Discworld – Page 6

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

08/03/2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders” with guest author Nadia Bailey discussing the fourteenth Discworld novel, 1992’s Lords and Ladies.

The episode title references the long-running, much beloved and extremely twee crime drama Midsomer Murders, which debuted on ITV in 1997 and is still running, 21 series later. It’s based on the Chief Inspector Barnaby books by Caroline Graham in which first Tom Barnaby, and later his cousin John Barnaby, solve murders in the fictional, sleepy English county of Midsomer, which after 124 episodes is now often joked to be the murder capital of Great Britain.
There are two examples of Steven Moffat writing women who marry men who follow them around in Doctor Who – first in his most famous episode, Blink, and then in the Christmas special The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. There are similar behaviours in his other work, going all the way back to Press Gang.
We previously mentioned The Craft in our Witches Abroad episode, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of its stars, Fairuza Balk, made her major screen debut in another film referenced this episode: Return to Oz (see below).
The Last Unicorn (1982) is an adaptation of the 1968 fantasy novel by American writer Peter S. Beagle, and has a pretty star-studded voice cast including René Auberjonois, Alan Arkin (who plays the incompetent magician Schmendrick), Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow (who plays the titular unicorn), Angela Lansbury and Death himself, Christopher Lee! It has music written by Jimmy Webb, including songs performed by the band America.
Narnia is a fantasy world invented by English writer C S Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia books. The White Queen first appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where it is revealed she has trapped Narnia in an endless Winter. Her origins are explored in the prequel The Magician’s Nephew (1955).
The Tuatha Dé Danann (TOO-a day DONNan; Ben butchers this and is very sorry) are the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. They reside in Tír na nÓg, often translated into English as the “Otherworld”, which could be accessed (among other ways) via “passage tombs” under the earth – much like the Long Man’s barrow. They have some things in common with elves, but a closer analogue are the aos sí (“ays SHEE”) or Sidhe (“SHEE”, as popularised by William Butler Yeats and, much later, the fantasy roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming). The Sidhe appear in both Irish and Scottish mythology, and take many forms and roles – “banshee” is an English form of bean sidhe, for example. They are often said to live in another world (or underground in barrows, or across the sea – it’s mythology after all), but this is not usually considered to be Tír na nÓg.
If the plot of Maurice Sendak’s award-winning Outside Over There (1981) sounds familiar, that might be because it served as partial inspiration for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) – Sendak is thanked in the credits. The book forms part of a “trilogy” following a child’s psychological development, following his better-known books In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are.
The very long dining table appears not only in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) but also in a whole host of films, TV shows and other media. TV Tropes calls this cliche “table space“.
This is indeed the first appearance of “millennium hand and shrimp“, later used by the beggar Foul Ole Ron (from Soul Music onwards) and bag lady Mrs Tachyon (in the Johnny Maxwell books). Terry apparently generated it using a gibberish computer program, into which he fed a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song, “Particle Man”, one line of which is “Millennium hand and an aeon hand”. (Ben was very excited to discover while researching this episode that Terry, like Ben, was a big TMBG fan!)
A lot has been written on mental health in academia; a good place to start if you’re interested might be this Guardian series on the subject, which spans three years.
Howl’s Moving Castle, originally a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, was fairly loosely adapted into an animated film by Studio Ghibli in 2004. Both are wonderful.
Return to Oz is a 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz, loosely adapting two of the later Oz books by Frank L Baum. As mentioned above it stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale, who after returning from her trip to Oz is seen as mad by her guardians and is sent for psychiatric treatment – including turn-of-the-century style electro-shock therapy. While it was not a big success at the time it has become a cult hit, in no small part because of its creepy imagery and for-the-time amazing practical and stop-motion effects. (The film also inspired the final track on the eponymous debut album, which uses Dorothy’s experiences as a metaphor to describe drug use in the queer community.)
The “Jesus picture” meme is also known as “potato Jesus“, and you’ve almost certainly seen it.
The game Jason Ogg plays with his Binky-iron horseshoe is not quoits, but…er…horseshoes. They both involve tossing a round object at a peg, but quoits is specifically played with circular “quoits”, these days usually made from rope or rubber.
Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga aimed at teenage girls, which launched in 1991. It’s best known in English speaking countries via the 1995 anime adaptation, which ran for 200 episodes. It follows the adventures of Tokyo middle-school student Usagi Tsukino, who is given the power to transform into “Sailor Moon”, a soldier with magical powers who is destined to save the Earth. Sailor Moon’s main love interest is “Tuxedo Mask”, a hero whose disguise is…er…a tuxedo and a mask. However the high school student who transforms into him is for a long time unaware of his secret identity, so they can only meet when in costume. Sailor Moon remains hugely popular, especially in cosplay circles, where you will often see the whole gang of “sailor scouts”.
If you’ve seen the 1987 film The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 novel by William Goldman), you can revisit the “to the pain” speech on YouTube here. It really is quite similar to the Elf Queen’s threat to Esme, but it’s worth noting that in the film the speech is given by the hero! (If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, the scene is quite near the end of the film and is a bit of a spoiler.)
The Doctor Who story with the Morris Dancers is 1971’s The Daemons, starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It also features a white witch named Olive Hawthorne as a supporting character, and she has quite a few things in common with a certain ex-member of the Lancre coven…
We previously mentioned Get Smart in our Guards! Guards! episode, but the specific running joke mentioned here is Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, encountering an enormous version of something and remarking: “Why, that’s the second biggest [thing] I’ve ever seen!” This joke is also used in one of Ben’s favourite videogames, The Secret of Monkey Island, in a scene he recently recreated in his Instagram feed.
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, often cited as his first tragedy. It’s a graphically violent story about (fictional) Roman general Titus, who angers the Goth queen Tamora, setting off a vicious cycle of revenge. If you’re going to look it up, we’d just like to give you a content warning for murder, torture, mutilation and rape. It’s…not gentle.
The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who have lived on an isolated island ever since Prospero was deposed as the Duke of Milan. The play begins with a tempest summoned by Prospero to wreck a ship carrying he betrayers onto his island, but it’s not a revenge story; it’s usually classified these days as a romance.
The club started by Reg Shoe for the “vitally challenged”, and first seen in Reaper Man, is the Fresh Start Club, not the “Second Chance Club” as Ben misremembers.
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies; while the central plot is serious – a villain slandering a young woman, Hero, to ruin her wedding to the dashing Claudio – it is feisty verbal fencers Benedick and Beatrice, who are tricked into revealing their mutual love, who always steal the show. Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version starred him as Benedick and Emma Thompson – to whom he was still married at the time – as Beatrice, and is a traditional but wonderful adaptation with grand music and a cast including Denzel Washington, Imelda Staunton, Keanu Reeves, Robert Sean Leonard, Richard Briers, Michael Keaton, Ben Elton, Brian Blessed and – in her film debut – Kate Beckinsale. Joss Whedon’s black and white 2013 film has a contemporary setting and stars faces familiar to fans of Whedon’s work: Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof as Beatrice and Benedick, plus Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and Jillian Morgese.
Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue, super-fast hedgehog and Sega’s biggest videogame franchise, starring in a tonne of games beginning with 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive (aka the Sega Genesis), and also appearing in a short-lived animated television series, also called Sonic the Hedgehog, which ran from 1993 to 1994. In case Liz’s pun on his name is too blue (sorry) for you, he was also briefly spoofed in one of Ben’s favourite childhood shows, Tony Robinson’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, as “Chronic the Hedgehog”.
Pet Sematary is one of Steven King’s most famous novels, published in 1983. It involves an ancient burial ground, hidden behind the children’s “pet sematary”, where the dead don’t stay buried. It was adapted into a successful film in 1989, and a new adaptation comes out this year.
The Milgram Experiment, named for psychologist Stanley Milgram, was a 1961 social experiment supposedly showing that ordinary people will obey an authority figure even when instructed to do things beyond their personal ethical boundaries. The experiment was considered unethical, and prompted significant changes in the way psychological testing was approved. In 2012 the validity of the original study was called into question when evidence was uncovered suggesting Milgram had manipulated or misrepresented the results.

#Pratchat2 Notes and Errata

08/12/2017 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery discussing the fourth Discworld novel, 1988’s Mort.

Sir Terry’s own thoughts on where to start reading the Discworld are most clearly outlined in the essay “Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin”, which is most easily found in the 2014 non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard.
“Mort” does mean death, but it’s not Latin – it’s French (or in Discworld terms, Quirmian).
A “squib” in the world of Harry Potter is the rare child of a magical person who is not magical themselves.
The lead Gentleman in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Hush was played by Doug Jones, now famous for playing Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, and Saru in Star Trek Discovery. He plays Count Orlok, the titular vampire, in the upcoming remake of Nosferatu. And he’d make a great Death.
Christopher Lee was the voice of Death in both Cosgrove Hall animated adaptations (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music), and The Mob’s live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic, following Ian Richardson’s death. And his Death. (Richardson played Death in The Mob’s first Discworld adaptation, Hogfather.) The body of Death was played by Marnix Van Den Broeke, who also played the golem Mr Pump in Going Postal.
The horse that plays Bucephalus in Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is, unfairly, not named in the credits of the film.

#Pratchat2 – Murdering a Curry

08/12/2017 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

In our second episode, writer and editor Stephanie Convery joins us as we discuss the runner-up in our poll for which book to read first – Mort! Published 30 years ago, it’s the fourth Discworld novel, and the first to put Death in a starring role.

Mort (short for Mortimer), a daydreaming farmer’s son, is offered an apprenticeship by Death himself. Travelling outside of space and time to Death’s home, he finds things aren’t what he expects: Death has an elderly manservant, an adopted daughter, and an unusual interest in fly fishing. Mort, left to do the job alone, tries to defy fate in a very human (and teenage) moment – but can he possibly succeed? And why does an immortal anthropomorphic personification need an apprentice, anyway?

Mort is often cited (including by us) as the first book in the series that feels like the Discworld we know and love, so if you’re joining us for the first time this episode, this is a great place to start. (And don’t worry: we will go back and read the first three books at some point!)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33:48 — 86.6MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS | More

Guest Stephanie Convery is deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia, a writer and an author. Her first book, After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, was published in March 2020 by Penguin Books. You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @gingerandhoney, and find her work on Guardian Australia.

You can find the full show 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.

Let’s Start From The Very Beginning (but not actually)

20/10/2017 by Elizabeth Flux Leave a Comment

The polls are in and though it was neck and neck throughout, Men At Arms won over Mort by a whisker. Sorry Mort – gonne but not forgotten.

We’re now deep into prep for next month’s episode. Ben’s dug up his lovingly-contacted copy*, we’ve been in chats with our ~special guest~, and now it’s time to address a question that came up during the voting process: why aren’t we starting at the beginning?

It’s a good point – one that we debated at length about, but in the end as much as we love The Colour of Magic (though some of us, admittedly, love it more than others) we didn’t feel that it represented Discworld as a whole as well as either Mort of Men At Arms would. The tone and voice isn’t quite the same as the slightly later books, and so we wanted to start with something that would give a better idea of what the series was like over all.

We will come back to it though, and we’ll discuss this and all the emotional luggage that comes along with it at greater length.

Thank you to everyone who voted and who has already listened to episode 0. We’ll see you again in November!

*and we’ve really been enjoying all the pictures you’ve been tweeting us of your copies.

#Pratchat14 – City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation

08/12/2018 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

In episode fourteen we celebrate 35 years of the Discworld by going all the way back to the beginning! Writer and podcaster Joel Martin joins us for a bumper A’Tuin-sized discussion of the very first Discworld story, adventure, chronicle, tale…The Colour of Magic, published in 1983!

Rincewind, a wizard unable to cast spells, makes a living of sorts in the mighty city of Ankh-Morpork through his gift for languages. But his gift gets him more than he bargains for when he becomes the guide to the Discworld’s first tourist. Fresh off the boat from the distant and obscenely wealthy Counterweight Continent, naïve Twoflower has come armed with a phrasebook, a demon-powered picture box and his magical Luggage full of enormous gold coins, determined to see the barbarians, brawls and beasts he’s read about in stories back home. But seeing them is the easy part – surviving to talk about them is another matter entirely…

Though we’ve often talked about the differences between the earliest books and those that came later, The Colour of Magic introduces Ankh-Morpork, Rincewind, Death and of course Great A’Tuin and the Disc itself with varying degrees of familiarity. Split into four sections – The Colour of Magic, The Sending of Eight, The Lure of the Wyrm and Close to the Edge – it manages to be both homage and parody of multiple beloved fantasy genres, while at the same time trying to establish its world – and author – as something new. Do you think it succeeds? Did you start at the start? Use the hashtag #Pratchat14 on social media to join the conversation and tell us! We’d also love to see some fan art of the Luggage based directly on the text, rather than Kirby’s ubiquitous, fleshy baby-legged version.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:23:41 — 65.9MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS | More

Guest Joel Martin is a fantasy author whose several novellas and novels include his own take on classic sword-and-sorcery, The Broken World (whose protagonist is not Kane, but Karn). For more about him and his work, visit his web site, thepenofjoel.com, or follow him on Twitter at @thepenofjoel. He also hosts the writing discussion podcast The Morning Bell with Luke Manly and Ian Laking; find it at themorningbell.com.au.

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

This is our final episode for the Year of the Justifiably Defensive Lobster (aka 2018), but we’ll be back in January, when we’ll fire up Queen’s Greatest Hits and kick off proceedings with one of Pratchett’s most celebrated novels: Good Omens! Yes, we’re getting in to cover Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman before said co-author and Amazon Prime bring their version to subscribers’ screens in 2019. (Don’t worry, it’ll be on the BBC at some point too.) With twice the authors, we’re expecting twice the questions (though we’ll try and stick to our usual running time of under two hours), so send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat15.

#Pratchat21 Notes and Errata

08/07/2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea” featuring guest David Ryding, discussing the seventeenth Discworld novel Interesting Times.

The episode title puns Memoirs of a Geisha, a 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg in 2005. The film was criticised for casting Chinese actors as some of the Japanese characters, while Golden was criticised for his portrayal of geishas and sued by Mineko Iwasaki, one of the ex-geishas he interviewed for the book, as he named her in the acknowledgments despite her requesting anonymity. She later went on to write her own autobiography, Geisha, A Life, which corrects many misconceptions she saw in Golden’s book.
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, published in 1993. We covered it in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, with guest Cal Wilson.
“Inscrutable” is a word long associated with stereotypical depictions of Asian cultures, especially the Chinese. It stems from a lack of effort to understand the differing cultural conventions encountered by Europeans, and seems to have reached a height in Victorian literature.
Bill Bryson is an American-British non-fiction author whose work covers language, travel, history and science. His best known works include Notes From a Small Island, The Mother Tongue and A Short History of Nearly Everything.
The white saviour is a trope in which non-white characters are unable to save themselves, and are rescued from disaster by a heroic white character. The Wikipedia article lists a large number of examples.
“Eurogames” are a tradition of modern boardgames with their roots in post-war Germany. Such games often focus on strategic depth and a balance of luck and skill. The Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995, was one of the first such games to become popular in America, and features players trying to build the most successful settlement by gathering and spending various resources on a fictional island with limited space. Ted Alspach’s The Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a more recent example, first published in 2014, but there are many, many more great ones. Some of Ben’s favourites include Carcassonne, Cyclades, Inis and Ticket to Ride.
One of the editorial directions popularised by Stan Lee during his time at Marvel Comics was the idea that “any issue could be someone’s first“. This mostly manifested as in-character expository dialogue, but also as footnotes from the editor pointing readers to previous issues for backstory.
Potatoes often appear in fantasy fiction as a staple of medieval Europe-like worlds – but they weren’t brought to Europe from the Americas until the 16th century. This is explored in Adam Roberts’ academic work about Arthurian fiction, Silk and Potatoes, and also in the “Fantastical Feasts” episode of the podcast Imaginary Worlds (though the latter is now only available via paid subscription).
We’ve previously noted the possible influence on Pratchett of Mel Brooks’ 1960s spy sit-com Get Smart in Guards! Guards!, Good Omens and Lords and Ladies.
Gunpowder was invented in 9th-century China, and was first seen in Europe 400 years later, around the same time the first cannons were invented – also in China.
Bob Hawke was the extremely popular Labor Prime Minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He died in May 2019. He is remembered both for the many achievements of his government, and for being a larger-than-life figure who embodied the “larrikin” Australian stereotype while at the same time showing great compassion and emotion. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 (see below), he extended temporary permits and offered permanent visas to tens of thousands of Chinese students so they could stay in Australia rather than return to the violence at home.
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square, the main public square in Beijing, to suppress the hundreds of thousands of students gathered there to protest for a variety of democratic reforms. Many were killed, with the death toll estimated in the thousands, and there were also reports of torture and mass arrests. A famous photo was taken the following day of a lone “Tank Man“, standing in front of a column of tanks to slow down their progress.
The Golden Horde was a khanate – an empire ruled by a Khan – that succeeded the Mongol Empire. It lasted for about 250 years from the mid 13th century, though some remnants of it survived into the 19th century. The Horde was founded by Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan.
The members of the Silver Horde are:
- Genghiz Cohen – aka Cohen the Barbarian, age unknown
- Boy Willie – the youngest one, aged 80; his name references Billy the Kid
- Caleb the Ripper – aged 85, source of most of the unfortunate jokes
- Ronald “Teach” Saveloy – our favourite
- Truckle the Uncivil – the sweary one
- Old Vincent – aged 87; doesn’t talk much, presumably the second oldest (though Cohen might be older)
- Mad Hamish – the oldest one; uses a wheelchair
Three Men in a Boat is an 1889 comic novel written by English author Jerome K Jerome, following the titular three men on a holiday they take on the Thames River.
We previously explained chicken parmigiana in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, but in short, it’s an Australian perversion of an Italian dish in which a chicken schnitzel is covered in tomato sauce and cheese (among other things). The original Italian version uses eggplant, and is distinct from its Australian offspring.
Bunnings sausages may be the most Australian thing we’ve ever referenced on the show. Bunnings Warehouse is a chain of large hardware supply stores found across Australia and also in New Zealand, now owned by Wesfarmers, who also own the Australian versions of Kmart and Target. Many Bunnings stores hold a “sausage sizzle” in their carparks on weekends. This is a common Australian fundraising activity, in which cheap sausages are cooked on a barbecue and sold in slices of white bread with tomato or BBQ sauce and fried onions. The proceeds are donated to a local charity or other cause. (Sausage sizzles are also commonly held at polling stations on election days, giving rise to the “democracy sausage” meme.)
Lisa McCune is an Australian actor best known for her portrayal of Senior Constable Maggie Doyle during the first six years of the long-running and popular early 2000s cop drama Blue Heelers. Doyle was famously killed off in front of her fiancee, fellow cop PJ, while waiting to enter a witness protection program at the beginning of season seven. McCune went on to star as naval lieutenant Kate McGregor in Sea Patrol from 2007 to 2011, and also has a highly successful career on stage, including Australian productions of many big musicals.
Horror novelist Anne Rice, best known for writing Interview with a Vampire and its sequels, wrote a widely circulated Facebook post which began “After the publication of The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments.”
Ben is correct in that the distinction between turtles, tortoises and terrapins is not a definitive, scientific one, and the usage of the terms varies a bit depending on where you live. Land-based chelonians – the group that includes all turtles and tortoises – are called tortoises everywhere; aquatic chelonians are generally known as turtles, but if they live in fresh water may be known as terrapins in the UK. Similarly there are three families of pinnipeds – mammals with flippered feet. These are the true or earless seals; sea-lions and fur seals (who have ears); and walruses. True seals can’t walk on land or balance a ball on their nose; only sea-lions and fur seals can do that.
Zen buddhism originated in China, but the “zen garden” is a Japanese tradition.
Twoflower’s boss (and later, his imaginary dragon friend) is actually named Ninereeds; Nine Turning Mirrors was a previous Grand Vizier, killed by the boy emperor during a poisoning attempt in Mort.
Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thick crust and a sweet filling usually made of red bean or lotus seed paste. Folk tales say that the revolt of the Han Chinese against the rule of the Mongols was coordinated by messages either hidden in mooncakes, or printed on their surface in parts. Their distribution was supposedly ensured through rumours of a plague that could only be warded off by the consumption of mooncakes.
“Fridging” in narrative is the act of killing off or otherwise harming a woman to provide a male protagonist with motivation for their story, without treating the woman as a character in her own right. The term “women in refrigerators” was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, who noticed the prevalence of this trope in superhero comics; it references the fate of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in Green Lantern #54 (coincidentally published the same year as Interesting Times). The term was popularised by a web site of the same name which documented instances of the trope in comics.
My Little Pony: The Movie was released in 1986 with an extraordinary voice cast including Hollywood stars Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman. Leachman plays Hydia, an evil witch who creates the “Smooze”, a gross purple ooze that will destroy the ponies’ home of Dream Castle. Several of the ponies go on a search for the Flutter Ponies, magical winged ponies who may be able to help, and yes, they do destroy the Smooze by flapping their wings and creating a magical wind.
A persistent rumour has done the rounds of the Internet for years that American comedian Sinbad played a genie in a comedy movie titled Shazaam. Despite the fact that the movie never existed, many people swear they remember it, and deny they are thinking of the genie film Kazaam, which really did exist and starred basketball player Shaquille O’Neil. Shazaam is considered by some to be an example of the “Mandela Effect”, where some people have developed erroneous memories of which they are so certain, they believe them to be evidence of time travel having changed history. The name comes from a similar phenomenon in which people claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s.
The 2019 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, or NGV, was “Terracotta Warriors and Cai Guo-Qiang“. It features a collection of artefacts from ancient China, including a large number of Terracotta Warriors, as well as specially-commisioned works by contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose art incorporates the ignition of gunpowder. Liz wrote about the exhibition for The Saturday Paper.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was the third in the series starring Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell. It also starred Jet Li as the Emperor, and features both yetis and and army of animated terracotta warriors. It’s…well, let’s just say there’s a reason we usually only talk about the first Brendan Fraser Mummy movie.
Lemmings is a popular series of videogames originally published by Psygnosis, the first of which was released in 1991 for home computers like the Amiga 500, and later ported to a variety of game consoles and computer platforms. The titular Lemmings are green-haired, pink-skinned bipedal creatures who are dropped into a variety of landscapes and walk mindlessly into danger. The player must assign individual lemmings to dig holes, build stairs and redirect their fellows to help guide them safely to the exit.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a fantasy novel for children, the debut novel of English author Alan Garner. It’s set in Cheshire and follows the adventures of two children as they attempt to keep the weird stone of the title safe from the evil spirit Nastrond, meeting a variety of witches, wizards and magical creatures along the way.
The Simpsons episode “Bart vs. Australia“, from the show’s sixth season in 1995, is one of the broadest parodies of Australia ever created. In the episode, Bart makes a collect call to an Australian number to find out if water spirals in the opposite direction in toilets in the southern hemisphere (it doesn’t), leading to him being indicted for fraud. While the episode has had a mixed reaction in Australia, some elements of it are still popular, notably the use of the term “dollarydoos” to refer to Australian currency and a spoof of the famous “that’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee.
American actress Lucy Liu rose to fame as cold-hearted lawyer Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, at the time one of the only female Asian characters on American television. Liu went on to star in a number of hit films including Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill before being cast as Dr Joan Watson in the modern take on Sherlock Holmes, Elementary (one of Ben’s favourite television shows).
B D Wong played psychiatrist and profiler Dr George Huang on nearly 250 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Father Ray Makuda on prison drama Oz, but many will know him best as scientist Henry Wu from Jurassic Park and its sequels Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He’s also been in Mr. Robot, The Flash and more recently Gotham, where he plays a wonderful version of the character Hugo Strange. He’s also an award-winning theatre and musical actor, and the author of a memoir about he and his partner’s experience having a child with the help of a surrogate mother.
Masayori “Masi” Oka is best known as the time travelling Hiro Nakamura on the superhero show Heroes and its sequel, Heroes Reborn, though you’ll also find him in the reboot of tropical cop drama Hawaii Five-0 and a number of films including the 2008 version of Get Smart. He used to work as a digital effects artist for Industrial Light and Magic, and worked on all three Star Wars prequels!

#PratchatNA7 Notes and Errata

23/06/2019 by Ben 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.
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 #Pratchat20, “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.

#Pratchat23 Notes and Errata

08/09/2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 23, “The Music of the Nitt“, discussing the eighteenth Discworld book Maskerade with guest teacher, opera singer and Dungeon Master Myf Coghill.

This episode’s title puns on the name of protagonist Agnes Nitt and “The Music of the Night”, one of the most famous songs from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. (See below for more on the musical.)
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a series of ten fantasy novels written by American author Stephen R. Donaldson between 1977 and 2013. Covenant is an author from our world who loses two fingers before being diagnosed with leprosy, shortly before his wife divorces him. When he is knocked unconscious he is transported to “the Land”, a fantasy world where he is a hero of prophecy in the conflict against the evil Lord Foul, though Thomas thinks that the Land is a delusion. The series has had a mixed critical response. If you’re going to look into them, please note our content warning: the first book contains an act of rape and this is referred to many times throughout the first trilogy.
The English sit-com Keeping Up Appearances was a farce created by Roy Clarke (of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine fame) which ran on BBC One from 1990 to 1995. It starred Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, a woman who aspires to move among the upper class, and is desperately ashamed of her lower class family. A running gag is that she tries to have everyone pronounce her family name “bouquet”, despite the fact that her middle class husband Richard – played by Clive Swift – has always pronounced it “bucket”.
Avengers: Endgame (2019) was the final film in the Avengers series, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It brought together characters from the previous twenty-one Marvel films in a massive crossover, and became the highest-grossing film of all time.
Deadpool and its sequel Deadpool 2 are films from 20th Century Fox about the titular superhero character, a mutant mercenary with rapid healing powers. While technically part of the X-Men film franchise, the films are made on a lower budget and Deadpool – who often breaks the fourth wall in the comics and is aware he is in a movie – comments on the lack of cameos from more famous actors and characters, especially Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
Dolores Umbridge is appointed as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and thus major villain, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She is loyal to the Ministry of Magic, even when its infiltration and corruption by Voldemort’s Death Eater followers is apparent, and conducts a Macarthy-esque witch hunt (if you’ll excuse the term in this context) to find traitors – including torturing poor Harry.
OP is short for “Original Post” or “Original Poster” and is used in online discussion forums to refer back to the first post in a thread and its author. (OP is also used in games jargon as shorthand for “overpowered” – a description of a card, item, ability or other element in a game which is considered to give a player or character who possesses it an unfair edge.)
Tuvan throat singing, also known as hooliin chor, is practiced by the Tuva people of Siberia; its most popular style, khoomei, is also found in Mongolia. It is a form of overtone singing, in which the singer manipulates their mouth, larynx and pharynx to create a second “overtone” over the top of a droning, fundamental tone, a bit like the drone of a bagpipe. This TEDx talk from Baltimore in 2016 features the Tuvan band Alash providing a traditional example.
Permeate is actually a generic term meaning a substance that has passed through a porous or permeable membrane, as in the process of osmosis. In dairy farming, it is used to refer to the parts of milk that are not retained in the ultrafiltration process used to collect and add additional milk proteins to raw milk for making cheese. Traditionally this kind of permeate was added back to milk to increase the yield and to help standardise it – a process intended to make sure milk has consistent levels of fat, proteins, sugars and so on. This was basically all unknown outside the dairy industry until 2012, when Australian company Dairy Farmers launched a marketing campaign labelling their milk as “permeate-free“. Despite their web-site clarifying that milk permeate isn’t dangerous or unhealthy, the labelling – and a story on the current affairs program A Current Affair – gave them a short-lived edge in the market until all the other milk companies in Australia followed suit, despite the fact that smaller dairies wouldn’t have been using permeate in the first place.
Parabens, or parahydroxybenzoates, are a group of chemicals used as preservatives in cosmetics and sometimes food thanks to their antibacterial and fungicidal properties. There’s little to no evidence that they pose any serious health risks, but they can cause (usually mild) allergic reactions in a small percentage of people. While they’re synthetically produced for commercial use, parabens do occur naturally and many synthetic parabens are identical to natural ones.
The song “Smelly Cat” was written and performed by the character Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) on the sit-com Friends, initially in the second season episode “The One with the Baby on the Bus”. It was popular with fans and revisited many times over the life of the show, often with celebrity musical guests – including Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who co-wrote the song. It’s been covered many times; Lisa Kudrow even sang it on stage with Taylor Swift in 2015.
La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) is an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). The opera follows the story of Violetta, a courtesan whose love for the young bourgeois Alfredo is thwarted by prejudice against her past.
“Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry and a popular meme for women showing resiliency in the face of patriarchy. The phrase became popular after US Senator Elizabeth Warren was interrupted by Mitch McConnell and other Senators while trying to read a letter sent to the Senate in 1986 by Coretta Scott King criticising Senator Jeff Sessions for limiting the voting rights of black Americans, as part of her objections to Sessions being appointed US Attorney General. The Senate voted to silence Warren on the grounds that she was breaking a Senate rule against maligning other Senators; afterwards McConnell said: “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Sieglinde is a major mortal character in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second work in his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle). She is based on Signy from the Norse Völsunga saga, one of the main sources for the opera. In Die Walküre, Sieglinde was separated from her brother Siegmund at birth, and they fall in love before discovering they are twins, though this doesn’t dissuade their love. Siegmund dies in a fight with Sieglinde’s husband, a king she was forced to marry, and Sieglinde wishes to die rather than live without him until the Valkyrie Brunhilde convinces her to stay alive and give birth to their son, Siegfried, who goes on to be the hero of the final two operas in the cycle, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
The O.C. was an American teen television drama set in Orange County, California which ran from 2003 to 2007. We joke about not talking about it because it starred the other, more famous Ben McKenzie as Ryan Atwood, a poor, abused teen thrown out of home by his mother. Ryan is adopted by his public defender, and his struggle to fit in amongst the affluent O.C. kids was a major driver of the show’s first two seasons, though it was also very much about tempestuous relationships and love affairs and all that good high school drama stuff.
The excerpt from La Traviata is from a 1958 performance by Maria Callas; you can find the full performance on YouTube.
Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer and, famously, a contemporary and “rival” of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though they competed for the same positions, it seems unlikely the rivalry went very far, and that they instead had mutual respect for each other. In Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus he is the main character, presented as bitter and jealous of Mozart’s seemingly God-given talent, and he claims to have poisoned Mozart with arsenic. Rumours like this did plague the real Salieri, but historians don’t take them seriously, and the play and subsequent film have revived interest in his work. The role was originated in the West End by Paul Schofield opposite Simon Callow as Mozart; in the original broadway production he was played by Ian McKellan, opposite Tim Curry. In the 1984 film version he is played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for the role.
Singin’ in the Rain is a 1952 American film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly, who also stars as Don Lockwood, a humble silent film star in the 1920s during the introduction of “talkies”. Don’s insufferable leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), has a terrible voice, and has to be dubbed over by Don’s love interest, chorus girl Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Despite this plot point, in one scene where she is being dubbed, Jean Hagen performs both Lina’s annoying voice and Kathy’s replacement!
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the psychological phenomenon where someone who is not good at something is likely to overestimate how good they are, while those who are good at something are likely to underestimate their ability. This is because the same knowledge and skills are required to do something and judge the results.
Terry’s first publisher was Colin Smythe Limited, named for its founder and based in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire. After publishing his first four books – including the first two Discworld novels – Colin became Terry’s agent in 1987, co-publishing with Victor Gollancz in the UK and representing him to larger publishers all over the world. Colin also handled all rights to Terry’s intellectual property until the founding of Narrativia, Pratchett’s own production company, now run by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett. Colin Smythe Limited still publishes books; you can find out more about the company at colinsmythe.co.uk. The Terry Pratchett section of the site contains details of every edition of every one of Terry’s books; we’ve found it useful on many occasions!
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti is a 1790 comic opera composed by Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) and Don Giovanni fame. As Myf points out, the tutte of the title is feminine, and so rather than “so do they all” means “so do all women” – the argument of the character Don Alfonso, who believes that all women are unfaithful. (Another common translation of the full title is All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers.) Alfonso makes a bet against two military officers, who swear their fiancées, who are sisters, will be faithful to them. To prove it, the officers pretend to have been sent away to fight, then return disguised as “Albanians” to try and seduce each others’ fiancées. Alfonso bribes the sisters’ maid to help him win his bet, and the two women do eventually succumb, though they endure a false wedding to the “Albanians” and mock outrage from their fiancées before all is forgiven. In Australia, Così fan tutte is most well known from Louis Nowra’s 1992 play Cosi, in which the residents of a psychiatric hospital try to stage the opera.
As we may have mentioned before, the character known only as Janitor in the NBC/ABC medical sit-com Scrubs was originally intended to be a figment of main character JD’s imagination. During the first season of the show he never speaks or interacts with any other characters, but the idea was scrapped.
21 Jump Street was a US police drama produced from 1987 to 1991 about a group of young police officers who use their ability to pass as teenagers to go undercover in high schools and colleges.
In the sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, one of the main characters is the hologram Arnold Rimmer, a computer simulation of a dead man based on recordings of his memories and personality. Rimmer is famously a coward, but in the episode “Dimension Jump” the crew encounter “Ace” Rimmer, a heroic version of Arnold from an alternate universe. Before leaving on a dangerous test flight, he utters his now-famous catchphrase: “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.”
The Somebody’s Else’s Problem field originates in Douglas Adams’ third Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Its basic premise is that while making something invisible is impossible, its very easy to boost peoples’ natural tendency to ignore things they find hard to accept. Thus a device that generates an SEP field can run indefinitely on a 9 volt battery.
Die Fledermaus is a 1874 German operetta composed by Johann Strauss II, with a libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée. It’s based on the German farce Das Gefängnis (The Prison) by Julius Roderich Benedix. We previously mentioned it in episode 12, as Nanny mentions “die flabberghast” when they seemingly wander into the pages of Dracula.
Sailor Moon is the lead character in Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon), a manga and anime series from Japan that debuted in 1991. Usagi Tsukino is a school girl who uses a “sailor crystal” to magically transform into Sailor Moon, one of several “sailor scouts” who use their magical powers to protect the Earth from the forces of evil. Tuxedo Mask is a man wearing…er…a domino mask and a tuxedo. He initially appears mysteriously to help the Sailor Scouts, who don’t know that he’s Usagi’s school friend and love interest Mamoru Chiba, who also has a sailor crystal.
“Four Yorkshiremen” is a classic British comedy sketch originally written and performed for At Last the 1948 Show by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and was later made more famous when performed in live shows by members of Monty Python, including a performance for The Secret Policeman’s Ball featuring Rowan Atkinson. In the sketch, four wealthy Yorkshiremen compete to tell the most extreme stories of the poverty they experienced growing up.
“NPCs” are, in the parlance of roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, “non-player characters”: antagonist or supporting characters played by the Dungeon Master. The name derives from “player characters” or “PCs”, meaning the characters controlled by the other players – who are usually the protagonists of the game.
The Sydney Opera House, built on the Gadigal land of Bennelong Point in Darling Harbour, was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who won an international competition held by the New South Wales government in 1957. He quit the project in 1966, six years before the completed building was officially opened by the Queen in 1973. The official web site tells the story of the Opera House’s construction in depth.
Tripod vs the Dragon was a comedy musical written and performed by Australian trio Tripod, which began life in the US as Dungeons & Dragons: the Musical. The final version debuted at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2010. You can find the soundtrack album on Bandcamp.
Call Me by Your Name (2017) is a multi-award-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, based on a 2007 novel by André Aciman. It’s set in northern Italy in 1983, and is the coming-of-age story of teenager Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), who meets and falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate-student assisting Elio’s father.
Only wine made in the Champagne region of France is allowed to be marketed as Champagne; Australian winemakers have to do with the term “sparkling white”. At the time of recording, Australia was considering a European trade agreement which would impose similar restrictions on many other foodstuffs, include feta cheese.
The leader of the Magi in The Mummy – the action film starring Brendan Fraser which we’ve mentioned many, many times in previous episodes – is Ardeth Bay, played by Israeli actor Oded Fehr.
Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa is best known for playing Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, but was also Ronon Dex in Stargate: Atlantis, had a go at being Conan the Barbarian, and most recently played Aquaman on the big screen. He plays the character of Duncan Idaho in Denis Villeneuve’s new film version of Dune, due in 2020.
The character of Billy, introduced in the second season of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, is played by Dacre Montgomery. He has a poetry podcast called DKMH.
We’ll hopefully get to Carpe Jugulum in 2020.
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the modern term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD). The change seeks to clarify that a patient has distinct “personality states” rather than truly separate personalities, and it is far more common in films and other media than in real life. The way it is portrayed in film is seen as highly misleading and harmful by many mental health professionals, not least because most characters with DID are shown to have at least one personality which is sadistic, violent and dangerous.
The smaller Melbourne-based opera companies mentioned are Cordelia’s Potted Operas (the link is to their Facebook page), GBD Productions and BK Opera.
Norma is a 1831 Italian opera composed by Vincenzo Bellini, with a libretto by Felice Romani based on the play Norma, ou L’infanticide (Norma, or The Infanticide) by Alexandre Soumet. It’s a tragedy about Norma, a druidic priestess in Gaul during the Roman occupation (aka Asterix times), who is caught up in a love triangle with a Roman officer and her friend, another priestess. Melbourne Opera’s production opens on September 17, 2019.
You can read all about Victorian Opera’s under 30s program on their web site.
Amahl and the Night Visitors is a 1951 English opera in one act composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, who also wrote the libretto, originally for NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame program. It was the first opera written for US television, and an Australian version was broadcast in 1957. Amahl is a disabled boy whose family are visited by the three Magi, Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, who are seeking a place to rest on their long journey to bestow gifts on the newly born Jesus Christ.
Lorelei is a 2018 Australian operatic cabaret composed by Julian Langdon, with a libretto by Casey Bennetto and Gillian Cosgriff. It features the Lorelei, three sirens who begin to wonder if the men they lure to their deaths really all deserve to die. It was originally staged by Victorian Opera; an Opera Queensland season opens in March 2020.

#Pratchat24 Notes and Errata

08/10/2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

#Pratchat30 Notes and Errata

08/04/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for our special questions-only thirtieth episode, “Looking Widdershins“.

Widdershins is an old English word (not to be confused with an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. On the Discworld, it is one of the four cardinal directions, along with hubwards (towards the centre or hub of the Disc), rimwards (towards the edge or rim) and turnwise (in the direction of the Disc’s spin; the opposite direction to widdershins). Knowing this in year twelve really impressed Ben’s English teacher, who had never read any Pratchett.
We’ve listed a few solid options here for Discworld books to start with:
- Wyrd Sisters – Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, three witches from the country kingdom of Lancre, are forced to meddle in politics when their king is murdered by a Duke who cares nothing for the kingdom. If you like the idea of the Witches, this is probably the best book to start with. We discussed it in episode 4, “Enter Three Wytches“. As discussed, Equal Rites precedes it, but only features Granny. We covered Equal Rites in episode 25, “Eskist Attitudes“.
- Mort – the anthropomorphic personification of Death takes a gormless country lad as his apprentice. This is the first book to feature Death as a protagonist, though he’s more or less the B plot to Mort himself. Introduces many ideas, places and themes of the Discworld, and is arguably the first to have the familiar Discworld tone. We discussed it in episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“.
- Men at Arms – the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has its work cut out for it as racial tensions simmer between dwarfs and trolls, at the same time as a mysterious series of murders takes place. The second of the Watch books, we (and our future listeners) thought it a great enough introduction to the Discworld to pick it as the first one we discussed on Pratchat in episode 1, “Boots Theory“. The first Watch book is Guards! Guards!; it’s not essential to read it first, but it is a great read, even if the characters themselves are still finding their feet a little. We read it for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
- The Colour of Magic – failed “wizzard” Rincewind is forced to look after the Discworld’s first tourist, Twoflower, on a series of misadventures across the Disc. Still brilliantly funny, but much more a parody of sword and sorcery and high fantasy than establishing itself as its own thing, and with a definite different tone. Ends on a cliffhanger, making the second book, The Light Fantastic, the only direct sequel in the series. We discussed it for its 35th anniversary in episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“.
- Going Postal – con-man Moist von Lipwig is forced to revive the flagging fortunes of the Ankh-Morpork post office. A particular favourite of Liz’s, and a great intro as Moist is a new protagonist and not originally from Ankh-Morpork. It happens much later in the overall series than the other suggestions, but Moist returns in two later books, Making Money and Raising Steam.
The three live-action Discworld adaptations, all very faithful to the books, were produced by The Mob, a UK production company best known for its advertising work. They were originally broadcast on Sky1 in the UK in two parts, and are usually available in two parts wherever you can find them. They are currently available to stream via Amazon Prime Video. Terry Pratchett appears in a cameo role in all three productions, and many cast members reappear, though rarely in the same role.
- Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006) – Death has taken the place of the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas; his granddaughter Susan tries to get to the bottom of it. Starring Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey), Marc Warren (Hustle) and Ian Richardson as the voice of Death, plus a great supporting cast including David Jason, Nigel Planer and David Warner. It was first broadcast a week or so before Christmas, and is very faithful to the novel. We discussed the novel in episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
- Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – adapts both The Colour of Magic (see above) and its sequel The Light Fantastic, though it streamlines the plot and takes a few liberties. First broadcast over Easter, it stars David Jason as Rincewind, despite the fact that he’s a great deal older than the character of the books. Twoflower is played by Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings). The supporting cast includes David Bradley (Harry Potter, Doctor Who), Tim Curry, Jeremy Irons and Christopher Lee as the voice of Death.
- Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010) – an adaptation of the first Moist von Lipwig novel. Stars Richard Foyle (Coupling, Sabrina) as Moist, with David Suchet (Poirot) and Clare Foy (The Crown), plus a supporting cast including Charles Dance and Tamsin Grieg.
Cosgrove Hall actually made three animated Discworld adaptations, if you include the short Welcome to the Discworld, starring Christopher Lee as Death – a part he plays in all three animations – in a sequence based on the novel Reaper Man. They’re quite hard to find now, though we hear that if you search a certain popular video platform you might find them… They were sort of one show, originally broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 as 23-minute episodes and titled Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with a subtitle for each series specifying the book being adapted.
- Soul Music (1994, 7 episodes) – young bard Imp wants to be the greatest musician the Disc has ever known, but he should be careful what he wishes for… As “Music With Rocks In” sweeps the world, Death feels moved to intervene, and his granddaughter Susan is drawn in as well. As Ben mentions, the soundtrack is something special, especially fans of the Beatles or the history of rock and roll; it’s not on Spotify, but it is still available on Apple Music. We covered the book in episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
- Wyrd Sisters (1997, 6 episodes) is a faithful adaptation of the novel (see above) over six episodes, with the witches played wonderfully by Annette Crosbie (One Foot in the Grave), June Whitfield and Jane Horrocks (the latter two both probably best known to modern audiences from their supporting roles in Absolutely Fabulous). One of Ben’s comedy heroes, Eleanor Bron, plays the Duchess, and there’s some other great cast too.
There are definitely other Pratchett adaptations; the most notable would be Cosgrove Hall’s stop-motion adaptation of Truckers, Amazon Prime’s BBC co-production of Good Omens, and the upcoming BBC America series The Watch, though that seems more a loose interpretation than a direct adaptation. There have also been low-budget TV versions of Johnny and the Dead (for ITV) and Johnny and the Bomb (for the BBC). An animated feature of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is in production in Europe, though whether it will retain its Discworld setting is unknown. An adaptation of Discworld novel The Wee Free Men has been in pre-production with the Jim Henson Workshop, though there’s been little news of it since it was announced in 2016.
As Ben mentions in the footnote, Troll Bridge is an epic short film based on the short story about ageing Discworld hero Cohen the Barbarian. (We discussed the short story its based on in our first live episode, “A Troll New World“.) The licensing agreement for this fan production means there are pretty tight restrictions on how and where it can be sold or screened, so it seemed there was no way left to see it if you hadn’t already got on board. But it’s not so! At the time of writing, you can still become a member of the “Streaming Arena” and access the film – plus hours of bonus material – by visiting the Troll Bridge BackerKit page and following the instructions. (Do note that there’s a manual approval process, so access won’t be instant and might take a week or so.)
If you’d like to listen to Ook Club, see our Support Us page.
The Discworld Collector’s Library editions were first published from 2014 to 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, who only had rights to the books up to Jingo, which explains why initially only the first 21 books were available in this format. Penguin Random House have since continued the imprint for the later books, and now all of them are available except for the younger readers books – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and all the Tiffany Aching books, though the latter have had their own series of fancy new editions (which include dust jackets, much to Liz’s dismay). They retail for about £13 in the UK, and $27 AUD in Australia. The early ones weren’t available in the US or Canada for licensing reasons; we’re not sure what the situation is now. We could list an affiliate link, but instead we’d like to recommend you contact your local independent bookshop – they can order in anything you want, and they could really use your business right now. If you’re in Melbourne, this Broadsheet article lists some bookshops which were providing free local delivery (though it wouldn’t hurt to double-check if that’s still the case).
The Folio Society have been publishing deluxe, illustrated editions of books since 1947, including some extra special limited editions. Ben and Liz remembered correctly that they have published editions of both Mort and Small Gods, and they also have an edition of Good Omens.
Howl’s Moving Castle is a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of Sophie, the oldest of three sisters in a magical kingdom, who expects her life will be boring as it is always the youngest sister who has romantic adventures. Instead she ends up cursed by a Witch and working for the Wizard Howl, hoping to free his fire demon Calcifer so he will break her curse. The book was brilliantly (if fairly loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004. Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s famous 1932 dystopian novel which depicts a future society genetically engineered into castes and kept compliant and docile with drugs and sex.
The year of five books was 1990, during which Pratchett published Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings. He was no slouch in 1989 either, publishing four books: Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat. We’ve covered all nine of those books on Pratchat.
We’d like to apologise to listener Neil Webber (@RugbySkeptic on Twitter), who was actually the asker of the question about which books we thought were most politically on point! This was entirely an error at our end when collating questions from the various social media platforms.
We’ve covered many of the books mentioned in this middle section, including Jingo (“Leshp Miserablés”), Small Gods (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”), Feet of Clay (“Arsenic and Old Clays”), Lords and Ladies (“Midsummer (Elf) Murders”) and Maskerade (“The Music of the Nitt”).
Agnes Nitt does indeed appear again in Carpe Jugulum, as well as another later book, but we won’t say which because of slight spoiler possibilities.
We discussed Dodger way back in episode 6, “A Load of Old Tosh”, with guest David Astle.
We covered Moving Pictures in episode 10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”, and Soul Music in episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
Rhianna Pratchett was given official permission by her father to continue writing for the Discworld, but announced back in June 2015: “I don’t intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so”, and neither would Terry’s assistant Rob Wilkins. She also ruled out the possibility of publishing any of his unfinished works; they were later destroyed by crushing Pratchett’s hard drives under a steam roller, as per the stipulations of his will.
And Another Thing… is a sixth book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, written by Eoin Colfer with permission from Adams’ widow, Jane Belson. It was published in 2009 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first novel, and met with mixed reviews. It was adapted for radio as The Hexagonal Phase, incorporating some of Adams’ unused material.
The Rivers of London series of novels by Ben Aaronovitch follow the adventures of Constable Peter Grant, a police officer whose dreams of making detective are complicated when he meets a ghost and becomes apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale – the last official wizard in England. The series encompasses eight novels, two novellas and at least seven volumes of comics. Most of the novels contain at least one Pratchett reference, so Aaronovitch is clearly a fan.
Since there’s no significant Discworld character named Vincent, we are pretty sure that when Liz says “Vincent and Moist” she meant Leonard of Quirm and Moist.
The Dysk Theatre features in Wyrd Sisters, and rates a mention in Lords and Ladies and Thief of Time. The chief characters there are Olwyn Vitoller, proprietor; his adopted son Tomjon, a gifted actor; and the genius and always working dwarf playwright Hwel.
Johnny Maxwell is the protagonist of three of Pratchett’s books for middle grade readers. An ordinary thirteen year old boy with no wish for supernatural adventure, he nevertheless becomes the Chosen One destined to save a fleet of computer game aliens, speaks to the dead, and travels back in time. We’re covering these books this year, starting with Only You Can Save Mankind in episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”.
The Watch, as mentioned briefly above, is a new BBC America series currently in production in South Africa and expected to be released later this year. It is loosely based on the Discworld books about the City Watch, and stars Richard Armitage as Commander Sam Vimes. The wider casting, and the initial on-set photos so far released, suggest a very different interpretation of the characters and stories, with a more modern (though still fantastical) setting. We’re keen to see how it all works out.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a Netflix original series very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Douglas Adams. It takes the core concept of a “holistic detective” devoted to the idea of the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” and then runs in a very different direction. Despite this, Ben rather loved it for being its own thing. It ran for two seasons, each telling a different long story, with some plot elements carrying over between the two.
The Borrowers is a 1952 children’s fantasy novel written by English author Mary Norton, about a family of tiny people who secretively live in a house of normal-sized humans, “borrowing” what they need to survive. It was followed by four sequels between 1955 and 1982, and adapted into several television series and films.
Land of the Giants was a 1960s science fiction series produced by Irwin Allen (of Lost in Space fame), in which the passengers and crew of the sub-orbital commercial spacecraft Spindrift are sucked through a dimensional tear and crash on a planet of human-like aliens who are twelve times larger than humans.
You can find Nanny Ogg’s hand washing song in this video from the Australian Discworld Convention. It’s not her most offensive song, but probably strays into NSFW territory.
There have been several officially licensed Discworld board games (links are to entries on BoardGameGeek.com, aka BGG):
- Thud (2002) was the first official Discworld boardgame, and is based on the game Thud played by dwarfs and trolls in the novel, er…Thud. It plays like a modernised version of the Viking game Hnefnatafl: it uses a Chess-like symmetrical board (though this one is octagonal) and asymmetrical player pieces – one player controls 32 dwarfs, and the other eight trolls. Thud was designed by Trevor Truan with “liner notes” by Pratchett and pieces designed by “the Cunning Artificer” Bernard Pearson (now proprietor of the Discworld Emporium). After an initial limited release it had two big box editions, both now out of print. A third major edition, first released in 2009, comes in a cloth bag with a cloth board, and is available from the Discworld Emporium.
- Watch Out: Discworld Board Game (2004) was designed by Trevor Truan and published by the Cunning Artificer. Like Thud, it was an asymmetrical game with chess-like pieces, but the board was made of square cards representing Ankh-Morpork locations, and one player controlled eight thieves while the other controlled eight Watchmen.
- Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (2011) has the players secretly take on the roles of various Ankh-Morpork characters as factions vy for control of the city in the wake of Lord Vetinari’s disappearance. Designed by Martin Wallace for his company Treefrog Games, it’s the highest rated of the Discworld games on BGG. It’s now out of print, but Wallace’s 2019 game Nanty Narking is a new and slightly improved version of the same game with a new theme of Victorian London, replacing the famous Discworld characters with characters from the works of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and more.
- Guards! Guards! A Discworld Boardgame (2011) was designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are new recruits in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, sent to infiltrate one of the city’s guilds to retrieve the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo, which have been stolen from Unseen University.
- In The Witches: A Discworld Game (2012), also by Martin Wallace, players are trainee witches in Lancre dealing with the more everyday problems of the local folk. Notably it had rules for solo and cooperative play, as well as the competitive version. (I found multiple references suggesting Martin Wallace designed a third Discworld game, but without any details; if he was working on one it seems it was never finished, or at least never published.)
- Clacks: A Discworld Boardgame (2015) is also from Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are Clacks operators for the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, trying to win the race against Moist von Lipwig’s newly revitalised postal service. Includes rules for competitive and cooperative play. Still in print, so it might be available via your local game store (who needs your support right now); otherwise it’s also at the Discworld Emporium.
Though no version has ever been commercially released, BGG does list Cripple Mr Onion in its database – specifically the 1993 rules devised by Andrew Millard and Terry Tao, and originally posted online at alt.fan.pratchett. These rules are reproduced in later editions of The Discworld Companion, including the one titled Turtle Recall, and suggest players combine a deck of regular playing cards with a deck of Spanish cards (which use Tarot suits) to get the eight suits required. An alternative is “The Fat Pack” deck of cards from The Fat Pack Playing Card Company, designed in part to support play of Cripple Mr Onion. Its eight suits are Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Roses, Axes, Tridents and Doves. The company still has a web site, so we’re ordering some cards and will let you know how we go.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – one of Ben’s favourite books – is the Hugo Award winning 2004 debut novel from English author Susannah Clarke. Set in an 1800s England with a lost history of wizardry, it tells the story of two modern magicians destined to revive English magic: the bookish recluse Mr Norrell, and the idle gentleman Jonathan Strange. It was adapted by the BBC into a largely faithful seven part mini-series in 2015. A collection of short stories set in the same world, The Ladies of Grace-Adieu and Other Stories, was published in 2006.
You can find the famous Discworld reading guide diagram in high resolution on imgur here; the makers also have a Facebook page. HarperCollins also released a very similar official one on their Epic Reads blog. These don’t really tell you where to start, but they represent the various sub-series in clear visual style.
We talked about Interesting Times in our previous episode, “Great Rimward Land“.
The Victorian Discworld Klatch is the local Discworld fan group, who hold occasional meetings in Melbourne, Australia. You can find out more at their Facebook group. If you’re looking for fan groups in other parts of Australia, you can find a list on the Australian Discworld Convention site.
Stargates are the ancient technology in the film and various television series of the same name, which form stable wormholes between planets allowing for instantaneous travel. Jump by Sean Williams is the first in a trilogy of novels imagining a future Earth where an unlimited energy source has enabled a worldwide network of matter transporters, which has transformed human culture.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard’s first officer Will Riker discovers that when he was transported to safety from a dangerous situation eight years earlier, the transporter beam split and two Rikers were created – him on the rescue ship, and another one back on the planet. The philosophical implications of this are covered in Richard Hanley’s book The Metaphysics of Star Trek. The one trapped on the planet is rescued, and after a brief time spent with his transporter twin, decides to go by his middle name, Thomas, and start a new life. It…doesn’t end well.
The lemming-like animal Ben is thinking of is the vermine, which appears in footnotes and asides in several of the earlier Discworld novels.
The Casanova TV series starring David Tennant was written by Russell T Davies of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who fame, and produced for the BBC in 2005. Several actors from it also later appeared in Doctor Who.
Hail and Well Met is a podcast production team based in Perth, Western Australia, who make several audio drama shows.
The “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” can be summarised in this sentence from Men at Arms:
“A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”