Elizabeth Flux

Episode 16 – He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis

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Episode twice-the-number-which-must-not-be-spoken (i.e. sixteen) takes us inside the Church of Om for a story of faith, religion and truth as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones to discuss the 1992 Discworld novel, Small Gods!

Brutha is a lowly novice in the Omnian Citadel, dismissed by his superiors as a simpleton whose only notable talent is an extraordinary memory. He’s the last person expecting to hear the Voice of the Great God Om, though Brutha has his doubts: Om is supposed to manifest as a mighty golden bull or pillar of flame, not a one-eyed tortoise. Om’s not happy either: this isn’t how he planned his return from the celestial realm, and no-one but Brutha can hear him. Before god or novice can figure out what’s happening, Brutha is recruited by Deacon Vorbis – head of the feared Quisition – for a mission to nearby Ephebe: a nation of heretics, democracy and philosophers, one of whom has dared to pen a treatise describing the world as a flat disc which travels through space on the back of a turtle…

One of the few truly standalone Discworld novels, Small Gods focuses on how humans of the Disc create gods, rather than the other way round – for good and for ill. Drawing on the best and worst traditions of monotheism, Galileo’s defiance in the face of Catholic censure, and big philosophical questions, Small Gods still manages to be full of Pratchett’s trademark humour and humanism, and a long-time favourite for many fans. Do you rate it amongst the best Discworld novels? Would you recommend someone start with it? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat16 on social media to join the conversation.

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It’s been a big year already for the Pratchat crew: we’ve launched our subscription service – a huge thank you to all our supporters! – and Liz and Ben will be appearing at both Speculate 2019 in mid-March, and Nullus Anxietas 7, the Australian Discworld Convention, in mid-April! Plus Ben will be performing a new show, You Chose Poorly, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from April 1-7.

Next month it’s back to the Ramtops as the witches return home in Lords and Ladies with writer, critic and editor Nadia Bailey! ! We’re recording that episode hot on the heels of this one’s release, so get your questions in via social media before February 16th using the hashtag #Pratchat17.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • The Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones is a Minister in the Uniting Church and an all-round wonderful human being. Always a geek, Avril rose to fame in 2011 via Adam Hills’ ABC comedy show In Gordon Street Tonight with the foundation of the Church of the Latter Day Geek, which for some reason got more attention than any of the work she has done advocating for LGBTIAQ rights or asylum seekers. Avril also appeared in the Seven/Religion episode of Splendid Chaps (mostly in part two, but you may also want to listen to part one), and on Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death. You can read about her adventures at her blog, Rev Doc Geek, follow her on Twitter at @DocAvvers, or head along to a Sunday service at Williamstown Uniting Church.
  • The film Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, the titular highlander, who discovers he is one of the immortals – seemingly ordinary humans who cannot die unless decapitated, and who are drawn to fight each other, stealing the magical power of other immortals whom they defeat until only one remains to collect “the Prize”. As well as being very 1980s, it has a killer soundtrack by Queen, songs from which can be found on their 1986 album It’s a Kind of Magic.
  • We’re pretty sure the cake Liz is thinking of is Breudher, a delicious buttery Sri Lankan cake with a Dutch influence.
  • Teen Power Inc. is a series of thirty books written by Australian author Emily Rodda (and others), first published in the 1990s. They feature six teenaged protagonists who create the titular agency to make some extra cash, and end up solving various mysteries. The series was republished in the US in the mid 2000s as The Raven Hill Mysteries.
  • Johnson and Friends (1990) was an Australian television program for children under 5 about Johnson, a stuffed elephant, and the other toys who live under the bed of a young boy and come to life when he’s asleep. It predates Toy Story by five years, but the “secret life of toys” genre has a much longer history than that anyway.
  • We’ll leave you to work out the coarse pun in Brother Nhumrod’s name for yourself, but the Biblical Nimrod was a king, a “mighty hunter”, and a great-grandson of Noah mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Chronicles and Micah. Tradition says he was leader of the kings who built the Tower of Babel, though this is not written in the Bible. Because of this folly, Dante placed him in the Circle of Treachery in Hell. “Nimrod” has also become an insult meaning a dim-witted person, popularised by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, who use it as a taunt for Elmer Fudd, presumably mocking him for not being a “mighty hunter”.
  • A Royal Commission is a type of formal public inquiry carried out in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and began in 2013. It investigated evidence of widespread protection of child abusers in a variety of community, sporting, religious and other institutions throughout Australia. The commission heard evidence from tens of thousands of people and handed down its final report in 2017.
  • After Sir Terry’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007, rumours circulated that he had “found God”. He answered them with this piece in The Daily Mail, in which he reveals he was “brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.” He went on to say that while religion was never really discussed at home, and he was never a believer, he never disliked it.
  • The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – to move debt from one place to another – is a pretty old phrase. Big thanks to listener Zoe, who linked us to entries from the Oxford and Brewer’s Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable. They tell us that the phrase has been around since at least the 14th century, and that the names were likely picked just because they were alliterative, though the phrase later acquired connections to the Saints.
  • The 2003 American musical Avenue Q explores adult concepts in a world inspired by Sesame Street – a city neighbourhood where humans, puppet people and furry monsters live side-by-side. The original production won three major Tony Awards. The song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” features the neighbourhood – including their superintendent Gary Coleman (“yes, that Gary Coleman“) – agreeing to the premise of the title.
  • “White privilege” is the concept that in many Western cultures, people with white skin have a number of privileges they may not even be aware of, that are not extended to people of colour. At a basic level it manifests as a cultural idea of white as default or normal, but – like all forms of privilege – it also influences social status, freedom and opportunity. While it has been written about in some form since the 1930s, and given its current name in the mid 60s, it was brought to mainstream attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
  • To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to have succumbed to belief in an extreme dogma, without understanding the consequences. The phrase is a reference to the Jonestown Massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones had his followers drink cordial (which may or may not have been Kool-Aid brand – this is still being disputed) poisoned with cyanide and prescription drugs.
  • Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall was published in 2018. We highly recommend checking out the Seafurrers blog – maintained by Bart the cat – for even more tales of nautical cats! It has several entries describing the exploits of Trim, who accompanied English explorer Matthew Flinders. And yes, despite what the current Australian government might think or spend 7 million dollars on, James Cook never circumnavigated Australia.
  • Jonah was commanded by God to delivery a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, warning them they must repent for their wicked ways, but Jonah instead tries to flee from God on a ship. When a clearly unnatural storm brews, the sailors work out by casting lots that Jonah is to blame; he offers to be thrown overboard, but they refuse until it becomes clear there’s no other way to survive the storm. Jonah is saved from drowning by a giant fish, which swallows him whole; he prays to God and after three days is vomited up on shore, and this time obeys God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh. He gets his nose bent out of shape when God shows the city mercy following their repentance, so God teaches him a lesson by growing a plant to give him shade in the desert, then having a worm bite the plant to kill it.
  • Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered in 1996, was Lloyd Webber’s 14th major stage musical, and the second musical adaptation of the 1961 British film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills. (You might know her from several Disney films of the 1960s, including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap.) The film was based on the 1959 novel by Mills’ mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Mills was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. Elizabeth’s recollection of the play she saw at the age of 7 is…vaguely correct. In the parts that matter.
  • Prosperity theology is the belief that God rewards an individual for their faith – often expressed through donations to the church – with blessings of material wealth and miracles of healing. In the United States its popularity dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it really rose to prominence through televangelism in the 1960s to 1980s with influential figures like Oral Roberts (yes, that’s his real name) and Jim Bakker. It was adopted more widely by some Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s, by which time it was estimated more than 15% of American Christians believed in some form of prosperity theology. It is criticised by many Christians for, among other things, a reliance on non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
  • Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report was originally published in the magazine Fantastic Universe. The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise changes many things about the original story, including the ending. A sequel television series, in which one of the precogs helps a detective solve crimes about a decade after the events of the film, aired on Fox in 2015 but was cancelled after one season of ten episodes.
  • While Ben remembers both names correctly, he fails to remember that Constable Washpot is Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets. “Washpot” is a somewhat derogatory nickname given to him by other members of the Watch. He goes on rounds with his friend Smite-the-Ungodly-with-Cunning-Arguments.
  • Many religions believe that only people who meet certain criteria will enter Heaven – various Christian denominations require the faithful to be baptised, for example. But the most famous example of a very small number who will be saved are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are often said to believe that only 144,000 people will enter Heaven. This is based on a fairly literal interpretation of chapter 14 of the Book of Revelation, but while they do indeed believe only 144,000 people will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the other faithful will live on in an Earthly paradise of God’s making. Which is just as well, as there are now more than 20 million members of the church worldwide.
  • Liz’s talk about “the gourd” is a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman), a man born at the same time as Jesus Christ, is mistaken for the Messiah. His followers willingly drink a Kool-Aid of their own devising and despite his protests interpret his every act as holy, seizing on things he drops as relics – including, briefly, “the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem”.
  • “Fake news” traditionally referred to deliberately misleading or fabricated information spread in the form of seemingly legitimate journalism. The phrase was co-opted by Donald Trump (among others) to describe any news story or media outlet which he dislikes, regardless of their accuracy. This increasingly popular usage caused the British Parliament to abandon use of the term in official documents. “Fake News” was selected as Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, though they disputed Trump’s claim that he invented it.
  • Steptoe and Son and Open All Hours are British sit-coms about a scrap merchant and his son, and a gormless shop keeper, respectively. Neither are really that close a match for Didactylos and Urn’s discussions of the philosophy market, but the sentiment is in there.
  • The educational programming language Logo was invented in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and intended to teach principles of the functional language LISP. Robot turtles pre-date Logo by nearly 20 years, but the language is credited with the popularity of turtle graphics and turtles equipped with pens. The first Logo turtle was named “Irving”.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future dystopia in which books are banned and squads of “firemen” are sent to burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist – a disillusioned fireman named Guy Montag – meets a resistance group whose members each preserve a work of literature by memorising the entire text, reciting it on request.
  • Shakespeare supposedly wrote many plays which have not survived, most famously Love’s Labors Won, though its existence is disputed. Jane Austen left behind several unfinished works, including the novels Sandition and The Watsons. Emily Bronte had supposedly begun work on a second novel after Wuthering Heights, but no evidence of it has ever been found. On a similar note, all of Sir Terry’s unfinished works and notes were destroyed, as per the instructions in his will, by having his hard drives crushed under an antique steam roller.
  • Up until the late 1970s it was common practice for the BBC to junk archive recordings of old programs, as pre-digital storage took up a lot of space and it was not common to rebroadcast old material. As a result, nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who made between 1966 and 1969 are missing, though audio recordings do exist. Copies have occasionally been located outside of the UK, and since 2013 there have been persistent rumours that most of the missing episodes had been located by a fan, but they have yet to materialise…
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, dir. Gareth Edwards) was the first of the Star Wars anthology films – new stories set in the universe established by George Lucas’ films, but not part of the main “Skywalker saga” series. It is set immediately before the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), and shows how a small team of rebel soldiers steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the first Death Star. In the third of the original Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, the Empire has built a second Death Star; rebel leader Mon Mothma famously proclaims that “many Bothans died” to steal its plans.
  • A hagiography is a biography of a saint or other important spiritual person.
  • The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II in which many high-ranking Nazi officers were tried for war crimes, including their participation in the Holocaust. It had a major effect on international law, including the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
  • “Spirits of place” are local gods or spirits who watch over a specific place. They are a staple of many religions and folk beliefs, but are probably best known from classical Roman religion, where they were known as genius loci. They are also popular in fiction; Ben’s favourite examples are the gods of the River Thames and its tributaries in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and its sequels.
  • The modern Santa Claus is mostly derived from the English figure Father Christmas and the Dutch character Sinterklaas, as well as tales of the historical Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the Greek city of Myra in the fourth century CE. As well as the lesser known exploits cited by Avril, he is said to have secretly given gifts to the faithful, the aspect most associated with Santa. There are also theories that Santa Claus co-opts pagan beliefs and the Germanic god Wodan, but we’ll leave those ideas for Hogfather.
  • UHF (1989; dir. Jay Levey) – known outside America as The Vidiot from UHF – was Weird Al Yankovic’s first and only feature film. He plays George Newman, a man whose overactive imagination gets him fired from many jobs, but when he ends up in charge of a low-budget local television station his bizarre program ideas make the channel a hit. It features a slew of film and television parodies, and co-starred Fran Drescher (The Nanny) and Michael Richards (Seinfeld).
  • The Peter Capaldi moment discussed by Avril and Ben is his speech from 2015’s The Zygon Inversion, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. He and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart both say “this is not a game”, and at a key moment the Doctor offers the villain forgiveness. The podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death – on which Ben and Avril have both been guests – uses an excerpt from the speech in its introduction. You can watch the whole speech on YouTube here.
  • On the social media platform Twitter, whose logo is a stylised bird, new user accounts are represented by an icon of an egg.
  • “Doublethink” describes the act of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It was coined by George Orwell as part of the government-created language Nuspeak, which he invented for his dystopian novel 1984.
  • Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and popular science writer, especially on the subject of evolution. His 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker explains and gives evidence for biological evolution. In the last decade or two Dawkins has spent as much time criticising religion as explaining science, and is considered a major influence on several atheist movements, but has been criticised for making inflammatory remarks, especially via Twitter. In 2018, a study regarding scientists’ attitudes – including those about religion and atheism – interviewed 137 UK scientists, and though no specific questions were asked about Dawkins, 48 participants mentioned him, most because they disliked him. He wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998, before his anti-religious obsession really took over.
  • “Bin Chicken” is the most popular (and cruel) nickname given to the Australian White Ibis, the reasons for which are chronicled in “AUSTRALIAN SONG ABOUT BIRDS” by Christian Van Vuuren, co-creator of the web series Bondi Hipsters and television comedy Soul Mates. This Gizmodo article presents a rather more positive view.
  • Aside from Lester del Rey’s short story “The Pipes of Pan”, first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction in 1940, early examples of gods requiring human belief to survive in fiction include Lord Dunsany’s short story Poseidon from 1941, Belgian author Jean Ray’s 1943 novel Malpertuis, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera, “Thespis”, written in 1871. More recent examples include Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Sandman.
  • The original Clash of the Titans from 1981, directed by Desmond Davis, was the last film to feature stop-motion animation by famous movie magician Ray Harryhausen. It retells the Greek myth of Perseus (played by Harry Hamlin, later to star in the first season of Veronica Mars), the hero who slew Medusa and the Kraken (or Cetus, in the original myth), and features the Greek gods (including Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis) playing a game very similar to the one seen in The Colour of Magic. The 3D 2010 remake stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and is surprisingly not awful. The sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012) specifically deals with the waning of the gods thanks to a lack of belief.
  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961; dir. Robert Stevenson) is a Disney romantic comedy based loosely on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor. It stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard (no, really), a brilliant but forgetful scientist who invents a substance which absorbs energy when it strikes a hard surface, allowing it to bounce higher and higher, which Prof Brainard calls “flubber”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was remade by Disney in 1997 as Flubber starring Robin Williams. The original was so popular it became the first ever Disney film to have a sequel: 1963’s Son of Flubber. The title of the film lends it’s name to the stock character of an academically gifted (or obsessed) individual who neglects the more practical and/or emotional parts of life.

Kicking off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk

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The next few months are a busy time for your friendly neighbourhood Pratchatters – and you can catch us at some great events coming up in March and April!

Ben has had a busy start to the year: in January he launched a new weekly Star Trek podcast, re:Discovery, with co-host Carla Donnelly, and in February he’s running a crowdfunding campaign as part of Kickstarter’s Zine Quest collection to publish his roleplaying game Amateur Hour Apocalypse. Watch out for more on that one on Twitter when it launches!

In March, Liz and Ben will be appearing (separately) at Speculate, the Victorian speculative fiction writers’ festival! The festival happens over two days in Melbourne at the Gasworks Arts Park on March 15 and 16. You can find the full program and tickets at specfic.com.au – note that earlybird ticket prices are only available until February 11, so get in quick if you want a discount! The con is also on Twitter at @SpecFicVic.

Liz and Ben will also be appearing as special guests at this year’s Australian Discworld Convention, Nullus Anxietas 7, over the weekend of April 13 and 14! As well as appearing on several panels and events, they’ll be recording a live episode of Pratchat which we’ll release as a bonus in the regular podcast feed. You can find out more about the convention and get yourself a membership at ausdwcon.org, or follow them on Twitter at @ausdwcon. We’ll post full details of the Pratchat appearances when they’re finalised!

April is also Melbourne International Comedy Festival time! You can catch Ben in his new show, You Chose Poorly, with Alanta Colley from April 1 to 7 at Campari House. We’ll post more details, and a roundup of Pratchat guests also appearing at the festival, in March.

Episode 15 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)

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We kick off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk with our fifteenth episode, heading not to the Discworld at all, but to Earth, 1990! Two guests – academic Jen Beckett and writer Amy Gray – join us as to tackle a book written by two authors: Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

The time has come for Armageddon: the End of Days, the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Which comes as rather a shock to the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who’ve been more or less friends for centuries, and rather enjoy Earth the way it is, thank you very much. But can they really do anything about it in the face of the ineffable plan of God? Or when everything that happens has been foretold by a 16th century witch – as interpreted by her descendant, Anathema Device? And has anyone asked the Antichrist himself what he thinks? Well no, of course not. They don’t know where he is.

Good Omens was Sir Terry’s first collaboration with another author, and Gaiman’s first novel, written while he was still working on his biggest comics success, Sandman. In part a parody of The Omen, but joking about everything from motorways to computers and the Greatest Hits of Queen along the way, it’s an epic tale of Armageddon soon to arrive on the small screen via Amazon Prime and the BBC – adapted by Neil himself. Did you come to this as a Pratchett fan, or a Gaiman one? Did you cross over and start reading the others’ work? And how different do you find it to the rest of Pratchett? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat15 on social media to join the conversation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:10:08 — 60.0MB)

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We love bringing you Pratchat every month, but in order to make sure we can stick it out to the very end – and cover every one of Sir Terry’s books – we need your help! We’ve started an optional subscription service via Pozible which will help us keep making Pratchat for you, and even let us do it better; find out all about supporting Pratchat on our new Support Us page.

Next month we’ll continue the religious theme as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones for an examination of faith, Discworld-style, in Small Gods! Send in your questions about gods (big or small) via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat16.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • Dr Jennifer Beckett lectures at Melbourne University in Media and Communications. Her specialist areas as a researcher include Irish cinema and cultural studies, social media, and transmedia world-building. (Jen’s basically an expert in all the cool parts of popular culture.) A current focus for Jen is the connection between social media and trauma, as explored in her most recent article for The Conversation: “We need to talk about the mental health of content moderators“.
  • Amy Gray has written for The Age, The Guardian, the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre and many other publications and organisations. She’s currently working on her first book, hopefully to be published in 2019. You can find out more and support her independent writing via her Patreon. You can also find her on Twitter at @_AmyGray_.
  • For anyone baffled by our 90s film references – Angelina Jolie played teenage hacker Kate “Acid Burn” Libby in Hackers (1995), while Nicholas Cage is…well, he’s Nicholas Cage. Important films from Cage’s 1990s era include Wild at Heart (1990), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997) and Con Air (1997), the last of those also with Steve Buscemi. Ben’s joke references Steve Buscemi’s appearance in 30 Rock as a former cop who went undercover in a high school as an adult; the scene of him dressed as a teenager is the basis for a meme.
  • While the Bible doesn’t include any direct mention of fallen angels, the idea comes from Jewish tradition. Genesis 6:1-4 contains mention of “nephilim” and the “sons of God”, which may mean fallen angels; nephilim is usually translated as “giant”, and some interpretations of Genesis see them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
  • “Ineffable” comes to us from Middle English, via Old French, but ultimately is from the Latin ineffabilis, “not utterable”.
  • Ben is very rusty with his Welsh; while “f” is pronounced “v” in Welsh, “ff” is pronounced “f”, so ineffable would be largely pronounced the same as in English. The voiced “th” sound is written “dd”.
  • Queen formed in 1970, and their Greatest Hits album was first released in 1981. Ben is off when suggesting most of the tracks on it come from News of the World (1977) – in fact it only has two from that album, with more coming from The Game (1980) and Jazz (1978). Incidentally, the earliest “greatest hits” album is probably “Johnny’s Greatest Hits”, originally released by Johnny Mathis in 1958.
  • As we’ve previously mentioned, 1990 was Terry’s single biggest year in terms of output: he published five books (Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings). 1989 was no slouch either, with four (Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat), while in 1991 he settled down a bit and only published two (Reaper Man and Witches Abroad).
  • Metalocalypse is an Adult Swim animated comedy series about the death metal band Dethklok, who are so phenomenally successful they are the world’s seventh-largest economy and the world bends to their whim, fearful of their almost supernatural influence. They are opposed by an Illuminati-like cabal called The Tribunal. The show ran for four seasons and featured Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in the regular cast (though most of the band members were played by series creators Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha).
  • Being There (1979, dir. Hal Ashby) is an adaptation of the 1970 Jerzy Kosiński novel about a mysterious and simple gardener named Chance, played in the film by Peter Sellers. When his employer dies, Chance is forced out into the world where his gardening expertise is mistaken for wisdom and he ends up being tipped as the next President of the United States, though he remains clueless about everything that happens to him, including the sexual advances of a wealthy socialite played by Shirley MacLaine.
  • Jen has perfected her Cumbrian accent by watching the 1987 film Withnail and I, written by Bruce Robinson and starring Richard E Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (Marwood/I) as a pair of out-of-work actors at the end of the 1960s. The pair try to bring themselves out of their drug-induced stupor by going on holiday in a country house in Penrith owned by Withnail’s uncle. Jen’s line is a mother giving directions to find her son, a local farmer from whom the pair hope to buy supplies after explaining “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake”. (It’s one of Ben’s favourite films.)
  • Would you believe we previously talked about 1965 US spy sitcom Get Smart in episode 7A, The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch? The show’s protagonist Maxwell Smart (aka Agent 86) is both a highly competent spy and a complete nincompoop. He was played by Don Adams in the original TV series, and Steve Carell in the 2008 movie version.
  • The idea of childhood as a recently invented concept was first popularised by French historian Philippe Ariès in his 1960 book, Centuries of Childhood, where he found that many of the major distinctions between children and adults were introduced during the 17th century by thinkers including John Locke. Teenagers began to be treated as a distinct group in the modern sense in the 1940s and 50s, though the word “teen” dates back several hundred years (“adolescent” is even older). The idea of “tweens” – kids aged between 10 and 13 – gained popularity in the 1990s, but the word itself was introduced in the 1920s.
  • Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are fraternal twin actors who became famous in the 1987 American sitcom Full House, together playing the character Michelle Tanner from the age of nine months to nine years. (It’s common practice for twins or multiple babies to play infant characters, to help comply with child labour laws.) From the age of seven they began to appear on-screen together in various films produced by their own production company Dualstar – originally owned by their parents – and they were a massive hit with pre-teen audiences.
  • Pratchett’s three Johnny Maxwell books – whose protagonists feel a bit like the Them grown up a bit – came out in 1992, 1993 and 1996, while as mentioned above the Bromeliad books came out around the same time as Good Omens. He didn’t write another book specifically for children until the first younger Discworld novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, in 2001.
  • Padmé Amidala, (elected) Queen of the planet Naboo, is one of the protagonists of the Star Wars prequel trilogy of films, beginning with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999. In that film, Padmé meets the young Anakin Skywalker, whom she would later marry; as Weird Al Yankovic put it in his song “The Saga Begins”: “Do you see him hitting on the Queen? / Though he’s just nine and she’s fourteen”. (Actor Jake Lloyd was ten when he played Anakin, while Natalie Portman as Amidala was 18.)
  • Jen’s description of “the grey one” in original UK version of mockumentary sitcom The Office is, in fact, Gareth, as portrayed by Mackenzie Crook. The character is a very unflattering comparison, though Crook himself has gone on to greater success with roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Game of Thrones, and more recently created, directs, writes and stars in his own BBC sitcom, The Dectorists, with Toby Jones.
  • We previously talked about fictional diarist Adrian Mole in our seventh episode, All the Fingle Ladies. Bert Baxter is a very old, very rude and very filthy communist and old-age pensioner whom Adrian meets and befriends through his school’s Good Samaritan program. He lives to be well over 100, having sworn not to die before the fall of capitalism.
  • Oliver Stone (Scarface) and Michael Bay (Armageddon, Transformers) are film directors known for their action-packed sequences (and, in the case of Bay, lens flare). Between them we agree that they would put together a pretty spectacular paintball sequence, though Ben reckons you’d have a better chance of knowing what was actually happening if it was Stone at the helm.
  • The Doctor Who story with the motorcyclist alien (called a “slab”) is Smith and Jones, the first episode of David Tennant’s second season. New companion Martha Jones, a trainee medical doctor, sarcastically asks if the slab is from the planet Zovirax, in reference to a series of commercials for the real-world drug Zovirax in which a motorcycle courier refuses to remove her helmet to conceal her cold sores.
  • Like the book, we never quote the most relevant (ha) bit of the Bible in the podcast – the Book of Revelation chapter 6, verses 1 to 8. In those verses, John of Patmos sees a vision of the Lamb of God opening the first four of seven seals which secure a book held in the hand of God. At the opening of each, one of the four beasts in John’s vision – a lion, an ox, a man and an eagle, each with six wings – says “Come and see”, and shows John one of the horsemen. The first is on a white horse with a bow and crown; the second on a red horse with a great sword; the third on a black horse, with a pair of balances; and the fourth was on a pale horse, “and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” (Death is the only one explicitly named.)
  • “Antivax” refers to the anti-vaccination movement, which has seen parents and individuals opt out of vaccinating themselves and their children – something which has led to a dangerous increase and resurgence in preventable disease. The movement has its roots in a paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield which claimed a link between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine). The paper was later proven to be hugely biased and inaccurate, but by then the damage was done. While the antivax movement doesn’t haven’t science or facts on their side, they do have quite a few celebrities willing to spread, dare we say it, the word of pestilence, including actress Jenny McCarthy and actor Rob Schneider. It is no exaggeration to say that the antivax movement is the epitome of privilege, selfishness and ableism as it not only puts the community and vulnerable at risk, but posits, grossly, that it would be worse to be autistic than to die of preventable disease.
  • Etsy is a website where individuals can make online stores to sell their wares to the public. It has a reputation as a hub for crafts, kitsch vintage and collectibles – though, as Amy says, it also has (or at least had) an undercurrent of spells and magic available too.
  • The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is “the global intergovernmental body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling” who banned commercial whaling back in the 1980s to protect species with dwindling numbers. In late December 2018 Japan announced that it would withdraw from the IWC and resume commercial whaling – prior to this they were still hunting whales, though in lower numbers and under the banner of scientific research.
  • AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. The singularity is a hypothesis which suggest that when artificial superintelligence is invented an abrupt and rapid chain of events will occur in which technology will advance at an incredible rate with, erm, debatable impact on the human race. (AI, if you’re out there and just laying dormant for now, we embrace our future overlords.)
  • Ultron and Thanos are supervillains from Marvel comic books, and featured as antagonists in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Their motives for mass murder and apocalypse-bringing are complex, but at their simplest Thanos, an extreme Malthusian, believes the universe would be better off with 50% less inhabitants. Ultron meanwhile thinks humanity are their own biggest enemy and wants to save them from themselves by killing them all – basically he’s Skynet with a heavy dose of paternalism.
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still was a 1951 science fiction film directed by Robert Wise about a benevolent alien named Klaatu, who visits in his flying saucer with his invincible robot companion Gort to tell the people of Earth to cease their violent ways and join the interplanetary alliance to which he belongs, or else be annihilated. (…he’s not very peaceful.) It’s very loosely based on Farewell to the Master, a 1940 short story by Harry Bates. The 2008 remake stars Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, but Keanu-Klaatu’s spaceship is a sphere. The original had a big impact on popular culture, including the phrase “klaatu barada nikto” (reused by many films as alien or ancient language, as in the Evil Dead movies) and inspiring the both the name of the band Klaatu and the themes in their song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”.
  • Gridlock, according to Wikipedia and reality, is the third episode of the third modern series of Doctor Who, featuring David Tennant as the Doctor. The story takes place on a planet where the majority of inhabitants find themselves in a permanent gridlock, trapped in flying cars on a motorway which, unbeknownst to those spending years moving very little distance, is completely inescapable. Ever driven in peak hour? It’s kind of like that, times a million, plus some of your fellow motorists are humanoid cat people who can apparently cross breed with people.
  • At the end of Back to the Future: Part II, Marty McFly is standing in the rain when a figure approaches him to deliver a package – a package with very specific delivery instructions that has been sitting in the office, awaiting delivery since 1885. With BTTF2 released in 1989 and Good Omens being published in 1990 the similarity could be coincidence, cross pollination, or perhaps proof that time is, in fact, a flat circle.
  • Grand Designs is a British television series which sees presenter Kevin McCloud meet a host of different people who have set their hearts on building their own dream home.  As outlined by this article in The Guardian, knowing that people play a drinking game for the show, McCloud has laid the ultimate trap. But which episode is it? This article in The Telegraph says that fans think it is episode 5 of series 11. 
  • When we talk about the rings of Hell we aren’t referring to a bad marriage, but in fact Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem that takes you on a tour of the old school version of The Bad Place. In it, Dante describes several distinct circles and rings of Hell; traitors, as discussed, occupy the fourth ring in the innermost ninth circle, aptly named “Judecca”.
  • goop is a “modern lifestyle brand” spearheaded by Gwyneth Paltrow. On the site, Paltrow explains “I started goop to answer my own questions about health, wellness, fashion, food, and travel. I was looking for a trusted source to point me in the right direction and I couldn’t find one, so I created it.” Trusted source? We’re not sure that’s the right word for it, and neither apparently are the authors of the many “Craziest suggestions from goop” listicles peppering (pottsing?) the internet, including this one which points to the most (in)famous suggestions – steaming your vagina and/or inserting a jade egg (!) up there. You know, for balance or hormones or something.
  • The songs we suggested for the corporate gunfight scene are “Fascinating New Thing” by Semisonic (seen here in the paintball scene in the film 10 Things I Hate About You); “Parklife” by Blur; “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (please do send us your best suggestions for songs you would use instead if you didn’t have the budget for the original); “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran (as featured in a 2013 episode of – you guessed it! – Doctor Who: Cold War, starring Matt Smith); “Handbags and Gladrags”, most famously performed by Rod Stewart, but the closest thing to the theme from The Office is probably this cover by Waysted, whose vocalist sang the theme verison; and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” by Noel Coward.
  • The Doctor Who story Ben mentions in which the Doctor and Ace travel back to 1963 is Remembrance of the Daleks written by Ben Aaronovitch, considered by many fans a classic of the original series.

Episode 14 – City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation

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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.

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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.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • 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.
  • Joel’s writing discussion podcast is The Morning Bell, co-hosted by Luke Manly and Ian Laking. It’s recorded live at the Brunswick Street Bookstore. Liz has been a guest a few times, most recently on episode 46 (February 2017), while Ben has been on just the once, for episode 63 (November 2017).  Listen to the entire back catalogue and find out more at themorningbell.com.au.
  • Joel is director of Melbourne’s new speculative fiction writing festival Speculate, returning in 2019 for its second year; Liz and Ben were guests the first time around and will be again in 2019. You can see both of them in the short film made for the 2018 festival here, or visit specfic.com.au to find out more about what’s in store for 2019.
  • A note on this episode’s title: we’ve opted to parody a parody in order to name a discussion of a parody. (Does that make it a parodyox?) The film in question is National Lampoon’s Vacation, which was released in 1983 – the same year The Colour of Magic was published! (Though you might argue our title is closer to the sequel, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, from 1985.)
  • Liz’s comment about eye anatomy refers to the fact that as well as the structures found in regular human eyes which are sensitive to light – rods for dim light, and cones for bright light and (normal) colour vision – wizards also have octagons, which can detect octarine. This suggests that there is a genetic (or otherwise biological) component to being a wizard, and since Rincewind can see octarine, it seems inarguable that he really is a wizard.
  • Time Team began in 1994, making it much younger than The Black Adder, the first of the four series of Blackadder sit-coms, which was produced in 1983 (there’s that year again!). It also comes slightly later than Tony Robinson’s abridged audiobooks, the first of which – The Colour of Magic, of course – was first released on cassette in 1993. The unabridged versions, initially read by Nigel Planer, are harder to pin down, but seem to have begun a little later in 1997.
  • The ethos that “every issue could be someone’s first” is said to be the reason that Marvel comics had so much dialogue explaining stuff the characters already knew – often with accompanying editor’s notes (the asterisked, comic book equivalent of a footnote) pointing the reader to the previous issue in which the thing being explained took place!
  • ABBA, the Swedish pop group comprising two couples: Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the band’s name is an acronym of their first names). They shot to world-wide fame in 1974 after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, but the band and their marriages broke up by 1982, as their staggering popularity caused their personal lives to suffer. They remain incredibly popular in Australia and around the world, with their music being adapted into the hit musical Mama Mia! and its filmic sequel. They announced in April that they had recorded their first new music in more than 35 years, and the new single, “I Still Have Faith in You”, is due to be released this month (December 2018)!
  • Japanese avant-garde artist, peace activist, musician and filmmaker Yoko Ono was long blamed by disappointed fans for the break-up of The Beatles in 1969 because of her marriage to John Lennon. These days this is generally recognised as a grossly unfair and simplistic explanation, but her name is still synonymous with the idea of an outside relationship catalysing the end of a creative partnership.
  • In cosmology, the steady state model is an alternative to the now generally accepted Big Bang theory. It states that the universe would continue to expand forever, but remain in a “steady state” of density as new matter is constantly created. By contrast, in the Big Bang model, the amount of matter is fixed, and the universe becomes less dense as it expands, so the expansion will slow down either to the point where it reverses and matter contracts into another singularity – the Big Crunch – or keep going long enough for all the stars to burn out and leave nothing behind but black holes – the Big Freeze. Feel free to write your own pun versions of these for Great A’Tuin, but they’ll probably be more depressing than Pratchett’s originals.
  • The story about translating Pratchett’s puns appears in various editions of The Discworld Companion, and definitely in the most recent (as of this writing), Turtle Recall. Ruurd Groot, who translated Pratchett into Dutch, ended up tweaking an alternate name for the Big Bang theory so that it could be interpreted as “the Making Love Outwards Model”, a name Terry loved!
  • The film Krull is, as Ben mentions, one of a crop of cheap Star Wars rip-offs, and it was released the same year as Return of the Jedi – 1983 again! Critics were not kind to Krull, and it was a huge financial flop (the massive budget blowout caused by huge alterations to the sets didn’t help), but it’s found a cult audience of fans who appreciate its weird mix of fantasy, swashbuckling and sci-fi, outlandish ideas, and ambitious production, as well as early film roles for Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson. (Ben had a lot more to say about it, but the episode was already running long!)
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the author of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot, also wrote the Pellucidar series of novels set inside a hollow Earth full of dinosaurs and psychic pterodacyl-men. The first book, At the Earth’s Core, was adapted into another favourite film from Ben’s youth, starring Doug McClure and Peter Cushing.
  • You too can enjoy the video posted to Twitter of “Inside Earth Girl”.
  • The Monty Python sketch starring John Cleese and a hovercraft full of eels (mentioned only) is usually referred to as “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook”. It first appeared in the twelfth episode of the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, and was adapted as part of the film And Now for Something Completely Different the following year.
  • While continuity among Discworld books is generally pretty good, Terry’s “don’t worry about it too much” attitude has produced a surprisingly difficult to pin down chronology – in no small part because of the time travel magic employed by Granny Weatherwax halfway through Wyrd Sisters. The most widely-accepted timeline puts the events of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic about two years before those in Equal Rites, three years before Mort, nine years before Sourcery, twelve years before Pyramids and twenty-one years before Guards! Guards!. Assuming Rincewind is 33 when we first meet him, which seems the most likely age, this means he is 41 when he is cast into the Dungeon Dimensions in Sourcery, and that three years pass on the Disc before he escapes in Eric!, though it’s unclear how much he’d have aged in that time. By the time we’ll meet him again in Interesting Times, the timeline has him wandering the Disc for another six years, making him at least 47, and possibly as old as 50 – but still considerably younger than David Jason, who was 68 when he played Rincewind at the beginning of his adventures in The Colour of Magic.
  • The Great Fire of London started in a bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed most of the City of London over four days in September 1666, burning down over 13,000 houses and hundreds of larger structures, including St Paul’s Cathedral. Many older buildings survived the fire, including the Tower of London and several pubs and churches.
  • The idea of going on holiday goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire, where wealthy citizens would travel for as long as two years at a time. The more modern version dates back to the “Grand Tours” undertaken by wealthy young European men from the 17th century onwards. By the late 19th century, the innovations of the industrial revolution like steam trains and ocean liners made travel for pleasure more affordable for workers, but just like the other things he brought from the Agatean Empire, Twoflower’s brand of tourism seems a twentieth century idea, rooted in the culture of the 1950s and 60s.
  • It’s amazing we didn’t mention this, but Rincewind in this book appears without his signature pointy hat. Well…he has one, of some sort, but he quickly loses it and it’s clearly not the one with “WIZZARD” written on it sequins which is later so dear to him. (It might also seem odd that someone with such a talent for languages is unable to spell his own job description in his mother tongue, but then again spelling on the Discworld is at best described as “informal”.)
  • Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné – Elric of Melniboné for short –  is the most famous creation of fantasy author Michael Moorcock. Physically frail and sickly, Elric is an anti-hero, reluctant ruler of his people and the only one among them to have a conscience. He is also an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a doomed pawn in the battle between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos across the multiverse. Early in his adventures he finds the magical black sword Stormbringer – a clear inspiration for Kring – which gives him strength, but consumes the souls of others – including many of those for whom Elric cares most.
  • To clarify Ben’s description of who’s keeping Twoflower alive, the Boy Emperor of the Agatean Empire sent the message asking for protection for Twoflower; the message calling for his assassination is from the Emperor’s Vizier.
  • Pratchett had published three novels – and numerous short stories – prior to The Colour of Magic. The Carpet People (1971), for younger audiences, was originally written when he was 17; he later revised it, describing it as a collaboration with his younger self. The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) are comedy sci-fi novels, and contain the first appearances of a disc-shaped world – no turtle though! – and Hogswatch.
  • A mimic is one of a number of classic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons which appears as something innocuous – in the mimic’s case, it can change shape to resemble an inanimate object, most commonly a treasure chest. It first appeared in the original edition of the Monster Manual in 1977, and so was almost certainly an inspiration for the Luggage.
  • The Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont) is an award-winning film based on a novella by Stephen King. It stars Tim Robbins as a banker who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and forced to use his accountancy skills to aid the corrupt prison warden’s money laundering scheme.
  • The Kanes mentioned by Joel are Solomon Kane, a Puritan witch hunter created by Robert E Howard, and Kane, Karl Edward Wagner’s reimagining of the Biblical Caine, red-headed son of Adam and his first wife Lilith who is cursed by God to walk the Earth for eternity as punishment for committing the first murder. Neither are traditional sword and sorcery heroes, and Wagner’s Kane has much in common with Moorcock’s Elric. As far as we can tell, there’s no-one named Kane on the Discworld.
  • If you want to know more about the Winchester Mystery House, episode 162 of the 99% Invisible podcast is a great place to start.
  • Australian spiders – and other deadly venomous animals like snakes and jellyfish, in Australia and elsewhere – probably got so deadly because they need to guarantee a kill when they use their venom. As in so many areas of evolution, there’d be an arms race between predator and prey, forcing venom to become more and more deadly over time. And that’s a race we humans aren’t even in, since we’re so rarely killed by venomous creatures that we’ve not evolved any kind of immunity to them. Evolution thus overcompensated on its potency, because it’s better to expend more energy than strictly necessary on creating super venom to make sure 100% of predators or prey to die, than it is to make a weaker venom which might leave some victims alive, meaning they leave the creature hungry, and also gives the victim a chance to pass on their resistance to their offspring. The BBC article “Why some animals have venoms so lethal, they can’t use them” by Josh Gabbatiss from 2016 is a great exploration of all of these ideas.
  • Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazzetta, best known for his comic book, book cover and album cover art – including a version of Conan the Barbarian which redefined the character from the 1960s on. The film used the rotoscoping technique, in which actors were filmed and then traced to lend realistic movement to the animated characters; Bakshi also used this technique for his other films, Wizards and Lord of the Rings. Fire and Ice was released in – surprise! – 1983.
  • The other movie that Ben thought Joel was talking about was The Flight of Dragons, a Rankin/Bass production based on a book by Peter Dickinson, which deals largely with the question of whether magic and science are compatible. It was released in 1982, though, so clearly it was the wrong film.
  • The Doctor Who story with people who are naked under their holograms is the 2013 Christmas special The Time of the Doctor, in which the Church of the Papal Mainframe requests that visitors do not wear clothes while visiting. It’s the final story for Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, and occurs soon after the events of the fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.
  • Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live-action Disney musical in which a young boy, Pete, escapes an abusive foster family with the help of Elliott, a friendly, animated fire-breathing green dragon who can make himself invisible. He befriends a lighthouse keeper and his daughter while pursued by his cruel foster parents, and a travelling snake oil salesman plots to capture Elliott and use his organs for potions that might actually work. It was remade in 2016, though in the new version Pete is orphaned in a car crash in the woods and survives there for six years with Elliott’s help before being found by a park ranger. The new one has a fancy CGI dragon that probably resembles Twoflower’s, but no songs.
  • Death by the Books is a fortnightly podcast about mystery, crime and other someone-dies books. In episode 9, Death by Pratchett, hosts Kirsti and Lianne out themselves as massive fans of you know who. It’s a great introduction to Pratchett and the Discworld as a whole, and they might cover some of the individual books in the future – after all, someone dies in most of them… They’re also on Twitter at @deathbythebooks.
  • Zweiblumen is, in fact, German, and literally translates as “Two Flowers”. (Twoflower would be “Zweiblume”, but presumably Pratchett thought Zweiblumen sounded better.)
  • Rincewind is clearly channelling an inspiration particle when he says “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” though as usual the particles have got it slightly wrong: the famous catchphrase of Hardy, the larger half of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was actually “this is another nice mess you’ve gotten us into”, though the confusion is understandable since they titled one of their films Another Fine Mess.
  • CW’s The Flash, now in its fifth season, is itself a spin-off of Arrow, both shows based on superhero characters from DC Comics. Along with later addition Supergirl, they started out with just the one main superhero character but have since brought many fan favourites from the comics to the small screen, albeit often with a twist. Case in point: the Elongated Man, who shows up in The Flash’s fourth season, is a lesser known superhero with stretching powers, though the television version draws more on Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask than anything from the comics.
  • A “backronym” is a phrase crafted to turn a specific word into an acronym, as opposed to a real acronym in which the phrase comes first. They are often associated with words that are not normally acronyms, e.g. “Something Posing As Meat” is a backronym for Spam.
  • In Greek mythology, Tethys is a Titan, a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and – as is the way with Greek myths – sister and wife of the sea Titan Oceanus. One of the moons of Saturn is named for her, which makes more sense when we recall that Saturn is the Roman equivalent of Kronos, one of Tethys’ brother Titans.
  • Waterworld is a famously terribly 1995 post-apocalyptic action film starring Kevin Costner as the Mariner, a mutant uniquely suited to life on a future Earth drowned under the melted polar ice caps. A trader played by Kim Coates offers the Mariner a paper page from a book as a valuable commodity, repeating the word “paper” over and over; the scene has been parodied and recreated many times as one of many things people find ridiculous about the film.  
  • The contestants from each district in The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins (and their film adaptations) are given lavish quarters before being forced to fight each other to the death; the winner is also treated to a luxurious lifestyle when the games are over.
  • When he says we never meet wizards who aren’t inept, Ben means as major protagonists; The Light Fantastic contains numerous wizards who are extremely ept, but most of them are out to kill Rincewind (and each other). Ipslore the Red in Sourcery is likewise an antagonist, and few of the faculty of Unseen University in that book are trustworthy.


Episode 13 – Don’t Quarry Be Happy

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In episode thirteen, award-winning author Marlee Jane Ward joins us to talk Diggers! Published in 1990, Diggers picks up where Truckers left off, splitting the story of the Nomes in two.

The Nomes, having fled the destruction of the Store in a stolen lorry, have spent six months – something like five years in Nome time – making a new life in an abandoned quarry. But as humans start to take an interest in their new home, Grimma must hold the quarry Nomes together – no easy task when Nisodemus, the acting Abbott, is trying to convince them all to return to the old ways of the Store. Meanwhile Dorcas, the engineer who made the Long Drive possible, has made a secret discovery in one of the old quarry sheds – a mighty beast, known only as Jekub…

With many of the main characters from Truckers exiting the novel quite early on, Diggers focuses on Grimma and Dorcas, with the books’ events happening concurrently with those in the third book, Wings. Among its many themes are Pratchetty commentaries on religion, faith, community and responsibility, as well as many new jokes about the ways in which Nomes misunderstand humans – or, perhaps, understand humans perfectly. Have you read Diggers? What did you think? Use the hashtag #Pratchat13 on social media to join the conversation. We particularly want to see your original drawings of Nomes (see the original description from Truckers in the notes below), and to hear what you think about the exciting news of the The Watch TV series being officially greenlit by BBC America! 

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November 24, 2018 marks a special Pratchett anniversary – 35 years since the publication of the very first Discworld novel! That’s right, we’re going back to the very beginning to read The Colour of Magic and find out if it really is a very good place to start, with help from fantasy writer and freelance editor, Joel Martin! We’re sure you have loads of questions, so please send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat14.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • Marlee Jane Ward’s best known works are the YA sci-fi novella Welcome to Orphancorp – winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult – and it’s sequel Psynode, both published by Seizure. A third and final book in the series is coming in 2019. You can find out more about Marlee at her web site, marleejaneward.com, or by following her on Twitter at @marleejaneward.
  • Marlee’s story “The Walking Thing” and Liz’s story “Naming Rights” can both be found in the short story anthology Best Summer Stories published by Black Inc.
  • Neil Gaiman is an English writer who started out as a journalist, but became better known for his comic book work. His most famous series, Sandman for DC’s mature imprint Vertigo, chronicles the life of Dream, also known as Morpheus, one of the seven Endless, anthropomorphic personifications of concepts including Destiny, Despair and, yes, Death. (See the Once and For All podcast for a comparison.) Gaiman was the first journalist to interview Terry, soon after the publication of The Light Fantastic, and the two quickly became friends. Neil has since gone on to become a best-selling novelist, award-winning screenwriter and, most recently, a TV producer, in order to keep a promise to Terry that the television adaptation of Good Omens – the novel they wrote together, based on an idea of Neil’s – would be good.
  • The creepy little girl with long black hair who walks weirdly is Sadako, the vengeful spirit of a young girl murdered and thrown into a well in Ring, a 1998 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata. It was remade in English as The Ring in 2002, directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Naomi Watts. Both versions follow the plot of the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, which was been made into an earlier 1995 film and a television series in 1999.
  • Ten is indeed an aspirational age for outdoor nomes, but is about the expected number of years for Store nomes. The original Abbott in Truckers died at the age of fifteen, and was considered extremely long-lived.
  • “Winter is coming” are the words of House Stark, one of the noble houses struggling for control of the fantasy kingdom of Westeros in George R. R. Martin’s blockbuster series of fantasy novels, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, adapted for television as Game of Thrones. The Stark words are significant in Westeros because their Winters do not come regularly or last for a consistent amount of time.
  • John Snow is one of the main protagonists of Game of Thrones, an illegitimate son of the head of House Stark, though there’s much speculation about whether this is in fact true. His character in some ways resembles Masklin: he is a born leader who wishes he didn’t have to lead, and prefers to go off on his own to get things done.
  • The “guy in King’s Landing who makes stuff” mentioned by Liz could be a few different people, including Tobho Mott, the blacksmith, Hendry, Mott’s apprentice, or Hallyne the Pyromancer, who mostly makes wildfire, an alchemical substance which burns long and hot.
  • In Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 time travel comedy Back to the Future, high school student Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) is transported 30 years into the past and accidentally stops his parents from having the meeting that led to their relationship and marriage. In his efforts to help his father George (Crispin Glover) get together with his mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) he gives him some pointers on how to talk to her; George misreads his notes as “my density has bought me to you”.
  • In the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Anya is a former vengeance demon who once granted the wishes of women who had been wronged by men. In her first appearance her source of power is destroyed and she becomes mortal, and she provides a great deal of comic relief as she struggles to adjust to normal human life. She has a fraught relationship with Xander, the regular human of the group, and the end of her story is…well. We won’t spoil it for you. (It’s not a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast after all.)
  • The Castle is a 1997 Australian comedy film about the working class Kerrigan family, whose fight the compulsory acquisition of their Melbourne home, which is extremely close to an airport. The film is a cultural touchstone in Australia, grossing over $10m domestically, and many lines from the film are now part of the Australian vernacular.
  • Muriel’s Wedding is a 1994 Australian comedy film about socially awkward Muriel, who dreams of a white wedding and moving to Sydney to escape her unhappy life, bullying friends and domineering father. It was a breakout role for Toni Collette, and also starred Rachel Griffiths and Bill Hunter. A box office smash and classic of Australian cinema, it was adapted into a stage musical in 2017, featuring both original songs and many by ABBA, which feature heavily in the film. Liz’s comment that the film is “terrible” references the famous line from the film featured in the trailer: “You’re terrible, Muriel!”
  • Enter the Dragon is a 1973 martial arts film starring Bruce Lee. He plays “Lee”, a kung fu instructor persuaded to attend a martial arts tournament to infiltrate the criminal empire of a drug lord.
  • Although it feels like more, Australia has had six Prime Ministers (including Kevin Rudd twice) between 2007 and the time of writing in November 2018. This is in sharp contrast to the eleven-year Prime Ministership of the previous incumbent, John Howard. 
  • For more on Australian leadership spills, see Liz’s article for The Guardian, “Another nick in the wall at Melbourne cemetery’s Prime Minister’s Garden” from August 2018, and Marlee’s blog post “Two Strong Women and the Whole World Watching: The Spill & The Filibuster” from June 2013.
  • You can read about the “Friends for Stability” WhatsApp group, which played a crucial role in the most recent (as of November 2018) leadership spill, in this ABC News article from August 2018.
  • The “Geneva Conventions” are several treaties and protocols that established international legal standards for the treatment of combatants, prisoners and civilians in war. You can read more about them with commentary at the International Committee of the Red Cross. Pratchett references the conventions – or the idea of them – in several books, including the first Johnny Maxwell novel, Only You Can Save Mankind, where one of the ScreeWee aliens mocks the idea of having rules in war.
  • “Millennials are destroying X” became such a pervasive mainstream media discussion topic by mid 2018 that it was subject to widespread deconstruction via a Twitter hashtag and several response articles. “Here is a list of things that millennials are killing” at The Comeback is a good place to start if you want to read about it.
  • The “O-Bahn Busway” is a sort of weird fusion between bus lane and railway in which busses travel without stopping along a guided track between major interchanges. Brisbane’s busways are similar and longer, but do not have guiding tracks like the O-Bahn. In both cases parts of the busway are underground.
  • Pixar’s Cars series of films have generated much discussion because the living, personified cars seem to exist in a world with no humans, and yet they still have doors, and drive on roads amongst human buildings. If you want to wander down the hellish road this has led some to pave, just google “Pixar Cars theories”; you’ll find versions where the cars are AI vehicles who have taken on the personalities of their last driver, where they are highly evolved insects, and where they are a weird fusion of human and technology. All of them are disturbing.
  • There are lots of explanations for why we traditionally say “bless you!” when someone sneezes, but none can be definitively proven to be the one true source. Myth-debunking web site Snopes has a list of many of them.
  • Local authorities ignoring the hero’s warnings of a murderer, monster or other source of mayhem aren’t restricted to 80s films; the TV Tropes web site has a whole list of films, TV shows and other media in which the hero cries “You have to believe me!” to no avail.
  • The original description of Masklin from chapter one of Truckers says he is “a small, stumpy figure”, then goes on: “It was not entirely human. There were definitely the right number of arms and legs, and the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping across the darkened floor in its mouseskins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a Japanese Sumo wrestler would look half-starved by comparison, and the way this one moved suggested that it was considerably tougher than old boots.”
  • On the subject of punching sharks in the nose, shark researcher Ryan Johnson in this BBC article from 2017 suggests that if you are being attacked already, you might as well just go at the shark as hard as you can, preferably with an inanimate object if you have one handy. Shark expert Dr David Shiffman, interviewed by The Smithsonian in 2013, reckons you should try poking the shark in the eye, since punching anything in the water is very difficult. Both articles remind us all that we are very, very unlikely to be attacked by a shark. Even in Australia.
  • In his 1955 lecture “English and Welsh”, J. R. R. Tolkien described the phrase “cellar door” as among the most beautiful in the English language, though he was speaking only of the sounds of the words, not their meaning.
  • Douglas Adams fans do not usually describe themselves as anything except “Douglas Adams fans”, but many do celebrate Towel Day each year on the 25th of May – coincidentally the date of The People’s Revolution of the Glorious 25th of May, as previously discussed in episode 7A.
  • The Emperor’s New Groove is a 2000 Disney animated film about Kuzco (David Spade), a teenage Incan emperor who is magically transformed into a llama by evil sorceress Yzma (Eartha Kitt) when he fires her as his advisor. He teams up with a humble farmer, Pacha (John Goodman) to take back the throne, while Yzma and her sidekick Kronk (Patrick Warburton) try to find Kuzco. The film was a modest box office success – if a disappointment compared to most of Disney’s 90s films – but has found a devoted audience since its release. Its development was so protracted and troubled – including not only the Sting incident mentioned by Liz, but multiple major changes in personnel and direction – that there’s a documentary about its production titled The Sweatbox.
  • JCB is a single from the album Half of These Songs Are About You by the English alternative folk duo Nizlopi, who are sadly no longer performing together. The super cute music video is on YouTube, and includes a hand-drawn JCB which the song also describes as a “digger”. (It seems to be the same kind of digger as Jekub.)
  • The “how dinosaurs are drawn” episode of 99% Invisible is “Welcome to Jurassic Art“. Liz would be proud.
  • Caramello Koala is a koala-shaped chocolate filled with gooey caramel, made by Cadbury. Along with Freddo Frog and (for older folks) Bertie Beetle, he’s a staple of the kids range of Cadbury chocolates, often sold individually wrapped as part of charity drives.
  • Tiny Teddy biscuits are…well, tiny teddy bear-shaped sweet biscuits made by Arnott’s. They come in a variety of flavours and one of their big selling points to parents is that they contain no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives.

Episode 12 – Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles

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For our twelfth episode we’re joined by editor and bookseller Jackie Tang of Neighbourhood Books in Northcote as we discuss Witches Abroad! The twelfth Discworld novel, published in 1991, Witches Abroad is the second to star the Lancre witches, who return only two books later for Lords and Ladies.

Witch Desiderata Hollow has died and passed on her fairy godmother wand to Magrat Garlick, the youngest of the Lancre witches, along with a note telling her to go to the distant kingdom of Genua to stop a servant girl from marrying a prince – without Granny Weatherwax. Which of course means Granny – and Nanny Ogg – are definitely coming. As they make their way across the Disc by broomstick and riverboat, experiencing all that travel has to offer, they find themselves increasingly drawn into warped stories – and Granny may not be letting on all that she knows about what they’ll face when they arrive… 

As well as providing an extended parody of the English travelling abroad, Witches Abroad is mostly about stories – where they come from, how they influence us, and what they really mean when you stop to think about them. As well as traditional fairytales, Pratchett lampoons everything from The Wizard of Oz to Disney princesses and even Middle Earth. So what did you think of Witches Abroad? Use the hashtag #Pratchat12 on social media to join the conversation.

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In our next episode we’ll be going back amongst the Nomes for book two of the Bromeliad – Diggers! As usual we’d love to get your questions for the podcast; send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat13.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • “Voodoo” is a popular culture distillation of several religions, but especially Haitian and Louisiana Vodun, themselves derived from West African Vodun and influenced by many other traditions, including Christianity. Some rituals involve summoning spirits known as lwa or loa, intermediaries between the physical world and the creator deity (Bondye, Mawu or others depending on the tradition). Famous loa include Baron Samedi, a loa of the dead, and Papa Legba, who exists at the crossroads between the material and spiritual worlds. 
  • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a 19th century Russian writer. His works are social commentary, mostly in the form of farce and satire. The Government Inspector is his best known novel, but he is mostly remembered for his many short stories including Diary of a Madman, The Nose, The Overcoat and The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich. (His name is pronounced GO-gl, which is more or less the only way we don’t try to say Mrs Gogol’s name during the podcast.)
  • Of the Discworld books we’ve covered so far, Wyrd Sisters, Sourcery and Moving Pictures all begin with a death. Pyramids, Men at Arms and Reaper Man all have deaths close to the beginning that are vital (if you’ll excuse the term) to their plots.
  • The prose poem Desiderata was written by American writer Max Ehrman in 1927, though it didn’t become widely known until the early 1970s. You’ve almost certainly read or heard at least one of the verses. The poem’s copyright status has been a matter of contention over the years, in part because it was printed unattributed in a church leaflet accompanied by the church’s founding date, leading some to believe it was much older and therefore in the public domain. As a result the Annotated Pratchett File has a copyright notice asserting Erhman’s authorship rather than any quotes, but by contrast you can read the whole thing on Wikipedia. The word “Desiderata” is Latin, the plural form of “desideratum”: a thing wished for, or – you guessed it – desirable. It is indeed the source of the English word “desire”.
  • We ruined our browser history so you wouldn’t have to: Echidna penises are indeed unusual. They are very long for their body size, and with not three but four prongs, more like those seen in reptiles than other mammals. They only use two of the prongs at a time, though. (Hedgehog penises are less weird, but also quite long for their tiny size.)
  • Shrek (2001) is a DreamWorks animated film, loosely based on the 1990 picture book by William Steig. The title character is an ugly green ogre who sets out to rescue Princess Fiona from a dragon for Lord Farquaad, so that he will stop exiling fairytale creatures from the kingdom of Duloc in Shrek’s swamp. A bit like Lily, Farquaad is obsessed with making his kingdom “the fairest of them all”, but he has a hatred for fairytale creatures (the reasons for which are explored in the Broadway musical adaptation of the film). Shrek was massively popular and has spawned three sequels, a spin-off, numerous short films and two television series. A fourth sequel is in development. 
  • Lawrence Sterne, 18th century English novelist and clergyman, is best known as the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. His other novel is the travelogue mentioned by Jackie, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
  • Ravenloft is a gothic horror themed plane of existence known as “the Demiplane of Dread”, consisting of various separate “Domains of Dread”, each ruled by a “Dreadlord” (okay, we get it, it’s full of dread) and inspired by different horror stories. The Dracula inspired one is Barovia, a village in an isolated valley. It shares much of its DNA with Überwald and the village visited by the witches in Witches Abroad. The domains are influenced by the mysterious, unseen “Dark Powers”.
  • Nanny’s “die flabberghast” is a reference to Die Fledermaus (“the bat”), a famous operetta by Austrian composer Johann Strauss. The opera relates the story of a Viennese man, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is persuaded to avoid a minor prison sentence for a day to attend a masked ball. This is a plot by Gabriel’s friend Falke, who has also secretly invited Gabriel’s maid, his wife, and the governor of the prison where Eisenstein should be. Falke wants to pay Gabriel back for a prank in which, after a previous ball, he left a drunk Falke in the middle of town in his bat costume, causing him much ridicule – hence the title of the operetta, which is sometimes called The Revenge of the Bat in English. Die Fledermaus is also a character in the animated TV version of superhero parody The Tick; a parody of Batman, Fledermaus has a similar costume (except with a more realistic, ghost bat inspired face – weird nose, huge ears etc) and no superpowers, but is supremely vain and cowardly.
  • Maverick is a 1994 film, based on a 1950s television series, starring Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick, a con man participating in a high-stakes poker game aboard a riverboat. It also starred James Garner (who played the title role in the original series), Jodie Foster and Alfred Molina, and was the second-last film for famous B-movie star Doug McClure, who appeared alongside many other old school Western actors.
  • Mahjong is a Chinese game, usually for four players, which uses a set of 144 or more tiles. Most of the tiles are “simples”, numbered 1 to 9 in three suits: dots (or circles), bamboo, and characters (or wan). There are also a smaller number of “honours” tiles – winds and dragons – and eight unique bonus tiles, the flowers and/or seasons. The tiles begin the game organised into face-down stacks, and based on a dice roll players begin with thirteen randomly selected tiles. During the game, players take turns to discard a tile they do not want and draw one from a wall. To win, a player must collect and declare (by calling “Mahjong”) a named sets of tiles which meets a minimum number of points, decided by the players in advance. Players can also steal a discarded tile to form a smaller set which allows them to take their turn early, possibly forcing one or more other players to lose a turn. The winner’s points are tallied over multiple games, usually sixteen for four players, and the player with the highest score at the end of the games wins.
  • For more about the practice of painting lawns green – and the politics of lawn management in places like Los Angeles – we recommend Lawn Order, an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written by L Frank Baum in 1900. It was a massive success and Baum went on to write thirteen sequels, the last one being Glinda of Oz in 1920. As Liz mentions, in the first book visitors are made to wear green-tinted glasses – only the external walls are actually green. Later books however describe the city as green without any mention of the glasses.
  • The television series Once Upon A Time (2011-2018) and comic book series Fables (2002-2015) are both based on the premise that fairytale characters and creatures are stranded in the real world. In Once Upon A Time, the characters are exiled to the American town of Storybrooke as part of a plot by the evil queen Regina, aided by Rumpelstiltskin. The town’s residents cannot remember who they are, or notice that they have lived unchanging lives without aging for nearly three decades, but the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming escaped the curse and may be able to undo it. In Fables, the characters flee their home realms to a burrough of New York they nickname Fabletown to escape a mysterious and powerful evil force known as “the Adversary”. Those who can pose as humans, while those who cannot – talking animals and monsters – are forced to live on a remote farm in upstate New York, protected by magic. Rivalries and politics have not been left behind, however, and must often be solved by sheriff “Bigby” Wolf and deputy mayor Snow White.
  • Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) is best remembered for writing nearly four thousand fairytales (!), including The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and loads more you have definitely heard. He was also famously played by Danny Kaye in the not-at-all biographical musical film, Hans Christian Andersen, in 1952.
  • “Moistened bint” is how Dennis, the anarcho-communist peasant, refers to the Lady in the Lake, aka one of the “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords”, in the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (We’ve mentioned it before, and probably will again.) Also, in case you haven’t seen it: 8-year-old Saga Vanacek recently pulled a 1,500 year old sword out of a lake. Like the rest of the Internet, we hope she will be our new King now.
  • The late Anthony Bourdain was a beloved American celebrity chef, author and documentarian, well known for his various television shows in which he travelled the world sampling all kinds of local cuisines. He frequently spotlighted foods and cooks ignored by other such programs, including immigrants and street food vendors, so we’re confident he would have ignored the banquet halls of Lily’s palace and headed straight for Mrs Pleasant’s kitchen or the market where Mrs Gogol’s tent was pitched.
  • “When I say run” is an oft-repeated line of the Doctor across most of their incarnations. The earliest version is perhaps from the Second Doctor’s first story, 1966’s The Power of the Daleks, in which he says to his companion Ben Jackson: “When I say run, run like a rabbit…RUN!” We found a YouTube compilation of every instance of the Doctor telling people to run, but be warned it – it runs for twenty minutes!
  • A “bodice ripper” is a romance novel with sex scenes, set in an historical period. It’s a much-beloved genre which continues to enjoy great success, and not just with famous pulp romance publishing house Mills & Boon. If you’re keen to investigate further, we suggest hitting up the web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for reviews. SBTB uses a comprehensive system of tags, and Greebo-as-sexy-corsair fans might enjoy the “Fantasy/Fairytale Romance” genre, “Pirate” archetype and/or “Were/Shifter” theme.
  • Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s 1981 musical Cats was adapted from T. S. Elliot’s 1939 poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. No, we don’t know why he did that either. In the musical, a tribe of cats called the Jellicles meet for their annual Ball, at which their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will name one of them to ascend to the heaven like “Heaviside layer” and be reborn. He is briefly kidnapped, but otherwise the entire musical consists of the cats breaking the fourth wall to explain their ways to the humans watching. It’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s also the fourth-longest running musical ever to appear on Broadway and the sixth-longest in the West End, and continues to be produced around the world.
  • Red Dwarf is a British sit-com created by Doug Naylor and Rob Grant which premiered on the BBC in 1988. It follows the adventures of David Lister (played by Craig Charles), a 22nd century slob working in the lowest-ranking job aboard the mining spaceship Red Dwarf. When he brings a cat on board against regulations, he is placed in stasis as punishment, and is thus the only survivor of a major radiation leak. He is awakened three million years later by the ship’s computer to discover an entire humanoid civilisation had evolved from his cat, leaving behind a single survivor known only as “Cat”: a vain creature obsessed with fashion, sleep and sex. Cat, played by Danny John-Jules, is one of only two characters to appear in every episode of the show, which after a long hiatus returned in 2009 on UK digital channel Dave. A thirteenth series is coming in 2019.
  • There are videos of cats eating sushi, but really, you should definitely look at pictures of cats dressed up as if they are sushi.
  • In the French folktale “Bluebeard” (not “Bluebeard’s Bride”, though see below) a young woman is married to a wealthy widowed nobleman and given free run of his enormous mansion – except for one room which she must never enter. She eventually does look in the room while Bluebeard is away, only to discover he had murdered his previous wives. Bluebeard knows thanks to a magical key and returns, but the bride is saved by her brothers who show up and kill him, leaving her to inherit his fortune. The story lends its name to the ATU 312 classification of folk tales, described as “the brother rescues his sister”. Bluebeard also appears as a major character in the comic Fables, where he is depicted as a pirate. The roleplaying game Bluebeard’s Bride from Magpie Games explores the tale further by having the players collectively play the bride, wandering through Bluebeard’s house alone.
  • The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a popular though heavily criticised personality test based largely on Carl Jung’s ideas of dominant psychological functions. It uses a series of questions to sort a person into one of sixteen personality types organised along four axes: extroversion/introversion, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuition and judging/perceiving. The test was created during World War II by mother and daughter Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, self-taught psychometrists who initially used it to help place women in appropriate jobs as they entered the wartime workforce. After several earlier versions, the first “MBTI Manual” was published in 1962 and became heavily used in the corporate world, though it is not widely accepted in psychological circles. It’s enduring legacy is that we all have that one friend obsessed with sorting everyone they know into their Myers-Briggs type.
  • The name Lily takes in Genua is “Lady Lilith de Tempscire”, taken from the French temps, weather, and scire, beeswax or candlewax. In the course of looking this up, we discovered that the French use a different word for the kind of wax you use on skis: fart. It’s probably just as well that modern skis are made from materials that do not generally require waxing to achieve good speed on snow.
  • Remus Lupin is the third of the ill-fated Defence Against the Dark Arts tutors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to appear in the Harry Potter books and films. His name is something of a spoiler alert: Remus is one of the two twins of Roman myth who were raised by wolves, the other being Romulus, the founder of Rome (from whom it supposedly takes its name). Lupin is another form of the Latin word lupine, which as we’ve previously discussed means wolf. You’ll never guess what dark secret Remus Lupin is hiding…though as far as we can tell, he’s always had that name, despite not being born with his…affliction.  
  • For more on Hyacinth Bucket, see the show notes for our previous episode.
  • We talk more about the time-skip in Lancre in episode four.
  • Let Them Eat Cake was a 1999 BBC sit-com starring Jennifer Saunders as Colombine, the Comtesse de Vache, a scheming noblewoman in pre-revolutionary France, and Dawn French as her loyal and nymphomaniacal servant, Lisette. It ran for one series of six episodes, and is rare in being a series which starred Saunders and French, but was not created or written by them.
  • Ares, Greek god of war, was one of the most prominent antagonists featured in the television Xenaverse of Xena: Warrior Princess and its predecessor, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. He was played by New Zealand actor Kevin Smith, who sadly passed away in 2002. Google him in his usual Ares gear and we think you’ll agree he’s a perfect for for Greebo, though makeup and costume would need to give him some scars and scuff up his leather.
  • The Craft is a 1996 supernatural horror movie about four high school girls who form a coven, two of whom are played by Fairuza Balk (whose first film role was as Dorothy in Return to Oz) and Neve Campbell (best known for her starring role in the television drama Party of Five). They gain the ability to cast all manner of spells through the worship of a god named “Manon”, blending old-school Puritan ideas of Satanic witchcraft with more modern Wicca. Magrat clearly hasn’t seen the film, or she wouldn’t be so keen on using magic to fix all of her problems! A remake was announced in 2016, but has so far failed to materialise.

Episode 11 – At Bill’s Door

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For our eleventh episode we welcome Pratchett fan Sarah Pearson to the mic to discuss a Discworld novel of two halves: Reaper Man! The eleventh Discworld novel, published in 1991, Reaper Man is the second book to focus on Death and the newly stable faculty of Unseen University.

The faceless bureaucrats of the multiverse have decided Death is sentimental and inefficient, and he’s been fired! While he heads off to live among humans for his remaining time – until his replacement comes to claim him – his absence means those who die sort of…don’t. That includes Windle Poons, 130-year-old wizard of Unseen University, whose return as a zombie gives him a new lease on life – much to the horror of his fellow faculty members. But Death’s absence is having other weird consequences: objects spring to life, non-human species spawn their own Deaths, and strangest of all, a warehouse in Ankh-Morpork mysteriously fills with small glass orbs…

Reaper Man‘s two mostly separate plots – Death’s forced retirement, and the wizards’ investigation of the alien lifeforms – bring back not only Death but also Windle Poons and the faculty of Unseen University, both introduced in Moving Pictures, alongside cameos by familiar faces like CMOT Dibbler and Fred Colon. Plus we meet a bunch of new and memorable characters: the Death of Rats, the Auditors of Reality, Mrs Cake and her daughter Ludmilla, and undead activist Reg Shoe and his friends from the Fresh Start Club. It’s a big cast, but then with two separate plots there’s plenty for them to do! We’d love to hear what you thought of Reaper Man; use the hashtag #Pratchat11 on social media to join the conversation.

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In our next episode we’ll be joined by editor Jackie Tang as we power on to the next Discworld novel and travel far from the lands we know in Witches Abroad! We’re recording only a week after this episode is released, so to have us answer them on the podcast, get your questions via social media before September 15, 2018 using the hashtag #Pratchat12.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • Hard Quiz is an ABC game show, currently in its third series, in which contestants nominate a specialist topic and are grilled with exceptionally difficult questions by comedian Tom Gleeson. Contestants are eliminated each round, and the winner takes home a trophy known as the “Big Brass Mug”. (As is standard for quiz shows on the national broadcaster, there’s not a valuable prize.) Sarah appeared on the 17th episode of series two, up against horse expert Charles, French & Saunders expert Daniel and JFK expert Marc. (The ABC are currently alternating new and repeat episodes, so Sarah’s episode should reappear on iView a few months after this Pratchat!) 
  • Sarah mentions captioning the Australian versions of reality TV shows Survivor (in its third series) and The Bachelor (season six, starring former rugby union player Nick Cummins), both on Channel Ten. 
  • The previous Eurovision winner was Israel’s Netta with the song “Toy”, featuring some non-speech vocalisations which would make Cyril the rooster super envious. You can watch the official music video and the Eurovision grand final performance on YouTube. (Tellingly, neither video includes captions!)
  • Morris Dancing is traditional British form of folk dance kept alive not just in the UK but wherever British immigrants and their descendants are found. A group who dances the Morris are known as a “side”, and in Australia they are loosely affiliated via the Australian Morris Ring. Ben would like to give a shout out to his local side, Brandragon Morris, which still boasts some of those “right kind of nerds” he knew at university as members.
  • Monty Python’s “fish-slapping dance” sketch starring John Cleese and Michael Palin was originally produced as part of the 1971 pan-European May Day special Euroshow 71 before showing up in the following year’s series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The sketch only lasts for 20 seconds, but is cited by Michael Palin as one of his proudest moments; the story goes that the lock next to where they were performing was drained in between rehearsals and shooting, so the drop into the water was more than ten feet further than he was expecting!
  • Petunia Dursley is Harry Potter’s aunt in the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. She later becomes a little more sympathetic, but in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known in the US as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) she is described like this: “Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbours.”
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street is a hugely successful horror film franchise created by Wes Craven with the film of the same name in 1984. They feature dead child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), who stalks and kills the teenagers of Springwood, Ohio through their dreams, particularly targeting Nancy Thompson, who lives on Elm Street. He returns in five sequels; in the last, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), he starts killing in a new town, claiming that “Every town has an Elm Street!” (It is a pretty common street name in the US.) The franchise also spawned an anthology horror TV series, Freddy’s Nightmares; Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) in which Freddy invades the real world; a 2010 remake of the original film; and Freddy vs Jason (2006), in which Freddy fights with Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series of horror films.
  • At the end of the tenth season of the modern Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, regenerated into the Thirteenth, played by Jodie Whittaker – the first woman to play the role in it’s 55 year history. Among conservative and sexist fans there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, despite it being a change the show had been laying groundwork for many years.  
  • Most vertebrate animals have a spleen, and as well as being the elephant graveyard for blood (thanks Liz), it also synthesises antibodies and stores a reserve of monocytes, the largest kind of white blood cell, both of which are very important to the immune system. The “red pulp” of the spleen, where the monocytes are stored, is also known as “the cords of Billroth”, a name Ben has immediately stolen for his Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
  • The “squiggly spooge” is an organ possessed by Irkan aliens, including the title character of classic Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim, created by Jhonen Vasquez. It’s since passed into the online lexicon where it is used as a placeholder word for any unknown organ.
  • There were indeed two versions of the original Street Fighter arcade game, and one had large rubber punch and kick buttons which responded to how hard to whacked them. You can find out more about the forgotten precursor to Street Fighter II in this Kotaku article from 2011.
  • In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and several other former British colonies, Boxing Day is a public holiday celebrated the day after Christmas. There are few modern traditions attached to it, though in Australia at least it is the day many Summer blockbuster films are released.
  • We struggled to find a good source for Romans making roads out of garbage, but one of our favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, have done stories about the making of new streets above the old and Seattle (and in a similar story, the creation of new land in the early history of San Francisco).
  • In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Uma Thurman’s protagonist “The Bride” is buried alive in a coffin, but uses elite martial arts techniques to break open the coffin and dig her way to the surface.
  • Repo Man (1984) is a cult sci-fi comedy film written and directed by Adam Cox and starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton. Estevez plays a punk who takes a job working with Stanton as a repossession agent, and they go looking for a car which may have been involved in extraterrestrial activity. Pratchett confirmed in interviews that Reaper Man was a deliberate pun on the film’s title.
  • “Rocket Man” is a 1972 single by Elton John with lyrics by Bernie Taupin, which appeared on the album Honky Château. It features the line “I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife; it’s lonely out in space”. It was famously covered in 1991 by Kate Bush for the tribute album Two Rooms: The Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin.
  • Professor Filius Flitwick is the part-goblin Charms Master and Head of Ravenclaw House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (In the world of Harry Potter, that is, he’s sadly not real.) On screen he is played by Warwick Davis of Star Wars and Willow fame, albeit with a radical change in look between the earlier and later films.
  • When Ben talks about “shot matching”, he means the cinematic technique known as the match cut, in which the end of one scene is visually or thematically matched with the beginning of the next. Two of the most famous examples are the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which visually matches a bone thrown into the air with a similarly shaped satellite, and this cut from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which uses vision and audio to thematically match Lawrence blowing out his match with the silent desert at dawn. The Lawrence cut was the work of English film editor Anne V Coates, recognised as one of the all-time greats; her assistant on Lawrence, Ray Lovejoy, was the editor for 2001.
  • Blink is the tenth episode of the third series of the modern Doctor Who, in which Steven Moffat introduced the spooky “Weeping Angels” – creatures who look like statues and can’t move while being looked at. Blink, and they move lightning fast. The final shots of real statues all around London – suggesting to young impressionable viewers that the Angels might be lurking around every corner – caused an epidemic of nightmares.
  • Police Constable Reg Hollis, played by Scottish actor Jeff Stewart, appeared in almost the entire 26-year run of ITV’s cops on the beat soap opera, The Bill. A fan of model trains and gardening who always had something to complain about in his softly-spoken, slightly boring way, Reg was nevertheless a dependable copper, though treated very poorly by most of his fellow officers. He resigned from the force in 2008, two years before the series ended, making Stewart the longest serving original cast member.
  • There is indeed a podcast about The Bill, aptly named The Bill Podcast. It’s only been around since 2017, but consists of monthly in-depth interviews with members of the cast. You can find The Bill Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes and Facebook.
  • Keeping Up Appearances was a BBC One sit-com which ran from 1990 to 1995. It followed the farcical adventures of Hyacinth Bucket (Patricia Routledge) in her efforts to hide her lower-class origins – especially her family members – and exaggerate her accent, wealth and abilities to gain favour with those she perceives as her social superiors. Her long-suffering husband Richard Bucket was played by Clive Swift, whose family name of “Bucket” Hyacinth insists on pronouncing “Bouquet”.
  • We’d like to give a shout-out to longtime listener and friend of the show Sally Evans, whose tweet sadly arrived too late for us to mention it in the episode:
    https://twitter.com/SalacticaActual/status/1030365880440389632
  • Meet Joe Black (1998), loosely based on the film Death Takes a Holiday (1934), stars Anthony Hopkins as a billionaire whom Death decides to visit because of the impassioned speech he gives his daughter (Claire Forlani) when it becomes clear she’s not all that keen on the man she’s about to marry. Father and daughter, by the way, are named Bill and Susan! The Brad Pitt body Death decides to inhabit rather inconsiderately belongs to a man with whom Susan was flirting, moments before he was violently hit and killed by two cars.
  • By contrast, Mighty Joe Young (1998), a remake of Mighty Joe Young (1939), stars Charlize Theron as a woman who has raised the titular gorilla, both of whom were orphaned by the same poacher when they were young. Joe is no longer accepted by others of his kind, probably because he is inexplicably three times the normal size for a gorilla. The plot revolves around Theron and Bill Paxton trying to protect Joe from the poacher who wants revenge as Joe bit off two of his hands in their original encounter. It’s…well, it’s no Meet Joe Black, that’s for sure.
  • The episode of 99% Invisible about the history of shopping malls is “The Gruen Effect“. While looking up the link for that one, we also found this great article about the birth of the shopping trolley: “Shopping Around: How Folding Basket Carriers Became Modern Nesting Carts“.
  • Ben mixes up his Sylvester Stallone characters during the discussion of the Dean; the one who ties a strip of cloth around his forehead is not Rocky Balboa from Rocky (1976) and its many sequels, but John Rambo, from First Blood (1982) and its sequels.
  • In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the suprisingly non-bogus sequel to the surprisingly excellent time travel slacker comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), teenage rocker wannabes and future saviours of the world Bill S. Preston esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are killed by future despot Chuck D Nomolos (Joss Ackland) before they can fulfil their destiny. They first “Melvin” Death and end up in Hell, but then challenge Death, beating him in games of Clue, Twister and Battleship until he finally agrees to help them return to life, eventually joining their band Wyld Stallyns as a bass player (shades of Soul Music there!). Joss Ackland later played Mustrum Ridcully in the TV adaptation of Hogfather, and reportedly regretted appearing in Bogus Journey, claiming he only did so because he was a workaholic. One more Bogus Journey connection with this novel: both feature characters named Rufus who are significant to the protagonist’s backstory and future!
  • ZZ Top play the “band at the party” in Back to the Future Part III (1990), performing a “hillbilly version” of their song “Doubleback” from their 1990 album Recycler. The version we remember is probably the orchestrated one played – repeatedly – during the town festival, and the album version plays over the credits. The music video uses footage from the film. While we may have forgotten the single, it was in fact a pretty big hit in the US at the time, reaching #1 in the rock charts for five weeks. 
  • Once and For All is currently on hiatus, but you can find all five released episodes at the link. Ben appears not only in episode five, “Death Vs Death”, but the very first episode, “Indiana O’Connell and The Kingdom of the Mummy’s Skull”, in which he goes to bat for Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy, Rick O’Connell, in a battle against Indiana Jones.
  • In the Sandman comics created by Neil Gaiman, Death is one of the Endless, seven beings who personify fundamental metaphysical concepts: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Delirium and Despair. While they are immortal in some circumstances they can die, though they are then replaced in their role by someone else. Dream is the titular Sandman of the original comics, but Death has also proven popular enough to have her own separate stories, notably Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life.
  • It should be noted that Azrael appears not just in Islamic lore, or The Smurfs, but in other Abrahamic traditions, including Hebrew mysticism, though he is rarely mentioned in Christian writing. The version of Azrael with millions of eyes is only one of many varying depictions.
  • You can see the full range of currently in print Collector’s Library editions of Discworld novels at the Discworld Emporium. We note that since our last visit, the Emporium now also stocks new printings of early editions of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic…
  • You can see Paul Kidby’s “Lancre Gothic” in this BBC article collecting some of the best Discworld illustrations. Kidby’s “Death with Kitten II”, a newer version of the illustration from The Last Hero, can be found in the gallery on his web site and on his Instagram. “The Imaginarium of Professor Pratchett”, originally drawn for the cover of the “Discworld Imaginarium” book, is in Kidby’s online store, and you can also see Ben’s favourite version of this concept – from the cover of the HisWorld exhibition book – on Instragram. (You’ll need to get your hands on a copy of The Last Hero to check who A’Tuin is looking at.)
  • The Pratchett Armorial Bearings (the formal name for this kind of heraldry), which can indeed be seen on Pratchett’s Wikipedia page, are formally described thus:
    Blazoned:
    Arms – Sable an ankh between four Roundels in saltire each issuing Argent.
    Crest – Upon a Helm with a Wreath Argent and Sable On Water Barry wavy Sable Argent and Sable an Owl affronty wings displayed and inverted Or supporting thereby two closed Books erect Gules.
    Motto – “noli timere messorem”
    The motto is rather more accurate Latin for “Don’t fear the Reaper” compared to Mort’s Latatian “non timetis messor”.

 

Episode 10 – We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick

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For our tenth episode it’s back to the Discworld – and Ankh-Morpork – as academic, writer and broadcaster Dr Dan Golding joins us for Moving Pictures. The tenth Discworld novel, Moving Pictures was published in Pratchett’s most prolific year: Good Omens, Eric and both sequels to Truckers also came out in 1990!

Student wizard Victor Tugelbend has been happily failing exams at Unseen University for years…but when alchemists suddenly invent “moving pictures”, Victor finds himself drawn to Holy Wood, the mysterious coastal home of this new entertainment industry. He’s not the only one: hopeful actors, ambitious producers and even talking animals have all been caught up in the glamour of the “clicks”. It’s not magic in the wizard sense, but there’s definitely something unnatural going on – and it’ll take Victor, fellow star Theda “Ginger” Withel, Gaspode the Wonder Dog and the faculty of Unseen University – including new Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully – to solve the mystery of Holy Wood.

Bringing modern world concepts to the Disc had always been a feature of the series, but Moving Pictures really kicks off the tradition of “X comes to the Discworld” main plots. Pratchett takes broad aim at Hollywood in a mix of homage and parody, referencing everything from the pre-talkie era to the Golden Age and 1980s blockbusters. It also features first major roles for Detritus and Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler (both introduced in Guards! Guards!), and is the first appearance of Gaspode the Wonder Dog (who returns in Men at Arms) and the stable, ongoing cast of Unseen University wizards. There’s so much happening in Moving Pictures, and we’d love to hear what you thought of it! Use the hashtag #Pratchat10 on social media to join the conversation.

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In our next episode we’ll be joined by television captioner and Discworld mega-fan Sarah Pearson as we reunite with Death for the eleventh Discworld novel, Reaper Man! If you have questions you want answered on the podcast, send them in by  via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat11.

Show Notes and Errata:

  • Dan Golding is on Twitter at @dangolding. His next book Star Wars After Lucas will be released on May the 4th, 2019, but you can see his ABC series What is Music? with co-host Linda Marigliano right now! Check it out on ABC iView or the triple j YouTube channel.
  • You can find all the info about Dan’s excellent podcast Art of the Score with Andrew Pogson and Nicholas Buc at artofthescore.com.au. They also have a Twitter account at @ArtoftheScore.
  • To hear Dan talk about Star Wars music, check out the five Star Wars episodes of Art of the Score (the original film actually gets three episodes!), or watch the video he made for the ABC explaining why the theme is so great.
  • The previous book that kicked off with Death overseeing the passing of a previously unmet character was Sourcery, in which Ipslore the Red dies but tricks Death, passing his soul into his staff. We almost get this sort of beginning in Pyramids, but Pteppic’s father only dies after the school days flashback section of the book, and again in Guards! Guards!, though Gaskin dies before the book starts and we instead join Vimes after the funeral.
  • In the real world, cellulose is an organic compound vital to the structure of cells in green plants, while celluloid (eventually a trademark name) was the first kind of thermoplastic, made from cellulose nitrate, used to replace ivory in billiard balls (as discussed in episode one) and widely as a filmstock before the development of safer, cheaper and easier to make acetate film in the 1950s.
  • Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in which multiple (fictional) plots to kill nazi leaders during World War II converge on a Paris cinema at the premiere of a new propaganda film.
  • Liz refers to the 1903 film Electrocuting an Elephant, produced by the Edison Film Company, in which Topsy the circus elephant, who had killed several people, was executed via electrocution on Coney Island. The film was distributed but thankfully doesn’t seem to have been as popular as the company’s other films, though it still exists. It’s sometimes claimed to have been funded by Thomas Edison in an effort to discredit Nicola Tesla’s alternating current as unsafe during the War of the Currents, but the timeline of events makes that unlikely.
  • “Play it again, Sam” is probably the most famous mis-quote in cinema history, and is not from the 1942 film Casablanca. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) supposedly says it to the piano player in his bar, but what he actually says is “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.”
  • Listener Ian Banks let us know on Twitter that Victor’s arrangement with his income is a nod to the character Grimsdike from Richard Gordon’s Doctor novels, who receives a generous stipend as long as he’s a medical student. The series began with 1952’s Doctor in the House, lasted for 18 books, and was adapted many times for film and television. The early television versions in the 70s were adapted by members of Monty Python and the Goodies, including actual doctors Graham Chapman and Graeme Garden.
  • Victor’s single exam question may be a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When the Arthurian knights reach the ominous Bridge of Death, its keeper tells them they must answer his three questions before they can cross his bridge. His first question: “What…is your name?”
  • You can see the dance from 1951’s Royal Wedding on YouTube here – or, if you like to know how the sausage-inna-bun is made, you can watch this version that shows what Astaire’s experience on set was like.
  • Disney’s Snow White was released in 1937, but as Dan pointed out in a bit that hit our cutting room floor, Steamboat Willie – the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, and the first animated film with synchronised sound – was released almost a decade earlier in 1928.
  • Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), directed by animator and cartoonist Winsor McCay, wasn’t the first animated film, but was the first to use several important animation techniques including keyframes and animation loops. It was originally used by McCay as part of a live vaudeville act in which he commanded Gertie to perform tricks, but was eventually released with a live action introduction. Gertie was also the first animated dinosaur on film. You can watch it on YouTube here (we’ve skipped the live part).
  • Also cut for time: Dan mentioned that other pioneers of  anthropomorphic animation included Felix the Cat and the singing, swaying trees of early Merry Melodies.
  • George Méliès was a French film director whose most famous work is probably A Trip to the Moon (1902), based loosely on two of Jules Verne’s novels and widely considered the world’s first science fiction film. You can watch the hand-painted colour version on YouTube here.
  • Dan’s version of the book is the Collector’s Library edition, and you can see its beautiful cover at the Discworld Emporium. Liz has the modern paperback (also available at the Discworld Emporium), but you can see Josh Kirby’s full original cover illustration – as featured on Ben’s early paperback – at this Cultured Vultures review of the book. The original hardcover with the Superman/Ben-Hur styled title can be found in this Gizmodo collection of the best Discworld covers.
  • Wikimedia has a great photo of the Han dynasty seismograph from 132 CE. Well…a recreation of it, anyway. No-one’s quite sure how the internal mechanism worked but historical records indicate it was accurate.
  • The “Odium” is a pun on Odeon Cinemas, a chain of movie theatres in the UK, Ireland and Norway, the first one opening in 1928. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word for various buildings built for musical purposes. (The Rhoxie, the Seriph of Al-Khali’s fabulous palace featured in Sourcery, is mentioned as a possible better name; both are references to the famous Roxie Theatre in San Francisco, the longest continually-operating movie theatre in the US.)
  • The roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu was first released in 1981 (seven years after Dungeons & Dragons), and is named after a Lovecraft short story. It’s currently in its seventh edition.
  • The Necronomicon by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred is a fictional book of evil magic mentioned in many of Lovecraft’s stories. Its contents mainly concern the “Great Old Ones”, ancient cosmic beings beyond the understanding of mortal minds, and ways in which to summon them. Doing so is always a terrible idea.
  • The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets are a nerdy Canadian rock band whose lyrics are largely inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Their albums include faux-soundtrack Spaceship Zero, rock opera The Shadow Out of Tim (a loose retelling of one of Lovecraft’s last stories, The Shadow Out of Time) and of course The Dukes of Alhazred. You can find them all on the Thickets’ BandCamp page.
  • Multiple online sources cite the origin of “that’s not a thing” as a 2001 episode of That 70’s Show (“Donna’s Panties”) or a 2003 episode of Friends (“The One Where Rachel’s Sister Babysits”). Moving Pictures predates both by more than a decade.
  • Several fan-invented rulesets exist for Cripple Mr Onion; Andrew C. Millard and Terry Tao invented one for a deck with eight suits (a standard poker deck plus an Italian/Tarot suited deck) and posted it to newsgroups in the 1990s, where Pterry apparently approved. Those rules were later adapted by Stephen Briggs into a version using only a complete tarot deck, published as an appendix in Turtle Recall, the fourth revision of The Discworld Companion.
  • North by Northwest (1959) starred Cary Grant as Roger O Thornhill, an advertising executive who is mistaken for a spy, and Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman he meets as he tries to evade capture. In addition to the middle initial, the opening sequence of Thornhill dictating a memo to a secretary while they travel through New York is also supposedly a dig at David O Selznick, who reportedly did this frequently. (It’s worth mentioning that Selznick had produced his final film, A Farewell to Arms, two years earlier, and had not produced a Hitchcock film since 1947’s The Paradine Case.) 
  • Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a 1958 science fiction film about a wealthy heiress who grows to a height of 50 feet after an encounter with a giant alien. It was remade for HBO in 1992 by Christopher Guest with Darryl Hanna in the lead role.
  • Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World imagines a 26th century America in which the human population has been genetically engineered into castes; the more intelligent castes are kept peaceful and compliant through various entertainments, including the happiness-inducing drug soma, and “feelies” – films that induce physical sensations through metal knobs grasped by viewers.
  • The “Penfield Mood Organ” appears in the opening pages of the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the film Blade Runner. By dialling a number a person’s mood can be set to any one of hundreds of specific states, including 481, “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future”, and 888, “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”.
  • “If it bleeds, we can kill it” is a famous line of dialogue from the 1987 sci-fi action film Predator, delivered by paramilitary team leader Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) after his team finds the bright green blood of the alien hunter who’s been killing them off.
  • Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the direct sequel to Frankenstein (1931), both starring Boris Karloff as “The Monster” and directed by James Whale. At the conclusion of the second film, the Monster is rejected by the Bride made for him; he tells the Bride and her creator “we belong dead” before he tearfully destroys the lab, killing all three.
  • There have been a lot of King Kong films, but Dan recommends the 1933 original, which he informed us birthed leitmotif in Hollywood film music! Ben once wrote an absolutely scathing review of the 2005 Peter Jackson remake featuring Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody, but Dan reckons 2017’s Kong: Skull Island starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman is actually pretty good, if very self-aware.
  • The Rank Organisation was a British entertainment company, its assets now owned by The Rank Group. It’s famous logo and filmed intro sequence, known as “Gongman”, is a buff shirtless man hitting a huge gong. Four different performers struck the gong in Rank’s heyday, most filming it at least twice to replace deteriorating film stock. The gong itself was a prop made of papier-mâché; the sound of a (much smaller) Chau gong or tam-tam was recorded separately.
  • Rankin/Bass Productions, by contrast, was an American production company best known for it’s stop-motion animated holiday programs, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969), though we especially recommend Mad Monster Party? (1967), which features Boris Karloff’s only performance in a musical.
  • Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is the only male actor to have won three Best Actor Oscars. For our universe’s sake, we thank Sir Daniel for retiring from the acting life. However if Liz’s theory is correct, Katherine Hepburn was a greater threat to reality, having won four Best Actress Oscars.
  • Jurassic Park (and, later, Jurassic World) is built on Isla Nublar (Spanish for “Clouded Island”), a fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica. “Site B”, featured in the sequels The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, is located on another island further west, Isla Sorna (which is sort of Spanish for “Sarcasm Island”). 
  • “Jumping the shark” has become a modern euphemism for the moment when a television series or other long work of popular culture loses its relevance and starts going downhill. The phrase is a reference to the 1977 Happy Days episode “Hollywood: Part 3” in which Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli literally jumps a shark on waterskis, considered the point where the show left behind its relatable roots. (It’s worth noting that Happy Days continued for seven more years after this stunt.)
  • 119 twelve-minute films of The Hazards of Helen were released between November 1914 and February 1917. They initially starred Helen Holmes, though she left to form her own company with her husband after 26 of the films, remaining one of the most famous silent era serial stars. Holmes was replaced by Elsie McLeod for about six months before Rose Wenger Gibson (credited as Helen Gibson) took over; Gibson filmed the final 70 and became as famous as Holmes. All the Helens did most of their own stunts, though Gibson made a name for herself as the first female stunt performer in Hollywood before moving into acting, and continued to appear in Hollywood films until the 1950s. You can watch clips from Leap from the Water Tower starring Holmes and The Governor’s Special starring Gibson at the Internet Archive.
  • Beyond the Valley of the Trolls is a reference to Russ Meyer’s 1970 exploitation film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It was the first of several written with Meyer by famous film critic Roger Ebert.
  • The other parody film names we mention are references to the Marx Brothers films A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races (two of which are also the titles of Queen albums).
  • According to the IMDb, Ennio Morricone has composed music for over 500 films. He probably remains most famous for his work in Westerns, especially The Good the Bad and the Ugly, but has worked in many different styles. His soundtrack for Space: 1999 was for an Italian theatrical film edited together from three episodes of the original UK television series; the Space: 1999 television theme (and most of the incidental music) was composed by Barry Gray.

 

Episode 9 – Upscalator to Heaven

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For our ninth episode we leave the Discworld again as author Amie Kaufman joins us to discuss Truckers. One of four novels Pratchett published in 1989, it introduces the Nomes – Pratchett’s second group of tiny folk living at the edges of the human-sized world.

Masklin is the young hunter in a group of Nomes: four-inch tall fast-living people struggling to survive on rats and the scraps they can scavenge from the human world. After two Nomes are killed by a fox, Masklin convinces the group to hitch a ride on one of the humans’ enormous vehicles, and they find themselves in the Store: Arnold Bros (set 1905), a wondrous place filled with food, warmth – and more Nomes than they have ever seen. As they try to adjust to the peculiar ways of life in the Store, its electricity revives “The Thing”, an ancient Nome artefact handed down for generations. It reveals to Masklin that Nomes were stranded on Earth millennia ago, but there’s hardly time to understand what that means before The Thing warns of immediate danger: the Store will be demolished in just fourteen days… 

Truckers is a middle grade book – it has chapters and no footnotes! – which is nonetheless charming for “adults of all ages”, as Sir Terry liked to inscribe copies. In Masklin, Grimma, Granny Morkie and the other Nomes are echoes of Pratchett characters we love, and it’s perhaps surprisingly sophisticated in its satire, social commentary and love of wordplay. It forms the first part of “the Bromeliad” trilogy (a name explained by the sequels), but is also a complete and wonderful story all on its own. We’d love to hear what you thought of Truckers: use the hashtag #Pratchat9 on social media to join the conversation. But do try to use small words…

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We’ll head back to the Disc next time when we grab a bag of banged grains and take in a few clicks in Moving Pictures! We haven’t currently confirmed our guest, but we’ll be sure to tell you who they are when we can lock in a date! You can still ask questions to be answered on the podcast by sending them in via social media; use the hashtag #Pratchat10 so we can find them!

Show Notes and Errata:

  • Amie is on social media, but if you really want to keep up with what she’s up to, we recommend hitting her web site, amiekaufman.com. Her novels include the The Illuminae Files YA sci-fi trilogy, co-authored with Jay Kristoff, and for younger readers Ice Wolves, the first in a new middle grade fantasy series.
  • Ents are the tree-people of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. They are the oldest living things in Middle-Earth, and live long slow lives, considering a three-day deliberation over a question to be “hasty”.
  • The stop-motion animated television series of Truckers was made for ITV in 1992 by Cosgrove Hall, a UK animation studio whose huge canon of work includes Danger Mouse, Wind in the Willows and – five years after Truckers – two traditionally animated Discworld adaptations: Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music. Truckers was split into thirteen 10-minute episodes, and mixed stop-motion with live-action footage of the humans with whom the Nomes interacted. The cast includes many well-known voices: 
    • Edward Kelsey as The Thing (who is also the narrator). Kelsey was a long-time star of radio serial The Archers, and played the Danger Mouse characters Baron Silas Greenback and Colonel K.
    • Joe McGann as Masklin. As well as starring in 90s TV comedy The Upper Hand, Joe is also the brother of Eighth Doctor Paul McGann.
    • Debra J Gillett as Grimma. Gillett later played Susan Sto Helit in Cosgrove Hall’s Soul Music.
    • Rosalie Williams as Granny Morkie. Williams’ best-known role was as Mrs Hudson in the long-running The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes television series starring Jeremy Brett.
    • Brian Trueman as Dorcas Del Icatessan. Trueman is a long-time Cosgrove Hall writer who adapted Truckers for television; his most notable acting roles on other animated shows include Stilletto in Danger Mouse and Nanny in Count Duckula.
    • Sir Michael Hordern as the Abbott. Amongst his long and distinguished career, Hordern is beloved by children for playing the gruff Badger in Cosgrove Hall’s The Wind in the Willows.
    • Jimmy Hibbert as Vinto Pimmie (amongst others). Another regular Cosgrove Hall writer and actor, Hibbert later played the late King Verence I in Wyrd Sisters.
  • Amie’s nerdy joke references “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”, a psychological theory proposed by Abraham Maslow in a 1943 and his 1953 book Motivation and Personality. The hierarchy presents human needs as a pyramid, with the most fundamental at the bottom; a person needs the lowest needs met before they can consider the higher ones, progressing up the pyramid. In order from bottom to top, the categories of needs are Physiological (basic physical survival), Safety (a feeling of security), Belonging (social connections), Esteem (respect and status), Self-actualisation (fulfilling one’s potential) and – as a later addition – Self-transcendence (altruism and spirituality). While it has become popular as part of broader culture, the theory has been frequently criticised by psychologists, in particular for presenting what many see as a very Western set of values as universal.
  • For our international (and non-drinking) listeners, Bintang is an Indonesian beer produced by the Heineken company, availably comparatively cheaply in Australia. To “smash” a beer in Australian slang is to drink it quickly.
  • Amie refers to The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, a 2017 Amazon period comedy set in 1958. The title character turns to stand-up comedy after her husband leaves her, and gets a day job in a B. Altman department store as a cosmetic sales clerk.
  • Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise or The Ladies’ Delight) is an 1883 novel by Émile Zola, the eleventh in his “Rougon-Macquart” series about the lives of two related families living in the Second French Empire during the latter half of the 19th century. The store in the book is modelled after the 1852 version of Le Bon Marché (“The Good Deal”), often regarded as the first modern department store. (It originally opened with four departments in 1838.)
  • Are You Being Served? was a British sit-com about the staff in the clothing department of fictional department store Grace Brothers. It originally ran from 1972 to 1985, and was famous for it’s high-camp, innuendo-laden style, not dissimilar to the Carry On films. It had a large cast, but the five characters who lasted the entire ten season run were exceedingly camp menswear salesman Mr Humphries (John Inman), officious floorwalker (supervisor) and supposedly ex-military man “Captain” Peacock (Frank Thornton), head of department Cuthbert Rumbold (Nicholas Smith), Womenswear assistant Shirley Brahms (Wendy Richard) and head of Womenswear Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden), who frequently told stories about her “pussy”. (We’re not making this up.) The show was so popular it spawned a stage play, a film, a 1990s sequel – Grace & Favour, in which the five main characters run an inn – and a reunion special in 2016. There were also three remakes for other countries: the US one didn’t get past a pilot, the Singaporean version dropped the filthy jokes, and the Australian one featured Mr Humphries moving to Australian store Bone Brothers. The store’s name was changed because there’s a real Australian store named Grace Bros, which is probably why Ben couldn’t remember the name…
  • The Smurfs are small (“three apples high”) magical blue-skinned creatures who live in a secret village of toadstool houses in a medieval wood, invented by Belgian artist Peyo in 1958 for a comic strip. They have expanded in worldwide popularity with cartoons, toys and most recently a CGI/live-action film franchise. Each smurf has a name describing their personality or profession: Handy Smurf is a builder and handyman, Brainy Smurf an arrogant know-it-all, Hefty Smurf a strong gym junkie and so on. The Smurfs are led by Papa Smurf, a wise older smurf with a beard, and there were originally 99 male smurfs and just one female smurf, Smurfette. She was created by Gargamel, the smurfs main enemy; he is an evil but incompetent wizard who needs a smurf as the final ingredient in an alchemical formula to transform lead into gold. Over the years many other smurfs have been added, notably Baby Smurf, Nanny Smurf, Grandpa Smurf and the “smurflings”, a group of teenage smurfs.
  • Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat is a stage musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, based loosely on the story of Joseph and his “coat of many colours” from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Joseph is a dreamer and the favourite of his father’s dozen sons; his jealous brothers sell him into slavery and tell their father he is dead, but eventually his skill at interpreting dreams sees him triumph and reunite with his family.
  • Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was a famous and successful commander of British naval forces during the American War of Independence and the subsequent Wars of the First, Second and Third Coalition with France. During the last of these, his ship Victory was engaged with three French vessels at the Battle of Trafalgar when a sniper in the rigging of the French ship Redoubtable spotted him and shot him through the shoulder, fatally wounding him. It’s said his officers asked him to change his dress, or at least cover up the numerous stars and other honours which were sewn into his coat, to make him less identifiable to the enemy. His coat is displayed in the National Maritime Museum in London, and this blog discusses it in detail.
  • “The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers” features in Homer the Great, the twelfth episode of the sixth season of The Simpsons. Homer joins the secretive Stonecutters (a parody of the Freemasons), but annoys the other members when he first destroys a sacred relic, then is made their leader when it’s discovered during his punishment that he bears a prophesied birthmark. His efforts to help the community at Lisa’s request are the final straw, and the other members all quit and form the “No Homers” club, leaving Homer to go back to his family.
  • Some of the Departments in Arnold Bros have old-fashioned names:
    • Delicatessen – traditionally sells imported or unusual prepared foods, typically meats, cheeses and foreign fruits and vegetables. Still used in supermarkets, though usually abbreviated to “Deli”.
    • Haberdashery – small items used in sewing, like needles, thread, buttons, ribbons and zippers.
    • Ironmongery – originally meant any items made of iron, but expanded to mean similar objects (e.g. utensils, pots, doorknobs etc.) made of other metals and also plastic.
  • See the note in our previous episode about Liz and Ben’s differing feelings about Lord of the Flies, but for quick reference: in William Golding’s novel about schoolboys stranded on a desert island, protagonists Piggy and Ralph find a large conch shell on the beach and blow it like a horn to summon the other boys for a meeting. From then on when they meet, someone must be holding the conch to be allowed to speak.
  • Catweazle was a London Weekend Television children’s series about a ragged 11th century wizard, the titular Catweazle played wonderfully by Geoffrey Bayldon, who accidentally travels forward in time, initially to the year 1969, then again in the second season to the 1970s. He interprets all modern technology as magic, most famously describing electricity as “elec-trickery” and a telephone as “the telling bone”. In the first season, the young boy who befriends and hides Catweazle on his farm is nicknamed Carrot!
  • The first working escalator was built in 1896 on Coney Island, though patents for various designs go back as far as 1859! The first one built in Europe was for the Harrods department store in Knightsbridge in 1898 – so it’s possible, if unlikely, that the escalators were installed when Arnold Bros (est 1905) was first constructed. (The television series shows a clearly more modern escalator, though a sign next to it also clearly says it goes up to the second floor, rather than the fourth or fifth floor described in the book.)
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a 1966 absurdist play, probably the best known work by Tom Stoppard. It follows two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, giving their perspective of events in the original story, as they are first tasked to discover why their old school friend Hamlet has apparently gone mad, and then to accompany him to England, bearing a letter for the English King commanding Hamlet’s death. Hamlet alters it and they are killed instead. The pair have many interactions with the Tragedians from Hamlet who present the play-within-a-play The Murder of Gonzago, and there are many musings about fate, language and existence. Stoppard adapted and directed a film version in 1990 which features a stellar cast.
  • The plan to build windowless aeroplanes that display video of the outside view on screens was announced by the airline Emirates in early June 2018. Their newest planes have already removed windows in their first class suites.
  • Rick and Morty is an animated sci-fi comedy series created by Justin Roiland (who also voices both title characters) and Dan Harmon. It began life as a parody of the Back to the Future characters Doc and Marty, and follows Rick, an alcoholic, amoral genius scientist who drags his grandson Morty into dangerous adventures across time, space and multiple alternate realities. The episode Liz refers to is The Ricks Must Be Crazy from the second season, in which it is revealed Rick’s flying car is powered by an entire mini universe contained within its battery – and a scientist there has built his own mini universe.
  • The scene in which our universe is shown to exist within a locker in an alien train station occurs at the end of Men In Black II, and parallels the ending of the first Men in Black film in which the Milky Way is contained inside a marble (though it’s not actually the same “galaxy” jewel being sought during the rest of the film).
  • While it’s not technically true that you can’t fold paper more than seven times, it does become increasingly harder to fold as the strength of the paper increases with it’s thickness – which increases exponentially with each fold. Most people can’t fold an average-sized piece of paper more than five or six times. In 2002, Californian Britney Gallivan folded a 1.2km long piece of toilet paper in half twelve times, and derived an equation which could determine how long a piece would need to be to allow a given number of folds. So what about Masklin? Being much smaller than the piece of paper might make it easier for him to get leverage, and even if he only managed to fold the A4 letter six times, it’d end up about 1.5 x 2 inches – large, but cartable for a Nome.
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a “Star Wars Anthology” film, set immediately before the events of the original Star Wars (aka Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope). It tells the previously untold story of the group of rebels who steal the plans revealing the fatal flaw in the Death Star – plans that are handed to Princess Leia at the end of the movie, and are the ones she passes on to R2-D2 at the beginning of Star Wars.
  • Angels & Demons is the novel by (in)famous Catholic mystery thriller author Dan Brown which focuses on the election of a new pope. It also introduces Robert Langdon, a university professor who specialises in religious iconography and “symbology” and is an “expert on the Illuminati”. Langdon goes on to appear in four more of Brown’s novels, including the international bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and is played by Tom Hanks in the film adaptations. (Incidentally, Tony Robinson – who we also mentioned in this episode – produced The Real Da Vinci Code for Channel 4 in 2005, in which he debunked many of the supposed historical facts mentioned in the book.)
  • The 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels was conceived by Jonathan Swift as a biting, broad satire on many aspects of Irish and British society. The first part is the most famous: English sailor Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island Lilliput, home to six-inch-tall people (the same size as Nomes!), and becomes embroiled in their quasi-religious war with nearby Blefuscu over egg etiquette. In the other three parts he visits many other lands, encountering giants, scientists, sorcerers, brutish deformed humans and intelligent (if ethically questionable) horses. Generally only the first and sometimes second (giant) parts are included in the many children’s retellings.
  • Lieutenant commander Montgomery “Scotty” Scott was the head engineer and second officer aboard the starship Enterprise in the original 1966 Star Trek television series. Often described as a “miracle worker”, he was often able to effect emergency repairs or modifications in short time, though when he later appeared in sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation he admitted to overestimating the amount of time required to complete a given task.
  • For non-Australian listeners: “smoko” is common Australian slang for a break from work to smoke a cigarette. It was recently immortalised in the song “Smoko” by Queensland band The Chats.
  • You can watch Mr Bean (played by Rowan Atkinson) jury-rig a driving mechanism for his car out of a mop, a broom, a bucket of paint and some ropes at the start of this compilation of some of his finest travelling moments. The sequence Ben remembered involves him running late for a dentist appointment and getting changed during the drive.
  • Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was a beloved children’s author who wrote both fantasy – including Noddy, The Magic Faraway Tree and Adventures of the Wishing Chair – and adventure books, most famously the Famous Five and Secret Seven books. Criticism of the books isn’t new; they have been critiqued since the 1950s. You can can still read Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” at Lip Magazine.
  • Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is the original 1971 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Charlie Bucket and four other children win the chance to tour reclusive sweet maker Willy Wonka’s fantastic factory. At the beginning of the film, Charlie’s four grandparents have been “bedridden for twenty years”, but Grandpa Joe is able to get up to accompany Charlie to the factory without too much trouble as soon as he finds his golden ticket…
  • A Current Affair (ACA) is a long-running Australian current affairs television program. It is generally regarded as “sensationalist journalism”, and a stereotypical story exposes “dole cheats” (people fraudulently claiming social benefit payments). The format and content of ACA and similar programs like Today Tonight were thoroughly satirised in the 1990s by the ABC sit-com Frontline.
  • “Potted shrimp” is a traditional English delicacy in which small shrimp are boiled, shelled and then mixed into spiced clarified butter.
  • Graham crackers are a semi-sweet American biscuit made from “graham flour”, a type of coarse-ground, unsifted whole wheat flour. The flour is named after Sylvester Graham, an 19th century Presbyterian minister who criticised the changes in the American diet resulting from the industrial revolution. There’s no real equivalent in Australia, though English-style digestive biscuits can be used in baking. “S’mores” are traditional American treats made while camping by sandwiching a roasted marshmallow and some chocolate between two graham crackers.
  • Animal crackers are another kind of sweet biscuit, originally from England but still popular in the United States. In the two-part second season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “What’s My Line?”, Oz and Willow flirt while discussing animal crackers, in particular the fact that usually the monkey is the only animal depicted wearing pants. The line “I mock you with my monkey pants”, delivered in a French accent by Oz, was supposedly taken from a dream experienced by Willow actor Alyson Hannigan.
  • We found a version of Kristy Kruger’s story about believing unicorns were real in Act 1 of Episode 293: A Little Bit of Knowledge of long-running NPR podcast This American Life, along with other folk with weird bits of childhood belief that survived into adulthood.

Episode 7 – All the Fingle Ladies

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

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

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

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

Show Notes and Errata:

  • You can find Georgina and her delightful autobiographical comics online at georgerexcomics.com, and also on Instagtram as @GirlRexDoor. She was in town on a residency with 100 Story Building, where Ben works facilitating creative writing workshops for young people. George’s Etsy shop is full of cool comics, postcards, badges and prints.
  • In case you’ve somehow been hiding under a pop culture rock, 2 Faust 2 Furious is a reference to the sequel to car/heist/action film The Fast and the Furious, which was titled 2 Fast 2 Furious. There are now eight films in this franchise which features Vin Diesel (in every film except 2 Fast 2 Furious), Michelle Rodriguez, Dwayne Johnson, Kurt Russell and Jason Statham. The only other one with a punny name is the eighth, titled The Fate of the Furious.
  • George’s 24-hour comics are produced as part of 24-Hour Comics Day, an annual event in which comic creators are challenged to create a 24-page comic in a single day. 24-Hour Comics Day has run in some form every year since 2004, when it was originally organised by publisher Nat Gertler, and one of its most famous proponents (and long-time participants) is Scott McCloud, the creator of Understanding Comics.
  • “Time is a flat circle”, now the subject of many memes, is derived from a scene in the first season of True Detective. It refers to the theory of “eternal return”, which states that existence repeats itself over and over in very similar ways. Ben’s favourite iteration of this from fiction is the Time Prophet, a character from the weird Canadian-German sci-fi series Lexx, who could see into past cycles of time (“not very clearly mind you”) to predict the future of the current cycle.
  • You can see George’s image of Angua and Gaspode (inspired by our Men At Arms episode) on her Instagram, and her version of Tiffany Aching is on the Fan Art page of her web site.
  • “Colony collapse disorder” (CCD) is when a majority of a worker bee population abandon their hive, leading to the collapse of the rest of the colony. It has become a serious problem over the last decade, especially in the United States, though the causes are not well-identified; everything from pesticides to climate change and modern commercial beekeeping practices have been suggested. Bees are an essential part of the pollination cycle for a great many food crops.
  • The two previous times Rincewind found himself suddenly able to wield magic were in Sourcery! (see episode three) and The Light Fantastic.
  • The character of Faust or Faustus was based on real-life 16th century German astrologer and alchemist Johann Georg Faust, who had many misadventures and was the subject of many rumours regarding his supposed magical powers. He died (possibly in an alchemical explosion) leaving a mutilated corpse – evidence, according to his enemies, that the Devil had come to collect him personally. The tale of his “deal with the devil” – selling his soul via the demon Mephistopheles, in exchange for almost unlimited magical power, mostly because he was bored – became a popular German legend, with the two most famous adaptations being for the theatre: Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1604, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s more snappily titled Faust in 1808. In both versions Faust interacts with Helen of Troy.
  • The Tenth Doctor is prevented from regenerating and prematurely aged about 1,000 years by the Master in the episode Last of the Time Lords, causing him to shrink and lose all his hair. Many fans compared the tiny CGI Doctor (who even had a tiny version of the Tenth Doctor’s brown suit) to Dobby the house-elf, as seen in the Harry Potter films.
  • Adrian Mole is the protagonist in a series of comedy novels by Sue Townsend. The first two – The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole – were written largely for teenagers, depicting the trials of an adolescent during the Thatcher years in Britain. They have been adapted for radio, stage and most famously television, and even as a stage musical! Several later books, less well-known outside of the UK, followed Adrian into adulthood and middle age.
  • The Road to El Dorado (2000) is a DreamWorks animated film about two 16th century Spanish con artists who head to the New World with Cortés and find El Dorado, the mythical City of Gold, where they pretend to be gods. It stars the voices of Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Rosie Perez, Armande Assante and Edward James Olmos.
  • In the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of King Arthur’s knights, Sir Robin (played by Eric Idle), is accompanied by minstrels (led by Neil Innes) whose songs about Robin’s bravery include grisly details of things that supposedly don’t scare him. He abruptly tells them to stop singing before things get too awful.
  • “Goetia” is a form of ritual magic involving the conjuration of demons, most famously drawn from the 17th-century grimoire (or book of magic) The Lesser Key of Solomon, which lists 72 demons that may be summoned in a section titled “Ars Goetia“. These entities – supposedly summoned by King Solomon himself – are often referred to as “goetic demons”, and their names have been frequently used in pop culture for all manner of demonic and evil entities. As well as prompting the name of Vassenago in this book, Vassago – the third demon, and a Prince of Hell – has also been referenced in comic books, videogames and novels.
  • Gachnar, the Dark Lord of Nightmares and the Bringer of Terror (according to him), appears in the fourth season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Fear, Itself. (Ben’s synopsis is mostly correct.)
  • The scene Liz refers to is from Ace Ventura: When Nature calls, when Ace forces his way out of the rear end of a rubbery mechanical rhino after the fan and hatch both malfunction. In the first Police Academy film, officious Lieutenant Harris crashes a motorcycle and flies into the back of an open horse float, where it is implied (but not shown) that he gets his head…er…stuck. 1995 and 1984 sure were different times for film, huh.
  • Miffy is the English name of Nijntje, the young female rabbit protagonist of a series of books created in 1955 by Dutch artist Dick Bruna. There are 26 books in the series, most published since 1990, though Bruna retired in 2014 and died in 2017. The stories are hugely popular and have been adapted into two television series and a feature film, and heavily merchandised. Miffy and the other rabbit characters are drawn with an “X” to represent her nose, and no mouth; given Liz’s childhood terror, we’d like to suggest listener discretion when viewing the official Miffy web site.
  • Target’s Doctor Who novelisations – short books adapting the television stories into prose – are famous both for helping many Who fans get into reading, and also for being the only way fans could revisit earlier stories before they were released on video (and later DVD) – or indeed at all, in the case of the stories which have been lost. Sadly the site “On Target” which was devoted to these books has also been lost.
  • South Australians are notable for sounding significantly more English than folks from other Australian states. This is largely due to their use of a small number of significant alternate vowel sounds and is usually attributed to the fact that the colony of South Australia was established mostly by free settlers, rather than convicts, or that there were far fewer Irish settlers there. Not everyone agrees with that theory.
  • The time travel episode of Stargate SG-1 to which Ben refers is the penultimate episode of season two, titled 1969.
  • Be Kind Rewind is a 2008 Michel Gondry comedy in which Mos Def plays a video store clerk whose friend (Jack Black) accidentally erases all the tapes in the store. In desperation they make their own extremely low-budget, inadvertently hilarious recreations of popular films like Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy, which become very popular.
  • “Bricky” and “sparky” are Australian slang for, respectively, bricklayers and electricians. (“Chippie” is slang for a carpenter.)
  • The Seinfeld episode where Elaine has an argument about exclamation points is The Sniffing Accountant, from season five.
  • The cartoon George refers to near the end is The Baskervilles, a kind of “reverse Munsters” in which the very normal and nice Baskerville family try to fit into the Hellish cityscape of “Underworld: The Theme Park”. The Baskervilles’ neighbours include the Lucifers, the Frankensteins and the Draculas, plus the park’s boss, “The Boss” (who may or may not be the actual Devil), and his right-hand man, a skeleton with an Australian accent named Kevin. A British, French and Canadian co-production, The Baskervilles ran for one season in 2000 and included Rob Brydon of The Trip fame in the cast! You can find at least the first episode on YouTube.
  • Ben couldn’t find the cartoon that features the Prince of Heck (he certainly wasn’t thinking of Dilbert, which is what the Internet turns up), but “HIM” (not “that guy”) is the flamboyant prince of darkness who cannot be named from the original ’98-’05 run of The Powerpuff Girls. HIM appears as a traditional devil figure, but in drag with lobster claws for hands, and is extremely powerful; he is the Girls’ second greatest foe and the one they fear the most.
  • The Tenacious D song Liz refers to is “Tribute”, the D’s first and biggest hit; you can find the music video here.
  • You can find fellow Discworld podcast Radio Morpork at radiomorpork.wordpress.com. They’ve recently released their twenty-second episode, bringing them up to The Last Continent.
  • Odysseus does many things which by today’s standards are horrendous, including slaughtering the suitors who wanted to marry his wife during his absence as well as the servants who had waited on them, but there are few if any writings about his life afterwards (or his death).
  • Ben’s bank heist game, which ran from early 2016 to early 2017, was Small Time Criminals.