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Nanny Ogg

#Pratchat48 Notes and Errata

08/10/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”, featuring guest Benjamin Riley, discussing the 26th Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.

(To avoid any confusion, in these notes we’ve referred to our guest this episode as “Guest Ben”, and our co-host as “our Ben”, which has the delightful side effect of making it sound like he’s part of the Ogg clan.)

  • The episode title is a riff on the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, featured on their 1967 concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While long rumoured to be about hallucinations brought on by the use of psychotropic drugs – in large part because the title coincidentally includes the acronym LSD – it was actually inspired by an illustration made by John’s young son, Julian Lennon, which he described using the phrase.
  • Guest Ben and Liz used to have “Time Travel Wednesdays” when they worked together, but our Ben’s brain immediately time travels to Tuesdays, presumably for the sake of alliteration. We apologise for any confusion caused.
  • Craig Hildebrand-Burke was indeed our guest when we discussed Jingo back in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“. (This is one we’d like to revisit with a bit more sensitivity to some things in our blindspot last time.)
  • Guest Ben’s favourite Discworld period (which he points out is the same as previous guest Craig’s) runs from Jingo (the twenty-first Discworld novel, published in November 1997; see #Pratchat27) to Thud (the thirty-fourth, published in September 2005; probably coming in 2022). This period also includes the first three Science of Discworld books, the first three younger readers books (The Amazing Maurice and the first two Tiffany Aching books), and the introduction of Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal. It’s also notable that Pratchett didn’t publish any non-Discworld books during this period. (Our Ben feels that thematically and tonally this run begins slightly earlier, with either Maskerade or Feet of Clay, meaning it also includes Hogfather.)
  • Cigars are most associated with His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch and Duke of Ankh, though in Guards! Guards!, when he was still just the low-paid Captain of the disregarded Night Watch, he rolls his own cigarettes. By Men at Arms he has moved on to “cheap” cigars, and in Feet of Clay “thin” ones which he carries in a case (or at least he did until Nobby stole the case). He sometimes lights them using swamp dragons, a habit which annoys Sybil. He’s not the only cigar smoker; Nobby is plied with cigars in Feet of Clay, and Nanny Ogg also indulges, though this is only seen briefly in Wyrd Sisters when she’s also drinking in the pub.
  • “That X-Men movie that fixes that crap X-Men movie” is X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014; dir. Bryan Singer), a film adaptation of the epic comic book time travel story which turned the intended reboot film X-Men: First Class (2011; dir. Matthew Vaughn) into a prequel of the original X-Men movie trilogy. The film opens in a future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction, so Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is psychically sent back in time to prevent the murder which sent history down that leg of the trousers of time. He is successful, and when he returns to the present, the timeline resembles that of the original trilogy – except that the events of the near-universally hated X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, dir. Brett Ratner) haven’t happened, as quickly established by the inclusion of characters either only appearing or killed off in that film.
  • The idea of the white face and the red nose – named after two styles of clown makeup, and expounded upon in Eric Idle’s sci-fi novel The Road to Mars – is a characterisation of comedic duos in which one, the “white face”, is serious and has (or assumes) a higher level or importance than the other, the buffoon or “red nose”. As well as the obvious surface level, comedy is often derived from the red nose puncturing the white face’s pompous attitude. Colon and Nobby are in some ways the archetypal Discworld example, but there are many others. In theatre terms, the white face is said to be a “high status” character, while the red nose is “low status”.
  • There are two kinds of big wheel that circus performers roll around in, but the one our Ben is thinking of is a German wheel: two big metal hoops connected by metal struts with stirrups and handholds. They were invented for – and are still used in – gymnastics. (The other kind of circus wheel is a single metal hoop called a Cyr wheel.)
  • Wallace and Gromit are the stop-motion animated stars several short and feature films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Wallace (voiced primarily by Peter Sallis) is a well-meaning, eccentric and talented inventor with a passion for cheese, while Gromit is his supremely competent and loyal dog. The success of their first film, 1989’s A Grand Day Out, led to several sequels and spin-offs, including the television and film series Shaun the Sheep.
  • We’re afraid you’ll have to get used to the term “timey-wimey” during this episode, since it just feels so apt for a book with little in the way of actual time travel, but much in the way of time-related weirdness. Its origin is Doctor Who, specifically the Tenth Doctor’s explanation of causality in the third season episode “Blink”. We gave the full quote in our notes for #Pratchat35, but here we’ll add that in the fiftieth anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, when the Eleventh Doctor uses the phrase and the War Doctor (an earlier, grumpier incarnation) finds it preposterous, the Tenth Doctor pretends he’s never heard it.
  • Jeremy Clarkson started out as a journalist, but is best known now as a television personality. He was one of many hosts of the original version of Top Gear, the BBC Two motoring show which ran from 1977 to 2001, and after it was cancelled devised a new format for the show which debuted in 2002 – the year after Thief of Time was published, so he was considerably less famous then (though still pretty well-known in the UK). He was one of the new version’s original hosts, alongside Richard Hammond; they were joined by James May from the second series and remained the main hosting team for over a decade. Even before the new Top Gear, Clarkson attracted criticism for making bigoted remarks, but these only increased in frequency as he grew more famous, with a series of controversies over comments on- and off-air that ran the gamut of anti-environmentalism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and racism. (There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to controversies on Top Gear, most of them involving Clarkson.) Clarkson generally dismisses these criticisms, but also seems to court controversy deliberately to increase his fame, stating on multiple occasions that he may not believe all the things he says. By 2014, however, he was on a “final warning” from the BBC, and in 2015, after he verbally abused and then physically assaulted one of the show’s producers while on location (ostensibly because he wasn’t served the meal he wanted), the BBC cut the show’s season short and declined to renew Clarkson’s contract, despite a petition from fans with a million signatures. Hammond and May left the show with him, which continued with various new presenters, including Friends and Episodes star Matt leBlanc. Clarkson’s new show with Hammond and May, The Grand Tour, was basically Top Gear in all but name, and began on Amazon Prime in 2016, where he now also hosts Clarkson’s Farm, a show about the farm he owns in the Cotswolds, not far from Pratchett’s home in Wiltshire. He’s still very famous in the UK, where he has hosted their version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? since 2018 and makes various other television appearances – though not on the BBC.
  • Lobsang is a favourite name of Pratchett’s, used most prominently here and as the name of a major character in The Long Earth books, though it crops up many times in the novels. The earliest Lobsang is the Abbott Mort deals with on his first solo round as Death in Mort, though his name is only mentioned once – the rest of the time he’s just “the Abbott” – so don’t feel bad if you missed it. Another early appearance is near the end of Guards! Guards! (See also the note below about knowledge coming from a long way away.) The name is a fairly specific reference to “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa”, author of several books about the spiritual and paranormal, most famously The Third Eye in 1956. He was later revealed to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber from Devon. For more on his weird story, listen to our discussion of The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, or look him up yourself; you’ll be amazed.
  • The tick of the Universe more or less exists in the real world in the concept of Planck time, the “briefest physically meaningful span of time”, which is about 5.39×10−44 seconds. According to an article from 2020, the briefest time so far measured is 247 zeptoseconds (or 10-21 seconds), so even the most accurate atomic clocks can’t duplicate Jeremy’s feat. (Assuming the same length of tick in Discworld space is dubious, but if true, the glass clock is approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more accurate than the best atomic clock.)
  • Susan Sto-Helit is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sto-Helit – Death’s one-time apprentice Mort and adopted daughter Ysabell. Their story is told in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort (see #Pratchat2), while Susan first appeared as a teenager in Soul Music (#Pratchat19) before returning at more-or-less the same age she is here in Hogfather (#Pratchat26). In the animated Soul Music she was voiced by Debra J Gillet (who also provided the voice of Grimma in the stop-motion version of Truckers), and in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, she was played by Michelle Dockery (now best known for her starring role as Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey).
  • Montessori and Steiner schools are two different alternative models for educating children and young people.
    • Montessori education, developed by Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952) around the turn of the twentieth century, focuses on self-directed learning based on natural human development. Its basis is that children naturally want to learn, but formal education prevents them from doing so in the way that’s best for them; Montessori schools are usually primary schools and allow students to pursue the activities and subjects they find most interesting, usually through playful means. Many aspects of Montessori’s work have been adopted into mainstream teaching as well.
    • Steiner education, also known as Waldorf education, is based on the work of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher (among many other things). Steiner’s “anthroposophy” teaches that humans can better understand the spiritual world through personal development, though the spiritual aspects of the philosophy are not always emphasised in Steiner education. Its main focus is holistic teaching, believing that students will do best if they develop their intellectual skills alongside artistic and practical ones. Steiner schools use a developmental model that runs from infancy through to secondary education, and have become increasingly popular; they are now the largest independent educational movement in the world, and have forty-five schools across Australia.
  • Professor Valerie Felicity Frizzle, PhD, originally known as Ms Frizzle or “the Frizz”, is the teacher in The Magic School Bus books by Joanna Cole, later developed into television series and videogames. The titular bus could travel safely to just about anywhere in time and space, allowing Ms Frizzle to teach her students about various scientific concepts. Cole died in 2020, the year a Netflix continuation, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, debuted. In the sequel, the original Ms Frizzle gets her doctorate and passes the school bus on to her younger sister, Miss Fiona Felicity Frizzle. In both the television and Netflix series, Valerie Frizzle is played by Lily Tomlin; Fiona was played by Kate McKinnon (of Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters fame).
  • Lu-Tze and the History Monks first appear in 1992’s Small Gods (discussed in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“). They are described as the caretakers of history, keepers of the “the books from which history is derived”. Lu-Tze is sent by the 493rd Abbot – the same one recently reincarnated in this book – to Omnia, where “things must be…carefully observed“. Lu-Tze mentions in Small Gods that he hasn’t been to Omnia in seven hundred years, which almost agrees with his age of eight hundred in this book, set about a century later. By the end of that book he has “patched up” history such that Brutha does not die, avoiding a century of terrible warfare; Brutha instead lives for most of the intervening century and reforms Omnianism. This suggests Lu-Tze’s mission to Omnia was one of the things that needed fixing as a result of the first glass clock; Igors are long-lived enough that this Igor’s grandfather could certainly have built the previous clock a century earlier, though it also seems that the History Monks are able to leave their valley at just about any point in history they choose. Lu-Tze will return in Night Watch.
  • Lu-Tze’s name is derived from Loazi (老子), author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism, who lived in the 6th century BCE. Loazi – also romanised as Lao Tze or Loa Tzu – is actually an honorific title meaning “venerable master”, and there is some debate about who he was, or even if such a single person truly existed, or was just a pen name for multiple authors of the Tao Te Ching. Listener Felix let us known that Lu-Tze might be an intentional bilingual pun, as Lǔ is a Mandarin word meaning “foolish” or “crude”, making Lu-Tze a “Foolish/Crude Master”.
  • While we may not have been able to spot many references to specific kung fu movies, there’s at least one clear reference to the 1972 American TV series Kung Fu. When Lu-Tze takes on Lobsang as an apprentice, he tells him: ‘Word One is, you don’t call me “master” and I don’t name you after some damn insect.’ In Kung Fu, the main character Caine – played by white American actor David Carradine, who was cast over a host of potential Asian American actors, including Bruce Lee – is a Shaolin monk wandering the Old West looking for his brother. In flashbacks to his training, he refers to he teacher as “Master”, who calls Caine “Grasshopper”.
  • We previously talked about The Karate Kid (1984, dir. John G Avildsen) in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Mr Miyagi is the elderly Japanese neighbour of Danny LaRusso, who asks him to teach him karate so he can protect himself from the bullies at his new school. Miyagi sets Danny chores which are revealed to have taught him some basic movements essential to karate.
  • We’ve not yet nailed down which kung fu movie with the famous moving shot Liz is thinking about; suffice to say it’s not called The Tenth Dojo. If you know the one, please get in touch!
  • If you want to get a handle on the history of martial arts films, The Conversation recently published a great article by Joyleen Christensen: “From Bruce Lee to Shang-Chi: a short history of the Kung Fu film in cinema”.
  • Speaking of kung fu cinema, one of the many things that inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars was the Master-Apprentice relationship in such films. Thus Jedi ideally begin training at a young age, and when they reach the rank of “Padawan” they are apprenticed to a Jedi Master, travelling with them and learning from them until the Jedi Council deems them worthy of the rank of Jedi Knight, at which point they have finished their apprenticeship.
  • The previous joke about people thinking wisdom has to come from far away appears in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12), where Magrat is reading The Path of the Scorpion, a book of which she is suspicious partly because the author – “Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler” – has an address in Ankh-Morpork. (The author is clearly CMOT Dibbler, leading us to wonder why the name “Lobsang” is apparently well-known on the Disc – and why Newgate Ludd ends up with it…) The full quote of the joke appears below (though see also the following note):

It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.*

Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)
  • Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite appears in Moving Pictures, where she is a “little old lady” seamstress in Ankh-Morpork who becomes a costume designer in Holy Wood for Century of the Fruitbat Moving Pictures. She is also mentioned in the footnote to the quote above from Witches Abroad, which contains the first appearance of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, in which monks travel from the Hub mountains to hear her wisdom, though they can’t understand her. It would seem Lu-Tze was the first of these monks, since by the time others come to visit her she is hitting them with a broom and telling them to push off, rather than taking them in as lodgers. Her address is consistently given in all the books as 3 Quirm Street, an unusually specific bit of continuity that leads us to wonder if she is an obscure reference of some sort? (Despite that attention to detail, her surname is spelt “Cosmopolite” in all the books except Thief of Time, where its spelt “Cosmopilite”; the reasons for this are a mystery.)
  • Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time”, and thus experiences his life somewhat out of order. We previously discussed it in #Pratchat26. A film adaptation was made in 1972; Vonnegut was very happy with it.
  • Monstrous Regiment is the thirty-first Discworld novel, published in 2003. We’ll cover it in a future episode, but listener Steavie urged Guest Ben (and the rest of us) to listen to Pratchett’s interview for the Wheeler Centre in 2014 (now available only YouTube), which we previously linked to in #Pratchat26 when the interviewer, Michael Williams, was our guest. Pratchett talks (from around the 31:30 mark) about researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”. (In The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Marc Burrows identifies this research as taking place in “queer-focussed bookshops”, though no specific ones are named.) This seems a pretty good indication that he knew what he was writing, at least on some level.
  • The gay character in Unseen Academicals, Pepe the dwarf fashion designer, was quite definitely intended by Pratchett to be gay; in the same 2014 interview linked above, Pratchett describes Pepe being “as gay as a tree full of monkeys”. (We’ve linked to it here at the start of the question where he says this.)
  • Of course there’s no way for us to know if Pratchett had many out gay friends, but he certainly met a great number of queer and trans fans, many of whom have shared stories via social media that show him to have been kind and empathetic towards them.
  • Many of the stories from the note above were reported in response to the “gender critical” incident, which we won’t give too much oxygen. (If you need some background on what “trans” means, guest Fury gives a little 101 in #Pratchat29.) The short version is that a couple of vocal anti-trans commentators, angry that Maragret Atwood had identified herself as a trans ally, got fed up with Neil Gaiman also being clearly pro-trans. So they suggested on Twitter that Terry Pratchett was more “acquainted with reality” than Gaiman and that the Witches books showed Pratchett knew “what female is and means in the world”. Twitter’s considerable number of Terry fans – including his daughter Rhianna – of course found this absurd, given the way he writes about gender roles in books like Equal Rites, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant and Monstrous Regiment. That didn’t stop commentators claiming that we “couldn’t know” what he thinks as he wasn’t around to ask…though we reckon his closest friends and family might have a pretty good idea?
  • The idea of consensual reality is that the universe conforms to people’s beliefs. Wikiality is sort of the opposite idea – that people have a common idea of what’s true that might not align with objective reality. The word was coined by Stephen Colbert on the July 6, 2006 episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report; his right-wing persona, in his “The Wørd” segment, praised Wikipedia for being editable, meaning that it could be changed to reflect “truthiness”, Colbert’s parody of terms used by conservative politicians to deny facts they found inconvenient. He defined the word “wikiality” to mean “truth by consensus”, and encouraged his viewers to edit Wikipedia to change “facts”, making people believe things that weren’t true. This resulted in a whole thing where people edited multiple articles on Wikipedia to suggest the world’s elephant population had tripled…
  • We’ve previously mentioned alt.fan.pratchett, the newsgroup from the 1990s where Pratchett occasionally answered fan questions; see the notes for #Pratchat42 for more information.
  • Listener Vlad pointed out to us that there is indeed an aviator on the Discworld – Hamish, of the Nac Mac Feegle, is referred to as “Hamish the aviator” by Tiffany in Chapter 7 of The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32). While Tiffany presumably learned the word from her cover-to-cover read of the dictionary, in our Ben’s defence, it’s a bit weird that it’s in the dictionary if it’s a term invented by or for the Feegles – though as it comes from the same root word as “Avian”, it certainly makes sense for Hamish to use it, since he does his flying on birds! (We’ve since realised that this also applies to Corporal Buggy Swires, gnome recruit in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, who rides a heron in Night Watch.) All that said, in the same chapter Tiffany tells Hamish about a paratrooper toy she had as a younger child, so perhaps we just have to accept that things which were singular oddities before powered flight on Roundworld have somehow gained enough notice to become talked of frequently and affect language on the Disc…
  • Despite it being generally believed that he did, Terry did not cover nuclear reactors as a journalist; a case of wikiality in action! As Marc Burrows clarifies in his biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Terry quit journalism in 1979 (before he sold his first big novel) and took a job – mostly for the money – in public relations, specifically for the South-West office of the Central Electricity Generating Board (or CEGB). The job wasn’t meant to revolve around nuclear power, but the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US – causing the evacuation of 140,000 people – happened three weeks before he started, and the region covered by his office of the CEGB included three of Britain’s nuclear power plants. So of course he spent most of his time responding to public and media fears of meltdowns.
  • Lifetimers, mentioned only in passing in this book, are the hourglass-like devices which Death uses to determine when people on the Disc will die. Everyone has one, even the gods and – in Reaper Man at least – Death himself. While Death doesn’t always seem to need one – they’re not often referred to in his cameos to collect souls – Mort is taught to take with him the lifetimers of those he needs to visit in Mort, so our speculation that they’re required might be correct. (Death clearly has somewhere in his robe where he can hide them…)
  • Q – with the help of his department, Q Branch – is the boffin responsible for James Bond’s famous gadgets, like the car that could turn into a submarine, various watches with electromagnets, lasers and knockout gas, and a tiny rocket launcher disguised as a cigarette (no really) – plus of course dozens of different things that could explode. The character’s codename is short for “Quartermaster”, a military term which in the army refers to a senior soldier in charge of equipment and supplies. Q is mentioned but never appears in the original novels; the closest equivalent is Major Boothroyd, an armourer who appears in Dr. No, the sixth novel. Desmond Llewellyn appeared as Boothroyd in the film version of Dr. No, and the producers decided to keep him on as Q in subsequent films, merging the two characters together (or at least making audiences think they’re the same person). Llewellyn’s Q appears in seventeen of the Bond films, in scenes where he would show off gadgets to Bond and often have to remark “Oh do pay attention, 007”. He announced his plans to retire in 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which also introduced his assistant “R”, played by John Cleese, who took over as Q in the following film, 2002’s Die Another Day. The Daniel Craig Bond films feature a new younger Q, played by Ben Wishaw, who appears in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
  • Desmond Llewellyn died in a car accident in December 1999, a few weeks after the release of The World is Not Enough, while on his way to a book signing. Thief of Time was published about eighteen months later, in May 2001, so Pratchett may have started writing it while Llewellyn was still alive. Terry’s quote on the matter from the Annotated Pratchett File is: “As I wrote it I could [hear Llewellyn’s voice], too. Qu will be back — unlike, alas, Desmond Llewellyn.” (Qu did come back, in Night Watch.)
  • The boffin with the exploding gadgets in Night Terrace – the time travel radio comedy co-produced, co-written and co-starring Ben – is Horatio Gray (played by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen). He appears primarily in the second season episode “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”, and is the creation of Night Terrace co-creator Lee Zachariah. (You can find out more about the show at nightterrace.com.)
  • Guest Ben’s summary of the theory of relativity is pretty much spot on: special relativity was Einstein’s explanation for the speed of light, which had been observed in experiments to always be the same, even under conditions where you’d expect it to be different. The theory tells us that time and distance are not fixed, but are relative, in the same way we already though of motion as being relative. “History” – in this case, our personal perception of time – has to “give” to keep the speed of light constant in those circumstances. (General relativity, which came later, explained how special relativity interacted with gravity by combining space and time into a single set of dimensions we now know as “spacetime”. It describes gravity as a curving of spacetime near massive objects.) Of note is that the idea of time and distance being relative had already been worked out mathematically by Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, ten years before Einstein, but he thought this was an abstract mathematical model, not a description of the way the physical universe worked. (This is why the equations involved in translating time and location information between frames of reference – between you on the surface of the Earth and a satellite in orbit, for example – are called Lorentz transformations.)
  • We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s love of videogames in #Pratchat28 (about Only You Can Save Mankind) and #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum, which includes a pretty blatant reference to Tomb Raider). Of note: he was a big fan of roleplaying games too; his special favourite for a long time was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, largely because of the modding community of fans who create “mods” (modifications) that add in extra stuff, like being able to make a living from crafting, more realistic weather, even rainbows. You can read an out-take from a radio interview where he talked about this stuff on The Author Hour in 2009.
  • “Man not of woman born” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Lord Macbeth is given a prophecy by three witches that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”. It later turns out that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” – i.e. born via Caesarean section – which apparently doesn’t count as being “of woman born”. Bit of a long bow, if you ask us. Probably a closer analogue to what we were talking about was the prophecy in The Lord of the Rings, in which it is said of the mighty Witch-king, the Lord of the Nazgūl (the Ring-wraiths who serve Sauron), that “not by the hand of man shall he fall”. He ends up being killed instead by Merry (a hobbit) and Éowyn (a woman) at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. (This is the big fight between orcs and men at the city of Minas Tirith; it appears in the third book and film, The Return of the King.)
  • Reservoir Dogs (1992) was the first feature film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. In the film, six men participating in a bank heist refer to each other only by the pseudonyms Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink. In the scene where they get their aliases, they argue about the allocation of names, which are given out by the organiser. (Content warning for the clip: it’s not gentle language, and the crims are casually homophobic.)
  • Guest Ben talks about Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, likening the incarnated Auditors to monsters from his era (perhaps the Whispermen from The Name of the Doctor), and the time in the museum to the the end of Matt Smith’s first season – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.
  • Was Pratchett a Doctor Who fan? Not really…though he did enjoy the show. Writing for SFX magazine in 2010, he complained that it “breaks most of the laws of narrative”, and he derided the modern show as being powered by “makeitupasyougoalongeum”, a sentiment he repeated when writing the introduction to Behind the Sofa, a 2012 collection of celebrity reminiscences about the program published to raise money for Alzheimers research. (It was updated and expanded in 2013.) He did confess, in the SFX article, that despite his misgivings he continued to watch: “After all, when you’ve had your moan you have to admit that it is very, very entertaining, with its heart in the right place, even if its head is often in orbit around Jupiter.” (You can find some excerpts from the SFX article in this piece at The Guardian; Behind the Sofa is still available as an eBook.)
  • Both Death and the Doctor having a granddaughter named Susan is likely a deliberate decision on Pratchett’s part, given that in the introduction to Behind the Sofa (see above) he starts by saying “I was there in the beginning,” and refers to “that strange grandchild and rare teachers who took everything in their stride”. This is Susan, and her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the first humans to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS.
  • The Horsemen of Good Omens are much more closely based on the Biblical account, inasmuch as that’s possible – Revelations doesn’t actually have that much to say about them, beyond the signature items that identify each of them, and the colours of their horses. Notably in these global pandemic times, the Pestilence of Good Omens quit the position in 1936, “muttering about penicillin”, though in the same paragraph his successor Pollution seems to think that was premature: “If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…” (For more on all this, see #Pratchat15.)
  • The Horsemen of the Apocralypse previously rode out – or at least tried to – in Sourcery, when the magic unleashed by Coin, the Disc’s first sourcerer in millennia, released the ice giants from their prison and they rode towards Dunmanifestin to end the world, in a cataclysm more inspired by Norse mythology than the Bible. On that occasion, a certain amateur hairdresser, her barbarian sidekick, and the Seriph of Al Khali stole War, Pestilence and Famine’s horses, rather putting the kibosh on the whole thing. (See #Pratchat3 for more on Sourcery.)
  • There are still many thousands of deaths in hospitals caused by lack of hand washing. As recently as 2018 the World Health Organisation put the figure at up to 30,000 women and 400,000 babies every year from preventable infections, such as puerperal sepsis, though those numbers also include deaths due to lack of sanitation or clean water. It’s easy to forget that in the majority world (i.e. most of it outside the relatively affluent nations in places like North America, Western Europe and Oceania), those things aren’t guaranteed even in hospital facilities, and even health workers without consistent access to clean water and soap need to work at getting into the habit. Cleanliness in general was championed by many before the germ model of disease was accepted, including Florence Nightingale, though she apparently fudged her stats to push her case. The generally accepted pioneer of hand-washing in particular, though, was Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 briefly convinced doctors working with pregnant women to wash their hands after conducting autopsies. It didn’t last…and his story has a sad ending. But you can learn more about the history of hand washing via this episode of NPR’s Short Wave podcast.
  • When our Ben mentions Dirk Gently, he is referring to the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ novels Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Dirk claims to solve mysteries via the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, one manifestation of which is that when he doesn’t know where to go, he follows someone who looks like they know where they’re going. Through this method he claims that, while he might not end up where he wanted to go, he frequently ended up somewhere he needed to be.
  • 100 Story Building is a creative writing centre for young people based in Footscray in Melbourne. Ben has been one of their workshop facilitators since 2016. They primarily work with schools; you can find out more at 100storybuilding.org.au.
  • The Matrix: Resurrections is the upcoming 2021 sequel to the original Matrix trilogy, written and directed by half of the original Matrix creative duo, Lana Wachowski, with Lily’s blessing. In the first teaser trailer, there’s a shot of Keanu Reeves in the bath with a rubber duck on his head – and dedicated listener A’Tuin Sneezed beat our Ben to the punch with this tweet:

@PratchatPodcast @McKenzie_Ben @ElizabethFlux Keanu out here auditioning for Duck Man when the beggars get a spin off 🦆 https://t.co/954q18vG6u

— A’tuin Sneezed (@damethelog) September 10, 2021
  • When Liz says “For Star Wars reasons we’re sending you to different places”, she’s referring to the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in which twins Luke and Leia are sent into “hiding” from their father, Darth Vader. We used scare quotes there because they send Luke to Tattooine (his father’s home planet) to be cared for by his Uncle and Aunt through marriage (on his mother’s side), and Leia to Alderaan, where she’s adopted by Bail Organa, a galactic Senator (and secret Rebellion leader) well-known to Vader’s master, the Emperor. I mean…where else would you send them? Somewhere with no connection to the people trying to protect them, or their actual parents?
  • There are several “fifth Beatles”, but the best known is drummer Pete Best. He was indeed the fifth member of the band then called “The Silver Beatles” (though there had been others in John’s previous band, The Quarrymen). Pete joined John, Paul, George and Stuart (Sutcliffe), four guitarists in need of a drummer, in 1960. After Sutcliffe left, Best remained with the group until he was fired and replaced by Ringo Starr (whom, we’d like to point out, is never referred to as “the sixth Beatle”, which seems a little unfair). We previously talked about Pete in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”. Ronnie Soak, having left under his own steam over “creative differences”, seems to have had the better treatment.
  • The fifth horseman doesn’t appear in a previous footnote, but there are a number of other groups of “four horsemen” of lesser disasters listed in Interesting Times, and Good Omens features “the Other Horsemen” – a bunch of bikies who ride out with the real four, arguing with each other over what their names should be.
  • There are many angels in the book of Revelations of the Christian Bible, though the one most resembling the angel mentioned in Thief of Time is probably the one from chapter 10, in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets. This angel appears to John of Patmos carrying “a little scroll”, and cries out with a lion’s roar; in response, seven thunders utter mysteries to John which he is not allowed to write down (and given what he is allowed to write down, must be pretty wild). The angel then gives the scroll to John and has him eat it, leading to a further vision in chapter 11 before the final trumpet sounds. Note that this is well after the four horsemen, who are introduced upon the opening of the first four of the seven seals, which is before the first trumpet. Revelations is a lot.
  • We’ve previously talked about the cosmic battle of Law versus Chaos in the work of Michael Moorcock in #Pratchat14, #Pratchat29, #Pratchat44 and #Pratchat45. While we don’t know if Pratchett ever corresponded with Moorcock, Moorcock was the editor who published Pratchett’s first professionally published story. See the notes for #Pratchat45 for more info.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, alignment is a declaration of where a character stands in the opposition of the forces of good and evil, and law and chaos. It was much more significant and restrictive in older editions, where it was expected to dictate (or at least match) your character’s behaviour, and where magic could detect what your alignment was: Paladins – holy warriors who had to be on the side of lawful good to be granted their powers – could cast detect evil and determine straight up if someone was evil or not. In modern editions, it’s been described more as a guideline for actions, and the ability to detect alignments has been removed from the game; for example the equivalent spell is now detect evil and good, and it detects only beings that are intrinsically linked to forces of positive and negative energy, like angels, demons and the undead.
  • The Thunderdome – clear inspiration for the Iron Dome dojo in Oi Dong – is the gladiatorial arena featured in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985, dir. George Miller). It is used in the post-apocalyptic settlement of Bartertown to settle disagreements via a battle to the death – “two men enter, one man leaves”, as the crowd chants.
  • Albert is Death’s manservant, a major character in Mort and Hogfather, and a supporting character in Reaper Man and Soul Music, but who is mentioned exactly once in this book. Following the events of Soul Music, Albert has very little real life left to him, so while it’s not surprising he doesn’t take part in Thief of Time, it’s weird not to at least see him briefly in the opening scenes set in Death’s Domain.
  • Ysabell is Susan’s mother, a sixteen-year-old girl rescued and adopted by Death for reasons that are never fully explained. She appears in Mort, and briefly – during scenes set in the past – Soul Music.
  • The other characters we mention towards the end of the podcast are:
    • Angua von Überwald, werewolf member of the watch introduced in Men at Arms (#Pratchat1) and a major supporting character in most subsequent Watch books, especially The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40);
    • Agnes Nitt, a younger witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (#Pratchat17) but is a major character in Maskerade (#Pratchat23) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36); and
    • Adorabelle Dearheart, who runs the Golem Trust in Ankh-Morpork, a major character in the Moist von Lipwig books starting with Going Postal (#Pratchat38).
  • The concept of “substition” also appears in Jingo (see #Pratchat27). Pratchett writes of 71-Hour Ahmed: “He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless were untrue. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.” Rather appropriately for Thief of Time, among the examples of substitions he gives in Jingo is “It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it”.
  • The Doctor’s “pull the trigger, end my life” speech to the sniper occurs in part 2 of the 1988 story The Happiness Patrol. You can find the scene on YouTube.
  • In The Matrix films, “the machines” have enslaved humanity in a simulated reality – a 1999 megacity which forms the titular Matrix. Agents are the machines’ troubleshooting programs which hunt down humans who are resisting the Matrix program; they look like men in black and are stronger and faster than humans. Agent Smith is the main antagonist of the first film; during the sequels he becomes a virus-like entity who threatens to destroy the Matrix itself, something neither machines or humans want. The films also feature other “rogue programs”, intelligent bits of software who escape the machines’ mainframe and live in the Matrix, where they take on the forms of humans or human-like creatures.
  • You can find out more about the OverLondon Project (not to be confused with London Above, London Below or Fallen London) at overlondon.net.
  • The software toy Mountain was developed by Irish artist David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions, the games company founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Monkey Island fame. Originally released in 2014, it received a major 2.0 update in 2018 (at no additional cost). It’s still available on Steam (for Windows and Mac) and for smartphones and tablets. (This discussion has prompted our Ben to reinstall it and have another play with it; while working on these notes, a brain and a bomb embedded themselves in the side of his mountain! Let us know if you check it out too.) The 2017 follow up was Everything, which simulates an entire universe – a bit like Roundworld Project!
  • The main staff of The Ankh-Morpork Times are William de Word, Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto von Schriek, all introduced in The Truth (#Pratchat42). Sacharissa and Otto especially appear in cameo roles in several later books.
  • Pteppic is the protagonist of Pyramids (see #Pratchat5).
  • The 2019 TV show Pennyworth tells the story of how ex-British special forces officer Alfred Pennyworth ends up working for the wealthy Wayne family in America, and is set in an alternate universe in which the Nazis won World War II. (Sigh…there are other alternate universes, right?) Two seasons have been made for the US cable channel ePix, and there’s talk of a third, perhaps for HBO Max. Reports are that it’s…okay, actually?
  • The fates of Greek mythology are the Moirai, last mentioned in #Pratchat36. The version in which they number three is best known; those three are Clotho (spinner in ancient Greek), who spins new threads; Lachesis (alotter), who measures the threads; and Atropos (inevitable), who cuts the threads. Our Ben’s idea of a recycler might be named Nostos, which is Ancient Greek for “returner”.
  • While the cat doesn’t appear in the Chinese “zodiac”, it does appear as the fourth sign in the Vietnamese equivalent, replacing the Chinese rabbit. There are multiple versions of the story Liz mentions; several involve Cat being tricked by Rat, or even Rat just not waking Cat up as requested, explaining their modern day relationship.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Auditors, Ben McKenzie, Ben Riley, Death, Death of Rats, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Lobsang, Lu-Tze, Nanny Ogg, Susan

#Pratchat39 Notes and Errata

08/01/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

  • The episode title was inspired by the fete or fair-like atmosphere of the Witch Trial, and by UK singer David Essex’s album, song and jukebox musical “All the Fun of the Fair”.
  • The Sea and Little Fishes was first published in a promotional “sampler” alongside the The Wood Boy by Raymond E. Feist. Both then appeared in the novella collection Legends, along with other new work by the likes of Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R. R. Martin and Anne McCaffery. At just over 13,500 words, it’s maybe a little short for a novella, but very long for a short story.
  • For more information on the Wurundjeri people, visit the web site of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation.
  • The two-part television adaptation Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was made by British production company The Mob, and first broadcast on Sky1 in the UK on the 17th and 18th of December, 2006. We talked about it and the other Pratchett adaptations to date briefly in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“. We discussed the novel Hogfather back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
  • On the subject of swears appearing early on in the books, Rincewind tells Bravd the Hublander to “bugger off” in The Colour of Magic. “Shit” appears four times in Guards! Guards!, but we couldn’t find any swears in the first ten pages or so; Marc might have been thinking about another book.
  • Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English radio and television writer and novelist, best known for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which…well you know. We’ll probably talk about it in more detail another time.
  • Robert Rankin is another British author of comic fantasy whose books are loosely connected by the (fictional) English village of Brentford, where many of them take place. These kicked off with his first novel, 1981’s The Antipope, part of “The Brentford Trilogy”; he is currently working on the final book of “The Final Brentford Trilogy”, which began with The Lord of the Ring Roads in 2017.
  • Here’s @terryandrob’s tweet about Marc’s book:

It isn’t an official or authorised biography, our lawyers have read it – we haven’t – and although we don’t endorse it, we do wish @20thcenturymarc all the best.

— Terry Pratchett 🇺🇦 (@terryandrob) March 31, 2020
  • If you’re a regular listener then you’re probably familiar with Liz’s history with English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). It’s previously come up in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat, The Amazing Maurice and Johnny and the Bomb. The subject of the forum’s (misplaced) ire was Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine, which revisits the tropes common to her work which we now consider harmful.
  • A quick bit of errata: Enid Blyton was born in East Dulwich, but by 1938 had moved to Beaconsfield, where Pratchett was born, and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. Terry was born in 1948 – twenty years before Blyton’s death in 1968, at the age of 71! They could have met, but it seems like the sort of thing Marc would have discovered when writing his book. The pair had a few other things in common: Blyton was also a workaholic, writing more than 700 books during her career, and also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease towards the end of her life.
  • G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his Father Brown series of mystery stories. He was born in Kensington in London, but moved to Beaconsfield in 1909, by which time he was a successful author.
  • We discussed the Valhalla Cinema Blues Brothers story back in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000) was a British singer/songwriter who is best known to many for her performance on “Fairytale of New York”, a very non-traditional Christmas song performed by The Pogues, produced by her husband of the time, Steve Lilywhite – a probable source for the criminal brothers’ surname in Hogfather? One of her many hits was 1981’s “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the lead single from her debut album Desperate Character. You can see her performing it on YouTube.
  • Pratchett’s first published story was The Hades Business, in which the Devil engages a shady marketing executive named Crucible to advertise Hell. It’s reprinted – with an author’s note full of embarrassment – in A Blink of the Screen, but first appeared in Science Fantasy volume 20, #60 in August 1963 (a few months before the debut of Doctor Who). You can find it online at the Internet Archive, where you can also find Terry’s never-collected second published story Night Dweller in New Worlds volume 49, #156 from November 1965.
  • “Theatre of Cruelty” was the second Discworld short story, written in 1992 for a publisher’s magazine and later collected in The Wizards of Odd in 1996. It features Captain Vimes and Corporal Carrot of the Watch investigating the murder of a children’s entertainer.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is presumably set before Carpe Jugulum, and as discussed about 1,000 words were cut and later repurposed as a scene in that novel. Granny’s worries about her growing power and propensity for darkness in Carpe Jugulum fit in well as a consequence of this story. Tiffany attends her first Witch Trial in her second novel, A Hat Full of Sky, which features the return of several characters from this story including Letice Earwig and the dwarf Zakzak Stronginthearm. We later discussed A Hat Full of Sky in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben’s comment “I’m too old for this shit” is referencing the line made famous by Danny Glover as aging police detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon films, beginning with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Glover has used the line in several other roles and cameo appearances as well.
  • We previously discussed whether Nanny Ogg was the more powerful witch in our Wyrd Sisters episode: #Pratchat6, “Enter Three Wytches” with Elly Squire.
  • Marc is referring to the original 1971 edition of The Carpet People, Pratchett’s first published novel, which he sold at the age of 23, though it came from much earlier writings. We discussed the original version of The Carpet People in a special video panel for the Australian Discworld Convention, which we also released in a special annotated form to Pratchat subscribers as “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You can see the original, unannotated version of the discussion on YouTube. We covered The Dark Side of the Sun back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“. And don’t worry – we’ll get to his other pre-Discworld sci-fi novel, Strata.
  • The Country Women’s Association formed as separate chapters in Australian states in 1922, with a national body (the CWAA) formed in 1945. They’re still incredibly important in rural Australia.
  • The witches go to the opera in Maskerade (#Pratchat23), and the theatre came to them in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4).
  • Willow’s disappointing meeting with her college’s upsettingly mundane Wiccan group, the “Daughters of Gaea”, occurs in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush”. We previously talked about this way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • The word “grok” comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Human Valentine Michael Smith is born on Mars and raised by Martians, learning their ways, which he later tries to teach on Earth. The Martian word “grok” (invented by Heinlein) is very important in his teachings; it literally means “to drink”, but metaphorically means a deep and empathic or intuitive understanding. The term was popularised on the non-fictional planet Earth by nerds and hippies, who embraced the novel and many of its messages.
  • The weasel-word phrase “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” was made famous by politician character Francis Urquart, protagonist of the novel and television series House of Cards. In the original English series, he is played by Ian Richardson; when he later voiced Death in The Mob’s television adaptation of Hogfather (see above), they gave him a very similar line as an in-joke.
  • We covered the Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, Johnny and the Dead in #Pratchat34, and Johnny and the Bomb in #Pratchat37.
  • Kermit the Frog is the most famous of Jim Henson’s puppet characters, the Muppets. Performed by Henson himself until his death, he made his debut in 1955 as a lizard-like creature on Henson’s first television show, Sam and Friends, though he wasn’t specifically referred to as a frog until the 1960s. He is best remembered as a reporter on Sesame Street, the host of The Muppet Show and the central character of the subsequent Muppet films, the first of which – 1979’s The Muppet Movie – tells the story of his rise to fame. The film memorably opens with Kermit singing “The Rainbow Connection”, accompanying himself on a banjo.
  • The frog from the famous Merry Melodies cartoon was later named “Michigan J Frog“, though it is not given a name in the original cartoon, 1955’s One Froggy Evening. He was later revived as the mascot of Warner Brothers cable network in the 1990s.
  • Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She suffered burns to her face and hand in the scene where she vanishes in a ball of flame, which was achieved with real flame while she dropped through a trapdoor. She took six weeks to recuperate, but is reported to have said: “I won’t sue, because I know how this business works, and I would never work again. I will return to work on one condition – no more fire work!”
  • Marc is referring to the scene near the end of Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman), when the heroes are confronted by Gozer, herald of a supernatural “Traveller” who will take on a form chosen by one of its victims. The Ghostbusters try not to think of anything, but Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) can’t manage that. Instead he tries to think of the least dangerous thing possible – and unwittingly summons a giant killer version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a confectionary mascot.
  • Room 101 appears in George Orwell’s novel 1984 as the feared location where a prisoner of the state is taken to receive the ultimate, personalised torture. As government agent O’Brien explains to Winston Smith: “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” It inspired a BBC radio and television show of the same name, in which celebrity guests are asked to discuss their pet hates, trying to persuade the host to put them in Room 101 where they will never be seen again. (Which isn’t really the spirit of the original, but the show is often funny.)
  • Fuck has long been considered the most versatile swearword. George Carlin has a famous routine about its many uses, which was widely copied and remixed and sent around via fax and email in the 1980s and 1990s. (it’s also been widely shared via YouTube, but there’s no official version so we’ll leave it up to you to find it.) Fuck is also the subject of the first episode of the Netflix series History of Swear Words, hosted by Nicholas Cage.
  • To untangle the superhero confusion: Ben referred to Liz as Ms. Marvel; while this is an older name used by Captain Marvel (aka Carol Danvers, played by Brie Larsen in the recent films), Ben meant the current Marvel superhero of that name, Kamala Khan, who has shapeshifting abilities, which she uses in her early stories to make her fists bigger while fighting bad guys. Liz mentions being married to “Yon-Rogg“, an alien Kree warrior who mentors Captain Marvel in the Captain Marvel film; he’s played by the always dishy Jude Law. They’re not married, but we can all dream. (Thanks to listener Claude, who helped Ben realise this is who Liz was talking about – he thought she said “Ioan Gruffudd“, the also handsome Welsh actor, whose only superhero role was as Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic, in the 2005 film Fantastic Four and its sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. He also has stretching powers that would allow him to make his hands bigger. The character’s wife is Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, who is played in the film by Jessica Alba.)
  • The song “Very Mild Superpowers” is by Irish comedian David O’Doherty; you can watch him performing it on Australian musical gameshow Spicks & Specks on YouTube. 
  • Marc’s band, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, was founded by Andy Heintz and British anarchist and occult comedian Andrew O’Neill, with whom Marc has also toured as a stand up.
  • The Manic Street Preachers, subject of the anthology book Marc is editing, are a Welsh punk and alternative rock band formed in 1986. They’ve been as famous for their “controversial” behaviour as their music, especially in the case of former member Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995. The band’s single “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” and the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours reached number one in the UK charts in 1998.
  • English musician Marc Bolan (1947-1977) was lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex, and is credited by many for starting the glam rock movement when he appeared on Top of the Pops in 1971 dressed in glitter and satin. He died in a car crash in London just before his 30th birthday. (We’re gonna guess you know who David Bowie is.)
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Marc Burrows, Nanny Ogg, short story, Witches

#Pratchat36 Notes and Errata

08/10/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

#Pratchat50 Notes and Errata

08/12/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, featuring guest Cal Wilson, discussing the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

To prove we really did cook these things, here are some photos! Be warned: the last one is not for the faint of heart…

  • Stage one of Rincewind’s Potato Cakes: mashing the potatoes!
  • The potato mixture with sage and fried onions added. (It’s already delicious.)
  • Frying up the cakes – these ones are waaaaay too big.
  • A couple of more reasonably-sized potato cakes. They turned out great!
  • The “brinner” meal with scrambled eggs made in the same pan.
  • Liz’s Wow-Wow sauce, artfully drizzled on a plate!
  • You can use it on an omelette…
  • …or on meat!
  • We apologise for this highly upsetting image…but we think you’ll agree Cal did an amazing job of making Sticky Toffee Rat Onna Stick.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is reference to the famous 2017 cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by American chef Samin Nosrat. Nosrat also had a Netflix cooking show of the same name, which appeared in 2018. We’re sure you’ll work out how the rat comes into it, but we may not have mentioned Lord Downey’s contribution to the book: a recipe for mint humbugs which includes the ingredient “arsenic to taste”…
  • Cal’s previous episodes were #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” from November 2017 and #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind” from January 2018.
  • Cal’s Tiktok username is @calbowilson; look for the hashtag #baristacats.
  • To avoid any confusion:
    • The “Baristacats” are Cal’s cats, Pirate and Barnacle, who like to sit on top of the coffee machine in her kitchen, leading her to create a series of videos in which she tries and fails to get them to serve her coffee.
    • The Aristocats (1970, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman) is a Disney animated musical about a family of aristocratic cats who get into trouble and must turn to an alley cat and his friends for help.
    • “The Aristocrats” is a famous dirty joke in which a family of performers try to get a job by describing to a theatre manager the incredibly depraved and taboo-breaking things they do in their performance – usually a long list, improvised by the comedian – before being asked the name of the act; they respond with “The Aristocrats!” While it dates back to the vaudeville era, it continues to be popular in private among American comedians, with the point being to improvise the most transgressive and offensive description of the act. It was the subject of a documentary film in 2005, The Aristocrats, directed by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza.
  • Liz’s cats are named after Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley. There have been recent prestige television adaptations of their best-known works: Asimov’s Foundation for Apple TV+ in 2021, and Huxley’s Brave New World for the NBC streaming service Peacock in 2020. Brave New World was cancelled after the first season, but Foundation is getting a second season.
  • The Great British Bake Off – known as The Great British Baking Show in the US – is an extremely wholesome reality television show that started in 2010. Contestants are (usually amateur) bakers, who compete in a series of challenges to impress a panel of judges, all for the glory of being crowned the best baker (there’s no prize money). It’s produced by Love Productions, originally for the BBC, where it grew to be so successful on BBC Two that it was moved to BBC One. Despite commissioning Love Productions to make other shows about sewing and pottery using the same format, the BBC made an in-house program about hair styling, Hair, in 2014. This led to a legal dispute over copyright that eventually led to Love Productions taking the show to Channel 4, where it’s been since 2017. Many countries have their own version, including Australia.
  • Bridgerton is a 2021 Regency-era period drama made for Netflix, adapted from the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn. It’s known for its racy sex scenes. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • J H C Goatberger – publisher of the Disc-famous Almanack – and his chief printer Mr Cropper both appear in Maskerade. We discussed it in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Encyclopædia Britannica is probably the most famous English-language encyclopaedia, which is a compendium of knowledge. The Britannica was first printed in 1768 in the United Kingdom, and most of its editions span multiple large volumes. In 1901 it was taken over by American managers, who shortened and simplified its language and began selling it via door-to-door salesmen. It still exists, though the last print edition was published in 2012; it’s now exclusively online at britannica.com.
  • Where Did I Come From? is the 1973 classic children’s book about sex and reproduction. It was originally subtitled “The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations”, and is the first of many similar books by Peter Mayle, an English businessman who became an advertising copywriter and then author. Mayle went on to write the Wicked Willie series of risqué cartoon books about a talking penis, which might sound familiar: they were illustrated by Gray Joliffe, the same person who drew the cats for Pratchett’s The Unadulterated Cat! More about that in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • We’re pretty sure the “sexy origami” book mentioned by Cal is 2015’s The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made, by Australian cartoonist and illustrator Fiona Katauskas. She was inspired to create it because when having the talk with her own son, she found she was using the same book her parents had used – Where Did I Come From? – and thought it could use an update.
  • If you’d like to know about Ken’s underpants area, we recommend this delightful piece from Jezebel, “The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll’s Crotch” from 2019, by Rich Juzwiak.
  • In Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma, Alan Rickman does indeed play Metatron, the angel who is the voice of God. If you’re curious to know what his underpants area looks like, there’s a great photo of him showing it off while holding a Ken doll in this piece for Digital Spy in which Kevin Smith pays tribute to Rickman after his death in 2016.
  • Ben’s very silly quip here is a reference to Patrick Stewart’s appearance in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras. Like all the other big name actors who appeared in cameo roles, he plays a weird parody of himself, who tells Gervais’ main character about his idea for a facial comedy film in which he has the power to make women’s clothes fall off. His refrain is that by the time they put them back on, “It’s too late, I’ve seen everything.“
  • The recipe book plagiarism scandal we discuss is about Elizabeth Haigh’s book Makan. Singaporean-born Haigh was a contestant on the 2011 series of reality cooking show MasterChef in the UK; while she didn’t win, the experience cemented her love of cooking and she went on to great success as a chef, even opening her own restaurants, one of which – Pidgin – was awarded a Michelin star in 2017. Her book Makan was published in October 2021, but soon Sharon Wee, author of Growing Up in a Nona Kitchen, made allegations that many passages relating stories of learning to cook from a grandmother were paraphrased or directly taken from her book. Comparisons of passages where posted online by New Zealand cookbook store Cook the Books, and other authors discovered Makan seemed to “borrow” from other other books and recipe blogs too – both in the anecdotes and personal stories, and some of the recipes. You can read more detail about the scandal in this piece from Eater magazine by James Hansen, though it seems no further information has been officially disclosed, pending the outcome of legal action.
  • The introductory text that Ben reads at around the 14:30 mark is for the entire fictional book, not just the cookery section as he suggests.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • Ben mentioned some cookbooks for other fictional worlds, specifically 2012’s A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook, 1999’s Star Trek Cookbook – co-written by Ethan Philips in the persona of Neelix, the character he played on Star Trek: Voyager! – and two cookbooks based on Doctor Who. Ben was thinking of the original one from 1985, The Doctor Who Cookbook, but a newer one inspired by the revived series was published in 2016: Doctor Who: The Official Cookbook. It’s worth noting there are plenty of unofficial cookbooks for recipes based on various fictional worlds, too.
  • The character Liz mentions from Game of Thrones is Hot Pie, who appears in the second and third novels in the series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, and the first four seasons of the television show.
  • Schnapps – from the German schnaps – isn’t a specific kind of alcohol. The original German word is used generically for any kind of strong alcoholic drink. In English it usually means one that is flavoured and sweetened with fruit, but there aren’t any rules – it’s sort of the opposite of Champagne.
  • The famous English Twitter user who grows big vegetables is 72-year-old ex-butcher Gerald Stratford (@geraldstratfor3). He’s not a farmer, but an avid vegetable gardener, and after amassing a huge following on social media published a book in 2021, Big Veg. You can read of Gerald’s rise to fame in this lovely article from Eater magazine by Jenny G Zhang. [We promise we’re not sponsored by Eater, they just seem to write the best articles about English food-related stuff! – Ben]
  • Ben would just like to clarify that when he says Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is “a real fan’s book” (at around 23:40), he means it’s really a book for fans, not a book that’s for “real fans”. We don’t go in for that sort of gatekeeping around here – and neither did Pratchett, as evidenced by the way that he expressly tells readers where to find out more if they’re lacking context. There’s no wrong way to be a fan, except for hurting other folks with how you go about it.
  • Bergholdt Stuttley “Bloody Stupid” Johnson is first mentioned in Men at Arms, as the designer of the gardens surrounding the Patrician’s Palace, which are said to be the “high spot” of his career. His proper given names are revealed in Maskerade, in a footnote about the organs used by the Opera House and University.
  • Speaking of B S Johnson, the “pie bird” is indeed a real thing. They’re an evolution of the originally quite dull ceramic pie funnels stuck into pies to allow some of the steam to vent, preventing fruit pies from bubbling over and helping to ensure a crispy crust. In the earlier twentieth century manufacturers started making them in all kinds of animal shapes, though birds were most popular. Read all about the history of pie birds in this article by Baileyberg at Food52. (See? Not all our sources are Eater this month…)
  • We also discussed the “humour” genre of books in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, in relation to The Unadulterated Cat. The primer example mentioned by Ben was Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, though there are thousands to choose from, and they continue to be published, if in smaller numbers. Modern such books are often compilations of social media accounts, like The Midnight Society, the (entirely fictional) minutes of the meetings of of club made up of famous horror, fantasy and sci-fi authors.
  • Spotted dick is indeed a real dish, also known as “spotted dog” and “railway cake” (the latter name especially common in Ireland). The English version is a baked pudding made from suet and dried fruit – most often plums, sultanas or raisins – which are the eponymous “spots”. (For more about this, see the Hogswatch Feast bonus episode.)
  • Ben did indeed research the various kinds of fat mined in Überwald for #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“. You can find his list of them in the episode notes for #Pratchat40.
  • Vegetable suet is made from refined vegetable oils. Like animal suet it’s only readily available in the UK, and not all varieties are gluten free, so check the fine print if you’re buying some and that’s a consideration for you. Nigella Lawson’s website also recommends grated vegetable shortening as a substitute; the most easily found form of this in Australia is Copha, which is made from coconut oil. (See the link for instructions on how to grate it.)
  • As it turns out, the difference between lamb and mutton varies depending on where you’re from. In the UK sheep meat (and indeed the sheep) is called lamb in its first year, and mutton if the sheep is two or more years old. In Australia, a sheep’s age is measured instead by how many teeth – specifically permanent incisors – it has (or rather had): Australian lamb comes from a sheep with no permanent incisors; mutton is from a sheep with more than two. (Sheep usually grow a pair of new ones each year, so it works out mostly the same.) Meat from sheep in between lamb and mutton age is called “hogget”, though apparently in the UK plenty of “lamb” is actually hogget in disguise – a step down from mutton dressed as lamb, we suppose. Organic and rare breed farmers in England’s North are known to sell hogget, though. Sheep typically live for around ten to twelve years (when not eaten by foxes, wolves or humans), so seventeen year old mutton isn’t something you need to worry about.
  • The Discworld mainstay “sausage-inna-bun” first appears alongside its most famous vendor, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, in Guards! Guards!, discussed in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“. He shows up to hawk food to the crowd watching the hero attempt to slay the dragon, though he never says “sausage-inna-bun”; instead he describes them as “hot sausages”, and shouts “inna bun!” as one of their many attributes. On this occasion he is also selling peanuts and figgins alongside the sausages, all cooked in a tiny frying pan on his tray.
  • We previously discussed Bunnings sausages in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“. In brief: a “sausage sizzle” is a traditional way to raise money for charity by selling cheap (and possibly donated) sausages cooked on a barbecue in slices of bread, usually with fried onions and tomato sauce or mustard. It’s common – or it was, in pre-pandemic times – for ubiquitous hardware store chain Bunnings Warehouse to have a sausage sizzle outside its stores, usually in a carpark.
  • Roundworld drop scones are not siege ammunition, but rather small pancakes made by dropping a dollop of batter onto a frying pan. Depending on where you grew up in Australia, drop scones might be better known as pikelets. We won’t get into the discussion of what constitutes a “regular” scone, as this varies considerably around the world. (Australian ones are generally similar to English ones, though we have pumpkin and date varieties less popular elsewhere.)
  • The French word for bread is indeed pain, but Ben does not pronounce it remotely correctly. The French word uses a neutral vowel sound, not either of the “a” sounds Ben uses. Sorry French speakers.
  • We were unable to confirm it, but it does seem that Paul Kidby’s illustrations for Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook are all originals, done for this book. Certainly the ones of the imps and the various dishes don’t appear anywhere else that we know of.
  • Malicious compliance is when someone follows instructions given to them to the letter, knowing that it will cause harm or problems. It’s often described as a form of passive-aggression, though it is sometimes used as an effective form of protest against ridiculous or draconian demands from managers or officials.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is the third of five published Discworld short stories. We discussed it in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” While it does introduce the Witch Trials, and names the scarecrow used for the Cursing “for several hundred years”, no further information about Unlucky Charlie is given; this section is mostly new.
  • Carved wooden lovespoons are a tradition that dates back to at least the seventeenth century. Welsh ones may be the most well known, but they’re also found in Germany, Scandanavia and Eastern Europe. While the “Lancre Loveseat” may well be inspired by them, it should also be noted that Nanny lists “Llamedosian spoon” as the appropriate gift for a fifteenth anniversary.
  • The tweet advising that women may be “fascinated” by giving them cheese was an image of a page from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen. You can read more about the history of cheese in witchcraft in this article from The Conversation, inspired by the original tweet by Gavin Wren, which we’ve included below. (Pratchat would like to note that we do not condone the use of witchcraft or any other kind of coercion when making advances toward folks of any gender.)

Pro dating tips pic.twitter.com/t0agf7JrgN

— Gavin Wren (@GavinWren) January 12, 2021
  • We’ll learn more about the Discworld’s Moon – and Leonard da Quirm – when we cover The Last Hero, but it is considerably closer to the Disc than our Moon is to the Earth. It has to be, as it appears about the same size, but is only about eighty miles (or 130km) across. The Earth’s Moon is over 2,150 miles across (3,475km), and about 238,855 miles (or 384,400km) away, so for the Disc’s Moon to appear about the same size, it must be a bit under 9,000 miles from the surface of the Disc. (For simplicity we’re going to ignore the likely difference in lensing effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and the Disc’s intense magical field.) For context, that’s a bit more than a third of the distance around the Earth! The Disc’s Moon likely passes much closer to the Rim, so a supermoon is probably a weekly event for places like Krull.
  • The Moon being a giant egg was a weird plot used by Doctor Who in the 2014 episode Kill the Moon.
  • Branston Pickle is a chunky, pickled chutney that’s made from diced vegetables pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomatoes, apples, sugar and spices. It’s been made since 1922 and continues to be hugely popular in the UK. In March 2020, manufacturer Mizkan Euro recalled some of their products as they may have been contaminated with pieces of plastic packaging. This recall affected jars with use-by dates of 2022; you can check if you have any affected jars here, but any you find in stores now will be fine.
  • Massel is an Australian brand which makes vegan stock and other vegetable-based food products. They’ve been around since 1982. Ben only ever buys the vegetable kind, but now realises that their other flavours are labelled “Chicken Style” and “Beef Style”, so they’re a good vegetarian substitute for the real deal.
  • Marzipan is made from honey, sugar and almond meal. There are different kinds but they don’t seem radically different, though when its used on fruit cakes it is usually glazed and, as Cal says, more traditional icing goes on top.
  • The Overlondon Project’s question with the emojis was as follows:
    Most practically edible and least edibly practical… 🧙‍♀️🍆🥕🍌🥒🍑🥭 and possibly 🦑
  • The restaurant in Going Postal is Le Foie Heureux – “the happy liver” in Quirmian. There isn’t a description of the food beyond how much it costs, sadly, but we can dream. The restaurant in Hogfather isn’t named, but its dishes include Mousse de la Boue dans une Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures (“mud mousse in a basket of shoe pastry”) and, as featured in this cookbook, Brodeuin Rôti Façon Ombres (“man’s boots in mud”).
  • Biers is the Ankh-Morpork bar where nobody asks your name; it’s frequented by the undead and other creatures of the night who want a place where they can escape the pressures of being normal. It makes its most notable appearances in Feet of Clay (see #Pratchat24) and Hogfather (see #Pratchat26).
  • It turns out that while you can make alcohol from cabbages, it doesn’t seem a popular choice – partly because cabbages don’t contain much sugar, so they don’t ferment into alcohol on their own. Cabbages are more usually fermented into the non-alcoholic food sauerkraut. There is, though, a cabbage wine made in Narusawa prefecture in Japan, an area which like the Sto Plains grows mainly cabbages. (Narusawa wine is also 40% grapes, though.)
  • You can buy commercial beef spreads, but the brands Ben names are beef-extract based drinks, sold in paste form similar to yeast extracts like Vegemite and Marmite. Bovril has been made in the UK since the 1870s, while Bonox is Australian, first sold in 1919 by the same company who invented Vegemite. (For more on that, see the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.)
  • Fairy bread is an Australian children’s party staple: buttered white bread sprinkled with small bits of sugar confectionary, usually spherical “hundreds and thousands” (in Ben’s opinion the superior option), or sprinkles.
  • For more on the great potato cakes vs potato scallops debate, see this survey of regional variation in Australian language conducted by the the Linguistics Roadshow in 2015. (It’s the first response.) For the record, “potato cake” won the bigger vote, but neither cake nor scallop had a clear majority.
  • You can hear an extract from Sven’s podcard in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“. Note though that the bit Ben describes about the ads for Maggi noodles only appears in the full podcard, which is included in the fourth episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, from April 2020.
  • The Australian SF (“Ditmar”) Awards, or just Ditmar Awards for short, are the Australian national awards for achievement in speculative fiction and fandom. Any eligible works can be nominated by members of the Australian fan community; the awards are then voted on by members of the Australian National SF Convention (or “NatCon”) for that year. The established Australian cons take it in turns to be the NatCon; in 2021, it was Conflux in Canberra. You can see a list of all the 2021 Ditmar nominees and winners in Locus Magazine. Pratchat was also nominated for the “Best Fan Publication in Any Medium” award in 2019.
  • The Coode Street Podcast, the winner in our category this year, is a long-running bi-weekly show which describes itself as “an ongoing casual conversation between two friends about the nature of science fiction (among other things).” It launched in 2010. The two friends who host it are publisher and editor Jonathan Strahan, and editor, critic and humanities Professor Gary K. Wolfe. Prior to this win, The Coode Street Podcast had been nominated for seven Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award, and six Ditmar Awards…but not won any of them! (Sounds like we have a few more award nominations to rack up before we win anything…)
  • You can find out more about the cancellation of the 2022 Australian Discworld Convention on the official website at ausdwcon.org.
  • Ben is correct: Garth Nix won the Ditmar for Best Novel for his 2020 book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. It also won the 2020 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for the 2021 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Photos, Rincewind

#Pratchat51 Notes and Errata

08/01/2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“, featuring guest Garth Nix, discussing the 2006 Discworld novel Wintersmith.

Iconographic Evidence

Here are some photos of Ben’s office, to accompany the visual section about video meeting boffo.

The posters on the mirrored wardrobe behind Ben’s desk
The one-page RPGs on the bookshelf; you can also see the kakapo on the top shelf
The dragon made by Ben’s Mum – with bonus tortoise and Babel fish!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title references not only Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but more specifically Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a long-running Buffy recap and discussion podcast hosted by musician Jenny Owen Youngs and writer Kristin Russo. Each episode of the podcast covers a single episode, and includes an original song about the show; they have a whole album’s worth of new songs dedicated to the Buffy musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling”! (One of several things referenced in the title of #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.)
  • As mentioned in the footnote, “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix” was a public appearance by Terry at the Sydney Opera House on 17 April, 2011. You can listen to to the whole thing via this MixCloud link.
  • The Colour of Magic, Pratchett’s fourth novel, was first published in the UK by Colin Smythe on November the 24th, 1983. As we noted for Richard Watts, our guest in #Pratchat49, who also read it when it was first available, In Australia this was probably in 1985, the year of the first Corgi paperback edition.
  • Pratchett’s first novel, The Carpet People, was first published by Colin Smythe on November 16th, 1971. This was a fairly small print run of 3,000 copies, which is why any that come up for sale routinely go for huge prices. (Garth did well to get a hold of one when it came out!) The later version – rewritten and edited by the older Pratchett – was first published by Corgi on the 30th of June, 1992. The original short stories from 1965 can be found in the collection The Dragons of Crumbling Castle, first published on the 11th of September 2014.
  • The Good Wife and The Good Fight are CBS legal dramas set in Chicago. The Good Wife follows Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her husband, a State’s Attorney, is jailed in a corruption scandal. A major theme of the show is what women are expected to give up to be “good wives” to influential husbands. The Good Wife ran for seven seasons from 2009 to 2016, and was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a sequel and spin-off that follows the character of Diane Lockhart (played by Christine Baranski). A year after the end of the earlier show, Lockhart – a named partner at Alicia’s law firm – is forced out when her life savings are lost in a financial scam that dupes her protege and god-daughter. The pair move to another Chicago law firm, where another former employee of the original firm now works, and take on a number of cases with political and social justice angles. The Good Fight is up to four seasons and still running.
  • Tiffany is 9 years old in The Wee Free Men – not 6, 7 or 8, as guessed by Garth and Ben. Everyone was wrong! In A Hat Full of Sky she is 11, and as discussed she turns 13 during Wintersmith.
  • You’ll find most of Liz’s complaints about Wentworth in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”, discussing the first Tiffany book The Wee Free Men. There might also be one or two in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, about A Hat Full of Sky.
  • The “This is where you came in” thing is called by trope-listing websites “How We Got Here“. A famous example of Ben’s phrase for it is in Billy WIlder’s 1950 film noir mystery Sunset Boulevard.
  • We previously mentioned the film Mean Girls (2004, dir. Mark Waters) in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“. Written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, it follows new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from an isolated life in Africa to the social jungle of of an American high school.
  • Bilbo Baggins’ age is a prominent point in The Lord of the Rings, when he chooses the occasion of his eleventy-first birthday to literally disappear by using the magic ring he stole from Gollum during the events of The Hobbit. It is noted that Bilbo has not aged normally for a hobbit, who usually live for around 100 years – a bit longer than the humans of Middle Earth.
  • The Pratchett interview in which he discusses Tolkien’s influence is his 2006 chat on Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, a production of the Seattle Channel, a community cable channel run by the City of Seattle. Appropriately enough it was during his promotional tour for Wintersmith! You can find the main Tolkien quote in his answer at around the 3:30 mark, which also includes his classic story about how and when he first read the books. An earlier – possibly the original – version of the same thought appears in Pratchett’s 1999 essay “Magic Kingdoms” for the Sunday Times, prompted by the publication of the third Harry Potter novel. It’s collected in A Slip of the Keyboard, and this version has been circulated in image form recently, so we include it here as text:

J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of a mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way Mt Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt Fuji.

Terry Pratchett, “Magic Kingdoms”, 1999
  • Pratchett’s other Tolkien references include a lot of stuff about dwarfs (and indeed the use of the plural “dwarfs”), the Gollum sequence in Witches Abroad, Mustrum Ridcully, aka “Ridcully the Brown” (a very different take on a Brown wizard who is close to nature), and his deliberately non-Tolkienistic takes on elves, orcs and goblins. In several interviews – including the one linked above – he also describes Discworld “in the short form” as “Middle Earth 500 years on, when everyone’s actually got to settle down and deal with one another.” (See #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World“, for more on this idea.)
  • Lady Justice is the modern incarnation of Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, introduced by Emperor Augustus. Justitia herself is likely inspired by Dike, the Greek goddess of moral order and fair judgement, who also held a pair of scales, possibly influenced by earlier Egyptian gods like Maat and Isis. (Dike’s mother, Themis, is also described as a goddess of justice.) Justicia was also depicted holding a sword, but the blindfold worn by the modern version of Lady Justice seems to have been introduced in the sixteenth century. The earliest depiction of Lady Justice with all three elements seems to be the statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) in Bern, Switzerland, which was sculpted by Hans Gieng in 1543. Not all famous depictions of Lady Justice have the blindfold – for example the statue of her on the Old Bailey courthouse in London.
  • As Ben mentions, not everyone can or does visualise things in their imagination – in fact the ability to do so exists on a continuum, across all senses, not just sight. This kind of “blind” imagination is described as “aphantasia”, and around 3-5% of humans are estimated to think this way. This 2017 article from The Conversation does a pretty good job of explaining aphantasia, but there’s also a worldwide Aphantasia Network, established in 2020.
  • Not only are personifications of fate often depicted as weavers – see previous episodes #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires” and #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang” – but the moirai, the Greek fates, are the children of Themis, and sisters to Dike!
  • To be clear, we don’t hate any of the story teaching terms we groan about in this episode – Ben uses them in his teaching work a lot! – but they do take us back to school days we’re happy to have left behind us. In case you’re not familiar with any of them:
    • The “inciting incident” is modern writing jargon for the moment in a story where the protagonist’s regular world is disturbed. While it’s used by just about everyone who teaches Western-style writing (who often define it as having anywhere between three and seven defining characteristics), it can be fairly directly traced back to the work of story scholars like Gustav Freytag and Joseph Campbell.
    • A “story graph” or “story arc” is a curved line meant to show time progressing in the story from left to right, and tension, excitement or some other measure of the story’s intensity going up and down. It demonstrates the same basic principles as Freytag’s Pyramid, which is to say the most tension or excitement etc goes somewhere in the middle, at least in standard Western story structures. In primary school creative writing it is sometimes called the “story mountain”.
    • A “topic sentence” is a device taught in essay writing in which an early sentence in a paragraph – often the first one – gives the reader an expectation of what the paragraph will be about.
  • The Dark Morris is first mentioned – though not by name – at the very start of Reaper Man (see #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“). Pratchett tells us that while all inhabited worlds of the multiverse have a Morris dance, only on the Discworld in one small village in the Ramtops is it danced it properly. Their secret is “the other dance”, which is described in more detail at the end of the book: that dance it’s danced without music, while dressed in black and wearing bells made of octiron, which make “the opposite of noise”. The award-winning Lancre Morris Men, led by Jason Ogg, appear in Lords and Ladies, but they don’t seem to be the ones who dance the Dark Morris; they mention that the Morris is “for every day”, whereas the dancers of the Dark Morris do the regular and correct Morris dance only once a year. This also correlates with the fact that Miss Treason’s steading is not in Lancre – which is well served by both Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax – just somewhere nearby.
  • In Joe Dante’s 1984 horror comedy Gremlins, teenager Billy Peltzer (Zach Gallagher) is given a mysterious Christmas present bought by his travelling salesman/inventor father from a weird little shop (you know the sort). It’s a strange, intelligent and very cute creature called a mogwai (the name is derived from the Cantonese word for devil, 魔怪), and it comes with three rules: keep it away from bright light, especially sunlight, which will kill it; do not let it come into contact with water; and – most famously – “never, no matter how much he pleads, no matter how much he begs, never ever feed him after midnight”. By the end of the film, of course, all three rules are broken. We previously discussed the film’s 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
  • For more about the Scots language, see the episode notes for #Pratchat36, the afore-mentioned “Home Alone, But Vampires“. In short it’s a Germanic language which, like modern English, derives from a dialect of Middle English. If you’d like to hear some Scots spoken and learn a few words, we highly recommend following poet Len Pennie on Twitter (@Lenniesaurus) or TikTok (@misspunnypennie). Len posts a “Scots word of the day”, recites her own poyums, and is all around excellent.
  • A showie (a shortened – and happily gender neutral – form of “showman”) is a worker in a travelling show; it’s the Australian equivalent of the US term “carnie“, which is derived from the word carnival. Carnie dates back to the 1930s, but it’s possible “showie” might be a little older. In Australia, such workers operate rides, games and concessions at agricultural shows, open markets and cultural festivals, and many operate family businesses that have been around for three or four generations or more. Many showies do not like the term carnie.
  • On Roundworld, the word “boffo” dates back to at least the era of vaudeville, and was used in showbiz circles as a noun to mean a hit show, act or film. We’ve not had much luck in finding a more specific origin; if you have a lead, let us know!
  • For more on Hyancinth Bucket – the lead character in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, who insists her surname is pronounced “Bouquet” – see #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“.
  • When Ben talks about “the heart and soul of witchcraft“, he means “the soul and centre“; as Granny Weatherwax would readily admit, there’s not always room for heart to enter into it. (For more on this, see #Pratchat43.)
  • As mentioned this episode, Pratchett’s short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” introduces many things important in the Tiffany novels, including Mrs Earwig, the Witch Trials and Zakzak Stronginthearm and his magic shop. We discussed it with Marc Burrows in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“.
  • Tir Nani Ogg is a pune, or play on words, referencing Tír na nÓg, the Irish “Otherworld” (or part of it) and home to the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. As discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“, Tír na nÓg was often said to be accessed via underground passages, much like the Long Man’s barrow in Lords and Ladies. Of note for the Tiffany stories: another name for the Otherworld – or perhaps a different part of it – is Tír fo Thuinn: “Land Under the Wave”! For more on how this relates to Pratchett’s version of elves, see the episode notes for #Pratchat17.
  • Anoia, Goddess of Things that get Stuck in Drawers, is introduced in chapter ten of Going Postal, as one of the gods to whom Moist prays for deliverance. (For more on this, see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“.) Moist prays to her again in Making Money, with surprising results. As discussed, in Wintersmith Anoia reveals she was once a volcano goddess, always smoking because the storm god rained on her lava. This is a clear callback to Going Postal, in which Anghammarad says that Adorable Dearheart reminds him of “Lela The Volcano Goddess, Who Smokes All The Time Because The God Of Rain Has Rained On Her Lava”.
  • The state of witchcraft has changed considerably over the course of the books. At the start of Witches Abroad, Granny and Nanny attend a sabbat of Ramtops witches at which only four witches are present – Nanny, Granny, Gammer Brevis and Old Mother Dismass. They bemoan the “increasing shortage of witches”, which is so bad there’s no-one available to take the place of Desiderata Hollow, and discuss “moving the boundaries” so they can cover her patch. They are scandalised that a nearby township has brought in a wizard, and Granny also rejects the idea that Desiderata might have named her own successor, since – as we see in Wintersmith – that’s not how they do things in the Ramtops. By the time of Lords and Ladies, the young coven led by Lucy “Diamanda” Tockley has revived interest among the younger Ramtops folk about witchcraft.
  • In Roundworld mythology, the Cornucopia – from the Latin for “Horn of Abundance”, and usually translated as the “Horn of Plenty” – is associated primarily with the Greek and Roman pantheons, and there are multiple accounts of its origin, though it is usually the broken horn of some kind of nature god or similar creature. In one account, infant Zeus, hidden in a cave so he wouldn’t be destroyed by his father Cronus, accidentally broke the horn off of the magical goat which fed him milk. Many gods and goddesses in both Greek and Roman pantheons have held the cornucopia, though few are associated with Summer – rather they are mostly gods of riches, prosperity, the harvest or even fate. It’s now also associated with Thanksgiving in North America, and via that becomes a major motif in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian series The Hunger Games.
  • The language on the cornucopia does seem to be ancient rather than modern Greek. The translation by the memory of Dr Bustle is accurate, as far as we can tell.
  • The universal translator pre-dates Star Trek by a little over twenty years, first appearing in the 1945 novella “First Contact” by American writer William Fitzgerald Jenkins (writing under the pseudonym Murray Leinster), which probably also coined the titular phrase. Versions of a universal translator are used in many science fiction programs to avoid having to deal with frequent language barriers in stories about meeting other cultures. Notable examples include the TARDIS telepathic circuits in Doctor Who (not explained until more than a decade into the show’s history), the “translator microbes” of Farscape and – perhaps most famously – Douglas Adams’ invention of the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
  • Hivers are described in A Hat Full of Sky, where the writings of Dr Bustle explain that they are not demons, but a form of bodiless, mindless not-truly-alive consciousness which drifts through space, and which were formed in the first moments after the creation of the Universe. As the Hiver that inhabited Dr Bustle and Tiffany later admits, it seeks refuge in human minds in order to hide from “everything” – Hivers consciousness has no filter between itself and the entirety of existence, so they are constantly overwhelmed and afraid. Steeleye Span took this as inspiration for the song “Hiver” on the Wintersmith album (more on that below).
  • If like Liz you’re daunted by the amount of Star Trek available, Ben recommends Max Temkin’s articles: “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours“, and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in in 82.5 Hours“. They recommend the essential episodes you need to watch to follow and get the gist of those two beloved Star Trek shows from the 1990s.
  • Moist von Lipwig is an (ex?) con-man and the last major new protagonist introduced by Pratchett to the Discworld. Caught for his various crimes in Ankh-Morpork, the Patrician offers him an honest job revitalising the post office in Going Postal. (See #Pratchat38.) In the television adaptation, he is played by Richard Coyle, best known from Coupling and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Moist later becomes master of the Royal Bank and Royal Mint in Making Money, and in Raising Steam is made the city’s representative overseeing the creation of a new railway system. As for tax auditing, Pratchett had mentioned that he was considering a book starring Moist von Lipwig titled Raising Taxes, in which he would take over as Ankh-Morpork’s head auditor. It was expected to be the next book after I Shall Wear Midnight, but that was instead followed by Snuff and then the rather different Lipwig story, Raising Steam. (For more on other hints of Pratchett’s planned books that never saw the light of day, see the episode notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.)
  • Stories about a fish that has swallowed something thrown away go back a long way. The Greek historian Herodotus recounted a story about Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, who was advised by Egyptian king Amasis to rid himself of some of his many possessions in order that he know some hardship, or else expect a tragic end. He threw his prized emerald ring into the sea, and regretted it, but he was later brought a fish as tribute which, when gutted, contained the ring. The best-known fairytale with this motif is usually called something like “The Fish and the Ring”, and some sources say it is of Norwegian origin. It’s a story of ATU type 930, “The Prediction”, or more specifically 930D, “Fated Bride’s Ring in the Sea”. The story recounts a wealthy or noble man who learns he, or his son, is fated to marry the daughter of a peasant; he tries to dispose of her in several ways, but she is repeatedly saved by fate, eventually having a gold ring taken from her and thrown into the sea, being told by the nobleman not to come to him without the ring. It’s found inside a fish, and this is usually the point at which the nobleman accepts fate cannot be cheated. It can also be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since without the prophecy and his intervention the man would never have even met the woman.
  • “Bluebeard’s Bride” – or just “Bluebeard” – is a French folktale about a notorious nobleman – often later described as a sea captain – whose many wives have mysteriously vanished. When he asks a neighbour to marry one of his daughters, they are frightened, but the youngest eventually agrees. Bluebeard gives his new bride the keys to his enormous house and tells her she may go anywhere except the basement. While he is away she invites her sisters for a party, but is overcome with curiosity and sneaks into the basement…to find the bloody corpses of Bluebeard’s previous brides. She drops the keys, which become stained with blood, and on his return Bluebeard discovers she has found his secret; however she is saved by her brothers, who kill him, and she inherits his wealth, which she uses to bury his other wives before moving on. The tale is ATU type 312, which is known as “The Bluebeard” or “The Maiden-Killer”.
  • The 2007 Doctor Who episode “Blink” by Steven Moffat introduces the Weeping Angels, creatures who (typically) appear to be statues of angels covering their eyes. But this part of their ultimate defence, in which they become “quantum locked” when observed, unable to move but also very difficult to be hurt, as they transform into stone. (They cover their eyes so as not to observe each other.) As soon as they are not observed – for example, if someone watching them blinks – they are able to move incredibly quickly and silently. Their touch while unobserved transports a victim back in time to before the time of their birth, and they feed off the energy created by this possibly paradoxical change to history.
  • We’ve talked before about the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and the Lovecraftian parody in Pratchett’s earlier work; see particularly #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, for discussion of Cthulhu and the other Lovecraftian entities who clearly inspired the Things. Pratchett most directly parodies the Lovecraftian style in “Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”, the non-Discworld short story we discussed in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“.
  • The “Phantom of the Opera book” is Maskerade, the penultimate book starring the original Discworld witches. We discussed it back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • Tolliver Groat was introduced in Going Postal (see #Pratchat38) as the oldest ever Junior Postman, but by the end of the book was promoted to Assistant Postmaster. During the events of Making Money, presumably set shortly after Wintersmith as it was published next, he will (at least briefly) rise to the position of Acting Postmaster. In the television adaptation of Going Postal, he is played by Andrew Sachs of Fawlty Towers fame.
  • Steeleye Span are one of the best known British folk rock bands, formed in 1969 at the height of the British folk revival by bass player Ashley Hutchings, who left the other big folk rock band of the time, Fairport Convention, following a car accident. The initial lineup also featured vocalist Maddy Prior, her duo partner Tim Hart on guitars and vocals, and husband and wife team, guitarist and vocalist Terry Woods (later a member of The Pogues) and vocalist and strings player Gay Woods. Their success and fame were secured by early hits: in 1973 they made it nearly to the top 10 with “Gaudete”, an a cappella recording of a traditional Latin Christmas carol from the 17th century, and in 1975 “All Around My Hat”, a traditional 19th century song about a sailor who goes to sea and returns to find their lover about to marry another man. sold like hotcakes and got them to number 5 in the charts. Their signature style is traditional folk songs set to modern instrumentation, with electric guitars and a rock beat, including popular songs like “Thomas the Rhymer”, “Black Jack Davey” and “Alison Gross”. They’ve also written many original songs – including the tracks on Wintersmith (see below). They are still performing, and released fiftieth anniversary greatest hits and live albums in 2019.
  • The album Wintersmith was released in October 2013, with a deluxe 2-disc version featuring four extra tracks and a live performance following in 2014 (this is the version Ben has). The story goes that Terry discovered folk music when a friend made him listen to the Steeleye Span track “Thomas the Rhymer”, and immediately wanted to find and listen to everything they’d ever done. Some sources name Maddy Prior as Terry’s favourite singer. Prior in turn is a big Pratchett fan. It’s not clear when they first met, but Steeleye Span played at Terry’s 60th birthday party in 2008, and a few years later Terry approached the band with the idea of making an album based on Wintersmith. Most of the sixteen songs are inspired directly by the novel, but there are also tracks drawing on The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and I Shall Wear Midnight. Pratchett himself appears delivering a spoken word performance on the track “A Good Witch”, and was directly involved in the project, working with the band on the lyrics. Guitarist (and actor) Julian Littman, who joined the band in 2010 and wrote some of the songs for the album, noted that when appearing on stage with the band a year or so before his death Pratchett told the audience: “If I’d known it was going to be that good I’d have written a better book.” Ben loves it too, and as a fellow Steeleye Span fan, hopes to discuss it more fully on a future episode of the podcast, perhaps after we’ve covered I Shall Wear Midnight.
  • When Ben says “What You Witch Is What You Get“, he is invoking the phrase WYSIWYG, an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”. It was used mostly in the 80s and 90s in computing, to describe interfaces which showed you on the screen what the computer would produce on the printed page (or other non-digital output) – something which seemed miraculous at the time. Ben probably should have said “Witch You See Is Witch You Get”, but you can’t have ’em all. Pratchett made fun of the phrase in The Science of Discworld (see #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“) when, at the end of chapter five, Ridcully invokes “the ancient principle of WYGIWYGAINGW”: “What You Get Is What You’re Given And It’s No Good Whining”.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about Nanny Ogg being more powerful than she appears in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, about Wyrd Sisters. He mentions that book being “the first one”, i.e. the first in the witches series; that title might more properly belong to Equal Rites, though as only Granny Weatherwax appears, it’s certainly not the first book about the Lancre coven.
  • Terry’s favoured hat was a black, wide-brimmed Louisiana, often mistaken for a fedora. He wrote about his love of hats – including the specific brands and types he’s bought over the years – in the 2001 article “A Word About Hats” for the Sunday Telegraph Reveiw, which is collected in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • The new Tooth Fairy is appointed in Hogfather. See #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, for more on that book, but we won’t spoil their identity here.
  • Both versions of the personification (or avatar) of Time appear in Thief of Time, discussed in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • Old Man Trouble is mentioned in Soul Music, Hogfather, Feet of Clay and Thief of Time. The Discworld Companion describes him as the personification of Murphy’s Law (i.e. “Whatever can go wrong, will.”) but he’s a reference to the Roundworld “Old Man Trouble”, a personification of problems or bad luck, thought by some to be a polite way of referring to the devil. He is best known from his appearance in American songs, especially the George and Ira Gershwin classic “I Got Rhythm” – the reason for Lord Downey thinking being able to carry a tune would keep him safe from Old Man Trouble – and the Fats Domino song “Old Man Trouble”.
  • Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is a board game originally designed by Robert Harris and published by UK games giant Games Workshop in 1983. In the game, players choose from a variety of fantasy hero characters, and roll dice to travel through a fantasy kingdom, encountering various dangers while attempting to find a Talisman which will allow them to travel into the centre of the board. If they can make it there and reach the Crown of Command, their character becomes ruler of the kingdom and they win the game. Apparently the original design wasn’t fantasy themed at all, but had the players take the roles of boys at a boarding school attempting to be prefects! The fourth edition, first released in 2008, is currently published by Pegasus Spiele. It’s one of those games most beloved by those with nostalgic memories of playing it as a teenager; Ben prefers games which aren’t quite so heavily reliant on the luck of the dice, but it continues to be be popular.
  • Honey Heist is one of Grant Howitt’s many one-page RPGs. It gained popularity in online RPG forums and then a bigger boost in fame when it was played by the cast of hugely popular roleplaying YouTube show Critical Role. You can get Honey Heist on the Rowan, Rook and Decard website, offered via a pay what you want (including nothing) model.
  • As depicted in the photo above, Ben’s handmade kakapo – the endangered ground parrot of New Zealand – was crafted by Sayraphim Lothian as part of their Journey project in 2014. You can find out more about the project on Sayraphim’s website.
  • We don’t have a photo of Garth’s Disreputable Dog and Mogett, but we can tell you these are animal characters from the Old Kingdom books, magical creatures who travel with their wizard masters. It is important that their collars remain “safely on”, but we won’t spoil the reasons why here.
  • A “Lazy Susan” is a turntable designed for use in the middle of a table to help serve food. Similar devices predate the name, which seems to first appear in the World War I period, though exactly where the name comes from is unclear.
  • Terciel and Elinor is, as Garth explains, a prequel to the Old Kingdom books; the titular characters are the parents of original protagonist Sabriel, who appears in the first novel Sabriel and its sequels Lirael and Abhorsen. Please note that when Garth says “this year”, we recorded this episode in December 2021.
  • Frogkisser is Garth’s funny 2017 novel aimed at a middle grade or young adult audience about the Princess Anya, who has the power to break curses with a kiss. She goes on the run when her evil step-parents want to take over the kingdom for good. On a Quest to save the kingdom, she is aided by “a loyal talking dog, a boy thief trapped in the body of a newt, and some extraordinarily mischievous wizards”…yes, I think we can see the Pratchett influence here.
  • Newt’s Emerald is Garth’s 2015 novel of Regency romance, spiced up with a bit of “fantasy of manners” – i.e. a magical take on the “comedy of manners” style of Restoration comedy novels. It follows the adventures of Lady “Newt” Truthful, who dresses as a man in order to recover the stolen jewel in her family’s collection: the Newington Emerald.
  • Who Watches The Watch is, in their own words, “A fun (but highly intellectual) podcast in which four pals read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, talk about left-wing politics and have a riotous good time while they’re about it.” It began in May 2020 and episodes are generally released every week or two. The original plan was to read the Watch books as a lead-in to discussing The Watch TV show, but after reading Guards! Guards! they decided to cover the Discworld more broadly. They also have a spin-off show, Immortal Incantations: Heartspell, in which the hosts – Chaz, Lucy, János and George – are writing their own fantasy novel. You can find out more about both shows on their Patreon page.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Annagramma, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Garth Nix, Granny Weatherwax, Miss Treason, Nanny Ogg, Petulia Gristle, Photos, Tiffany Aching

#Pratchat51 – Boffoing the Winter Slayer

08/01/2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Year of the Lachrymating Leveret! Bestselling sci-fi and fantasy author Garth Nix joins Liz and Ben up in the Ramtops, where Tiffany Aching dances a forbidden dance and gets into more trouble in the thirty-fifth Discworld novel, 2006’s Wintersmith.

Two years after her first Witch Trial, Tiffany Aching is nearly a teenager and two months into her stint with her latest mentor – terrifying Miss Treason, the 113-year-old deaf and blind justice witch. In the dead of night Miss Treason takes her to witness the “dark dance”, but against the rules she is given, Tiffany does more than observe – after all, what good is a dance you can only watch? But Tiffany’s been noticed: the spirit of Winter himself has his eye on her now. There’s something different about Tiffany, too…but that might have to wait. The Nac Mac Feegle are back, there’s a witch’s cottage up for grabs, the boy she’s been writing went to a party with someone else, and if she can’t figure out how to fend off the Wintersmith, it might be an uncomfortably long Winter…

Published in one of Pratchett’s rare one-book years, Wintersmith advances Tiffany Aching into adolescence – and appropriately enough deals with themes of unwanted attention, uncontrollable urges, the perils of teenage and adult politics, and hordes of tiny blue men. Plus it’s full of favourite characters, both old and new.

Do you think Tiffany could have chosen not to enter the dance? Have the Feegles been to our world – and do they belong in this book, or has Tiffany outgrown them? What’s the most ridiculous thing someone has done to try and impress you? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat51 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_51.mp3

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Guest Garth Nix is a bestselling and award-winning Australian author, best known for his young adult fantasy series “The Old Kingdom”, which began with Sabriel in 1995. In November 2021 he published the prequel Terciel and Elinor, about the parents of the original novel’s protagonist. He’s also written dozens of other novels and short stories, including the Seventh Tower and Keys to the Kingdom series of novels, 2015’s Newt’s Emerald, 2017’s Frogkisser, and 2020’s The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, which recently won the Ditmar Award for best novel. You can find Garth on Twitter as @garthnix, and info about his books on his website at garthnix.com

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

Next month we’re not reading a book or a short story; instead we’re getting in front of the television and checking out the somewhat divisive BBC America series The Watch, “based on characters created by Terry Pratchett”. Is it a bold new punk direction for the Disc, or a travesty born from years in development hell and too much distance from the source material? We’re going to find out! Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat52, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Annagramma, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Garth Nix, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Miss Tick, Miss Treason, Nac Mac Feegle, Nanny Ogg, Petulia Gristle, Tiffany Aching

#Pratchat4 – Enter Three Wytches

08/02/2018 by Pratchat Imps 3 Comments

In episode four, vaudevillian Elly Squires – aka Clara Cupcakes – joins us to discuss one of her first Discworld books, and the start of the witches series proper: Wyrd Sisters! The sixth Discworld novel, published in 1988, it’s the second book to feature Granny Weatherwax – but the first to introduce her fellow witches, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick.

Seasoned witches Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are adjusting to life in a coven with recently graduated apprentice Magrat Garlick when the king of their tiny country of Lancre is murdered, and his baby son escapes into their arms. The murderer, Duke Felmet, is crowned the new, much crueller king, but with the rightful heir off being raised by a troupe of travelling actors, Granny, Nanny and Magrat must contend with rumour, theatre and their own clashing personalities if they are to change their kingdom’s story…

The witches are one of Pratchett’s most beloved groups of characters, and pre-date both the City Watch and the modern faculty of Unseen University – so it’s surprising to see them spring so fully-formed from their first novel! We loved meeting them all over again. We’d love to hear what you think of Wyrd Sisters – if you’re joining this episode’s discussion on social media, please use the hashtag #Pratchat4 so we can all find each other’s thoughts! (Big thanks to listener Jodie for this brilliant idea.)

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_04.mp3

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Elly Squires can be found on Twitter as her alter-ego @claracupcakes. She’s touring her hit 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, The Worst, to various festivals around Australia and the world, including Fringe World in Perth and the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. Keep an eye out for her tour dates on Facebook or (if you’re not afraid of Russian hackers) at claracupcakes.com.

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

Our next book, discussed in our March 8th episode, will be 1989’s standalone Discworld novel, Pyramids – and joining us to talk about assassins, gods and a very different tiny kingdom will be comedian Richard McKenzie! We’ll be recording on February 19th, so get your questions in before then if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast! You can use the hashtag #Pratchat5 to ask them via social media.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Granny Weatherwax, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Witches, Wyrd Sisters

#Pratchat50 – Salt Rat Arsenic Heat

08/12/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Happy fiftieth episode to us! We’re celebrating with the return of our very first guest, comedian and author Cal Wilson! Cal joins Liz and Ben in the kitchen to brave the recipes within the 1999 Discworld side project Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, co-authored with Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, with illustrations by Paul Kidby.

After his latest books are forcibly withdrawn from sale, J H C Goatberger reluctantly decides to publish another manuscript sent to him by Nanny Ogg. He hires a few editors to “put in the spelling, grammar and punctuation” and has his wife vet it for anything objectionable enough to get the book banned. The result is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a collection of Nanny’s own recipes, others she’s collected from around the Disc, and some of her wit, wisdom and advice – in particular when it comes to etiquette.

Published alongside The Fifth Elephant (see #Pratchat40), Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is one of several “in-universe artefact” books. It collects around fifty or so recipes – minus a dozen or so joke ones – devised by Hannan. Pratchett and Briggs round out the book with Nanny’s advice on matters of life, death, flowers and everything in between. Paul Kidby provides some great illustrations of various characters, dishes and other glimpses of Discworld life.

What do you think of books like this, that bring a bit of a fictional world into the real one? Which of Nanny’s recipes would you try? How do her observations match up with your own experiences of life, love and…um..toilet seats? Do you want a sausage-inna-Bunnings T-shirt? And are you ready to see pictures of our efforts? (Probably not…) Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat50 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_50.mp3

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Guest Cal Wilson – one of Australia and New Zealand’s most beloved comedians – previously guested in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, talking about Men at Arms and Sourcery, respectively. Since we saw her last she’s published two children’s books – George and the Great Bum Stampede and George and the Great Brain Swappery. Cal is no stranger to podcasts; she’s guested on dozens! Her upcoming children’s storytelling podcast is The Story Tailor (we’ll link to it when it’s out!), and she’s previously co-hosted Money Power Freedom (it does what it says on the tin) with journalist Santilla Chingaipe for the Victorian Women’s Trust. You can find Cal online as @calbo on Twitter, and as mentioned in our chat, on TikTok as @calbowilson. (Or just search for the hashtag #baristacats.)

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site – including some photos of our culinary efforts! (Viewer discretion is advised.)

December is a busy time for us! To further celebrate reaching fifty episodes, we’ve invited a bunch of great folks, including past guests, fellow Pratchett podcasters and more to cook a few more recipes for a special Hogswatch Feast episode! Watch out for it on Hogswatch day (i.e. December 25, Australian time).

We’re also recording our next episode very soon – December 17 in fact – and we’ll be discussing the next adventure for Tiffany Aching, 2006’s Wintersmith, with Australian fantasy author Garth Nix! So if you have questions, get them in “toot sweet”, as Nanny might say, using the hashtag #Pratchat51, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Patrician, Paul Kidby, Rincewind, Stephen Briggs

#Pratchat39 – All the Fun of the…Fish?

08/01/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We’re kicking off the Year of the Beleaguered Badger with something a little different: an international guest, and a short story! Unofficial Pratchett biographer Marc Burrows joins us from the UK to discuss the third Discworld short story: 1998’s The Sea and Little Fishes!

Without much else but the carefully applied annoyances of Nanny Ogg to occupy her time, Granny Weatherwax is ready to win the annual Witch Trial – just as she does every year. But Lettice Earwig, self-appointed leader of a sort of witch committee, has decided this is discouraging new witches, and asks Granny not to participate. She also tells Granny to try being “nice” – and the worst part is, Granny appears to be taking her advice…

Very long for a short story, The Sea and Little Fishes delves into the relationship between two of Pratchett’s most beloved characters, and introduces people and concepts he’d later expand upon in the Tiffany Aching novels. In a sense it’s a story in which almost nothing happens, but then that’s largely the point – someone like Granny Weatherwax hardly has to do anything at all to move mountains. Where did you read it? What do you think of the title? And how long can a story be while still being considered “short”??? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat39 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_39.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:19 — 42.7MB)

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Guest Marc Burrows is a writer, musician and comic. His articles and reviews about music and culture have appeared in The Guardian and a variety of other publications, but he’s currently best known as the author of the first, unofficial Terry Pratchett biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, which you can learn all about at askmeaboutterrypratchett.com. He is also a member of the band The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, and has two upcoming non-fiction books about music. The best place to find Marc online is as @20thcenturymarc on Twitter and Instagram, and you can sign up to his newsletter “The Glom of Nit” via tinyletter.com.

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

We plan to cover short stories once or twice a year to help us all keep up with the schedule, in part because our original plan – to cover them as live shows – hasn’t worked out this last year. But next month it’s back to the Discworld novels, and the Watch, with The Fifth Elephant – and we’re welcoming back one of our earliest guests, Richard McKenzie! Send us your questions via email, or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat40.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – and maybe make a few more live episodes like this? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Discworld, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Marc Burrows, Nanny Ogg, short story, The Sea and Little Fishes, Witches

#Pratchat48 – Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang

08/10/2021 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

Freelance writer and journalist Ben Riley joins Liz and Ben for a magical history tour as Susan Sto Helit teams up with a couple of monks to stop time…er…stopping in the twenty-sixth Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.

In Ankh-Morpork, a mystery woman tasks the odd but talented Jeremy Clockson to build a clock so accurate it can measure the tick of the Universe. In mountain monastery of Oi Dong, Lu-Tze, sweeper of the History Monks, gains a new apprentice: the unmotivated but gifted Newgate “Lobsang” Ludd. And in his domain, Death senses that the Auditors of Reality, grey entities who count every atom, are once again seeking to curb the chaos of life. He recruits his granddaughter Susan to help find the son of Time. If they can’t, he’ll have to get the old band back together and ride out for the end of the world – at precisely one o’clock, this Wednesday…

Pratchett brings back a string of old favourites for this action-packed romp through…well, not quite through time, but it’s certainly “about” time. It’s the last book to properly star Susan Sto Helit, and for that matter Death; it brings back Lu-Tze, the sweeper who nudged Brutha in the right direction back in Small Gods; and Nanny Ogg is here too, in her first major appearance since the last Witches book, Carpe Jugulum. Oh, and there’s a main character named Lobsang, and we know all about that name…

Is this what you were hoping for in a third outing for Susan? How do you feel about the fate(s) of Lobsang and Jeremy? Where do you land on having an in-universe excuse for continuity errors in Discworld? And are the monkish wisdom jokes okay because they’re based more on kung fu movie tropes than actual Tibetan culture, or is it still a bit on the nose? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat48 on social media!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_48.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:27:34 — 67.9MB)

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Guest Benjamin Riley (not to be confused with Spider-Man clone Ben Reilly) is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist. He’s written for Junkee, SBS Online, PopMatters, Overland, the Star Observer and many other publications. Ben also works in AIDS research and in HIV and sexual health policy, organises queer community events, and co-hosted and produced the queer political podcast Queers with Simon Copland from 2015 to 2019. (You can still find old episodes in most podcast directories and via the Queers acast page.) For more on what Ben’s up to, follow him at @bencriley on Twitter or hit up his website at benjaminriley.com.au.

In other Ben news, the videogame Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown, written by a certain Ben McKenzie, is now available on Steam!

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

Next episode we take another little breather – it’s been a long lockdown here in Melbourne, folks – to read a Pratchett short story: his take on Arthurian myth, Once and Future! It was originally published in 1995 in the collection Camelot, but like most of his short fiction you can find it in A Blink of the Screen. Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat49, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

And yes, we are planning something a little different and special for our fiftieth episode in December – watch our website and social media for news on that soon!

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Auditors, Ben McKenzie, Ben Riley, Death, Death of Rats, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Lobsang, Lu-Tze, Nanny Ogg, Susan
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