Elizabeth Flux

#Pratchat7 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, featuring guest Georgina Chadderton, discussing the 1990 illustrated Discworld novel Eric.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s George’s illustration of Angua and Gaspode, from her Instagram:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title – and the quip in the episode that inspired it – are a play on Beyoncé’s massive pop R&B hit single “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” from 2008. The music video was also a massive hit, with a dance routine inspired by the work of famous Hollywood choreographer Bob Fosse, and the entire thing filmed in a single take in black and white.
  • 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) at the top of this page, and also on her Instagram. Her versions of Tiffany Aching, Rincewind and the Luggage are on the Fan Art page of her web site.
  • Bees are an essential part of the pollination cycle for a great many food crops. “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.
  • The two previous times Rincewind found himself suddenly able to wield magic were in Sourcery! (see episode three) and The Light Fantastic.
  • We didn’t spot this at the time of recording, but that joke in the first footnote about a feather being erotic and a chicken being kinky is not a Pratchett original. Whether it’s an oldie that’s done the rounds multiple times or not we can’t be sure, but we’ve found at least one earlier usage: the 1982 special Christmas episode of The Kenny Everett Television Show. Kenny Everett’s second TV series included many solo sketches featuring various recurring characters, and in this episode Everett tells the feather vs chicken joke (in pretty much the same way as Pratchett) as philosophical punk Gizzard Puke. You can find this episode on YouTube – we’ve linked to the time index of the joke section, at around 3m44s.
  • 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, though why was not explained) 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 home video – 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 to keep the store going, they replace the tapes with 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.

 

#Pratchat63 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 63, “Decline by Committee“, discussing the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices”, plus some extra discussion of the novel Thud!, with special guest Matt Roden.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the “Explaining a Board Game” sketch from Australian sketch group Aunty Donna, which Ben has indeed been sent many, many times – including by Matt, shortly after we recorded this episode.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on the phrase “Design by Committee”, which refers to a situation where no-one is in charge of the design of a product, leading to a lack of direction.
  • “Trilogy in four parts” is borrowed from Douglas Adams, who described The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book series this way after publishing the fourth novel, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. It later became “The Increasingly Innacurately Named Hitchhikers Trilogy” with the publication of the fifth book Mostly Harmless.
  • You can find the first three parts of our trilogy here:
    • #PratchatPlaysThud – “The Troll’s Gambit”, about Thud the board game, with Dr Melissa Rogerson
    • #Pratchat61 – “What Terry Wrote”, about Thud!, with Matt Roden.
    • #Pratchat62 – “There’s a Cow in There“, about Where’s My Cow?, with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
  • “Nepo baby” was a buzz-term in late 2022. It’s short for “nepotism baby”, a new name for the concept of getting a leg up via a family connection. That’s as old as…well, a very old thing, but discussion of it really took off as younger social media users learned to their surprise that many Hollywood stars and influencers have parents or other relatives they’d never heard of who are also in show business. Matt asks Ben if he read “the article” – Ben hadn’t, but we think Matt meant “What is a Nepotism Baby, Anyway? How a ‘Nepo Baby’ is Born” by Nate Jones for Vulture, which was also a cover story for New York magazine.
  • Ridcully’s snooker table covered in paperwork appears not in Lords and Ladies, but in Soul Music. A footnote reveals that a wizard’s trick shots can include temporal spin, and that Ridcully once bounced a ball off the Bursar’s head “last Tuesday”.
  • We’ve listed below the senior faculty members of Unseen University who appear in most of the Wizards books. (We’ve tried to avoid any spoilers here for books not yet covered on the podcast.)
    • Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor
    • Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, Reader in Invisible Writings, and Praelector. (He later acquired more titles, including Reader in Non-Volatile Intelligence, Cantoride Speaker in Slood Refurgance and at least one it would be a spoiler to reveal here.)
    • A. A. Dinwiddie (aka “The Bursar”), Bursar. His name is revealed in The Truth.
    • Henry (last name not revealed), the Dean of Pentacles, known as “the Dean”. (His name is revealed in a later book.)
    • The Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    • The Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    • The Senior Wrangler.
  • Ponder Stibbons and Victor Tugelbend were students taking final exams at the time of the rediscovery of Holy Wood, as chronicled in Moving Pictures. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.) This was indeed also the first appearance of Archchancellor Ridcully, though he doesn’t play a major part in a novel until Reaper Man, which also introduces the rest of the faculty we know best.
  • We discussed our theories about Rincewind’s entry into Unseen University in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • The “National Interest Test” (NIT) was a requirement added to the grant application process for the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2018 by the previous Liberal/National coalition government. The ARC is the independent body which assesses university grant applications for research, and recommends which projects should get grants to the Minister, who generally approves all of them. But the NIT was part of an increasingly commercial agenda of the conservative government to restrict research, and in 2021 further recommendations were given to the ARC to make this more stringent. In late December 2021, Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert rejected six grants which had been approved and recommended by the ARC on the grounds that they were not “good value for taxpayers’ money” or in the national interest. The timing of the announcement – just before Christmas – and the nature of the projects removed (which included subjects like climate change and political activism in China) suggested a political motive for the rejections, which was met with .
  • The wizard who knows about stories is most likely Ladislav Pelc, Prehumous Professor of Morbid Bibliomancy, whom Moist goes consults about the Post Office’s letters in Going Postal. He has very large ears and no beard, but out of deference to wizarding tradition he wears a false one when in view of the public.
  • The incident with Windle Poons is in Reaper Man; the other wizards attempt to bury him at the corner of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, described as two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork.
  • There are many schools in Ankh-Morpork, aside from Unseen University itself:
    • The Assassin’s Guild school appears most prominently in Pyramids and Night Watch.
    • The Clockmaker’s Guild – which seems to provide more of an apprenticeship – appears in Thief of Time. It’s implied the Thieves’ Guild has a school or apprenticeship program as well.
    • The Fool’s Guild school is important in Wyrd Sisters and Men at Arms.
    • The Musician’s Guild may also offer more of an apprenticeship, but they raised and taught Keith, Maurice’s “dumb kid”, as he mentions in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
    • By the time of Thief of Time, Susan (who herself went to Quirm College for Young Ladies) is teaching at Madam Frout’s Learning Through Play School.
  • We previously brought up the issue of copaganda – the bias towards showing police in a positive light in news media and popular culture – in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”, though we never quite got around to discussing it. Ben’s not sure we’ve done the discussion justice here, either – he’s had more thoughts since the episode – but the concept pre-dates the word, going back to at least the 1950s and the publicity stunt puff pieces in newspapers about police officers rescuing cats and early friendly neighbourhood policemen characters on television. Indeed, the concept has been used to criticise exactly the friendly English bobby image we talk about in this episode, so perhaps we have some more thinking to do. The origins of the word aren’t easily traceable, and probably it was coined more than once; it definitely dates back to before 2015, but has seen a resurgence in use and popularity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased public awareness of the failings of the police system.
  • We mention quite a few cop shows this episode, though Ben would like to say he realises we may have been unconsciously cherry picking to support our idea about the difference in pop cultural depictions of cops in the UK and Australia compared to the US (and see also the note above about copaganda). Here are the police films and television shows we mentioned:
    • The Bill was a British police drama about the life and work of beat officers at the fictional Sun Hill Police Station in metropolitan London. It was broadcast on ITV for 26 series between 1983 and 2010, and was also popular in Australia. A reboot is apparently in the works. The show’s title comes from the slang term for police, “the Old Bill” or just “the Bill”.
    • Blue Heelers was an Australian drama about the fictional rural Victorian town of Mount Thomas, told from the perspective of the local police officers. It ran for twelve years on Channel 7 from 1994 to 2006, and made stars out of Australian actors Lisa McCune (who left after the seventh series) and John Wood (who was the lead character for all twelve years). Blue heelers are an Australian breed of working dog, and also slang in some parts of Australian for a police officer or the police in general (Australian police uniforms are generally blue).
    • Police Rescue was an Australian police drama which began life as a 1989 feature film before spawning a television series which ran for five series between 1991 and 1996. It focused on the NSW Police Rescue Squad, who travelled all over the city and the state attending accidents, disasters and other emergencies. It starred Gary Sweet and Sonia Todd.
    • Water Rats was an Australian police drama focussed on the Sydney Water Police, whose bear is Sydney Harbour. It ran for six seasons on Channel 9 between 1996 and 2001, and featured Colin Friels, Gary Bisley, Aaron Pederson and Jay Laga’aia (who soon after appeared in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as Captain Typho).
    • Hot Fuzz (2007) is the second of Edgar Wright’s “cornetto trilogy” of comedy action films which began with Shaun of the Dead. It stars Simon Pegg as Sgt. Nick Angel, a hotshot London police officer whose colleagues resent his success and get him reassigned to a small town in Gloucestershire, where he is initially bored before a series of bizarre murders begins. The film also stars Nick Frost as local constable Danny Butterman.
    • Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010 on ITV. It was based on the “Constable” novels written by ex-cop Peter N Walker (using the pseudonym Nicholas Rhea). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, and had a number of main characters over its run, but is probably best known for the original pair: young police officer Nick (played by ex-EastEnders heartthrob Nick Berry) and his wife Kate (Niamh Cusack), the town doctor. Other notable characters were Sergeant Blaketon (Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds), older constable Alf Ventriss (William Simons), a war veteran – partial inspiration for Fred Colon, perhaps? – and local “lovable rogue” Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard).
  • Bernard “The Cunning Artificer” Pearson, of Clarecraft and The Discworld Emporium fame, was indeed a police officer in his youth. He was also one of Pratchett’s closest friends and often consulted on various matters, including “his policing “the more arcane policing arts”, as Rob Wilkins puts it in Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes.
  • Regarding Pratchett’s attitude towards Agatha Christie, Ben mentions this interview for the Bookwitch blog from 2010. (Interestingly he mentions several times that he’s working on I Shall Wear Midnight, and insists it will be the last Tiffany Aching book…) On Agatha Christie, he says: “Well, Agatha Christie; you have to get her out of your system sooner or later. Same with James Bond. And then you realise that not all murders happen in one house containing seven people.” He also describes her work as fantasy in his pieces “Whose Fantasy Are You?” (1991) and “Let There Be Dragons (1993)”, which can be found in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • You can find A’Tuin Sneezed’s great, long Twitter thread about Thud! by starting with this tweet:
  • Thomas the Tank Engine is an anthropomorphic steam locomotive – basically a regular train, but with a human-like face on the front – who is the star of the Railway Series books by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry, written between 1945 and 1972. While the books were very successful, it was the television series adaptation Thomas & Friends that really cemented Thomas’ popularity. The series ran from 1984 to 2021, and used live-action model train versions of Thomas and his friends with narration by Ringo Starr. The human characters – including the “Fat Controller”, who was in charge of the railway system on Thomas’ home, the Island of Sondor – were portrayed by wooden models.

More notes coming soon!

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#Pratchat33 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

Thanks to listener Steavie, who co-directed the Brisbane Arts Theatre‘s 2014 production, here are some images of the musical version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. (See below for more about the musical.) The Brisbane Arts Theatre usually produces at least one Discworld adaptation every year; while they took a break during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, they resumed in 2022 with Night Watch.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title references both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie’s first feature film from 1998, and the common refrain of unmasked villains in the cartoon series Scooby Doo – a show Malicia would probably have mixed feelings about.
  • Überwald is located about 1,500 miles Hubwards and Widdershins of Ankh-Morpork, according to The Discworld Mappe. The name “Überwald” is a pretty direct German translation of  “Transylvania”, both meaning “beyond (or over) the forest”.
  • Hermione is an ancient Greek name meaning “Princess of Hermes”; in classical mythology, Hermione is the daughter of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and is a child at the start of the Trojan War. Hermione Granger is the most notable contemporary character to bear the name, but others appear in the works of P G Wodehouse, D H Lawrence and Pee-wee Herman.
  • This book was the first standard Discworld novel with cover art not by Josh Kirby. The Last Hero, published earlier the same year, was a large-format illustrated book with a cover and internal illustrations by Paul Kidby. For more on that see #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“. Kidby would take over the Discworld covers from the next book, Night Watch. The Amazing Maurice was published only a month or so after Kirby’s death, so we’d speculate the change was mostly due to it being a children’s book – while Kirby did covers for the re-issue of The Carpet People and the original Truckers trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books each had art by a different artist, though Kirby illustrations were used for some foreign language editions. The original Amazing Maurice cover was by David Wyatt; Ben’s edition has a cover by Paul Kidby; and Michelle’s edition of the audiobook has a cover by Bill Mayer. The newest edition has cover art by Laura Ellen Anderson. You can see all of these on the L-Space wiki entry for the book.    
  • “Crazy Old Maurice” is the nickname of Belle’s father, an “eccentric inventor”, in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Gaston calls him by this derogatory nickname in song. The inventor angle is a departure from the original fairytale, in which Belle’s father is a failed businessman who has lost all his money. While there are certainly a few Beauty and the Beast references in The Simpsons, we couldn’t find any evidence of this one.
  • The Pied Piper of Hamelin – or Hameln, as the real German town’s name is properly spelled (thank you Sven) – is a folk tale with origins that go back to around 1300 CE, though it may also have been inspired by real history (see below). The most common version of the story is that the town is plagued with rats and hires a piper with magical powers to get rid of them. (He’s “pied”, meaning he was dressed in gaudy or multicoloured clothing.) Once the job is done, the town’s mayor refuses to pay the piper (giving rise to the modern idiom); in retaliation he uses his music to lead all the children of the town into a crack in a nearby mountain, which seals shut – leaving only one young boy, with a lame leg, behind. In the Aarne-Thomspson-Uther index, which categorises folk tales, it is classified as ATU 570, “The Rat-Catcher”.
    • Unlike most folk tales, which have their origins in ancient mythology, the pied piper story seems to be based on an historical event in which a majority of the children in Hameln were lost. Theories include them dying in an accident, being captured and sold off to workhouses, or being forced to move to other regions, though it’s all very mysterious. For more on this fascinating aspect of the story, we recommend “Narratively Satisfying Lever“, the second episode about The Amazing Maurice from sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
  • The Netflix show Liz remembers is 2019’s The Society; it’s a weird modern twist, loosely inspired by the legend. A second season is due late this year.
  • Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is probably the most famous English language version of the story, and is still popular thanks to it’s dynamic rhythm and catchy rhymes. It was first published as the last poem in his 1842 book Dramatic Lyrics. (Ben is wrong that Pratchett quotes it directly; he closely paraphrases it.)
  • Pet rats are usually domesticated Norway Rats (Rattus norvegicus), aka laboratory rats or “Fancy Rats”. Michelle is spot on about their lifespans: they live on average for 2-3 years, but can live up to 4-5 years if well cared for (and lucky). The oldest known pet rat we could find was Rodney, who lived in Japan and died at the age of seven years and four months in 1990. (We couldn’t verify this for sure but it seems legit.)
  • Überwald is first mentioned by name as the home country of both Angua and Cheery Littlebottom in Feet of Clay (discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays”), and plays a major part in both Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant (both published shortly before The Amazing Maurice in the series). But Granny Weatherwax and her Lancre coven visit a small town in the shadow of a castle on their way to Genua in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“), and while neither the town nor country are named, it’s clearly the same place.
  • Scrote is a small town in the Sto Plains, and like most places there makes most of its money from cabbage farming. It features briefly (but memorably) in Soul Music, when The Band With Rocks In stops there for the night while on tour at the Jolly Cabbage. Death also visits Scrote during the events of Hogfather.
  • “Rathaus” – pronounced “RART-house” – is indeed the German term for Town Hall. It comes from the words “rat” meaning “council”, and “haus” meaning…er…well you can probably figure that one out. 
  • The Rat Name Game is the invention of Pratchat subscriber Joel Molin. (We mention him later in the questions section, but felt it was remiss of us not to mention his name at the time when we played it.) Send us yours using the hashtag #Pratchat33!
  • We’ve mentioned The Good Place before; the short version is that it’s a sit-com in which Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies, ends up in a heavenly afterlife, and quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake. Her supposed soul mate, an ethics professor (William Jackson Harper), agrees to help her learn to be a better person.    
  • The film adaptation of the book, titled The Amazing Maurice, is a co-production between German studio Ulysses Filmproduktion and the Irish Cantilever Group. It was announced in June 2019, with the more recent news in October 2019 that it had scored a global distribution deal. What we know so far is that it has an “unexpected” script by Terry Rossio, who wrote Shrek and has worked with Disney; character designs by Carter Goodrich, best known for Ratatouille and Despicable Me; and the directors will be Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, whose previous work is not well-known outside of Germany. Ulysses Filmproduktion list it as “in production” on their web site, and the announcements gave an expected release date of 2022. There’s no word on how COVID-19 delays or the exclusive Narrativia/Motive Pictures deal have affected the production, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
  • The “if a dog wore pants” meme stormed the Internet in 2015 and spawned many imitators and extrapolations. 
  • The theatre cat in the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical Cats is Gus, invented by T. S. Eliot in the poem “Gus, the Theatre Cat”. His full name is “Asparagus”; he was played by Stephen Tate in the original West End cast in 1981, and by Ian McKellan in the 2019 film.
  • The musical version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (see above for some photos) seems to now only be available as a package for schools that includes photocopiable scripts, limited performance rights and supporting materials. It was written by Matthew Holmes, who also created a similar adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb. We’ve heard mixed reviews; one listener thought it sacrificed a lot of the humour, and considered the Stephen Briggs theatrical version superior. On the other hand Steavie – who directed the production in Brisbane – feels it does a great job of paring the story back to the essentials to make room for some great songs – including ones for the Trap Squad and the Rat King. Steavie thinks its the best Hopefully we’ll get to see it one day!
  • In the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek, Lord Farquaad is the ruler of Duloc, a city-state where he has outlawed fairytale creatures and the citizens live in austerity. (The Pied Piper appears in the fourth film in the series, Shrek Forever After.)
  • We’ve previously talked about Enid Blyton in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven” and #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”. Her Famous Five and Secret Seven books are the most obvious inspiration for Malicia’s adventurous notions.
  • We last mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”. Many of his worlds break down the walls between reality and fiction, but this is especially true of his Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair.
  • We’ve talked about Neil Gaiman many times. A fantasy writer who started as a journalist and first made his name in comics, he was a long-time friend of Terry Pratchett.
  • Goosebumps is a series of horror novels for middle grade readers, all written by Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine. We previously mentioned them in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”.
  • Rllk is clearly the pre-Clan rat sound for “fuck”.
  • Hieroglyphics are the characters of the ancient Egyptians form of writing, though the term is sometimes applied to other cultures’ similar forms. While each character was an image, and could represent the object they resembled – making them pictograms –  they also represented sounds, making up the syllables of longer words, and clarified the meanings of other adjacent heiroglyphs. The Clan’s written language is not quite the same.
  • A guru, from pan-Indian tradition, is a spiritual guide and teacher. The term applies to teachers and mentors in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism. 
  • We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s obsession with Lobsang in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”.
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written by American professor of literature Joseph Campbell in 1949; in it he argues that there is a common mythological hero story across many cultures. The book is hugely influential on modern fiction – it’s effect on Pratchett is perhaps felt most in Only You Can Save Mankind – but has been applied in a very reductive way, and its popularity has led many to view the stories of other cultures through a very classical, Western lens.
  • Pratchett’s love for the lone wagon wheel rolling out of an explosion appears most prominently in Soul Music, but also in several other books as an aside.
  • Secret Valley was an Australian kids’ adventure show, co-produced with Spanish and French companies, first aired in 1980. It was about the kids who worked and played at the fictitious holiday camp, Secret Valley, and their ongoing rivalry with a gang of bullies led by Spider McGlurk (no really). Spider – who despite Ben’s insistence off-air was not played by a young Russell Crowe – was paid by developer William Whopper to ruin the camp so he could buy up the land. The series was repeated often on the ABC throughout the 1980s, and was created by Roger Mirams, who went on to create the spin-off  Professor Poopsnagle’s Steam Zeppelin. Ben never saw the latter show – it ran on Channel Nine, before his country town had more than two television stations – but it apparently has quite a cult following in the UK, even today. The Secret Valley theme was indeed sung to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”.
  • The Doctor Who serial with the giant rats and overt racism is 1977’s Victorian-era adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela, and introducing two fan favourite guest characters, theatre proprietor Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin) and pathologist Professor George Litefoot (Trevor Baxter). The other one, with the character screeching “Ratkin!”, is 1989’s Ghost Light, from the show’s final season before being cancelled in 1989.
  • Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy Neverwhere was originally a television series, produced for the BBC in 1996. It introduces the idea of “London Below”, an alternate city invisible to those who live in “London Above” and where various aspects of London take on supernatural forms. In London Below, rats are revered as intelligent beings, and the Rat Speakers are an entire sect who serve them. Neverwhere was turned into a book, and followed by the short story How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Gaiman is currently working on a full-length sequel.
  • The film in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson leaps off a tower is 2018’s Skyscraper, in which he plays a war veteran and former FBI agent who is frankly over-qualified to take on a security job in the new tallest building in the world, being built in Hong Kong. It’s attacked and set on fire by terrorists while his family are inside, instigating the jumping.
  • Eight (it’s okay, it’s safe to say on Roundworld) is established in the very first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as the number of occult significance on the Discworld. Wizards avoid saying it out loud, using euphemisms like “7A” and “twice four”, as in the wrong time or place it can summon evil creatures – notably Bel-Shamharoth, aka “the Soul Eater” or “the Sender of Eight”.
  • Cranium Rats first appeared as part of the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons’s second edition in 1994. They are not natural creatures, but are created from regular rats by the evil psychic beings known as Mind Flayers. You can find details of Cranium Rats for the game’s current, fifth edition in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, published in 2016.
  • “Deus ex machina” is a narrative cliche in which the plot is resolved suddenly by an unlikely or overtly supernatural occurrence. It comes from ancient Greek theatre, and means “God out of the machine”; the playwright Aeschylus invented it as a way of ending plays, and they literally brought Greek Gods onto stage using machines – namely a trapdoor or a crane – to end the story.
  • For an explanation of the Gonnigal, and the origins of the name, see our previous episode, “Meet the Feegles”.
  • Truckers is the first in Pratchett’s “Bromeliad” trilogy about a society of Nomes, tiny creatures who live in the cracks of the human world. We’ve previously covered all three books in the trilogy: Truckers, Diggers and Wings.
  • Phillip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1998 (which won that year’s Carnegie Medal). After a moderately successful film adaptation of the first novel (under it’s American title The Golden Compass), the trilogy is now being adapted for television by the BBC and HBO, beginning with a season covering the events of the first book in 2019. Pullman is currently working on finishing The Book of Dust, a sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. His other work includes the Sally Lockhart novels, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke, which was also adapted by the BBC starring Billie Piper.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the Harry Potter series, is the first after the proper return of “wizard Hitler” Voldemort. It features the horrendously cruel teacher Dolores Umbridge and the death of a major, beloved character. So…you know, pretty heavy for a 7-year-old.
  • There have been a lot of adaptations of Oliver Twist, but not that many cartoon versions: the two most recent straight versions are a 1974 American production, and a 1982 Australian one. The 1989 Disney film Oliver & Company loosely adapts the story to be about a lost kitten who joins a gang of street dogs, though Sally doesn’t die (or indeed appear) in that one.
  • Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 novel which serves as an allegory for the communist revolution in Russia. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm depose the human farmers and take over, creating a fairer society before falling prey to greed and corruption. The “glue factory scene” also involves the death of a beloved character.
  • Burgo’s Catch Phrase was a popular Australian version of the US/UK gameshow Catch Phrase, originally using the same name, that ran from 1997 to 2003 on the Nine Network. Contestants viewed animated picture puzzles, not unlike a rebus, and had to determine the phrase they represented. It was renamed to include “Burgo” in the title in 1999, to capitalise on the popularity of host John Burgess, a media personality known as “Burgo” or “Baby John”, who was previously famous as the Australian host of Wheel of Fortune.
  • The “dab” is a dance move in which a person ducks their head into one bent elbow while stretching out and raising their other arm. Exactly where it originated is hard to pin down – similar moves appear in Japanese anime – but it seems pretty clear the worldwide fad, especially amongst teenagers, was inspired by American footballer Cam Newton, who dabbed after a goal, though he was taught the move by his teenage brother. It’s popularity was pretty long-lived for a fad, only having waned in the last couple of years; it was partly kept alive by inclusion in the immensely popular videogame Fortnite: Battle Royale.
  • Graeme Base is an English-Australian children’s author and illustrator, most famous for his picture books Animalia and The Eleventh Hour. Animalia has an illustration for each letter of the English alphabet: “M” features “meticulous mice monitoring mysterious mathematical messages” on computers while wearing monocles and headsets. It’s glorious.
  • “He protec, he attac” – originally “he protec, but he also attac” – is a meme that started in 2016. It’s been used for all sorts of things but the earliest origin seems to be two images of a nude man wielding a lightsaber. The more you know…
  • Zoom is a popular videoconferencing application which has seen a boom in use in the last year, especially since the start of mandated isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom’s popularity has largely come from its easy to use design, but this approach has been criticised for causing multiple security problems, leading some major corporations and governments to ban its use. Many of the major security concerns have been addressed in updates since May 2020.
  • Lord Vetinari befriends the intelligent (but not talking) rats – not mice – in Guards! Guards!, communicating with their leader Skrp in their own language and using them as spies when he is temporarily deposed and imprisoned. We loved Skrp, as you’ll hear in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
  • Magneto is a character in the X-Men books from Marvel Comics. Usually a villain, he is the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (they leave the “Evil” out in later versions), and one of the most powerful mutants in the world, able to create and manipulate power magnetic fields, primarily to move metal objects. He is played in the films by Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender. 
  • “Yeet” is a modern slang word meaning to throw something with a lot of force. It can also be used as an exclamation, something that seemingly started with basketball players who were sure they would score when shooting, and was briefly a dance, which seems to have been where it spread most widely. Like a lot of such fads, it originated with African Americans before quickly becoming appropriated into general “youth culture”, a pattern that has repeated many times.
  •  Jurassic Park III (2001) features Alan Grant returning to the abandoned secondary site where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were created. There he meets a Spinosaurus, a huge predatory dinosaur. Michelle may also be thinking of the Indominus rex from Jurassic World (2015), a hybrid dinosaur created by combining DNA from multiple species.
  • Margo Lanagan is a multiple award-winning Australian author. Her 2008 YA fantasy novel Tender Morsels draws inspiration from the Grimm fairytale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”, though note it deals with themes of family violence, sexual assault and miscarriage. 2012’s Sea Hearts (published outside Australia as The Brides of Rollrock Island) explores the consequences of a witch selling seals transformed into women as brides.
  • Jeremy Lachlan is an Australian author. His Jane Doe series for older children (13+) begins with Jane Doe and the Cradle of Worlds, and continues with 2020’s Jane Doe and the Key of All Souls.
  • The Call is a 2016 horror-fantasy YA novel by Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín, in which people are abducted to another world, where they hear the call of a hunting horn… It has one sequel so far, 2018’s The Invasion.

 

#Pratchat62 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 62, “There’s a Cow in There“, discussing the Discworld picture book, 2005‘s Where’s My Cow? with special guests, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

Iconographic Evidence

  • We’re sourcing a good video of a hippo – watch this space!
  • We might also add some partial images from the book; we apologise this episode was so visual!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme song of the Australian version of Play School, a children’s educational and entertainment programme produced by the ABC since July 1966. The first line of the song is “There’s a bear in there”, referring to one of the two staple toys from the show, Little Ted or Big Ted. (See below for more about them.)
  • The other children’s book to make its way from Discworld to Roundworld is another favourite of Young Sam’s: Miss Felicity Beadle’s The World of Poo. It appears in Snuff, and was published alongside the Corgi paperback edition of the novel. We’ll cover it when we get to Snuff, but it stays much more in-universe than Where’s My Cow?
  • The rock song that might have inspired Detritus’ line in the book is actually the poetic opening to the Moody Blues’ 1969 album On The Threshold of a Dream. The first words heard are: “I am, I think I am. Therefore I must be. (pause, then uncertainly) I think…”
  • Ben likens the Sams’ flying chair to the music video for the UK’s 2022 Eurovision song; specifically that’s Sam Ryder’s “Space Man”.
  • Blackboard is one of the puppet characters from the long-running Australian children’s program Mr Squiggle; we previously referred to him in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • The Abominable Snow Baby is a 2021 animated adaptation of Pratchett’s early short story of the same name, produced for Channel 4. It was narrated by David Harewood, and starred Hugh Dancy as Albert, and Julie Walters as his Granny; the picture of Terry Pratchett appears in Albert’s flat, though it’s not clear if he’s meant to be Albert’s grandad or not.
  • The children’s book about death mentioned by Liz is Duck, Death and the Tulip by German children’s author and illustrator Wolf Erlbruch, first published in English in 2011.
  • You can find Terry’s official answers about the cow on the L-Space web.
  • The Amazing Maurice opens in Australian cinemas on 12 January 2023, but if you’ve looked this up very soon after our episode was published, you can get tickets for the 10 December preview screening in Adelaide from the Australian Discworld Convention. Head to ausdwcon.org/amazing for tickets and more info!

More notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat29 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“, featuring guest Fury, discussing the 1998 Discworld novel The Last Continent.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on Fury’s glorious illustration of Trunkie!

Notes and Errata

  • This episode’s title puns on the Icehouse song “Great Southern Land“, a big hit in Australia which also featured on the soundtrack of Yahoo Serious’ 1988 Australian comedy film Young Einstein. In retrospect both the song and the film might have been expected to show up parodied in The Last Continent – especially the song, since Pratchett listed it as one of his tracks when he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1997. (Thanks to Al of Desert Island Discworld for this fact!)
  • Our pre-show disclaimer uses the phrase “going off like a frog in a sock”. “Going off” on its own means to put a lot of energy or excitement into something, sometimes in anger, but in the frog idiom always in a fun way. Unusually for Australian slang, this isn’t ironic, just a straight-up metaphor; imagine you’ve caught a frog in a sock and it’s trying to get out, and you’ll get the idea. (And no, Australians don’t actually catch frogs in socks, this is strictly a thought experiment.)
  • The Kiwi-Aussie portmanteau is spelled “Kaussie“, whereas the slang for swimwear is “cossie“; it’s short for “swimming costume”.
  • The South Australian television personality who keeps getting in fights on the Internet is Cosi, host of South Aussie with Cosi, a travel show produced by Channel 9. (Not to be confused with Cosi, the play by Australian playwright Louis Nowra, previously discussed in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.)
  • “Swimming togs” comes from the British slang word “togs”, which just meant clothes. It’s one of a number of slang terms now archaic in the UK which have survived in some form in Australia.
  • Helen Zaltzmann is host of The Allusionist, a podcast about language, and one of Ben’s favourites. We’re sure she’d be the first to tell you that not every word – slang or otherwise – has a satisfying true origin story.
  • Stephen Briggs was a frequent collaborator with Terry, beginning with the original map of Ankh-Morpork. He also contributed to the diaries, The Discworld Companion and many other books outside the main novels. He adapted many of the books into plays, some of which have been published, and has read the audiobook versions of more than 30 of Terry’s novels. (Stephen Fry reads the UK editions of the Harry Potter audiobooks; if you’ve heard the US versions, those are read by Jim Dale.)
  • Mike Schur’s afterlife sitcom The Good Place set much of its third season in Australia, and copped much criticism from actual Australians for the quality of the accents. You couldn’t fault the jokes, though – or the punny names of the restaurants, shops and incidental characters in those episodes.
  • Pretty Little Liars is a teen mystery TV series based on the books by American YA author Sara Shepard. The UK accented character is antagonist Alex Drake, who shows up in season 7. We’d tell you more, but…spoilers.
  • The extreme Australian wizard slang originated in a reply to a tumblr post from about JK Rowling’s the introduction of the American term for muggle, “no-maj”; you can find the original here, but just in case it vanishes from Tumblr forever, we’ll immortalise the words of user edenwolfie here (and a quick warning – we haven’t censored the print version). We’d also like to point out that Australian wizards and witches would most likely spell it “muggo”.

I can just imagine the Australian word being some awful slang that’s derived from muggle, such as “mugo”.

Ah, I can imagine it now, wizards in thongs, drinking butter-VB yelling “You’re such a fucking mugo, you wandless cunt!”

edenwolfie, Tumblr, 11 November 2015
  • Minotaur is Melbourne’s biggest independent pop culture and science fiction bookstore. Many of Terry’s early Melbourne signings occurred at its original location on Bourke Street, but it moved to Elizabeth Street in 2000.
  • PhanCon ’98 was a one-off fan science fiction convention held in Sydney in 1998. Information on it is in short supply, but guests included Terry Pratchett and British fantasy author David Gemmell.
  • Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 broke up in 1992 and smashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994, to much excitement (on Earth at least). It was named for astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy, who discovered it after it had been captured by Jupiter’s gravity into a decaying orbit.
  • English scientists did indeed doubt the reality of the platypus, which not only has a unique and wonderful anatomy, but is one of just two surviving monotremes – a group of mammals that lay eggs. (The other one is the echidna.) As well as its distinctive bill, it has sharp ankle spurs which in the male can inject venom, and the ability to sense electric fields as a way of locating prey.
  • The Dreaming is a sophisticated concept in the stories of Aboriginal cultures. It has a complex relationship to space and time, existing both long ago and now, but despite the name – which was coined by Europeans – it has nothing to do with dreaming. An older term, “dreamtime”, is generally no longer considered appropriate. We recommend reading up on the topic; one good place to start is this article at Common Ground.
  • Boomerangs bought in stores and thrown to return are, indeed, toys. Hunting and war boomerangs were generally much larger, sharpened, and often had one wing longer than the other.
  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 Australian comedy film which was a surprise box office hit often considered hugely significant in the history of queer cinema. It follows two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) and a trans woman (Terence Stamp) as they travel from Sydney through the outback to perform in Alice Springs. Though initially praised for its queer-positive message, the portrayal of Filipino character Cynthia attracted widespread criticism for relying on racist stereotypes of Asian women common in Australia. Original writer and director Stephan Elliott adapted the film into a stage musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in 2006; the musical retains the characters and plot more or less unchanged, but hasn’t been criticised nearly as much for the character of Cynthia.
  • The opal fossils gallery at the South Australian Museum is still there, and you can see the skeleton Ben mentioned. The web site is sketchy on details, so we can’t confirm if it’s an Elasmosaurus or another species of plesiosaur, but we still recommend you check it out yourself!
  • The protagonist wizard (or at least wizarding student) in Moving Pictures was Victor Tugelbend. Other wizards not part of the regular faculty include Drum Billet, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon and Esk (Equal Rites); Igneous Cutwell (Mort); Alberto Malich (Mort and most other Death novels); and Ipslore the Red (Sourcery).
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is more-or-less a mashup of two of Douglas Adams’ Doctor Who scripts: the unfinished Shada, and City of Death, which contributed the storyline about time-travelling aliens who crash on Earth in the distant past and spark life on the planet. There are other elements in it which are wholly original, perhaps most notably the Electric Monk. This description applies to the original novel; the television adaptations, especially the US one, are very different.
  • Mot was indeed a French cartoon series about a purple monster who could travel through time and space, taking his young friend Leo on various adventures. It was based on the French children’s comics created by Alfonso Azpiri. It was aired on Australian television in the late 1990s.
  • Thanks to listener and supporter Molokov, who pointed out that Rincewind’s magical ability to find “bush tucker” might be a reference to retired army Major Les Hiddins, aka “the Bush Tucker Man“. Hiddins researched Australian native foods as part of his army career by working with Aboriginal peoples, mostly in northern Australia. He came to national fame through The Bush Tucker Man television series on the ABC in the late 80s and early 90s. In each episode Hiddins, wearing his trademark larger-than-usual Akubra hat, visited a part of Outback Australia and introduced viewers to the local edible plants and animals. Hiddins wrote several books, and then disappeared onto a remote retreat he created in the bush for retired army service people, before returning to the public eye in 2019 with a new website: bushtuckerman.com.au
  • We discussed Interesting Times back in episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Black Sheep was released in 2006, written and directed by Jonathan King with special effects by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. It seems the main way to watch it now is via the Amazon Prime Video streaming service, though it should also be available on DVD.
  • Terry has not always had kind things to say about Rincewind; he suggested the wizard’s job is “to meet more interesting people” than himself, lamented Rincewind’s lack of an inner monologue, and did indeed feel like he was running out of things to do with an eternally cowardly character. Agatha Christie’s negative feelings about Poirot are well-documented, from as early as 1930; in a notable quote from 1960 she describes him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. But she refused to kill him off because she felt she had a duty to keep writing about a character that was still so popular with the public.
  • Michael Moorcock was an English fantasy author who created a number of characters including Elric of Melnibone, one of several incarnations of “the Eternal Champion”, fated to be reborn through the ages and battle in the primeval war between the forces of Law and Chaos.
  • We discussed Only You Can Save Mankind in our previous episode, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (aka Skippy) was an Australian family television series about an usually smart kangaroo who helped park ranger’s son Sonny have various adventures. It was very much in the mould of Lassie or Flipper. It ran from 1968 to 1970, and there was a brief sequel series in 1992 featuring Sonny as an adult. It was broadcast in most Commonwealth countries, as well as the US and many Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
  • We’ve mentioned it before, but you can find the Annotated Pratchett File at the old L-Space Web site. Its successor is the L-Space Wiki.
  • The Moa is a large extinct flightless bird, similar to a Cassowary. Like many megafauna of Australia and New Zealand, they were hunted to extinction, in the Moa’s case by the Māori peoples.
  • “Jeremy Bearimy” is an explanation of how time works in the afterlife in the sitcom The Good Place. Rather than a straight line, the flow of time there resembles a curve which looks like a signature reading “Jeremy Bearimy”. The dot in the i (or tittle) is a weird separate bit of spacetime.
  • “Guzzaline” was the term used for petrol in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth Mad Max movie, released in 2015. It stars Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a driver for a despotic warlord in post-apocalyptic Australia. Tom Hardy appears as Max Rockatansky, the titular character, who was the protagonist of the previous three films, where he was played by Mel Gibson.
  • When Liz refers to Darwin, she means the city, which is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. It was named for Charles Darwin by John Clements Wickham during a subsequent voyage of the ship Darwin took on his famous voyage, the HMS Beagle.
  • In Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant claims to know that the Tyrannosaurus rex – portrayed in the films as a ferocious predator – has vision “based on movement”. This is one of many things that make no sense in the film. Have a few drinks with Ben, or your local friendly palaeontologist, and they’ll tell you about some others.
  • Richard Dawkins is now best known for heavy-handed criticism of religion and, most recently, feeling the need to confirm that whatever you think of it, eugenics works. But he initially found fame for his pretty good books on evolutionary biology. In The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, he popularised the idea that the gene is the basic and most important unit of evolutionary information, and also coined the term “meme”, meaning the behavioural or cultural equivalent of a gene.
  • Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists frequently find evidence that revise the likely length of Aboriginal culture’s existence in Australia about every six months – usually making it older. Current estimates range from 50,000 to 125,000 years.
  • You can read about the Sydney baboon escape from late February 2020 in this article at The Guardian – written by previous Pratchat guest, Stephanie Convery! (Steph was a guest in #Pratchat2, and later returned for #Pratchat42.)
  • You certainly used to be able to get tea-towels and such that were supposedly from “Didjabringabeeralong, The Outback”, but these days we’d like to think we’re a bit more culturally sensitive. The unique names of many Australian towns and cities – like Wagga Wagga, Geelong and Nar Nar Goon – are drawn from local Aboriginal languages, many of which have been lost as those peoples were displaced or massacred by Europeans.
  • Tank Girl is a punk-inspired comic book series by created by British writer Jamie Hewlett and artist Alan Martin. Tank Girl is the main character, who lives in a tank in post-apocalyptic Australia. She’s accompanied on her adventures by her mutant kangaroo boyfriend, Booga. The comic was adapted into the 1995 film Tank Girl, directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as her friend Jet Girl (who has a jetpack), with Malcolm McDowell as the antagonist. It has a cult following but was not a big success.
  • Listener Ian Banks in our Discord pointed out that another, probably more likely inspiration for the anthropomorphic animals is The Magic Pudding, a 1918 children’s book written and illustrated by famous Australian artist Norman Lindsay. The story’s main characters are Bunyip Bluegum (a koala person), human sailor Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff (a penguin person). The titular pudding, Albert, has a face, arms and legs, and regenerates, so he can supply an infinite amount of food. The story also features “pudding thieves” Patrick and Watkin, a possum and wombat respectively.
  • We want to make it clear that despite Liz’s hangups, marsupial pouches are not dirty; kangaroos lick theirs clean before their joeys enter them.
  • Barry McKenzie, a creation of Australian comedian Barry Humphries, began life as a comic strip character in the pages of UK comic magazine Private Eye in 1964. A parody of the Australian abroad, he is a hard-drinking, womanising, simple-but-forthright “larrikin” who gets himself into various scrapes. He was played by singer and actor Barry Crocker in two films in the 1970s, which also introduced Humphrie’s long-running character Dame Edna Everidge, who is Barry’s aunt. The films nearly killed director Bruce Beresford’s career, but he later went on to find fame and success, with such big films as Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer.
  • “Squids” in the book is almost certainly a pun on “quid”, slang for a pound sterling in the UK and pre-decimal Australia. It’s still used occasionally as slang for money in Australia, usually in the phrase “a few quid”.
  • In case you missed it, the shearing competition in the book is clearly inspired by the Australian folk song “Click Go the Shears“.
  • We cut the discussion for time but “something for the weekend” reminded Ben of ska band Madness’s song “House of Fun”, which is about a teenager who has turned sixteen and is using various euphemisms to try and buy condoms at his local chemist.
  • In The Man From Snowy River, the actual description of the hero’s horse is “something like a racehorse undersized”.
  • As alluded to in the book, drop bears are a fictional cousin of the koala, a horrible killer animal which waits in treetops to drop on and eat children. Inventing dangerous creatures has been a long-running prank played on visitors to Australia, playing on their fears of the real deadly animals that live here. A recent incidence of the drop bear was this prank played on a UK reporter visiting to report on the bush fires.
  • The bush ballad “Waltzing Matilda” is thought by academics to describe the Great Shearer’s Strike of 1891, in which shearer’s killed a number of sheep and one of their number, being chased by police, killed himself rather than be taken alive. A lot of the slang in the song is never heard anywhere else anymore – including “jumbuck”, a term for sheep thought to have been derived from an Aboriginal language. There are many versions of the lyrics, but the most famous one was adapted by the Billy tea company. In some, Liz’s question becomes moot, as the troopers ask “Whose that jolly jumbuck”, rather than “Where’s“.
  • If you’re confused by Liz’s “cat in a bag” antics, you can read about Schrodinger’s Cat and other feline behaviours in our discussion of Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book The Unadulterated Cat. You’ll find it in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • The Domestic Blindness sketch was indeed part of vintage 1980s Australian sketch comedy show The Comedy Company; you can find it on YouTube here.
  • Listener and previous guest Avril (who you might remember from #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“) points out that the god’s love of beetles is likely a reference to English geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, perhaps most famous for writing about abiogenesis and the idea of “primordial soup”, among many other accomplishments. In response to being asked what his study of nature might reveal about the Creator, Haldane is perported to have said “that He is inordinately fond of beetles”, due to the phenomenal number and variety of beetle species. While this exact response might be apocryphal, he definitely said something equivalent many times, both in print and in speeches.
  • Gachnar the Fear Demon appears in the fourth season Halloween episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Fear, Itself”, from 1999.
  • Australian cockroaches are not actually Australian at all – they live all over the world, and probably originally come from somewhere in Africa.
  • White-tailed spiders are small spiders native to south-eastern Australia. They are not aggressive but might bite if disturbed, and like to hide among leaf litter. They were demonised in the media during the late twentieth century as their bite supposedly caused necrosis, but medical research in the early twenty-first century didn’t find evidence of any such symptoms. Instead, the spider’s venom caused only unpleasant but mild symptoms, especially by Australian standards.
  • The Stonefish is a real fish, one of the most venomous in the world. It disguises itself as a stone in order to catch smaller fish as prey, but has sharp spines on its back which deliver venom as a defence against predators. Four of the five species live outside Australian waters; their sting can be treated with hot water (which denatures the venom) and anti-venom.
  • Last Chance to See was a 1989 radio documentary following Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Cawardine as they travelled the world to visit nine different endangered species. Adams turned it into a book in 1990, and in 2009 Stephen Fry joined Cawardine for a sequel television series, accompanied by a new book.
  • Pauline Hanson is a right-wing populist politician from Queensland who rose to fame when she ran for federal parliament in 1995 as a member of the conservative Liberal Party. They dis-endorsed her after she made racist comments about Aboriginal Australians, and she formed her own party, One Nation, and won a seat. She was found to have committed electoral fraud and jailed, though the charges were subsequently overturned on appeal. She left her own party in 2002 over those charges, but remained a figure in the Australian media, aided by appearances on breakfast television and the reality show Dancing with the Stars. She returned to politics and One Nation in 2013, and was elected to the Australian Senate in 2016. She is famous mostly for various racist views that very much align with those of Fair Go Dibbler.
  • Lost is a TV series about a bunch of plane crash survivors who find themselves lost on a mysterious island. It famously makes no sense whatsoever and it’s generally considered that it’s creators, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, were making it up as they went along to stay ahead of the guesses of fans on the Internet about what was really going on.
  • The Galah (pronounced “ga-LAR”) is a large, loud pink and grey cockatoo (a type of parrot), common in many parts of Australia. “Galah” is also slang for a ridiculous or foolish person.
  • The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a one of the largest pride parades in the world. It happens annually on the first Saturday in March, and started in 1978. It draws massive crowds from all over the world.
  • Intersex people are born with genetic and/or physical characteristics associated with both of the traditional genders. While the statistics are sometimes contested, it’s thought as many as 1.7% of people are born with some kind of intersex characteristics. The I in LGBTIAQ+ is for intersex.
  • The infamous Australian episode of The Simpsons, “Bart vs Australia”, is from the show’s sixth season in 1995.
  • The tough guy who appreciates art in Thief of Time is probably Newgate Ludd.
  • Damian Callinan’s The Merger started life as a one-man show, but was adapted in 2018 into a feature film. You can find it on the free streaming service Kanopy if you are a member of a library that subscribes to it, and its now on Netflix in many regions too.
  • The original Harry’s Cafe de Wheels started out in Woolloomooloo, a harbour-side inner suburb of Sydney, as a “caravan cafe” specialising in serving late night pies. It was founded by Harry “Tiger” Edwards in 1936. It’s been patronised by many international celebrities and there are now several Harry’s cafes around Sydney and New South Wales – though not, despite Ben’s later confusion, in Adelaide.
  • The word for the smell you get after it rains – specifically, the smell of earth after it rains – is “petrichor”. Hopefully it’s okay for us to use it as we’re not writing a poem.
  • Tropical areas – such as the northern part of Australia – are often described as having Wet seasons and Dry seasons. The Wet season is also known as monsoon season or the Rainy season in some parts of the world.
  • You can read about the six seasons described by the Kulin people of Melbourne on this web site.
  • To avoid any confusion: in Good Omens, it’s said that any cassette tape left in the glove box of a car transforms into Queen’s Greatest Hits. In Mort, it’s said that no matter what’s put into it during the day, a pantry raided in the middle of the night contains only some very specific and disappointing items.
  • “How to Make Gravy” is a 1996 song by Australian singer-songwriter (and national treasure) Paul Kelly. It was originally written and released as part of a Christmas charity album benefitting the Salvation Army, when Kelly found out the song he initially wanted to cover had already been picked by another band. In Kelly’s song the narrator, Joe, has been sent to prison; the lyrics are a letter he’s writing on December 21 (dubbed “Gravy Day” by some fans) lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, and giving his brother his gravy recipe, since that’s his usual contribution to the Christmas cooking. It became a surprise hit and was nominated for the APRA song of the year award in 1998. Below is the official video. (We’ll mention the song again in the Oggswatch Feast 2021 bonus Christmas episode.)
  • Captain Raymond Holt is the captain of police precinct 99 in the sitcom Brooklyn-99. He – like all the characters in the show – is wonderful.
  • Umami is the “fifth taste”, after the other basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The word comes from Japanese, and translates as “pleasant savoury taste”, being derived from the word umai, “delicious”. Other foods with an umami taste include various vegetables, mushrooms, shellfish, cured meats and green tea.
  • Barnaby Joyce is (as of March 2020) the current leader of the National Party, a conservative party popular in rural areas. They have a long-standing coalition with the Liberal Party; the Liberal-National coalition are currently in government. Tony Abbott is a former leader of the Liberal Party who was Prime Minister of Australia for a brief period, before being ousted in favour of the more moderate Malcolm Turnbull. He lost his seat at the last federal election. Both are pretty weird units, to use an Australian phrase, with their share of scandals, bizarre behaviour and controversy.
  • “Where the bloody hell are you?” was the key question asked by model Lara Bingle at the end of a largely ridiculed Australian tourism ad produced for the international market in 2006. It was controversially banned on release in the UK, despite costing 180 million Australian dollars, and despite its infamy was considered a failure. It was overseen by now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who at the time was Managing Director of Tourism Australia; this led to some reprise of the question directed at him – including by Bingle herself on social media – when he was overseas on vacation during the beginning of the disastrous 2019-2020 bush fires. It was also part of the inspiration for his derisive nickname “Scotty from Marketing”. You can watch the original ad on YouTube here.
  • Paul Parker found internet fame after he angrily reacted to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments that members of Australia’s volunteer fire fighting organisations “want to be out there” fighting the unprecedentedly fierce bushfires that raged in late 2019 and early 2020. In a video that went viral, he leaned out of his firetruck and asked a Channel 7 news crew to tell the Prime Minister to “go and get fucked from Nelligen”. After there were (disputed) claims this got him sacked from the Rural Fire Service (a volunteer organisation), another video emerged of him saying that Pauline Hanson was the only politician who cared about Australia. The whole saga is covered by Jan Fran in her first “The Frant” video for The Guardian.
  • “I’m not here to fuck spiders” is a slang expression meaning “I’ve got serious work to do,” most often used in response to a question about one’s intentions. It is also used as a more emphatic version of “I’m not here for a haircut”, which is a sarcastic response to being asked if one has come to a place to do the obvious thing, like being asked in a car dealership if you want to buy a car. It’s been a matter of debate for some years whether “not here to fuck spiders” is a “real” expression, or if it was invented as a joke and since been embraced by Australians. Looking through Google’s trends tool, which goes back as far as 2004, the first and biggest spike in searches for the phrase is in November 2005; then there’s very little until it slowly increases in search popularity from 2010, with smaller spikes since 2018 where it has been mentioned by Australian celebrities. The only reference Ben could find from 2005 were a series of replies to a forum post asking about the phrase, many of which seemed to suggest straight up examples of having heard it years before that… It’s worth mentioning that one of the repliers had come to the thread because they heard it from an Australian comedian, which might mean it was made up as a joke, or it could just mean that was the first time people who didn’t get it were hearing it.
  • The Man From Snowy River television show is not actually related to the 1982 film starring Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson. The TV series starred Andrew Clarke as Matt McGregor, the stockman from the poem, and is set 25 years after the events depicted in the poem. It ran from 1993 to 1996.
  • Bore water is water drawn from underground sources, usually by drilling a borehole into an artesian aquifer – a porous underground layer of the Earth’s crust in which water is stored or flows. In Australia, the source is most commonly the Great Artesian Basin, a huge artesian aquifer under large parts of Queensland and its neighbour states.
  • “Advance Australia Fair” has been the official Australian anthem since 1984, though it was written far earlier, in the late 1870s. It was chosen in a plebiscite attached to the 1977 referendum about voting and political reforms. It beat “Waltzing Matilda”, “The Song of Australia”, and the previous anthem “God Save the Queen”. (For more on this, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we compare the Australian and Ankh-Morpork national anthems.)

 

#Pratchat60 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 60, “Eyes Turnwise“, a special episode in which we answer listener questions.

Iconographic Evidence

Watch out for some photos here soon!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title echoes that of #Pratchat30, but this time we’re looking the Discworld equivalent of forwards rather than exclusively backwards.
  • We discussed Small Gods in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones.
  • Steve’s questions aren’t just about Small Gods, but specifically the sequences in that book where Brutha is in Ephebe and learns about the Ephebian gods. They occur around 40% into the book.
  • The Hide Park line up devised by Glitch1958 includes the ones we mentioned in the episode: English Patella Throwing Weapons; Newly Arrived Wood Pond; Tropical Penguins; Pay ‘n’ Park; Unnerved Nana; and The Quite Warm Spicy Vegetables. Glitch also added Twinkle-Up; In Bus Queue; Open square bracket, Insert new monarch here, close square bracket; Nanny Ogg’s Bananananananarama; Flu-Theater; Irritated with the motor; and No way, sis!
  • On that last note: the Oasis cover band No Way Sis do exist, but they’re Glaswegian. The Australian one is Noasis.
  • The quotation “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” is from Men at Arms, about Edward d’Eath. You’ll find it quite near the start, just before Carrot’s finishes his letter home. We the book in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.
  • Chaz’s question is a reference to “The Queue” – that is, the queue to see Queen Elizabeth’s body while it lay in state at Westminster Hall. For five days leading up to her funeral on 19 September 2022, 250,000 people lined up for as much as 24 hours over a distance of up to sixteen kilometres. Lots of people live-tweeted the Queue’s status, including the dedicated account @QE2Queue. Liz mentioned the TikTok musical, which was the creation of English actor Rob Madge. You can find it on TikTok here:
@rob_madge_

♬ original sound – Rob Madge
  • Many of the conspiracy theories around the Queen’s death originate from QAnon, and include things like her body not being in the coffin, that Queen Elizabeth II had been already dead for months or years, or even Princess Diana secretly being alive, and coming out of hiding to become the next Queen.
  • We discussed the idea of “lockdown in Ankh-Morpork” in Eeek Club 2021, our special bonus episode in which topics are chosen by subscribers, for the Glorious 25th of May. We also answered some similar questions in our previous all questions episode, #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“.
  • You can find links to The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s headcanon threads in the episode notes for Eeek Club 2021. If they do one for the Patrician’s queue we’ll link to it here.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld II just over a year ago in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“.
  • So far three podcasts have discussed all 41 Discworld novels – Radio Morpork, The Death of Podcasts and Wyrd Sisters. You can find links to all their episodes, and many more besides, at Ben’s side project, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
  • Here’s the Reddit thread of favourite Pratchett footnotes mentioned by Liz, from the subreddit r/Discworld.
  • We mention the following footnotes while answering Manning’s question:
    • The gold/Glod typo footnote appears in Witches Abroad:
      Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy seraph of Al-Ybi was once cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered.
    • The Amazing Maurice does indeed appear in Reaper Man, but not in a footnote; the Dean complains about being taken in by Maurice’s scam, which had also worked in Quirm and Stopped Lat.
    • The Light Fantastic footnote about the magic shop:
      No one knows why, but all the most truly mysterious and magical items are bought from shops that appear and, after a trading life even briefer than a double-glazing company, vanish like smoke. There have been various attempts to explain this, all of which don’t fully account for the observed facts. These shops turn up anywhere in the universe, and their immediate non-existence in any particular city can normally be deduced from crowds of people wandering the streets clutching defunct magical items, ornate guarantee cards, and looking very suspiciously at brick walls.
    • The definition of the Thaum first appears in The Light Fantastic, and is later recapped in The Science of Discworld III. Here’s the original version:
      A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.
  • We’ve discussed the Long Earth books in the following episodes:
  • We discussed Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“.
  • We discussed Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • We’ve previously discussed Pratchett’s children’s books:
  • Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (not Science Fiction, as Ben misremembers) and Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy are the work of American writer and artist Wayne Barlowe, who also works as a concept artist and creature designer in film and television on works including Galaxy Quest, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Aquaman.

More notes coming soon!

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

#Oggswatch2021 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat’s special Oggswatch Feast episode for 2021, featuring guests Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Anna Ahveninen and the hosts of the podcasts Wyrd Sisters, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography. All of them cook dishes from the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add some more images of other recipes – or links to where you can find them – soon.

Bananana Soup Surprise

Bananana Soup Surprise in the pot.
Served as Nanny Ogg intended!
A few moments from the video we made of this disgusting odyssey.

Celery Astonishment

Are you astonished? We certainly are.

CMOT Dibbler’s Sausage Inna Bun

As promised, the Wyrd Sisters shared some pictures of their sausages!

Figgins

Figgin pastry and filling ready for assembly.
Aaron’s resident big wee hag helping out. (Picture used with permission.)
Figgins ready for the oven!
The figginshed result!

Dwarf Bread

All the ingredients ready for dwarf baking!
It certainly looks like gravel…
…especially close up!
Not much like the illustration…
Pounded flat and ready for the oven!
It really did look like a slab of asphalt at this point…
Finished dwarf bread!
Looks the part, and actually pretty good.
Proof that Anna was still enjoying it the next day.
Anna and Ben’s first adventure in dwarf bakery!

Notes and Errata

  • A huge shoutout to the ever-amazing David Ashton for the Hogswatch version of our theme tune!
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat” from December 2021.
  • We previously discussed Paul Kelly’s 1996 Christmas hit “How to Make Gravy” back in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“. Perhaps we should compile a Fourecksian cookbook and include a gravy recipe?
  • While Kelly’s description of writing “How to Make Gravy” suggests it was written fairly quickly, Ben is exaggerating when he says the song was written in an afternoon.
  • The “Paul Kelly Cinematic Universe” does exist, but the protagonist of “How to Make Gravy” is not the same person from his hit single “Dumb Things”. Instead Joe appears in Kelly’s earlier songs “To Her Door” (1987) and “Love Never Runs on Time” (1994).
  • Whamageddon is a folk game in which players try to avoid hearing “Last Christmas”, the 1984 Christmas single by Wham!, between December 1st and 24th. (No shade on the song – it’s just still very popular in the UK, where the game originates, and so gets played a lot.) The game dates back to an online forum in 2010, though it didn’t get the name until 2016, when the Facebook page took it to new heights of fame. You can find the rules at whamageddon.com.
  • Names suggested for Ben’s proposed Australian variant of Whamageddon have included “Gravygeddon”, “Armagravy”, “Paullkellypse” and “Catastophgravy”.
  • Peppers or bell peppers are indeed what we Australians and New Zealanders call a capsicum. This differentiates it from the other kinds of peppers, which all have specific names. Capsicum is the genus of plants in the pepper family, but that includes most varieties of chilli as well.
  • ASMR is an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a well-documented sensation of physical tingling and low-level euphoria felt by some in response to certain sounds. ASMR is a form of paresthesia, a term for sensations felt on the skin which do not have (or at least don’t match) a physical cause; “pins and needles” is the most common form. The tingling of ASMR is most often experienced in the scalp and the back of the neck, and can be triggered by a variety of things, though whispering is most common. The phenomenon is fairly widespread, and ASMR videos and audio recordings are all over the Internet. (If you go searching, be aware that while ASMR is not inherently sexual, there’s a fairly large subset of videos that mix in erotica.)
  • Schitt’s Creek is a Canadian sitcom created by father-and-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy, starring the pair of them, Catherine O’Hara and Annie Murphy as a rich family who lose their fortune and are forced to live in a motel in a town they once bought as a joke. It ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020 on CBC, and is available internationally on Netflix. You can find the “fold in the cheese” scene on YouTube; it’s from the second episode of the second season, “Family Dinner”.
  • “How the sausage gets made” is a common idiom, meaning to discover the perhaps unpleasant process behind something on enjoys, which one might prefer not to know. It’s also a line in the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the second act of Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit broadway musical Hamilton. It describes the Compromise of 1790, in which at a private meeting Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agree to build a new capital city for the United States in the South (rather than making New York the capital), perhaps in return for using Hamilton’s proposed financial system. The song is from the perspective of Hamilton’s friend/rival Aaron Burr, who laments that no-one really knows what was agreed in “the room where it happens”:
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens
  • American sausages are not all like Frankfurts! They have more English-like ones as well. As the Wyrd Sisters themselves explain: “They’re a fairly common breakfast food, usually as part of a larger meal. The main difference is that they’re smaller and a little drier than what you get in the UK and Australia – if your sausages are grapes, ours are raisins.” Smaller breakfast sausages are also very popular in the UK, but not often seen in Australia, at least on the East coast.
  • There have been several separate chains of supermarkets in the US named Market Basket. Manning is talking about the New England Market Basket, which has stores in the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. It was founded in 1917 by Greek immigrants as DeMoulas Market in Lowell, Massachusetts. Over the years there’s been a few disputes between branches of the DeMoulas family, which still owns the chain, but these were mostly settled in court in 2014, when Arthur T. Demoulas was fired and, after mass worker protests, reinstated as the company President. The workforce is not unionised, but employees who work 1,000 hours or more a year are entitled to enter a profit sharing arrangement, and the chain does not use automated checkouts.
  • “Freedom units” is a satirical way to refer to the imperial measurements still widely used in everyday American life, though it’s worth mentioning that this may be preferable to the weird mix of metric and imperial that you find in the UK and Canada… As Manning mentions, the “cup” is particularly confusing: a US cup is 240mL (that’s millilitres, thousandths of a litre), or 8.45 imperial fluid ounces. A metric cup – as used in Australia – is 250mL, handily one quarter of a litre. But they’re obviously very close, so you probably won’t go too far wrong.
  • We discussed Maskerade in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, back in September 2019. The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret discussed it over three episodes in September 2021: “Chekhov’s Chandelier“, “As the Actress Said to the Bishop” and “Climbing Into Box 8“.
  • A sous-chef is the second most senior chef in a professional kitchen. The full title is sous-chef de cuisine, French for “under-chief of the kitchen”.
  • Jo and Francine eat scones in their third Equal Rites episode, “Crumbs All Up In There“, from January 2020.
  • Nigel Slater is an English food writer, best known as the head food writer for Marie Clare magazine from 1988 to 1993, and afterwards as the chief writer for The Observer Food monthly supplement. He’s also written an autobiographical column for The Observer for more than a decade; a popular memoir, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, in 2003, which was later adapted for television and the stage; and numerous cookbooks, mostly concentrating on simple comfort food. His 2007 book Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table sounds like a great resource for those looking to learn more about the influences on Nanny Ogg’s cookery.
  • Tannins are biological molecules which bind to proteins and other organic compounds and cause them to precipitate, ie solidify out of a solution. They are naturally found in most berries, some unripe fruits, nuts, wine, tea and cannabis, and as the name might suggest are also used in tanning, the process of making leather. Wine acquires tannin both from the varieties of grapes used to make it, and through the aging process, from the wood of the barrels, giving wine it’s astringent taste. Tannins occur naturally in tea as well.
  • There’s a bit of confusion about books adapted into films featuring magical cooking with chocolate in the title, so to clarify:
    • Ben is talking about Mexican author Lara Esquivel’s 1989 magical realism novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), about a young woman forbidden to marry the love of her life, who magically (and unwittingly) infuses the food she cooks with her emotions. It was filmed in Mexico in 1992, adapted by Esquivel, directed by Alfonso Arau, and starring Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi and Regina Torné. Both novel and film include authentic Mexican recipes. A companion work, Tita’s Diary, was published in 2016.
    • Everyone else is talking about Chocolat, a 1999 magical realism novel by English-French author Joanne Harris. It’s about a witchy single mother, Vianne, who arrives in a small French village at Lent and opens a chocolaterie, leading her into conflict with the village’s priest. It was followed by two sequels, The Lollipop Shoes (2007) and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (2012). It was filmed in 2000, directed by Lasse Hallström with a cast featuring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Carrie-Anne Moss.
  • The media tie-in cookbooks mentioned by Joanne are:
    • The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook (2019) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, for the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and it’s many predecessors).
    • A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook (2012), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones television series, plus the companion book From the Sands of Dorne (2017). (There’s also an unofficial one, published in 2012, The Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook: From Direwolf Ale to Auroch Stew, by Alan Kistler.)
    • World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook (2017), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, based on the MMORPG video game World of Warcraft. (Joanne wasn’t kidding about this being a lucrative gig for some authors; Monroe-Cassel also has books out or on the way for Star Trek, Overwatch, Firefly, Star Wars and more.)
    • Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook (2020) by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer, inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
  • While we’re talking about these books, if you’re looking for them, be wary of imitations! It seems since 2020 there’s been a rash of cheap self-published unofficial ebooks of similar collections of recipes, especially where the expiry of a license means the official one is no longer available, or where it was never offered as an ebook in the first place. It’s not clear if these are any good or even actually full of appropriate recipes, so try and save your money for the people who’ve put in the real work.
  • Gilmore Girls is an American dramedy series about young independent mother Lorelai Gilmour and her daughter Rory, who moved away from Lorelai’s rich parents to live in the small town of Stars Hollow. The show ran for seven seasons on The WB and The CW between 2000 and 2007, with a revival mini-series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix in 2016. The show has inspired more than one cookbook, which is unsurprising given how Lorelai and Rory’s lives – personal and professional – revolve around food…
    • Eat Like a Gilmore: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of Gilmore Girls (2016) and Eat Like a Gilmore: Seasons: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of the Gilmore Girls Revival (2021) are both by Kristi Carlson, and seem to have been the first and most popular of the bunch. They’re also available in a box set of both books, which together contain two hundred recipes!
    • Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook, by Elena Craig and Kristen Mulrooney, will be the first official one, and is coming in 2022.
  • The “Gas mark” is a scale for oven temperature used mostly in the UK and Ireland. It dates back to the 1930s, when many gas ovens were produced using a standard gas regulator, in most recorded cases a “Regulo” brand one, which had “marks” from 1 up to 9, as well as ½ and ¼, to indicate various levels of heat. Their instruction manuals, along with recipe books given away with some ovens, used the marks rather than a specific temperature, in the form “Gas: Regulo Mark 7”. Eventually this became widespread enough that other brand regulators used the same numbers and by the 1950s the brand name was no longer used, with recipe books referring to “gas mark 8” and so on. Gas marks correspond to temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit: gas mark 1 is 275 °F, and each mark above that adds 25 °F (or subtracts it, in the case of ½ and ¼). Similar scales exist in other countries, notably France (labelled “Th”, short for thermostats) and Germany (“Stufe“, German for “step”); those scales are, of course, different to the gas mark and to each other. But modern cookbooks will generally include a temperature, as well as the mark, Th or Stufe.
  • It’s not surprising Ben hasn’t heard barberries, the fruit of the Berberis plant; turns out they grow all over the world except in Australia! The European species is Berberis vulgaris, which grows wild, but has fallen out of use in many countries. It’s still popular in Iran; the Persian name for it is zereshk (زرشک), and in Europe at least most commercially available barberries are grown there. The berries are tart and tangy, and when dried are around the size of a currant, though red in colour.
  • Figjam is the 2005 single released by Brisbane hip-hop band Butterfingers, from their 2006 album The Deeper You Dig… It reached number 11 in the Triple J Hottest 100 that year, but only around 50 in the mainstream charts. In the song, the acronym is “Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me” rather than Great.
  • Figgins are indeed mentioned in Guards! Guards!; the master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night uses the term repeatedly as a vague threat, mentioning that interlopers will “have their figgin put on a spike”, and noting to himself that his followers have never asked what a figgin is. A footnote explains that in The Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words, a figgin is defined as “a small short-crust pastry containing raisins”, and provides several other obscure culinary delights that could have made it into the Master’s speeches. CMOT Dibbler is later seen selling figgins from his tray alongside his sausages, and it’s a repeated joke that the Elucidated Brethren assume anything said about figgins describes a horrifying form of torture. Figgins also score a minor mention in Men At Arms, when Vimes imagines his fate if he were to stay in the watch to an old age with no family.
  • The Discworld cookery masterpost on Tumblr is a delight. Thank you, user toooldforthisbutstill, and to the major contributor, fantasyfeasts, who also makes stuff from other worlds.

We’ll add a few more notes soon.

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

#Pratchat45 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, featuring guest Penelope Love, discussing Pratchett’s 1987 short story, “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting“.

  • The episode title – and our choice of short story – is inspired by tradition of “Christmas in July“, Hogswatch being the Discworld equivalent of Christmas (see our Hogfather episode, #Pratchat26) and Grune being the Discworld month that comes after June. In Australia, and the rest of the Southern hemisphere, December 25 occurs during Summer, and so workplaces and friendship groups here and in New Zealand sometimes celebrate a gathering during the Winter, when the colder weather makes it feel a little closer to a traditional European Christmas (and makes it more palatable to eat enormous Christmas dinners). Much to our surprise, this tradition turns out to have begun rather more ironically in America in the 1930s or 40s, though mostly as a marketing ploy rather than an actual gathering of loved ones.
  • Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Petersen is a horror roleplaying game, and one of the oldest RPGs still in print: the first edition was published by Chaosium in 1981. The current 7th edition was first published in 2014. The world of the game is based on the “Cthulhu Mythos”, drawn from the stories of horror writer (and, sadly, infamous racist) H P Lovecraft and his contemporaries and successors, including Frank Belknap Long, Robert E Howard and August Derleth. It’s theme is “cosmic horror” – as Penny says, the players generally discover they live in a universe where immensely powerful and ancient beings could easily destroy our world – and the characters’ grip on reality. The game uses a version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System, modified to track each character’s “sanity” – which they lose as they glimpse the awful truths of the universe – alongside their skills and abilities. The default setting for the game is 1930s America, where Lovecraft’s stories are set, but play in many other eras and locations is also supported – including, via one of the books Penny worked on, Australia.
  • Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) was an English author best known for his humorous novels, especially those chronicling hapless toff Bertie Wooster and his hyper-capable valet Jeeves, whose name has become synonymous with the image of the unflappable English manservant. He also wrote Broadway musicals, and worked for a time in Hollywood, though he felt his own talent and that of many others was being wasted there, and said so publicly. He moved to France to avoid paying taxes in the UK, and as a result was captured by the Germans; he was later released and made speeches over German radio, leading to outcry in the UK and effectively sending him into exile, living out the last decades of his life in the US.
  • Wodehouse is pronounced “Woodhouse”; Ben is getting it wrong, and Penny knows what she is talking about. This is a pattern for much of the episode.
  • The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the third full-length novel to feature Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster. It’s a sequel to 1934’s What Ho, Jeeves and as well as returning character Gussie Fink-Nottle, it also introduces Roderick Spode, a broad parody of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
  • Pratchett’s very first professionally published story was actually “The Hades Business”, originally published in Science Fantasy vol. 20, no. 60 in August 1963. That story is collected in Once More* * With Footnotes, A Blink of the Screen and a few other anthologies. The serious story Ben is thinking of is his third published story, “Night Dweller”, which was published in New Worlds volume 49, #156 in November 1965 – at the time edited by Michael Moorcock (more about him in a bit). You can find a digital facsimile of the original magazine at the Internet Archive. We previous talked about both stories in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” (Note that we are not counting the stories Pratchett had published in his school newspaper, the Technical Cygnet, but also note that he was fifteen years old when he had this incredibly competent and actually pretty creepy space-based horror story published in a professional magazine!)
  • There have been several “facsimile” editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan-Doyle, which were published between 1887 and 1927 in The Strand Magazine. The Strand featured short fiction – either complete stories, or short serialised novels – and general interest articles, and was published monthly in London for sixty years, from 1890 to 1950. It was also published in the US from 1891 until 1916. In London it had a circulation of around half a million readers. The name comes from the major London street the Strand, which was near the offices of the magazine on Burleigh Street and later Southampton Street. Conan Doyle was a frequent contributor, and published 121 short stories in the magazine, as well as nine novels (including the Sherlock Holmes ones), 70 non-fiction articles, two interviews and one poem!
  • We’ve previously mentioned Pratchett’s love of “gl” words; he writes about this in The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“). We’re also sure he does this in another book, but we’ve never been able to remember which one.
  • The epistolary novel – one presented as a series of documents, most often letters or diary entries – has a long tradition, with famous examples of the style including Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Screwtape Letters, The Color Purple, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, The Martian, Bridget Jones’ Diary, World War Z and the Illuminae trilogy by Jay Kristoff and previous Pratchat guest, Amie Kaufman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula features letters, diary entries and even transcripts of wax cylinder recordings, but it was popular for horror novels too – in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor’s story is relayed by Captain Robert Walton (who finds him in arctic waters) to his sister in a series of letters.
  • Lovecraft used the epistolary style in several stories, most notably The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941). Some of his other stories, including The Call of Cthulhu (1928), also include newspaper excerpts or other documents without being told entirely in that style.
  • Verisimilitude in fiction is the believability of the work, or its contents, either in comparison to reality (“cultural verisimilitude”) or the work’s genre (“generic verisimilitude”). Victorian horror stories often strive for believability in terms of how the characters react to the bizarre and horrifying beings and situations they encounter, whereas modern horror – especially in films – often has the characters behave in unbelievably stupid ways to further the plot.
  • We mentioned Michael Moorcock just last month, when guest Joel Martin brought up his novel-length essay “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy”. As well as publishing one of Pratchett’s first stories (see above), Moorcock is best known for his fantasy novels, many of which depict a cosmic battle between the forces of Law and Chaos. These often feature an incarnation of “the Eternal Champion”, whom we compared to Rincewind’s “Eternal Coward” role in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, and discussed Elric of Melniboné, one of those incarnations, in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“.
  • While best known for Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction and horror. Such works include the novels and stories starring scientist Professor Challenger, most famously The Lost World, and many short stories such as “The Case of Lady Sannox”, “The Leather Funnel” and “The Horror of the Heights”.
  • Creepy collections of Victorian Christmas cards did the rounds on social media in 2015, resulting in multiple articles like this one at the BBC and this one in online magazine Hyperallergenic. Both contain excellent examples of the grotesque, bizarre and just not-quite-right illustrations which just don’t quite say “Merry Christmas”. The frogs on display there aren’t musical, but are doing a murder on each other; the one Ben discusses is actually American, but from the same era. You can find it (if you dare!) in this American Antiquarian article.
  • We discussed Pratchett’s Dickens homage/pastiche Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
  • To explain Ben’s “nerdy roleplaying game reference“, the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons features a city, Sigil, which is located on the inside of a torus (basically a ring) floating at the top of an infinite spire (don’t think about it too hard). Known as the City of Doors, it allows travel to and from the other planes of existence, and is ruled by a mysterious supernatural figure known as the Lady of Pain. She is generally permissive, but suffers the worship of no gods in her city; doing so, or otherwise invoking her ire, often leads to being “mazed” – placed inside a unique labyrinth-like pocket universe, which can only be escaped by traversing the maze. A lot of her victims die in the attempt.
  • We discussed Pratchett’s more sexual explicit writing in our previous episode, #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, in the context of some comments about Rincewind’s sexual experiences – solo and otherwise.
  • The tradition of the “saucy seaside postcard” (sold throughout the UK) was largely the work of one artist, the prolific Donald McGill (1875-1962). He produced more than twelve thousand postcard designs over his career, from 1905 through to his death in 1962. During World War I, he produced anti-German propaganda designs, but his most famous postcards feature cartoons of men and women making suggestive double entendres, not only at the seaside but in many other situations. He ran afoul of the “war on smut” in the 1950s, put on trial in 1954, but later helped to revise the Obscene Publications Act 1857. His most famous postcard, featuring the joke “Do you like Kipling?”; “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”, reportedly holds the record for the world’s best-selling postcard, with claims it had sold over 6 million copies. A museum was opened in 2010 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, celebrating his work, but has since shut down.
  • Penny comments that the Oxford scholar’s end was “very Pickwickian“, a delightful adjective described by the Oxford Dictionary as meaning “Of or like Mr Pickwick in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), especially in being jovial, plump, or generous.” It is used in the novel itself to describe a word or phrase that is misused or misunderstood, which is said to be using such a phrase in “the Pickwickian sense”.
  • L’Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island) is an 1875 novel written by Jules Verne; it is a sequel not only to Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), but also his 1867 novel Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways). In the story, a group of prisoners of the South in the American Civil War stage a daring escape via hot air balloon, but are blown out to sea and crash on an island. They have many adventures, including rescuing a castaway from a smaller island nearby (a character from In Search of the Castaways), but are mysteriously helped by an unseen force, who saves them on multiple occasions. This turns out to be none other than Captain Nemo, who survived the maelstrom at the end of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – though this makes no chronological sense since 20,000 Leagues is set after the Civil War had ended. This book reveals his origin story as an Indian Prince, something not alluded to at all in the first novel. The book doesn’t contain any giant animals, but the 1961 film – starring Herbert Lom as a distinctly non-Indian Nemo – features a giant crab, flightless bird, bees, plants and octopus, all explained to be the results of Nemo’s genetic experiments. The creatures were stop-motion animated by Ray Harryhausen.
  • “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, originally published in 1936. In the story, the narrator tells of his investigation into the port town of Innsmouth some years previously. He discovers much superstition and mystery surrounding the town, where its founding father Obed March started a cult, and many of the inhabitants have “the Innsmouth Look” – unusually flat noses, bulging eyes and narrow heads. It’s eventually revealed that they are hybrids, born of humans cross-breeding with the “Deep Ones”, fish people who live in an underwater city and worship the foul god Dagon.
  • Penny’s Lovecraft quote “things he cannot and must not recall” is from the 1925 story “The Festival”:

They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”; Weird Tales vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1925): 169–174.
  • The article Ben mentions about Dickens’ inventing modern time travel fiction may have been this BBC piece by Samira Ahmed in 2015, or this one, by Joshua Sargeant for SF Gate. (He’s not sure – it wasn’t as recent a read as he thought!) A Christmas Carol (1843) definitely pre-dates The Time Machine (1895), and is the first story we know of to depict someone seeing their own future and subsequently changing it. There are many earlier tales featuring a kind of time travel, including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), which set up the tradition of one-way travel into the future via magical sleep.
  • Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man” was first published in the 1866 Christmas edition of Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round. He started the magazine in 1859 after he had a disagreement with the publishers of his previous magazine, Household Words, who he sued to win control of the name and then shut down, with a final issue announcing it would be merged with All the Year Round. His sub-editor was William Henry Wills, who also worked on the previous publication; they co-founded and co-owned the new magazine, but Dickens had much greater editorial control. All the Year Round kicked off with the first part of Dickens’ serialised novel A Tale of Two Cities and was an immediate success, with a first series of twenty 26-week long volumes running under Dickens’ control until 1868, though he wrote less in the magazine as he spent more time doing public readings of his work. He hired his own son, Charles Jr, as a subeditor on the “new series”, then bequeathed the magazine to him; Charles Jr edited it until at least the end of the second series in 1888, with a third series running until 1895.
  • “Obverse” isn’t actually a synonym for “reverse”, but it’s opposite, generally used only when referring to the faces of coins or other two-sided objects. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines it as “The side of a coin or medal that contains the principal device” – i.e. the “heads” side for traditional European-style coins. In the context of the story, though, it’s used to simply mean “the other side” – as the blank sides with the writing are said to be the “obverse side” of the “windows”, which are clearly the illustrated covers of the cards.
  • Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, most famous for her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House (since adapted many times for the screen) and 1948 short story “The Lottery”, which was first published in The New Yorker (and is currently in development as a feature film). The story about being trapped in a painting is “The Story We Used to Tell”, which was potentially unpublished until 1996, when it appeared in the collection Just an Ordinary Day with other rare stories discovered by her children. It is currently in print as part of the collection Dark Tales, and you can also hear it read by LeVar Burton in the October 20, 2020 episode of his LeVar Burton Reads podcast.
  • There are no shortage of “creepy things kids say” articles on the Internet. We couldn’t find a definitive or best one, so we’ll leave you to google them for yourself…if you dare. Please share your favourites with us!
  • As Ben and Penny mention, the names of the three wise kings (or magi) are traditionally given as Melchior, a Persian scholar; Balthazar, an Arabian king; and Caspar (aka Kaspar or Gaspar), a King from India. The magi are only mentioned once in the Bible, in Matthew 2:1-12, without names or number; it just refers to “wise men from the East”. Most likely they are counted as three to match the number of named gifts: the famous gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their names are said to come from a Greek manuscript written around 500 CE. The magi also feature in Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera we discussed briefly back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a short horror story first published in the November 1846 issue of the American women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. It’s one of many stories of the time to revolve around someone being buried alive.
  • Snoopy is the beagle who features in the comic strip Peanuts, written, drawn and coloured solo by American cartoonist Charles M. Schultz (1922-2000). Peanuts is considered the most popular comic strip in history, originally running from 1950 through to 2000 (around a month before Schultz’s death) in syndication in newspapers in the United States and across the world. Its popularity led to several animated television movies, most famously A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first full-length adaptation of the characters, which along with others themed after other holidays are indeed still shown on television every year in the States. The strip follows the adventures and social interactions of a group of children, with the two main characters being determined anxious failure Charlie Brown (whose closest thing to a catchphrase was his frequent utterance “good grief”), and his dog, Snoopy, who first appeared in the third strip on October 4, 1950. Snoopy doesn’t speak, but has human-like thoughts, written as thought balloons in the comic strip but communicated through non-verbal grunts in animation. Snoopy often retreats into his imagination and adopts various alter-egos, most famously a World War I flying ace who is always shot down by the Red Baron. During the 1970s, Snoopy’s increasing popularity led to a greater focus on him in the strip. Toys and other merchandise of the main characters, especially Snoopy, have been available since the late 50s, and by the 1980s Snoopy was ubiquitous.
  • Candy canes have been associated with Christmas since at least the nineteenth century. An unsubstantiated origin story in folklore traces the tradition back to 1670, in Cologne, Germany, where a choirmaster supposedly wanted to give “sugar sticks” to children to keep them quiet during a recreation of the nativity scene, and justified this by asking for them to be made in the shape of shepherd’s crooks. Gingerbread men are a form of confectionary popular in Europe since the sixteenth century. They are made and eaten at various festive occasions and holidays, and especially Christmas, when they are sometimes hung from Christmas trees as edible ornaments.
  • We previously discussed Garfield, the orange cat and star of Jim Davis’ comic strip Garfield, in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“. Garfield is one of the few comic strips to seriously rival Peanuts in popularity, the other main contender being Bill Waterstone’s Calvin & Hobbes.
  • The “Kitten of the Baskervilles” is a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s third and most famous novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure, which was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902.
  • “Kitten Kong” is the seventh episode of the second series of The Goodies, originally broadcast on November 12, 1971. The Goodies is a television comedy written by and starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, using a hybrid sketch show and sitcom format in which the three “Goodies”, whose motto is “Anything, Anytime”, take on a variety of weird jobs and schemes. In “Kitten Kong”, they start a business looking after “loony animals” that leads to a number of misadventures, culminating in feeding too much growth formula to a kitten which grows enormous and threatens to destroy parts of London. A re-edited version of the episode with extra gags, “Kitten Kong: Montreux ’72 Edition”, won the Silver Rose at the 1972 Rose d’Or Festival, held in Montreux, Switzerland. (The Rose d’Or is a European television award, held annually since 1961.)
  • The original horror short story “The Birds” was written by Cornish author and playwright, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (1907-1989). It was first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, so a bit later than Penny’s guess of the 20s or 30s (though du Maurier was definitely active then; her most famous novel, Rebecca, was published in 1938). As well as Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1963 film adaptation, it has also been adapted several times for radio and television, and even for the stage!
  • The Irregulars is a British mystery show created for Netflix by British screenwriter and playwright Tom Bidwell. It is very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories, but centred on “the Irregulars” – four homeless youths who fulfil the role of the “Baker Street Irregulars” from the Conan Doyle stories. In the series they are not merely informants, but do all the detective work, contracted by Dr John Watson. The series has them investigating various mysteries with supernatural causes. The Irregulars was cancelled after its first eight-episode season.
  • Liz’s ghost story about person who haunts a vague acquaintance is “There in Spirit“, published in June 2020 in The Saturday Paper. (You’ll need a subscription to the paper to read it.)
  • Shaun of the Dead (2004) is a romantic zombie comedy film (or “rom-zom-com”) directed by Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Simon Pegg, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost, with Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, and Penelope Wilton. Pegg stars as Shaun, a retail assistant whose life is already going nowhere when a zombie apocalypse comes. He tries to rescue his ex-girlfriend Liz, her flatmates and his parents with the help of his equally aimless friend Ed (Frost). It started life as an episode of Pegg and Wright’s sitcom Spaced, in which Pegg’s character Tim hallucinates a zombie apocalypse while taking drugs and playing videogames. It’s the first film in the “Three Colours Cornetto” trilogy of films, which while unrelated in plot share core cast and crew and couch a relationship comedy in the context of a genre film.
  • Grabbers (2012, dir. Jon Wright) is a horror comedy starring Moist von Lipwig himself, Richard Coyle, as an alcoholic Garda (Irish police officer). His new partner gets them assigned to a remote Irish island, which they soon discover is under attack from voracious tentacled aliens who need bood and water to survive. Like Shaun of the Dead, despite the comedy it doesn’t shirk the gore.
  • Tremors (1990, dir. Ron Underwood) is western/sci-fi/horror/comedy film starring Kevin Bacon in which the residents of a small desert town in Nevada are attacked by giant worm-like creatures that burrow through the ground and eat people. The film was a hit and spawned six sequels, as well as a short-lived television series, though Kevin Bacon isn’t in any of them. One of the characters from the basement scene Penny describes – Burt Gummer, played by Family Ties Dad Michael Gross – does return in all of them, including a prequel set in the Old West in which Gross plays his character’s ancestor.
  • Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a 2017 one-hour stand-up comedy show, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House and released on Netflix in 2018. It deconstructs comedy and also tells some honest stories of Gadsby’s experiences growing up queer and gender non-conforming in conservative rural Tasmania.
  • Montague Rhodes James OM FBA (1862 – 1936), better known as M R James, was not an Oxford don; sorry Penny, but he went to “the other place”: he was a provost (a senior academic administrator) and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work as an author, with a style so distinctive it has often been emulated and described as “Jamesian”. Penny specifically mentions his stories “Lost Hearts” (1895) and “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (1904).
  • Charles Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. At 3:13 PM on the 9th of June 1865, a train travelling to London on the South Eastern Main Line derailed when it crossed an aqueduct where part of the track had been removed for works. A worker was present to flag down trains, but was only about half as far from the missing section as required by regulations, and the train could not stop in time. Fifty people were injured, and ten of those died – some while being tended to by Dickens. He was hugely affected by the incident – his son said he never really recovered from it – and his story “The Signal-Man” was published a year after the accident, in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round. It may well have been influenced by the Staplehurst crash, though the train crash detailed in the story is more likely modelled after Clayton Tunnel crash of 1861. Perhaps not coincidentally died, Dickens died on June 9, 1870 – five years to the day after the accident.
  • The JibJab dancing elves Ben remembers is the company’s website Elf Yourself, which launched in 2007 and still exists.
  • Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was released in 2010 and was written and directed by Jalmari Helander. It is based on two earlier short films, Rare Exports Inc and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions. It’s not included in any streaming services but you can rent or buy it on Apple TV, YouTube, Fetch and several others.
  • The Krampus is a mythological figure from the Alpine region of Europe. The horned beast is said to accompany Saint Nicholas on his rounds, scaring children who have been badly behaved and, in some versions, punishing them by whipping them with birch rods or even kidnapping them and taking them to hell. His origins are unclear, but he might be inspired by pre-Christian beliefs, and he was outlawed in Austria for a time. The Krampus has more recently found international fame after featuring in the 2015 Christmas horror film Krampus, written and directed by Michael Dougherty and starring Adam Scott and Toni Collette as the parents of a boy who unwittingly summons the Krampus.
  • A great example of the “kids drawings made real” genre is thingsihavedrawn.com, the website where Photoshop artist Tom makes “real” versions of the drawings made by his kids Dom and Al.
  • The BBC has adapted several of M R James short stories for television as part of A Ghost Story for Christmas – and also Dickens “The Signal-Man”! This series of shorts originally ran at Christmas between 1971 and 1978, but was revisited in the 2000s with several new adaptations of M R James stories, including “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” in 2010 and “Mezzotint” in 2021.
  • It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, dir. Frank Capra) is based on the 1943 short story “The Greatest Gift” by American author Philip Van Doren Stern, itself inspired by A Christmas Carol. In the film, George Bailey, a selfless resident of the town of Bedford Falls, thinks of killing himself, but his guardian angel – on his first assignment to Earth – intervenes, showing him what life would have been like for the people of the town if he got his wish to have never been born.
  • The Bon Jovi song Liz refers to is “Livin’ on a Prayer”.

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’s The Truth.

  • The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
  • As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
  • Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
  • The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
  • Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
  • Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
  • The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
  • Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”. 
  • Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
  • Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
  • Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
  • The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
  • We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
  • “Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
  • There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the episode notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
  • You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collection on their website.
  • Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
  • Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
  • Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
  • Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
  • The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and was published on the 26th of March, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
  • The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker,  pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester. (We mention him in our episode about that book: #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.)
  • Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:
  • In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
  • Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
  • The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
  • Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018. We previous mentioned that 99% Invisible episode in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
  • Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
  • The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
  • While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
  • Stream Team is a series of Guardian articles about the hidden gems available via various streaming services. Liz did indeed eventually write an article about The Mummy films for Stream Team, in June 2021.
  • Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
  • Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
  • Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
  • Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
  • The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
  • Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
  • While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
  • Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
  • The other Discworld podcasts we mention this episode are Who Watches the Watch? and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

#Pratchat11 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 11, “At Bill’s Door“, featuring guest Sarah Pearson, discussing the 1991 Discworld novel Reaper Man.

  • 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 Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker – the first woman to (officially) play the role in the show’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 in 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:
  • 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”.