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#EeekClub2022 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2022“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add a photo of the enormous Senate ballot paper from the 2013 election as soon as we can find one!

Notes and Errata

  • We’ll find the “buckle up as I teach you about something I just learned myself!” tweet at some point, but it’s eluded us for the moment. (Let us know if you find it!)
  • You can find the biggest Democracy Sausage project at democracysausage.org or on Twitter at @DemSausage. Note that this project is not, In any meaningful way “official”, but it’s an impressive effort nonetheless. We’d also make the comment that while the democracy sausage is a fun tradition, it ought not to be so universally necessary for public schools to fundraise for themselves in this way every election…
  • We did indeed talk about the confluence of the Glorious 25th of May and Towel Day in last year’s Eeek Club episode.
  • Our previous T-shirt ideas have been a “Sausage Inna Bunnings” design, from #Pratchat50, and the “Sausorobos” design – a sausage in a circle eating it’s “tail” – in #Pratchat53. We also considered a Helvetica names T-shirt of the Hogfather’s four boars in #Pratchat26.
  • Listen Sven told us about the early, cheaply-made German editions of the Discworld books, from publisher Heyne, who inserted an ad for Maggi cup-a-soup into their version of Sorcery (and possibly other books). These were discontinued not long after Terry found out. They “wouldn’t promise not to do it again” in Terry’s words, and so they took the German publication rights to Goldmann instead.
  • Our previous reflective episode, with also served to give us some breathing room at the start of the pandemic lockdowns, was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, in April 2020.
  • Our single episode overview of The Watch is #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.
  • We mention three recent screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes this episode:
    • Sherlock (2010-2017) – the BBC “prestige” series, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as a modern-day Holmes and Watson.
    • Elementary (2012-2019) – the CBS procedural crime drama, born out of a failed attempt to make a US adaptation of the BBC show. It stars Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who, after becoming addicted to heroin, relocates to New York to start over. Lucy Liu plays Joan Watson, an ex-doctor and Sherlock’s assigned “sober companion” as he recovers from his addiction.
    • Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) – Guy Ritchie’s film versions, set in the same time as the original stories, but with dashes of action, steampunk and occultism. Both star Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock, and Jude Law as Watson.
  • The 100 (2014-2020) is an American dystopian science fiction TV series. The series is set in a future where the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war, but humans have survived in an orbiting space station, the Ark. A century after the war, one hundred “juvenile delinquents” are sentenced to a form of community service in which they are sent back to Earth to determine if it’s safe for the rest to return.
  • Liz has previously written about adapting the work of one of her other favourite authors, Philip K Dick, in this piece for Kill Your Darlings magazine.
  • The Hunger Games was originally a series of three novels – The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – by American author Suzanne Collins, published between 2008 and 2010, with a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, published in 2020. The original trilogy was adapted into four films – the last book in two parts – and Collins co-wrote the adaptations for all of them except Catching Fire. She has also adapted the screenplay for the prequel, which is set to be released as a film in 2023.
  • We’ve mentioned Diana Wynne Jones loads of times on the podcast. As well as the 2004 Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle – which as Liz says, is fairly loosely based on the book – another of her books, Archer’s Goon (1985), was adapted for television by the BBC in 1992. The book features an ordinary family who find a “goon” on their doorstep, who says he has come to collect the two thousand words which thirteen-year-old Howard supposedly owes to someone named Archer. (Which is an amazing concept for a story in any medium!) Wynne Jones was quite closely involved in the adaptation, as the producer, Richard Callanan, wanted to make the series faithful to the book; Wynne Jones described her job as sitting with the producer around a table with scriptwriter Jenny McDade, persuading her to make it more like the book. While she didn’t think McDade enjoyed this process, Jones seems to have been happy with the result. The author also commented that she sees the two modes of writing as very different ways to tell a story, and scriptwriting did not appeal to her.
  • To clarify, the “one million dollars per hour” figure for drama television refers to how much it costs to make an hour of finished television, not how much it costs to work on a show for an hour. This number is based on analysis done by Screen Australia, but Ben’s fudged an overall average here he got from someone else because the cost of television varies a lot. For long-running series or serials, costs are spread out over dozens of episodes, bringing that cost down to about $350,000 per hour. That average is probably quite a bit lower than most shows cost, though, due to the effect of long-running soaps like Home and Away and Neighbours, which produce hundreds of hours every year on very tight budgets. (Now Neighbours has closed down, the average will probably shoot up considerably!) Compare that to a mini-series, which costs much more than Ben’s average – over $1.7m per hour. And then children’s drama, treated as a separate category, costs quite a lot too: about $1.25m per hour! Possibly because it’s more often fantastical, whereas we make hardly any adult sci-fi or fantasy in Australia these days?
  • Firefly (2002) was a fan favourite space western infamously cancelled by the Fox network half-way through its first season. Set in the 26th century, it imagines a future where the wealthiest cultures on Earth – implied to be the US and China, though elements of some other cultures also remain – terraform the numerous planets and moons of a trinary star system and establish a new life there after the Earth is “used up”. It was followed by the film Serenity in 2005, produced by Universal, which continued and wrapped up the main story arc from the series. The story has continued though, mainly in comic books. The rights to the show passed to Disney when they bought Fox, and as recently as February 2022, rumours circulated that Disney might reboot the show for Disney+ – though the fan base is much keener on a continuation of the old one.
  • Troll Bridge, based on the first Discworld short story (see #PratchatNA7), was produced in Australia by Snowgum Films, starring Don Bridges as Cohen the Barbarian. The original crowdfunding campaign ran on Kickstarter in 2011, though work on the film started as early as 2004. The film was released in 2019, and is now available for free on YouTube.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished at a perfectly acceptable point after seven seasons, but it was continued in several comics both during and after its run – including an official continuation of the series from IDW Publishing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, produced by original series creator Joss Whedon from 2007 to 2011. It was a big success for IDW and led to a follow up, Season Nine, from 2011 to 2013, and also a similar continuation of Buffy’s spin-off series Angel, and a connected series based on the popular character of Spike.
  • The Mob’s Discworld adaptations for the UK pay television channel Sky1 are Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006), Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – which combined The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic – and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010). All three are presented as two-part telemovies.
  • The Doctor Who novelisations were most famously produced by Target Books, an imprint of Universal-Tandem publishing and later W H Allen, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Aimed at middle grade readers (mostly), each book adapted one of the original show’s serialised adventures, which usually ran for four to six episodes, and included a few internal illustrations as well as exciting covers. Where possible the original scriptwriter was hired to adapt their own stories, sometimes resulting in very interesting choices and a chance to restore things cut or changed during editing, or adding additional background or motivation to characters. A huge number of these were written by former Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks, who is affectionately known as Uncle Terry by many fans who grew up reading the books. Target no longer truly exists – W H Allen was bought by Virgin (who produced original Doctor Who novels in the 1990s), who was in turn bought by Random House and folded into their imprint Ebury Books. The Doctor Who license reverted to the BBC, and since 2018 they’ve published both novelisations of the stories never originally covered by Target, and new novelisations of stories from the 2005 incarnation of the show, published in a paperback format which deliberately mimics the old Target books style. You can still find the Target books in secondhand book shops all over Australia, which is where Ben collected nearly all of them as a boy.
  • The cynicism/stoicism/epicurean quote is, in fact, from Terry himself! It appears in Small Gods as a summation of the philosophy of Didactylos, who combines the thinking of all three schools (or at least their modern popular interpretations). Here’s the relevant section:

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn’t philosopher material. He didn’t bath often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophised about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of thing. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: Is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous conundrum: ‘Yes, But What’s It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!’

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink. Mine’s a double if you’re buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!’

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1990)
  • Ben mentions our episode about Guards! Guards!, which sis #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, from June 2018.
  • A quick primer to the various philosophies that crop up in this discussion:
    • Cynicism dates back to around 400 BC, and the philosophers Antisthenes (a student of Socrates) and Diogenes (who it’s said lived in a clay jar in the streets of Athens). The core belief of cynicism is that being virtuous is the only important goal of life, and thus they rejected societal morés as a distraction. They were big on rejecting most things, actually, including hierarchy, shame and pomposity. They distrusted earnestness and anyone who claimed superiority, and thought it hypocritical to claim that humans are anything other than another kind of animal. This way of thinking led to the original Cynics giving away their wealth and possessions and trying to live “naturally”, or at least simply. They were not popular at the time; the name “Cynics” was a derogatory one, meaning “of a dog” in Ancient Greek, but they adopted it wholeheartedly. (Thanks to subscriber Felix for supplying some of this info!)
    • Stoicism is also an Ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Zeno in around 300 BC. It also asserts that being virtuous is the only important goal in life, but they considered everything else – wealth, pleasure etc – to be neither good nor bad in themselves. They were also keen on living in harmony with nature, and emphasised the importance of action over speaking when it comes to evaluating virtue. The modern meaning of stoicism – of someone who resists strong emotional responses – comes from the original Stoic philosophy that “virtue is sufficient for happiness”, meaning that they considered that as long as you acted in a virtuous way, you could be happy no matter what misfortune you suffered.
    • Epicureanism is named after its founder, Epicurus, another Greek philosopher, and is also from around 300 BC, originally as a challenge to the philosophy of Plato. It’s more or less a form of hedonism: its main tenet is that pleasure (rather than virtue) is the greatest good in life, and that one should live as pleasurably as possible (though in moderation, to avoid the suffering that comes from overindulgence). Epicureanism is about pleasures of the mind rather than physical ones, though, and also concentrates on “natural” desires, though Epicurus didn’t think much of sex or passion. He instead focussed on the desires of minimising negative experiences like pain, suffering and anxiety, which he saw in part stemming from belief in the gods.
    • Utilitarianism is an ethical framework which judges whether an action is right or wrong based on its outcomes, with the goal of maximising happiness or wellbeing for the largest number of people. Thus it considers that it is okay for one or a small number of people to suffer, if it means much much larger number of people are made safe or happy. It has ancient roots, but was popularised as a distinct position in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
    • Paternalism is less an ethical stance and more a derisive term for those who seek to limit the freedoms of others supposedly in their own good. It’s been applied to a wide range of things from parenting styles to government interventions; in Australia the term “Nanny State” has been used to criticise everything from the introduction of seatbelt laws to the restriction of sales of alcohol and tobacco.
  • Vetinari reads sheet music for pleasure in Soul Music, not Feet of Clay, as Ben guessed. We discussed Soul Music in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • The article Frank sent us about Pratchett’s philosophy is “Terry Pratchett rethought as a philosopher in new study“, from The Guardian in 2014. It refers to the book Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, which we don’t currently have on our list for the podcast – let us know if you’d like us to cover it! (We have a few other similar books in the collection – we can talk about those too, though as they generally contain essays about a wide breadth of Pratchett’s work, episodes like that would necessarily contain some spoilers for books we’ve not yet discussed, and we’d probably leave them until near the end of the show’s run.)
  • Here’s Patrick Alexander’s classic Australian election comic “You Can’t Waste Your Vote!”, starring Dennis the Election Koala and Ken the Voting Dingo (please disregard whatever names Ben misremembered). If you find it useful, please consider throwing a tip Patrick’s way; he isn’t otherwise paid for doing this!
  • You can find the list of weird Australian Capital Territory political parties in the Wikipedia article about the 1989 ACT election. Thanks again Karl!
  • More notes to come!

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

#Pratchat55 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“, discussing the twenty-seventh Discworld novel, 2001’s illustrated “Discworld Fable”, The Last Hero with returning guest Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex).

Iconographic Evidence

Here are George’s drawings that we mentioned in the podcast!

Georgina’s earliest surviving art – a self-portrait of her as Rincewind
A cartoon illustration of characters from the book The Last Hero, sitting at a long table in the style of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"
“The Last Hero’s Last Supper” by George Rex!

Notes and Errata

As a quick note, we’ve preferenced using page numbers from the 2002 and 2007 editions of the book, since they’re probably the one you have. We’ve included page numbers for the first edition (where relevant) in brackets.

  • The episode title is a reference to Australian children’s television icon Mr Squiggle, the “Man from the Moon” who visited Earth in his pet rocket (named Rocket) to turn children’s “squiggles” – scribbled drawings of random lines and shapes – into delightful pictures of birds, fish and koalas with yo-yos using the pencil he had for a nose. His show is an Australian institution, running for forty years between 1959 and 1999 on the public broadcaster, the ABC. We previously mentioned him in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“. (The episode was originally titled “Mr Leonard, the Man on the Moon”, but then Ben rediscovered that the nickname “Mr Doodle” was suggested for Leonard in Men at Arms, and it was too perfect a fit not to change it!)
  • Other guests who’ve returned after a few years include Cal Wilson (in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, and then #Pratchat50), Stephanie Convery (#Pratchat2 and #Pratchat42), Richard McKenzie (#Pratchat5 and #Pratchat40), and most recently Nadia Bailey (#Pratchat17, then #Oggswatch2021 #Pratchat54). Guests who’ve come back without such a big break include Will Kostakis, Fury and Joel Martin. (If there’s a guest you’d love us to get back on the show, let us know! We already have a few in mind…)
  • Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and the smallest state capital on the mainland (Hobart in Tasmania is much smaller). Unlike the other British colonies in Australia, it was established by free settlers rather than convicts, but it still nearly destroyed the Kaurna people who lived there. Like Australia’s many smaller cities (basically everywhere that’s not Sydney or Melbourne), it has a reputation of being more like a big country town.
  • Earthquakes in Australia are usually too minor to be noticed by humans, but in March 2022 Adelaide experienced two big enough to rattle windows and give people a fright (and prompt the posting of images of garden chairs knocked over with captions like “We will rebuild”, a common sentiment when mild disasters occur). Adelaide is surrounded by fault lines, though, which explains why sometimes they get a few in a row; this ABC News article gets into the details (and gives an example of the meme we mentioned).
  • If you want to get a preview of George’s graphic novel, she released Oh, Brother, a teaser of the original version, which you can find in the shop on her website. (Ben’s read it, it’s really good.)
  • You can find out more about the Paper Cuts Comics Festival on their website, papercutscomicfestival.com.
  • Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a British comedy film directed by Anthony Fabian set to be released in July 2022. It’s based on the 1958 novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico, and stars Lesley Manville as the titular cleaner living in post-war London, who dreams of escaping her life and owning a fancy gown made by Christian Dior. The nearly three-minute long trailer does indeed reveal pretty much every plot beat of the film.
  • In Greek mythology, Prometheus is one of the younger Titans who helped the gods overthrow the other Titans. In many versions of his story, he subsequently tricked Zeus, including causing him to accept bones and fat rather than meat as a sacrifice from mortals, which is what angered Zeus into hiding fire from them. Prometheus then stole it back, but in some accounts also taught humans many other hallmarks of civilisation, and possibly saved them from obliteration at Zeus’ hand. For these transgressions he was, like Fingers-Mazda, chained to a rocks and had his liver eaten by an enormous eagle in the day, only to grow whole again overnight to repeat the torture for eternity. He is eventually freed by Heracles, in some versions with Zeus’ permission, though Heracles kills the eagle rather than letting Prometheus do it.
  • The Bayeux Tapestry is a famous artwork depicting the history of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It’s huge, almost 70 metres long, and was probably made in England not long after the events describes, perhaps in the 1070s. Traditionally it is thought to have been commissioned by Queen Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, but historians consider it more likely to have been commissioned by the Bishop Odo, William’s half-brother. It got its name in the 18th century when it came to the notice of scholars as it was displayed in a cathedral in Bayeux, Normandy. The seventy or so illustrations on it are not woven into the linen fabric, as in many tapestries, but are embroidered, using a form of wool yarn, leading some scholars to prefer the term “Bayeux Embroidery”, though many think this is splitting hairs as the term “tapestry” isn’t that precise.
  • Fan service means anything including in a work of fiction that’s specifically designed to please an existing fan base. The term originates with Japanese manga and anime, where it often more specifically means content which is titillating or sexual in nature.
  • If you’re interested in learning about the visual literacy in comics, and in general about how comics work, we highly recommend the now classic work by Scott McLeod, Understanding Comics.
  • A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 science fiction novel written by English author Anthony Burgess (1917-1993). It depicts a dystopian future in which teenagers speak in a slang called “Nadsat” (from the Russian suffix meaning “-teen”) and form gangs to engage in random acts of “ultra-violence”. The protagonist, Alex, recounts some of his exploits, including falling out with his gang and being abandoned by them after an assault and robbery to be arrested, imprisoned and eventually put through an experimental form of aversion therapy, the “Ludivico Technique”. Stanley Kubrick famously filmed the novel in 1971, with a young Malcolm McDowell in the role of Alex; the film was controversial for including the violence (including murder and rape) present in the book, and has been hugely influential, introducing some of the slang terms like “droogs” (friends) and “ultra-violence” into common parlance. The Kubrick film was based on the US edition of the novel, which omitted the final chapter, and Burgess did not like the result. Burgess himself wrote a musical stage adaptation in 1987, and there have been many other stage productions since.
  • bell hooks (1952-2021) was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, an academic, activist and writer who wrote many influential books about race, feminism and class. hooks used lowercase for her pen name (which was also the name of her Great Grandmother) in an attempt to emphasise the work over the person. Ben is mistaken when he says she doesn’t use much capitalisation or punctuation, though; while she does favour plain language and long sentences, she uses standard English grammar.
  • There have been four editions of The Last Hero in English:
    • The original 2001 hardcover (160 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-06885-X; US – HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-104096-7) is the one all three of us have read. It has Cohen atop a mountain on the cover, and is roughly 24cm wide and 28.5cm tall. As far as we know is the only one to feature the full-colour illustration of Leonard on the Moon looking at the Disc, which appears on the back cover of the dust jacket. (A pencil drawing of this illustration appears in the background on page 121 (or page 133 in the later editions). There’s a German translation of this edition, but it seems most other translations are of the second edition.
    • 2,000 copies were made of a limited “Deluxe Edition” of the UK hardcover (ISBN 0-575-07370-5), though we’re not sure what exactly was different about it – all the photos we can find look just like the hardcover Ben has with the dust jacket taken off! (For the record: the cloth cover underneath is plain black, embossed with the title, authors’ names and just Cohen from the original cover in gold.) Some sources list it as a “slipcase” edition, so it might have been exactly the same except with a slipcase instead of a dust jacket. (It was only £25 compared to the standard edition’s price of £17.99, so this minor change seems about right.)
    • The 2002 paperback edition (176 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-07977-2; US – Eos/HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-050777-2) has the same page dimensions as the original hardcover (though the cover is a little smaller). This one features the Rincewind “Scream” cover and includes text describing it as “The No. 1 Bestseller” and “Includes 16 pages of all-new illustrations”. That the new illustrations did not appear in the deluxe edition caused some fans to be disgruntled with the publishers…
    • The 2007 paperback edition (176 pages; Victor Gollancz, ISBN 978-0-575-08196-3) is pretty much exactly the same as the 2002 version, except with an illustration of the entire Silver Horde on the cover, and it’s smaller: about 17cm wide and 19.5cm tall. Thanks to the specific layout, the page numbers are identical. This version has stayed in print since it was introduced, and is also the version on which the ebook, published in 2015, is based.
    • There’s also an audiobook of The Last Hero, published in 2008 by Isis Books (ISBN 978-0-7531-4058-1 / 040202) – the company with the original license to produce unabridged audiobooks of Pratchett’s works. Its narrated by Stephen Briggs. Its unclear as yet if a new audiobook of The Last Hero will be released as part of the new Penguin Audiobooks…
  • The Scream – whose actual title is Skrik (Norwegian for “Shriek”) or Der Schrei der Natur (German for “The Scream of Nature”) – is an 1893 pre-expressionist artwork by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It depicts a bald figure in the foreground, standing on a bridge or pier near the sea, under a red sky; the figure is clutching its head and has its mouth open in a scream. Munch painted four versions, two in oils and two in pastels, and a lithograph – a carved version from which several monochrome prints were made, some of which were then hand-coloured by Munch. The first version is on display in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, and bares a pencil inscription in Norwegian, written by Munch, that went unnoticed until 1903: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!“, “Could only have been painted by a madman!”
  • Is Rincewind a “young person”? He’s certainly much younger than Cohen, but by the time of The Last Hero he would by some accounts be around 57, though he looks considerably younger in Kidby’s drawings. Perhaps wizards age more slowly than other folks – or his time in the Dungeon Dimensions put a temporary stop to his physical ageing.
  • Ben makes good on his promise to describe at least most of the new illustrations from the second and later editions, but for reference, here’s a list:
    • Pages 50-51 – a map of part of the Disc, showing the route of the fleet that set out from Ankh-Morpork towards Krull.
    • Pages 70-71 – a portrait-oriented image of Death, the Death of Rats and Albert (holding a kitten in a box) looking up at A’Tuin’s immense life timer.
    • Pages 90-91 – the view down to the Hub from the spire of Cori Celesti.
    • Pages 104-105 – the Kite flying towards the viewer off the edge of the Rimfall.
    • Pages 116-117 – a painting of the wizards, the Luggage and Vetinari in the darkened hold of the ship, looking at the glowing lines of the spell tracking the Kite‘s path. (This is the one Ben later thinks is based on an existing work; see below for the answer we’ve come up with, thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta!)
    • Pages 126-127 – a portrait-oriented image of Rincewind on the moon, with one of the elephants in the background, in “the Scream” pose. (This is the image used for the cover of the second edition.)
    • Pages 138-139 – Ridcully, Ponder and another member of the Faculty (possible the Lecturer in Recent Runes) in the bow of the ship, the Luggage in the prow. The wizards are looking up at the moon, where the Kite blasting off can be seen, resembling a shooting star. Ridcully is fishing over the side of the ship – there’s a pile of very weird fish on the deck, and a worried looking sea serpent in the ocean. (This scene doesn’t quite appear in the text, but it’s a great painting.)
    • Pages 154-155 – a parody of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, depicting Cohen in Adam’s pose giving the finger to Blind Io, who takes the place of the Christian God, and is surrounded by the other gods. (This appears in sketch form in the background of the pages where Rincewind talks the heroes out of their plan, on pages 144-145 of the first edition and 160-161 of the later editions.)
  • Our episode about Interesting Times was #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“, a pun on the novel and film Memoirs of a Geisha. (See the episode notes for more.) The pun just about still works if you pronounce it “A-gatt-ee-ah”… Sadly the official source, The Discworld Companion, neglects to supply a pronunciation, but probably whatever Stephen Briggs says in the audiobooks is “correct”.
  • Old Vincent is noted as being 87 in Interesting Times, and having trouble with his memory. He is not actually the oldest of them; that would be Mad Hamish, who in Interesting Times is 105. Cohen himself estimated his own age as between ninety and ninety-five, while Caleb the Ripper was 85. Boy Willie is noted as being the only one under eighty.
  • How much time has passed since Interesting Times? As usual there’s no canonical answer, but clues and fan theories suggest it’s probably been about three or four years.
  • The Cabin in the Woods is a 2011 horror comedy, directed by Drew Goddard and written by Goddard with Joss Whedon, which parodies slasher films and serves up a critique of more modern “torture porn” style horror films. It has a great cast, including Chris Hemsworth (of Thor fame) and Bradley Whitford (of The West Wing), plus many actors familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel. It has a stereotypical collection of college student horror characters head for a weekend in cabin out in the woods, while a pair of scientists observe them and subject them to chemicals and other stimuli that force them to behave like horror movie characters, all leading to a mysterious ritual. The scientists receive messages from other labs around the world advising them that other experiments have failed, leaving the American team as the last hope…and we won’t spoil any more than that, because it’s a pretty great film.
  • The Agatean Empire does not appear in any subsequent novels, but there is a canonical answer to what happens next in The Compleat Discworld Atlas, so we’ll revisit this when we cover that book.
  • Leonard of Quirm – as he is more often called, though he is also referred to as Leonard da Quirm in the books – is first mentioned in Wyrd Sisters (see #Pratchat4), where he is responsible for designing the wave machine used for special ocean effects at The Dysk theatre in Ankh-Morpork. Notably he is still “at large” in that book, working primarily as a painter from the Street of Cunning Artificers, and doing engineering as a side hustle. He’s safely ensconced in the Patrician’s palace by the time of Men at Arms (#Pratchat1), having designed and built the gonne which – deemed more dangerous than the other things Leonard had actually constructed – was meant to be destroyed by the Assassin’s Guild. By the time of Jingo (#Pratchat27) he’s been in the palace for five years – and we realise he does get to go along on the submarine adventure in that book, but only under the Patrician’s strict supervision. He also appears in The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40), and is mentioned briefly in Soul Music (where one of his illustrations inspires the Librarian to build his motorcycle; see #Pratchat19) and The Truth (where Mr Tulip admires one of his artworks; see #Pratchat42), but will only return once more, in Monstrous Regiment.
  • Cohen doesn’t wear a loincloth – it’s always been described and illustrated as a “leather hold-all”, like the furry underpants worn by He-Man.
  • The exhibition of Terry’s life and work that Ben remembers was Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which featured at the Salisbury Museum from September 2017 to January 2018. Two books were produced for the exhibition – one limited edition small hardcover available only at the exhibition, and another larger art book. and you can find it and details of the exhibition at pratchetthisworld.com. The Shed of Doom was not actually build for HisWorld, but the following year for the Chalke Valley History Festival, where the HisWorld recreation of Terry’s writing room was also exhibited again. We’ve included a Tweet from the official @Discworld_com account below with some great photos of the Shed, and the CVHF also have a time-lapse video of its construction on Vimeo.
  • In the Pokémon series of videogames, there are several goals: one is to fill out your “Pokédex”, an index of every Pokémon creature, by capturing at least one specimen of every species. But you are also on a quest to prove yourself as the greatest Pokémon trainer in the region, usually by defeating the gym leaders – the best trainer is each of the local “Pokémon gyms”, which are basically training camps for Pokémon trainers, usually specialising in Pokémon of a certain type. When you enter a gym you find a unique (or at least distinctive) challenge you must overcome to get to the gym leader, which always includes fighting Pokémon battles against their gym members. And that’s even before you get to the final part of each game, which involves battling against the champion trainers above the individual gyms! Which is all to say that Evil Harry Dread being one of those unnamed trainers in the gym before the leader is a pretty scathing review from Liz of his Evil Overlord status.
  • Crufts is a famous UK dog show. We previously talked about it briefly in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • The Nothingfjord Blue swamp dragon does indeed seem to be a clear reference to Monty Python’s famous “Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the sketch, Mr Praline (John Cleese with a silly voice) tries to return a large, blue and clearly dead parrot to a pet shop, the owner of which (played by Michael Palin) tries to argue that it is not dead. The parrot in the sketch is described as a “Norwegian Blue” (a nonexistent species) which has “beautiful plumage”; the shopkeeper at one point claims that it is “pining for the fjords”. NoThingfjord, meanwhile, was first mentioned in The Last Continent as the birthplace of Mad the dwarf. It’s also mentioned in The Last Hero – it was the Duke of NoThingfjord who employed Mad Hamish and other members of the Silver Horde as mercenaries, in the battle they were asked to repeatedly re-stage for the purposes of capturing it in a tapestry. Some more details are given in The Discworld Mapp, where it’s revealed that it’s home to the Discworld’s equivalent of vikings, who were great explorers but not very successful raiders since they always made appointments with their potential victims, giving advance warning of their arrival.
  • The barbarian heroine in The Light Fantastic is Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan, who also gets a passing mention in Eric. We should also give Conina, Cohen’s daughter from Sourcery, a shout-out too.
  • Open All Hours was one of two successful BBC sitcoms developed from Seven of One, a showcase of sitcom pilots starring Ronnie Barker, which was broadcast in 1973. (The other was the prison comedy Porridge.) Barker, in a false moustache and pronounced stutter, plays Arkwright, the owner of a corner store in Yorkshire, who longs for and lusts after Nurse Gladys, who lives across the road with her elderly mother. He also attempts to teach all his dirty tricks for selling to customers to his assistant, his orphaned nephew Granville, played by David Jason – known to Discworld fans as both Albert in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, and Rincewind in the live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Open All Hours ran for four series between 1976 and 1985, and remained popular enough to spawn a sequel, Still Open All Hours, in which Granville (still played by David Jason) has taken over the store. Still Open All Hours has had six series between 2014 and 2019.
  • Liz has mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy novel The Homeward Bounders before, in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left”, and #EeekClub2021, our first special episode discussing topics chosen by subscribers. In the book, demonic entities known only as Them play a boardgame with the denizens of the many alternate universes that exist – in part by selecting mortals who will be thrown out of their own universe, and must then try to make it home.
  • The Mysterious Cities of Gold (in Japanese 太陽の子エステバン, “Esteban, Child of the Sun“, and in French Les Mystérieuses Cités d’Or) is a French-Japanese animated television series that ran for one season of 39 episodes in 1982 and 1983. Set in the sixteenth century, the show follows three children – Esteban, Mia and Tao – as they travel with (and sometimes run from) the roguish explorer Mendoza and his bumbling sidekicks, as they search for the legendary “Seven Cities of Gold”. Along the way it turns out all three of the children are connected to various ancient, technologically advanced civilisations, and they discover several technological marvels of the ancient world, including the “Golden Condor”, a bird-like flying machine roughly the size of the Kite, which is powered by the Sun. Aside from its super catchy theme song, one of the things that distinguished it from other cartoons was the live-action educational segment at the end of each episode, which aimed to teach viewers about the real-world history and cultures of South America (though let’s remember this was the early 1980s, so it probably wasn’t very culturally aware). It was broadcast in Australia on the ABC in the mid-80s, and again more recently on NITV. Three new seasons, continuing on from the original, were produced in France between 2012 and 2021. The new seasons also spawned two videogames.
  • In the 1970s and 80s there were several European-Japanese co-productions in animation, predominantly in France. The other well-known example is Ulysses 31 (also created by Jean Chapolin, of The Mysterious Cities of Gold and Inspector Gadget fame), which translated the story of Odysseus/Ulysses into a science-fiction context. There are others, but they’re not nearly as well known in English-speaking countries.
  • We haven’t been able to find any pictures of the Kite model made as a drawing reference, though we know that it exists from a quote from Pratchett himself, featured in the Annotated Pratchett Guide. We’d still love to see it, though, so if anyone knows of any photos that exist, please send us a link!
  • NASA did send an ape into space! There were many monkeys and apes involved in the early spaceflight program at NASA, used as passengers or even trained pilots in test flights made prior to sending a human. This was not, of course, very nice for the animals, many of whom did not survive; in fact before they returned from any mission, the chimpanzees at NASA were only given numbers, not names, to reduce the emotional impact of press stories about their deaths, which puts the whole thing into grim perspective. But the success story of the program was Ham, the chimp who became the first great ape in space when he successfully returned from a sub-orbital flight on January 31, 1961. He lived for another twenty-two years, mostly at a Zoo in Washington, D.C., and when he died he was buried at the International Space Hall of Fame – a much nicer end that the original plan to stuff him and put him on display in the museum, something Russia did with some of the dogs from its own early space program.
  • Goodby Bindle Featherstone of Quirm – better known as Errol – appears in Guards! Guards!, where he is first encountered by Vimes on his visit to Lady Ramkin to learn about dragons. He is later gifted to Vimes, who has already taken a liking to him, and gains his shorter name when Nobby comments that “he looks more like my brother Errol”. His ability to flame from the, er, other end is said in that book to be partly genetic and partly down to the swamp dragons’ ability to rearrange their internal plumbing to make use of whatever fuel they can find.
  • Leonard’s drawings of swamp and moon dragons appear on pages 77 and 129 (73 and 117 in the first edition).
  • The painting of Ridcully fishing near the Circumference while the Kite blasts off from the moon is on pages 138 and 139.
  • The painting of the wizards observing the spell (from pages 116-117 of the later editions) appears to be based very specifically on A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, painted in 1766 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Wright’s style (and Kirby’s excellent copy of it) probably seems familiar to you – he also painted An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which was the inspiration for Kidby’s cover painting for The Science of Discworld. (See #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, for more information.) Thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta for helping us solve this mystery!
  • The picture of Cohen holding his sword outside the background that frames him appears on page 136 (124 in the first edition). There doesn’t appear to be a general term for this in art, but in comics it’s known as a breakout panel, or panel breaking.
  • The Lady first appears in The Colour of Magic, where she appears to Rincewind and Twoflower, giving them a chance to escape their fate (and, er, Fate) in Krull. She also appears in Interesting Times, starting a new game against Fate. Her original description states that her eyes are “Not the pale green of ordinary eyes … the green of fresh emeralds and as iridescent as a dragonfly.” Interestingly they’re not described as being entirely green until Interesting Times, though the dryad Rincewind meets earlier in The Colour of Magic does have eyes like that.
  • Modern dice have their numbers arranged so that the ones on opposite faces add up to the number of faces plus one. This arrangement – called “sevens” for the sum on a six-sided dice – makes sure that if the dice gets flattened somehow, making the numbers on two opposite sides more likely to be rolled, the average result of the dice will stay the same. Ben has a novelty twenty-sided dice a bit bigger than a golf ball that’s like this; it mostly rolls a 3 or an 18, but this still evens out to good or bad luck. The sevens configuration goes back to ancient Roman times, though it fell out of fashion around the twelfth century, when dice became more standardised and switched to a “primes” configuration. Sevens came back into vogue from around 1450 – seemingly alongside an increasing understanding of mathematics and basic probability during the Renaissance – and was extended to other die sizes too. (As an aside, we’re using “dice” as both singular and plural here, which is accepted modern usage.)
  • The Scandanavian story of the dice is the story of Oláf Haraldsson from the Heimskringla saga, told by Snorri Sturluson – though even he thought it was a bit on the nose, and credited the story to another bard, Thorstein the Learned. Haraldsson was a Norwegian Viking who in 1015 proclaimed himself King Oláf II of Norway in a bid to reclaim his land from Danish and Swedish rule. He sorted out the Danes without much trouble – King Canute was not much interested in Norway at the time – and made peace with Sweden, in part by marrying King Oláf of Sweden’s daughter. (This is why history is never the great for stories – who gives their two protagonists the same name?) When the two kings met to finalise which kingdom would own what, they disagreed about the Island of Hísing, but rather than go back to war they played dice for it. In a story reminiscent of one of Arnold Rimmer’s Risk stories from Red Dwarf, the Swedish king threw double-sixes; then the Norwegian King threw double-sixes; then the Swedish King threw double-sixes…and then King Oláf II therew the dice, and one split in half, showing a six and a one, giving him a result of thirteen and breaking the ongoing tie. As Ben mentions, this story is mentioned in The Science of Discworld in Chapter 34, “Nine Times Out of Ten”, about probability. (It’s Chapter 32 in the original edition.) While the result is far-fetched, it’s far from the only time powerful people have gambled for something so valuable: Ben is reminded of the story of a Japanese businessman in “Anything For the Client“, a 2015 story from the Snap Judgment podcast.
  • “Are We the Baddies” refers to a series of sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look, a BBC Three sketch comedy series starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In the sketches, the pair play nazi officers during World War II; Mitchell’s character begins to worry that the skulls on their caps and various other clues might mean they are not the good guys. You can watch a compilation of the sketches on YouTube.
  • The illustrations of Carrot facing up to the Horde appear on pages 158 and 159 (142 and 143 in the first edition).
  • Michael Williams was our guest in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“. His story of the time he interviewed Pratchett live on stage was cut for time from #Pratchat26, but appears in the third episode of our subscriber-only podcast, Ook Club. (Our Support Us page has info on how you can get access to that podcast.)
  • We discussed Johnny and the Dead back in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
  • Emperor Carelinus is the Discworld equivalent of Roundworld’s Alexander the Great, at least seen through the lens of mythologising and popular culture. His name might be a reference to the Roman emperor Charlemagne, also known as Carolus. Alexander famously cut the Gordian knot, whose Discworld equivalent the minstrel informs us was located in Tsort. The bit about him reaching the end of the world and weeping is based on Alexander’s life, but also seems to be specifically a reference to the movie Die Hard, where Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber supposedly quotes the ancient historian Plutarch’s book about his life: “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” That phrase, however, doesn’t appear anywhere in Plutarch – it’s cobbled together from several passages and echoes similar things from other later sources, but was invented (or perhaps messed up artfully) for the film.
  • We mention the various editions of the Discworld books this episode, which is probably something to which we should devote an entire episode one of these days. But here’s a quick guide to the major ones, or at least the ones we get in the UK and Australia:
    • The original English editions, published in hardcover by Gollancz (up to Jingo; Doubleday afterwards) and paperback by Corgi, had the Josh Kirby covers up until Thief of Time. From Night Watch on, they have covers by Paul Kidby. Kidby also obviously illustrated The Last Hero, but didn’t do the original cover for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which was by David Wyatt. Kidby did later do a cover for The Amazing Maurice, but the newest editions have covers by Mark Beech, who’s done covers (and sometimes internal illustrations) for all of Pratchett’s books for younger readers. No editions of the earlier Discworld books have been published with covers by Kidby, even though he has done illustrations for some of them. (Though see the note on the new 2022 editions below.)
    • In 2012, Corgi began reissuing slightly larger B-format editions of the Discworld novels, which replaced the earlier paperback editions. These re-use Kirby and Kidby’s artwork, but reworked the cover designs, giving them a more consistent look, usually by using a smaller piece of Kirby’s artwork for the cover.
    • The hardcover/cloth ones mentioned by George are the Collector’s Library editions, which we previously discussed in #Pratchat30. These were first published between 2014 and 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, but because they didn’t have hardcover rights to the books after Jingo, the set remained incomplete. In 2017, Terry’s later publisher Doubleday (owned by Penguin Random House) got on board and continued the series with matching editions of the later books, though the “younger readers books” – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the Tiffany Aching books – weren’t published in this format until 2021. Of special note: Eric has been published in this format, as just the text, but The Last Hero has not, since the format doesn’t allow for the illustrated format.
    • As part of the “50 Years of Terry” celebration (marking fifty years since his first novel, The Carpet People, was originally published in 1971), new editions of “all 40 Discworld novels” will be published with a consistent cover design, coinciding with the release of the new unabridged audiobook versions (which use square versions of the same designs). Each sub-series is published together, with the standalone books distributed among the publication dates; the first batch, of the five witches books and Small Gods, were released in 2022 on Pratchett’s birthday, April 28. It seems likely The Last Hero will not be re-issued in this edition, explaining the “all 40” comment above.
  • Teflon and velcro are both often cited as having been originally created to solve problems for the space program, but in fact both were invented decades earlier. This is such a persistent “fact” that NASA still has an FAQ page answering the question “Are Tang, Teflon and Velcro NASA spin-offs?“
  • This is Spinal Tap is a 1984 improvised mockumenary film, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as the members of Spinäl Tap, a British rock band who are supposedly one of the biggest in the world. Parts of the film flash back to the band’s earlier days, including a sequence in black and white showing one of the earlier incarnations of the band, the Thamesmen, who had a Beatles-like hit titled “Gimme Some Money”. The song Ben references here, “Listen to the Flower People”, was recorded after the band changed their name to Spinäl Tap. The film is consistently named one of the funniest ever made, and established the largely improvised documentary format which Christopher Guest has returned to many times for films like Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. Rob Reiner announced in 2022 that he is planning a sequel, reuniting the original cast.
  • The illustration of the Kite crew on the moon looking at the elephant and disc appears on pages 130-131 (118-119 in the first edition).
  • In James Cameron’s 1986 film Aliens, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) joins a group of marines to investigate the silence of a colony established on the planet where her crew picked up a vicious alien lifeform in 1979’s Alien. When they confirm that the aliens are still there and have killed most of the colonists, and most of the marines have been killed as well, Ripley says one of many famous lines from the film: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” The dog-Latin version appears in Leonard’s drawings on page
  • Discworld books with few footnotes from around the time of The Last Hero include Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment (each of which has only ten), The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (with just four) and Going Postal (which has none!). Thud! has closer to an average number, with twenty footnotes.
  • “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning” are the directions given to Neverland by Peter Pan when Wendy asks his address in Peter Pan – or at least in the film adaptations. In the 1904 play Peter Pan and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, Peter doesn’t specify he means a star; he only says “Second to the right and then straight on till morning”, leaving Wendy none the wiser.
  • At the end of the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the starship Enterprise is sent back to Earth to be decommissioned. Captain Kirk decides to take it on one last journey, and when asked for a heading by helm officer Chekhov, says “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.” It’s nearly the last line of he film.
  • Ben mentions several sources for annotations for the book:
  • You can find lots of Paul Kidby’s other artwork – including pictures of gnomes, dragons, unicorns, fairies and many more – on his website, paulkidby.com.
  • The painting of Dunmanifestin is on page 17.
  • The Moai – the famous statues of Easter Island – are more than 900 monolithic statues of ancestors, created by the Rapa Nui people between around 1250 and 1500. While they are often referred to as “heads”, they are complete bodies, though many of the famous photos are of Moai from the coast, which are often buried in the earth up to the shoulders. They are on average around four metres tall, but the biggest is nearly 10 metres high – and an unfinished one was more than twice that!
  • Chichen Itza is a Mayan city in the Mexican state of Yucatán. Probably the biggest city of the Mayan civilisation, it is now an archeological site and tourist destination, at the centre of which is the Temple of Kukulcán, a step-pyramid also known as El Castillo or La Pirámide, names given by European explorers. It was built in worship of Kukulcán, the Mayan incarnation of the a feathered serpent deity known to the Aztecs as Qetzacoatl. A very similar temple to a fairly similar god features in Eric.
  • We couldn’t identify the building out the back of Dunmanifestin on our own – but we reached out to Paul Kidby on Twitter, who told us it’s the home of the Great God Om (of Small Gods fame), as requested by Terry himself! You can see our question and his response below.
  • The Man in the Moone is a 1638 novel by Bishop Francis Godwin of Hereford, in which a Spaniard travels to the moon in a chariot which is, well done Ben, drawn by swans. (The illustration of Leonard in a chariot drawn by swamp dragons – what the Patrician imagines his plan to be – appears on pages 32-33.) Godwin’s book is one of the earliest published stories about space travel, and was famous enough to be parodied by the real life Cyrano de Bergerac twenty years later, as referenced in Rostand’s famous 1897 play about Bergerac. Godwin’s story, or Bergerac’s parody, may have influenced many other writers, including Rudolf Raspe in his tales of Baron Munchausen.
  • “Tribute” is the first single from American rock duo Tenacious D, comprised of Jack Black and Kyle Gass. It was originally written for their HBO television series, and was released on their first album, Tenacisou D, in 2002. In the song, the pair tell the story of how they meet a demon and beat him in a “rock off” by playing “the Greatest Song in the World”, in a manner similar to the fiddling competition from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. Afterwards they cannot remember the song they played, and instead write this song as a “tribute” to that one. Apparently it wasn’t a huge hit in the US, but in Australia and New Zealand we loved it, rocketing it into the top ten; its certified platinum in AUstralia, New Zealand and the UK, and also did well in the Netherlands. A version of the “rock off” features in the Tenacious D feature film, The Pick of Destiny, where they compete against Satan after plotting to steal the titular guitar pick, which is made from a piece of his horn. (Ben, a big Tenacious D fan, recommends the soundtrack album for the film, but not the film itself.)
  • Ballads and sagas are different things, but only the former is usually a “story song“.
    • Traditional ballads can be songs or poems, but they usually tell a story in many short verses. (Ben wrote one himself, retelling the story of Frankenstein from the perspective of the often forgotten ship’s captain whose letters serve as a framing narrative.) They were particularly popular in Ireland and England for many centuries; the name seems to derive from the medieval Scottish ballares, which itself comes from the Latin ballare, meaning “to dance”, showing that they were also originally songs you danced to. (Both ballet and the different form of French poetry, the ballade – as practised by Cyrano de Bergerac in the famous poetic fight scene near the start of Rostand’s play – also get their name from the same Latin root.) Early ballads often have anonymous sources, but they are sources of stories about Robin Hood, Beowulf and many other figures. The ballad went on to have a rich history, in storytelling, political satire and popular music, until they fell out of fashion in the 19th century.
    • In historical terms, saga properly describes long prose stories from Iceland and other Scandinavian countries. The word saga (whose plural is sǫgur) is Old Norse, and evolved from meaning “what is said” to describing a story or history. (The modern words for all these things in Scandinavian languages are derived from saga.) The earliest sagas were mostly passed on orally, and were written down in the 13th century, but especially in Iceland – where the language has changed very little over a thousand or more years – they are still well understood. Probably the most famous author of sagas was Snorri Sturluson, a law speaker of the Althing in Iceland who lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is credited with composing or compiling many sagas about Icelandic history and legend, including the Prose Edda – on which our modern understanding of Norse mythology is based – and the Heimskringla, a history of Scandanavian kings we’ve already mentioned in these notes. In modern English usage, a “saga” is any long story, especially if its told in parts; for example the main films of the Star Wars universe are usually referred to as “the Skywalker saga”.
  • “Bardcore” is, as Ben says, a musical genre in which modern songs are performed in a “medieval” style, to varying levels of authenticity. There are indeed several bardcore versions of Led Zeppelin’s classic track “Immigrant Song”, from heir 1970 album Led Zeppelin III on YouTube. Our picks include this instrumental one by Constantine Bard; this one with English vocals by Grace Sledd; and this one translated into Old Norse by the Miracle Aligner, which he suggests might be better termed “Skaldcore”. Thanks to subscriber Sven who suggested that last one! (And while we’re talking “Immigrant Song”, some of Ben’s other favourite covers of it include The Cybertronic Spree, Robyn Adele Anderson (in a 1940s swing style), Karen O with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (for the soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and The Foo Fighters, featuring Tenacious D and Slash!)
  • Sea shanties have enjoyed a few rounds of popularity on TikTok, where shared videos can be offered as a “duet”, allowing other users to record themselves singing along and post a new video of both singers side by side. (You can do this multiple times, adding many levels of voices or instruments, and its not limited to music – some very funny videos have been created this way!) Shanies are perfect for this since hey’re designed to be easy to sing, but also they are traditionally sung a cappella without harmonies, leaving lots of room for modern additions. The most well-known shanty to become TikTok famous is “The Wellerman”, particularly a performance by Nathan Evans. This YouTube compilation gives you a good idea of the form. (Evans recently did a filk song version about the 2022 Doctor Who special “Legend of the Sea Devils”.)
  • The black-figure style – as seen in the image of Blind Io and Fingers-Mazda on page 8 – was very popular in Greece and parts of what is now Italy from around the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, though it hung around for a few centuries after its height. This style of art was painted in black, white and usually shades of orange or red on vases, amphorae and other ceramic vessels.
  • Kidby’s parodies of Leonardo da Vinci’s work in The Last Hero include:
    • A version of his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, on page 30. This is known as the Mona Ogg, because as revealed in The Art of Discworld – another book it seems we need to cover! – she and Leonard were romantically involved in their youth. Leonard’s version is indeed a painting of a young Gytha Ogg. In fact the one in this book seems to be a new version, since the Mona Ogg has existed before the gonne affair in Men at Arms, so perhaps the original was painted in their youth?
    • A version of the Vitruvian Man on pages 86 and 87, showing Rincewind strapped into Leonard’s spaceflight training device, with the usual number of arms. (This appears on pages 82 and 83 in the first edition, and it also the end papers.) da Vinci’s original artwork was an ink drawing from around 1490 titled Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, or “The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius”. It shows a man with his arms and legs draw in two different positions, describing both a circle and a square; Rincewind is drawn only in the circular position. Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and Leonardo’s notes that accompany the drawing – in mirror-writing, of course – refer to notes Vitruvius made about the proportions of the human body in his book De architectura (“On architecture”), written around 15-30 years BCE. It’s important to note that these proportions are of a typically masculine body, and so are not truly universal.
  • The story of the space pen vs the pencil is indeed mostly a myth. As Liz mentions, NASA had legitimate reasons for wanting to avoid pencils – highly flammable pencil shavings could present a hazard aboard a spacecraft, especially as graphite can conduct electricity and potentially cause a short-circuit if bits got into electronic components. The Fisher Space Pen ended up being the answer, but NASA didn’t spend billions of dollars creating it – the Fisher Pen Company was already working on a pressurised ink cartridge that enabled writing at various angles, and they perfected it after NASA reached out to them.
  • A mission patch – also known as a “space patch”, since they are mostly known from space exploration – is an emblem representing a particular mission which is worn as an embroidered cloth badge by astronauts and other mission personally. They date back to one of the early soviet space missions, Vostok 6, when the first one was worn by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Mission patches come from the military tradition of shoulder sleeve insignia (SSI) or shoulder patches – embroidered badges worn on the sleeves of military uniforms, especially in the US, to show the division to which a soldier belongs. (You can see them in Stargate SG-1, where the airforce personnel assigned to the Stargate program wear patches which seem part SSI, part NASA mission patch…and they’re attached by velcro, so they can remove them when operating on Earth and avoiding disclosing the classified Stargate program.)
  • The Lego Space theme is a classic theme for Lego sets introduced in 1978 and originally running until 1987. It’s logo, of a white space shuttle with a smaller red shuttle shown orbiting around it, deliberately resembles the NASA “meatball” logo. Sets using this theme were hugely popular, and it was revisited many times up until 2013. The character of Benny in The Lego Movie is a classic Lego Spaceman, with the Lego Space logo on his chest and the iconic oxygen tanks and helmet from that theme.
  • Rincewind’s motto “Morituri Nolumus Mori“ echoes the famous Latin phrase “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant” – “Hail, Emperor; those who are about to die salute you”. While it is popularly believed to have been said by gladiators to watching emperors, there’s actually no evidence this ever happened. It is documented in contemporary histories only once, in the work De vita Caesarum (“The Life of the Caesars”) by Suetonius. There it is said by soldiers participating in a mock naval battle in 52 AD.
  • In Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo (“The Creation of Adam”), his famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, God is surrounded by a billowing cloak. This was famously described as a brain in an episode of the television series Westworld, but that theory is older than that – and contentious, as some think it’s more like a uterus! This article at The Verge goes into detail.
  • Several books contain references to Rincewind’s childhood:
    • In The Light Fantastic, upon meeting Cohen, he recalls his grandad telling him stories about the barbarian.
    • Rincewind claims in Sourcery that his mother “ran away before I was born”.
    • Interesting Times reveals that Rincewind “had no personal experience of either parent but felt that they were probably at least vaguely humanoid, if only briefly.”
    • In The Last Continent Rincewind recognises sheep, despite growing up in the city, in part because he’d had a stuffed toy lamb as a child.
  • The tradition of orphans in Ankh-Morpork being given to a Guild is mentioned not only in Thief of Time (see #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“), where Lobsang is apprenticed to the Thieve’s Guild and Jeremy to the Clockmakers’, but also The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, where we learn Keith the pipe player was left on the doorstep of the Musicians’ Guild.
  • Esk’s age does not seem to be a factor in Equal Rites, where many of the prospective wizards hoping to enter the university are young enough to be accompanied by their parents.
  • Jedi are trained very young: Yoda claims the 22-year-old Luke is “too old to begin the training” in The Empire Strikes Back. The Jedi Council considered that even 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker might be too old in The Phantom Menace, and in Attack of the Clones we see a group of four- to eight-year-olds learning to use lightsabers. (Ben notes that if he tried such a thing he would certainly lose his Working With Children Check.)
  • We previously mentioned Wallace and Gromit in our discussion of Thief of Time (#Pratchat48). In their first stop-motion animated short film, A Grand Day Out (1989), inventor Wallace and his long-suffering but faithful dog Gromit build a rocket and fly to the moon in search of cheese.
  • Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (From the Earth to the Moon, a direct route in 97 hours and 20 minutes) – better known as From the Earth to the Moon – was first published in serial and novel form in 1865. In the book, an American gun club build an enormous “space gun” and use it to fire a hollow projectile containing three men with the aims of landing them on the Moon. The novel only details the adventure up until the gun is fired; their adventures on – or rather near – the Moon are detailed in the 1870 sequel, Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon).
  • We previously mentioned Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books in #Pratchat7A. The dragons in question are alien lifeforms on the planet Pern, where human riders form a two-way psychic bond with their dragons at the time of hatching. There are 23 novels in the series, some written or co-written by McCaffrey’s son Tom, beginning with 1968’s Dragonflight. The third part of The Colour of Magic, “The Lure of the Wyrm”, is a parody and homage to dragon fiction, including the Pern books.
  • We previously mentioned the Room 101 radio show in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” It has also been a television show.
  • The Repair Shop is a BBC television series in which family heirlooms are repaired and restored by experts. It first began in 2017, and is currently in the midst of its ninth season. It’s filmed at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which has a working smithy required to repair some of the items brought. An Australian version, The Repair Shop Australia, began on the Foxtel pay-TV channel LifeStyle on 3 May, 2022 – just before this episode came out!
  • Chris Hemsworth plays the hot-but-stupid receptionist Kevin in the 2016 Ghostbusters film, also known as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. We won’t say much more to avoid spoilers, but this scene of his job interview will give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about.
  • Imp y Celyn – aka “Buddy” – is one of the protagonists of Soul Music, which we discussed in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“. In that book it’s revealed that Mort and Ysabel died when the extra time granted them by Death ran out, and their carriage ran off the edge of a mountain road. We only get a few glimpses of their life between then and the end of Mort (discussed in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“), when the couple have become the new Duke and Duchess of Sto Helit, and Ysabel is pregnant with Susan.

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

#Pratchat52 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

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

The Watch cast and crew

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

Crew

Head Writer and Executive Producer
Simon Allen

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

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

Cast

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat27 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 27, “Leshp Miserablés“, featuring guest Craig Hildebrand-Burke, discussing the 1997 Discworld novel Jingo.

  • The O.C. is a 1990s teen drama we’ve previously mentioned in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It starred the other Ben McKenzie.
  • “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – meaning there’s not a hidden meaning in everything, no matter how obvious the phallic imagery may seem – is a phrase often attributed to German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. It’s almost certain he never said it, though.
  • Cthulhu is the ancient, god-like being created by H. P. Lovecraft, giving the name “Cthulhu Mythos” to the universe of linked cosmic horror stories written by Lovecraft and others. They feature Cylcopean architecture with non-Euclidean angles, civilisations of horrific beings that pre-dated humans on Earth, and other elements of cosmic horror. We previously talked about Cthulhu in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, as Moving Pictures also features Cthulhu-like horrors. (Bel-Shahamroth, featured in The Colour of Magic, also draws inspiration from the works of Lovecraft, as well as earlier sword and sorcery writing.)
  • The tradition of a “Speaker’s Corner“, where anyone can stand on a soapbox and give their opinion, originates in Hyde Park London and dates back to at least the 19th century. The original Speaker’s Corner in Melbourne was at Birrarung Marr, on the banks of the Yarra River; it’s now held on the lawns outside the State Library and known as the Speaker’s Forum. Sydney’s Speaker’s Corner is at the Domain.
  • Blackadder Goes Forth was the fourth and final season of satirical historical comedy Blackadder created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, though the later seasons were written by Curtis with Ben Elton. They star Atkinson as various members of the Blackadder family throughout history, always accompanied by his dogsbody (or general servant) Baldrick (played by Pratchett audiobook reader and star of Time Team, Toby Robinson). In Goes Forth, Edmund Blackadder is a Captain in the British Army on the Western Front of World War I. General Melchett (Stephen Fry) is their blustering Commanding Officer, who has no idea of their hardships and frequently orders them into danger from far behind the front.
  • You can find out more about the Mary Rose at the official web site.
  • The L-Space web was the primary web site hosting documents created on the newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett, including the Annotated Pratchett File (or APF). It still exists, though new annotations and notes now appear on the L-Space Wiki.
  • Pratchett spoke about “white knowledge” in several interviews, especially those given while publicising The Folklore of Discworld. He meant the phrase as an analogue to “white noise”, and defined it as knowledge you acquire without knowing how or where from.
  • Go Back to Where You Came From is an SBS reality television series which took groups of six Australians with “differing views” on asylum seekers and had them take the hazardous journey undertaken by refugees in reverse – sailing on small, seemingly fragile boats from Australia to nearby countries, and visiting refugee camps and other locations.
  • Tax avoidance is the (usually) legal avoidance of paying taxes, employed most successfully by the largest companies, who are allowed to offset profits with losses from previous years, depreciation of major assets (like fleets of airlines or electrical infrastructure), or income shifting (assigning income disproportionately to subsidiaries in countries with the lowest tax rates).
  • While the militarisation of police in the US is well-documented – many forces there have military-style assault rifles, some have tanks, and quite a few have been trained by ex-military forces personnel – it’s a more recent phenomenon here in Australia. After a year or so of discussion, Victoria Police announced in December 2019 it was buying 300 AR-15 assault rifles for use in “active armed offender” situations, though they have promised the guns will not be carried in public.
  • Terry Pratchett was awarded no fewer than ten honorary doctorates. They come mostly from universities in the United Kingdom, the first being from the University of Warwick in 1999. He also had one from Dublin University in 2008, and his last – awarded in May 2014, less than a year before his death – was from the University of South Australia. He was also an Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Dublin and South Australia, which more-or-less just meant he occasionally gave a guest lecture.
  • Andy Serkis is an English actor who rose to fame through his motion capture performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. He has since established himself as a influential voice in motion capture, both as an actor and director.
  • In the 2006 television adaptation of Hogfather, Nobby was played by Nicholas Tennant, who also played the Head Librarian in part one of the adaptation of The Colour of Magic.
  • The honorific “effendi” began life as a title in the Ottoman Empire, roughly equivalent to “sir”; it was derived from the Ancient Greek word authentēs, which means “lord”. It is still in use as an honorific in Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, though it’s not quite used the way it is presented in most Western fiction.
  • The attempt on Prince Khufurah’s life has many parallels with the assassination of JFK: he is in a procession along a route lined by onlookers; the shooter was in a tall building thought to be empty; there is a second shooter elsewhere (in our world behind a grassy knoll, rather than a gnoll); and the idea that the first gunman could have shot JFK in the manner that killed him is sometimes mocked by conspiracy theorists claiming that it would require “a magic bullet”. The initial investigation determined that Lee Harvey Oswald – himself murdered while in police custody – was working alone; a later investigation determined that there was indeed a second shooter, though it agreed that Oswald’s bullet was the one that killed the President.
  • The “Zapruder film” is the most famous footage of the assassination of President Kennedy. It was filmed by local clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder on a home-movie camera; he developed three copies of his film and gave two to the US Secret Service, and it was used in both major investigations of the assassination.
  • Leonardo Da Vinci secured the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, in around 1482, and was commissioned to build a huge bronze statue of a horse. A full-size clay model was made and exhibited to much acclaim, but the 80 tons of bronze intended for the statue was instead used to build cannons for a war against the French, and the statue was never completed. After the seizure of Milan by Louis XII, the clay model was used for target practice by French troops and destroyed. Some accounts say the Duke was impressed with Leonardo’s ingenuity and hired him to design weaponry, which may explain why his notebooks include many things that are definitely weapons, including a huge crossbow, guns with multiple barrels and armoured vehicles (including one with scythes to cut down enemy troops, illustrated complete with victims of the blades).
  • Hachikō was an Akita dog whose master, Hidesaburō Ueno, was a professor at the University of Tokyo. Ueno lived in Shibuya and Hachikō would come to Shibuya train station every day to meet him on his way home. Uneo died while at work in May 1925, but Hachikō continued visiting the station hoping to meet his master every day until his own death nearly ten years later. Hachikō became famous in 1932 when a newspaper wrote an article about him, and a statue was erected in his honour in 1934. The original statue was recycled during World War II, but a new statue by the original sculptor’s son was erected outside Shibuya Station in 1948. It’s still there, and the nearest entrance is now named after Hachikō. There are similar statues in Hachikō’s hometown Ōdate at the train station and the Akita Museum. In 2015, 80 years after his death, a new statue of Ueno meeting an excited Hachikō was unveiled at the University of Tokyo.
  • The film Lawrence of Arabia follows the exploits of real-life British officer T. E. Lawrence, who during World War I was sent to find out if the Syrian Prince Faisal had any chance of aiding in the war against Turkey. The film has been a source of controversy over its perceived historical inaccuracies, though it won many awards and propelled its star, Peter O’Toole, to great fame.
  • Embassies – the permanent homes of major “diplomatic missions” to other states – are not generally considered “foreign soil”, or “extra-territorial”, but fall under the jurisdiction of local governments. But they do get a bunch of privileges under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations established in 1961 which includes exemption from many local laws. And it turns out to be true that citizens and authorities of the local country cannot enter without permission – even to put out a fire!
  • Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010, based on the “Constable” novels by Nicholas Rhea (a pseudonym for ex-cop Peter N Walker). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield. It originally centred around PC Nick Rowan (Nick Berry) and his wife, Dr Kate Rowan (Niamh Cusack), but after a few years both left the program and characters took the limelight. The only characters to remain throughout were Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds as Nick’s Sergeant, Blaketon, who later retires and takes over the local pub, and older fellow PC Alf Ventriss (William Simons), who was a commando in World War II and whose wife was mentioned frequently but never appeared on screen. We never even find out her first name!
  • There are many examples of the “battle butler” in fiction. Aside from Willikins, there’s Alfred Pennyworth (Batman), Jarvis (The Avengers comics), Oddjob (Goldfinger), Cadbury (Richie Rich, especially in the film), Kato (The Green Hornet) and Mr Butler (Artemis Fowl).
  • The “white saviour” narrative is a common trope, especially in film, where a white protagonist saves non-white people from disaster or war, usually by leading them or making them “more civilised”. Lawrence of Arabia is one of the earliest major examples, but there are many, many others.
  • The Watchmen television series, which was first released in 2019, serves as a sequel to the 1987 comic book series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The comic is celebrated as a deconstruction of the superhero genre, and features a number of second-generation costumed vigilantes investigating a global conspiracy that seems to mean them harm. The television series, whose show runner is Damon Lindelof of Lost and The Leftovers fame, is set 34 years after the events of the original comics.
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an 1870 novel by French author Jules Verne. It follows marine biologist Pierre Arronax and his companions Conseil and Ned as they investigate a mysterious sea creature which is attacking and sinking ships. The creature turns out to be the Nautilus, a miraculous and hyper-advanced submarine invented and commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. The story is great, but Ben recommends you stick to adaptations as the book is “approximately 50% lists of fish Arronax sees out the window”.
  • The only major appearances of the nation of Klatch are in Sourcery and Jingo, but other nations of the Klatchian continent make major appearances in Pyramids (Djelibeybi and Ephebe), Eric (Tsort and the Tezuman Empire) and Small Gods (Omnia and Ephebe). Various others, including Howondaland, crop up in references throughout the books.
  • The Crown is a 2016 Netflix series chronicling the history of Queen Elizabeth II of England, beginning with her marriage to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Each season covers a different period of her reign, and so the main characters change and are re-cast over time. Elizabeth has so far been played by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. The fourth season, coming in 2020, will bring the narrative through to the 1980s.
  • The “trousers of time” were actually first mentioned in Guards! Guards!. Inspiration for the phrase seems to have come from the 1960s radio sketch comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, which featured a parody of Doctor Who titled “Professor Prune and the Electric Time Trousers”. The band Bangers has a track named “Trousers of Time” on their album Bird, which it seems must be a Discworld reference, since the first line is “I feel like I woke up in the wrong leg / Of the trousers of time”. “Trousers of Time” are also an item available in the videogame The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; the wording may be a Pratchett reference, but it’s more directly based on a previous game in the series, Ocarina of Time.
  • The dis-organiser is an astonishingly accurate prediction of modern smartphones’ “Intelligent Assistants“, which interpret spoken commands and automate tasks. One of those is “predictive appointments”, in which they suggest appointments for your calendar based on the content of your emails and other clues.
  • “Shaddap You Face” was a single by Italian-American-Australian performer Joe Dolce. Released in 1980, the song is about a young Italian migrant living in Melbourne, and is based on the language used by Dolce’s Italian grandparents. The chorus is the character’s mother telling him to cheer up, since “things are not so bad”. It was a number one hit in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and several European countries – though not, it should be noted, in Italy.
  • The Discworld Tacticus is probably based on several Roundworld people: his name comes from two Greek military writers, Aeneas Tacticus (4th century BCE) and Aelianus Tacitus (2nd century BCE), but also likely references Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian from around the second century CE whose work is used extensively to teach Latin in schools. Tacticus’ advice on war seems more inspired by Sun Tzu, Chinese author of The Art of War from around the 6th century BCE.
  • For more on the names and genius of camels, see Pyramids.
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was famously assassinated in Sarajevo on the 28th of June, 1914. He was shot by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old assassin armed by the Black Hand, a group of Serbian nationalists (Bosnia and Herzegovina was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). This lead to hostilities between Austria and Serbia and eventually to World War I.
  • We note that while The Joye of Snackes certainly represents one kind of danger of magical knowledge passing into print, it was likely printed using engraved plates, as movable type doesn’t properly come to Ankh-Morpork until The Truth.
  • We previously tried to cast Lady Sybil in episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • Miranda Hart is an English comedian and actor best known for her BBC sitcom Miranda and medical drama Call the Midwife. You might also know her from Hyperdrive, Not Going Out and various other British film and television comedies. She’ll next be seen playing Miss Bates in a new feature film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, directed by Autumn de Wilde.

#PratchatNALC Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat7A Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, featuring guest Aimee Nichols, discussing the 1989 Discworld novel Guards! Guards!

  • The episode title is a pun on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the 2003 mystery novel by British writer Mark Haddon. The book’s title is in turn a quote from the 1892 Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze”, referring to one of Holmes’ unseen adventures.
  • Get Smart was a sitcom created by Mel Brooks in 1965, starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86. Smart and the other main characters worked for spy agency CONTROL, thwarting various ridiculous villains – especially members of the rival agency of evil spies, KAOS. Despite being highly trained in espionage and combat, Max frequently exasperated his professional and romantic partner Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) and their boss the Chief of CONTROL (Edward Platt). One of the classic sitcoms of the ’60s, it contributed many famous catchphrases to popular culture in its original run of five seasons, which ended in 1970. It’s since been repeated many times, and spawned two film sequels, The Nude Bomb (1980) and Get Smart Again (1989); a short-lived revival/sequel series in 1995; and a surprisingly good film remake in 2008 starring Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway.
  • Monty Python’s Argument Clinic sketch is…well, if you haven’t seen it, you should just watch it.
  • “Incels” are so-called “involuntary celibates” – an online community of men who believe they have been unfairly denied sex by women. Jia Tolentino’s piece “The Rage of the Incels” for The New Yorker is a good introduction, but go gently – it’s unpleasant territory.
  • “Thatcherism” is descriptive of the politics of the Conservative party of the United Kingdom, particularly under party leader and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, from 1975 to 1990. They were a marked change from the period of the “post-War consensus”, in which the two major parties broadly agreed on things like state regulation and ownership of industries. Thatcher changed all that: she and her allies believed in much more economically-motivated conservatism, Victorian-style “family values” and British nationalism. Their beliefs under her Prime Ministership have left a huge mark on politics in the UK and around the world (not least in Australia).
  • In case you’re one of the sixteen people who didn’t see James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, the Na’vi are 10-foot tall blue cat people from the planet Pandora. Like many other species on their planet, including the dragon-like Banshees, the Na’vi have a long braid-like organ on the back of their head which connects to their brain. They are able to link these to other creatures to form a neural bond which…well, it’s not really explained what it does exactly, but it seems like mind control: the animals have to be forced to do it the first time, after which they become compliant, which is gross. It’s also established that connecting braids is a significant part of how the Na’vi conduct, erm, the kind of thing that happens at Mrs Palm’s, so make of that what you will.
  • Anne McCaffrey’s beloved book series, Dragonriders of Pern, is another alien-dragons-with-riders story, but on Pern the riders form a psychic bond with their dragons at the time of hatching, and the bond goes both ways. The first of the 23 novels in the series – some written or co-written by McCaffrey’s son Tom – is Dragonflight.
  • Lord of the Flies is William Golding’s 1954 novel about a group of schoolboys who must fend for themselves on a remote island after a plane crash. They initially form a functional society but eventually fall into tribalism and a violent struggle for power, and “Piggy”, the nerd of the book – whose glasses were the boys’ primary means of lighting fires – is murdered by one of the other boys, crushed to death under a large stone. It’s considered a classic, but Ben hated it so much in high school that he wrote a limerick about it. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was such a fan that she read it multiple times and started the (now-dormant) group “I studied Lord of the Flies In High School – and loved every minute” in the heady early days of Facebook.
  • Whizzer and Chips was one of the many anthology comics magazines popular in the UK until the 1990s. Such comics were full of one or two page strips featuring a variety of recurring characters. Whizzer and Chips employed the gimmick of being two separate comics – Whizzer and Chips – published together. The characters (mostly kids) in each comic formed a gang, and there was a rivalry between the two. (Ben considered himself a Whizz-Kid, but liked most of the strips in both.) Big Comic was a similar comic magazine that reprinted strips from other smaller comics.
  • “The Trio” were the major antagonists in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, comprising long-time supporting character Jonathan, Warren who had appeared in the previous season, and new character Andrew (though actor Tom Lenk had appeared earlier in a separate role as a background vampire henchman). Each was a geek with a different area of expertise in magic or technology; they decided to join forces and take over Sunnydale. Warren was the properly evil one Liz mentions, who dominated and manipulated the other two.
  • In the Channel 4 sit-com Black Books, Dylan Moran played misanthropic drunkard Bernard Black, owner of the eponymous bookshop. In the first episode, Bernard offers the optimistic but anxious accountant Manny (Bill Bailey) a job and a place to live above the shop, but he has forgotten this by the next morning. Thankfully for comedy audiences everywhere, Bernard’s friend Fran (Tamsin Grieg) forces him to let Manny stay, giving us one of the great odd couples of modern television.
  • “To Protect and Serve” was originally the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department. Its popularity from appearing in Hollywood productions has led it to be adopted by many other police departments around the world.
  • Nobby doesn’t actually appear in the Going Postal telemovie – Aimee and Ben are remembering Nicholas Tennant, who played him in Hogfather, where Constables Nobbs and Visit appear in the toy shop where Death is playing Hogfather. He really does look perfect! (It’s not easy to find screen grabs, but we found a good one in this Czech film review.) Nicholas Tennant went on to appear in The Colour of Magic as the Librarian (both pre- and post-transformation).
  • The Dungeons & Dragons image Ben is thinking of is the cover of the original 1978 Players Handbook (they left the apostrophe out on purpose), painted by David A. Trampier, who passed away in 2014. This article at The Dice Are A Lie talks about his life and the illustration in question.
  • Rowan Atkinson played the mostly silent, oddly child-like weirdo Mr Bean on television in Mr. Bean between 1990 and 1995, and Mr. Bean: The Animated Series from 2002 to 2004 and 2015 to 2019. He also stars in the feature films Bean (1997) and Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007). Mr Bean’s adventures in renovation can be seen in the “Painting His House” clip on the official Mr Bean YouTube channel. (The feasibility of his method of painting was investigated in the Mythbusters episode “Mind Control” in 2006.)
  • Guards! Guards! is indeed the first appearance of Ankh-Morpork’s finest Arthur Daley-esque dodgy entrepreneur, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, referred to by Vimes as just “Throat”.
  • “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” is the main refrain from the song “Maria”, one of many well-known songs from the hit stage and screen musical The Sound of Music. It’s sung by a convent of Austrian nuns about the protagonist Maria, a younger wannabe nun whose frivolous ways lead them to send her away to be a governess, giving her time to decide if the convent is really where she wants to be. (Spoiler alert: it’s not.) The whole thing is based on the memoir of the real-life Maria von Trapp, The Story of the von Trapp Family Singers.
  • The origin and debunking of the “bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly” story are explained well by Australian science writer Dr Karl Kruszelnicki in this “Greatest Moments in Science” piece.
  • The Golden State Killer is a serial killer, rapist and burglar who committed the bulk of his crimes in the ’70s and ’80s. In the wake of Michelle McNamara’s true crime book I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, the case received renewed interest. The killer was finally apprehended when police used a free public ancestry website to compare an old DNA sample to the site’s catalogue, narrowing down the pool of suspects to a single lineage.
  • Aimee is correct: this is also Detritus the troll’s first appearance. Lots of good first-time cameos in this book!
  • Vimes’s “Dirty Harry moment” mirrors the monologue from the original 1971 film in which Inspector Harry Callahan tells a bank robber he’s lost track of how many bullets he’s fired, and claims his .44 Magnum is “the most powerful handgun in the world, and could blow your head clean off”. The full dialogue is on the Wikipedia page for the film. As noted in the APF, the dragon’s name, Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, ends with two “fours”, echoing the gun Callahan has in the movie. He’s a clever one that Pratchett. (“Go ahead, make my day, punk” is from Sudden Impact, the third Dirty Harry sequel after Magnum Force and The Enforcer.)
  • The reference to 1942’s Casablanca – a classic war-time romance, whatever Liz might say – comes about 30 pages earlier, when Vimes thinks “Of all the cities in all the world it could have flown into … it’s flown into mine…”. This echoes the words of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, who runs an American-style cafe in Casablanca, Morocco, just before the United States entered World War II. After his ex-girlfriend Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) appears in his cafe with her husband, a Czech resistance leader wanted by the Nazis, Rick says: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
  • Liz’s suggestion for a new Sunshine Sanctuary references the 2001 comedy film Zoolander, in which “really, really good looking” but not very smart supermodel Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) wants to create the “Derek Zoolander Centre for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too”. He’s later shown a model of the proposed school, which he rejects; you can watch that scene here.
  • Best in Show (2001) was the second of Christopher Guest’s largely improvised mockumentary films, following Waiting for Guffman. It features Guest, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch and many of Guest’s other frequent collaborators as the administrators and competitors in a dog show in Philadelphia.
  • Danny the Pekingese – or more formally, “Yakee A Dangerous Liaison” – was the “Best in Show” winner at the 2003 Crufts, the most prestigious dog show in the UK. He was also featured in the BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed, produced by Passionate Productions, which investigated the health and care issues faces by pedigree animals, and highlighted the possibility of him overheating as one of many issues faces by his breed.
  • Pugs are believed to have been bred in China, and first introduced into Europe in the 16th century. Thanks to a few famous personages of the day having their portraits painted with their pugs you can indeed see how different they looked back then; a good example is the self-portrait of artist William Hogarth and his pug, Trump. (Trump appears in many of Hogarth’s paintings, and has his own Wikipedia article.)
  • Sorry Ben, but a “slug horn” is not a real thing. While Professor Horace Slughorn is the replacement Potions Master coaxed out of retirement and back to Hogwarts by Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when he refers to a “slug horn” Pratchett is referencing Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which features the lines “I saw them and I knew them all. And yet / Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set”.
  • Aliens from the same species as E.T., the alien protagonist of the Spielberg film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, appear in the galactic senate in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. This was to fulfil a promise Lucas made to Spielberg after Star Wars toys, including a child wearing a Halloween Yoda mask, were featured in E.T.
  • Torchwood: Children of Earth was a special five-day television event in which the members of the alien-hunting Torchwood Institute – an adult and previously very camp spin-off from Doctor Who – were plunged into a serious battle with factions of their own government over the response to alien invaders. It’s by far the best season of the show and completely different in tone, so you could probably get away with watching it in isolation if you’re prepared to do a little googling about the main characters’ backstories.
  • Sergeant Colon’s chant echoes the classic unionist refrain “The workers, united, will never be defeated”, which may have been inspired by “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”, a piano composition by American composer Frederic Rzewski, which itself was based on songs sung by the people of Chile in the early days of their struggle against the oppressive regime of Augusto Pinochet.
  • In Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element, Leeloo is a newly-created adult human, made by aliens as an “ultimate weapon” in the fight against ultimate evil – but she has no knowledge of humanity, and learning of their history of violence nearly causes her to give in in despair. (She’s also a prominent example of the “born sexy yesterday” stereotype.)
  • Rape Culture is a term that has been around since the ’70s to describe the normalisation of behaviours that both blame victims and downplay the severity of sexual assault. It’s impossible to explain succinctly, and many good articles have been written on the topic, including this one on the Huffington Post and this from Vox. It is worth mentioning, especially given the context of us including this in the show notes, many of the articles we went through while looking for resources specifically frame it in the context of women in relationship to men – e.g. “A Primer For Fathers”. Well intentioned, yes, but still a shame that a personal connection is seen as necessary in order to start viewing women as people.
  • We were going to explain Liz’s Orient Express reference, but it gives away the ending to a murder mystery, so we’re going to go without spoilers. You can read or watch Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express to find out!
  • Kanban is a scheduling system originally designed for manufacturing, invented for Toyota in Japan in the 1940s. Today it’s mostly used for “agile” or “just-in-time” development of software – terms we hope you never need to understand, so we won’t attempt to describe them. Kanban isn’t generally used for plotting novels, but if you look it up and try, let us know how you go!
  • Scrivener is writing software for complex long works, sometimes used by screenwriters and often by PhD candidates. Ben’s limited experience with it has taught him an important lesson he wishes to pass on: do not use it in conjunction with Dropbox, because the two do not play well together.
  • Anoia, “Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers”, is a deity mentioned in the later Discworld novels Going Postal, Making Money and Wintersmith, as well as The Compleat Ankh-Morpork.
  • Maid Marian and Her Merry Men is, as you might guess from the title, a non-traditional retelling of the legend of Robin Hood created by Tony Robinson in which Marian is the real hero. Robin is a cowardly tailor from Kensington who accidentally ends up the public face of Marian’s “vicious band of freedom fighters”, which also features Barrington the Rasta (played by Red Dwarf’s Danny John-Jules), the not-at-all-ironically named Little Ron, and enormous dimwit Rabies. It ran for four series between 1989 and 1994.
  • Tony Robinson’s storytelling series were Tales from Fat Tulip’s Garden and its sequel Fat Tulip Too, Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All (which covered The Iliad and The Odyssey) and Blood and Honey (covering a variety of stories from the Old Testament). His Pratchett audio books – which include every Discworld novel, as well as the Bromeliad trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books, The Carpet People, Dodger and, well, most of them – are all abridged versions.
  • The unabridged Discworld audiobooks were originally read by Nigel Planer (of The Young Ones fame) until long-time Pratchett collaborator Stephen Briggs took over from The Fifth Elephant. Briggs also read Eric (which hadn’t been part of Planer’s earlier series), while the unabridged Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters are read by actor Celia Imrie, best known for her comedy work with Victoria Wood and for roles in Bridget Jones’ Diary, Calendar Girls and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Unabridged versions of non-Discworld Pratchetts are often read by Briggs, but some have had other narrators, like the Johnny Maxwell series read by Richard Mitchley, and The Long Earth books read by Michael Fenton Stevens.

 

#Pratchat24 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“, discussing the nineteenth Discworld book Feet of Clay with guest weather presenter, meteorologist and science communicator Nate Byrne.

  • The gig at which Liz and Nate met was Sci Fight, a comedy science debate created and hosted by Ben’s sometime comedy partner Alanta Colley. At the time of writing, the next debate, “Nature Knows Best”, is on October 17 at Howler bar in Brunswick – featuring our own Ben McKenzie!
  • The Discworld videogame was released by Perfect Entertainment in 1995, and if we can find a way to play it, we’ll cover it for the podcast! It was written by Paul Kidd and designer Gregg Barnett, with the main plot drawn from Guards! Guards! but substituting Rincewind as the protagonist and adding in ideas from other books, especially The Colour of Magic. As well as Eric Idle as Rincewind, the voice cast includes Tony Robinson, Nigel Planer, Rob Brydon (The Trip), Robert Llewellyn (Red Dwarf), Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who) and – playing all of the notably few significant female characters – Kate Robbins (Spitting Image). Discworld was followed by two more games: 1996’s Discworld II: Missing Presumed…?!, with a plot written by Barnett and mostly based on a mash-up of Reaper Man and Moving Pictures, again with Rincewind as the protagonist; and Discworld Noir in 1999, an original story about Lewton, an ex-watchman and the Disc’s first private investigator, written by Chris Bateman in consultation with Terry himself. While none of the games are considered canonical, Discworld Noir is set not long after Feet of Clay.
  • We’d like to note that the language used in the blurb around suicide isn’t recommended; use of the verb “commit” implies criminal wrongdoing and further stigmatises those suffering from mental health problems. These days the recommended language is to say “died by suicide”, which acknowledges that such a death is caused by mental illness and other factors, rather than blaming the deceased.
  • There’s no good source for the origins of the name “Tubulcek“, but the golem’s names are definitely all based on Yiddish; see the further show note towards the end.
  • The golem myth Ben is remembering is actually about how to kill a golem. In some stories the golem has a word written on its forehead; one example is the word אמת (emet), which means truth. If the golem got out of control, erasing the letter aleph at the end of the word transformed it into מת (met), which means “dead”.
  • The 99% Invisible episode Ben and Nate refer to is episode 368: All Rings Considered (an almost Liz-worthy pun). It documents the rise and fall of customisable ringtones for mobile phones. The particular story they’re talking about is right at the end.
  • Dwarves as a plural for dwarf was popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien in his fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but is still not as popular as dwarfs. Its not as straightforward as that, though, as the conventions of Old English and its Germanic influences also play a part; episode 95 of The Allusionist podcast, “Verisimilitude”, describes some of the considerations involved when trying to invent a fictional language that sounds real, including some thoughts on English plurals.
  • Wildlife Wonderland was a minor tourist attraction and wildlife park in Gippsland, Victoria, which closed in 2012, leaving behind the abandoned “Giant Earthworm Museum” – a building in the shape of, and dedicated to, the Gippsland giant earthworm – and “Rosie”, a Great White Shark preserved in a glass and steel tank filled with formaldehyde. The podcast Abandoned Carousel has an episode all about Rosie.
  • Arsenic was originally popular as a poison because it’s very potent, easy to get ahold of – it was used in just about everything during the 19th century – and there was no way to detect its presence until the invention of “the Marsh test” in the 1830s. It remained popular in fiction for all of these reasons, and also because it causes really gruesome deaths.
  • Mr Pump is a golem who works for the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, and a major character in Going Postal. The fate of golems post-Feet of Clay is most significantly discussed in that same novel.
  • The 1920 play R.U.R. – “Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti“, or “Rossum’s Universal Robots” – was written by Czech playwright and author Karel Čapek. It imagines a future in the year 2000 where “roboti” – synthetic people made of flesh, closer to Blade Runner style replicants than mechanical robots – have replaced humans as a labour force, but rebel against the conditions under which they are forced to work. The play was a hit and was widely restaged and adapted, introducing the word “robot” in its modern sense into English. It comes from the Czech word “robota“, which referred to peasant forced labourers under the old Czech feudal system.
  • The “Galaxy Brain” or “Expanding Brain” meme is a series of illustrations of the human brain in order of increasing brain activity, culminating in one with energy streaming out of it. The images are paired with text of ideas that are humorously suggested to be increasingly sophisticated or intelligent. It first appeared in 2017, and you can find examples at knowyourmeme.com.
  • The dream of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, appears in the Bible in chapter 2 of the Book of Daniel, specifically verses 31-33, and 41-43.
  • Asimov is our resident “Pratcat”, who has his own Instagram account and was a guest in our recent episode about Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book, The Unadulterated Cat. Isaac Asimov is a famous science fiction author who created the “Laws of Robotics“, three rules used to govern the behaviour of all artificially intelligent robots in his books.
  • Orlando Bloom’s Dad – or, more accurately, his Pirates of the Carribbean character Will Turner’s Dad, Bootstrap Bill – was a member of the pirate captain Jack Sparrow’s crew when they stole cursed gold and forced to suffer a living death. In the first film, it’s revealed that Bootstrap Bill was the only one to defend Sparrow when his first mate Barbossa marooned him on the island from which they stole the gold, and was thrown overboard. As Liz predicted, this didn’t kill him, and in the second film we discover he is now one of the cursed souls who serve aboard the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, under captain Squidfac- er, Davy Jones.
  • Tallow is rendered animal fat, usually from cows or sheep. It was once widely used in the production of candles, explaining why Arthur Carry’s candle factory is in the slaughterhouse district. Modern candles are predominantly made from paraffin wax, a petroleum product.
  • Otto von Chriek is the vampire iconographer for Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, The Ankh-Morpork Times. We’ll meet him for the first time in The Truth.
  • The Kentucky Fried Chattin’ podcast no longer has its own web site, but you can find it in your podcast directory of choice, or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. It’s hosted by Melbourne comedians Bec Petraitis, Peter Jones, and Xavier Michelides.
  • It is established later, in the Tiffany Aching books, that Wee Mad Arthur is indeed a Pictsie who has been raised as a gnome. Whether his accent is intended as Geordie or Scots is still up in the air.
  • Hornets are larger than wasps, and build large, enclosed paper nests, usually suspended from trees. They are very aggressive, but don’t come into contact with humans as often because they prey primarily on other insects, and aren’t attracted to sugars like wasps.
  • Titus Andromedon is the roommate of Kimmy Schmidt in the Netflix sit-com The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which we previously discussed in our bonus live episode, “A Troll New World“.
  • Modern casters (or caster wheels) were first patented in the US in 1876, making wheeled chairs a 19th century invention – so not entirely out of the realm of semi-industrial Ankh-Morpork.
  • “It is a good day to die” is a common battle cry of Star Trek’s Klingons, a culture of ferocious warriors with a code of honour that glorifies violence. It is most famously said by Worf, one of the protagonists of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is set at a time when the Klingons have made peace with the United Federation of Planets.
  • Red dwarfs are indeed among the smallest and coolest stars, but Ben is incorrect about this being part of their life cycle – red dwarfs actually have very long lifespans, and might actually still be burning when the Universe collapses!
  • The Dungeons & Dragons clay golem is listed in the free basic rules for the current 5th edition; you can find it online at D&D Beyond.
  • Golem stories come mostly from Jewish folklore, with connections to the Jewish, Christian and Greek stories of the first humans being fashioned by gods from earth or clay. The classic golem narrative is the Golem of Prague, created by 16th century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel to protect his ghetto from an anti-Jewish pogrom. He was forced to kill it and the pieces of its body were supposedly kept in the Prague synagogue, to be brought back to life if needed again.
  • The golem names, in this book at least, are based on Yiddish. “Meshugga” is meshuga, which means “senseless” or “crazy”. “Dorfl” is a clever one, as it seems to be a mashup of the Austrian word for a town, “dorf“, and the German diminutive, “-l”, and is a play on the term Jewish folks in Austria used for their communities, “stetl“. Thanks to listener Felix who tipped us off about this, and also for pointing out that Dorfl’s name is particularly appropriate for a policeman!
  • For more info about the crowdfunding campaign for Night Terrace season three, visit nightterrace.com.