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Nadia Bailey

Oggswatch Feast 2021

25 December 2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Ho ho ho, Merry Hogswatch! To celebrate the festive season, and our own fiftieth episode, we’ve brought together a bunch of guests of Hogswatch Past, Present and Future – including the hosts no fewer than three other Discworld podcasts – for a special feast of additional recipes from Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Be warned: this podcast contains bananana!

Got comments on our efforts – or want to share your own? Do you want us to do this again next year? Please, join the conversation using the hashtag #Oggswatch2021 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Oggswatch_Feast_2021.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:08:40 — 92.2MB)

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Our guests this episode are:

  • Comedian and vaudevillian Elly Squire, aka Clara Cupcakes – claracupcakes.com; @ClaraCupcakes on Twitter and Instagram
  • Author Liam Pieper – liampieper.com; @liampieper on Twitter, @liampieperwrites on Instagram
  • Author Nadia Bailey – nadiabailey.com; @animalorchestra on Twitter and Instagram
  • The hosts of the Wyrd Sisters podcast, Manning and Liz – @WyrdSistersPod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • The hosts of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Jo and Francine – @MakeYeFretPod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • Two of the hosts of The Compleat Discography, Aaron and Ana – @Atuin_Pod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • Science communicator Anna Ahveninen – @Lady_Beaker on Twitter

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site; it might take a few days to fully appear, but we’ll be adding photos of many of the dishes cooked for this episode!

While our January episode is already in the can, in February we’ll be discussing BBC America’s series “based on characters created by Terry Pratchett” – The Watch! So have a watch yourself over the holidays, and send us questions by tagging us on social media and using the hashtag #Pratchat52, or by sending us an email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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: Anna Ahveninen, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, The Compleat Discography, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Wyrd Sisters podcast

#Pratchat54 – The Land Before Vimes

8 April 2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

The Trousers of Time end up in a knot as writer Nadia Bailey rejoins Liz and Ben and we go back to the Glorious Past in the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch.

While pursuing dangerous killer Carcer across the rooftop of Unseen University, a magical bolt of lightning (or something) sends Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh, thirty years into the past – along with his quarry. Carcer kills Vimes’ old mentor, Sergeant John Keel, and Vimes steps into Keel’s thinly-soled shoes; he’ll have to show himself the ropes to keep history intact. But he’s not just reliving any old past: it’s almost the Glorious 25th of May. The day the people deposed the paranoid Patrician Lord Winder; the day hundreds were killed in violent clashes across the city; and the day John Keel died…

Night Watch is beloved by Discworld fans, no least because it gives a double dose of everyone’s favourite “honest copper”, Sam Vimes. But he leaves Sybil in labour as he’s thrust back intp the best and worst days of his early career, forced to grapple with the darkness in his and others’ souls with only the technobabble of a few time boffin monks for guidance. It’s possibly Pratchett’s darkest book, and certainly takes us into one of the darkest corners of the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork before the rise of Vetinari and the Guilds.

Does Vimes knows where to draw the line in this book? Is Carcer an intriguing villain, or a cookie cutter evil psychopath? Could you teach your younger self everything you needed to know to become you? And is this book in your top five, or do you fail to see what all the fuss is about? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat54 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_54.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:29:37 — 68.9MB)

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Guest Nadia Bailey is a writer, editor and critic. She’s published a number of pop-culture related books about such diverse subjects as Stranger Things, Frida Kahlo and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her latest publication is The Deck of Crystals, a deck of cards which looks into the history, superstition and lore of gemstones. Nadia has just begun a PhD researching (among other things) the lives of queer women during World War I. You can find Nadia on Twitter as @animalorchestra, or visit her website at nadiabailey.com.

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

Next month we’re joining a ragtag crew of misfits on a desperate mission to save the Disc in the second big illustrated Discworld adventure, The Last Hero! And to help us navigate Paul Kidby’s astonishing illustrations, we’re welcoming back illustrator and comic book creator Georgina Chadderton. Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat55, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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, Colon, Discworld, Dr Lawn, Elizabeth Flux, Lu-Tze, Nadia Bailey, Nobby, Rosie Palm, The Watch, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat17 – Midsummer (Elf) Murders

8 March 2019 by Pratchat Imps 3 Comments

In our seventeenth episode we join everyone’s favourite dysfunctional coven – and guest, writer Nadia Bailey – as we return to Lancre for Terry Pratchett’s 1992 Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies!

The Lancre coven have returned from their trip abroad, but despite the impending royal wedding of Magrat and King Verence, all is not well in the Ramtops: it’s circle time, when the walls between worlds are thin, and in the witches’ absence someone has been toying with powers beyond their understanding. As usual Granny Weatherwax thinks she can sort everything out herself: facing down a young witch wannabe and keeping the Gentry at bay. But Granny is off her game. Is it the arrival of an old flame? Or is her time as a witch of Lancre nearly up? She’ll need Nanny and Magrat’s help to see off the threat of the Lords and Ladies…

Bringing us back to the witches after only one book away, Lords and Ladies is a particularly Pratchett take on the ancient Celtic stories that inspired modern ideas of fairies and elves. One of the few novels to cross the streams between the witches and wizards, it also gives us more of a glimpse into Esme Weatherwax’s past, hints at the future of witchcraft (and royalty) in Lancre, and introduces the infamous “Trousers of Time”. Is this your favourite witches novel? What do you think of the parallel universes, other dimensions and alternate timelines it describes? And is this the best take on elves since Tolkien? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat17 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_17.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:04:15 — 57.3MB)

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Guest Nadia Bailey is an author, journalist and critic whose work has appeared in The Australian, The Age, The Lifted Brow and many others. The Book of Barb, an unofficial celebration of the surprisingly popular supporting character from the first season of Netflix “kids on bikes” drama Stranger Things, was her first book; it was followed by The Stranger Things Field Guide in December 2018. In between Nadia wrote The World’s Best BFFs, a book of profiles of celebrity best friends. All three are published by Smith Street Books. You can find Nadia online at nadiabailey.com, and she tweets at @animalorchestra.

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

Don’t forget that you can see Liz and Ben at both Speculate 2019 on March 15 and 16, and at Nullus Anxietas 7, the Australian Discworld Convention, on April 13 and 14! Plus Ben’s new show, You Chose Poorly, plays at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from April 1-7.

Next month, to tie in with our appearance at Speculate, we’ll be leaving the Discworld and blasting off into outer space as we discuss one of Pratchett’s early sci-fi novels, The Dark Side of the Sun, with writer Will Kostakis! We’ll likely be recording around the time of Speculate 2019, so get your questions in via social media before March 15th using the hashtag #Pratchat18.

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: Ben McKenzie, Casanunda, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Librarian, Magrat, Mustrum Ridcully, Nadia Bailey, Nanny Ogg, Ponder Stibbons, Witches

#Oggswatch2021 Notes and Errata

25 December 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Bananana Soup Surprise

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

Celery Astonishment

Are you astonished? We certainly are.

CMOT Dibbler’s Sausage Inna Bun

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

Thanks so much to @PratchatPodcast for including us in your Oggswatch feast! (Liz's sausage on the left, Manning on the right) pic.twitter.com/wDlvedyZI7

— Wyrd Sisters Podcast (@WyrdSistersPod) December 24, 2021

Figgins

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

Dwarf Bread

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

Notes and Errata

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

We’ll add a few more notes soon.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Anna Ahveninen, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Photos, The Compleat Discography, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Wyrd Sisters podcast

#Pratchat54 Notes and Errata

8 April 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 54, “The Land Before Vimes“, discussing the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch with returning guest Nadia Bailey.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns on the 1988 animated feature film The Land Before Time (dir. Don Bluth), in which an improbable group of very cute baby dinosaurs who are separated from their parents and search for a safe haven known as the Great Valley. It was quite the sensation at the time, and spawned no fewer than thirteen direct-to-video musical sequels. (Ben tried out several different time/Vimes puns and liked this one the best, since the Ankh-Morpork of thirty years ago is effectively the land before Vimes.)
  • Nadia last appeared on Pratchat just over three years ago, in March 2019, for #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“, discussing Lords and Ladies. (Not including “pandemic time”, that’s only about twelve months ago.) The last time we recorded in person was a year after that, for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, released in March 2020.
  • Will Alma (1904-1993) was a Melbourne magician and historian of magic. Liz did indeed create the Wikipedia page about Alma; we’ll let you read it to find out more. You can also find information about the W G Alma Conjouring Collection on the State Library of Victoria website.
  • Iceland spar is a transparent form of crystallised calcium carbonate, or calcite; it looks a bit like chunky glass, and crystals are usually rhombus shaped. It’s found in many parts of the world, but the most famous source is the the Helgustadir mine in Iceland – hence the name. It has birefringence, which means that it refracts light differently depending on its polarisation. (Polarisation describes the direction in which a wave oscillates. Light from the sun and most natural sources is said to be “unpolarised”, because it’s made up of a mixture of waves oscillating in all directions.) In practical terms, Iceland spar splits unpolarised light into two distinct beams when it passes through the crystal. It’s thought to be the crystal known as sólarsteinn (“sunstone” in Old Norse) by the Vikings, who used the birefringence effect on sunlight to find the exact position of the sun – a vital bit of data in navigation – even when it was obscured by cloud.
  • Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is the classic comedy time travel movie, and we’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. In the film, teenager and wannabe rockstar Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally activates a time travelling car built by his mentor, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and gets stranded thirty years in the past. When trying to get home, he interrupts the event that caused his parents to meet, and spends the rest of the film trying to get them together before he alters history and wipes himself from existence. This is a form of the Grandfather Paradox – a time traveller interfering with the past in such a way as to cause themselves not to exist.
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is actually the Discworld book immediately before this one; it’s the first explicitly written for younger readers, and also the first not to have a cover by Josh Kirby after he was established as the regular cover artist. (The Colour of Magic was initially published with a cover painting of Great A’Tuin by Alan Smith; Kirby was brought in from that book’s second edition.) We discussed The Amazing Maurice back in July of 2020, in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. An animated film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice, is scheduled for release some time in 2022.
  • We discussed Men at Arms, including Vimes’ possible retirement, back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited it (rather shambolically) for the live recorded episode #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
  • There are many fan-produced Discworld timelines but the most famous is the one developed by members of the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup, and published on the L-Space Web. You can find the latest evolution of that timeline on the L-Space Wiki.
  • Sergeant Abba Stronginthearm was recruited by Carrot as part of his militia in Men at Arms, and subsequently mentioned in Jingo (where he is the next senior Corporal after Nobby) and features briefly in The Fifth Elephant (where’s he’s made Sergeant, and takes part in the Ankh-Morpork investigation into the theft of a model of the Scone of Stone).
  • Poppies are the symbol of Remembrance Day (November 11, marking the armistice that ended hostilities in World War I) and, in Australia and New Zealand, ANZAC Day (April 25, marking the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in Turkey, and the subsequent campaign in which thousands died). They are mostly worn in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. Pins of artificial poppies are sold to raise funds for veterans, and are worn by anyone who wishes to remember the dead of World War I (and, later, World War II). The poppy as an emblem was inspired by John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”, which refers to poppies growing in what were the battlegrounds in France and Belgium. The first lines of the poem read:
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, 
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
  • We’ve mentioned the end of Disney villains like Gaston before, in Eeek Club 2021, and #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“. The trope is that the hero doesn’t kill the villain, but they die anyway because they act on their own wrath or greed, causing their own death (often by falling). This simplifies the story by preventing the need for any kind of forgiveness or punishment, giving the heroes an easy happy ending. (TV Tropes calls this a “Disney Villain Death”, which is specifically for the falling off of something version.)
  • We’ve mentioned the dimension-hopping TV show Sliders before, mostly in episodes about Pratchett’s own multi-dimensional epic, The Long Earth series (see #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat46), but also in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“. The specific episode Ben refers to here is “Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome”, from about halfway through the second season in 1996. The title also refers to the framing device of one of the sliders, soul singer Rembrandt Brown, telling his story to a psychiatrist. Arturo’s final line that episode was indeed “Oh, my God…”
  • While Ben still questions applying it to time travel, Liz is right in that realistic theories of teleportation involve destroying a person and building a copy of them at their destination. This is because the transmission of actual matter is impossible, but it’s at least theoretically possible to transmit the information about the physical state of a person or thing and then recreate it perfectly at the destination. In such a setup, the original is disintegrated, possibly as part of the scanning process, or just to avoid creating copies of people and collect raw material for the return journey. There’s some disagreement over whether this is how transporters work in Star Trek – some explanations say it is, while others claim they transmit the original matter at a “quantum level”, though it is definitely broken down first. The philosophical implications of either version are usually ignored until it goes wrong, perhaps most famously in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix”. Some other stories which explore these ideas include Australian author Sean Williams’ Twinmaker trilogy of YA novels, a film we won’t name because it’d be a spoiler, and Ben’s own audio comedy mini-series Hello! My Name is Eddie, specifically in the episode “The Psychological Experiment of Death”.
  • Buggy Swires, gnome watchman, rides a heron for this kind of operation. He prefers a sparrowhawk for crowd control, but doesn’t seem unhappy with his heron, which he tames through a combination of concussion and a secret potion. If this feels a bit like the bird-riding antics of a certain Nac Mac Feegle, don’t worry – all will become clear in several books’ time.
  • For more information about the lightning strike from Thief of Time, see our episode about the book: #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • In The Terminator (1984; dir. James Cameron) and its sequels, characters from the future explain that the “time displacement equipment” they use requires a bioelectric field to work, which is why only living organic beings or things which mimic them successfully can travel through it. This includes the T-800 terminator, which has real flesh covering its metal endoskeleton, or the later models which are either composed of or covered in “mimetic polyalloy”, described as “living metal”.
  • We previously discussed the rules that come with the mogwai creatures in Gremlins (1984; dir. Joe Dante) in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. We’ve also mentioned the sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990; dir. Joe Dante), in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.; in that film, a minor character derides protagonist Billy’s explanation of the “don’t feed them after midnight” rule.
  • Doctor John “Mossy” Lawn makes his only major appearance here, but he does return in a cameo role in several later books, notably Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“).
  • The “vet” Vimes relies on in other novels is Doughnut Jimmy. He makes his major appearance in Feet of Clay, when he is called upon to treat the poisoned Patrician, but is also mentioned in Jingo and The Last Continent.
  • We talked about germ theory, hand washing and Semmelweis in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“. We’ll again point you to this episode of NPR’s Shortwave podcast, which shows that even after Semmelweis’ intervention, doctors did not want to admit that they might be causing sickness or death.
  • Granny Weatherwax explains her goblin-shaped germ theory to Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. We previously discussed this in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • As Ben will remember later in the episode, John Keel’s real-world counterpart is Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), a British Member of Parliament, and twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, though he remains most famous for founding the Metropolitan Police Force. He’s considered the “father of modern policing”, but his other achievements include the establishment of the modern Conservative party, free trade and modern banking in the UK. While we’re not a fan of his politics in general, it’s worth noting that he often started out with a traditional conservative opinion on a matter, but would later change his mind. Most famously, while he initially supported high tariffs on imported goods, he eventually moved to repeal the “corn laws” that made imported staple foods expensive in order to help alleviate the Great Famine in Ireland – acting against the wishes of most of his party, and leading to his resignation as Prime Minister.
  • To be clear, “Mrs Palm and Her Five Sisters” (and variations thereof) is a euphemism for the hand when used for masturbation, the five sisters being the fingers. The phrase is most prevalent in the UK, but is pretty common in Australia too.
  • Fred and Nobby’s ages are not specifically mentioned in the books. In Guards! Guards! Fred is said to have been married for thirty years, which certainly tallies with his younger self in Night Watch. Nobby is never described in a way that gives much of a clue as to his age, but given Fred is probably in his early twenties at most in Night Watch, the age gap between them is probably only a decade or so – not much of a consideration after thirty years.
  • Fred’s military service is more-or-less first mentioned in Guards! Guards!, where he is said to have “served in foreign parts”, though the nature of that service is not described. We say “more-or-less” because also in that book is the famous passage describing him as one of life’s Sergeants, which specifically says “if he took up a military career”, though Nobby also says towards the end that Colon had told him stories about winning archery contests in the army. In any case the Watch is not treated quite as distinctly from the military in the first couple of books as it would be in later ones, with the distinction first being very clearly made in Jingo. Nobby’s adventures in stealing stuff, meanwhile, also get a minor mention in Guards! Guards!: in the aftermath of Carrot’s brawl in the Drum, Nobby is sizing up the boots of some of the unconscious brawlers and is described as a “veteran of of a score of residual battlefields”, suggesting quite ruthlessly that they could cut the throats of the fallen. There’s no mention of this experience being on literal military battlefields, though, and in Men at Arms, when Fred is comparing Detritus to his old drill sergeant, Nobby makes no mention of having been in the army with him, so it seems likely only Fred went into military service.
  • Lu-Tze’s first re-writing of history occurs in Small Gods, and you can hear us discuss it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Sam spends about four days and one night in the past – a limit imposed by Qu, due to the situation and strain of both the magical and bureaucratic kinds, meaning Vimes arrives on the night of the 21st (or the early morning of the 22nd). This seems to be about the same amount of time Keel had in the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch before the 25th of May, so his lifelong impact on the younger Vimes took him only a few days to establish.
  • The Gestapo – short for Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police” – were established in 1933 by Herman Göring through a merger of the political and intelligence arms of the Prussian police force, making the new body national. They were responsible for sniffing out and eliminating any opposition to the Nazi regime, both in Germany and Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. They were disbanded in 1945, after being declared a criminal organisation in the Nuremberg trials, both for their involvement in the Holocaust and their ruthless and brutal suppression of any potentially anti-Nazi organisation. Their legacy of using informants and appearing to be all-knowing and around every corner were taken up by the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, “State Security Service”), the secret police of East Germany from 1950 until the reunification of Germany in 1990.
  • There’s no single consistent definition of “psychopath“, nor is psychopathy a recognised mental illness or condition. It’s often described in terms of a lack of “usual” characteristics, primarily fear, inhibition, impulse control and empathy, though the definition is still very broad. The modern concept of the psychopath is shaped largely by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, whose famous Hare Psychopathy Checklist has been roundly criticised. As for whether Carcer and Swing would fit the bill, the answer is – probably, depending on who was asking the questions. UK journalist and writer Jon Ronson examined a lot of these questions (in general, not about these characters specifically) in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, which brought the questionnaire to broader public attention, though the book itself did not avoid criticism either.
  • In Men at Arms, Vimes thinks during the book that it is much better to be threatened by an evil man, since he’ll want to see you squirm and will gloat and talk, giving you a chance to escape, whereas “A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” At the climax of the book, Carrot kills Dr Cruces in order to save Vimes and destroy the gonne, without saying anything, prompting Vimes to think his earlier thoughts again. (For more discussion of Men at Arms, see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The “revolution” in Les Miserablés is the real-life June Rebellion of the 5th and 6th of June in 1832 Paris. It has similarities with the events of Night Watch, but doesn’t seem to be the primary inspiration. At the time, Parisians were experiencing great hardship, with crop failures and economic problems causing a huge amount of suffering, alongside repeated attempted insurrections by supporters of the previous royal line deposed in the 1830 revolution (the one which followed the most famous one). A cholera epidemic swept through the city, killing more than 100,000 people – including the conservative Prime Minister Perier, and, on June 1, General Lemarque, an influential ex-military commander. Lemarque was involved in the 1830 revolution, and was one of the few members of the French parliament openly critical of the monarchy, making him hugely popular with republicans. After the massive state funeral for Perier, critics of the regime saw Lamarque’s funeral as a chance to show massive support for the republican movement, and turned out in huge numbers. Lafayette (yes, the one from Hamilton) was there, and called for calm after giving a speech for Lamarque, but to no avail. The republican movement was organised by secret societies like the “Friends of the People”, on which the fictional “Friends of ABC” from Les Miserablés is based (their name is a French pun). They raised flags with the famous revolutionary slogan “La Liberté ou la Mort” (“Liberty or Death”), and violence broke out between them and government troops. The insurrectionists put up barricades and claimed parts of the city. Fighting killed hundreds on each side, but the rebels were outnumbered and eventually defeated. In the aftermath, they were portrayed as an extremist minority, and the republicans would not have a true revolution until 1848 – but that’s a whole other story.
  • Javert is the antagonist of Les Miserablés, a guard at the prison from which Jean Valjean escapes, and later a police inspector in the town where Valjean has made a new life as mayor; he is the one who realises Valjean’s true identity, and becomes obsessed with bringing him “to justice”. In the end, Valjean offers to surrender to Javert, but Javert is overcome with confusion and regret when he realises the brutal criminal he’s hunted for so long is actually a compassionate man seeking to do what’s right, and unable to reconcile the law with his morals, drowns himself. In the famous musical adaptation of the story, he is changed little from the character in the book. He was perhaps most famously played on stage – in English at least – by Australian actor and former Playschool presenter Philip Quast, while in the 2012 film version of the stage musical, he is played by another Australian, Russell Crowe. Quast’s vocals are legendary, but Crowe’s were less well received, though it should be noted that the film was unusual for a musical in that the actors’ singing performances were recorded live on set rather than mimed along to studio recordings, as is usual practice. (It wasn’t the first film to do this, but it was a big deal at the time.)
  • Findthee Swing is described in the book as “a small, thin figure” and “a pale man with the screwed-up eyes of a pet rat.” Considerably more attention is given to the way he moves, which is summed up with the sentence: “There was no rhythm to the man.”
  • Corporal “Mayonnaise” Quirke is here kicked out of the Night Watch by Keel/Vimes, sent to join the Day Watch instead. Along with Sergeant Knock and Ned Coates he’s part of Carcer’s troop who attempt to capture John Keel towards the end of the book, though his exact level of participation in the fighting is not noted – presumably he is wounded or flees during the first ambush by the Night Watch, before Ned Coates changes sides. He remains in the Day Watch, and by the time of Guards! Guards! has been promoted to its Captain – an equivalent rank to Vimes, but much more prestigious. During the events of Men at Arms, Captain Quirke wears his obvious racism on his sleeve, arresting an innocent troll for the murder of a dwarf, starting riots across the city. The Night Watch continue to investigate the crime, leading to them being told to stand down; Quirke is the one sent to take the Watch’s weapons, and thinks that once Vimes is retired the watches will be combined under his command. When Carrot later forms a citizen’s militia, Quirke arrives to stop him, but Carrot announces he is relieving Quirke of command and knocks him out cold with a single punch, much to everyone’s delight. Quirke is never mentioned again, the Day Watch being dissolved and merged into a single Watch under the command of the newly promoted Vimes.
  • Winsborough Knock is the duty sergeant of the old Night Watch, a new character in this book. He is shown to be a thoroughly dirty copper, known to accept bribes and also attempting to frame Keel after he is demoted below him. He is also a coward, dropping his weapons and running away from the fighting at Treacle Mine Road.
  • As noted in #Pratchat51, Pratchett was officially diagnosed in 2007 with Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA – a rarer form of Alzheimer’s), announcing it publicly on the 11th of December that year, slightly more than five years after the publication of Night Watch. The earliest he and his close friends and family realised something was up was in 2006, though they would retroactively trace his symptoms back as far as 2005. Perhaps his official biography will shed light on whether he had any personal experience of dementia in others, or otherwise why it so often comes up in his work well before his own diagnosis. See also our episode about Johnny and the Dead.
  • “The powers that be” – meaning a group or organisation etc that has authority – dates back to at least the sixteenth century, where it appeared in the Tyndale Bible, the first in English to be mass-produced via printing press, and the first in Modern English to be translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, rather than from later Latin translations. The phrase features in Romans 13:1, which states that “There is no power but of God. The powers that be, are ordained of God.” This wording was preserved with only minor changes in the later King James Bible, still the main English Bible used in the world today, and from there into common usage. These days its probably best known from the Public Enemy song “Fight the Power”, whose chorus is a repetition of the title followed by “We’ve got to fight the powers that be”. Ben learned it there, but also from its usage in the TV series Angel, where the titular vampire with a soul and his team of demon hunters use it as a euphemism for the entities aligned with good which grant them visions and other powers. In the series the name is capitalised The Powers That Be, and sometimes abbreviated (as in real life) to TPTB.
  • The seamstress who is actually a seamstress is Miss Battye, aka “Sandra the Real Seamstress”. While played for laughs in the Discworld, “seamstress” has been a euphemism for sex worker on Roundworld for centuries – there’s a pun along these lines in Shakespeare’s Henry V, for example. As usual, though, Terry has done a deep dive into history and based his jokes on something much more specific. As noted in a great Twitter thread by writer Gabrielle Kent, Men at Arms features a gag where the census finds that seamstresses in the Ankh-Morpork docks vastly outnumbered needles. This is a reference to a real occurrence in Seattle in the late nineteenth century, where a census revealed 2,700 seamstresses in one small part of the city; they were, of course, sex workers. The city, on the edge of bankruptcy after closing down many of the vice industries which had previously paid it big taxes, worked out a deal with the sex workers that they pay a $10 per week “sewing machine tax”, solving the city’s revenue problems and allowing the seamstresses to continue working without interference. (Thanks to Stevonnie Ross for their corrections to this note!)
  • Dibbler’s full name is given as Claud Maximillian Overton Transpire Dibbler in Making Money, making his failure to coin his own nickname even weirder. While the phrase is most associated with Dibbler, though, he’s surely not the only salesman to have used it, so it’s also possible that in the original timeline Keel might have heard the phrase somewhere else and passed it on in the same way as Vimes does here, without having got it from future Dibbler. (And it’s also possible that Dibbler changed his name in order to allow him to legally be CMOT Dibbler, which is probably useful for brand recognition purposes.)
  • If you want to learn more about the militarisation of police and armed police response to peaceful protest, this 2020 article from The Conversation is a good starting point. While its most often discussed in the context of the US, it’s also been happening here in Australia for years, as noted in this ABC article from 2019. Protests around the time of the book’s publication included huge ones in early 2003 against the war in Iraq, which were held around the world…and soundly ignored by most of the involved governments.
  • You can hear more about Pyramids and the “Assassin’s School Days” section at the start of the book, in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • Vimes does indeed tell Madam Roberta his thoughts about her motives for supporting the change of Patrician; he can see Lord Winder and his associates are bad for business, and tells her he doesn’t want to join her revolution. Vetinari is hidden in the room and watches the whole exchange.
  • In the Batman comics, the young Bruce Wayne spent years travelled the world training with martial artists, detectives and trackers in order to become the ultimate crime fighter. A good use of his fortune? Probably not, but it has given us some great stories. The recent series Batman: The Knight revisits some of this time of his youth, and you can read more about his mentors in this DC Comics article.
  • Vimes contributions to the Widows and Orphans fund are a plot point in Men at Arms, when Angua discovers why Vimes never has any money. His notebook has many names of women and how much money he gives them; it turns out they’re all widows and orphans of dead Watchmen.
  • For more on Pratchett’s love of Dickens, see #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, our episode discussing his Dickens pastiche Dodger.
  • As quoted in the Annotated Pratchett File, Pratchett described the ginger beer trick like this: “To save debate running wild: I’ve heard this attributed to the Mexican police as a cheap way of getting a suspect to talk and which, happily, does not leave a mark. The carbonated beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. Hint: expanding bubbles, and the sensitivity of the sinuses. I seem to recall a brief shot of something very like this in the movie Traffic.” Traffic is a 2000 Stephen Soderburgh movie about the illegal drug trade. In the scene Pratchett mentions, a killer who worked for the Tijuana Cartel is tortured by police officers who mix soda water and chilli powder and put it up his nose.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about the end of The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
  • Lord Ronald Rust appears in primarily in Jingo, but also crops up regularly as a typically awful example of Ankh-Morpork’s aristocracy, including in Men at Arms, The Fifth Elephant, Monstrous Regiment and Snuff.
  • We’ve previously mentioned sitcom character Hyacinth “it’s pronounced Bouquet” Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances many times, including in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer,” #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
  • We know a little more now about the likely origins of “All the Little Angels”, thanks to reddit user armcie! On the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup in November 2002, Pratchett was asked about the song, and said he based it on one he could only vaguely remember from his youth; to quote the man himself: “consensus of opinion is that it may be a WW1 trench song which became an early version of what are now known as ‘Rugby songs.’ Whatever the tune, it should be simple and swing along. it’s only ‘sad’ in context.”
    Armcie also found that Terry seems to have asked folk song expert Steve Roud about the original song not long before the book’s publication; Steve hadn’t heard of it, but put out word for more info. Jacob B, in this old forum thread from the Mudcat folk and blues website, had the closest answer: a song sung to the tune of the German children’s song “O du lieber Augustin” (“Oh, you dead Augustin”), which puns “ascend” and “arse-end”, and has very similar lyrics.
    You might not know the name of that German song, but you’ve almost certainly heard the tune, as its been re-used by dozens of songs, mostly for children, since it was published around 1800. In Australia or the UK, you might know the Scottish-themed “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?”, while American versions include “The More We Get Together” and “Willy Had a Goldfish”. Most likely, though, you’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons featuring the song “Hail to the Bus Driver”, which seems to be a genuine American schoolyard song using the tune.
    In any case, “O du lieber Augustin” is in 3/4 time, so it’s not much use as a marching song – it’s clearly not the tune used on the Discworld. But it does seem a likely contender for the song Terry remembered from his youth. Terry’s quote above suggests he had no specific tune in mind for the song Dickson and the others sing, though, so feel free to make up your own. Thanks again, armcie!
    Here are the lyrics to the possible inspiration for “All the Little Angels”:
All the little angels ascend up to heaven
All the little angels ascend up on high
Which end up?
Ascend up.
Which end up?
Ascend up.
All the little angels ascend up on high
  • There are multiple recordings of the more upbeat version of “All the Little Angels” on YouTube, all based on the arrangement by Sunday Comes Afterwards. It’s not a million miles away from “O du lieber Augustin“, but definitely its own thing. Here are the links:
    • Sunday Comes Afterwards – All the Little Angels: their version is a simple demo of the tune they devised, with ukelele and vocals. The arrangement is also available as sheet music via flat.io. Released in March 2018.
    • DJ Boogie – All the little angels (how do they rise up): this version from is the most “music with rocks in” of the three. The video also contains numerous references to the book. Released in May 2020. (Boogie is clearly a fan; he has a YouTube list of several Discworld tunes, including a very funny filk of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” written to fans, and a parody of “A Few of My Favourite Things” rewritten to be a list of Abominations Unto Nuggan.)
    • Hate Kills – All the Little Angels: from a parody duo based in Devon, this version features acoustic guitar and some lovely harmonies. Released in May 2021. (They also do a great a cappella version of “The Hedgehog Song“.)
  • Another, very different version of “All the Little Angels” is by US-based musician Genviel. It’s not trying to be the song sung by the characters in the book, but uses the Little Angels chorus to make a song referencing the events of the Glorious 25th of May and more generally being critical of war. You can find “All the Little Angels, Night Watch & Terry Pratchett Tribute feat. Marcello Vieira” as the final track on Genviel’s 2019 album “Chronicles of a Collapse”, available on their website as well as Soundcloud, YouTube music and more.
  • Stevonnie Ross – Sunday Comes Afterwards themselves! – contacted us to let us know about another arrangement of “All the Little Angels” they thought our listeners might enjoy. This one is from Discworld-themed Celtic/German folk band “The Band with Folk In”, and definitely has a more “authentic folk music” kind of feel – especially the way they end. You can listen to it here on YouTube, and find some of their other songs there too; many of them are Discworld-themed “filks” – traditional or classic songs (including popular Tik-Tok sea shanty “The Wellerman”, and the Beatles’ “Let It Be”) with new, nerdy lyrics.
  • One more for the road, added after the fact: community choir Liber Chorus recorded another very different choral version of “All the Little Angels”. We can imagine this might be how it might be sung many years after the fact in a temple on the Glorious 25th, by any religious folks who remembered that day. It’s certainly not how the Watch members would have sung it at the time, but it is worth a listen; you can find a video of the song on Youtube, released in early July, 2022. The video shows members of the choir, but also features some gorgeous illustrations of some of the participants from the barricades of the Glorious Revolution.

More notes for this episode 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, Mustrum Ridcully, Nadia Bailey, Vetinari, Vimes

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

8 March 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

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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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