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Matt Roden

#Pratchat61 – What Terry Wrote

5 December 2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Designer and educator Matt Roden delves deep under Ankh-Morpork with Liz and Ben as they unravel the mystery of the penultimate City Watch book, 2005’s Thud!.

As the anniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley approaches, the dwarfs and trolls of Ankh-Morpork find their ancient enmity stirred up – not least by Hamcrusher, a conservative leader of the “Deep Down” dwarfs, who has preached hatred against the trolls. But now Hamcrusher’s dead – not that the other deep downers want the Watch to know about it – and Vimes must solve the puzzle of his murder before tensions explode across the city. On top of that, he’s also been sent a government inspector, he’s had to take on the Watch’s first vampire, someone’s stolen the most talked-about painting in town – and he has to get home at 6 o’clock sharp, every night, to read Where’s My Cow? to his infant son…

While most Watch books have a mystery that needs solving, none so far have felt as much like a contemporary thriller as Thud! There’s an awful lot going on, with politics, religion, art and history all in the mix. Is it too much for one book? Are there threads that get dropped along the way? Is Pratchett having his cake and eating it too with his fantasy abstractions of real world issues? And who do you think should star in Discworld legal drama The Good Dwarf? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat61 on social media!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_61.mp3

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Guest Matt Roden is a graphic designer, educator and the Creative Learning Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Matt has a long history with storytelling and education; he helped set up The Ministry of Stories in London, and was the first volunteer and a long-running Storyteller with Sydney’s Story Factory. You can follow Matt on Instagram (where you can see photos of his dog) at @matthewrodeo.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We apologise that this episode has gone out much later than planned. While our schedule has gotten a little out of whack, we’ll still be continuing our “Thud! trilogy” next episode with our special crossover with sibling Pratchett podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret. We’ll be joined by Jo and Francine to discuss Where’s My Cow?, the hottest children’s book in Ankh-Morpork! Plus we have plans to extend our Thud! trilogy to four parts – details coming in our very next episode.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Angua, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Colon, Detritus, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Nobby, The Watch, Trolls, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat63 – Decline by Committee

8 January 2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

In this final fourth part of our Thud! trilogy, Liz and Ben are rejoined by designer and educator Matt Roden. As we wait for the biscuits to arrive, we turn our attention to this month’s agenda items: the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, and squeezing in a bit more discussion of Thud!

Every Thursday the senior faculty of Unseen University have a committee meeting, during which they do very little except wait for the biscuits and tea to arrive – much to the annoyance of Ponder Stibbons. But this week, Ridcully announces that their latest magical mishap has annoyed the Patrician – and as a result, they have a few questions to answer from one A. E. Pessimal, newly appointed “Inspector of Universities”...

Written for the Times Higher Education Supplement and published a few months before Thud!, this very short story draws on Pratchett’s own experience on a committee. Does it tally with yours? Are you a Ponder, a Ridcully, or a Pessimal? Do you agree with Matt’s characterisations of the other faculty members? Plus we get back into Thud! – are we off the mark with our thoughts about whether it’s copaganda? What is Pratchett trying to say about religious extremism, if anything? And what Discworld cocktail would you make? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat63.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_63.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59:22 — 55.1MB)

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Guest Matt Roden was here just two months ago for #Pratchat61 discussing Thud! He is still the Creative Learning Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, as well as an accomplished graphic designer and educator. There are now even more photos of his dog on his Instagram at @matthewrodeo.

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

We’re easing into the year slowly with another short story for February, this time one of Pratchett’s earliest: “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor” from his time at the Bucks Free Press in 1974. Its available in both A Blink of the Screen and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner. Send us your questions about it using the hashtag #Pratchat64, or via email, which you can send to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the all-new Pratchat Reading Challenge for 2023! All the details are on our website, and you’ll also find it on the StoryGraph.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat65 Notes and Errata

8 March 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 65, “Let There Be Gaimans“, discussing several pieces from the “Scribbling Intruder” section of Pratchett’s 2014 nonfiction anthology, A Slip of the Keyboard, with special guest Peter M Ball.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ve mentioned it before a few times, but here again is Michael Williams’ interview with Terry Pratchett from 2013, during his tour to promote Snuff, titled “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.” (It used to be available as an audio recording, but now it’s only available via YouTube.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is probably not Ben’s best work, but it was there…
  • GenreCon is a writing conference in Meanjin (aka Brisbane) specifically for genre writers that tries to cover as many genres as possible: science fiction, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and more. It just ran its eighth conference from 17-19 February 2023, with this year’s guests including friends of this podcast Garth Nix (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“) and Will Kostakis (#Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“).
  • The Queensland Writers Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation supporting local writers of all kinds. It was established in January 1990, and as well as GenreCon runs workshops and other events, and provides various services including consulting, mentorship and manuscript assessment and editing.
  • The Author is the quarterly journal of The Society of Authors, established in 1884, and is the UK’s union for writers, illustrators and literary translators – not just for authors any more! Terry was Chair of their Management Committee from 1994 to 1995, helping to shape their policy and strategy. His time in those meetings inspired the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, which we discussed in #Pratchat63. He was also elected as a member of the Society’s Council. Philip Pullman was President of the Society from 2013 until early 2022, when he resigned following some controversy around a memoir. The current Chair is Joanne Harris, best known for her novel Chocolat. Notably both Harris and Pullman were some of the more level-headed voices speaking up about the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy (see below), with Harris in favour of the changes, and Pullman advocating letting Dahl’s books fade away without being republished.
  • Ben is wrong about one thing in his FAQ footnote: the Pratchett newsgroups (see below) did have an FAQ! You can still find it at lspace.org here. We think this was the last version, updated in 2005; like the Annotated Pratchett File (also see below), it was maintained by Leo Breebaart, who also created the L-Space web.
  • We’ve previously talked about newsgroups in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat42, but for context: the Usenet system was created in 1980 as an Internet-based alternative to local Bulletin Board Systems. Setting standards that would later be used by web-based internet forums, they organised posts by users into conversation-like “threads” of messages, which were themselves organised into “newsgroups” under hierarchical categories, similar to (but distinct from) domain names. There were three newsgroups of primary interest to Pratchett fans: alt.books.pratchett for discussion of the books themselves; alt.fan.pratchett (the big one) for general fan chit-chat (though this often included the books); and alt.fan.pratchett.announce, a moderated group for announcements of signings and other events of interest to fans. Pratchett was active on the first two.
  • Peter says Pratchett started publishing Discworld in about ’88, but we suspect he meant that the Discworld really took off around then, with the publication of the fourth and fifth books, Sourcery and his first really big hit, Wyrd Sisters. The Colour of Magic was first published in November 1983.
  • Pratchett’s fifth and tenth books (including the three pre-Discworld ones) were The Light Fantastic in 1985, and Pyramids in 1989. The gap in between contained the first big growth spurts of the Internet, but to put them in perspective, Tim Berners Lee only created the first version of the World Wide Web in 1989, and the first widely available web browser, Mosaic, didn’t launch until 1993 – by which time Pratchett was onto his twenty-fourth book, Johnny and the Dead! If you wanted to chat to people on the internet, newsgroups and mailing lists were the go in the 1990s…
  • In Benjamin Partridge’s monthly comedy podcast, The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, Partridge plays the unnamed host of the fictional industry body’s podcast. Through mostly unscripted interviews with characters played by various guest actors and comedians, Partridge slowly builds up a bizarre alternate reality over many years. One of the recurring characters is disgraced “Bovine Poet Laureate” Michael Banyan (played by comedian Henry Paker), author of a book of cow poetry titled Crab of the Land, who often tells outrageous stories about partying with Jonathan Franzen.
  • ChatGPT is an “AI chatbot” created by the company OpenAI and publicly launched in a prototype state in November 2022. It’s capable of producing sophisticated text responses to prompts using the GPT 3 large language model previously created by OpenAI, and as a result has become hugely popular and controversial. It’s not actually intelligent; rather it uses statistical models based on a huge corpus of text (i.e. large parts of the internet up to 2021) to assemble sentences, poems or lines of code which are drawn from that corpus. We’ll probably talk about it some more in the next episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club.
  • Pratchett told alt.fan.pratchett he was leaving for the reasons outlined in “this piece”Wyrd Ideas” on the 3rd February 1999, after a user speculated about Sam and Sybil having children (he was writing The Fifth Elephant at the time). This was despite other users in the group (and possibly the version of the FAQ available at the time) asking people not to do this sort of thing. You can see his post here – and thanks to Jo and Francine of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, who saved Ben the trouble of searching for this by linking to it from their own episode notes! Pratchett didn’t leave newsgroups altogether; he continues to “lurk” (i.e. read without posting much) on alt.books.pratchett and other newsgroups (mostly about videogames) until around 2008.
  • We mention several famous writers who published their works in serial form, usually in magazines. But we could have mentioned many more! As well as French authors Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, there’s also Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson and many, many more.
  • Speaking of Alexandre Dumas, his surname is pronounced “Doo-ma”. He was indeed paid by the line by some of the newspapers who published his stories, though others paid him by episode, leading to very long books rather than very short dialogue. According to some accounts, his publishers eventually caught on to his writing style, and insisted that a line had to fill half a newspaper column to count, supposedly forcing him to kill off a monosyllabic character he’d invented to extend his dialogue. Charles Dickens, by contrast, is said to have written verbosely as he was paid by the word, but in fact he was paid for instalments which had a very specific page count (32 pages in some accounts). Like a first year arts student, he may have used more words to fill the pages faster…a style emulated by Pratchett in Dodger (discussed in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“).
  • Watch this space for a brief history of fanfic, but in the meantime you can check out Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) for yourself – and yes, there’s an extensive Discworld collection there!
  • The Nanny (not Nanny Ogg) was a hugely popular American sitcom which ran from 1993 to 1999 – coincidentally the period between “Kevins” and “Wyrd Ideas” – on the CBS network. It starred co-creator Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a down on her luck Jewish woman from Queens who tries selling makeup door-to-door. She’s hired by high class English Broadway producer and widower Maxwell Sheffield to be the new nanny to his three children, and the two have a will-they or won’t-they relationship aided by Sheffield’s butler Niles and opposed by Sheffield’s business partner C.C. Babcock.
  • You can find the second edition of the Turkey City Lexicon on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association website.
  • The Neil Gaiman Masterclass on “The Art of Storytelling” is offered as part of the Masterclass streaming video service, which features hundreds of tutorials from famous leaders in their fields covering everything from acting to philosphy, personal style and astronomy. The BBC has a similar series of videos, BBC Maestro, with a class on Storytelling hosted by Alan Moore.
  • Pratchett used the term “figgin” for the kind of joke Peter describes because he used the word for exactly that kind of joke in Guards! Guards! In that novel, figgin is used by the Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night in one of the order’s oaths, secure in the knowledge that none of his flock knows what it means. (In this instance Pratchett doesn’t make us wait until the very end to discover the truth for ourselves; it’s defined in a footnote. In fact he only uses the word eight times in the novel, and three of those are callbacks made after the footnote.)
  • To avoid confusion, Ben would like to explain that the “sherbert lemon” kind of joke is not an example of shelving, which is when a comedian mentions a concept seemingly in passing so that they can come back to it later in a new context once the audience has forgotten about it and helping the comedy work through surprising recognition. (There’s a reason explaining how comedy works is described as “dissecting the frog”.)
  • Pratchett is on record (in the APF, of course) that there’s no pun in Twoflower:
    “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”
  • Andrew Harman is the English author of eleven pun-filled comic fantasy novels, published between 1993 and 2000. Most of them are set in the medieval fantasy kingdom of Rhyngill and surrounds, and five, beginning with The Sorcerer’s Appendix and ending with One Hundred and One Damnations, form a loose series following the adventures of the peasant Firkin and his friends. Harman went on to find more creative success as a game designer, founding his own publisher, YAY Games, which specialises in “gateway games” – ones that work well for introducing new people to hobby boardgames.
  • Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s classic sitcom farce about long-suffering but obnoxious hotel manager Basil Fawlty, ran for two series in 1975 and 1979 on BBC Two. It is often cited amongst the greatest sitcoms ever made, though its characters and many of the episodes’ premises rely heavily on ethnic and gender stereotypes. The titular hotel is located in the resort town of Torquay in the coastal “English Rivieria” region of Devon. Cleese was inspired to create the setting and main character for the show after an experience with the manager of a real Torquay hotel where the Monty Python crew stayed while filming on location in 1971.
  • For some perspective on the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy, you could do worse than these pieces from The Conversation:
    • “Roald Dahl rewrites: rather than bowdlerising books on moral grounds we should help children to navigate history” by Michelle Smith
    • “Roald Dahl: A brief history of sensitivity edits to children’s literature” by Alison Baker
    • “From Roald Dahl to Goosebumps, revisions to children’s classics are really about copyright – a legal expert explains” by Cathay Smith

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat61 Notes and Errata

5 December 2022 by Ben 2 Comments

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 61, “What Terry Wrote“, discussing the 24th Discworld novel, 2005‘s Thud! with guest Matt Roden.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays with “What Tak wrote”, the creation myth of the dwarfs, as featured at the start of Thud!
  • For those interested, here’s the Pratchat intro script as it appears in our episode notes template. Ben updates it when creating the notes for a new episode, inserting the book’s title and the details for the guest.
LIZ: I’m Elizabeth Flux.
BEN: I’m Ben McKenzie.
LIZ: Welcome to Pratchat, the monthly Terry Pratchett book club podcast.
BEN: Each month we discuss one of Terry Pratchett’s books with a special guest.
LIZ: This month we’re reading Book Title, [pun/joke about the book].
BEN: And our [returning] guest is [descriptors], [guest name] - welcome [guest]!
  • 100 Story Building and Story Factory are not-for-profit creative writing centres for children and young people which run workshops centred around storytelling, literacy and writing, mostly in schools. Both were inspired in large part by 826 Valencia, a creative writing centre for established in San Francisco in 2002 by educator Ninive Caligari and novelist Dave Eggers (of McSweeney’s fame). Other similar organisations exist in many countries, including The Ministry of Stories in London (with which Matt was involved) and Fighting Words in Dublin.
  • A geode is a hollow, rounded sedimentary or igneous rock (and we’ll come back to that term) which has minerals on the inside of the hard outer shell. Those minerals often include crystals, like quartz or amethyst. Igneous geodes are often formed when there is a bubble of gas inside a flow of magma or lava. They’re very popular as jewellery and ornaments, and are often cut in half for display, with the flat edge of the shell polished to show off its formations too. They’re not to be confused with thunder eggs, which are similar but distinct spherical structures also formed in lava.
  • Octarine – the eighth colour, the colour of magic – is last definitely mentioned before Thud! in The Last Continent, back in 1998. (It might also be mentioned in The Last Hero, though this is harder to verify without re-reading the whole book.) It does get a passing mention in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch, but only in a non-fiction chapter.
  • Detritus and Cuddy, the Watch’s first troll and dwarf recruits, argue – and become fast friends – in Men at Arms. We discussed the book all the way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, and revisited in the live special #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
  • The “dwarf and the troll in the rock band together” are hornblower Glod Glodsson and percussionist Lias Bluestone who form a band with Imp y Celyn’s in Soul Music. We discussed the novel in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Rush Hour is a 1998 action comedy directed by Brett Ratner and starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as Detective Inspector Lee from Hong Kong and Detective James Carter of the LAPD. Lee is summoned to Los Angeles to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of his former boss, and Carter is assigned to “babysit” him as punishment, making him determined to solve the case. It was a big hit, spawning two sequels: Rush Hour 2 in 2001, which moved the action to Hong Kong, and Rush Hour 3 in 2007, which took both officers away from home to Paris. There have been rumours of a fourth film for years, and in this era of legacy sequels who knows – it could still happen.
  • The Wire is an American crime television series created for HBO by David Simon, an American author and former crime reporter. It’s set in the city of Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, and each season explores a different group connected to crime and law enforcement, though drug gangs and the police appear in all five seasons, which were first broadcast between 2002 and 2008. Season four, the one specifically mentioned by Matt, deals with the education system and the mayor’s office. The Wire notably stars Wendell Pierce as William “The Bunk” Moreland, a homicide detective who features in all five seasons; you might know him as the voice of Death in BBC America’s The Watch. (See #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.)
  • We’ll mention the earlier Watch novel, The Fifth Elephant, quite a few times this episode. It introduced the idea of the Deep Downers and is the origin of a lot of Discworld dwarf culture, previous books having mostly stuck to a parody of Tolkien’s dwarfs. It also announced the impending arrival of Young Sam We discussed it in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, back in February 2021.
  • Fizz, the political cartoonist for The Ankh-Morpork Times, is named for Phiz, the pen name of popular Huguenot illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882). His inclusion here (and in Monstrous Regiment) reflects that he contributed cartoons for the British satricial magazine Punch in very much the same style, but Browne was also known for illustrating novels and serialised stories in more reputable publications, most notably for Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which started with the pseudonym Nemo before changing it to Phiz. “Phiz”, by the way, is short for “Phizzog”, an English slang term for face which is derived from the word “physiognomy”, which means “a person’s facial features or expression”. (We’re not sure which came first, the cartoonist’s tag or the slang term, but its a fun word all the same.)
  • The Good Wife is a CBS legal drama set in Chicago, which ran for seven seasons between 2009 and 2016. It stars Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her State’s Attorney husband is jailed for corruption. It was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a spin-off starring Christine Baranski as her The Good Wife character Diane Lockhart, a senior lawyer at Florrick’s firm who has to start over at a new one after her daughter is scammed, resulting in financial disaster. It ran for six seasons between 2017 and 2022. We previously mentioned both shows in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. The Good Dwarf could deal with similar themes of what women are expected to give up for men, but adding in the unique species and gender angles of Discworld dwarfs. Don’t forget to tell us which characters you think should be in it!
  • Code-switching is originally a linguistic term for when a multi-lingual speaker changes between languages (or varieties of the same language) in the same conversation. This usage dates back to 1951 with the book Language of the Sierra Miwok by Lucy Shepard Freeland, when she notes it in the context of Californian First Nations people. Code-switching involves a great deal of mental energy as different languages have very different structures, idioms and modes of speech, and multilingual speakers often have to switch for their own needs as well those of the people they’re speaking to. The term has seen expanded use to mean switching between any two different modes of speaking (or thinking), especially when it comes to different levels of privilege, expected gender roles, and neurodiversity.
  • The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s smash hit novel from 2003 (two years before Thud!), the second to star Robert Langdon, a university professor who specialises in religious iconography and “symbology”. Langdon, who was introduced in Brown’s 2000 novel Angels & Demons, would appear in four more books. The Da Vinci Code‘s plot uses ideas from earlier writings about the Holy Grail and the Templars, and kicks off when professor is murdered to protect a secret about Christ which was uncovered by Leonardo da Vinci, who left clues in his paintings – most notably The Last Supper. It was controversial for its portrayal of the Catholic Church (who employ assassins in the book) and Christianity in general, as well as for its cavalier attitude to religion, history and art – Brown claimed in interviews that the background history he used for the book was “all” or “99%” true, including the existence of secret societies generally considered fictitious. In 2005, the same year as Thud!, Tony Robinson – comic actor, Discworld audiobook narrator and presenter of Time Team – produced The Real Da Vinci Code for Channel 4, in which he debunked many of the supposed historical facts mentioned in the book. This didn’t hamper the book’s immense popularity, though, and in 2006 it was adapted for film by Ron Howard, with a script by Akiva Goldman and starring Tom Hanks as Langdon. The film was followed by adaptations of Angels & Demons and the fourth Langdon novel, Inferno.
  • A cyclorama (not “cyclodrama” as Matt says, though we’re all for drama in the round) is the Roundworld equivalent of Ransom’s painting in the book: a panoramic painting intended to be displayed on the inside of a cylindrical platform, surrounding the viewer. The term is also used for the building or room designed to hold such a painting. They were apparently very popular in the late 19th century. These days “cyclorama” is more commonly used to refer to the all-white backdrops used on stages, or in photography studios, where they are curved to give the illusion of there being no background at all.
  • Mr Sheen is an Australian brand of cleaning products – specifically an aerosol-based surface polish – created in the 1950s. They were popular well into the 1990s, remembered for their mascot, a small Mr Magoo-like cartoon figure with a large shiny forehead and glasses, and his catchy advertising jingle. He found success in other markets, too, notably the UK, where the Australian mascot was replaced by a moustached flying ace who flew around the house on a can of the product. “Mr Shine” has also been used as a name by many cleaning companies and products, though none of them seem famous enough to be a direct reference.
  • The city of Dis appears in Inferno, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, where it encompasses Lower or Nether Hell – which are the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth circles, housing those souls whose sins were willing or “obdurate” (i.e. unrepentant) – in order, those of heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. The city’s outer walls are surrounded by the River Styx, which forms a moat. Its name is derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, which refers to the Underworld as “the realms of Dis”, and mentions its “mighty walls”. “Dis Pater”, Latin for “Father of Dis”, was also the ruler of the Underworld in Roman mythology.
  • The Gooseberry is most obviously a pun on the Blackberry, the early smartphone which was a little ahead of its time, but nonetheless popular with high-powered business folks in the 1990s and 2000s, before the advent of touch-screen smartphones with the iPhone and its competitors. It might also be a reference to UK slang, in which a “gooseberry” is like a “third wheel” – someone who feels a bit unnecessary or left out in company, usually a couple.
  • “Unrelenting standards” is a psychological term for internal pressure to perform well, manifesting as perfectionism, difficulty in gauging one’s own performance compared to what’s generally considered acceptable, a desire to avoid criticism or mistakes, and an obsession with productivity and efficiency. It’s often said to be a product of growing up being valued primarily for your achievements, or in an atmosphere of frequent criticism and little praise.
  • We’ve previously mentioned the Love Languages in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“. They originate in the 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, which was written by Gary Chapman, a Baptist pastor and radio host. The book was phenomenally successful, selling more than 11 million copies and spawning many sequels and imitators. Ben is not a fan because the idea is very reductive; psychologists and counsellors have criticised Chapman’s work for over-simplifying and homogenising human experiences of love and communication, even where they appreciate the metaphor and have tried to expand it. Other critics note that Chapman is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, and based his book on his experience with a fairly narrow sample of his parishioners. He also rejects any expansion of the idea. perhaps because its made him a great deal of money… For the record, his original five love languages are “Acts of Service”, “Words of Affirmation”, “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch” – which you can probably see already leaves out a lot.
  • For more about Moving Pictures as a horror story, see our discussion in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Stephen King’s “Tak” appears in his 1996 novels Desperation and The Regulators, the latter of which was published under King’s outed pen name Richard Bachman, claiming to be a novel Bachman had written years earlier. Instead, it’s intentionally a story set in a parallel universe to Desperation, with alternate versions of many of the same characters – including the author!. Like the Summoning Dark, King’s Tak comes out of a deep mine in the desert and inhabits a human host – in Desperation it is a police officer who becomes a sort of berserker. We won’t say too much more, but as Ben mentions in the episode, the similarities don’t go much further than that, but it might be a deliberate reference.
  • The HBO miniseries starring Ben Mendelsohn is the 2020 adaptation of another Stephen King book, 2018’s The Outsider, which does indeed have a similar plot.
  • “And then the car ate a person I guess?” is a reference to Stephen King’s Christine, a 1983 novel about a seemingly possessed, jealous and violent classic car named “Christine”. It was adapted the same year into a film by John Carpenter, with some details – notably the source of the car’s demonic presence – changed considerably. Carpenter directed it as a career-saving move after his previous labour-of-love film, The Thing, didn’t do well at the box office, but both films are now cult classics. A remake of Christine is rumoured to be in production.
  • A “cryptex” is a small container with a secure, complex lock, intended to carry secret messages. The term – a portmanteau of “cryptic” and “codex” – was invented by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, though there’s nothing about the device itself that requires the use of cryptology to use. The original version in the novel is a hollow cylinder made of stone and brass with five rotating sections, each containing every letter of the alphabet (though whether it’s the Latin or modern English alphabet is unclear). This makes it basically a letter-based combination lock with between 280,000 and 11 million possible combinations, depending on some details not given in the novel. Physical reproductions of the cryptex have become widely available since the release of the Da Vinci Code film; Ben has even used one as part of an escape room experience he designed.
  • We mention that on the Discworld, werewolves are classified as undead, something which dates back to Angua’s first appearance in Men at Arms. We’ve never really agreed; see above for our episodes about the book, where we decide they are, if anything, “twice as alive”.
  • “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” is the fifth and final Discworld short story, first published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in May 2005, just four months before Thud! We’ll be discussing it in #Pratchat63, coming in January 2023.
  • “Fracas“, along with “rumpus”, are both used by William de Worde during a meeting with Lord Vetinari in The Truth. A footnote describes them as the word equivalent of rare fish, claiming that they are “found only in certain kinds of newspapers” and “never used in normal conversation.” For more on this, see #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • Liz mentions “Incepting The Wire“; she’s invoking the concept of “inception” from Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception. The film is about a crew of criminals who use technology to enter the dreams of others, stealing important secrets from their subconscious. The plot of the film involves the crew being hired for the more difficult crime of “inception”: inserting an idea into the mind of the target.
  • We Own This City is a 2022 television mini-seres created by David Simon for HBO. Like The Wire, it’s set in Baltimore and is about law enforcement – in this case, corrupt members of the Gun Trace Task Force, based on real-life events which occurred between 2015 and 2019.
  • The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. Ben doesn’t necessarily recommend it, especially if, like him, you’re not really a horror fan – it’s pretty full on. Ben prefers the director’s previous film, the 2002 black werewolf comedy Dog Soldiers, but The Descent was pretty successful. A sequel, The Descent Part 2, was released in 2009, though it was directed by Jon Harris, who edited the original. It’s considered to be…not as good.
  • When Detritus is in the desert of Klatch in Jingo, he initially has a lot of trouble in the heat, especially as his helmet conks out. Later, at night when the desert is very cold, his brain cools and becomes more efficient, as he puts it. Sadly he doesn’t say anything about the apparent demise of his helmet; the relevant passage is quoted below, and the helmet isn’t mentioned again. See also our discussion of the novel in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, and our next episode, #Pratchat62, “There’s a Cow in There“, when we mention the helmet again.

The troll was standing with his knuckles on the ground. The motor of his cooling helmet sounded harsh for a moment in the dry air, and then stopped as the sand got into the mechanism.

Jingo – Terry Pratchett, 1997
  • Matt mentions Brick’s stream-of-consciousness passages read like “an excerpt from an Irvine Welsh novel“. Welsh is a Scottish author, most famously of Trainspotting, the 1993 novel about a group of addicts – of heroin or other things – that was adapted into film by Danny Boyle in 1996. Both book and film are considered classics.
  • Matt’s “dribbling dragon” is an allusion to “Chekhov’s gun” (originally “Чеховское ружьё”, or “Chekhov’s rifle” in Russian), advice given by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in several letters to younger writers in the early twentieth century. It’s basically the idea that you should only include necessary details in your story – the usual example being that if you include a gun in the first act of your story, it should be used to shoot someone before the end of the play or else taken out of the story entirely.
  • Reg Shoe, revolutionary-turned-zombie-turned-activist-turned-police detective, is not at all mentioned in Thud!, despite having a prominent supporting role in the two preceding Watch novels, The Fifth Elephant and Night Watch. Angua does mention in passing to Sally that “no-one cares if you’re a troll or a gnome or a zombie or a vampire”, but that’s as close as it comes. Vimes doesn’t even think of Reg during the flashback to his meeting with the Patrician about Sally, when he mentally lists the weirder members of the Watch: he thinks only of trolls, dwarfs, golems, a werewolf, an Igor and Nobby.
  • We’ve mentioned the British drama Downton Abbey a few times before on the podcast, most notably in #Pratchat36. The series was created and co-written by English actor, writer, director and actual aristocrat and member of the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. It follows the inhabitants of the titular manor house: the aristocratic Crawley family, led by Lord Grantham, and their servants. It’s set between 1912 and 1925 and features many significant historical events, including the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War, and the Spanish Flu epidemic. (Of note: Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of Lord Grantham, is played by Susan Dockery, known to Discworld fans as Susan in the television adaptation of Hogfather.) It ran for six series on ITV between 2010 and 2015, and became a worldwide phenomenon, especially after it was added to the streaming service Netflix. The story has since been continued in two films: Downton Abbey in 2019, set during a visit by the royal family to Downton in 1927, and Downton Abbey: A New Era in 2022, set in 1928 and involving a film crew hiring the Abbey as a location, and the family going on a trip to France to visit a villa the Dowager Countess (played by Maggie Smith) is bequeathing to one of her great granddaughters. Fellowes also created the HBO series The Gilded Age, set in 1880s America, and there’s been talk of potentially featuring a younger version of Smith’s character in that show.
  • When Ben mentions “the witch in that Tiffany Aching book“, he’s referring to Miss Level, the witch with two bodies – kind of the opposite of Miss Pickles and Miss Pointer – who mentors Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. For more on that, listen to #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • The Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme is an image of the actor character Rick Dalton pointing at a movie screen when he sees himself, taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino). It’s often used in conjunction with a quote, retweet or another image to show the poster self-identifies with it. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, and #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben hasn’t yet confirmed whether its Mr Shine or Grag Bashfulsson who warns Vimes he might have to rein in his anger more than usual, but he’ll keep looking.
  • Vetinari worries he’s pushed Vimes too far in Men at Arms, though Ben has the reasoning backwards – he’s worried because, as he mentions to Leonard da Quirm, Vimes didn’t punch the wall.
  • Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her personal, confessional works in a variety of media, and was considered an enfant terrible of the Young British Artists (or YBAs) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her most famous piece is probably Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of all her sexual partners, which was destroyed in a fire in a storage facility in 2004. The “modern” artworks mentioned in the book are by Daniella Pouter, and include Don’t Talk to Me About Mondays, described as a pile of rags, which might be a reference to Emin’s famous 1998 work My Bed, literally the artist’s bed piled with items from her bedroom in disarray.
  • “The Peaky Blinders thing” is a reference to the flat caps with sharpened pennies sewn into the brim, used as concealed weapons by Willikins street gang. The real “Peaky Blinders” were a street gang in Birmingham in the 1880s through to the 1910s; there’s a story that they used caps with razor blades sewn into them as weapons, leading to the gang’s name, but the name pre-dates disposable razor blades so this is probably apocryphal. A more sound theory is it referred to their sartorial style: they did wear flat caps, but also dressed rather well for a street gang, so the name probably referred to the hats and that they were fancy, as “blinder” is Birmingham slang for “dapper”. Another possibility is their technique of grabbing a robbery victim’s hat from behind and pulling it down over their eyes, so they wouldn’t be seen and couldn’t be identified. The term has become popular again since the BBC series Peaky Blinders gained popularity, though it’s a heavily fictionalised version of the real gang. It ran for six series between 2013 and 2022.
  • We heard the story of Michael Williams’ 2014 interview with Pratchett during the recording of #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, and we included his story in the third episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. You can hear the full discussion as “Imagination, Not Intelligence, Made Us Human” on the Wheeler Centre website…or you could. Now, instead, we direct you to the video of the discussion on YouTube. There’s a lot of good stuff in it!
  • If you’re interested in a full count of who dies in the Discworld books, you’re in luck: The L-Space Web fan site has just such a record! Like a lot of things on L-Space, “The Death Lists” wasn’t maintained all the way to the end of the series, but peters out around the time newsgroups and static websites were being replaced by social media and wikis. But, in this case, it only goes up to Thud! so happily (if that’s the right word) it covers most of the books we’ve discussed on the podcast up to this point. Though you might want to take it with a grain of salt – we note the Thud! entry doesn’t seem to include the four mining dwarfs left to die under Ankh-Morpork after hearing what the Cube had to say…
  • Ben would like to apologise for being needlessly pedantic about the two Discworld books which don’t feature Death, and his roasting at Matt’s hands is well deserved. Despite that, we can confirm he remembered correctly that they are The Wee Free Men (which we covered in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”) and Snuff. The Reaper Man thing is absolutely not true, do not go back and check or listen to #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door”.
  • The Thing appears in the Bromeliad, mostly the first and final books Truckers (see #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”) and Wings (see #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings”). In those books the Thing is a small, seemingly indestructible black cube passed down through generations of Nomes to Old Torrit and then Masklin, which used to occasionally speak and provide advice. When Masklin brings it to Arnold Bros, it recharges itself using the Store’s electricity and reveals that it is “Flight Recorder and Navigation Computer of the Starship Swan”, helping Masklin with a lot of his plans to get the Nomes out of the Store and eventually back to their home planet. Cube-shaped computers and recording devices also appear in other media, most notably in Star Wars, where both the Jedi and the Sith store holographic recordings on “holocrons” which are commonly cube-shaped.
  • The main mentions of school projects in Pratchett’s work occur in the Johnny books. In Chapter 5 of Johnny and the Dead, Johnny uses the excuse of a school project to ask about the surviving member of the Blackbury Pals, claiming that “You could get away with anything if you said you were doing a project.” He uses this trick again in Johnny and the Dead in order to speak to Mrs Tachyon when she’s in hospital, and his legit history project comes in handy when the kids have to disguise themselves for a trip back in time to the 1940s.
  • Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) is a Disney musical blending live-action and animation, much like Mary Poppins. Also like Mary Poppins, its based on novels for children by an English author, in this case Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The protagonist, Ms Eglantine Price (played by Angela Lansbury in the film, in her screen musical debut), is a single woman living in a coastal village in Dorset during World War II who is, against her will, saddled with some children evacuated from London. They discover Ms Price is learning witchcraft by correspondence, and end up joining her on an adventure to complete her education and locate a powerful spell she believes can aid in the war effort. It’s not specifically included in the list of Pratchett Family Movies (or PFMs) mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 9 of A Life With Footnotes, but it wouldn’t look out of place next to the likes of Time Bandits, The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke.
  • Irish, British and American actor Angela Lansbury (1925-2022) had a long and distinguished career on stage and screen. She is best remembered as Jessica Fletcher, the crime writer protagonist of the popular American cosy mystery TV series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons between 1984 and 1996, followed by four TV movies up until 2003. But she was also an accomplished singer, and played many famous roles in stage musicals including being the original Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Potts in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast. Her last role being a cameo appearance as herself in Ryan Johnson’s Glass Onion in 2022, and she died on 11 October, 2022, not long before we recorded this episode.
  • In Thud!, while complaining to Cheery about the announcement in the Times that the post office is issuing memorial Koom Valley stamps, Vimes says “Remember the cabbage-scented stamp last month?” This is an unusually direct reference to the events of the immediately previous Discworld novel, Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”). In Chapter 12, once stamp collecting has started to take off, Junior Postman Stanley Howler presents his own design to Moist for a stamp depicting a cabbage, printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli: “A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains”. This directly links the two books as being closer in time than the gap between their publication, and reinforces the basic idea that the Discworld books more or less happen in the order in which they’re published, with a couple of notable exceptions.
  • Ridcully certainly has a busy month. The above link suggests that there is less than a month between Ridcully overseeing Moist’s race against the Clacks in Going Postal and tricking out Vimes’ coaches in Thud! Ridcully also appears at an important meeting near the end of Making Money, and also has his head printed on the fee-dollar note when Moist introduces paper money in the final chapter. Of note: The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59) and the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” (see #Pratchat63) were also published the same year as Thud!, so Ridcully may also be dealing with A. E. Pessimal’s inspection and an invasion of Auditors into Roundworld at around the same time. A busy month indeed!
  • Brian Blessed (b. 1936) is an English actor from Yorkshire who is known for his booming voice. His best-known roles include King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder, Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen in the 1981 film version of Flash Gordon, and the voice of Boss Nass in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But he’s been a fixture of British television, stage and film for years, popping up in memorable guest roles in Space: 1999, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who and many more. As well as many cult films of the 1980s, he’s been in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare films Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996). Of note to Terry Pratchett fans, he appears as William “Bill” Stickers, deceased communist, in ITV’s 1995 adaptation of Johnny and the Dead.
  • Lord Melchett, played by Stephen Fry, is another character from the British sitcom Blackadder. He appears in the second series, Blackadder II, as an obsequious member of the royal court and Lord Edmund Blackadder’s rival for the favour of Queen Elizabeth I. In this instance, though, Ben is really thinking more of Lord Melchett’s descendent, the Blackadder Goes Forth character General Melchett (also played by Fry), who is more over-the-top eccentric and dangerously in charge of British soldiers on the front line during World War I.
  • We’ve mentioned Back to the Future before, most recently in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our discussion of Night Watch. In the film, eccentric scientist Doc Brown creates a time machine using a DeLorean sports car. Its time travel device, the “flux capacitor”, requires the vehicle to travel at 88 miles per hour (about 142 kilometres per hour); when it hits that speed the car and its occupants are instantly transported to the destination point in time, leaving behind flaming tyre tracks. At the end of the first film, Doc returns from a trip to the future to take his young friend Marty “back to the future”; Marty worries they don’t have enough road to get up to 88mph, to which Doc famously replies “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” The DeLorean then begins to fly… Pratchett was a fan of the film – the biography A Life With Footnotes recounts the story of the time he almost bought a replica of the DeLorean time machine – and he previously referenced it in Soul Music, in which Binky leaves flaming hoof prints behind when he travels time-bendingly fast.
  • George R. R. Martin is the bestselling author of the A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of books that begins with A Game of Thrones. The series was famously adapted for television by HBO as Game of Thrones. The novels are very long, but don’t all cover the same amount of time; by some estimates, the narrative time that passes varies between as little as a few months to more than a year. And then you have to factor in that the seasons of the world of the book are also irregular, for undisclosed fantastical reasons…
  • Listener Graeme Kay sent us in his tip that he thinks Koom Valley might be based on a place in Far North Queensland, not least because Pratchett is known to have spent plenty of time on holiday in that part of Australia. The specific place Graeme was thinking of is at Babinda Boulders on the land of the Yidindji people south of Cairns. Graeme mentioned “The Devil’s Pool”, but it’s one of several specific spots at Babinda which are connected by rushing water (the others are “The Chute” and “The Washing Machine”). Despite warning signs and local oral traditions about Siren-like dangers, younger tourists continue to visit those parts of the Boulders. More than twenty people have died there in the last century or so, largely because of underwater hazards that make it very difficult to survive being dragged under by the current. Those hazards do sound very similar to the ones encountered by Vimes in Koom Valley, and which would have surely killed him if not for the influence of the Summoning Dark. Sadly this is not a phenomenon of the past; the latest death occurred in December 2021, and a recent safety review completed in January 2023 recommended better signage to try and prevent more deaths. You can read about that, and see pictures of the location and diagrams of the hazards there, in this ABC news article.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum, the last of the witches books, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”.
  • Granny Weatherwax battles with her sister Lily in Witches Abroad. It’s never stated clearly, but it’s suggested that Lily is older than Granny, though her use of magic makes her look younger. She’s never described as her twin.
  • Granny doesn’t say anything about it, but in Carpe Jugulum when she is fighting the influence of Count de Magpyr, she has to choose between the darkness and the light to escape the lands of Death. In the end, she faces the light…and steps backwards. A very Granny Weatherwax solution, and reminiscent of her dilemma in the mirror dimension in Witches Abroad.
  • Liz says “Revved up like a deuce”, which is a lyric from “Blinded by the Light”, a song by Bruce Springsteen released on first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. It was famously covered by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on the 1976 album The Roaring Silence, and that version was a top ten hit in several countries.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Sophie’s Choice, the 1979 final novel by American author William Styron, which was adapted into a film in 1981 starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. While it’s meant to be a surprise revelation in the story, it’s now famous for Sophie – a Polish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany – having to choose which of her two children would be killed when she was sent to Auschwitz, with both of them being killed if she refused to choose. It’s since entered popular culture as a shorthand for an impossible (or at least very difficult) choice.
  • We mention a few famous fictional butlers this episode, including Alfred Pennyworth (Batman), Mr Butler (Miss FIsher’s Murder Mysteries), Alfred Pennyworth (not to be confused with Pennywise the Clown), and Jeeves (of Jeeves and Wooster fame). We previously talked about Willikins and the “battle butler” trope in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”, when discussing Jingo.
  • The line about a god of policemen does not actually appear in Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24), and Vimes doesn’t say it – though it is attributed to him. In The Last Hero (#Pratchat55), when Carrot arrives in Dunmanifestin, chief god of the Disc Blind Io asks Carrot if there’s a god of policemen. ‘No, sir,’ Carrot replies. ‘Coppers would be far too suspicious of anyone calling themselves a god of policemen to believe in one.’ There’s also this line from near the start of Night Watch (#Pratchat54), which explains why most Watch members are buried in the Cemetery of Small Gods: “Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.”
  • Despite his self-doubt, Ben is right: igneous rock is indeed formed by volcanoes. Specifically, igneous rock is formed from cooled magma or lava, forms of molten rock that naturally occur beneath the Earth’s crust but come nearer the surface in volcanos (magma) or are released during an eruption (lava).
  • Liz and Ben are both sort of right about the difference between concrete and cement. Cement is the binding agent used to make concrete, mortar, stucco and grout. It’s a combination of limestone, clay, shells and silica sand, which is mixed with water and then sets hard when it dries out. It’s not often used on its own, but instead combined with aggregate (a mixture of gravel and sand) to make concrete, which is the hard substance used for footpaths, driveways and structures. Most cement today is “Portland cement”, a fine grey powder developed in the 19th century by father and son Joseph and William Aspdin, who named it for its resemblance to Portland stone from the island of Portland in Dorset in the south of England. It mostly replaced the use of hydraulic lime, or “quicklime”. Cement is also combined with sand to make mortar, the “glue” that holds bricks together, and stucco, also known as render, used as a wall covering and to fashion ornamentations; and grout, used to fill the gaps between tiles. While all three use the same basic ingredients, they use different recipes, techniques and additives to achieve different consistencies suited to each use.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Angua, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Colon, Detritus, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Nobby, The Watch, Trolls, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat64 Notes and Errata

8 February 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, discussing the 1973 short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, with special guest Andy Matthews.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the Two Ronnies sketch mentioned by Andy in which they use letters (and numbers) instead of words. It’s framed as “Swedish Made Simple”, a “Swedish lesson in Norwegian”, in which the subtitles use only single letters and numbers to represent words. It seems to be from the second episode of the fourth series of the show, broadcast on BBC Two in January 1975 – and please be warned that the sensibility of the sketch reflects the state of comedy in that era, especially in the way it’s ended.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a play on the “GNU Terry Pratchett”, which many websites – including this one, if our plugin is working correctly – add to a special “Clacks overhead” bit of information. This is a reference to Going Postal, in which a message prefixed GNU is sent up and down the Clacks system forever. John Dearheart’s name is preserved this way, in accordance with the idea in Pratchett’s writing that “a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”. GNU is also a reference to the Roundworld GNU Project, a cornerstone of the free software movement which set out to create a free Unix-like operating system. In this context, GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”
  • We mention a lot of Terry’s other books this episode; here’s a list with our episodes:
    • Feet of Clay – discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“
    • Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes – Terry’s official biography written by Rob Wilkins, which we’ve not yet covered.
    • Strata – his early sci-fi novel which we’ve not yet covered
    • The Dark Side of the Sun – his early sci-fi novel which we have covered, in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“
    • The Johnny books – Only You Can Save Mankind (#Pratchat28), Johnny and the Dead (#Pratchat34), and Johnny and the Bomb (#Pratchat37)
    • The Bromeliad – Truckers (#Pratchat9), Diggers (#Pratchat13) and Wings (#Pratchat20)
    • Equal Rites – discussed in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“
    • Wyrd Sisters – discussed in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”
    • Small Gods – discussed in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”
  • In the 1999 film The Matrix, future humanity is enslaved by sentient machines, who use the humans as living batteries after environmental disaster prevents traditional methods of power generation. They keep the humans subjugated by plugging them into an artificial reality known as “The Matrix”, but there are some free humans who present the imprisoned ones with the truth. Famously one of them – Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne – does so by offering a prospective recruit two pills. The red one will allow them to see the truth of their situation, exiting the Matrix, never to return. The Wachowskis, who wrote and directed the film, turned it into a trilogy by making two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, in 2003. A fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, was released in 2021.
  • Owls are indeed mentioned in the Bromeliad – Granny Morkie describes them in Diggers while attempting to “cheer up” the Nomes who’ve gone outside at night to try and rescue Dorcas. In her words: “Cunning’ devils, owls. You never hear ‘em till they’re almost on top of you.” The Nomes who grew up in the Store are terrified.
  • The four books collecting Pratchett’s early stories are Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (which contains this story), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and The Time-traveling Caveman. Most of the stories are from the Bucks Free Press, but Father Christmas’s Fake Beard also contains a number of Christmas-themed stories from other points in Pratchett’s career.
  • The origins of the name Rincewind are actually known: it comes from the long-running humour column “By the Way” in the Daily Express newspaper. Written by various writers under the pen name “Beachcomber”, “By the Way” was a broad spoof of society news, with short snippets of nonsense about various fictional characters. One group of frequently recurring characters were “twelve red-bearded dwarfs” who were highly litigious, and who were at one point given individual names – one of which was “Churm Rincewind”. As mentioned in the Annotated Pratchett File entry for The Colour of Magic, Terry read a lot of the columns in published collections when he was 13, but didn’t realise that’s where he’d picked up the name until his friend Dave Langford pointed it out many years later. So Ben’s dramatic recreation wasn’t too far off the mark…
  • “Fishing from the same stream” is mentioned in the L-Space wiki, though the specific quote about it is not sourced. Pratchett is said to have invoked this when saying its ridiculous that anyone would suggest a certain famous author had plagiarised him just because they both had schools of magic in their books, since it was an old concept that both had drawn on. “That’s how genres work,” he says, and indeed sites like TV Tropes and All the Tropes would agree.
  • In the film Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant and his young friends escape a Tyrannosaurus rex in part because Grant advises them its vision is “based on movement” – much as Rincemangle advises his fellow gnomes. But Rincemangle is partially correct – cats are ambush predators and while they have excellent night vision are relatively short-sighted. While it’s not true that stationary objects or mice are invisible to them, they are instinctively drawn to movement and use it to identify prey when laying in wait. To see why this is probably a silly assumption to make about T. rex, try to imagine the dinosaur as it appears in the film hiding in the grass and waiting to ambush its prey… Modern thought is that T. rex probably had great eyesight, just like many modern predatory birds, making it able to see prey from quite a long distance and chase it down. The assumption also appears in Crighton’s original 1990 novel, though in that case Grant makes the observation after seeing the live dinosaurs, though this is backtracked in the sequel, The Lost World.
  • For more on how cats see, here’s the MYSTERIOUS FELINE VISION article from catveteran.com shared with us by subscriber Ian Banks.
  • Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, and one of the most influential Spanish-language writers in the world. While he’s most famous for his short stories, which came to the attention of English-language readers in the 1970s, he also wrote novels, poetry and nonfiction, and perpetrated a great number of literary hoaxes. His most famous stories were mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, and include “The Library of Babel”, about a library that contains every possible book that could ever exist, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges discovers that a secret society invented a country and the world of its legends, and by doing so conjured them into being.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat63 Notes and Errata

8 January 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

I’m rereading Thud by @terryandrob for @PratchatPodcast so this will be quite a long thread. I’m only 6 pages in but the book has an almost epic feel to it already. Important Things Are Going To Happen. pic.twitter.com/67FoMoaOR0

— A’tuin Sneezed (@damethelog) October 17, 2022
  • Thomas the Tank Engine is an anthropomorphic steam locomotive – basically a regular train, but with a human-like face on the front – who is the star of the Railway Series books by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry, written between 1945 and 1972. While the books were very successful, it was the television series adaptation Thomas & Friends that really cemented Thomas’ popularity. The series ran from 1984 to 2021, and used live-action model train versions of Thomas and his friends with narration by Ringo Starr. The human characters – including the “Fat Controller”, who was in charge of the railway system on Thomas’ home, the Island of Sondor – were portrayed by wooden models.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

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#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
Listen to us discuss the in-universe Discworld books The Ankh-Morpork Archives volume I and II, collecting the Discworld diaries, and The Discworld Almanak. Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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