”. Neither side of the euthenasia were particularly pleased, but as Prachett points out, it did get people talking.
  • “That dog episode” of Futurama is “Jurassic Bark”, from the show’s fifth season, first broadcast on 17 November, 2002. In the episode, protagonist Fry finds that archaeologists have discovered the pizza parlour where he used to work as a delivery boy one thousand years earlier – including the remains of Fry’s now fossilised dog. Along with other artefacts is a fossilised dog – Fry’s own dog, Seymour, who Fry decides to clone, Jurassic Park style. It’s generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and was nominated for an Emmy.
  • David Harewood OBE gave the 2023 Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was titled “75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving in this country”. The HMT Empire Windrush was originally the MV Monte Rosa, a German passenger ship seized by the British after World War II. In 1948, the Empire Windrush brought more than one thousand passengers, most of them West Indian, to England, a voyage that became a famous symbol of post-war migration to the United Kingdom. This group of migrants are sometimes referred to as the “Windrush generation”, and among them were members of Harewood’s own family.
  • The Reith Lectures are a similar lecture series broadcast annually on BBC Radio, and which are also available as a podcast; you can find an archive of the lectures at the BBC. The lecture Myf mentions was given by forensic psychotherapist Gwen Adshead in 2024, and is titled “Four Questions About Violence”.
  • Rob Wilkins was indeed a “Stunt Pratchett” during a talk at the Sydney Opera House, but that was on 17 April, 2011 – more than a year after the Richard Dimbleby Lecture. So its understandable he may have been nervous about doing it for the first time for national television! We’ve previously mentioned this event in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, as the event was chaired by that episode’s guest, Garth Nix! You can still find it as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast, currently available on Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”.
  • Tony Robinson produced the documentary Tony Robinson: Me and My Mum in 2006, as part of Channel 4’s series The Trouble with Old People. It covered his difficulties in finding a care home for his mother, who also suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and includes her life and death in the home. Robinson is still an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society; last year he featured the Society’s Director of Research and Innovation, Fiona Carragher, on an episode of his podcast Cunningcast. The episode is titled “DEMENTIA Action Week: A Defining Year”, and was released on 16 May 2024.
  • The BBC Big Read was a survey conducted in 2003, with more than 750,000 responses. Pratchett’s entries in the final list of one hundred were, in order: Mort (#65); Good Omens (#68); Guards! Guards! (#69); Night Watch (#73); and The Colour of Magic (#93).
  • The line “I never saved anything for the swim back” is from the science fiction film Gattaca (1997, dir. Andrew Niccol), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. We won’t say too much, since the line comes fairly close to the end, but it still holds up and is worth a watch.
  • Death’s scene with the swan is in Maskerade, as is the scene where Granny Weatherwax plays cards with Death for the life of a newborn baby. After Death lets her win, she notices he has a shoulder injury and pops his arm back into place for him. As he’s leaving, Death asks her what she would have done if she’d lost. Granny replies with a smile: ‘Well, for a start … I’d have broken your bloody arm.’
  • The Pitt is a 2025 American medical drama on HBO’s Max streaming service. It’s set in the emergency department of a fictional hospital in Pittsburgh. The show’s first season covers one 15-hour shift in the ED, which is nicknamed “The Pitt”. It stars Noah Wyle (best known for playing another doctor in ER) as a senior attending physician, alongside a cast of younger doctors, including students, interns and residents.
  • Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher probably best known for his idea of the “collective unconscious” – that humans have in common a set of instincts (basic desires) and archetypes (universal symbols). Despite much criticism and evolution of thought in psychology, Jung’s theories remain very popular.
  • Rumpelstiltskin is the German version of a folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Similar stories appear in many cultures; it’s known in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 500, “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”. The titular character, usually described as an imp, is not summoned by anything in particular except desperation on the part of the heroine, who has been given the impossible task of spinning straw into gold, as her father boasted she could. If she does not, she will be killed. Rumpelstiltskin completes the task but in return asks for her first born child. Some years later, the women has married the prince and become Queen, and the imp returns for his payment when the child is born. When she protests, he gives her a chance: he will give up the child if she can guess his name, but she has only three days to work it out. His own pride is eventually his undoing, since the King eventually discovers his name by coming across his house in the woods, and secretly watching him as he dances and sings a song to himself about how she will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. Therea re many variations, including some from Nordic countries, and the British Isles, some explicitly making the Rumpelstiltskin character a demon of some kind.
  • The Reddit carbon monoxide leak story is from 2015, posted on r/legaladvice as “[MA] Post-it notes left in apartment.” In 2018 the story was made into an episode of the podcast The Endless Thread, “Something Wicked”.
  • Dignity in Dying is a UK not-for-profit, membership supported campaigning organisation originally formed in 1935 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society. They also have a sister organisation, Compassion in Dying, formed in 2008. Compassion in Dying do not campaign for changes in the law, but are a registered charity that helps individuals to talk about and make decisions related to their own deaths, including legal and administrative assistance for things like living wills, Do Not Resusciatate orders and giving power of attorney to trusted loved ones.
  • Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585) was a 16th-century English composer primarily of choral music. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth gave Tallis and his later contemporary William Byrd an exclusive letters patent for printing music and music paper in England, which made sure his music was perfomed across the British Isles and preserved into the modern day. Most of his works are religious, and the best known include Lamentations of Jeremiah, Miserere nostri, and Spem in alium.
  • Unity LeJean is an Auditor in Thief of Time who so well creates a human body that she develops human thoughts and sensibilities. We discussed Unity’s life and death in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”.
  • While we have not been able to find any documented cases of people being coerced into assisting dying, it is notable that reasons like “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”, “isolation or loneliness” and financial issues are often cited as reasons by those accessing assisted dying in Canada and Oregon. Meanwhile in the UK, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, 187 assisted suicide cases were referred to them by police between April 2009 and March 2024. Only 24 of those proceded without being withdrawn, mostly because they failed the test of being in the public interest. Of those, eight became cases of other crimes, including homicide; one resulted in acquittal; four were successfully prosecuted; and six are still ongoing. They don’t say what happened to the other five, but we infer that most of those with were withdrawn by police or with which the CPS didn’t proceed failed a public interest test, which maybe suggests they are the sort of thing that would be legalised under assisted dying laws.
  • “The Appointment in Samarra” is an ancient Mesopotamian tale which dates back to the Babylonian Talmud. The best-known modern version derives from Sheppey, the last play written by English writer W. Somerset Maugham, in 1933. Towards the end of the play, the title character – an Irishman who has won the lottery, but decides to spent the winnings on charity – is visited by Death. When he muses that he should have bought a new home on the Isle of Sheppey, as he considered earlier in the play, death gives a brief monologue recounting the story of the Appointment in Samarra. It is definitely worth a google, though you may find the top result is the 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra by American writer John O’Hara, who included Somerset Maugham’s version in his book after he was shown it Dorothy Parker and was inspired to change the title of the novel.
  • The Google search engine was launched in 1998, the first search engine to use back-link data to algorithmically rank pages by importance in search results. Exactly when it became the most popular search engine is hard to guage, but the phrase “to google” meaning “to search on the Internet” had entered popular usage by 2002, so Google was certainly firmly entrenched by 2010.
  • Assisted dying laws in Australia are state legislation, like most other medical law. Ben isn’t quite correct; every state has an active assisted dying law, but the two Australian territories do not (yet). The laws have many similar restrictions, and are seen as quite strict compared to legislation in other countries: patients must be legal adults, have a terminal illness with a life expectany of twelve months or less, and be in severe pain. There are also administrative barriers in terms of how and when a patient can make the request. The laws differ in many other ways, including who is allowed to give life-ending medication, how doctors must behave if they object to such a treatment, and who is allowed to suggest voluntary assisted dying (complicated further by federal laws prohibiting the discussion of suicide over carriage services, which includes telehealth). As of March 2025, the situation in each state is:
    • The Northern Territory previously had the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, making it the first jurisdiction in Australia to legalise assisted dying. The conservative federal government of the time disagreed with the law, and introduced the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which made it illegal for territories to pass laws permitting assisted dying. This was repealed by the the Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022. A panel reported findings on possible new legislation for the Northern Territory in 2024, but no new law has yet been proposed.
    • Victoria was the first state to pass assisted dying legislation, with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. It came into effect on 19 June 2019. Amendments to the bill to get it passed also increased funding for palliative care in regional areas. It served as a model for legislation in most of the other states.
    • Western Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019, which came into effect on 1 July 2021.
    • Tasmania has the End-of-Life Choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Act 2021, which came into effect on 23 October 2022.
    • Queensland has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 1 January 2023.
    • South Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 31 January 2023.
    • New South Wales has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022, which came into effect on 28 November 2023.
    • The Australian Capital Territory passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2024 on 5 June 2024, which comes into effect on 3 November 2025.
  • When Ben mentions that the government has introduced and then taken away support for those with disabilities, he’s referring to changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), first introduced by the Gillard government near the end of their time in office, in 2013. This is a government scheme that supports those under the age of 65 with permanent disabilities, including medical costs, equipment and services. Successive conservative governments did not do the scheme any favours, capping the number of staff at its Agency well below projected need, and making changes to its leadership. In 2024 major reforms were passed in legislation by the Albanese Labor government, but while these were supposedly based on recommendations from an independent review of the scheme, they were criticised for effectively removing support from many disabled Australians, who are already underserved by the scheme.
  • The Victorian death pyramid – more properly known as the “Metropolitan Sepulchre” – was a pyramid-shaped necropolis proposed by the architect Thomas Willson in 1829. It was meant to address the shortage of burial space in London, and would have been built in Primrose Hill. The design was “nearly four times the height of St Paul’s” (about 90 stories), with external stairs and an obervatory at the top; it has a potential capacity of five million corpses. Even at the time, it was considered “extraordinary” and “absurd”. Surprisingly, and to Ben’s disappointment, 99% Invisible don’t appear to have done an episode (or even a mini-story) about this.
  • The infant mortality rate in Victorian London was very high, especially compared to the overall death rate, which had otherwise declined. Some sources place the infant mortality rate at over 300 in 1,000 births in 1800. One pamphlet from 1862 noted that in 1859, two in every five deaths was of an infant aged five or under, and half of those – one in five deaths – was of babies under a year in age. These observations led to activism around child health and safety, and reforms and initiatives including bottle feeding of babies.
  • Liz has previously mentioned the Melbourne General Cemetery in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”; the latter episode is no longer available.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Discworld, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Glenda Sugarbean, goblins, Igor, Juliet Stollop, Mr Nutt, Mustrum Ridcully, Pepe, Ponder Stibbons, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trevor Likely, Vetinari, William de Worde, Wizards

#Pratchat51 Notes and Errata

8 January 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Annagramma, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Garth Nix, Granny Weatherwax, Miss Treason, Nanny Ogg, Petulia Gristle, Photos, Tiffany Aching

#Pratchat83 Notes and Errata

8 January 2025 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, with guests Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics).

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the official song of the 2010 World Cup, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. The song also features South African band Freshlyground, and was a big hit in both Europe and Africa. But it wasn’t without controversy: there were claims of plagiarism, though these were dismissed by the supposed victims, and some criticism of having a Colombian artist perform the song for the first (and so far only) World Cup held in Africa.
  • Tansy was previously a guest for both of our live shows: “A Troll New World” from June 2019, and “Unalive from Überwald” from August 2024. Fun fact: you add both of those episodes together, they’re still shorter than this one! (But they’re both around an hour and a half long.)
  • “Likely lad” has a couple of meanings, but the most common is derived from Geordie slang, meaning “likely to succeed”. It seems to have originated from boxing, but has expanded to mean someone with potential. In some places, it’s also used to mean “likely to cause trouble”. The phrase was popularised by the BBC sitcom The Likely Lads in the 1960s. This featured the misadventures of two young men in the Northeast of England, Bob and Terry, who like football, beer and girls.
  • The new faculty member Ben couldn’t remember was the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. “Recondite” means obscure, or hidden, leading Ben to wonder if this is really a new character, or just a new and broader title for the Reader in Invisible Writings… But the Reader in Invisible Writings is Ponder Stibbons, who is present in the same scene, referred to by one of his more recently acquired titles, the Master of Traditions. So no; a new character, it would seem.
  • We have confirmed that there have been multiple Megapodes that attend Discworld conventions, carried by various fans. We’re currently hoping to contact the Australian fan we met doing it to find out more about her Megapode! We think it was either a custom job or a repurposed generic weird bird toy. We’ll let you know the score when we do!
  • Hunting the Megapode is almost certainly inspired by the “Mallard Song” (not to be confused with the Duck Song, or indeed the separate English folk song “The Mallard”) of Oxford’s All Souls College. All Souls is made up only of Fellows – there are no student members of the College, and recent graduates (usually in law or history) can apply to join via an examination and interview. The Mallard Song is the College’s official song, and it’s sung every year at the Bursar’s dinner, complete with a refrain of “Ho, the Bloud”. More importantly for this book, it’s also sung once a century during a ceremony that recreates a moment from the building of the college, when supposedly a large mallard flew out of the foundations. The last ceremony was in 2001, so unfortunately most of us won’t be around for the next one. But you can read the original lyrics of the song, and learn more about the ceremony – which includes carrying around a “Lord Mallard” in a sedan chair, following a wooden duck on a pole – at this 2018 blog post from The History Girls.
  • The University tradition of the Ceremony of the Keys appears near the start of The Last Continent, where it’s revealed that it happens around 2 AM every morning when a group of three bledlows present the Archchancellor’s Keys to the bledlow on gate duty. The whole business is very clearly a pisstake of the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, which also happens every evening. We found this whole playlist on YouTube of the Ceremony over the years. It’s said to date back to the 14th century, though it’s current form is probably no more than a couple of centuries old.
  • We’ve previous discussed Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. An English author best known for his humorous novels, especially Jeeves and Wooster, his name should actually be pronounced “Woodhouse”. He came to a bit of an ignominious end, effectively exiled from the UK, but his work is still seen as quintessentially British comedy. Wodehouse is very definitely one of Pratchett’s influences; both biographies mention him reading Wodehouse’s work at an early age, especially in the pages of Punch magazine.
  • Brazeneck College is first mentioned during a faculty meeting at the start of The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory”), published in May 2005. There it’s spelled “Braseneck”, but as it’s Unseen University’s rival in the building of Very Big Things, seems clearly to be a school of magic of some sort; it’s location is not mentioned. It becomes Brazeneck in it’s very next appearance, “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devlish Devices” (see #Pratchat63, “Decline by Committee”), published almost at the same time as The Science of Discworld III. In this short story, it’s held up as an example against which UU is being measured by A. E. Pessimal. Brazeneck College publishes papers, and attracts many new students, which is said to be “to the benefit of the city”. Many readers have assumed this means Brazeneck College is based in Ankh-Morpork, but we feel bound to mention that the text does not say which city. Pessimal could be arguing that UU needs to be a benefit to Ankh-Morpork in the same way Brazeneck is to its home town. In Unseen Academicals, Brazeneck is referred to as both a College and a University, and is explicitly located in Psuedopolis. It isn’t mentioned by name again; in The Science of Discworld IV (see #Pratchat71, “It Belongs in a University”) the Dean is said to be Archchancellor at Pseudopolis University, perhaps implying that Brazeneck College has changed names, or is now part of a bigger institution.
  • As mentioned, Ponder Stibbons is introduced as a student wizard in Moving Pictures, which you can hear more about in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”. His fear of exams there is somewhat at odds with his later presentation as an all-round genius.
  • Ponder’s memory of his first magic comes when Ridcully organises the first football game amongst the wizards and has two captains pick teams. The “fat kid” was off limits since his father owned a sweet shop, leaving Ponder the bullies’ main target: ‘which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder’s fingers and Martin Sogger’s pants caught fire. He could smell them now. Best days of your life be buggered’.
  • British comedy in the 70s and 80s frequently featured sketches and gags about football. The most famous example is probably Monty Python’s “Philosophy Football” sketch, in which Ancient Greek philosophers play German ones. But Ben was most influenced by The Goodies. The 1975 episode “Wacky Wales” featured a Welsh minister (played by Jon Pertwee!) who turns out to be leading a coven of rugby-worshipping druids, resulting in an “ecclesiastical rugby sevens” tournament. But the big one for association football was the 1982 episode “Football Crazy” from their final season, in which the Goodies try to solve the problem of violence at football matches by first changing the game to make it less sexy, and then banning spectators, leading football fans to turn their attention to ballet instead. While the concepts of the jokes hold up well, we won’t link a clip here, mostly because they use the kind of homophobic language common for football hooligan taunts of the time. (And thankfully less common now.)
  • Fast & Furious is a long-running franchise of action films, beginning with The Fast and the Furious (2001; dir. Rob Cohen), about a tightly-knit crew of street racers and thieves who carry out their crimes in high-speed cars. In the first film, the Toretto family are hunted by the police; by the end of the film the undercover officer investigating them is well on the way to becoming part of the family. As Liz mentions, the cops never do anything to stop the street racing in the films, though they do turn up at the end of a race or two. As of this episode (January 2025), there have been ten films in the main series, a spin-off film, an animated TV series, and still more in the works. Each film has pushed the franchise more into fantasy: by the sixth film (Fast & Furious 6, 2013, dir Justin Lin) the street racing crew are being offered an amnesty to work with the police to take on mercenaries; in the seventh (Furious 7, 2015, dir. James Wan), they’re recruited by secret agents to take on terrorists. The spin-off Hobbs & Shaw (2019, dir. David Leitch) is a buddy cop film about a cop and mercenary from the series teaming up to take on a “cyber-genetically enhanced” terrorist threatening the world with a “programmable supervirus”. You get the gist.
  • Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby’s second book, first published in 1992, and now a Penguin Modern Classic. The memoir is split into chapters, each of which relates the experience of watching an Arsenal game and how it connected to Hornby’s life at the time, especially his romantic relationships, and his relationship with his Dad. It’s been fictionalised and turned into a romantic comedy film twice: 1997’s Fever Pitch starred Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell, with a screenplay by Hornby. A 2005 American version, directed by the Farrelly Brothers, changed the story to be about baseball, and starred Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. This version was retitled The Perfect Catch outside America.
  • Tansy mentions two sport-based comics by American comic artist and writer Ngozi Ukazu. Her webcomic Check, Please! ran from 2017 to 2020, and tells the story of a young queer figure skater who joins his college’s ice hockey team. It’s still available online, and has also been collected into two print volumes. The new graphic novel Bunt: Striking Out on Financial Aid, published in 2024, is the story of an arts college freshman who learns her scholarship is no longer valid – but if she can field a softball team and win at least one game, then all nine players will get an athletic scholarship. Classic stuff! Ukazu also published her first work for DC Comics in 2024: Barda, about the warrior Big Barda, raised on the hell-like world of Apokolips, ruled by one of the biggest villains in the entire DC Universe. It’s all about her finding love in adversity, and also sounds like a great read.
  • We’ve talked about Pratchett’s addiction to fat jokes many times, but our deepest discussion is in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, where we talk about Agnes with guest Myfanwy Coghill.
  • The acronym WAGs – “Wives and Girlfriends”, or “Wife and/or Girlfriend” in the singular – was popularised with the British tabloid press in the 1990s. They were then writing so much sexist drivel about the female partners of footballers – mostly those who were already celebrities in their own right – that they needed a shorthand. It really took off in the early 2000s with coverage of Victoria Beckham (more on her in a moment) and then Cheryl Cole, a singer with British pop group Girls Aloud who married footballer Ashley Cole in 2006. The term persisted into the mid 2010s, and spawned television series like the ITV drama Footballer’s Wives (2002-2006) and reality TV shows like WAGs Boutique (2007) and the Australian WAG Nation (2012). Despite being flagged as sexist by the Equalities and Rights Commission in 2010, it still pops up from time to time. A number of related acronyms have also been created; the best one is “Celebritity’s Husbands and Partners”, or CHAPs.
  • In 2023, country-pop crossover megastar Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, a pro American Football player who’s been a “tight end” with the Kansas City Chiefs team since 2013. (”Tight end” is an offensive playing position – i.e. one that helps score. The innuendo would make Pepe proud.) Their relationship was highly publicised, but in a turnaround for this sort of interaction it was clear far more people knew who Swift was than Kelce. Taylor Swift fans began to take an interest in the game and the team, helping it to break all kinds of ticketing and merch records, but also sparking stupid social media exchanges complaining about the football coverage including shots of her in the stands. As of January 2025 they’re still together, and the two fandoms seem to have settled down – not that the Swift fans ever seemed bothered about her going to games, except for the fact that she would use a private jet to get to them while on her international Eras tour.
  • Posh and Becks is the nickname given to celebrity power-couple David and Victoria Beckham. Victoria “Posh” Beckham, née Adams, found fame when she was cast in the Spice Girls as “Posh Spice” in 1994. In 1997 she married David Beckham, then a star player for Manchester United. The tabloids went crazy for them. They remain celebrities; Posh has a solo musical career, reunited with the Spice Girls, worked as a model, and started her own fashion and beauty brands, though those have not been financially successful. Becks moved on from the Premier League to the World Cup, playing for Real Madrid, and then LA Galaxy for the American Major League, before retiring from the sport in 2013.
  • The Shove doesn’t have a modern Roundworld equivalent, but it is very similar to the way crowds would gather in the “mob football” played in medieval times. (Indeed the Audible audio drama adaptation of Unseen Academicals renames “foot the ball” to “mob ball”; more about that below.) Mob or medieval football seems to have had few rules and often didn’t involve kicking; but not much detail of the game (or games; there would have been many local versions) survives for us to know how it was played.
  • In modern times, the closest thing to the violence of the Shove have been the disastrous “crowd crushes” at football matches (and other gatherings) where fans are shoved against the barriers of the pitch, resulting in multiple injuries and deaths. The worst crush in British football was the Hillborough disaster in 1989, where 94 people died on the day and three more in the days and years after from injuries sustained in the crush. It resurfaced in 2016 when a second inquiry found that both the design of the stadium, and the negligence of police and ambulance officers, were responsible for the disaster, not the fans themselves. This resulted in charges against six people in 2017, though charges against one of them was dropped.
  • Elle McPherson is an Australian model and actress best known for magazine covers in the 1980s and 1990s – she holds the record for the most appearances on Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. In recent years she’s come under fire for her non-scientific views about medicine, especially after she recovered from breast cancer. She also dated notorious anti-vaccine activist and medical fraud Andrew Wakefield from 2017-2019. Appropriately for this episode, she also has a football connection (though the wrong kind of football): her father, Peter Gow, was a longtime President of Ben’s hometown rugby team, the Cronulla Sharks.
  • There are eleven foot-the-ball “sides” named in the book. The main ones we mention by name in the episode are Unseen Academicals, Ankh-Morpork United, Dimwell Old Pals and Dolly Sisters Football Club. The others are mostly named after locations in Ankh-Morpork: The Angels, Treacle Mine Tuesday (aka the Miners), the Cockbill Boars, Pigsty Hill Pork Packers, Naphill United, Whopping Street Wanderers (aka the Whoppers) and Lobbin Clout.
  • When discussing the team colours, we mix up the teams: Trev supports Dimwell Old Pals, who wear pink and green. Dolly Sisters wear black and white, so Ben was pretty close with blue and white.
  • We’ve been unable to find any examples of Dimwell hats (again, not Dolly Sisters), or other Discworld football memorabilia (aside from a set of football cards created to publicise the book, the text from which is collected in A Blink of the Screen.) Certainly it doesn’t seem there’s been any official apparel, so if you know of any fan-made scarves or hats etc, please let us know!
  • While a human named Igor works in Biers (as seen in various books, but especially Feet of Clay and Hogfather), the first proper Igor appeared in Carpe Jugulum, working for Count Magpyr. There have since been many throughout the later Discworld novels.
  • Liz mentions midi-chlorians in response to Ben’s suggestion that Mr. Nutt’s “Little Brother” might be microbes in his bloodstream. We’ve previously talked about them twice, way back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World” (Tansy’s first appearance). In brief, they’re microscopic organisms introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menance to provide a scientific explanation for why some Star Wars characters are stronger in the Force than others. Despite being an idea George Lucas had during the development of the original film, this more clinical reason for the Force was not popular with fans.
  • Ben notes a couple of other fantasy and sci-fi species with fantastic powers of recuperation. In Star Trek it’s established that Klingons have multiple redundancies built-in, including extra and more complicated organs, so they can survive grievous injuries. In the “grim dark future” of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, orks aren’t actually fungus themselves, but their symbiotic relationship with a species of fungus means that they feel little pain, and can regenerate from all but the most brutal injuries, requiring only fairly rudimentary surgical assistance. Warhammer Fantasy orcs, on the other hand, are pretty much the standard evil monsters of Tolkien-style high fantasy. (We’ve previously mentioned Warhammer 40,000 in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”)
  • The idea that under capitalism, the police serve as “protectors of capital”, is a simple overview of a more complex critique. While there are instances where this might be literally true, in most cases what it means is that the police force as an institution protects the interests of the capitalist class, not the workers. This includes not just capitalists and their property, but also the social relationships and structures that benefit capitalism – thus it is police who arrest protesters, but other bodies that shut down corrupt businesses.
  • We skip over this in the episode, but when Glenda discovers someone has eaten lots of her pies, she asks Trev “Who ate all the pies?” This is a reference to a popular (though body-shaming and fatphobic) British football chant thrown at players considered to have put on weight or otherwise be out of shape. There’s a spurious claim that the chant dates all the way back to the 1890s, but it’s most likely a more recent invention; it was certainly at the height of popularity in the 80s and 90s, when it was used against players like Paul Gascoigne and the phrase “who ate all the pies?” made its way into popular culture, even outside of the UK. The chant is usually sung to the tune of “Knees Up Mother Brown” (written in 1918), and the reworked lyrics include a refrain of “you fat bastard”, which has been adopted (ironically or otherwise) by various comedians and musicians (and may be the inspiration for the infamous Austin Powers character). The chant also been used by the Barmy Army – UK cricket supporters who travel abroad to cheer on their national team – against Australian cricket players, including Shane Warne. Thankfully it seems to have faded away since around the time Unseen Academicals was written. (Thanks to listener Metal Nurse on Bluesky for pointing out that not everyone would know this one.)
  • Glenda’s pie with the crispy onions is a “Ploughman’s Pie”, a variation on the “ploughman’s lunch”. This is a traditional pub meal, whose essential elements are bread, cheese and pickled onions, though modern variations add other things too. Glenda’s pie version has “cheese pastry” and a “hot pickle layer”, making it likely that it’s a meat pie with added ploughman’s ingredients, but it seems at least possible that Glenda’s genius could result in a vegetarian version.
  • Cyrano de Bergerac (1615-1695) was a real person, a French writer, libertine and duellist, but he’s better known as a fictionalised version from the play Cyrano de Bergerac. Written by Edmond Rostand in 1897, the play’s version of Cyrano is a nobleman and gifted poet, scholar and solder in the French Army. He loves his cousin Roxanne, his intellectual equal, but considers that she could never love him back because of his enormous nose, which makes him “ugly”. Just as he’s persuaded to tell her of his feelings anyway, she announces that she’s fallen in love with a handsome but dim soldier, Christian, who is being sent to join Cyrano’s regiment. Initially against his better judgement, Cyrano is persuaded to help Christian speak and write poetically to Roxanne to woo her. The original story ends badly: Roxanne and Christian are married, but another nobleman who wanted Roxanne for himself spitefully sends Cyrano’s regiment to a dangerous battle. Christian dies in battle, but not before he realises Cyrano has been writing letters to Roxanne on his behalf, and that he loves her. Cyrano returns home and says nothing to Roxanne, who goes into a long period of mourning and joins a convent. Years later, Cyrano is fatally wounded by his enemies while on one of his regular visits to Roxanne, but while concealing his injury he accidentally gives away that he wrote Christian’s letters and loved her all along. She says she loves him, too, and he gives one last delirious speech before he dies in her arms. Ben loves the original, but recognises it’s not a modern love story. It’s one of the great French classics, though, and has been adapted many times; Ben’s favourite versions are the 1990 film version starring Gerard Depardieu, and Steve Martin’s weird 1987 American happy ending version, Roxanne. There’s also a 2019 musical version, Cyrano, which starred Peter Dinklage, that was itself adapted into a film in 2021; Ben’s yet to see that one.
  • Lady Margolotta is introduced in The Fifth Elephant, so for more about her, see #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”. This is her first major appearance since then, and she’ll return once more, but she is also mentioned in several other novels, including The Truth, Going Postal and Making Money. While she doesn’t rule Überwald or any of the smaller countries nearby, she is clearly wields formidable influence. She’s a founding member of the Überwald League of Temperance, the “black ribboner” vampires who replace blood with another obsession; in Margolotta’s case, the obsession is not explicitly named, but the passage about her meeting of the League suggests it may be “control” – something rather less concrete than the other black ribboners we meet.
  • The book Tansy mentions about Churchill’s cook, Georgina Landemare, is Victory in the Kitchen by Annie Gray, first published by Profile Books in 2020.
  • The book Liz mentions about the fashion industry is le plus beau métier du monde by French anthropologist and ethnographer Giulia Mensitieri, translated into English by Natasha Lehrer as The Most Beautiful Job in the World for Melbourne University Press in 2020.
  • Scream 3 (2000; dir. Wes Craven) is, as the name suggests, the third film in the Scream franchise of slasher horror films. The series is famous for having characters who know and use the conventions of slasher films. Scream 3 is about the killer, nicknamed “Ghostface” because of the mask they wear, targeting the cast and crew of the film-within-a-film Stab 3, based on the Ghostface murders. A subplot involves the main character Sidney (who survived the first two films) discovering that her mother had worked as an actor in the 1970s and was sexually assaulted by the producer who is now making the Stab movies. The film has many references to real Hollywood, including the names of the actor characters (e.g. Jennifer Jolie, Angelina Tyler and Tom Prinze),
  • “The beautiful game” is one of many nicknames given to association football. It dates back to the 1950s, and was popularised by the Brazilian player Pelé, one of the most famous footballs of the 1960s and 70s, but its origins aren’t entirely clear. It now usually refers to the sport as a whole, though it used to also mean a specific style of play popular in Brazil, the jogo bonito; that style is now called art football (futebol-arte). The Beautiful Game is also the title of a 2000 West End musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton revolving around a local football team in 1969 Belfast; a 2012 film documentary about African football; and a 2024 Netflix drama starring Bill Nighy about the English team in the Homeless World Cup. Because there are many different kinds of football (or codes, as we call them in Australia), and most are just called “football” where they’re most popular, most end up with multiple nicknames. A similar name for association football in Australia was “the world game”, popularised by the SBS TV series of the same name (2002-2019) hosted by commentator Les Murray.
  • Diego Maradona (1960-2020) was an Argentine football player and later manager, often regarded as one of the best players in the history of the game. He rose to fame in the 1980s playing for Barcelona and Napoli, and set records for how much he was paid to transfer between teams. He is still revered in Argentina, especially for his performance in the 1986 world cup, where he scored two goals in the quarter-final against England and ultimately led the team to victory.
  • “Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” is a reference to a famous comment given by eccentric Country Party MP Bob Katter from Queensland in response to a media question about his opinion on same-sex marriage in 2017. This was only days after the results were revealed of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, a non-binding postal vote held in Australia over whether to amend the marriage act to allow same-sex couples the right to marry. His answer takes an odd turn almost immediately; we won’t spoil it, because you can watch the whole 20 second clip on YouTube.
  • The furies in the book are the “Little Sisters of Perpetual Velocity”, and they come from Ephebe, the Discworld equivalent of Greece. The name is inspired by the names of orders of Catholic nuns, something Pratchett has played with before, most famously with “the Chattering Order of St. Beryl” in Good Omens.
  • Light Emitting Diodes – LEDs for short – are basically tiny light bulbs. Old-fashioned light globes produce light by passing current through a filament, a conducting material that heats up so that it glows, producing light and heat. LEDs produce light from the movement of electrons and positive charges (called “holes”) through the diode, which is a kind of semiconductor – a device that only conducts electricity in one direction. As the charges interact, they emit photons – the particle of light – in a specific wavelength. This process doesn’t produce (much) heat or significantly degrade the diode, and requires less energy than a traditional incandescent bulb. Red, green, amber and infrared LEDs were relatively cheap and easy to make, but the blue LED was the holy grail – blue could combine with amber, or with red and green, to make LEDs which were white, or any other colour! The different colours are produced by using different materials for the crystal, which is then “doped” by adding impurities of specific materials to add holes and turn the crystal into a semiconductor. This produces different “gaps” between the energy of the holes and electrons, and the size of the gap determines the wavelength of light emitted. Blue was theoretically possible by growing gallium nitride crystals, but this was difficult and expensive because it needed a much higher temperature than the materials used for existing LED colours. In 1993, engineer Shuji Nakamura cracked the problem by creating a new kind of reactor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014, alongside Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, who were the first to grow large gallium nitride crystals using similar techniques in the 1980s. The first blue LEDs were inefficient, producing heat and only a dim light. Nakamura also solved this problem, by adding a lot more dopant – in this case, magnesium – than usual. Why gallium nitride needed so much magnesium was only solved in 2015, when British researchers used quantum modelling techniques to discover the processes going on inside the crystal. In the early 2000s, LED production became much cheaper, and it wasn’t long before they were being used to produce full-colour displays, light globes and even programmable stage lights, though blue LEDs remained less efficient and more expensive to make for some time afterwards, though they’ve been improved in the last few years.
  • Nobby Nobbs’ relationship with erotic dancer Tawnee is portrayed in Thud!, which we discussed in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”.
  • Liz notes the line “My fare, lady?”, which is one of many references in the book to My Fair Lady, the 1956 Broadway musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Both versions are the story of a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who’s taught to speak like an upper class lady by academic Henry Higgins, as an experiment to see if she can pass as a lady. The musical ends quite differently from the play… It’s best known today via the 1964 film version starring original Broadway star Rex Harrison as Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. We previously discussed it way back in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”.
  • A litter is a kind of vehicle without wheels, in which a platform or in an enclosed compartment is carried by human beings. Ancient Roman cities did indeed ban or at least restrict wheeled vehicles, then as now because they get stuck easily – you can’t turn them around quickly when a road is blocked, but a litter can easily move in any direction.
  • There have been four audio versions of Unseen Academicals:
    • Three are standard audiobooks: the abridged Corgi audiobook read by Tony Robinson; the unabridged Isis audiobook, read by Stephen Briggs (which is no longer available); and the most recent one, the Penguin unabridged audiobook, read by Colin Morgan and featuring Peter Serafinowicz as Death, and Bill Nighy as the “voice of the author” (he reads the footnotes). This is the one Tansy listened to, and Colin Morgan reads all of the Wizards books in this series – typecasting, perhaps, since he is best known for starring as the titular young wizard in the BBC television series Merlin between 2008 and 2012. Morgan also played Newton Pulsifer in Dirk Maggs’ 2014 radio version of Good Omens, which featured a cameo by Terry and Neil Gaiman as two policemen, recorded only a few months before Pratchett’s death.
    • Dirk Maggs also directed the fourth audio version of Unseen Academicals, mentioned by Ben: the Audible Original full-cast adaptation released in July 2018. This version is heavily abridged – split into ten chapters, it’s about four and a half hours long in total (compared with 14 hours for the unabridged audiobook). It’s also very much its own thing, and changes a lot to fit the shorter run time and reach a more general audience, including names, condensed plots and combined characters. For example, the University’s stakes are higher: the “Weatherwax bequest” (one of many overt references to the rest of Discworld) requires it to win a game of “mob ball” once a century, or lose 87% of its total budget and be forced to shut down. And the characters are less subtle – most notably Trev, who is more or less combined with Smeems and becomes much less likeable, and Mr Nutt, whose rage is barely under control compared to the Nutt of the book. David Jason, who played Albert and later Rincewind in the TV adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, is the narrator, who provides a lot of context – including a cosmic turtle intro (sorry Liz). The rest of the cast includes the likes of Matthew Horne (Gavin from Gavin & Stacy) as Trev Likely, comedian Josie Lawrence (who was Agnes Nutter in the radio and television Good Omens adaptations) as Glenda Sugarbean, Jon Culshaw (of Dead Ringers and the Penguin City Watch audiobooks) as William de Worde, Stephen Briggs as Drumknott (aiding Ray Fearon as Vetinari), and, of note to Baldur’s Gate III fans, Samantha Béart (yes, Karlach herself) as Madame Sharn! Ben recommends not listening to it directly after reading the novel, and suggests it was not made with established Discworld fans in mind.
  • There’s no definitive account of the origins of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but in Middle-Earth only the supreme god Ilúvatar could truly create life. Thus all the orc origins – and there are seven suggested in Tolkien’s letters and further writings, mostly in-universe speculation – involve the evil Valar Morgoth, once Ilúvatar’s second, corrupting existing beings one way or another. Tolkien’s later writings seem to favour the idea that orcs are corrupted men, rather than elves or other beings, and he even seems to have revised the timeline of Middle-Earth to make this possible (in earlier versions orcs appeared before men).
  • As for regretting making orcs irredeemable, Tolkien seems to have been torn on the subject. Here are three major examples, including from his letters. These have been catalogued, and many published in the 1981 collection The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
    • Letter 153 is an unsent draft reply to Peter Hastings from 1954, who had written with theological concerns about The Lord of the Rings, including the nature of evil in Middle-Earth. There Tolkien described the orcs as “creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad” but then adds in parentheses: “(I nearly wrote ’irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.)”
    • Letter 269 is a reply to W. H. Auden in 1965, who had written to ask whether the idea of orcs being irredeemable was heretical; Tolkien wrote that he wasn’t sure about that, but also that he didn’t “feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”. This, he said, was backed up in “Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable…..” (See Pratchett’s thoughts along similar lines below.) So characters in the books don’t think they are naturally evil, despite the fact that they are portrayed as so.
    • In Morgoth’s Ring, one of the later volumes of The History of Middle-Earth by J.R.R.’s son Christopher, there’s an essay by the elder Tolkien simply titled “Orcs” in which he says: “…the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law.” He goes on to say that this means orcs would be treated with the same dignity in capture as men or elves or dwarves, and also mentions in a footnote that orcs never ask for mercy because Melkor and Sauron had done such a good job convincing them that elves and men were vile, evil creatures, not to be trusted.
  • Pratchett’s thoughts on orcs are much easier to discern, because he wrote about them at the time Unseen Academicals was published. In an article for Guardian book club in December 2009, Pratchett wrote: “Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.
    This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn’t flat.”
  • More notes to come!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Discworld, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Glenda Sugarbean, goblins, Igor, Juliet Stollop, Mr Nutt, Mustrum Ridcully, Pepe, Ponder Stibbons, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trevor Likely, Vetinari, William de Worde, Wizards

#PratchatMerch – Discworld: The Flamethrower

8 February 2025 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Our recording of #Pratchat83 was delayed at the last minute, so our discussion of The Ankh-Morpork Archives and The Discworld Almanak will have to wait until later in the month – hopefully around the 25th February. But subscriber Molokov suggested it might be fun to discuss some of the other, less book-like Discworld merchandise available, so in this shorter bonus episode, Ben does just that!

We’d love to hear about your favourite merch, official or fan-made! Drop us a line and/or a photograph using the hashtag #PratchatMerch on social media, via email, or chat to us via our subscriber Discord.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_bonus_episode_Merch.mp3

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The merch Ben mentions this episode from the Discworld Emporium includes the Ankh-Morpork Doodle Map, Terry Pratchett’s Hat silver pin badge; Death’s Omega cloak pin; the Band with Rocks In tour T-shirt; the plushie Greebo and rat-onna-stick; beermats of pubs and brands; and the dried frog pills box.

It’s not as easy to link to individual items at Discworld.com, but things Ben mentioned from there include various pins and badges; rare collectible pins; shopper bags; acrylic beanies; and the Great A’Tuin golf umbrella. The Anoia tea towel Ben liked was also from the Emporium, not Discworld.com, though they have tea towels too. He forgot to mention Discworld.com’s notebooks – the Unseen University and Assassin’s Guild ones are especially good. And their T-shirts aren’t as “subtle” as he remembered, though their socks are certainly a bit less subtle than the Emporium’s.

The episode title is a reference to a specific scene in Mel Brooks’ 1987 Star Wars parody Spaceballs.

We’ll be back in late February with #Pratchat83, discussing The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I and Volume II, and The Discworld Almanak. If you’re very quick you could still get a question in about those! In March we’re commemorating the tenth anniversary of Terry’s death by discussing his thoughts on dying from “Shaking Hands with Death”, the Richard Dimbleby lecture he gave (with help from Tony Robinson) in 2010. It’s most readily available in A Slip of the Keyboard, but you can also watch the original speech on YouTube. It gets pretty heavy, but we’ll approach this discussion with empathy and kindness. Get your questions for that one in using 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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Bonus Episode, Discworld

#Pratchat79A – Cover Stamps

8 September 2024 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Scheduling issues pushed back our recording of #Pratchat80, so unfortunately we aren’t going to be able to bring you that discussion of Making Money until October. But it has been a very long time since we talked about Going Postal, so Ben thought you might like a recap to tide you over – plus a discussion of some of his favourite Discworld book covers, prompted by subscriber Ian!

We’d love to hear about your favourite covers, from any of the various editions of Pratchett’s works! Let us know about them using the hashtag #Pratchat79A on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_79A.mp3

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You can find various covers of the Discworld books via the L-Space wiki, or via the Internet Speculative Fiction Database at isfdb.org. For the isfdb, make sure you choose “Fiction Titles” below the search box when searching for a specific book, then scroll down to the bottom of the list of editions and click the link which says “View all covers for [Book Title]”. Note that not all the covers Ben mentions are at those two sources; we’ve linked to other sources below where necessary.

Ben mentions these favourite covers:

  • The original cover for The Colour of Magic by Alan Smith
  • Pratchett’s own original cover for The Carpet People (the image isn’t as small as Ben remembered)
  • The new Penguin paperback designs by Leo Nickolls, incorporating Paul Kidby’s artwork, especially Moving Pictures. (The link is to the L-Space page Ben put together for these editions, which also gives you handy links to all the books in the wiki.)
  • Paul Kidby’s covers for the first UK editions, in particular Night Watch, Going Postal and The Science of Discworld, plus the back cover of the original hardcover edition of The Last Hero
  • Josh Kirby’s covers for Eric (the original large format edition), Small Gods, and especially Reaper Man
  • The cover for the graphic novel adaptation of Small Gods by Ray Friesen
  • The Penguin 25th Anniversary edition of Hogfather, with art by BoomArtwork
  • The American hardcover edition of Raising Steam, with art by Justin Gerard
  • The Mai Més Catalan editions with covers by Marina Vidal, especially Equal Rites and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

We discussed Going Postal way back in 2020, in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”, with guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung.

We’ll be back in October with #Pratchat80 discussing Making Money with guest Stephanie Convery.

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Bonus Episode, Discworld, Footnote, Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig, recap, The Long War

#Pratchat28 Notes and Errata

8 February 2020 by Ben 2 Comments

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.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Bigmac, Elizabeth Flux, Johnny Maxwell, Kirsty, Steve Lamattina, Yo-Less

#Pratchat22 Notes and Errata

8 August 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Asimov, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, non-fiction, The Unadulterated Cat

#Pratchat18 Notes and Errata

8 April 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, sci-fi, standalone, Will Kostakis

#Pratchat83 – This Time for Ankh-Morpork

8 January 2025 by Ben 2 Comments

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!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_83.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:16:30 — 90.4MB)

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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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Discworld, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Glenda Sugarbean, goblins, Igor, Juliet Stollop, Mr Nutt, Mustrum Ridcully, Pepe, Ponder Stibbons, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trevor Likely, Vetinari, William de Worde, Wizards

#Pratchat82 – Clack Go the Gears

8 December 2024 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

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.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_82.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26:24 — 40.0MB)

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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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, board game, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Lawrence Leung, Moist von Lipwig, Nicholas J Johnson
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