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Nanny Ogg

#Pratchat12 – Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles

8 October 2018 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

For our twelfth episode we’re joined by Jackie Tang discuss Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad! The twelfth Discworld novel, published in 1991, Witches Abroad is the second to star the Lancre witches, who return only two books later for Lords and Ladies.

Witch Desiderata Hollow has died and passed on her fairy godmother wand to Magrat Garlick, the youngest of the Lancre witches, along with a note telling her to go to the distant kingdom of Genua to stop a servant girl from marrying a prince – without Granny Weatherwax. Which of course means Granny – and Nanny Ogg – are definitely coming. As they make their way across the Disc by broomstick and riverboat, experiencing all that travel has to offer, they find themselves increasingly drawn into warped stories – and Granny may not be letting on all that she knows about what they’ll face when they arrive… 

As well as providing an extended parody of the English travelling abroad, Witches Abroad is mostly about stories – where they come from, how they influence us, and what they really mean when you stop to think about them. As well as traditional fairytales, Pratchett lampoons everything from The Wizard of Oz to Disney princesses and even Middle Earth. So what did you think of Witches Abroad? Use the hashtag #Pratchat12 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_12_v1.mp3

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Guest Jackie Tang is an editor and bookseller who works at Neighbourhood Books in Northcote.

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

In our next episode we’ll be going back amongst the Nomes for book two of the Bromeliad – Diggers! As usual we’d love to get your questions for the podcast; send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat13.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Jackie Tang, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Witches, Witches Abroad

#Pratchat17 – Midsummer (Elf) Murders

8 March 2019 by Pratchat Imps 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat48 Notes and Errata

8 October 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”. (The question and answer where he says this starts at around 16m30s.)
  • 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

#Pratchat66 Notes and Errata

8 April 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 66, “Ol’ No Eyes Is Back“, discussing the 2010 Discworld novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, with returning guest Amie Kaufman.

Iconographic Evidence

We refer a few times to Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby lecture, “Shaking Hands With Death”. It was published in 2012, and then collected in A Slip of the Keyboard in 2014, and we’ll have an episode on it in due course. You can watch the whole thing below, as the lecture is televised on BBC One, though the YouTube clip is not an official upload. Pratchett was unable to read it himself on the night, and gave the gig to Tony Robinson.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title riffs on the classic 1973 Frank Sinatra album Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. It’s also, because we’re big nerds, a reference to Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, the 1991 album by Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Brent Spiner, whose android character Data has golden eyes. Ben was delighted to discover another riff on the title while looking up these details: Old Brown Ears Is Back, a 1993 album by noted muppet pianist and singer, Rowlf the Dog!
  • Guest Amie Kaufman was last on way back in July 2018 for #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, discussing Truckers. Her most recent books at the time were Ice Wolves, the first in the Elementals trilogy, and Obsidio, the final book in the Illuminae Files trilogy with Jay Kristoff. Since then she’s published the two other Elementals books, Scorch Dragons and Battle Born; another YA sci-fi trilogy with Kristoff, the Aurora Cycle; the Illuminae Files novella Memento (a hard to get publisher exclusive); two duologies with Meagan Spooner, The Other Side of the Sky and Beyond the End of the World, and Unearthed and Undying; and two books with Ryan Graudin, The World Between Blinks and Rebellion of the Lost. So by our count, that’s actually eleven novels and one novella!
  • The blurb Amie reads seems to be from an American edition of the book, but we’re not sure which one. If you know, please tell us! A new edition is on the way in June, with a new cover matching the other recent paperback editions, and it uses a blurb very similar to, though shorter than, the one Amie reads. The old blurb was:
    A man with no eyes. No eyes at all. Two tunnels in his head… It’s not easy being a witch, and it’s certainly not all whizzing about on broomsticks, but Tiffany Aching – teen witch – is doing her best. Until something evil wakes up, something that stirs up all the old stories about nasty old witches, so that just wearing a pointy hat suddenly seems a very bad idea. Worse still, this evil ghost from the past is hunting down one witch in particular. He’s hunting for Tiffany. And he’s found her…
  • Pratchett mentions that I Shall Wear Midnight is the last Tiffany Aching book is at least a few places, but you can find it mentioned in this interview with book blogger the Bookwitch, and in this Guardian piece about I Shall Wear Midnight, both from 2010.
  • Pratchett doesn’t say in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture that he gives the death he describes for his father to the Baron, but the Guardian piece mentioned above draws the same conclusion.
  • On the subject of Boffo, Wintersmith pretty directly tells us it isn’t a common practice for witches to buy stuff from there, at least not in the Ramtops. In chapter 3, “The Secret of Boffo”, Tiffany asks Miss Treason directly:

‘Do all witches buy from Boffo?’ said TIffany.
‘Only me, at least around here. Oh, and I believe Old Mistress Breathless over in Two Falls used to buy warts from there.’

  • Granny previously visited Ankh-Morpork in Equal Rites (see #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes”), and again with Nanny Ogg in Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”).
    • In Equal Rites there’s exactly one mention of city witches: they’ve left “witch marks” on the outside of the rear doors of Unseen University, advising any witches who visit that they are welcome and that the housekeeper Mrs Whitlow is “gullible and foolish”; Granny notes that “city witches didn’t seem that bright themselves”, though she doesn’t meet any or mention that any live in Ankh-Morpork. After spending some time with Mrs Whitlow, who at the time considered herself a psychic medium and put on posh airs, Granny wonders if she isn’t a “born witch who somehow missed her training”. She also does some witchery for folks while staying in the city, including brewing potions with the excitingly cheap glassware available.
    • In Maskerade, when she arranges lodgings in the Shades, Granny describes Mrs Palm as “an old friend. Practic’ly a witch.” But there’s no mention of any actual city witches.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Amber Petty, Amie Kaufman, Angua, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Letitia, Mrs Proust, Nac Mac Feegle, Nanny Ogg, Preston, Roland, The Chalk, Tiffany Aching, Vimes

#Pratchat39 Notes and Errata

8 January 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

8 October 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

8 December 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

#Pratchat4 Notes and Errata

8 February 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

8 March 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

#Pratchat23 Notes and Errata

8 September 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

  • This episode’s title puns on the name of protagonist Agnes Nitt and “The Music of the Night”, one of the most famous songs from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. (See below for more on the musical.)
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a series of ten fantasy novels written by American author Stephen R. Donaldson between 1977 and 2013. Covenant is an author from our world who loses two fingers before being diagnosed with leprosy, shortly before his wife divorces him. When he is knocked unconscious he is transported to “the Land”, a fantasy world where he is a hero of prophecy in the conflict against the evil Lord Foul, though Thomas thinks that the Land is a delusion. The series has had a mixed critical response. If you’re going to look into them, please note our content warning: the first book contains an act of rape and this is referred to many times throughout the first trilogy.
  • The English sit-com Keeping Up Appearances was a farce created by Roy Clarke (of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine fame) which ran on BBC One from 1990 to 1995. It starred Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, a woman who aspires to move among the upper class, and is desperately ashamed of her lower class family. A running gag is that she tries to have everyone pronounce her family name “bouquet”, despite the fact that her middle class husband Richard – played by Clive Swift – has always pronounced it “bucket”.
  • Avengers: Endgame (2019) was the final film in the Avengers series, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It brought together characters from the previous twenty-one Marvel films in a massive crossover, and became the highest-grossing film of all time.
  • Deadpool and its sequel Deadpool 2 are films from 20th Century Fox about the titular superhero character, a mutant mercenary with rapid healing powers. While technically part of the X-Men film franchise, the films are made on a lower budget and Deadpool – who often breaks the fourth wall in the comics and is aware he is in a movie – comments on the lack of cameos from more famous actors and characters, especially Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
  • Dolores Umbridge is appointed as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and thus major villain, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She is loyal to the Ministry of Magic, even when its infiltration and corruption by Voldemort’s Death Eater followers is apparent, and conducts a Macarthy-esque witch hunt (if you’ll excuse the term in this context) to find traitors – including torturing poor Harry.
  • OP is short for “Original Post” or “Original Poster” and is used in online discussion forums to refer back to the first post in a thread and its author. (OP is also used in games jargon as shorthand for “overpowered” – a description of a card, item, ability or other element in a game which is considered to give a player or character who possesses it an unfair edge.)
  • Tuvan throat singing, also known as hooliin chor, is practiced by the Tuva people of Siberia; its most popular style, khoomei, is also found in Mongolia. It is a form of overtone singing, in which the singer manipulates their mouth, larynx and pharynx to create a second “overtone” over the top of a droning, fundamental tone, a bit like the drone of a bagpipe. This TEDx talk from Baltimore in 2016 features the Tuvan band Alash providing a traditional example.
  • Permeate is actually a generic term meaning a substance that has passed through a porous or permeable membrane, as in the process of osmosis. In dairy farming, it is used to refer to the parts of milk that are not retained in the ultrafiltration process used to collect and add additional milk proteins to raw milk for making cheese. Traditionally this kind of permeate was added back to milk to increase the yield and to help standardise it – a process intended to make sure milk has consistent levels of fat, proteins, sugars and so on. This was basically all unknown outside the dairy industry until 2012, when Australian company Dairy Farmers launched a marketing campaign labelling their milk as “permeate-free“. Despite their web-site clarifying that milk permeate isn’t dangerous or unhealthy, the labelling – and a story on the current affairs program A Current Affair – gave them a short-lived edge in the market until all the other milk companies in Australia followed suit, despite the fact that smaller dairies wouldn’t have been using permeate in the first place.
  • Parabens, or parahydroxybenzoates, are a group of chemicals used as preservatives in cosmetics and sometimes food thanks to their antibacterial and fungicidal properties. There’s little to no evidence that they pose any serious health risks, but they can cause (usually mild) allergic reactions in a small percentage of people. While they’re synthetically produced for commercial use, parabens do occur naturally and many synthetic parabens are identical to natural ones.
  • The song “Smelly Cat” was written and performed by the character Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) on the sit-com Friends, initially in the second season episode “The One with the Baby on the Bus”. It was popular with fans and revisited many times over the life of the show, often with celebrity musical guests – including Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who co-wrote the song. It’s been covered many times; Lisa Kudrow even sang it on stage with Taylor Swift in 2015.
  • La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) is an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). The opera follows the story of Violetta, a courtesan whose love for the young bourgeois Alfredo is thwarted by prejudice against her past.
  • “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry and a popular meme for women showing resiliency in the face of patriarchy. The phrase became popular after US Senator Elizabeth Warren was interrupted by Mitch McConnell and other Senators while trying to read a letter sent to the Senate in 1986 by Coretta Scott King criticising Senator Jeff Sessions for limiting the voting rights of black Americans, as part of her objections to Sessions being appointed US Attorney General. The Senate voted to silence Warren on the grounds that she was breaking a Senate rule against maligning other Senators; afterwards McConnell said: “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
  • Sieglinde is a major mortal character in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second work in his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle). She is based on Signy from the Norse Völsunga saga, one of the main sources for the opera. In Die Walküre, Sieglinde was separated from her brother Siegmund at birth, and they fall in love before discovering they are twins, though this doesn’t dissuade their love. Siegmund dies in a fight with Sieglinde’s husband, a king she was forced to marry, and Sieglinde wishes to die rather than live without him until the Valkyrie Brunhilde convinces her to stay alive and give birth to their son, Siegfried, who goes on to be the hero of the final two operas in the cycle, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
  • The O.C. was an American teen television drama set in Orange County, California which ran from 2003 to 2007. We joke about not talking about it because it starred the other, more famous Ben McKenzie as Ryan Atwood, a poor, abused teen thrown out of home by his mother. Ryan is adopted by his public defender, and his struggle to fit in amongst the affluent O.C. kids was a major driver of the show’s first two seasons, though it was also very much about tempestuous relationships and love affairs and all that good high school drama stuff.
  • The excerpt from La Traviata is from a 1958 performance by Maria Callas; you can find the full performance on YouTube.
  • Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer and, famously, a contemporary and “rival” of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though they competed for the same positions, it seems unlikely the rivalry went very far, and that they instead had mutual respect for each other. In Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus he is the main character, presented as bitter and jealous of Mozart’s seemingly God-given talent, and he claims to have poisoned Mozart with arsenic. Rumours like this did plague the real Salieri, but historians don’t take them seriously, and the play and subsequent film have revived interest in his work. The role was originated in the West End by Paul Schofield opposite Simon Callow as Mozart; in the original broadway production he was played by Ian McKellan, opposite Tim Curry. In the 1984 film version he is played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for the role.
  • Singin’ in the Rain is a 1952 American film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly, who also stars as Don Lockwood, a humble silent film star in the 1920s during the introduction of “talkies”. Don’s insufferable leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), has a terrible voice, and has to be dubbed over by Don’s love interest, chorus girl Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Despite this plot point, in one scene where she is being dubbed, Jean Hagen performs both Lina’s annoying voice and Kathy’s replacement!
  • The Dunning-Kruger effect is the psychological phenomenon where someone who is not good at something is likely to overestimate how good they are, while those who are good at something are likely to underestimate their ability. This is because the same knowledge and skills are required to do something and judge the results.
  • Terry’s first publisher was Colin Smythe Limited, named for its founder and based in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire. After publishing his first four books – including the first two Discworld novels – Colin became Terry’s agent in 1987, co-publishing with Victor Gollancz in the UK and representing him to larger publishers all over the world. Colin also handled all rights to Terry’s intellectual property until the founding of Narrativia, Pratchett’s own production company, now run by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett. Colin Smythe Limited still publishes books; you can find out more about the company at colinsmythe.co.uk. The Terry Pratchett section of the site contains details of every edition of every one of Terry’s books; we’ve found it useful on many occasions!
  • Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti is a 1790 comic opera composed by Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) and Don Giovanni fame. As Myf points out, the tutte of the title is feminine, and so rather than “so do they all” means “so do all women” – the argument of the character Don Alfonso, who believes that all women are unfaithful. (Another common translation of the full title is All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers.) Alfonso makes a bet against two military officers, who swear their fiancées, who are sisters, will be faithful to them. To prove it, the officers pretend to have been sent away to fight, then return disguised as “Albanians” to try and seduce each others’ fiancées. Alfonso bribes the sisters’ maid to help him win his bet, and the two women do eventually succumb, though they endure a false wedding to the “Albanians” and mock outrage from their fiancées before all is forgiven. In Australia, Così fan tutte is most well known from Louis Nowra’s 1992 play Cosi, in which the residents of a psychiatric hospital try to stage the opera.
  • As we may have mentioned before, the character known only as Janitor in the NBC/ABC medical sit-com Scrubs was originally intended to be a figment of main character JD’s imagination. During the first season of the show he never speaks or interacts with any other characters, but the idea was scrapped.
  • 21 Jump Street was a US police drama produced from 1987 to 1991 about a group of young police officers who use their ability to pass as teenagers to go undercover in high schools and colleges.
  • In the sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, one of the main characters is the hologram Arnold Rimmer, a computer simulation of a dead man based on recordings of his memories and personality. Rimmer is famously a coward, but in the episode “Dimension Jump” the crew encounter “Ace” Rimmer, a heroic version of Arnold from an alternate universe. Before leaving on a dangerous test flight, he utters his now-famous catchphrase: “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.”
  • The Somebody’s Else’s Problem field originates in Douglas Adams’ third Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Its basic premise is that while making something invisible is impossible, its very easy to boost peoples’ natural tendency to ignore things they find hard to accept. Thus a device that generates an SEP field can run indefinitely on a 9 volt battery.
  • Die Fledermaus is a 1874 German operetta composed by Johann Strauss II, with a libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée. It’s based on the German farce Das Gefängnis (The Prison) by Julius Roderich Benedix. We previously mentioned it in episode 12, as Nanny mentions “die flabberghast” when they seemingly wander into the pages of Dracula.
  • Sailor Moon is the lead character in Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon), a manga and anime series from Japan that debuted in 1991. Usagi Tsukino is a school girl who uses a “sailor crystal” to magically transform into Sailor Moon, one of several “sailor scouts” who use their magical powers to protect the Earth from the forces of evil. Tuxedo Mask is a man wearing…er…a domino mask and a tuxedo. He initially appears mysteriously to help the Sailor Scouts, who don’t know that he’s Usagi’s school friend and love interest Mamoru Chiba, who also has a sailor crystal.
  • “Four Yorkshiremen” is a classic British comedy sketch originally written and performed for At Last the 1948 Show by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and was later made more famous when performed in live shows by members of Monty Python, including a performance for The Secret Policeman’s Ball featuring Rowan Atkinson. In the sketch, four wealthy Yorkshiremen compete to tell the most extreme stories of the poverty they experienced growing up.
  • “NPCs” are, in the parlance of roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, “non-player characters”: antagonist or supporting characters played by the Dungeon Master. The name derives from “player characters” or “PCs”, meaning the characters controlled by the other players – who are usually the protagonists of the game.
  • The Sydney Opera House, built on the Gadigal land of Bennelong Point in Darling Harbour, was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who won an international competition held by the New South Wales government in 1957. He quit the project in 1966, six years before the completed building was officially opened by the Queen in 1973. The official web site tells the story of the Opera House’s construction in depth.
  • Tripod vs the Dragon was a comedy musical written and performed by Australian trio Tripod, which began life in the US as Dungeons & Dragons: the Musical. The final version debuted at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2010. You can find the soundtrack album on Bandcamp.
  • Call Me by Your Name (2017) is a multi-award-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, based on a 2007 novel by André Aciman. It’s set in northern Italy in 1983, and is the coming-of-age story of teenager Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), who meets and falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate-student assisting Elio’s father.
  • Only wine made in the Champagne region of France is allowed to be marketed as Champagne; Australian winemakers have to do with the term “sparkling white”. At the time of recording, Australia was considering a European trade agreement which would impose similar restrictions on many other foodstuffs, include feta cheese.
  • The leader of the Magi in The Mummy – the action film starring Brendan Fraser which we’ve mentioned many, many times in previous episodes – is Ardeth Bay, played by Israeli actor Oded Fehr.
  • Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa is best known for playing Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, but was also Ronon Dex in Stargate: Atlantis, had a go at being Conan the Barbarian, and most recently played Aquaman on the big screen. He plays the character of Duncan Idaho in Denis Villeneuve’s new film version of Dune, due in 2020.
  • The character of Billy, introduced in the second season of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, is played by Dacre Montgomery. He has a poetry podcast called DKMH.
  • We’ll hopefully get to Carpe Jugulum in 2020.
  • Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the modern term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD). The change seeks to clarify that a patient has distinct “personality states” rather than truly separate personalities, and it is far more common in films and other media than in real life. The way it is portrayed in film is seen as highly misleading and harmful by many mental health professionals, not least because most characters with DID are shown to have at least one personality which is sadistic, violent and dangerous.
  • The smaller Melbourne-based opera companies mentioned are Cordelia’s Potted Operas (the link is to their Facebook page), GBD Productions and BK Opera.
  • Norma is a 1831 Italian opera composed by Vincenzo Bellini, with a libretto by Felice Romani based on the play Norma, ou L’infanticide (Norma, or The Infanticide) by Alexandre Soumet. It’s a tragedy about Norma, a druidic priestess in Gaul during the Roman occupation (aka Asterix times), who is caught up in a love triangle with a Roman officer and her friend, another priestess. Melbourne Opera’s production opens on September 17, 2019.
  • You can read all about Victorian Opera’s under 30s program on their web site.
  • Amahl and the Night Visitors is a 1951 English opera in one act composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, who also wrote the libretto, originally for NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame program. It was the first opera written for US television, and an Australian version was broadcast in 1957. Amahl is a disabled boy whose family are visited by the three Magi, Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, who are seeking a place to rest on their long journey to bestow gifts on the newly born Jesus Christ.
  • Lorelei is a 2018 Australian operatic cabaret composed by Julian Langdon, with a libretto by Casey Bennetto and Gillian Cosgriff. It features the Lorelei, three sirens who begin to wonder if the men they lure to their deaths really all deserve to die. It was originally staged by Victorian Opera; an Opera Queensland season opens in March 2020.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Greebo, Maskerade, Myf Coghill, Nanny Ogg, Witches
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#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
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