Discworld

#Pratchat83 Notes and Errata

Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

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

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

#PratchatNA7 Notes and Errata

Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for our bonus live episode “A Troll New World” featuring guest Tansy Rayner Roberts, discussing the 1991 Discworld short story Troll Bridge.

  • Troll Bridge was first published in the 1991 anthology After the King: Stories In Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, the most recent edition of which was released in 2012. Other authors in the collection include Stephen R. Donaldson, Jane Yolen, Gregory Benford, Emma Bull, Poul and Karen Anderson, Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove, Karen Haber and Charles de Lint, among others. The story was reprinted in 2001’s The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (which also features stories by Neil Gaiman and Terry Jones) and A Blink of the Screen, the 2012 collection of Pterry’s short fiction.
  • For those of you listening in the future: a great accompaniment to this episode is the February 15, 2022 episode of LeVar Burton Reads, a podcast in which Star Trek: The Next Generation star LeVar Burton reads a piece of short fiction. In this episode, he reads “Troll Bridge” – and gives a lovely short introduction to Terry’s work, and the Discworld itself. If you’re confused as to why Burton would be doing this, before his run on Star Trek, Burton – at the time known for his role in the television series Roots – was the presenter and executive producer of the children’s story reading programme Reading Rainbow on PBS. Burton was the host and also read some of the picture books featured, but it also featured a raft of different celebrities and actors doing the reading. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton was better known to US audiences than Patrick Stewart! It had a long run from 1983 through to 2006; in 2012, a Reading Rainbow iPad app created by Burton’s company RRKIDZ became the most-downloaded app in the App Store. In 2014, Burton launched a massively successful Kickstarter campaign to expand the reach of the app to Android and the web, but a legal dispute with WNED, the PBS station that owned the Reading Rainbow brand and had licensed it to Burton, ended with him no longer being able to use the name. Burton launched his weekly podcast – for which he primarily reads adult fiction – in 2017.
  • The short film Troll Bridge by Snowgum Films was adapted for the screen and directed by Daniel Knight, and stars Don Bridges as Cohen, Glenn van Oosterom as the horse and John Jenkins as Mica. It was a mammoth undertaking, especially considering it’s a fan film, albeit an extremely polished one: the cast and crew all worked without pay, with production costs paid for by a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It’s currently screening in film festivals and fan conventions around the world, but you can still pre-order a digital, DVD or Blu-Ray version ahead of its release in November. Head to www.trollbridge.film to see the trailer and find out more.
  • 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. (We’re not so fussed about the sequels, though.) We’ve mentioned it in passing in the show notes before, in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat19. The character Liz describes is, coincidentally, named Captain Winston Havelock, and is played by the late Welsh character actor Bernard Fox. Depending on when you started watching television, you might remember him as the witch-doctor Dr. Bombay on the sitcom Bewitched.
  • English actor Jude Law famously took on the role of Albus Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, playing a younger version of the character originated on film by Richard Harris and Michael Gambon. He also plays Lenny Belardo, a young Archbishop of New York who becomes the first American Pope of the Catholic Church, in The Young Pope and its upcoming sequel The New Pope.
  • It was announced in early April 2019 that a prequel to the hit 1978 musical Grease was in development at Paramount Pictures, with a script to be written by John August (best known for his work with Tim Burton, as well as his podcast Scriptnotes). Provisionally titled Summer Lovin’, it will supposedly explore the fling that Sandy and Danny had, though as Tansy mentions, we really already know everything we need to thanks to the song “Summer Nights”. We previously mentioned Grease in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • The Clacks are a system of sophisticated semaphore-like signalling towers which allow the transmission of information very quickly across the Sto Plains to and from Ankh-Morpork. They’re first mentioned in The Fifth Elephant, play a prominent role in Going Postal, and are also important to the plot in Monstrous Regiment and Raising Steam.
  • The Silmarillion is a collection of five works originally pitched by Tolkien as a sequel to The Hobbit, but they were rejected by his publisher as being too obscure. Heavily influenced by Celtic mythology, they tell the story of the creation of the world in which his other books are set, including Middle-Earth, and of the conflicts between its various deities, and form a backstory which explains the history that led to The Lord of the Rings. It was published after his death, compiled from incomplete writings by his son, Christopher.
  • Technically Troll Bridge is the first time we meet a troll under a bridge on the Discworld, as it was published a year before Lords and Ladies, but it’s likely they were both being written around the same time.
  • You can hear all about Good Omens (the book at least) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Xena of Amphipolis, played by New Zealand legend Lucy Lawless, is the protagonist of Xena: Warrior Princess, the hugely popular fantasy adventure series filmed in New Zealand which began life as a spin-off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Xena starts out as a ruthless warlord encountered by Hercules, but he convinces her to walk a more righteous path. In the series, which ran for six seasons from 1995 to 2001, Xena roams the world of Ancient Greece trying to help people, accompanied by Gabrielle, the Battling Bard of Poteidaia. In the opening episode of season three, “The Furies“, Xena claims that she is the daughter of Ares, god of war, a frequent antagonist (and a great visual for Greebo, as discussed in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“). While Xena indicates this was a lie to fool the Furies, it’s left ambiguous, so she could be a demi-god…but most of us prefer to think of her as an exceptionally skilled mortal warrior.
  • We explained the Star Wars concept of “midi-chlorians” in the show notes for #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, which was recorded the night before this live show. In brief: they’re an explanation for why some people can use the Force and some can’t. It didn’t please fans, who didn’t feel the need for such a pseudo-scientific explanation when it was introduced in the 1999 prequel film The Phantom Menace. They’ve rarely been mentioned since.
  • The trailer in question is the first full teaser for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last of the sequel trilogy and the final film in the Skywalker saga, to be released in December 2019.
  • The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a Netflix sitcom created by Tina Fey. The titular Kimmy is a young woman who moves to New York to make a new life after spending 15 years in an underground bunker kidnapped by a cult leader. She ends up living in a tiny basement apartment in Queens with struggling musical performer Titus Andromedon. In the season four episode “Kimmy and the Beest!”, Titus gets a gig directing a school musical and takes it all way too seriously.
  • There is some evidence that “trolling” was a fishing term for dragging bait to attract fish, distinct from “trawling”, or dragging a net. That certainly could be the origin of the “Internet troll”, but there are other competing theories too. It probably dates back to the late 1980s, but it’s first documented use is from 1992 on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, where it was more gently used to “troll for newbies” – posting well-debunked stories that existing posters would know were false, but to which new users would respond.
  • In February 2013 – so a little more than five years ago, Liz – authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in frozen IKEA meatballs manufactured by IKEA’s main supplier in Sweden. IKEA temporarily stopped all sale of meatballs across Europe. This was part of a wider scandal that year in which it was revealed that many food supply companies in Europe had substituted cheaper meats like horse and pork for beef to increase their profit margins, with as much as 1% of beef products in Britain containing some horse DNA.
  • Guest Sarah Pearson revealed the existence of Library Captains in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • Dr Dan Golding discussed Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Asimov, resident Pratcat, can be heard in the afore-mentioned episode 10 and also #Pratchat18, episode 18.
  • We discussed Small Gods with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • We discussed Lords and Ladies with Nadia Bailey in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • Each Nullus Anxietas convention has a theme, and the theme for NA7 was Going Postal – hence Liz’s comment that she may have been playing to the audience by favouring the book. The next convention, to be held in Sydney in July 2021, has the theme “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousande Surprises”. We hope to see you there!
  • We discussed The Colour of Magic with Joel Martin in episode 14.
  • Lucy Lawless has indeed been filming a new television show in Melbourne: a new “comedy drama” titled My Life is Murder, starring Lawless as private investigator Alexa Crowe. It’ll screen on Network Ten in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand and Acorn TV in the US in mid-2019.
  • Zoë Bell is a New Zealand stuntwoman and actress. Aside from working on Xena: Warrior Princess, she has also been stunt double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok. Her acting work includes the film Death Proof and the videogame Fallout: New Vegas. Liz’s interview with Zoë was printed in Metro magazine (and is not available online).
  • You can find out more about Night Terrace at nightterrace.com.
  • Cary Elwes is most famous for playing Westley, aka the Man in Black, in The Princess Bride, but is also beloved for his portrayal of the lead character in Mel Brooks’ spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You might also know him as Dr Lawrence Gordon in the horror film Saw and its sequel Saw 3D, and he’s joined the cast of Stranger Things for its third season on Netflix.

#Pratchat83 – This Time for Ankh-Morpork

2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat82 – Clack Go the Gears

Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat38 Notes and Errata

Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat38 – Moisten to Steal

Leave a Comment

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

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:24:42 — 66.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

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

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

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

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

#EeekClub2023 Notes and Errata

Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat80 – Always Believe in Your Golems

2 Comments

Inequality reporter Stephanie Convery returns on a trip with Liz and Ben into the world of banking, high finance and monetary theory in Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money.

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is running very smoothly – which has left Moist von Lipwig, reformed con-man and Postmaster General, at a loose end. But he resists the Patrician’s offer of a new job revitalising the Royal Mint and Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. The bank’s current owner is a Mark 1 Feisty Old Lady who knows her rich family are out to get her – and her little dog, too. But despite Moist’s best attempts to not get involved, both dog and bank wind up in his care – putting him in the sights of the Lavish family, and especially Vetinari-obsessed Cosmo Lavish. Meanwhile, manager of the Golem Trust (and Moist’s fiancée) Adora Belle Dearheart is digging up something ancient out on the desert. And Moist’s past is about to catch up with him…

Just a few novels after debuting in Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig is back! Making Money is about the nature of money, but also about the thrill of the chase, grappling with one’s inner nature, and obsession. Aside from Gladys the Golem, Moist and Adora Belle bring few of their previous supporting cast along for the ride; instead we meet a new cast including Mr Bent, the Lavishes, another Igor, the Post-Mortem Communications Department of Unseen University, and the very good boy Mr Fusspot.

Does this live up to the promise of Going Postal? Could Moist be in other Discworld books in disguise – and if so, as who? Did you guess Mr Bent’s secret? And if you had a Glooper, what would you use it to change in the world of money? No purchase necessary to join the conversation for this episode; just email us or use the hashtag #Pratchat80 on social media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:39:14 — 73.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Stephanie Convery (she/her) is is a writer and author. Previously the Deputy Culture Editor for The Guardian Australia, she’s now their dedicated inequality reporter. Stephanie’s first book, After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, was published in March 2020 by Penguin Books. (We suspect it won’t be her last.) You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @gingerandhoney, and find her work at Guardian Australia. Her previous appearances on Pratchat were for #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry” (about Mort), and #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press, and Every -ing” (about The Truth).

You’ll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next episode we’re continuing our Moist streak (sorry) with the (so far) latest Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us by mid-October 2024 by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat79A – Cover Stamps

Leave a Comment

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:16 — 7.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

Ben mentions these favourite covers:

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

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

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

#Pratchat79 Notes and Errata

Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 79, “Unalive from Überwald”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2002 short story “Death and What Comes Next”, with returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts and new guest Karen J Carlisle.

Iconographic Evidence

If you also took photos of us at the convention, please get in touch – we’d love to see them and add a few here!

You can also find photos of the convention at the official website.

A photo of Ben and Liz, in costume as Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig, attempting to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo.
Ben and Liz attempted to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo, with costume and iconographic assistance from Danny Sag.
A photo of a small piece of white paper on a green surface. Handwriting in black pen reads: “dead and not dead” Schrödinger’s cat What if the cat is Greebo? Next to the writing is drawn a small cartoon cat with prominent whiskers and an eye patch.
The audience question with the very cute illustration of Greebo!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme for Nullus Anxietas IX, “Come Alive in Überwald”, but since we were talking mostly about Death, “Live from Überwald” didn’t seem quite right.
  • Nullus Anxietas IX is, as you probably know, the ninth bi-annual Australian Discworld convention. As mentioned at the end of the episode, the next convention will be in Sydney in 2026, and you can already get a supporting membership for the next convention. For details, plus information on past conventions and Discworld fan clubs across Australia, head to ausdwcon.org.
  • Our previous live shows are:
  • Liz mentions two of her short stories:
    • The story about women turning into cleaning equipment is “Call Him Al”. You can read it in Meanjin, where it was published in 2020.
    • The story about an immigrant splitting into two people is “One’s Company”, originally published in the anthology Best Australian Stories 2017. It was published online at InterSastra in an Indonesian translation (“Cukup Sendiri”) by Nicolaus Gogor Seta Dewa; the original English version is also available there.
  • “Pantsers and Plotters” are widespread terms for “the two types” of writers, embraced to varying degrees by writing communities and individuals. The classification is based on whether a writer works out a plot in advance (a plotter), or writes by the seat of their pants (a pantser), making it up as they go along. It’s not entirely clear where these terms originated, but these days some writers refer to themselves as “plantsers” (a combination of the two), and other terms exist for roughly the same ideas. For example, in 2011 George R. R. Martin used the terms architect (similar to a plotter) and gardener (a variation on pantser in which the emphasis is on the weeding, i.e. editing).
  • Tansy’s stories that get mentioned include:
    • Musketeer Space, the gender-swapped Three Musketeers in space;
    • Teacup Magic, the Regency-inspired fantasy mystery series (we’ve linked to the collection);
    • We don’t think Tansy has written “Beauty and the Beast with cyborgs”, but she has written Curse of Bronze, a novella which riffs on Beauty and the Beast. It’s available for free as an ebook via BookFunnel (you’ll need to sign up to Tansy’s mailing list), or in audio form on her podcast Sheep Might Fly.
  • More notes coming soon.

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