Granny Weatherwax

#Pratchat39 Notes and Errata

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

  • The episode title was inspired by the fete or fair-like atmosphere of the Witch Trial, and by UK singer David Essex’s album, song and jukebox musical “All the Fun of the Fair”.
  • The Sea and Little Fishes was first published in a promotional “sampler” alongside the The Wood Boy by Raymond E. Feist. Both then appeared in the novella collection Legends, along with other new work by the likes of Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R. R. Martin and Anne McCaffery. At just over 13,500 words, it’s maybe a little short for a novella, but very long for a short story.
  • For more information on the Wurundjeri people, visit the web site of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation.
  • The two-part television adaptation Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was made by British production company The Mob, and first broadcast on Sky1 in the UK on the 17th and 18th of December, 2006. We talked about it and the other Pratchett adaptations to date briefly in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“. We discussed the novel Hogfather back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
  • On the subject of swears appearing early on in the books, Rincewind tells Bravd the Hublander to “bugger off” in The Colour of Magic. “Shit” appears four times in Guards! Guards!, but we couldn’t find any swears in the first ten pages or so; Marc might have been thinking about another book.
  • Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English radio and television writer and novelist, best known for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which…well you know. We’ll probably talk about it in more detail another time.
  • Robert Rankin is another British author of comic fantasy whose books are loosely connected by the (fictional) English village of Brentford, where many of them take place. These kicked off with his first novel, 1981’s The Antipope, part of “The Brentford Trilogy”; he is currently working on the final book of “The Final Brentford Trilogy”, which began with The Lord of the Ring Roads in 2017.
  • Here’s @terryandrob’s tweet about Marc’s book:
  • If you’re a regular listener then you’re probably familiar with Liz’s history with English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). It’s previously come up in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat, The Amazing Maurice and Johnny and the Bomb. The subject of the forum’s (misplaced) ire was Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine, which revisits the tropes common to her work which we now consider harmful.
  • A quick bit of errata: Enid Blyton was born in East Dulwich, but by 1938 had moved to Beaconsfield, where Pratchett was born, and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. Terry was born in 1948 – twenty years before Blyton’s death in 1968, at the age of 71! They could have met, but it seems like the sort of thing Marc would have discovered when writing his book. The pair had a few other things in common: Blyton was also a workaholic, writing more than 700 books during her career, and also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease towards the end of her life.
  • G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his Father Brown series of mystery stories. He was born in Kensington in London, but moved to Beaconsfield in 1909, by which time he was a successful author.
  • We discussed the Valhalla Cinema Blues Brothers story back in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000) was a British singer/songwriter who is best known to many for her performance on “Fairytale of New York”, a very non-traditional Christmas song performed by The Pogues, produced by her husband of the time, Steve Lilywhite – a probable source for the criminal brothers’ surname in Hogfather? One of her many hits was 1981’s “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the lead single from her debut album Desperate Character. You can see her performing it on YouTube.
  • Pratchett’s first published story was The Hades Business, in which the Devil engages a shady marketing executive named Crucible to advertise Hell. It’s reprinted – with an author’s note full of embarrassment – in A Blink of the Screen, but first appeared in Science Fantasy volume 20, #60 in August 1963 (a few months before the debut of Doctor Who). You can find it online at the Internet Archive, where you can also find Terry’s never-collected second published story Night Dweller in New Worlds volume 49, #156 from November 1965.
  • “Theatre of Cruelty” was the second Discworld short story, written in 1992 for a publisher’s magazine and later collected in The Wizards of Odd in 1996. It features Captain Vimes and Corporal Carrot of the Watch investigating the murder of a children’s entertainer.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is presumably set before Carpe Jugulum, and as discussed about 1,000 words were cut and later repurposed as a scene in that novel. Granny’s worries about her growing power and propensity for darkness in Carpe Jugulum fit in well as a consequence of this story. Tiffany attends her first Witch Trial in her second novel, A Hat Full of Sky, which features the return of several characters from this story including Letice Earwig and the dwarf Zakzak Stronginthearm. We later discussed A Hat Full of Sky in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben’s comment “I’m too old for this shit” is referencing the line made famous by Danny Glover as aging police detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon films, beginning with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Glover has used the line in several other roles and cameo appearances as well.
  • We previously discussed whether Nanny Ogg was the more powerful witch in our Wyrd Sisters episode: #Pratchat6, “Enter Three Wytches” with Elly Squire.
  • Marc is referring to the original 1971 edition of The Carpet People, Pratchett’s first published novel, which he sold at the age of 23, though it came from much earlier writings. We discussed the original version of The Carpet People in a special video panel for the Australian Discworld Convention, which we also released in a special annotated form to Pratchat subscribers as “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You can see the original, unannotated version of the discussion on YouTube. We covered The Dark Side of the Sun back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“. And don’t worry – we’ll get to his other pre-Discworld sci-fi novel, Strata.
  • The Country Women’s Association formed as separate chapters in Australian states in 1922, with a national body (the CWAA) formed in 1945. They’re still incredibly important in rural Australia.
  • The witches go to the opera in Maskerade (#Pratchat23), and the theatre came to them in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4).
  • Willow’s disappointing meeting with her college’s upsettingly mundane Wiccan group, the “Daughters of Gaea”, occurs in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush”. We previously talked about this way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • The word “grok” comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Human Valentine Michael Smith is born on Mars and raised by Martians, learning their ways, which he later tries to teach on Earth. The Martian word “grok” (invented by Heinlein) is very important in his teachings; it literally means “to drink”, but metaphorically means a deep and empathic or intuitive understanding. The term was popularised on the non-fictional planet Earth by nerds and hippies, who embraced the novel and many of its messages.
  • The weasel-word phrase “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” was made famous by politician character Francis Urquart, protagonist of the novel and television series House of Cards. In the original English series, he is played by Ian Richardson; when he later voiced Death in The Mob’s television adaptation of Hogfather (see above), they gave him a very similar line as an in-joke.
  • We covered the Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, Johnny and the Dead in #Pratchat34, and Johnny and the Bomb in #Pratchat37.
  • Kermit the Frog is the most famous of Jim Henson’s puppet characters, the Muppets. Performed by Henson himself until his death, he made his debut in 1955 as a lizard-like creature on Henson’s first television show, Sam and Friends, though he wasn’t specifically referred to as a frog until the 1960s. He is best remembered as a reporter on Sesame Street, the host of The Muppet Show and the central character of the subsequent Muppet films, the first of which – 1979’s The Muppet Movie – tells the story of his rise to fame. The film memorably opens with Kermit singing “The Rainbow Connection”, accompanying himself on a banjo.
  • The frog from the famous Merry Melodies cartoon was later named “Michigan J Frog“, though it is not given a name in the original cartoon, 1955’s One Froggy Evening. He was later revived as the mascot of Warner Brothers cable network in the 1990s.
  • Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She suffered burns to her face and hand in the scene where she vanishes in a ball of flame, which was achieved with real flame while she dropped through a trapdoor. She took six weeks to recuperate, but is reported to have said: “I won’t sue, because I know how this business works, and I would never work again. I will return to work on one condition – no more fire work!”
  • Marc is referring to the scene near the end of Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman), when the heroes are confronted by Gozer, herald of a supernatural “Traveller” who will take on a form chosen by one of its victims. The Ghostbusters try not to think of anything, but Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) can’t manage that. Instead he tries to think of the least dangerous thing possible – and unwittingly summons a giant killer version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a confectionary mascot.
  • Room 101 appears in George Orwell’s novel 1984 as the feared location where a prisoner of the state is taken to receive the ultimate, personalised torture. As government agent O’Brien explains to Winston Smith: “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” It inspired a BBC radio and television show of the same name, in which celebrity guests are asked to discuss their pet hates, trying to persuade the host to put them in Room 101 where they will never be seen again. (Which isn’t really the spirit of the original, but the show is often funny.)
  • Fuck has long been considered the most versatile swearword. George Carlin has a famous routine about its many uses, which was widely copied and remixed and sent around via fax and email in the 1980s and 1990s. (it’s also been widely shared via YouTube, but there’s no official version so we’ll leave it up to you to find it.) Fuck is also the subject of the first episode of the Netflix series History of Swear Words, hosted by Nicholas Cage.
  • To untangle the superhero confusion: Ben referred to Liz as Ms. Marvel; while this is an older name used by Captain Marvel (aka Carol Danvers, played by Brie Larsen in the recent films), Ben meant the current Marvel superhero of that name, Kamala Khan, who has shapeshifting abilities, which she uses in her early stories to make her fists bigger while fighting bad guys. Liz mentions being married to “Yon-Rogg“, an alien Kree warrior who mentors Captain Marvel in the Captain Marvel film; he’s played by the always dishy Jude Law. They’re not married, but we can all dream. (Thanks to listener Claude, who helped Ben realise this is who Liz was talking about – he thought she said “Ioan Gruffudd“, the also handsome Welsh actor, whose only superhero role was as Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic, in the 2005 film Fantastic Four and its sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. He also has stretching powers that would allow him to make his hands bigger. The character’s wife is Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, who is played in the film by Jessica Alba.)
  • The song “Very Mild Superpowers” is by Irish comedian David O’Doherty; you can watch him performing it on Australian musical gameshow Spicks & Specks on YouTube. 
  • Marc’s band, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, was founded by Andy Heintz and British anarchist and occult comedian Andrew O’Neill, with whom Marc has also toured as a stand up.
  • The Manic Street Preachers, subject of the anthology book Marc is editing, are a Welsh punk and alternative rock band formed in 1986. They’ve been as famous for their “controversial” behaviour as their music, especially in the case of former member Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995. The band’s single “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” and the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours reached number one in the UK charts in 1998.
  • English musician Marc Bolan (1947-1977) was lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex, and is credited by many for starting the glam rock movement when he appeared on Top of the Pops in 1971 dressed in glitter and satin. He died in a car crash in London just before his 30th birthday. (We’re gonna guess you know who David Bowie is.)

#Pratchat36 Notes and Errata

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

  • You’ll understand the episode title when you get to about the 1 hour 45 minute mark. Ben would also like to mention his second episode title choice, “Thoroughly Modern Magpyr”, which references the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  • We discussed Maskerade with opera singer and teacher Myf Coghill back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Truth, which concerns the rise of the Fourth Estate (i.e. journalism and a free press) in Ankh-Morpork, is the twenty-fifth Discworld novel. It introduces Pratchett’s most beloved vampire character, iconographer Otto von Chriek. We cover it in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, six months after this episode.
  • The performing arts (along with the arts sector in general) have been especially badly hit by the COVID-19 crisis: theatres and cinemas and other venues were the first to shut down, the sector and its businesses have received little in relief funding, independent artists often find it hard to qualify for individual support and it is much more difficult to get audiences to pay for online live performance. On top of that, theatres will likely be among the last businesses allowed to open up again, as they are considered high risk and non-essential. If you can support your local artists, please please do.
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the 2016 live theatre sequel to the Harry Potter books, set nineteen years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It features Harry and friends as adults, though the main protagonist is one of his sons, Albus. Before the worldwide shutdown of theatres there were only three productions worldwide, in London’s West End, Broadway in New York, and at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. A fourth, in Toronto Canada, was originally planned to open this month.
  • A word about the ethics of supporting J K Rowling: we won’t give any more space to her many public transphobic comments, but instead we want to make it clear that Pratchat supports the rights and respects the identities of all- (and non-) gendered folks. While boycotting Rowling’s work may seem an easy choice, a large production like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes those ethics complex. While undoubtedly you would be fuelling Rowling’s wealth and thus influence by buying a ticket, the show also provides vital ongoing employment for hundreds of workers on and behind stage – many of them trans or non-binary themselves. And of course many see – or saw – Harry Potter as a story about someone finding a community and chosen family who accept them for who they are, when their own relatives reject and abuse them, making Rowling’s comments all the more hurtful.
  • #KeepTheSecrets is the hashtag used by productions of The Cursed Child to encourage those seeing the play to avoid spoiling others, since with only three productions worldwide, opportunities to experience the story are far more scarce than for the books or films that precede it.
  • “Say no more, say no more, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat” is a line from Monty Python’s “Candid Photography” sketch, aka “Nudge Nudge”. In it, Eric Idle asks increasingly outrageous “suggestive” questions to Terry Jones in a pub. It first appeared at the end of the third episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in October 1969.
  • ATMs (aka cashpoints) in Vatican City are indeed probably the only ones in the world which offer Latin as a language option. While Vatican City’s official language is modern Italian, all visiting Catholic church officials can read Latin, so it’s an easy way to make sure everyone can use them.
  • The Igor employed by the Counts Magpyr is indeed the first we meet in the course of the Discworld novels, but far from the last. In fact we meet about thirteen actual Igors (and Igorinas), with a few more mentioned. We’ll meet several more in the next Discworld book, The Fifth Elephant.
  • The popular culture version of Igor stems from Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein, though as usual with these things it’s not that simple, since that character is named Fritz. The assistant does not appear in the book, and is borrowed from one of the early stage adaptations. Two of the later sequels had a character played by Bela Lugosi named Ygor, and by the 1950s the name and the archetype had been merged together in the popular consciousness. “Igor”, by the way, is a real name, supposedly Russian in origin and meaning “warrior”.
  • The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, was an American sci-fi drama series which originally ran for nine seasons on the Fox Network between 1993 and 2002. The series follows two FBI agents, believer Fox Mulder and skeptic Dana Scully, as they investigate various unexplained phenomena that are consigned to the so-called “X-Files” of the Bureau. It alternated between weird monster-of-the-week stories and a labyrinthine ongoing plot about a complicated alien conspiracy. It was immensely popular, and spawned the films The X-Files (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), the spin-off series The Lone Gunmen, and the related Chris Carter series Millennium. The X-Files itself was revived for tenth and eleventh seasons in 2016 and 2018.
  • We covered The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching book and the first appearance of the clan of Mac Nac Feegle we know best, in #Pratchat33, “Meet the Feegles“. Not only do they speak differently in Carpe Jugulum, but their name is capitalised differently (“Nac mac Feegle”, not “Mac”), they wear loincloths rather than kilts, and they are depicted wearing smurf-like caps (see the next note). Later Tiffany books make reference to a clan in the mountains who live by a lake and write things down, which is probably the one depicted here.
  • We previously mentioned the Smurfs in our episode about Truckers, “Upscalator to Heaven” (#Pratchat9). They were created in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo – no, not Peyote, thanks autocorrect – and grew to worldwide prominence through an American animated series that ran throughout the 1980s. They are the archetypal jolly little characters with adjective-based names like “Happy Smurf”, “Brainy Smurf” and “Papa Smurf” which helpfully describe each Smurf’s personality or skills. Since the Smurfs are small, blue, magical and live in a community with 99 men and one woman, its clear that parodying them was at least part of Pratchett’s intent with the Feegles, who in this book are even depicted wearing pointed caps which droop down just as the Smurfs’ do (though the Feegle’s caps are blue, not white or red).
  • Scots is a Scottish language distinct from both English and Scottish Gaelic. While Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language derived from an eastern dialect of Middle Irish (making it a sister language to modern Irish), Scots is Germanic language derived from a northern dialect of Middle English (making it a sister language of modern English). Helen Zaltzman made an excellent episode of The Allusionist podcast about the survival of Scots despite the efforts of English rule to eradicate it (episode 78, “Oot in the Open“), and another about modern efforts to introduce LGBTIAQ+ terms to the language (episode 117, “Many Ways at Once“).
  • We discussed Wyrd Sisters way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, with guest Elly Squire. We had a lot of thoughts about Magrat and Verence’s courtship.
  • Harry and Meghan are Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, sixth in line to the British Throne, and American actress Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. They have been outspoken on many issues, including Meghan’s own treatment by the press, which is hard not to see as racist when compared to the way they treat Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton. In January 2020, the couple announced they were stepping back as senior members of the royal family, a move described in scathing tones by the British press as “Megxit”, a play on Brexit.
  • Charles, Prince of Wales, usually known as Prince Charles, is the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and heir apparent to the British Throne. He has long taken an interest in various public and philanthropic subjects, most notably urban planning, architecture and the environment. But it’s not all good news: his relationship with Diana Spencer was…not great, to say the least, with both having extra-marital affairs before a controversial divorce and her death in a car accident. His environmentalism has been viewed as a bit dodgy, and he’s also controversially a fan of alternative medicines – including homeopathy which, as Granny knows well, is nonsense. He is in many ways the quintessential weirdo royal who gets away with being eccentric.
  • Gentrification is the process in which more affluent (usually middle class) folks move into neighbourhood and prompt (or demand) changes which drive up rents, house prices and the general cost of living (replacing cheaper stores, cafes and restaurants with more expensive ones, for example), forcing out the poorer folk who originally lived there.
  • Giacomo Casanunda, the dwarfish parody of real-life famous lover Giacomo Casanova, appears in only three novels: Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies and the brief cameo here. He is first briefly mentioned in a footnote in Reaper Man as one of the Disc’s greatest lovers, though that early version of the joke uses the less subtle spelling “Casanunder”.
  • Ben’s comment that Magrat is “a bit of a helicopter” is in reference to a “helicopter parent“, one who constantly “hovers” near their child rather than letting them make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. It’s probably an unfair assessment, given young Esme’s age. (Incidentally, Liz revealed the surprising etymology of “helicopter” back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.)
  • The meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen, usually known as “pointing Rick Dalton” or “pointing Leonardo DiCaprio”, is an image taken from the 2019 Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In the scene DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, is watching a television show with his stunt double (Brad Pitt) in a private cinema, and points at the screen when he sees himself on screen. Read about some of its famous uses on knowyourmeme.com.
  • Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong is a blog started in 2008 by Jen from Orlando. It showcases the often terrible cakes people get from professional bakeries which don’t quite match the representative image, or when the notes on what to write in icing are read a little too literally. It’s still going strong at cakewrecks.com. Thanks to Twitter listener Ilbeon for mentioning it in this context!
  • Hollywood-style hacking has very little resemblance to the real world equivalent. You can find a list of those inaccuracies on the All the Tropes web site under “Hollywood Hacking“, though the specific version Ben references is the “Phone Trace Race“, as it used to be about tracing a phone call. You can find it in films like Hackers, Swordfish and to a lesser extent even classics like Wargames. If you want to feel like a (Hollywood) hacker yourself, we recommend playing with hackertyper.com.
  • The “Tolerant Left” is a sarcastic term used by conservative commentators when they try to point out ways in which progressive or “leftist” politics is intolerant. It’s best known from the meme “so much for the tolerant left“, in which various spurious examples are given to show how petty and inconsequential most of the conservative complaints are. The phrase can also be used to describe the more right-leaning branches of supposedly leftist parties, like mainstream Democrats in the US or many factions within the Australian Labor Party. Their politics are actually pretty conservative on an absolute scale, while still being quite far left of their more obviously conservative opponents.
  • The “Boris Johnson approach” to COVID-19 was to resist any kind of lockdowns or restrictions on gatherings, as seen across the rest of Europe and in many other countries. Early on his government seemed to be following advice to let people to contract the virus in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, a move opposed by doctors as it would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Similar criticisms have been levelled at the United States and Sweden, though the latter is a bit of a special case from a political perspective.
  • It’s true; Liz promised/threatened to talk about vampire boners in our previous episode, “Great Balls of Physics“. Er…the title of that episode was not meant to be a pun on this.
  • Many of the weird vampire myths mentioned in the book are indeed real, as Terry himself is quoted as saying the Annotated Pratchett File: “”As an aside, very little vampiric legend and folklore in CJ is made up – even the vampire tools and watermelons are real world beliefs.” Both of those examples are from Slavic folklore. (See the later note for more about the socks thing.)
  • We’ve mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer many times, including in our discussions of Mort, Dodger, Eric, Guards! Guards!, Truckers, Diggers, Hogfather and The Last Continent. In brief it was a highly influential TV show created by Joss Whedon, based on his 1992 film, which ran from 1997 to 2003. It followed the adventures of teenager Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who tries to live a relatively normal Californian high school life while also fulfilling her destiny as the Slayer, a once-in-a-generation Chosen One granted supernatural powers to fight vampires and demons. (There’s some more about it during the listener questions section in this episode.)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade, “a roleplaying game of personal horror”, is a tabletop roleplaying game first published by White Wolf Publishing in 1991. Players take on the roles of vampires, who called themselves “kindred”, and try to survive both the urges of their darker side (“the Beast”) and the politics of modern vampire society. The “Masquerade” of the title is one of the major rules, or “Conventions”, of the Camarilla, a vampire sect who, like Count Magpyr, reject superstition and try to move with the times. The Convention of “Masquerade” is that vampires do not allow their existence to become common knowledge. The game has seen continued popularity, with (so far) five major editions and spin-offs including a TV series (Kindred: The Embraced; it was pretty terrible), several videogames, a trading card game (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle) and even a professional wrestler!
  • Yoga is a Hindu spiritual and philosophical tradition dating back around 3,000 years. It takes many forms, including hatha yoga, a physical discpline which has been adapted into the modern practice of “yoga as exercise”. Bikram Choudhury popularised his form of “hot yoga” in America (and from there throughout the Western world) as Bikram Yoga, in which participants strike various physical poses in a heated environment. It is now well-documented that Bikram abused his popularity and position of trust and authority, abusing and assaulting many students and instructors. Choudhury fled the United States in 2017 following multiple law suits and criminal charges. The five part series Bikram from the 30 For 30 podcast tells the story in a lot of detail.
  • The Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, beginning with Twilight in 2005, chronicle the love affair between clumsy teenager Bella Swan and 104-year-old telepathic vampire Edward Cullen, who is drawn to her in part because he cannot read her mind. Famously Meyer was unfamiliar with standard vampire tropes; her vampires can have (half-vampire) children, lack fangs, glitter in sunlight, and create new vampires by injecting venom. Unfortunately, Gill is wrong about the vampire boners: they are not described in any detail in the novels, as Meyer’s Mormon sensibilities led her to steer away from any detailed description of the sex that occurs in the final book, Breaking Dawn. Meyer is however happy to describe the horrifying vampire baby birth in great detail, and also tells us that Edward’s vampire super-strength leaves Bella bloody and bruised after their first night together – one of many questionable things about the novels.
  • The Southern Vampire Mysteries, also known as True Blood, are a series of thirteen novels by Charlaine Harris, beginning with 2001’s Dead Until Dark. They follow Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Louisiana, who lives in a world where vampires exist and have recently become public knowledge. She works in a bar frequented by vampires and likes hanging around them, including her 173-year-old romantic interest Bill Compton, because she can’t hear their thoughts. They were adapted into the HBO television series True Blood, which ran for seven seasons from 2008 to 2014 and starred Anna Paquin as Sookie. The TV series is named for a synthetic blood alternative, “Tru Blood”, which was developed by vampire authorities prior to their “coming out” to help in their campaign to co-exist with humans.
  • Midnight Sun, the Twilight book retelling the story from Edward’s perspective, was published in August 2020. Stephenie Meyer began writing it in 2008, and showed it to cast and crew of the Twilight films to influence their portrayal of Edward. Chapters from it were leaked in the Internet in 2011. She intends to write two more Twilight books.
  • Clementine Ford is an Australian writer, broadcaster and public speaker whose focus is feminism. As well as seven years of columns for The Age newspaper’s Daily Life and numerous articles for various online publications, she’s written two books, Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @clementine_ford.
  • Lord Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) is Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham in the TV series and subsequent film Downton Abbey, which follows the lives of his fictional aristocratic family and their servants between 1912 and 1927. Discworld fans will note that Grantham’s eldest daughter Mary is played by Michelle Dockery, who in one of her earliest screen roles portrayed Death’s granddaughter Susan in the 2006 television adaptation of Hogfather.
  • Ben cannot substantiate whether there is an official Catholic Church position on vampires and crosses. In medieval times the church attributed any evil creatures of folklore to the influence of demons, and so therefore they were warded off by the power of God, but there’s no consensus on the mechanism.
  • The film Ben is thinking of where a Star of David is used to repel a vampire is the 1979 comedy Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton as Dracula. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Rosenberg (Richard Benjamin), who is revealed to be van Helsing’s grandson, tries using a Star of David on Dracula, but as Dracula is really the protagonist of the film he brushes this off, just as he does a mirror, garlic and various other attempts to kill him. In several other films, including The Fearless Vampire Killers, vampires are presented with a cross but shrug it off because they were Jewish in life. A couple of other films doing this joke have their vampire hunters go on to use Nazi symbols to repel the vampires, which is a whole new level of wrong.
  • The Doctor Who vampire story Ben mentions is 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. As well as Russian soldier Sorin’s belief in communism and the Doctor’s faith in his companions, there are two sad scenes where a character’s faith is broken and no longer works (but we won’t spoil those).
  • Hammer Film Productions Ltd, also known as Hammer Horror or Hammer’s House of Horror, is a British film company founded in 1934 who are best known for their gothic horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. They produced the first popular colour films about characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, and made international stars out of Peter Cushing (mostly as Victor Frankenstein, van Helsing and other human villains and slayers, rather than monsters) and Christopher Lee (who played Dracula for Hammer in seven films).
  • Blaskó Béla Ferenc Dezső, better known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor who rose to fame by playing the title role in Dracula on Broadway, and in the 1931 Hollywood film adaptation of the play. He was an active union member both in Hungary – leading to his persecution after the revolution of 1919 – and in Hollywood. After Dracula Lugosi became typecast in horror roles, and was frustrated as he constantly received second billing under Boris Karloff, even when he was playing the lead. He later became addicted to the morphine he took as a painkiller for extreme back pain, and by the time of his death was only offered roles by famously terrible director Ed Wood.
  • Count von Count, usually just called “The Count”, is one of Sesame Street’s longest-running muppet characters, debuting in the show’s fourth season in 1972. As per a popular bit of folklore about vampires, he loves to count things, but while he has fangs, wears evening dress and can turn into a bat, he has now shed any of his more frightening attributes – he used to be able to hypnotise people, and his laugh was more sinister and accompanied by thunder and lightning! He was originally performed by veteran muppeteer Jerry Nelson until his death in 2012, when Matt Vogel – who had already been doing the physical pupeetering – took over The Count’s vocal performance.
  • Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the modern name for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Media portrayals often include an identity or “personality state” which is violent and dangerous, which is rarely the case in real life. In some cases it has been seen as a positive coping mechanism in the face of traumatic experiences. Dissociative Identity Awareness Day is March 5.
  • Laura Davis, award-winning Australian comedian and favourite of everyone in this episode, can be found online at lauradaviscomedy.com. Her latest album is The Bus Show, a special audio-only edition of her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe hit Better Dead Than A Coward. You can buy it and two other comedy performances via her web site.
  • Liz is referencing We Need to Talk About Kevin, a 2003 novel by American author Lionel Shriver. It is told as a series of letters written by a mother trying to come to terms with the fact that her son, Kevin, has perpetrated a school massacre. It was adapted as a film in 2011 starring Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother, Eva, and Ezra Miller as Kevin.
  • The concept of the “shame gremlin” is largely derived from American researcher Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability. She rose to international prominence when her 2010 talk for TEDxHouston went viral; it’s since been viewed over 50 million times.
  • Stealing a vampire’s sock, you’ll be glad to hear, is indeed based on a real bit of folklore, possibly from Romani tradition: they are compelled to chase their socks, so you can banish a vampire by stealing them and throwing them outside the town limits. Variations on this do seem to specify the left sock, while others say you fill them with grave dirt or rocks or garlic, and throw them into a river. This method is one of Taika Waititi’s favourites from his research for What We Do in the Shadows.
  • Liz’s euphemism for vampire testicles is a reference to The Lost Boys, a 1987 comedy vampire film directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland. It made Coreys Haim and Feldman famous for their roles as “the Frog brothers”, a pair of amateur vampire hunters, and Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Dianne West also appear! It was a very important film – and soundtrack – at the time. It did get a sequel and comic book series twenty years later, but neither made the same splash as the original.
  • “1337speak” – aka 1337, l337, leet and eleet – is a style of writing which uses alternate spellings and numbers or symbols in place of regular letters. “1337” thus translates to “leet”, short for “elite” – supposedly referring to the superior status of the hackers and videogame players who invented it on bulletin board systems in the 1980s. The symbols either look like the letters they replace, or sound like parts of the word when reading out the symbol’s name. (Of note: don’t use this method to add numbers and symbols to important passwords, as computer programs and hackers know it well.)
  • Derby names are the nicknames used by roller derby players. Traditionally they are puns or wordplay, often involving pop culture references and a saucy or violent twist that reflects the sport’s full-contact nature and punk- and rockabilly-inspired culture. Not unlike the faces of clowns discussed in our first episode, they can be registered in various places, including rollerderbyroster.com; some examples include Heather Blocklear, Candy Crush-Her, Robin Graves and Velvet Landmine.
  • The Fates of Greek mythology, more properly known as the Moirai, are the personifications of destiny, who control the fates of mortal lives, represented by a thread. They appeared in a few different versions before settling on the best known trio: Clotho spins new threads to begin lives; Lachesis measures the threads and decides how long each life should be; and Atropos cuts the threads, choosing the manner of their death.
  • The Norns are female beings in Norse mythology, sometimes described as giants, who control fate and destiny (though this is a modern distinction; in the source many terms are used interchangeably, including valkyrie). There are many of them, but the three most important – Urð, Verðandi and Skuld – guard the Well of Urðr (or Fate), and use its waters to feed the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Like the Moirai (see above) they decided the fates of mortals, and are sometimes also depicted measuring and cutting threads.
  • In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books the wizards, or istari, appear as old men, but are in fact angel-like beings called Maiar sent to Middle Earth to guide mortals. There are three main wizards: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, and Radagast the Brown. (Mustrum Ridcully is also known as Ridcully the Brown, and his love for nature – expressed through hunting it down – is a parody of Radagast.) Tolkien’s supplemental writings also briefly mention two other wizards wearing sea-blue robes, who headed into the East of Middle-Earth. We don’t know what happened to them.
  • We briefly discussed Gill’s operatic cabaret, Lorelei, at the end of our Maskerade episode. Co-written with Julian Langdon and Casey Bennetto, with lyrics by Gill and Bennetto, it tells the story of the lorelei, three sirens on the River Rhine who are wondering if they are sick of all this luring sailors to their deaths business. It was produced by Victorian Opera at the Malthouse for a short season in November 2018, and might one day return… You can read about it at the Victorian Opera web site.
  • Frankenweenie was Tim Burton’s 1984 live-action debut, a black and white short film for Disney about Victor Frankenstein, a boy living in 1950s America who brings his beloved dog back to life. It starred Barret Oliver (best known for his starring role as Bastian in The Neverending Story) as Victor and Shelley Duvall as his mother, and deliberately echoed the 1931 film version of Frankenstein. (Ben saw it in the cinema as a boy and loved it; it’s also included as an extra on some versions of The Nightmare Before Christmas.) In 2012 Burton remade it as a full-length stop-motion animated film, starring Charlie Tahan as Victor alongside a cast of old Burton faves including Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau.
  • “Bigger on the inside” is a Doctor Who tradition; the phrase is frequently uttered by humans who enter the Doctor’s TARDIS time machine for the first time, since on the outside it’s a 1960s London police box, but on the inside it’s a vast space. This is often subverted or lampshaded in the modern series; Ben’s favourite is in “The Husbands of River Song”, when the Twelfth Doctor pretends he’s never been inside the TARDIS before and hams up his own rendition. The episode “Smith and Jones” is another good one: the Tenth Doctor mouths the line when new companion Martha Jones says it (supposedly an ad-lib from actor David Tennant).
  • Tomb Raider is a videogame series originally published by Eidos and developed by Core Design and then Crystal Dynamics. Beginning with Tomb Raider in 1996, the series starred Lara Croft, a young English aristocrat and archaeologist who explores various secret tombs and ancient ruins looking for treasure and shooting a lot of people and animals. The series was famous for the title character and also for the puzzle-based exploration third-person gameplay, which was very different to the first-person shooters that still dominated the market at the time. After nine games, Eidos was bought by Japanese publisher Square Enix, and the series was rebooted in 2013. The new Tomb Raider featured a younger Lara in an origin story in which she is shipwrecked and forced to fight to survive against worshipper’s of the island’s god.
  • Rhianna Pratchett was lead writer for the new, more grounded Lara of the 2013 Tomb Raider. She was also the sole writer on the 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, for which she won multiple awards, including the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing. She did not work on the subsequent game, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
  • Granny’s famous “I ate’nt dead” sign doesn’t appear until her fourth novel, Lords and Ladies, as we discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • “One For Sorrow” is the final track on Australian indie rock/pop musician Megan Washington’s 2014 album, There There. The rhyme in the song’s context is counting stars, not magpies, which has precedence in folklore as well. The song is on YouTube here.
  • “Magpie” appears on The Unthanks’ 2015 album Mount the Air. You can find a great live version on YouTube from their appearance on Later… with Jools Holland.
  • We previously mentioned the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek – and the fairytale-hating Lord Farquaad – in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles” and #Pratchat33, “Cats, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The original picture book by William Steig was published in 1990. As revealed in the biography A Life in Footnotes, Pratchett was not very impressed by the film version.
  • The phrase “Up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen” is from the well-known poem “The Faeries”, written in 1850 by Irish poet William Allingham. The relevant verse is the most famous:
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
  • Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is British director Guy Ritchie’s 1998 feature film debut. It stars an ensemble cast of crooks and gangsters whose various schemes, initially disparate, all converge in a bloody finale. We referenced it in the title of #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“.
  • There’s no sign of any Pratchett family experience with Alzheimer’s prior to his own diagnosis. In this Guardian article, reprinted after this death in 2015, he mentions that his father died of cancer but glad he had “all his marbles”.
  • Once again we advise that The Rocky Horror Show can’t really be explained; you just have to see it. The song we reference here, “Over at the Frankenstein Place”, is the third one. It also appears in the film version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • In Suzanne Collins’ novel series The Hunger Games, the future dystopian North American state called Panem is divided into twelve Districts. As a reminder of the failure of a previous uprising against the Capitol, the Districts are forced to select one boy and one girl via lottery each year to participate in the Hunger Games, where they are forced to fight and kill each other until only one remains.
  • Home Alone is a 1990 John Hughes comedy film, directed by Chris Columbus, in which eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is accidentally left behind when his family go on Christmas holiday to Paris. When a pair of burglars try to rob the house, he sets up traps using items from around the house to defend himself, many of which would be deadly outside of the cartoon logic of Hollywood.
  • The Princess Bride is a 1987 adventure comedy film, written by William Goldman and based on his 1973 comic novel of the same name. Without spoiling too much, a key plot point/gag at one point is that one of the protagonists is diagnosed as being only “mostly dead”, allowing him to be revived, but in a severely weakened state.
  • The Scorpion King (2002) was a spin-off prequel film about The Rock’s antagonist character from The Mummy Returns (2001), the not-nearly-as-good sequel to The Mummy (1999). Amazingly The Scorpion King had no fewer than four direct-to-video sequels, the most recent in 2018. None of them star The Rock as he was too busy being awesome.
  • It’s true: the Rock tore his gate off to get to work. On September 19, wrestler turned action movie star and all-round superhero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted on his Instagram that a power outage had prevented the gates opening at his estate. Not wanting to wait 45 minutes for the repair company and be late to set, he tore the gate off its hinges. And yes this is all after he and his family have had and recovered from COVID-19. The film in question is Red Notice, an action comedy also starring Gal Godot and Ryan Reynolds. Incidentally, The Rock now has more Instagram followers than anyone in the world, knocking Kylie Jenner from the top spot.
  • The Neville we’re referring to in “a very Neville moment” is Neville Longbottom, a supporting character in the Harry Potter books and films. Neville became a fan favourite thanks to the double success of stepping up to win a key victory in the last book, and also dorky child star Matthew Lewis – who plays him in the films – growing up to be a total babe by the time of the last one.
  • Australian Magpies are not closely related to their European and Asian namesakes. The various species of Eurasian magpies are corvids, related to crows, rooks and ravens, and among the smartest birds in the world. Australian magpies (locally nicknamed “maggies”, “swoopy bois” or a variety of curse words) and their cousins in New Guinea are passerines, or songbirds, the largest and most diverse Order of birds. They are found throughout most of Australia in nine subspecies, have a distinctive warbling song, are quite intelligent, and very social – but also very territorial, and famously aggressive in Spring.
  • Australian children are taught many anti-magpie techniques, not all of which are effective. This magpie video from the Australian Academy of Science is a great explainer for what to do to stay safe in swooping season. You can also find many videos online of folks on bikes being repeatedly swooped, and while completing these show notes, there was news of a magpie pecking the eyes of an elderly man in Pratchat’s home state of Victoria. Thankfully he’s expected to recover his sight after emergency surgery, and such extreme aggressiveness is rare.
  • The Duchess is a new Netflix sitcom created by and starring Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan. Set in London, Ryan plays a single mother and “terrible person” who is considering having a second child. Of note, the show also features Sydney comedian Steen Raskopoulos in a major supporting role!
  • “White feminism” refers to mainstream feminist activism, which has historically centred around the concerns of middle-class, educated white women while ignoring the plight of other women. The most obvious example of this is that in Western countries, the dates celebrated for achieving women’s suffrage usually only secured voting rights for white women, while black women, indigenous women and women of colour were still unable to vote. Modern feminist movements strive to be intersectional – considering all forms of social injustice as connected, and thus to be resisted together.
  • The idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are responsible for logic and creativity, respectively, is still popular in culture. As is usual in science, it’s not that simple. The original idea was based on experiments done with patients who, as a treatment for severe epilepsy, had the connection between the sides of their brain – the corpus colosum – severed. But observation of activity in intact brains has given us a very different idea about brain function. While there are certainly some functions that to reside predominantly in one hemisphere of the brain, such as language, both hemispheres seem to play at least some part in most complex tasks. It is true, though, that the right hemisphere controls movement in the left side of the body, and vice versa.
  • The Downton Abbey cast includes Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham; Elizabeth McGovern as his American wife Cora; Michelle Dockery as his eldest daughter Mary; Laura Carmichael as his younger daughter Edith; and Dan Stevens as Matthew, a distant cousin.
  • Australian comedian Luke McGregor is probably best known for his television work with Celia Pacquola. The two appeared as civil servants in two seasons of the ABC political satire Utopia before creating their own show, Rosehaven. McGregor plays Daniel, a young man who returns to his (fictional) their Tasmanian hometown of Rosehaven to help his ailing mother run her real estate business, where he is reunited with his childhood friend Emma (Pacquola), who has fled her marriage during her honeymoon.
  • We discussed The Dark Side of the Sun with Will Kostakis back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.

#Pratchat43 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, featuring guest Dr Sally Evans, discussing the 32nd Discworld novel, and the second to feature Tiffany Aching, 2004’s A Hat Full of Sky.

  • The episode title is a parody of the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, released in 2019. Tom Holland starred as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, who tries to leave his superhero life behind when he goes on a school trip to Europe. It…doesn’t work out.
  • Bonus episode note: Ben’s working title for this episode was “I’m Gonna Be the Big Man Who’s Hivering to You”, a reference to Scottish band The Proclaimers biggest hit, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)“, from their 1988 album Sunshine on Leith. It was initially only a big hit in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (it reached number 1 in the charts down under), but had a second lease on life in the US when it was featured on the soundtrack to the 1996 film Benny & Joon. The second verse includes the lines “And if I haver/Then I know I’m gonna be/I’m gonna be the man who’s haverin’ to you”; Ben always thought “haver” was Scots slang for vomiting (the preceding lines are about getting drunk), but actually it means to speak nonsense, especially when flirting or complimenting someone. So also something you do when drunk.
  • Red Dwarf is a British science fiction sitcom, created Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for the BBC. It stars Craig Charles as David Lister, the lowest ranked crew member of the deep space mining ship Red Dwarf, who is placed in suspended animation for refusing to hand over a cat he smuggled on board. He wakes up to find that a radiation leak has killed the rest of the crew and that Holly, the ship’s now-senile computer (Norman Lovett and later Hattie Hayridge), kept him in stasis for three million years. He is joined by a descendant of his cat, evolved into humanoid lifeform known simply as Cat (Danny John-Jules); his hated bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), who died and is now a hologram computer-simulation; and later Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), a domestic service android. It originally ran for eight series on the BBC between 1988 and 1999, and was resureccted by UK digital channel Dave in 2009 for a mini-series, “Back to Earth”, and three more series and a telemovie between 2012 and 2020. In the early years of The BBC series, Grant and Naylor – under the pseudonym Grant Naylor – wrote two Red Dwarf novels, essentially a revised version of storylines from the first few series without the limitations of a television effects budget.
  • Ben Elton was a star of the 1980s alternative comedy scene, who later gained success as a television personality, sitcom writer (he joined Blackadder from the second series) and comic novelist. His science fiction novels include Stark (1989; also adapted for television in 1993), This Other Eden (1993) and Blind Faith (2007).
  • The Last Continent was first published in May 1998, and Jingo in November 1997, so Sally’s guess is right on the money. We discussed those books in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land” and #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés” respectively.
  • We’ve spoken before about Enid Blyton and Liz’s feelings on loving an author whose work we can now see contains a lot of problematic stuff. Her school story books included the “Naughtiest Girl” series, starring spoiled rich girl Elizabeth Allen, who is sent away to a progressive boarding school when her bad behaviour at home causes her governess to quit. They started with The Naughtiest Girl in the School in 1940, and followed by three more in the 1940s. Six more, beginning with The Naughtiest Girl Keeps a Secret, were written by Anne Digby between 1999 and 2001. She also wrote the “St Claire’s” books about twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan, who go to the titular boarding school. The original series consisted of five novels written between 1941 and 1945, beginning with The Twins at St. Claire’s. As with the Naughtiest Girl books, they were later continued by another author, with Pamela Cox writing two more books in 2000 and another in 2008.
  • The Baby-Sitter’s Club was a series of novels by Ann M. Martin (and later several ghostwriters) chronicling the adventures of four teenage girls – Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia and Stacey – who run a babysitting service in their (fictional) home town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, later joined by many other characters. The original series was published between 1986 and 1999, and included 131 books, of which the first 35 were written by Martin herself. There were also a huge number of specials and spin-offs, including the popular Baby-Sitter’s Club: Mysteries series. The main series was adapted for television in 1990, and ran for 13 episodes; a new series was released on Netflix in 2020, with a second season expected in 2021. There are quite a few Baby-Sitter’s Club podcasts re-reading the books; if you’ve listened to any, we’d love to hear which ones you rate!
  • The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories is a series of mystery novels starring fictional teenage detective Nancy Drew, beginning with the 1930 book The Secret of the Old Clock. Nancy herself was originally 16, headstrong, impulsive and sometimes violent, but in later books – and revisions of the earlier ones – she was changed to be nicer. The series was created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer and ghostwritten by various authors as “Carolyn Keene”, with around 175 books published between 1930 and 2003. This setup was the same strategy Stratemeyer used for his earlier Hardy Boys mystery books. There have been several screen adaptations, including several short “B-films” in the late 1930s, a 1970s The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries crossover series for television (considered by some the most faithful adaptation), a 1995 television series which updated Nancy as a 21-year-old criminology student, the 2007 feature film Nancy Drew, and most recently, the film Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and the unrelated television series, a modern re-imagining titled Nancy Drew, in 2019. There’s still plenty of life in this investigator!
  • Tom Swift Jr was, it turns out, another series of ghostwritten children’s books created by Edward Stratemeyer! They were a continuation of the original Tom Swift series, in which the younger Tom’s father was the main character, though many supporting characters appear in both. The original series was written under the pseudonym Victor Appleton, and the Tom Swift Jr books under Victor Appleton II. In all there are over 100 Tom Swift books, beginning with the original series of forty books published between 1910 and 1941, and the 33 original Tom Swift Jr books, published between 1954 and 1971. (These are the ones Ben read as a kid.)
  • We previously discussed Just William and the William Brown books, and Pratchett’s love for them, way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh” (and especially in the notes for that episode). Written by Richmal Crompton between 1922 and 1969 (with the last one published after Crompton’s death in 1969), each book is a collection of short stories chronicling unruly schoolboy William’s various adventures. He is always eleven years old, but the stories are always set in the present day – i.e. the time at which they were written. So as well as scrumping for apples, William – along with his band of friends and accomplices, the “Outlaws” – also “Does His Bit” during the years of the Second World War, pretends to be on television and discovers the wonders of the National Health Service in the late 1950s, and get confused by a bunch of hippie spiritualists at the end of the 1960s.
  • Paul Jennings is an Australian author best known for his collections of short stories, often with fantasy elements and always containing a twist. His most famous books are the first nine volumes of these, published between 1985 and 1998, with titles like Unreal!, Uncanny!, Unbelievable! and Unmentionable! (Ben still has his copies of the first five or so.) He’s also written a large number of children’s chapter books, picture books and novels, some in collaboration with another famous Australian author, Morris Gleitzman. Based on the popularity of his short stories, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation created Round the Twist, a television show adapting stories from a variety of Jennings’ books. It revolved around the Twist family – widowed father and sculptor Tony, teenage twins Pete and Linda, and youngster Bronson – who move into an old lighthouse, where all kinds of weird stuff happens to them. It ran for four series between 1990 and 2001, moving from Channel 7 to the ABC, though with lots of cast changes as the child actors grew up. It was a massive hit in Australia and the UK, remembered for its theme song as much as the show itself.
  • Paul Jenning’s memoir is Untwisted, published in 2020. The title is a play on his most famous books, and the TV series they inspired.
  • Primary school happens at roughly the same age in most places, but the way the years are numbered are quite different. It’s not even consistent between Australian states! But it is common across Australia for children to enter year 1 (also galled grade 1, or first grade) in the year they will turn 6, usually after a year of pre-school that goes by various names (kindergarten, prep, reception etc). Most states consider high school to run from years 1 to 6 (when most children are 12 years old), and high school from years 7 to 12 (most students turning 18 in their final year). So in year 11, most Australian students would be in their second last year of primary school, year 5.
  • We’ve often talked about British author Diana Wynne-Jones; see #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26 and #Pratchat30 for more about Howl’s Moving Castle, plus #Pratchat22, #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat37, where we discuss her other books, especially the Chrestomanci series. In the original Howl novel, protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three sisters who all work in their father’s hat shop. Sophie, aware of the fairy tale conventions of the world she lives in, expects to live a boring life compared to that of her sisters. The middle child Lettie, the most beautiful, becomes an apprentice pastry chef, while the youngest and smartest, Martha, becomes apprentice to Mrs Fairfax, a witch who would probably get along very well with Nanny Ogg. They do indeed have some adventures of their own, but we won’t spoil those for you here.
  • Anges Nitt is a young witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (see #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“) as a member of a goth-like “coven” who meddle in the powers of fairies. While a minor character in that book, she nonetheless catches the eye of Granny and Nanny as one with true talent. In Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“), she has gone to Ankh-Morpork to become an opera singer, and the elder two witches just happen to be going there anyway, and of course they wouldn’t dream of telling her she should come home and take up witchcraft. By the time of Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“) Agnes is more-or-less the third witch in Granny and Nanny’s trio, though she doesn’t appear to be officially being taught or apprenticed by either of them. She has however taken over the cottage in Mad Groat which once belonged to Magrat and Magrat’s mentor, the research witch Goody Whimper.
  • Tiffany’s “see me” trick is described in Chapter 1 like this: “It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of ghost body that could walk around.”
  • On “hiver” being a reference to acne or pimples, the closest word is probably “hives” – itchy, swollen and often red areas of skin, usually caused by an allergic reaction. They can indeed sometimes resemble acne, though they’re not often mistaken for each other.
  • Liz makes a reference to the horror film It Follows (2014, dir. David Robert Mitchell), in which college student Jaime (Maika Monroe) is pursued by a supernatural creature which wants to kill her – a curse passed on to her by a boy she sleeps with. A key unnerving thing about the creature is that it can appear as any person, but only the victim of the curse can see it.
  • Queen Elizabeth first met Prince Philip in 1939, when she was 13 and he was 18. They were engaged in 1947, at ages 21 and 26.
  • The Uffington White Horse, briefly mentioned by Pratchett in his author’s note, is the oldest such “hill figure” in Britain, dated as being around 2,500 to 3,300 years old. Though called a horse for around 1,000 years (the oldest written history of any hill figure in the UK), there’s some debate over whether it was originally meant to be a horse. It’s made of crushed chalk, laid in trenches dug into the hill, and needs to be regularly maintained or it becomes difficult to see. The Uffington White Horse inspired many other similar horse figures around the UK, though the others are all much newer; the oldest is the Westbury White Horse in Pratchett’s home county of Wiltshire, which can’t be reliably traced back before the late 18th century.
  • The “beetle” in Disney’s Mulan (1998, dir. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook) is actually a lucky cricket named Cri-Kee, bought by Mulan’s grandmother to give her luck in her visit to see a Matchmaker. After that goes horribly, she tries to release him, but he sticks around, becoming a sidekick to her family’s guardian spirit, the dragon Mushu. You’ll be pleased to know he doesn’t explode during the film, but survives to feature in the direct-to-video sequel. He doesn’t appear in the 2020 live-action remake, but an archer character named Cricket does appear as a reference to him.
  • Anne Geddes is an Australian photographer who rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s with her photographs of cherubic babies involving elaborate props and costumes. These were incredibly popular, and her photos sold millions of greeting cards, calendars and coffee table books. She lived in New Zealand for much of the height of her fame, and in 2004 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit by the Queen for services to photography, though she also has a history of philanthropy. Since 2015, though, she’s made much less work – with social media all but killing the calendar and greeting card market, like many artists Geddes has turned to Patreon to continue making a living.
  • Mr Sheen is the tiny, bald-headed and bespectacled mascot of the Mr Sheen household cleaner, invented in Australia in the 1950s. It was the first aerosol-based cleaner to be sold in Australia, and continues to be popular in Australia and several other countries. His theme song was quite memorable, too, and remained largely unchanged for decades.
  • Black Books is a British sitcom created by and starring Irish comedian Dylan Moran. Moran plays Bernard Black, a misanthropic, drunk bookshop owner, who in the first episode hires an optimistic and naive assistant, Manny (played by one of Ben’s all-time favourite comedians, Bill Bailey). Together with their friend Fran (Tamsin Greig) they have various misadventures. The show won wide following and ran for three series between 2000 and 2004, broadcast on Channel 4. In the third episode, “Grapes of Wrath”, Kevin Eldon plays a distinctly creepy Cleaner hired by Manny to tidy up the shop. This YouTube clip of his first appearance will give you the idea…
  • The “hive mind of mushrooms” Liz mentions is known as a Mycorrhizal network. Some species of fungus grow large structures underground, connecting to other forms of plant life, transferring nutrients and water and possibly information of a sort between trees, leading to the nickname the “Wood Wide Web”. See this Science article from 2019 for more.
  • On Roundworld the Doctrine of Signatures dates back to ancient Greek and Roman physicians, but was popularised in the 15th to 17th centuries, especially via Jakob Böhme in his book The Signature of All Things. It’s perhaps most obvious in the common names of many (supposedly) medicinal plants, including eyebright, lungwort and birthwort (thought to resemble the uterus, and unfortunately a carcinogen). Modern thinking suggests that those medicines that do work were probably attributed a physical similarity after the fact. In any case you have to squint pretty hard to see the doctrine at work…
  • We’ve previously talked about shape-changing teenagers the Animorphs and their foes, the parasitic alien Yeerks, in #Pratchat19, #Pratchat25 and #Pratchat35. They are the stars of several related series of books written for teens by K. A. Applegate (a psuedonym for Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant),and published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001.
  • The Body Keeps the Score is an influential 2015 book written by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, about the causes and possible treatments for trauma.
  • The “Cloak of Billowing” appears in the 2017 sourcebook Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Its only magical ability is to “billow dramatically” on command.
  • Tree of Life is an Australian chain of “boho fashion” stores cultivating a “carefree hippie ethos”. It began in the early 90s in Balmain, Sydney, and was started by John and Wendy Borthwick, followers of the Indian spiritual leader, Meher Baba. ISHKA is a similar store started by Michael Sklovsky in Melbourne in the early 1970s, initially selling both Michael’s own craft as well as items sourced from overseas. Both sell a variety of clothing, knick-knacks and accessories made in India, Nepal, Thailand and other countries in the Middle East and Asia. While both brands have statements on their websites outlining a strong ethical stance, it’s unclear how they maintain this, and they do not seem to use any standard FairTrade practices (e.g. labelling goods with details of their supply chains).
  • Sigmund Freud believed that the reason we don’t remember our births is that it was too traumatic (and sexual, because, you know, Freud). But while that’s been debunked, it is definitely true that humans have “infantile amnesia” – an inability to remember facts and personal events from our first few years of life. We still don’t have a definitive explanation, but it does seem likely to be related to the enhanced rate of brain development that goes on at that time.
  • While the experience of phantom limbs – the sensation of feeling from a limb one no longer has – is common in amputees (even non-human ones), it’s not a “syndrome”. Ben is using the word incorrectly.
  • In Equal Rites (discussed in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“) a wizard passes on his staff to the eighth son of an eighth son…who is actually a daughter. The child, Esk, is sent to apprentice with Granny Weatherwax, who eventually realises that regardless of gender, wizard magic and witch magic are not the same. Granny takes Esk to Ankh-Morpork to convince the Unseen University to take on their first co-educational pupil. Nonetheless, Annagramma – and Mrs Earwig herself – are perhaps exhibiting some internalised misogyny when they say that witchcraft should be done in the wizard manner to be “proper”, since the two traditions are still largely split along gender lines. (This is a theme that will be revisited in later Tiffany books.)
  • We previously mentioned the Country Women’s Association (CWA) while discussing the short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
  • Ben is conflating two folk tales in his explanation of the third wish. The talking fish is from “The Fisherman and His (Greedy) Wife”, (catalogued in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 555), and importantly they don’t have a limited number of wishes, nor do they undo them with a final one; instead the fisherman is pushed to ask for grander and grander things until they go too far, and the wishes are undone with a crack of thunder and no explanation. The story with the sausage on the nose is “The Ridiculous Wishes” (ATU 705A), in which a poor woodcutter is given three wishes; his wife urges him to wait and think about the wishes, but while hungry that night he idly wishes for sausages. His wife is understandably upset, but when they argue he unthinkingly wishes the sausages were attached to her nose; in the end they must use the third wish to undo the second, leaving them only with the sausages.
  • While it’s clear that Granny has experience of the Black Desert, this book is the only time we see her actually go there. Her conversations with Death in Witches Abroad and Carpe Jugulum occur in the real world, and her metaphysical struggles in those books occur in the weird mirror dimension and inside her own mind.
  • Willow is a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas, written by Bob Dolman and directed by Ron Howard. It stars Warwick Davis as Willow Ulfgood, a farmer and aspiring sorcerer of the Nelwyn people. He and his family find a Daikini (i.e. human) child set adrift on a river, which unknown to them is part of a prophecy that will dethrone the evil sorcerer-queen Bavmorda (played by Jean Marsh). Along the way Willow and his friends recruits the Daikini mercenary Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and have various fantastic misadventures. While the film wasn’t a big box office success, it won a firm place in the heart of nerds everywhere. A television series returning to the world of the film is coming to Disney+ in 2022, with Davis reprising his role as Willow.
  • We previously explained the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen meme, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. It’s taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino), in which DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, points at a movie screen when he sees himself.
  • Yes, we goofed: Tiffany does not keep Granny’s old hat; she keeps the one she bought from Zakzak Stronginthearm, though it is also temporary. Granny shows her the new hat she is constructing to make the point that witch’s hats aren’t permanent.
  • The Secret of Monkey Island is the classic 1990 graphic adventure videogame created for LucasArts by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. A comedy (and one of Ben’s favourite games), the player takes on the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who wants to become a “mighty pirate” during the golden age of piracy. Pratchett was certainly playing videogames by this time and it was such an influential and popular game its hard to imagine he wouldn’t have played it. In the game, he meets the “Amazing, Adventurous, Acrobating, and Exceedingly Well-Known, Fabulous, Flying Fettucini Brothers”, Bill and Alfredo. While it’s clear some of their appearance is just an act, it’s not specified if they changed their names as Ben misremembers. In the 1992 sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, there’s also a reference to the “Linguini Brothers”.
  • The Monster Book of Monsters, a magical school textbook for third year Care of Magical Creatures students, first appears in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, published in 1999. That’s five years earlier than the LIBER IMMANIS MONSTRORUM in this book, though surely bonus points are awarded for the Latin.
  • The historical John Snow (1813 – 1858) was an English doctor who is famous for his work in epidemiology and anaesthesia. In a time before germ theory was accepted and understood in Europe, he was skeptical of the prevailing “miasma theory”, and as well as disabling a pump to prevent further cholera infections, also mapped cases to help determine how they were spreading. His work was influential enough to inspire the John Snow Society, who hold an annual “Pumphandle Lecture” at which a pump handle is symbolically removed and replaced. His work also influenced the design and use of public drinking fountains, and you can hear more about that in episode 188 of the podcast 99% Invisible, “Fountain Drinks“.
  • Modern vaccines use a variety of methods to create an active agent which appears to the body to be a specific virus or bacteria. This allows the body to develop an effective immune response to the real thing, without having to actually contract the disease. The precursor to vaccination was variolation, which goes back at least 1,000 years when it was first used in China. This is deliberate infection with a small dose of the actual disease, originally smallpox, with hope of achieving immunity after a mild illness, and it was used up until the 18th century. Modern vaccine agents do not use a live sample of the actual disease, but instead an agent created in a number of ways. These methods include material from dead or irradiated pathogens (known as “ghosts”), modified or naturally occurring viruses which are very similar to the dangerous one but do not harm the host (as in the case of cowpox being used to in smallpox vaccines), or most recently RNA vaccines, which use messenger RNA to more directly help the body create appropriate proteins that can act as antibodies.
  • Wittgenstein’s Ladder was described by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein () in 1921. In his own words (or at least, in an English translation of his own words): “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”
  • You can see Prince Philip’s self-designed Land Rover hearse in this BBC article.
  • You probably already know we love The Mummy, the 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser as adventurer Rick O’Connell, and – most relevant to this discussion – Rachel Weisz as librarian and historian Evie Carnahan. We’ve previous talked about it in #Pratchat11, #Pratchat19, #PratchatNA7, #Pratchat21, #Pratchat23, #Pratchat36 and #Pratchat42. And yes, we are seriously considering a short spin-off series of podcasts discussing those films.
  • On the subject of Esk being based on Rhianna Pratchett, less than a week after this episode was released, Rhianna Pratchett replied to a tweet asking what her Dad’s favourite of his books was, and for her own favourite. She replied that the witches and Tiffany books were among her faves, as was Nation (Terry’s own choice), and further that Equal Rites was the first of his books that she read – probably why it was dedicated to her! She confirmed that Esk is based (in part) on her in reply to a follow up tweet, in which she said that there was “more than a little” of her in the character… We’ve included the relevant tweets below.

#Pratchat4 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 4, “Enter Three Wytches“, featuring guest Ell Squires (aka Clara Cupcakes) discussing the 1988 Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters.

  • Footrot Flats is as much remembered for the 1986 animated movie Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tail Tale, which was a box office smash in New Zealand and Australia and gave the world Dave Dobbyn’s number one hit single “Slice of Heaven”.
  • Alice in The Vicar of Dibley was portrayed by Emma Chambers, also known for her role as Honey in Notting Hill. Sadly, Emma died at the age of 53 only a couple of weeks after this episode was released, on February 21st 2018.
  • Maggie Smith famously played Hogwarts professor Minerva McGonagall in all eight Harry Potter films, while Tilda Swinton was the villainous White Witch in three films based on C S Lewis’ Narnia books. Anjelica Huston played the Grand High Witch in 1990’s film version of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Miriam Margoyles is also a Hogwarts alumnus, playing Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the Potter films.
  • Willow meets the disappointingly non-magical “Daughters of Gaea” in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” – previously mentioned in our second episode!
  • While we couldn’t confirm the existence of a town named Fuck, there are places in the UK named Marsh Gibbon, Lickfold, Great Snoring, Crapstone and Shitterton. There is a town named Fucking in Lower Austria; their street signs were stolen so often by English-speaking tourists they had to start bolting them down.
  • “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All”, usually referred to as “The Hedgehog Song“, is the infamous folk song sung by Nanny Ogg whenever she’s had a few. Wyrd Sisters is the first time it is mentioned.
  • For those playing at home, the name of the demon summoned in Nanny Ogg’s wash basin is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz. The Superman character Ben mentions is Mister Mxyzptlk, an “imp from the fifth dimension”. Ben did not pronounce his name correctly either.
  • The woman who gives Poirot his pin in the television series is Mme. Vergine Mesnard, who appears in only one Poirot case, set at a very early point in his career, when he was still a policeman in Belgium. She does not give him a pin in the original short story.
  • If you’re interested in the story behind Dutton’s remarks about African gangs, here’s a good article from The Big Smoke Australia. (“The Big Smoke” is Australian slang for city.)
  • Our musings about the Librarian disagree with fan consensus, which is that his status as a member of the Unseen University faculty means he must be a wizard (and, quite possibly, the Wizard Formerly Known As Horace Worblehat). We’re sticking with our assessment for now, but we may revisit this in future episodes.
  • You can hear examples of the “real Shakespearean accent“, known as the Original Pronunciation (OP), in this video from the Open University featuring father and son duo David and Ben Crystal.
  • History records that Rasputin survived being poisoned and shot, but was then shot again before his body was dumped in the river. He didn’t get out. (Anastasia trumps history, of course.)

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat23 Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 32, “Meet the Feegles“, featuring guest Meaghan Dew, discussing the 2003 Discworld novel The Wee Free Men.

  • The episode title puns Meet the Feebles, an early film from the career of Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. It is an extremely inappropriate parody of the Muppets in which animal puppet characters engage in fightin’, thievin’, drinkin’ and many other things that even a Mac Nac Feegle might thing twice about… You’ve been warned!
  • Aimee Nichols was our other librarian guest; she joined us for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
  • The weird time contraption in Doctor Who is the “time flow analog”, which was indeed featured in the television series; the Third Doctor built one to disrupt the time experiments of the Master in the 1971 serial The Time Monster.
  • A Rube Goldberg Machine is a device which is far too complicated for its simple function; traditionally they involve a lot of balls, levers, ramps and so on. It is named for Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970), a cartoonist and engineer who drew cartoons of contraptions that gave rise to the name. By contrast, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (aka “The Notorious R.B.G.”) is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, well known as an outspoken liberal voice on the court. (That’s liberal with a small l, for Australian readers.)
  • Trout tickling is indeed a real and very old method for catching trout, often associated with poachers and the poor, as it’s quiet and requires no equipment. Basically if you rub a trout lightly with your fingers on its underbelly it becomes docile, and you can fairly easily pull it out of the water. In Scotland the practice is known as “guddling”, though it is apparently illegal in the UK. (Thanks to listener Vlad, who let us know of a similar practice in the US for catching catfish known as “noodling”!)
  • Ben discussed Animal Crossing – specifically the latest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch – in episode 30, “Looking Widdershins”.
  • The Wentworth Detention Centre is an entirely fictional women’s prison located in the equally fictional Melbourne suburb of Wentworth. It was created by Reg Watson for his surprise hit Australian television show Prisoner – known in the UK as Prisoner: Cell Block H – which ran on Channel Ten from 1979 to 1986. A modern reimagining, titled Wentworth, premiered on the pay TV channel SoHo in 2012 and has proved equally popular, with more series planned into 2021. Both versions explore political themes including feminism, LGBTIAQ+ rights and the efficacy of prisons.
  • Susurrus is pronounced “SUSS-ur-us”, so Ben was pretty much right. It’s a straight up loan word from Latin. Terry’s piece about it for The Word, a promotional collection for the 2000 London’s Festival of Literature, was reprinted as “The Choice Word” in A Slip of the Keyboard, the 2014 collection of his non-fiction writing.
  • “The Tinderbox” is a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, apparently inspired by a Scandanavian folk tale, though it’s a bit like the start of versions of Aladdin that include the magic ring. If you want to find other similar stories, check out the Aarne-Thompson tale index; “The Tinderbox” is type 562, “The Spirit in the Blue Light”.
  • Aldi is a German budget supermarket chain now found in many countries across the world. They are famous for two things: mainly selling their own products, which are imitations of more famous brands like “Bran & Sultanas” cereal, “Cheezy Twists” snacks, and “Hedanol” paracetamol; and for the “Aisle of Wonder” (not a name they use), which features their weekly collection of “Special Buys” which can include anything from inflatable beds to fire extinguishers and Blu-Ray players.
  • We’ve not found any historical accounts of itinerant teachers roaming the countryside and gathering in fairs like the one depicted in the book, so as far as we can tell it’s an invention of Terry’s – probably drawing on other traditions of itinerant workers. If you know differently, please get in touch!
  • “Neville would have got it done in four books” is now such a ubiquitous meme that it’s hard to find its origin, but to summarise: Neville Longbottom is a minor wizard character who goes to Hogwarts with Harry Potter, and often the butt of jokes about his incompetence. Then you find out his tragic backstory and in the final novel he rises up as a hero. All this combined with the actor who played him in the films growing up much more handsome and buff than anyone could have expected, winning both a huge number of devoted fans.
  • We mentioned Pratchett’s opinion of J K Rowling back in #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. You can read about it in this interview from The Age: “Mystery lord of the Discworld”, by Peter Fray from November 6, 2004.
  • Carpe Jugulum introduces the Nac Mac Feegle in its first few pages, though they are not named until much later. (We’ll link our episode covering that book when we get up to it.)
  • “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is, as described by Terry in his author’s note, a painting by English artist Richard Dadd completed in 1864 while he was incarcerated in the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam. (See our episode on Dodger, “A Load of Old Tosh”, for more on that place.) As Terry points out, it’s unfair to reduce Dadd’s life to the fact that he painted this and killed his own father, so we’d encourage you to read more about him. You can also listen to episode 65 of Dr Janina Ramirez’s Art Detective podcast, featuring guest Neil Gaiman, as they talk about the painting – thanks listener Amy Keller Kaufman for the suggestion! The painting talk starts at around the 20 minute mark, and while this book only gets a passing mention, Neil does talk about Terry and their shared love of the painting, and shares a touching story about one of the last times they spoke.
  • The Queen song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is featured on Queen II, which you have probably correctly guessed is the band’s second studio album. Freddie Mercury was inspired by the painting, and while we can’t be sure if Terry discovered the artwork via Queen, Neil Gaiman certainly did, though he says the album sleeve reproduction made no impression on him – it only struck him when he saw the original. (See the Art Detective episode linked above for more on that.)
  • As mentioned in our Good Omens episode, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”, in that novel Pratchett and Gaiman claim that any album left in a car’s glove box will transform over time into Queen’s Greatest Hits.
  • The Headless Horseman is nowadays best known from the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, written by American author Washington Irving. Many older versions of such characters exist, including the Irish fairy known as the dúlachán, a Scottish ghost (whose horse, Liz will be glad to hear, is also said to be headless), and the Green Knight who cuts off his own head in the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Irving story has been animated by Disney and made into the film Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton.
  • In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and its 1972 film adaptation, one of the most infamous scenes has movie producer Jack Woltz waking up covered in blood from the severed head of his prize-winning racehorse – left in his bed as a message from the Corleone crime family that he should do what they ask and make the Godson of the family’s Don the star of his next film. Horrifyingly they used a real horse’s head for the film, sourced from a slaughterhouse.
  • The Star Wars Anthology films are movies in the Star Wars franchise which are not part of the main “Skywalker Saga”. So far they include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story, both closely connected to the original 1977 film Star Wars.
  • Braveheart is the 1995 film depicting the life of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace, directed by and starring Mel Gibson. Despite being written by a Wallace – unrelated American Randall Wallace – the film has been heavily criticised for its historical inaccuracies, and especially its treatment of Scottish king Robert the Bruce. A spin-off sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019. The original’s most famous scene is of Wallace rousing Scottish warriors before a battle, in which he shouts “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” This is echoed by the Feegles’ “They can tak’ oour lives but they cannae tak’ oour trousers!” – which might explain why the Feegles don’t have trousers.
  • The Wee Free Church, or “Wee Frees”, was the nickname of the smaller Free Kirk branch of the Scottish Prebyterian Church, distinguishing it from the much larger United Free Kirk branch. (“Kirk” is the Scottish word for church.) It came about in protest against the 1900 union of the original Free Kirk church with the United Presbyterian Church, which was much more liberal. Like a lot of church history it’s intertwined with politics, but the term “Wee Free” has stuck around and is still used to refer to various smaller denominations of Scottish churches. The modern ancestor of the Wee Free is the Free Church of Scotland, now one of the larger Presbyterian churches in the country. Pratchett denies any connection between the Feegles and the Wee Free, but then he also likes to remind us all that there’s no Scotland on the Discworld either…
  • Woad is a natural blue dye made from the leaves of the plant Isatis tinctoria, also commonly known as woad. It’s been known since Ancient Egyptian times, and the Romans noted that celts would paint their bodies blue. The term “pict”, for the ancient peoples of northern and eastern Scotland, comes from this practice, and that of tattooing; in Latin it means “painted ones”.
  • The really mediocre Keira Knightley movie to which Liz is referring is probably Princess of Thieves, a 2001 Disney telemovie in which Knightley plays the daughter of Robin Hood. 
  • Zebras do indeed have black skin, with the stripes caused by selective pigmentation of their fur. There are many reasons posited for the stripes’ evolutionary benefit; a 2014 study showed that flies have a hard time landing on and biting stripey zebras, perhaps confused by the high contrast or an optical illusion. There are many other competing ideas, and indeed many of them may be correct.
  • Yan Tan Tethera counting systems come from Northern England, and are derived from an early Celtic language, similar to Welsh. There are many variations, most of which fell out of use a century ago; “yan tan tethera” most closely matches the ones found in the Derbyshire Dales and Lincolnshire. Neither of those use “jiggit”, though it – or some variation of it – is indeed the number 20 in most versions.
  • The Kelda refers to herself as a queen bee as an analogy, but while she has hundreds of sons who form her army and workforce, it’s worth remembering that in a beehive, all the workers and warriors are also female bees. The only males are drones, whose primary (if not quite only) purpose is to fertilise the queen.
  • The idea of the “perception filter” – a device or effect that causes people to see something unusual as something they can more readily accept – is an explanation from the revived Doctor Who series to explain why no-one seems to notice the TARDIS, even though a 1960s London police box is hardly inconspicuous. It’s also used to explain other things in the series, including the entrance to Torchwood HQ in Cardiff. The Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field is a similar concept introduced by Douglas Adams in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, 1982’s Life, the Universe and Everything; it does what it says on the tin.
  • William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902) was likely born in Ireland, moving to Scotland with his family and later pretending to have always been Scottish. He wrote his first poem in 1877, claiming a moment of firey inspiration to create, and was consistently deluded about his own talent. He would perform his poems in a variety of contexts, including polemics against drinking read in pubs, and reading his poetry as a circus act in which the crowd were allowed to throw eggs and food at him. His poems were collected in Poetic Gems and several sequels, published with assistance from friends to help him out of financial difficulties. But while he had an extraordinary life it ended quite sadly, as he died penniless and ill. We’d encourage you to read about him – if not his actual poetry.
  • The story of the bird wearing down a mountain with its beak is an old, old one, but modern versions are mostly descended from Grim’s Household Tales Volume 2, specifically the very short story “The Shepherd Boy”. The boy is posed three seemingly impossible questions by a King, and answers the third one – “How many seconds are in eternity?” – with: “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.” This story is recalled by the Doctor in the ninth season of the modern series, in the critically- and Ben-acclaimed episode “Heaven Sent”. 
  • In the legend of the Titan Prometheus, he is punished for stealing the secret of fire and giving it to humanity by being chained to a stone, and every day having an eagle tear out and eat his liver. Being an immortal, Prometheus’ liver grows back overnight and the torture is repeated. He is eventually freed from his torment by Heracles.
  • In C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four children find their way to the magical land of Narnia, which has been under the rule of the White Witch for centuries – resulting in an endless Winter where Christmas never comes. She famously tempts one of the children, Edmund, with his favourite sweet, Turkish delight. The Witch’s backstory is revealed in the later prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew.
  • Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception is about a group of professional thieves who steal information by entering the subconscious of their targets. In the film, they are tasked to do the opposite – to “incept” an idea into someone’s subconscious – and they go several “layers” deep in dreams within dreams.
  • Roland is, of course, the Baron’s lost son – there’s no Duke of the Chalk! Pratchett denies the name Roland has anything to do with the fairytale Childe Rowland, which dates back to at least 1814. The story includes many tropes common to legends of Elfland, including a kidnapped younger sibling, chopping off the heads of fairies, and not eating fairy food lest you be trapped in their world forever.
  • “Ohnoetry” is a popular term for terrible poetry; it’s impossible to track its origin, as it likely has many more than one. The cartoon Liz refers to might be this one from “Toothpaste for Dinner?”
  • The “Marshmallow Test” is a famous psychological experiment devised by American Walter Mischel in the 1960s. A 4-year-old child is given a marshmallow (or other favourite lolly) and told that they can eat it now, but if they wait for 5 minutes without eating it, they’ll get another one and can eat both. It’s been replicated by hundreds of parents on YouTube, none of whom had to deal with ethics committees. It supposedly showed that children who could delay gratification did much better in life, but the findings were questioned and – as is so often the case with psychological experiments – the situation is likely much more complex. The 2014 “Let Them Eat Marshmallows” episode of The Indicator podcast does a great job of summarising the updated findings.
  • Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple is an elderly amateur sleuth from the village of St Mary Meade. The 1932 short story collection The Thirteen Problems includes her first ever appearance, “The Tuesday Night Club”.
  • The 1997 John Woo film Face/Off stars John Travolta  and Nicholas Cage as an FBI agent and a terrorist who swap faces using experimental transplant technology. It’s about as terrible/great as that makes it sound.
  • A “tidal wave” is any wave that’s created by tidal forces – the gravitational effect of the Moon on sea level. A tsunami is a wave created by a seismic disturbance, usually an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and mostly occur out to sea. It’s true that the water recedes from the shore before a tsunami hits – this is known as “drawback” – but it usually only happens very shortly before the wave hits.
  • “Super Opera Man” was our tongue-in-cheek description of Walter Plinge in his guise as the Opera Ghost in our discussion of Maskerade, in the episode “The Music of the Nitt”.
  • There is a millennia-long history of the “Scotch Irish”, Scottish peoples who migrated to Ireland. The Ulster Scots are a particular group of Presbyterians who migrated to escape religious persecution. As a result there are many Irish families with Scottish surnames (like, say, “McKenzie”) and who thus have tartans and can trace their history back through both countries.
  • The most famous type of bagpipes are the Great Highland bagpipes seen in military bands in many English-speaking countries. Bagpipes are found in various forms across the world, however, and may have been around for as long as three thousand years. The most common kind of Irish bagpipes are called the “Uilleann” pipes, and are distinguished by an elbow-operated bellows used to inflate the bag, and a chanter – the pipe fingered by the player – with an unusually broad range.
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster occurred on December 28, 1879. A severe storm hit the rail bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between Dundee and Fife, just as a train was crossing; the bridge collapsed and the train fell into the Firth, killing all 70 passengers and crew aboard.
  • There’s no shortage of comedy Irish folk songs, usually about a disaster or some other gruesome subject. Ben’s favourites include Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad”, The Scared Weird Little Guys’ “Miners”, and – from the film A Mighty Wind – The Folksmen’s “Blood on the Coal”, which combines a train crash with a mining disaster.
  • William McGonagall was most famously lampooned by British radio comedy group The Goons, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers both playing the character “McGoonagall” in The Goon Show. The Monty Python sketch Ben mentioned is “The Poet McTeagle”, from the sixteenth episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
  • Vogons appear in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a species of horrible officious bureaucrats tasked with demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. One of the most famous entries from the Guide specifies that Vogons are the third-worst poets in the Universe, behind the Azgoths of Kria and “Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings” of Greenbridge, Essex. (This was an alteration from earlier versions which named real poet and friend of Adams, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, as the worst poet in the Universe. He requested his name be disguised.)
  • Liz remembers correctly that in traditional Chinese massage, it is said that the ears are the sensory organ related to the kidneys. Several sources recommend massaging the ears to promote good kidney health, while the kidneys themselves store “pre-natal Qi” inherited from your parents. So now you know! 
  • New Zealand-Canadian actor Anna Paquin was just eleven years old when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1993 for her role as Flora in Jane Campion’s film The Piano.
  • In Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wildling who really likes Brienne of Tarth is Tormund Giantsbane, played by Norwegian actor Kristofer Hivju. He might not be Scottish, but he is the very image of a human-sized Feegle.
  • “Crivens” is an archaic exclamation that comes from Scots, where it was originally spelt “crivvens”. It’s derived from the earlier “criffens”, which like many archaic swearwords was a form of blasphemy; it’s supposedly a contraction of “Christ fend us”. In terms of how strenuous a swear it is, think of it much like other stand-in terms for “Christ”, including “cripes” and “crikey” – i.e. not very, except perhaps to the strictest conservative Christians. It hasn’t entirely vanished from use, but is mostly used for mock surprise; it is sometimes survived via the phrase “well jings crivens and help ma boab” (approximately, “Jesus Christ, help my Robert!”), which was popularised in books and comic strips in the 1920s and 30s.
  • Red hair in humans is influenced by genes on chromosomes 4 and 16. The more prominent gene is MC1R on chromosome 16; red hair is caused by one of a number of recessive alleles (an allele is one of the possible variations of a specific gene) – i.e. a person needs to have two copies of it for it to express itself. Ben mentions partial or incomplete dominance, which is where a gene will express partly even if a dominant allele is also present. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the most prominent red hair gene, but might be explained by other alleles on chromosome 4. As is usual with biology, it’s not as simple as you might think.
  • Fraggle Rock is Jim Henson’s 1983 Muppet series for children about the Fraggles, small furry creatures that love radishes and live below the human world in a huge cave complex from which the series takes its name. The young Fraggle protagonists deal with a variety of social, emotional and philosophical issues, and occasionally travelled to “Outer Space” – the world above Fraggle Rock, populated by “Silly Creatures” (humans). Fraggle Rock was also home to the Doozers – tiny green humanoids who spent all their time making constructions out of “doozer sticks”, which the Fraggles would eat, forcing the Doozers to rebuild. There was also a third world, the Land of the Gorgs, enormous creatures who consider themselves rulers of the Universe; they have a large radish garden, and also a sentient Trash Heap who the Fraggles often visited for advice. A reboot is apparently coming soon from Apple TV+.
  • He-Man is the absurdly hyper-masculine protagonist (in name at least) of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a 1983 sword and sorcery cartoon series with science fiction elements based on a toy line created by Mattel. He often rode into battle on his giant green tiger-like companion, Battle Cat. Both gain their magical strength after being transformed by He-Man’s magic sword, and until then have alter egos – the feckless Prince Adam, and cowardly Cringer.
  • Tartans – cloth woven in distinctive patterns of criss-crossing colours – were originally associated with places, much like other patterns (Argyle, for example). The idea of clan tartans came into vogue during a visit to Scotland by King George IV, thanks mostly to Walter Scott. They’ve since become quite a fad, and it’s possible to request your own family tartan and have it officially recorded. The podcast 99% Invisible have a mini-series about fashion, Articles of Interest, and the episode “Plaid” (which is not synonymous with tartan, by the way) has a great summary of the history of tartan. In any case, Ben’s objection to the multi-tartan wearing Feegles doesn’t have much historical backing, though as they’re all from the same place you’d still expect a bit more uniformity.
  • The Narrativia web site now only lists the exclusive deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content for screen adaptations. It’s unclear what this means, if anything, for the films that were in production, namely the Henson adaptation of The Wee Free Men and the animated version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
  • The association between certain sounds and physical shapes is the “Bouba/kiki effect”. The excellent puzzle videogame Baba Is You, in which you manipulate the rules of the game world in order to progress, is named for this effect.
  • Ben still can’t find the earlier Pratchett book which talked about “gl” words and the equivalent of visual onomatopoeia; it’s not The Colour of Magic, Sourcery!, Moving Pictures or Soul Music. If you know which one it is, please let us know!
  • Magrat’s mentor was the research witch Goodie Whemper, based in the Lancre town of Mad Stoat.
  • We covered all three books in the Bromeliad trilogy in the previous episodes “Upscalator to Heaven”, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and “The Thing Beneath My Wings”. 
  • By Young Sam, Ben means Sam Vimes Jr, not Sam Vimes Sr when he was younger, as in Night Watch.
  • The other Pratchett books for younger readers that Ben hasn’t read yet are Nation, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (though we’re covering this next episode), and the rest of the books in the Tiffany Aching series: A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • Listener Bethany wondered on Twitter if “Fairy Nettle” was one of the aliases used by the witches in Witches Abroad, but while they did claim to be “flower fairies”, Magrat called herself “Fairy Tulip” and Granny “Fairy Daisy”, while Nanny called herself “Fairy Hedgehog”.
  • We didn’t end up talking about this in the episode, but Ben had a question he felt wasn’t answered clearly in the book: is the Queen of Fairyland the Queen of the Elves we met in Lords and Ladies? They have many similarities, including missing husbands, but she has no other elves, only smaller fairies. What do you think? 
  • In Harry Potter, the Grindylow is depicted as a small green squid-like creature with a more humanoid face, small horns and two arms ending in tentacled fingers, though the prose descriptions note that their physical forms can vary considerably. They are featured most prominently in the third and fourth books.
  • Drop Bears are mythical very real and dangerous Australian creatures. Their Discworld equivalent appears in The Last Continent, as discussed in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • Eisteddfods in Australia are traditional performance competitions with common sections or events including poetry recital, public speaking, dramatic performance and readings of various kinds. Their origins lie in Wales. (We’ve previously mentioned them on the podcast in a footnote; we’ll add a link to that episode when we remember which one it is!)
  • Kasabian are an English rock band, formed in 1997. Bien is French for “good”.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons reference web site Ben refers to D&D Beyond.
  • You can find the Kill Your Darlings podcast here. The magazine takes its name from the advice given to writers: you must be prepared to give up your favourite ideas – to “kill your darlings” – when they don’t work.