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#Pratchat39 Notes and Errata

08/01/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“, featuring guest Marc Burrows, discussing the third Discworld short story, 1998’s The Sea and Little Fishes.

  • The episode title was inspired by the fete or fair-like atmosphere of the Witch Trial, and by UK singer David Essex’s album, song (and jukebox musical) “All the Fun of the Fair”.
  • The Sea and Little Fishes was first published in a promotional “sampler” alongside the The Wood Boy by Raymond E. Feist. Both then appeared in the novella collection Legends, along with other new work by the likes of Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R. R. Martin and Anne McCaffery. At just over 13,500 words, it’s maybe a little short for a novella, but very long for a short story.
  • For more information on the Wurundjeri people, visit the web site of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation.
  • The two-part television adaptation Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was made by British production company The Mob, and first broadcast on Sky1 in the UK on the 17th and 18th of December, 2006. We talked about it and the other Pratchett adaptations to date in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“. We discussed the novel Hogfather back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
  • On the subject of swears appearing early on in the books mentioned, Rincewind tells Bravd the Hublander to “bugger off” in The Colour of Magic. “Shit” appears four times in Guards! Guards!, but we couldn’t find any swears in the first ten pages or so; Marc might have been thinking about another book.
  • Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English radio and television writer and novelist, best known for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which…well you know. We’ll probably talk about it more detail another time.
  • Robert Rankin is another British author of comic fantasy whose books are loosely connected by the (fictional) English village of Brentford, where many of them take place. These kicked off with his first novel, 1981’s The Antipope, part of “The Brentford Trilogy”; he is currently working on the final book of “The Final Brentford Trilogy”, which began with The Lord of the Ring Roads in 2017.
  • Here’s @terryandrob’s tweet about Marc’s book:

It isn’t an official or authorised biography, our lawyers have read it – we haven’t – and although we don’t endorse it, we do wish @20thcenturymarc all the best.

— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 31, 2020
  • If you’re a regular listener then you’re probably familiar with Liz’s history with English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). It’s previously come up in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat, The Amazing Maurice and Johnny and the Bomb. The subject of the forum’s (misplaced) ire was Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine, which revisits the tropes common to her work which we now consider harmful.
  • A quick bit of errata: Enid Blyton was born in East Dulwich, but by 1938 had moved to Beaconsfield, where Pratchett was born, and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. Terry was born in 1948 – twenty years before Blyton’s death in 1968, at the age of 71! They could have met, but it seems like the sort of thing Marc would have discovered when writing his book. The pair had a few other things in common: Blyton was also a workaholic, writing more than 700 books during her career, and also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease towards the end of her life.
  • G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his Father Brown series of mystery stories. He was born in Kensington in London, but moved to Beaconsfield in 1909, by which time he was a successful author.
  • We discussed the Valhalla Cinema Blues Brothers story back in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000) was a British singer/songwriter who is best known to many for her performance on “Fairytale of New York”, a very non-traditional Christmas song performed by The Pogues, produced by her husband of the time, Steve Lilywhite – a probable source for the criminal brothers’ surname in Hogfather? One of her many hits was 1981’s “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the lead single from her debut album Desperate Character. You can see her performing it on YouTube.
  • Pratchett’s first published story was The Hades Business, in which the Devil engages a shady marketing executive named Crucible to advertise Hell. It’s reprinted – with an author’s note full of embarrassment – in A Blink of the Screen, but first appeared in Science Fantasy volume 20, #60 in August 1963 (a few months before the debut of Doctor Who). You can find it online at the Internet Archive, where you can also find the never-republished Night Dweller in New Worlds volume 49, #156 from November 1965.
  • Theatre of Cruelty was the second Discworld short story, written in 1992 for a publisher’s magazine and later collected in The Wizards of Odd in 1996. It features Captain Vimes and Corporal Carrot of the Watch investigating the murder of a children’s entertainer.
  • The Sea and Little Fishes is presumably set before Carpe Jugulum, and as discussed about 1,000 words were cut and later repurposed as a scene in that novel. Granny’s worries about her growing power and propensity for darkness in Carpe Jugulum fit in well as a consequence of this story. Tiffany attends her first Witch Trial in her second novel, A Hat Full of Sky, which features the return of several characters from this story including Letice Earwig and the dwarf Zakzak Stronginthearm.
  • Ben’s comment “I’m too old for this shit” is referencing the line made famous by Danny Glover as aging police detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon films, beginning with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Glover has used the line in several other roles and cameo appearances as well.
  • We previously discussed whether Nanny Ogg was the more powerful witch in our Wyrd Sisters episode: #Pratchat6, “Enter Three Wytches” with Elly Squire.
  • Marc is referring to the original 1971 edition of The Carpet People, Pratchett’s first published novel, which he sold at the age of 23, though it come from much earlier writings. We covered The Dark Side of the Sun back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“. And don’t worry – we’ll get to his other pre-Discworld sci-fi novel, Strata.
  • The Country Women’s Association formed as separate chapters in Australian states in 1922, with a national body (the CWAA) formed in 1945. They’re still incredibly important in rural Australia today.
  • The witches go to the opera in Maskerade (#Pratchat23), and the theatre came to them in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4).
  • Willow’s disappointing meeting with her college’s disappointingly mundane Wiccan group, the “Daughters of Gaea”, occurs in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush”. We previously talked about this way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • The word “grok” come from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Human Valentine Michael Smith is born on Mars and raised by Martians, learning their ways, which he later tries to teach on Earth. The Martian word “grok” (invented by Heinlein) is very important in his teachings; it literally means “to drink”, but metaphorically means a deep and empathic or intuitive understanding. The term was popularised on the non-fictional planet Earth by nerds and hippies, who embraced the novel and many of its messages.
  • The weasel-word phrase “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” was made famous by the character of politician Francis Urquart, protagonist of the novel and television series House of Cards. In the original English series, he is played by Ian Richardson; when he later voiced Death in the Mob’s television adaptation of Hogfather (see above), they gave him a very similar line as an in-joke.
  • We covered the Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, Johnny and the Dead in #Pratchat34, and Johnny and the Bomb in #Pratchat37.
  • Kermit the Frog is the most famous of Jim Henson’s puppet characters, the Muppets. Performed by Henson himself until his death, he made his debut in 1955 as a lizard-like character on Henson’s first television show, Sam and Friends, though he wasn’t specifically referred to as a frog until the 1960s. He is best remembered as a reporter on Sesame Street, the host of The Muppet Show and the central character of the subsequent Muppet films, the first of which – 1979’s The Muppet Movie – tells the story of his rise to fame. The film memorably opens with him singing “The Rainbow Connection”, accompanying himself on a banjo.
  • The frog from the famous Merry Melodies cartoon was later named “Michigan J Frog“, though it is not given a name in the original cartoon, 1955’s One Froggy Evening. He was later revived as the mascot of Warner Brothers cable network in the 1990s.
  • Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She suffered burns to her face and hand in the scene where she vanishes in a ball of flame, which was achieved with real flame while she dropped through a trapdoor. She took six weeks to recuperate, but is reported to have said: “I won’t sue, because I know how this business works, and I would never work again. I will return to work on one condition – no more fire work!”
  • Marc is referring to the scene near the end of Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman), when the heroes are confronted by Gozer, herald of a supernatural “Traveller” who will take on a form chosen by one of its victims. The Ghostbusters try not to think of anything, but Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) can’t manage that, instead thinking of the least dangerous thing possible…summoning a giant killer version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a confectionary mascot.
  • Room 101 appears in George Orwell’s novel 1984 as the legendary place where a prisoner of the state will receive the ultimate torture. As government agent O’Brien explains to Winston Smith: “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” It inspired a BBC radio and television show of the same name, in which celebrity guests are asked to discuss their pet hates, trying to persuade the host to put them in Room 101 where they will never been seen again.
  • Fuck has long been considered the most versatile swearword. George Carlin has a famous routine about its many uses, which was widely copied and remixed and sent around via fax and email in the 1980s and 1990s. Fuck is also the subject of the first episode of the new Netflix series History of Swear Words, hosted by Nicholas Cage.
  • To untangle the superhero confusion: Ben referred to Liz as Ms. Marvel; while this is an older name used by Captain Marvel (aka Carol Danvers, played by Brie Larsen in the recent films), Ben meant the current Marvel superhero of that name, Kamala Khan, who has shapeshifting abilities, which she uses in her early stories to make her fists bigger while fighting bad guys. Liz mentions being married to Ioan Gruffudd, the Welsh actor, whose only superhero role was as Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic, in the 2005 film Fantastic Four; he has stretching powers that would also allow him to make his hands bigger. The character’s wife is Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, who is played in the film by Jessica Alba.
  • The song “Very Mild Superpowers” is by Irish comedian David O’Doherty; you can watch him performing it on Australian musical gameshow Spicks & Specks on YouTube. 
  • Marc’s band, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, was founded by Andy Heintz and British anarchist and occult comedian Andrew O’Neill, with whom Marc has also toured as a stand up.
  • The Manic Street Preachers, subject of the anthology book Marc is editing, are a Welsh punk and alternative rock band formed in 1986. They’ve been as famous for their “controversial” behaviour as their music, especially from former member Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995. The band’s single “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” and the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours reached number one in the UK charts in 1998.
  • English musician Marc Bolan (1947-1977) was lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex, and is credited by many as started the glam rock movement by appearing on Top of the Pops in 1971 dressed in glitter and satin. He died in a car crash in London just before his 30th birthday. (We’re gonna guess you know who David Bowie is.)
Posted in: Show Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Marc Burrows, Nanny Ogg, short story, Witches

#Pratchat39 – All the Fun of the…Fish?

08/01/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We’re kicking off the Year of the Beleaguered Badger with something a little different: an international guest, and a short story! Unofficial Pratchett biographer Marc Burrows joins us from the UK to discuss the third Discworld short story: 1998’s The Sea and Little Fishes!

Without much else but the carefully applied annoyances of Nanny Ogg to occupy her time, Granny Weatherwax is ready to win the annual Witch Trial – just as she does every year. But Lettice Earwig, self-appointed leader of a sort of witch committee, has decided this is discouraging new witches, and asks Granny not to participate. She also tells Granny to try being “nice” – and the worst part is, Granny appears to be taking her advice…

Very long for a short story, The Sea and Little Fishes delves into the relationship between two of Pratchett’s most beloved characters, and introduces people and concepts he’d later expand upon in the Tiffany Aching novels. In a sense it’s a story in which almost nothing happens, but then that’s largely the point – someone like Granny Weatherwax hardly has to do anything at all to move mountains. Where did you read it? What do you think of the title? And how long can a story be while still being considered “short”??? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat39 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/p/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_39.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:19 — 42.7MB)

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Guest Marc Burrows is a writer, musician and comic. His articles and reviews about music and culture have appeared in The Guardian and a variety of other publications, but he’s currently best known as the author of the first, unofficial Terry Pratchett biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, which you can learn all about at askmeaboutterrypratchett.com. He is also a member of the band The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, and has two upcoming non-fiction books about music. The best place to find Marc online is as @20thcenturymarc on Twitter and Instagram, and you can sign up to his newsletter “The Glom of Nit” via tinyletter.com.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We plan to cover short stories once or twice a year to help us all keep up with the schedule, in part because our original plan – to cover them as live shows – hasn’t worked out this last year. But next month it’s back to the Discworld novels, and the Watch, with The Fifth Elephant – and we’re welcoming back one of our earliest guests, Richard McKenzie! Send us your questions via email, or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat40.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – and maybe make a few more live episodes like this? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Discworld, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Marc Burrows, Nanny Ogg, short story, The Sea and Little Fishes, Witches

#Pratchat38 Notes and Errata

08/12/2020 by Ben 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.

  • The episode title plays on the phrase used to refer to envelopes you have to lick in order to seal them – “moisten to seal”.
  • Watch out for the rest of the show notes later in December. (Ben is moving house this month and has less time than usual to work on them!)
Posted in: Show Notes Tagged: Adorabelle Dearheart, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Moist von Lipwig, Mustrum Ridcully, Patrician, Sacharissa Cripslock

#Pratchat38 – Moisten to Steal

08/12/2020 by Pratchat Imps 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, the 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.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/p/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_38.mp3

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

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

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

The full show notes and errata for this episode will be added to our web site later in the month.

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 make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Adorabelle Dearheart, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Moist von Lipwig, Mustrum Ridcully, Patrician, Sacharissa Cripslock

#Pratchat36 Notes and Errata

08/10/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, featuring guest Gillian Cosgriff, discussing the twenty-third Discworld novel, 1998’s Carpe Jugulum.

  • You’ll understand the episode title when you get to about the 1 hour 45 minute mark. Ben would also like to mention his second episode title choice, “Thoroughly Modern Magpyr”, which references the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  • We discussed Maskerade with opera singer and teacher Myf Coghill back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Truth, which concerns the rise of the Fourth Estate (i.e. journalism and a free press) in Ankh-Morpork, is the twenty-fifth Discworld novel. It introduces Pratchett’s most beloved vampire character, iconographer Otto von Chriek. We expect to cover it in early 2021.
  • The performing arts (along with the arts sector in general) have been especially badly hit by the COVID-19 crisis: theatres and cinemas and other venues were the first to shut down, the sector and its businesses have received little in relief funding, independent artists often find it hard to qualify for individual support and it is much more difficult to get audiences to pay for online live performance. On top of that, theatres will likely be among the last businesses allowed to open up again, as they are considered high risk and non-essential. If you can support your local artists, please please do.
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the 2016 live theatre sequel to the Harry Potter books, set nineteen years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It features Harry and friends as adults, though the main protagonist is one of his sons, Albus. Before the worldwide shutdown of theatres there were only three productions worldwide, in London’s West End, Broadway in New York, and at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. A fourth, in Toronto Canada, was originally planned to open this month.
  • A word about the ethics of supporting J K Rowling: we won’t give any more space to her many public transphobic comments, but instead we want to make it clear that Pratchat supports the rights and respects the identities of all- (and non-) gendered folks. While boycotting Rowling’s work may seem an easy choice, a large production like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes those ethics complex. While undoubtedly you would be fuelling Rowling’s wealth and thus influence by buying a ticket, the show also provides vital ongoing employment for hundreds of workers on and behind stage – many of them trans or non-binary themselves. And of course many see – or saw – Harry Potter as a story about someone finding a community and chosen family who accept them for who they are, when their own relatives reject and abuse them, making Rowling’s comments all the more hurtful.
  • #KeepTheSecrets is the hashtag used by productions of The Cursed Child to encourage those seeing the play to avoid spoiling others, since with only three productions worldwide, opportunities to experience the story are far more scarce than for the books or films that precede it.
  • “Say no more, say no more, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat” is a line from Monty Python’s “Candid Photography” sketch, aka “Nudge Nudge”. In it, Eric Idle asks increasingly outrageous “suggestive” questions to Terry Jones in a pub. It first appeared at the end of the third episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in October 1969.
  • ATMs (aka cashpoints) in Vatican City are indeed probably the only ones in the world which offer Latin as a language option. While Vatican City’s official language is modern Italian, all visiting Catholic church officials can read Latin, so it’s an easy way to make sure everyone can use them.
  • The Igor employed by the Counts Magpyr is indeed the first we meet in the course of the Discworld novels, but far from the last. In fact we meet about thirteen actual Igors (and Igorinas), with a few more mentioned. We’ll meet several more in the next Discworld book, The Fifth Elephant.
  • The popular culture version of Igor stems from Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein, though as usual with these things it’s not that simple, since that character is named Fritz. The assistant does not appear in the book, and is borrowed from one of the early stage adaptations. Two of the later sequels had a character played by Bela Lugosi named Ygor, and by the 1950s the name and the archetype had been merged together in the popular consciousness. “Igor”, by the way, is a real name, supposedly Russian in origin and meaning “warrior”.
  • The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, was an American sci-fi drama series which originally ran for nine season on the Fox Network between 1993 and 2002. The series follows two FBI agents, believer Fox Mulder and skeptic Dana Scully, as they investigate various unexplained phenomena that are cosigned to the so-called “X-Files” of the Bureau. It alternated between weird monster-of-the-week stories and a labyrinthine ongoing plot about a complicated alien conspiracy. It was immensely popular, and spawned the films The X-Files (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), the spin-off series The Lone Gunmen, and the relayed Chris Carter series Millennium. The X-Files itself was revived for tenth and eleventh seasons in 2016 and 2018.
  • We covered The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching book and the first appearance of the clan of Mac Nac Feegle we know best, in #Pratchat33, “Meet the Feegles“. Not only do they speak differently in Carpe Jugulum, but their name is capitalised differently (“Nac mac Feegle”, not “Mac”), they wear loincloths rather than kilts, and they are depicted wearing smurf-like caps (see the next note).
  • We previously mentioned the Smurfs in our episode about Truckers, “Upscalator to Heaven” (#Pratchat9). They were created in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo – no, not Peyote, thanks autocorrect – and grew to worldwide prominence through an American animated series that ran throughout the 1980s. They are the archetypal jolly little characters with adjective-based names like “Happy Smurf”, “Brainy Smurf” and “Papa Smurf” which helpfully describe each Smurf’s personality or skills. Since the Smurfs are small, blue, magical and live in a community with 99 men and one woman, its clear that parodying them was at least part of Pratchett’s intent with the Feegles, who in this book are even depicted wearing pointed caps which droop down just as the Smurfs’ do (though the Feegle’s caps are blue, not white or red).
  • Scots is a Scottish language related to, but distinct from, both English and Scottish Gaelic. Helen Zaltzman made an excellent episode of The Allusionist podcast about its survival despite the efforts of English rule to eradicate it (episode 78, “Oot in the Open“), and another about modern efforts to introduce LGBTIAQ+ terms to the language (episode 117, “Many Ways at Once“).
  • We discussed Wyrd Sisters way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, with guest Elly Squire. We had a lot of thoughts about Magrat and Verence’s courtship.
  • Harry and Meghan are Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, sixth in line to the British Throne, and American actress Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. They have been outspoken on many issues, including Meghan’s own treatment by the press, which is hard not to see as racist when compared to the way they treat Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton. In January 2020, the couple announced they were stepping back as senior members of the royal family, a move described in scathing tones by the British press as “Megxit”, a play on Brexit.
  • Charles, Prince of Wales, usually known as Prince Charles, is the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and heir apparent to the British Throne. He has long taken an interest in various public and philanthropic subjects, most notably urban planning, architecture and the environment. But it’s not all good news; his relationship with Diana Spencer was…not great, to say the least with both having extra-marital affairs before a controversial divorce and her death in a car accident; his environmentalism has been viewed as a bit dodgy, and he’s also controversially a fan of alternative medicines – including homeopathy which, as Granny knows well, is nonsense. He is in many ways the quintessential weirdo royal who gets away with being eccentric.
  • Gentrification is the process in which more affluent (usually middle class) folks move into neighbourhood and prompt (or demand) changes which drive up rents, house prices and the general cost of living (replacing cheaper stores, cafes and restaurants with more expensive ones, for example), forcing out the poorer folk who originally lived there.
  • Giacomo Casanunda, the dwarfish parody of real-life famous lover Giacomo Casanova, appears in only three novels: Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies and the brief cameo here. He is first briefly mentioned in a footnote in Reaper Man as one of the Disc’s greatest lovers, though that early version of the joke uses the less subtle spelling “Casanunder”.
  • Ben’s comment that Magrat is “a bit of a helicopter” is in reference to a “helicopter parent“, one who constantly “hovers” near their child rather than letting them make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. It’s probably an unfair assessment, given young Esme’s age. (Incidentally, Liz revealed the surprising etymology of “helicopter” back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.)
  • The meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen, usually known as “pointing Rick Dalton” or “pointing Leonardo DiCaprio”, is an image taken from the 2019 Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In the scene DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, is watching a television show with his stunt double (Brad Pitt) in a private cinema, and points at the screen when he sees himself on screen. Read about some of its famous uses on knowyourmeme.com.
  • Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong is a blog started in 2008 by Jen from Orlando. It showcases the often terrible cakes people get from professional bakeries which don’t quite match the representative image, or when the notes on what to write in icing are read a little too literally. It’s still going strong at cakewrecks.com. Thanks to Twitter listener Ilbeon for mentioning it in this context!
  • Hollywood-style hacking has very little resemblance to the real world equivalent. You can find a list of those inaccuracies on the All the Tropes web site under “Hollywood Hacking“, though the specific version Ben references is the “Phone Trace Race“, as it used to be about tracing a phone call. You can find it in films like If you want to feel like a (Hollywood) hacker yourself, we recommend playing with hackertyper.com.
  • The “Tolerant Left” is a sarcastic term used by conservative commentators when they try to point out ways in which progressive or “leftist” politics is intolerant. It’s best known from the meme “so much for the tolerant left“, in which various spurious examples are given to show how petty and inconsequential most of the conservative complaints are. The phrase can also be used to describe the more right-leaning branches of supposedly leftist parties, like mainstream Democrats in the US or many factions within the Australian Labor Party. Their politics are actually pretty conservative on an absolute scale, while still being quite far left of their more obviously conservative opponents.
  • The “Boris Johnson approach” to COVID-19 was to resist any kind of lockdowns or restrictions on gatherings, as seen across the rest of Europe and in many other countries. Early on his government seemed to be following advice to let people to contract the virus in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, a move opposed by doctors as it would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Similar criticisms have been levelled at the United States and Sweden, though the latter is a bit of a special case from a political perspective.
  • It’s true; Liz promised/threatened to talk about vampire boners in our previous episode, “Great Balls of Physics“. Er…the title of that episode was not meant to be a pun on this.
  • Many of the weird vampire myths mentioned in the book are indeed real, as Terry himself is quoted as saying the Annotated Pratchett File: “”As an aside, very little vampiric legend and folklore in CJ is made up – even the vampire tools and watermelons are real world beliefs.” Both of those examples are from Slavic folklore. (See the later note for more about the socks thing.)
  • We’ve mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer many times, including in our discussions of Mort, Dodger, Eric, Guards! Guards!, Truckers, Diggers, Hogfather and The Last Continent. In brief it was a highly influential TV show created by Joss Whedon, based on his 1992 film, which ran from 1997 to 2003. It followed the adventures of teenager Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who tries to live a relatively normal Californian high school life while also fulfilling her destiny as the Slayer, a once-in-a-generation Chosen One granted supernatural powers to fight vampires and demons. (There’s some more about it during the listener questions section in this episode.)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade, “a roleplaying game of personal horror”, is a tabletop roleplaying game first published by White Wolf Publishing in 1991. Players take on the roles of vampires, who called themselves “kindred”, and try to survive both the urges of their darker side (“the Beast”) and the politics of modern vampire society. The “Masquerade” of the title is one of the major rules, or “Conventions”, of the Camarilla, a vampire sect who, like Count Magpyr, reject superstition and try to move with the times. The Convention of “Masquerade” is that vampires do not allow their existence to become common knowledge. The game has seen continued popularity, with (so far) five major editions and spin-offs including a TV series (Kindred: The Embraced; it was pretty terrible), several videogames, a trading card game (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle) and even a professional wrestler!
  • Yoga is a Hindu spiritual and philosophical tradition dating back around 3,000 years. It takes many forms, including hatha yoga, a physical discpline which has been adapted into the modern practice of “yoga as exercise”. Bikram Choudhury popularised his form of “hot yoga” in America (and from there throughout the Western world) as Bikram Yoga, in which participants strike various physical poses in a heated environment. It is now well-documented that Bikram abused his popularity and position of trust and authority, abusing and assaulting many students and instructors. Choudhury fled the United States in 2017 following multiple law suits and criminal charges. The five part series Bikram from the 30 For 30 podcast tells the story in a lot of detail.
  • The Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, beginning with Twilight in 2005, chronicle the love affair between clumsy teenager Bella Swan and 104-year-old telepathic vampire Edward Cullen, who is drawn to her in part because he cannot read her mind. Famously Meyer was unfamiliar with standard vampire tropes; her vampires can have (half-vampire) children, lack fangs, glitter in sunlight, and create new vampires by injecting venom. Unfortunately, Gill is wrong about the vampire boners: they are not described in any detail in the novels, as Meyer’s Mormon sensibilities led her to steer away from any detailed description of the sex that occurs in the final book, Breaking Dawn. Meyer is however happy to describe the horrifying vampire baby birth in great detail, and also tells us that Edward’s vampire super-strength leaves Bella bloody and bruised after their first night together – one of many questionable things about the novels.
  • The Southern Vampire Mysteries, also know as True Blood, are a series of thirteen novels by Charlaine Harris, beginning with 2001’s Dead Until Dark. They follow Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Louisiana, who lives in a world where vampires exist and have recently become public knowledge. She works in a bar frequented by vampires and likes hanging around them, including her 173-year-old romantic interest Bill Compton, because she can’t hear their thoughts. They were adapted into the HBO television series True Blood, which ran for seven seasons from 2008 to 2014 and starred Anna Paquin as Sookie. The TV series is named for a synthetic blood alternative, “Tru Blood”, which was developed by vampire authorities prior to their “coming out” to help in their campaign to co-exist with humans.
  • Midnight Sun, the Twilight book retelling the story from Edward’s perspective, was published in August 2020. Stephenie Meyer began writing it in 2008, and showed it to cast and crew of the Twilight films to influence their portrayal of Edward. Chapters from it were leaked in the Internet in 2011. She intends to write two more Twilight books.
  • Clementine Ford is an Australian writer, broadcaster and public speaker whose focus is feminism. As well as seven years of columns for The Age newspaper’s Daily Life and numerous articles for various online publications, she’s written two books, Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @clementine_ford.
  • Lord Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) is Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham in the TV series and subsequent film Downton Abbey, which follows the lives of his fictional aristocratic family and their servants between 1912 and 1927. Discworld fans will note that Grantham’s eldest daughter Mary is played by Michelle Dockery, who in one of her earliest screen roles portrayed Death’s granddaughter Susan in the 2006 television adaptation of Hogfather.
  • Ben cannot substantiate whether there is an official Catholic Church position on vampires and crosses. In medieval times the church attributed any evil creatures of folklore to the influence of demons, and so therefore they were warded off by the power of God, but there’s no consensus on the mechanism.
  • The film Ben is thinking of where a Star of David is used to repel a vampire is the 1979 comedy Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton as Dracula. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Rosenberg (Richard Benjamin), who is revealed to be van Helsing’s grandson, tries using a Star of David on Dracula, but as Dracula is really the protagonist of the film he brushes this off, just as he does a mirror, garlic and various other attempts to kill him. In several other films, including The Fearless Vampire Killers, vampires are presented with a cross but shrug it off because they were Jewish in life. Disturbingly, a couple of other films doing this joke have their vampire hunters go on to use Nazi symbols to repel the vampires, which is a whole new level of wrong.
  • The Doctor Who vampire story Ben mentions is 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. As well as Russian soldier Sorin’s belief in communism and the Doctor’s faith in his companions, there are two sad scenes where a character’s faith is broken and no longer works (but we won’t spoil those).
  • Hammer Film Productions Ltd, also known as Hammer Horror or Hammer’s House of Horror, is a British film company founded in 1934 who are best known for their gothic horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. They produced the first popular colour films about characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, and made international stars out of Peter Cushing (mostly as Victor Frankenstein, van Helsing and other human villains and slayers, rather than monsters) and Christopher Lee (who played Dracula for Hammer in seven films).
  • Blaskó Béla Ferenc Dezső, better known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor who rose to fame by playing the title role in Dracula on Broadway, and in the 1931 Hollywood film adaptation of the play. He was an active union member both in Hungary – leading to his persecution after the revolution of 1919 – and in Hollywood. After Dracula Lugosi became typecast in horror roles, and was frustrated as he constantly received second billing under Boris Karloff, even when he was playing the lead. He later became addicted to the morphine he took as a painkiller for extreme back pain, and by the time of his death was only offered roles by famously terrible director Ed Wood.
  • Count von Count, usually just called “The Count”, is one of Sesame Street’s longest-running muppet characters, debuting in the show’s fourth season in 1972. As per a popular bit of folklore about vampires, he loves to count things, but while he has fangs, wears evening dress and can turn into a bat, he has now shed any of his more sinister attributes – he used to be able to hypnotise people, and his laugh was more sinister, and accompanied by thunder and lightning! He was originally performed by veteran muppeteer Jerry Nelson until his death in 2012, when Matt Vogel – who had already been doing the physical pupeetering – took over The Count’s vocal performance.
  • Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the modern name for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Media portrayals often include an identity or “personality state” which is violent and dangerous, which is rarely the case in real life. In some cases it has been seen as a positive coping mechanism in the face of traumatic experiences; Dissociative Identity Awareness Day is March 5.
  • Laura Davis, award-winning Australian comedian and favourite of everyone in this episode, can be found online at lauradaviscomedy.com. Her latest album is The Bus Show, a special audio-only edition of her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe hit Better Dead Than A Coward. You can buy it and two other comedy performances via her web site.
  • Liz is referencing We Need to Talk About Kevin, a 2003 novel by American author Lionel Shriver. It is told as a series of letters written by a mother trying to come to terms with the fact that her son, Kevin, has perpetrated a school massacre. It was adapted as a film in 2011 starring Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother, Eva, and Ezra Miller as Kevin.
  • The concept of the “shame gremlin” is largely derived from American researcher Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability. She rose to international prominence when her 2010 talk for TEDxHouston went viral; it’s since been viewing over 50 million times.
  • Stealing a vampire’s sock, you’ll be glad to hear, is indeed based on a real bit of folklore, possibly from Romani tradition: they are compelled to chase their socks, so you can banish a vampire by stealing them and throwing them outside the town limits. Variations on this do seem to specify the left sock, while others say you fill them with grave dirt or rocks or garlic, and throw them into a river. This method is one of Taika Waititi’s favourites from his research for What We Do in the Shadows.
  • Liz’s euphemism for vampire testicles is a reference to The Lost Boys, a 1987 comedy vampire film directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland. It made Coreys Haim and Feldman famous for their roles as “the Frog brothers”, amateur vampire hunters, and Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Dianne West also appear! It was a very important film – and soundtrack – at the time. It did get a sequel and comic book series twenty years later, but neither made the same splash as the original.
  • “1337speak” – aka 1337, l337, leet and eleet – is a style of writing which uses alternate spellings and numbers or symbols in place of regular letters. “1337” thus translates to “leet”, short for “elite” – supposedly referring to the superior status of the hackers and videogame players who invented it on bulletin board systems in the 1980s. The symbols either look like the letters they replace, or sound like parts of the word when reading out the symbols name.
  • Derby names are the nicknames used by roller derby players. Traditionally they are puns or wordplay, often involving pop culture references and a saucy or violent twist that reflects the sport’s full-contact nature and punk- and rockabilly-inspired culture. Not unlike the faces of clowns discussed in our first episode, they can registered in various places, including rollerderbyroster.com; some examples include Heather Blocklear, Candy Crush-Her, Robin Graves and Velvet Landmine.
  • The Fates of Greek mythology, more properly known as the Moirai, are the personifications of destiny, who control the fates of mortal lives, represented by a thread. They appeared in a few different versions before settling on the best known trio: Clotho spins new threads to begin lives; Lachesis measures the threads and decides how long each life should be; and Atropos cuts the threads, choosing the manner of their death.
  • The Norns are female beings in Norse mythology, sometimes described as giants, who control fate and destiny (though this is a modern distinction; in the source many terms are used interchangeably, including valkyrie). There are many of them, but the three most important – Urð, Verðandi and Skuld – guard the Well of Urðr (or Fate), and use its waters to feed the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Like the Moirai (see above) they decided the fates of mortals, and are sometimes also depicted measuring and cutting threads.
  • In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books the wizards, or istari, appear as old men, but are in fact angelic beings called Maiar sent to Middle Earth to guide mortals. There are three main wizards: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, and Radagast the Brown. (Mustrum Ridcully is also known as Ridcully the Brown, and his love for nature – expressed through hunting it down – is a parody of Radagast.) Tolkien’s supplemental writings also briefly mention two other wizards, who wear sea-blue robes, who headed into the East of Middle-Earth; we don’t know what happened to them.
  • We briefly discussed Gill’s operatic cabaret, Lorelei, at the end of our Maskerade episode. Co-written with Julian Langdon and Casey Bennetto, with lyrics by Gill and Bennetto, it tells the story of the lorelei, three sirens on the River Rhine who are wondering if they are sick of all this luring sailors to their deaths business… It was produced by Victorian Opera at the Malthouse for a short season in November 2018, and might one day return… You can read about it at the Victorian Opera web site.
  • Frankenweenie was Tim Burton’s 1984 live-action debut, a black and white short film for Disney about Victor Frankenstein, a boy living in 1950s America who brings his beloved dog back to life. It starred Barret Oliver (best known for his starring role as Bastian in The Neverending Story) as Victor and Shelley Duvall as his mother, and deliberately echoed the 1931 film version of Frankenstein. (Ben saw it in the cinema as a boy and loved it; it’s included as an extra on some versions of The Nightmare Before Christmas.) In 2012 Burton remade it as a full-length stop-motion animated film, starring Charlie Tahan as Victor and a cast of old Burton faves including Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau.
  • “Bigger on the inside” is a Doctor Who tradition; the phrase is frequently uttered by humans who enter the Doctor’s TARDIS time machine for the first time, since on the outside it’s a 1960s London police box, but on the inside it’s a vast space. This is often subverted in the modern series; Ben’s favourite is in The Wives of River Song, when the Twelfth Doctor pretends he’s never been inside the TARDIS before and hams up his own rendition.
  • Tomb Raider is a videogame series originally published by Eidos and developed by Core Design and then Crystal Dynamics. Beginning with Tomb Raider in 1996, the series starred Lara Croft, a young English aristocrat and archaeologist who explores various secret tombs and ancient ruins looking for treasure and shooting a lot of people and animals. The series was famous for the title character and also for the puzzle-based exploration third-person gameplay, which was very different to the first-person shooters that still dominated the market at the time. After nine games, Eidos was bought by Japanese publisher Square Enix, and the series was rebooted in 2013. The new Tomb Raider featured a younger Lara in an origin story in which she is shipwrecked and forced to fight to survive against worshipper’s of the island’s god.
  • Rhianna Pratchett was lead writer for the new, more grounded Lara of the 2013 Tomb Raider. She was also the sole writer on the 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, for which she won multiple awards, including the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing. She did not work on the subsequent game, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
  • Granny’s famous “I ate’nt dead” sign doesn’t appear until her fourth novel, Lords and Ladies, as we discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • “One For Sorrow” is the final track on Australian indie rock/pop musician Megan Washington’s 2014 album, There There. The rhyme in the song’s context is counting stars, not magpies, which has precedence in folklore as well. The song is on YouTube here.
  • “Magpie” appears on The Unthanks’ 2015 album Mount the Air. You can find a great live version on YouTube from their appearance on Later… with Jools Holland.
  • We previously mentioned the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek – and the fairytale-hating Lord Farquaad – in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles” and #Pratchat33, “Cats, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The original picture book by William Steig was published in 1990.
  • The phrase “Up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen” is from the well-known poem “The Faeries”, written in 1850 by Irish poet William Allingham. The relevant verse is the most famous: “Up the airy mountain / Down the rushy glen, / We daren’t go a-hunting, / For fear of little men;”
  • Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is British director Guy Ritchie’s 1998 feature film debut. It stars an ensemble cast of crooks and gangsters whose various schemes, initially disparate, all converge in a bloody finale. We referenced it in the title of #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“.
  • There’s no sign of any Pratchett family experience with Alzheimer’s prior to his own diagnosis. In this Guardian article, reprinted after this death in 2015, he mentions that his father died of cancer but glad he had “all his marbles”.
  • Once again we advise that The Rocky Horror Show can’t really be explained; you just have to see it. The song we reference here, “Over at the Frankenstein Place”, is the third one. It also appears in the film version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • In Suzanne Collins’ novel series The Hunger Games, the future dystopian North American state called Panem is divided into twelve Districts. As a reminder of the failure of a previous uprising against the Capitol, the Districts are forced to select one boy and one girl via lottery each year to participate in the Hunger Games, where they are forced to fight and kill each other until only one remains.
  • Home Alone is a 1990 John Hughes comedy film, directed by Chris Columbus, in which eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is accidentally left behind when his family go on Christmas holiday to Paris. When a pair of burglars try to rob the house, he sets up traps using items from around the house to defend himself, many of which would be deadly outside of the cartoon logic of Hollywood.
  • The Princess Bride is a 1987 adventure comedy film, written by William Goldman and based on his 1973 comic novel of the same name. Without spoiling too much, a key plot point/gag at one point is that one of the protagonists is diagnosed as being only “mostly dead”, allowing him to be revived, but in a severely weakened state.
  • The Scorpion King (2002) was a spin-off prequel film about The Rock’s antagonist character from The Mummy Returns (2001), the not-nearly-as-good sequel to The Mummy (1999). Amazingly The Scorpion King had no fewer than four direct-to-video sequels, the most recent in 2018. None of them star The Rock as he was too busy being awesome.
  • It’s true: the Rock tore his gate off to get to work. On September 19, wrestler turned action movie star and all-round superhero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted on his Instagram that a power outage had prevented the gates opening at his estate. Not wanting to wait 45 minutes for the repair company and be late to set, he tore the gate off its hinges. And yes this is all after he and his family have had and recovered from COVID-19. The film in question is Red Notice, an action comedy also starring Gal Godot and Ryan Reynolds. Incidentally, The Rock now has more Instagram followers than anyone in the world, knocking Kylie Jenner from the top spot.
  • The Neville we’re referring to in “a very Neville moment” is Neville Longbottom, a minor supporting character in the Harry Potter books and films. Neville became a fan favourite thanks to the double success of stepping up to win a key victory in the last book, and also dorky child star Matthew Lewis – who plays him in the films – growing up to be a total babe by the time of the last one.
  • Australian Magpies are not closely related to their European and Asian namesakes. The various species of Eurasian magpies are corvids, related to crows, rooks and ravens, and among the smartest birds in the world. Australian magpies (locally nicknamed “maggies”, “swoopy bois” or a variety of curse words) and their cousins in New Guinea are passerines, or songbirds, the largest and most diverse Order of birds. They are found throughout most of Australia in nine subspecies, have a distinctive warbling song, are quite intelligent, and very social – but also very territorial, and famously aggressive in Spring.
  • Australian children are taught many anti-magpie techniques, not all of which are effective. This magpie video from the Australian Academy of Science is a great explainer for what to do to stay safe in swooping season. You can also find many videos online of folks on bikes being repeatedly swooped, and while completing these show notes, there was news of a magpie pecking the eyes of an elderly man in Pratchat’s home state of Victoria. Thankfully he’s expected to recover his sight after emergency surgery, and such extreme aggressiveness is more rare.
  • The Duchess is a new Netflix sitcom created by and starring Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan. Set in London, Ryan plays a single mother and “terrible person” who is considering having a second child. Of note, the show also features Sydney comedian Steen Raskopoulos in a major supporting role!
  • “White feminism” refers to mainstream feminist activism, which has historically centred around the concerns of middle-class, educated white women while ignoring the plight of other women. The most obvious example of this is that in Western countries, the dates celebrated for achieving women’s suffrage usually only secured voting rights for white women, while black women, indigenous women and women of colour were still unable to vote. Modern feminist movements strive to be intersectional – considering all forms of social injustice as connected, and thus to be resisted together.
  • The idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are responsible for logic and creativity, respectively, is still popular in culture. As is usual in science, it’s not that simple. The original idea was based on experiments done with patients who, as a treatment for severe epilepsy, had the connection between the sides of their brain – the corpus colosum – severed. But observation of activity in intact brains has given us a very different idea about brain function. While there are certainly some functions that to reside predominantly in one hemisphere of the brain, such as language, both hemispheres seem to play at least some part in most complex tasks. It is true, though, that the right hemisphere controls movement in the left side of the body, and vice versa.
  • The Downton Abbey cast includes Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham; Elizabeth McGovern as his American wife Cora; Michelle Dockery as his eldest daughter Mary; Laura Carmichael as his younger daughter Edith; and Dan Stevens as Matthew, a distant cousin.
  • Australian comedian Luke McGregor is probably best known for his television work with Celia Pacquola. The two appeared as civil servants in two seasons of the ABC political satire Utopia before creating their own show, Rosehaven. McGregor plays Daniel, a young man who returns to his (fictional) their Tasmanian hometown of Rosehaven to help his ailing mother run her real estate business, where he is reunited with his childhood friend Emma (Pacquola), who has fled her marriage during her honeymoon.
  • We discussed The Dark Side of the Sun with Will Kostakis back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
Posted in: Show Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Carpe Jugulum, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Gillian Cosgriff, Granny Weatherwax, Igor, Lancre, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Uberwald, vampires, Witches

#Pratchat36 – Home Alone, But Vampires

08/10/2020 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

Star of the stage Gillian Cosgriff joins Liz and Ben to cower in fear before that most horrifying of beasts: the magpie! Yes, it’s time for the twenty-third Discworld novel, 1998’s Carpe Jugulum.

The new princess of Lancre has been officially named! But all has not gone well: new priest Mightily Oats took Queen Magrat’s notes on the naming a little too literally. King Verence has been a little too liberal with which nobility he invited. And most worryingly of all, Granny Weatherwax – supposed to be the baby’s godmother – is nowhere to be found. As the forward-looking Count de Magpyr and his family effortlessly dominate the wills of all about them (with the notable exception of two-minded Agnes Nitt), can the fractured witches pull together a full coven and save the day? And what on the Disc is going on in the mews?

The fifth and last of the books to star the original coven of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and now-Queen Magrat Garlick shakes things up even more than its predecessors. Young witch Agnes Nitt’s inner voice is now a fully independent personality, while Nanny and Granny clash over their roles and responsibilities, and Magrat brings her child along to coven meetings. Pratchett also takes aim at every vampire tradition and cliche from curtain-twitching to shying away from holy symbols, pitting the modern vampire against his more monstrous predecessors. And on top of that, he introduces two enduring fan favourites: the first of many Discworld Igors, and the tiny “pictsies” of the Nac mac Feegle!

What did you you think? Does Carpe Jugulum make beautiful music? Is Pratchett’s ongoing need to make fat jokes too distracting? When he came up with the idea of vampires who turn into and control magpies instead of bats, do you think he realised how horrifying that would seem to Australians? Use the hashtag #Pratchat36 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Gillian Cosgriff is an actor, singer and cabaret star most recently seen as part of the Australian cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Gill’s career has included musical comedy, musical theatre and – as mentioned briefly in our Maskerade episode – opera! Find out more about her talents at gilliancosgriff.com, or you can look up some of her music on Youtube or buy her albums on Bandcamp. (Do so on a Bandcamp Friday if you want to make sure all your money goes to supporting the artist!) You can also follow Gill on Twitter at @gilliancosgriff.

Next time, we finish off Pratchett’s other children’s trilogy as Johnny and his gang go out with a bang in Johnny and the Bomb. Joining us is returning guest, author Will Kostakis! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat37, or send us an email at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Carpe Jugulum, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Gillian Cosgriff, Granny Weatherwax, Igor, Lancre, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Uberwald, vampires, Witches

#Pratchat33 Notes and Errata

08/07/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“, featuring guest Michelle Dew, discussing the 2001 Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

  • The episode title references both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie’s first feature film from 1998, and the common refrain of unmasked villains in the cartoon series Scooby Doo – a show Malicia would probably have mixed feelings about.
  • Überwald is located about 1,500 miles Hubwards and Widdershins of Ankh-Morpork, according to The Discworld Mappe. The name “Überwald” is a pretty direct German translation of  “Transylvania”, both meaning “beyond (or over) the forest”.
  • Hermione is an ancient Greek name meaning “Princess of Hermes”; in classical mythology, Hermione is the daughter of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and is a child at the start of the Trojan War. Hermione Granger is the most notable contemporary character to bear the name, but others appear in the works of P G Wodehouse, D H Lawrence and Pee-wee Herman.
  • This book was the first standard Discworld novel with cover art not by Josh Kirby. (The Last Hero, published earlier the same year, was a large-format illustrated book with a cover and internal illustrations by Paul Kidby, who would take over the Discworld covers from the next book, Night Watch.) It was published only a month or so after Kirby’s death, so we’d speculate the change was mostly due to it being a children’s book – while Kirby did covers for the re-issue of The Carpet People and the original Truckers trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books each had art by a different artist, though Kirby illustrations were used for some foreign language editions. The original cover was by David Wyatt; Ben’s edition has a cover by Paul Kidby; and Michelle’s edition of the audiobook has a cover by Bill Mayer. The newest edition has cover art by Laura Ellen Anderson. You can see all of these on the L-Space wiki entry for the book.    
  • “Crazy Old Maurice” is the nickname of Belle’s father, an “eccentric inventor”, in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Gaston calls him by this derogatory nickname in song. The inventor angle is a departure from the original fairytale, in which Belle’s father is a failed businessman who has lost all his money. While there are certainly a few Beauty and the Beast references in The Simpsons, we couldn’t find any evidence of this one.
  • The Pied Piper of Hamelin – or Hameln, as the real German town’s name is properly spelled (thank you Sven) – is a folk tale with origins that go back to around 1300 CE. The basic story is that the town is plagued with rats and hires a piper with magical powers to get rid of them. (The “pied” part refers to the fact that he was dressed in multicoloured clothing.) Once the job is done, the town refuses to pay the piper; in retaliation he uses his music to lead all the children of the town into a crack in a nearby mountain, which seals shut – leaving only one young boy, with a lame leg, behind. In the Aarne-Thomspson-Uther index, which categorises folk tales, it is classified as ATU 570, “The Rat-Catcher”.
  • The Netflix show Liz remembers is 2019’s The Society; it’s a weird modern twist, loosely inspired by the legend. A second season is due late this year.
  • Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is probably the most famous English language version of the story, and is still popular thanks to it’s dynamic rhythm and catchy rhymes. It was first published as the last poem in his 1842 book Dramatic Lyrics. (Ben is wrong that Pratchett quotes it directly; he closely paraphrases it.)
  • Pet rats are usually domesticated Norway Rats (Rattus norvegicus), aka laboratory rats or “Fancy Rats”. Michelle is spot on about their lifespans: they live on average for 2-3 years, but can live up to 4-5 years if well cared for (and lucky). The oldest known pet rat we could find was Rodney, who lived in Japan and died at the age of seven years and four months in 1990. (We couldn’t verify this for sure but it seems legit.)
  • Überwald is first mentioned by name as the home country of both Angua and Cheery Littlebottom in Feet of Clay (discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays”), and plays a major part in both Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant (both published shortly before The Amazing Maurice in the series). But Granny Weatherwax and her Lancre coven visit a small town in the shadow of a castle on their way to Genua in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“), and while neither the town nor country are named, it’s clearly the same place.
  • Scrote is a small town in the Sto Plains, and like most places there makes most of its money from cabbage farming. It features briefly (but memorably) in Soul Music, when The Band With Rocks In stops there for the night while on tour at the Jolly Cabbage. Death also visits Scrote during the events of Hogfather.
  • “Rathaus” – pronounced “RART-house” – is indeed the German term for Town Hall. It comes from the words “rat” meaning “council”, and “haus” meaning…er…well you can probably figure that one out. 
  • The Rat Name Game is the invention of Pratchat supporter Joel Molin. (We mention him later in the questions section, but felt it was remiss of us not to mention his name at the time when we played it.)  Send us yours using the hashtag #Pratchat33!
  • We’ve mentioned The Good Place before; the short version is that it’s a sit-com in which Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies, ends up in a heavenly afterlife, and quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake. Her supposed soul mate, an ethics professor (William Jackson Harper), agrees to help her learn to be a better person.    
  • The film adaptation of the book, titled The Amazing Maurice, is a co-production between German studio Ulysses Filmproduktion and the Irish Cantilever Group. It was announced in June 2019, with the more recent news in October 2019 that it had scored a global distribution deal. What we know so far is that it has an “unexpected” script by Terry Rossio, who wrote Shrek and has worked with Disney; character designs by Carter Goodrich, best known for Ratatouille and Despicable Me; and the directors will be Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, whose previous work is not well-known outside of Germany. Ulysses Filmproduktion list it as “in production” on their web site, and the announcements gave an expected release date of 2022. There’s no word on how COVID-19 delays or the exclusive Narrativia/Motive Pictures deal have affected the production, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
  • The “if a dog wore pants” meme stormed the Internet in 2015 and spawned many imitators and extrapolations. 
  • The theatre cat in the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical Cats is Gus, invented by T. S. Eliot in the poem “Gus, the Theatre Cat”. His full name is “Asparagus”; he was played by Stephen Tate in the original West End cast in 1981, and by Ian McKellan in the 2019 film.
  • The musical version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is available only as a package for schools that includes photocopiable scripts, limited performance rights and supporting materials. It was written by Matthew Holmes, who also created a similar adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb. We’re informed that the musical sacrifices a lot of the humour, though – perhaps they thought kids dressed as rats would be funny enough? – and that the Stephen Briggs adaptation is superior.
  • In the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek, Lord Farquaad is the ruler of Duloc, a city-state where he has outlawed fairytale creatures and the citizens live in austerity. (The Pied Piper appears in the fourth film in the series, Shrek Forever After.)
  • We’ve previously talked about Enid Blyton in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven” and #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”. Her Famous Five and Secret Seven books are the most obvious inspiration for Malicia’s adventurous notions.
  • We last mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”. Many of his worlds break down the walls between reality and fiction, but this is especially true of his Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair.
  • We’ve talked about Neil Gaiman many times. A fantasy writer who started as a journalist and first made his name in comics, he was a long-time friend of Terry Pratchett.
  • Goosebumps is a series of horror novels for middle grade readers, all written by Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine. We previously mentioned them in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”.
  • Rllk is clearly the pre-Clan rat sound for “fuck”.
  • Hieroglyphics are the characters of the ancient Egyptians form of writing, though the term is sometimes applied to other cultures’ similar forms. While each character was an image, and could represent the object they resembled – making them pictograms –  they also represented sounds, making up the syllables of longer words, and clarified the meanings of other adjacent heiroglyphs. The Clan’s written language is not quite the same.
  • A guru, from pan-Indian tradition, is a spiritual guide and teacher. The term applies to teachers and mentors in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism. 
  • We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s obsession with Lobsang in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”.
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written by American professor of literature Joseph Campbell in 1949; in it he argues that there is a common mythological hero story across many cultures. The book is hugely influential on modern fiction – it’s effect on Pratchett is perhaps felt most in Only You Can Save Mankind – but has been applied in a very reductive way, and its popularity has led many to view the stories of other cultures through a very classical, Western lens.
  • Pratchett’s love for the lone wagon wheel rolling out of an explosion appears most prominently in Soul Music, but also in several other books as an aside.
  • Secret Valley was an Australian kids’ adventure show, co-produced with Spanish and French companies, first aired in 1980. It was about the kids who worked and played at the fictitious holiday camp, Secret Valley, and their ongoing rivalry with a gang of bullies led by Spider McGlurk (no really). Spider – who despite Ben’s insistence off-air was not played by a young Russell Crowe – was paid by developer William Whopper to ruin the camp so he could buy up the land. The series was repeated often on the ABC throughout the 1980s, and was created by Roger Mirams, who went on to create the spin-off  Professor Poopsnagle’s Steam Zeppelin. Ben never saw the latter show – it ran on Channel Nine, before his country town had more than two television stations – but it apparently has quite a cult following in the UK, even today. The Secret Valley theme was indeed sung to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”.
  • The Doctor Who serial with the giant rats and overt racism is 1977’s Victorian-era adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela, and introducing two fan favourite guest characters, theatre proprietor Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin) and pathologist Professor George Litefoot (Trevor Baxter). The other one, with the character screeching “Ratkin!”, is 1989’s Ghost Light, from the show’s final season before being cancelled in 1989.
  • Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy Neverwhere was originally a television series, produced for the BBC in 1996. It introduces the idea of “London Below”, an alternate city invisible to those who live in “London Above” and where various aspects of London take on supernatural forms. In London Below, rats are revered as intelligent beings, and the Rat Speakers are an entire sect who serve them. Neverwhere was turned into a book, and followed by the short story How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Gaiman is currently working on a full sequel.
  • The film in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson leaps off a tower is 2018’s Skyscraper, in which he plays a war veteran and former FBI agent who is frankly seems over-qualified to take on a security job in the new tallest building in the world, being built in Hong Kong. It’s attacked and set on fire by terrorists while his family are inside, instigating the jumping.
  • Eight (it’s okay, it’s safe to say on Roundworld) is established in the very first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as the number of occult significance on the Discworld. Wizards avoid saying it out loud, using euphemisms like “7A” and “twice four”, as in the wrong time or place it can summon evil creatures, notably Bel-Shamharoth, aka the Soul Eater or the Sender of Eight.
  • Cranium Rats first appeared as part of  the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons’s second edition in 1994. They are not natural creatures, but are created from regular rats by the evil psychic beings known as Mind Flayers. You can find details of Cranium Rats for the game’s current, fifth edition in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, published in 2016.
  • “Deus ex machina” is a narrative cliche in which the plot is resolved suddenly by an unlikely or overtly supernatural occurrence. It comes from ancient Greek theatre, and means “God out of the machine”; the playwright Aeschylus invented it as a way of ending plays, and they literally brought Greek Gods onto stage using machines – namely a trapdoor or a crane – to end the story.
  • For an explanation of the Gonnigal, and the origins of the name, see our previous episode, “Meet the Feegles”.
  • Truckers is the first in Pratchett’s “Bromeliad” trilogy about a society of Nomes, tiny creatures who live in the cracks of the human world. We’ve previously covered all three books in the trilogy: Truckers, Diggers and Wings.
  • Phillip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1998 (which won that year’s Carnegie Medal). After a moderately successful film adaptation of the first novel (under it’s American title The Golden Compass), the trilogy is now being adapted for television by the BBC and HBO, beginning with a season covering the events of the first book in 2019. Pullman is currently working on finishing The Book of Dust, a sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. His other work includes the Sally Lockhart novels, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke, which was also adapted by the BBC starring Billie Piper.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the Harry Potter series, is the first after the proper return of “wizard Hitler” Voldemort. It features the horrendously cruel teacher Dolores Umbridge and the death of a major, beloved character. So…you know, pretty heavy for a 7-year-old.
  • There have been a lot of adaptations of Oliver Twist, but not that many cartoon versions: the two most recent straight versions are a 1974 American production, and a 1982 Australian one. The 1989 Disney film Oliver & Company loosely adapts the story to be about a lost kitten who joins a gang of street dogs, though Sally doesn’t die (or indeed appear) in that one.
  • Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 novel which serves as an allegory for the communist revolution in Russia. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm depose the human farmers and take over, creating a fairer society before falling prey to greed and corruption. The “glue factory scene” also involves the death of a beloved character.
  • Burgo’s Catch Phrase was a popular Australian version of the US/UK gameshow Catch Phrase that ran from 1997 to 2003 on the Nine Network. Contestants viewed animated picture puzzles, not unlike a rebus, and had to determine the phrase they represented. It was renamed to include “Burgo” in the title in 1999, to capitalise on the popularity of host John Burgess, a media personality known as “Burgo” or “Baby John”, who was previously famous as the Australian host of Wheel of Fortune.
  • The “dab” is a dance move in which a person ducks their head into one bent elbow while stretching out and raising their other arm. Exactly where it originated is hard to pin down – similar moves appear in Japanese anime – but it seems pretty clear the worldwide fad, especially amongst teenagers, was inspired by American footballer Cam Newton, who dabbed after a goal, though he was taught the move by his teenage brother. It’s popularity was pretty long-lived for a fad, only having waned in the last couple of years; it was partly kept alive by inclusion in the immensely popular videogame Fornite: Battle Royale.
  • Graeme Base is an English-Australian children’s author and illustrator, most famous for his picture books Animalia and The Eleventh Hour. Animalia has an illustration for each letter of the English alphabet, and “M” features “meticulous mice monitoring mysterious mathematical messages” on computers while monocles and headsets. It’s glorious.
  • “He protec, he attac” – originally “he protec, but he also attac” – is a meme that started in 2016. It’s been used for all sorts of things but the earliest origin seems to be two images of a nude man wielding a lightsaber. The more you know…
  • Zoom is a popular videoconferencing application which has grown in popularity in the last year, especially since the start of mandated isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom’s popularity has largely come from it’s easy to use design, but this approach has been criticised for causing multiple security problems, leading some major corporations and governments to ban its use. Many of the major security concerns have been addressed in updates since May 2020.
  • Lord Vetinari befriends the intelligent (but not talking) rats – not mice – in Guards! Guards!, communicating with their leader Skrp in their own language and using them as spies when he is temporarily deposed and imprisoned. We loved Skrp, as you’ll hear in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
  • Magneto is a character in the X-Men books from Marvel Comics. Usually a villain, he is the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (they leave the “Evil” out in later versions), and one of the most powerful mutants in the world, able to create and manipulate power magnetic fields, primarily to move metal objects. He is played in the films by Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender. 
  • “Yeet” is a modern slang word meaning to throw something with a lot of force, though it can also be used as an exclamation, something that seemingly started with basketballers who were sure they would score when shooting, and briefly as a dance, which seems to have been where it spread most widely. Like a lot of such fads, it originated with African Americans before quickly becoming appropriated into general “youth culture”, a pattern that has repeated many times.
  •  Jurassic Park III (2001) features Alan Grant returning to the abandoned secondary site where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were created, where he meets a Spinosaurus, a huge predatory dinosaur. Michelle may also be thinking of the Indominus rex from Jurassic World (2015), a hybrid dinosaur created by combining DNA from multiple species.
  • Margo Lanagan is a multiple award-winning Australian author. Her 2008 YA fantasy novel Tender Morsels draws inspiration from the Grimm fairytale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”, though note it deals with themes of family violence, sexual assault and miscarriage. 2012’s Sea Hearts (published outside Australia as The Brides of Rollrock Island) explores the consequences of a witch selling seals transformed into women as brides.
  • Jeremy Lachlan is an Australian author. His  Jane Doe series for older children (13+) begins with Jane Doe and the Cradle of Worlds, and continues with 2020’s Jane Doe and the Key of All Souls.
  • The Call is a 2016 horror-fantasy YA novel by Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín, in which people are abducted to another world, where they hear the call of a hunting horn… It has one sequel so far, 2018’s The Invasion.

 

Posted in: Show Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Keith, Malicia, Maurice, Michelle Law, The Clan, Uberwald, Younger Readers

#Pratchat7 – All the Fingle Ladies

08/05/2018 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

In episode seven, comic book creator and illustrator Georgina Chadderton, aka George Rex, joins us to discuss the ninth Discworld novel: Faust Eric! Published in 1990 – alongside four other novels, making it one of Pterry’s most prolific years – it’s a shorter novel, originally published in a large format with lavish illustrations by Discworld cover artist Josh Kirby. (Also, fair warning to the pun-averse: Elizabeth really goes to town in this one…)

Eric Thurslow is surprised to find that the demon he has summoned looks suspiciously like a wizard – but not as surprised as the inept “wizzard” Rincewind is to have been summoned. Freed from the Dungeon Dimensions, he now finds himself compelled to grant wishes to an adolescent demonologist – and to his even greater surprise, he’s able to do it! Meanwhile, following along behind him across space, time and dimensions, Rincewind’s faithful Luggage is catching up to its master – and just as well, because the Prince of Hell isn’t too pleased that his plans for Eric have gone awry…  

Eric is the fourth book to feature Rincewind – last seen in Sourcery – and like his previous appearances it’s a romp across the Discworld to places (and in this case times) previously unseen. Sometimes regarded as a bit of an addendum to the main Discworld series because of its short length, Eric wears its parody – and its classical allusions – proudly on its sleeve. Did you like Eric? Did you read an edition with the illustrations? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat7 on social media to join the conversation.

http://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/p/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_07.mp3

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Guest Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex) is a comic book creator and illustrator based in Adelaide. You can find her delightful autobiographical comics online at georgerexcomics.com, and at @georgerexcomics on Instagram. George was in Melbourne for a residency with 100 Story Building, where Ben works facilitating creative writing workshops for young people. George’s Etsy shop is full of cool comics, postcards, badges and prints.

We skipped ahead to make sure we could chat with Georgina while she was in Melbourne, so we’re going back a step for our June episode, where librarian Aimee Nichols will join us to talk about the very first City Watch book: Guards! Guards! We’ll be recording soon, so if you’d like us to respond to you on the podcast, get in quick! Ask your questions via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat7A. (What, you expected us to actually use the forbidden number?)

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Eric, Georgina Chadderton, Rincewind, The Luggage

#Pratchat5 – Ten Points to Viper House

08/03/2018 by Pratchat Imps 6 Comments

In episode five, comedian Richard McKenzie joins us to discuss that rare beast, a Discworld tale that stars no wizards, witches, watches or Death, and isn’t part of any of the ongoing storylines: Pyramids! The seventh Discworld novel, published in 1989, it’s chock-full of jokes, footnotes, gods and characters – but we’ll see almost none of them ever again…

Pteppicymon XXVIII – Teppic for short – is heir to the throne of the ancient river kingdom of Djelibeybi. But the kingdom is broke, having spent its money on pyramids, and in order to give him a profession, Teppic is sent to the best school on the Disc: the Assassin’s Guild in Ankh-Morpork. Seven years later he’s just taken his final exam when his father dies. Teppic is now King (and God) of Djelibeybi earlier than planned – and after so long away, he finds the ancient traditions of his homeland stifling. Can even the King challenge the authority of the kingdom’s high priest, Dios?

Though it features none of his most beloved characters, Pyramids is nonetheless a favourite among Discworld fans – not least because the first quarter of the book takes us into the classrooms of Ankh-Morpork’s most famous guild. What do you think of this tale of tradition, family and mathematics gone wrong? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat5 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/p/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_05.mp3

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Richard hosts trivia twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, at the Cornish Arms on Sydney Road in Brunswick, Melbourne. Make sure to use a Pratchett pun in your team name if you go!

You can read the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Our next book, for our April 8th episode, takes us outside the Discworld – and indeed the fantasy genre – for 2012’s tale of Victorian London: Dodger! Joining us to talk about toshers, geezers and peelers is a man who’s no stranger to fancy words, and better known by his initials: crypto-cruciverbalist and former Letters & Numbers dictionary master, David Astle! We’ll be recording on March 24th, so get your questions in before then if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast. You can use the hashtag #Pratchat6 to ask them via social media. (And check out the Episodes page if you want to see a bit further into our future schedule!)

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Assassin's Guild, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Ptraci, Pyramids, Richard McKenzie, Teppic

#Pratchat4 – Enter Three Wytches

08/02/2018 by Pratchat Imps 3 Comments

In episode four, vaudevillian Elly Squires – aka Clara Cupcakes – joins us to discuss one of her first Discworld books, and the start of the witches series proper: Wyrd Sisters! The sixth Discworld novel, published in 1988, it’s the second book to feature Granny Weatherwax – but the first to introduce her fellow witches, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick.

Seasoned witches Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are adjusting to life in a coven with recently graduated apprentice Magrat Garlick when the king of their tiny country of Lancre is murdered, and his baby son escapes into their arms. The murderer, Duke Felmet, is crowned the new, much crueller king, but with the rightful heir off being raised by a troupe of travelling actors, Granny, Nanny and Magrat must contend with rumour, theatre and their own clashing personalities if they are to change their kingdom’s story…

The witches are one of Pratchett’s most beloved groups of characters, and pre-date both the City Watch and the modern faculty of Unseen University – so it’s surprising to see them spring so fully-formed from their first novel! We loved meeting them all over again. We’d love to hear what you think of Wyrd Sisters – if you’re joining this episode’s discussion on social media, please use the hashtag #Pratchat4 so we can all find each other’s thoughts! (Big thanks to listener Jodie for this brilliant idea.)

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/p/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_04.mp3

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Elly Squires can be found on Twitter as her alter-ego @claracupcakes. She’s touring her hit 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, The Worst, to various festivals around Australia and the world, including Fringe World in Perth and the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. Keep an eye out for her tour dates on Facebook or (if you’re not afraid of Russian hackers) at claracupcakes.com.

You can read the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Our next book, discussed in our March 8th episode, will be 1989’s standalone Discworld novel, Pyramids – and joining us to talk about assassins, gods and a very different tiny kingdom will be comedian Richard McKenzie! We’ll be recording on February 19th, so get your questions in before then if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast! You can use the hashtag #Pratchat5 to ask them via social media.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Granny Weatherwax, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Witches, Wyrd Sisters
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