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#Pratchat26 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul”, featuring guest Michael Williams discussing the 1996 Discworld novel Hogfather.

Iconographic Evidence

Michael’s story about his 2014 interview with Pratchett ended up on the cutting room floor, but you can watch the interview itself in its entirety on YouTube below. (Subscribers can also hear his behind the scenes story about it in the third episode of our bonus podcast Ook Club.)

Notes and Errata

  • We’ve previously mentioned the steam roller story back in episode 6, but in brief: Terry stipulated in his will that his hard drives containing unfinished manuscripts be destroyed by being crushed under a vintage steam roller. The request was carried out in August 2017 at the Dorset Steam Fair.
  • Liz has said “time is a flat circle” many times, beginning way back in episode 5. It’s a popular meme derived from a scene in the first season of True Detective, based on the idea of “eternal return”.
  • To put Douglas Adams‘ death in Internet context, he died two months after Wikipedia was launched, and a year or more before the arrival of Facebook, YouTube or Reddit.
  • The Watch TV series is a Narrative production for BBC America, currently filming in South Africa. It will launch in 2020.
  • Mary Poppins is the magical nanny protagonist of eight books by English-Australian author P. L. Travers, beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934. Mary arrives on the East wind and is characterised as being stern and vain, but her magic wins over the children of the Banks family. She was famously portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney movie musical, which Travers herself did not like. Emily Blunt took over for the 2018 sequel.
  • Back in January 2019, the official Wizarding World twitter account really did reveal that wizards used magic for sanitation before they had plumbing. You can find it here.
  • In Victorian England, governesses occupied a weird middle ground, being neither a member of the family nor a servant. So it’s possible a noblewoman might take up the role.
  • The phrase “unstuck in time” is used to describe the plight of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Pilgrim experiences some of his life out of order.
  • We previously mentioned Hyacinth Bucket – who insists her surname is pronounced “bouquet” – in episode 24. Hyacinth is a wannabe socialite and the main character in the sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.
  • Dementors are magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe. They are soulless phantoms that suck the joy and sanity out of their victims. The wizard prison Azkaban employs them as guards.
  • Thanos, “the mad titan”, is an antagonist from Marvel Comics. He is famously the main villain in Avengers: Infinity War, based loosely on the Infinity War comic book series. In the film, Thanos seeks to destroy half of the life in the universe, ostensibly to restore balance and improve the quality of life for those who survive. An internet meme suggested he was right to do so.
  • “The Fat Man” is an alias used by Sidney Greenstreet’s character, Walter Gutman, in the archetypal 1941 film noir movie The Maltese Falcon.
  • Adam is a part-human, part-demon and part-cybernetic creature created by Maggie Walsh as part of the Initiative’s super soldier program in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • In 1993, Sydney won the bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics. At the announcement ceremony, IOC President Juan Antonia Samaranch firs fumbled with the envelope, and then uttered “The winner is Sydney“, his slightly accented pronunciation becoming almost as famous as the reaction of the NSW Premier (not least because of this segment on The Late Show).
  • Platform 9 3/4 is the magically hidden platform at Kings Cross Station in London that wizards use to board the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter universe.
  • The Death of Rats first appeared during Reaper Man though his first proper role was in Soul Music.
  • The original Helvetica T-shirt, featuring the names of the four Beatles, was designed by Experimental Jetset in 2001. They have been many, many parodies and homages since.
  • Pork products clearly don’t bother the Hogfather – as we failed to point out, he traditionally leaves them as gifts for everyone else!
  • Reindeer are eaten in many Scandinavian countries, as well as in Alaska, Finland and Canada. We don’t think they’re ever left out for Santa though.
  • Pigs can and have eaten humans, and this is a famous method of corpse disposal in fiction. Perhaps the most notable (and gruesome) explanation is by the character Brick Top in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch, though it was also a method favoured by Al Swearengen in the television series Deadwood.
  • The phrase “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” comes originally from an 1897 editorial in The New York Sun newspaper, written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. It is now the most reprinted editorial in the English language.
  • The Santa Clause is a 1994 comedy film starring Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, a divorced toy salesman who accidentally kills Santa and finds he is then obliged to take over his role.
  • ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was meant as a parody of indirect psychology and to show the limitations of human-machine interaction, but instead became one of the first in a long line of “chatterbot” programs and was seen as very lifelike. You can easily google up a live online version and try it yourself.
  • Ridcully’s curses manifested during the events of Reaper Man, when Death’s temporary retirement causes an excess of life.
  • Titivillus is discussed in “Typo Demom“, episode 106 of Helen Zaltzman’s language podcast The Allusionist.
  • As Liz mentions, the “tittle” is a diacritic mark most commonly seen in English over the lowercase i and j.
  • As many listeners have now told us, YMPA stands for “Young Men’s Pagan Association”, as mentioned in a book we’ve not yet re-read for the podcast, The Light Fantastic. The longer acronym YMRCIGBSA appears later on towels stolen by Albert for use in Death’s Domain.
  • “Good King Wenceslas” is a popular English Christmas Carol written in 1853 by John Mason Neale, set to the music of a 13th-century Spring carol, “Tempus adest floridum”. The king – a martyr and saint who died in the 10th century – sees a poor man and decides to personally deliver food, wine and fuel to him.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was preceded by a film in 1992, starring Kirsty Swanson, Luke Perry, Pee Wee Herman and Donald Sutherland.
  • Boggarts are creatures from the Harry Potter universe that change shape into the thing their victims fear most.
  • In Tooth Fairy, The Rock plays a tough ice hockey player nicknamed “the tooth fairy” because he often knocks out rival players’ teeth, but his anti-social behaviour – especially towards his girlfriends’ son – leads to him being forced to serve community service time as a tooth fairy.
  • In our world, the idea that you should believe in a God just in case he’s real is known as Pascal’s Wager, after French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
  • We previously mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle in episode 17.
  • Klaus Terber’s The Settlers of Catan (now known as Catan), the most famous European-style boardgame and one of the first to succeed in English-speaking markets, was first published in Germany in 1995.
  • While William Hartnell does indeed address the Doctor Who audience in “The Feast of Steven” – coincidentally the feast day featured in “Good King Wenceslas” – it seems this may have been planned and a BBC tradition at the time for dramas broadcast on Christmas Day.
  • A “centurion“, as we’ve mentioned previously, is a drinking “game” attempted by Australian students in which participants drink one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. Since this equates to more than nine pints in less than two hours, we do not recommend it. (A half-centurion is 50 shots either in 50 or 100 minutes.)
  • A Country Practice was a popular soap about the fictional rural NSW town of Wandin Valley, focussing on the doctors and nurses who worked at the local base hospital. It ran on Channel 7 from 1981 to 1994.
  • Lift Off was a popular television program for young children on the ABC which ran from 1992 to 1995. It featured a mix of live action, animation and puppetry. “EC” was a magical rag doll with a wooden head intended to be a blank slate and thus relatable to “every child”, though the initials initially stood for “Elizabeth and Charlie”, the names given to the doll by two of the children in the show.
  • You can watch Graham Chapman’s funeral service on YouTube.

#Pratchat26 – The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul

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In episode 26, Michael Williams of The Wheeler Centre joins Liz and Ben to get into the holiday spirit with Terry Pratchett’s very Christmassy 1996 Discworld novel Hogfather.

It’s Hogswatch, and the Assassins Guild of Ankh-Morpork has accepted a very unusual assignment, and Lord Downey has given it to the very unusual assassin Mr Teatime. But who would want to kill the Hogfather? And how would you even accomplish such a thing? As Death fills in for the Fat Man delivering presents, his granddaughter Susan is reluctantly drawn to investigate, teaming up with the newly created Oh God of Hangovers. But much more than the joy of children is at stake – for without the Hogfather, will the sun even rise tomorrow?

Hogfather brings to life a character previously mentioned only in passing rather paradoxically by replacing him with Death, who gets a sort of working holiday. It’s our second and final adventure with Susan, and the wizards get heavily involved – as does their arcane thinking machine Hex. It’s full of not-quite-Christmas cheer, black humour, true pathos and a pure expression of many of Terry’s most deeply held beliefs. Could this be the ultimate story of Christmas? Do its themes of belief and justice hit the mark? And what kind of creature would you call into existence if there were excess belief sloshing around? Use the hashtag #Pratchat26 on social media to join the conversation and have your say!

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Guest Michael Williams is the Director of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne. They have a year-round program of talks, interviews, panel discussions, podcasts and writing. Find out more about what’s happening at @wheelercentre on Twitter and Instagram, or check out videos of past talks on YouTube – including Michael’s 2014 interview with Terry Pratchett. You’ll find all the Wheeler Centre’s upcoming events at wheelercentre.com, as well as a collection of Michael’s writings and events. You can also find Michael on Twitter at @mmccwill.

The Sci-Fight comedy debate over the topic “Santa is Real” featured a great line-up of comedians and scientists, including previous Pratchat guest Nate Byrne (#Pratchat24). It was at Howler in Brunswick on Thursday December 12, 2019. Details and tickets for future debates, plus photos of the Christmas one, can be found at scifight.com.au.

Next month we continue through the Discworld with 1997’s Jingo, a tale of nationalism, war, racism and greed, which also has a submarine in it. We’ll be recording in the week or so before Hogswa- er, Christmas, so get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat27.

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

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.

#Pratchat19 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In” featuring guest Fury, discussing the sixteenth Discworld novel, 1994’s Soul Music.

Iconographic Evidence

We didn’t know about this when we recorded this, but twenty episodes later in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”, guest Marc Burrows told us about the 1981 song “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the lead single from debut album Desperate Character from British singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000). Clearly the inspiration for a certain line of dialogue! And, no doubt, one of many music references we likely missed (though this one might be forgiven; we’re not sure it charted highly in Australia!). Here’s Kirsty is performing it on what we think might be Top of the Pops. (Thanks to listener James for prompting us to add this Kirsty in the comments.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns the title of Duke Ellington’s 1931 jazz standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”, which has been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times over the last 90 years.
  • The Valhalla Cinema was a cinema in Melbourne which specialised in audience participation films – and in its early days you had to bring your own seats. Opening in 1976, it later relocated to Westgarth and changed names. The Wikipedia entry has a charming story about a rather eventful screening of The Blues Brothers – though we doubt that this was the one that Pterry attended (if, indeed, he attended one at all).
  • Look, the French Foreign Legion have a long and storied history, but in popular culture they are the go-to reference for the group you join when you want to get well away from your old life. Brendan Fraser’s character in The Mummy? French Foreign Legion.
  • Why are denim trousers called jeans? They’re named after the city of Genua, where the original fabric was manufactured. Read more about their history here. We know; we hoped they would be named after Gene Wilder too.
  • Rebel Without a Cause is one of James Dean’s most famous films and is often credited with kicking off the idea of the teenager.
  • Arthur Daley is a character from Minder, a British comedy-drama series that ran from 1979 to 1994.
  • Animorphs, first a book series, later adapted into a TV show, followed the adventures of a group of friends who had been given the power to morph into different animal shapes in an attempt to fight back against a secret alien invasion on Earth. Their enemy were the Yeerks – a parasitic species which would occupy the body of a host and control them.
  • Is Sioni bod da real Welsh? According to the Annotated Pratchett File: “‘Bod Da’ is Welsh for ‘be good’. Ergo, ‘Sioni Bod Da’ = ‘Johnny B. Goode’.”
  • “The Day the Music Died” is the name given to the tragic day where musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “The Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson were killed in a light aircraft accident. Both Holly’s wife and mother heard the news from media rather than authorities (his wife, Maria Elena, via a TV report and his mother via the radio). His mother collapsed at the news, and Maria Elena shortly afterwards had a miscarriage. This series of events led to the development of a policy for proper notification of victims’ families. The events of the day also inspired Don McLean’s song “American Pie”.
  • There have been at least two Dalek invasions of contemporary Earth in Doctor Who; the first was in the 1964 story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, later adapted into a feature film starring Peter Cushing.
  • The natural human preference for length of day is a subject of much debate. Some studies showed that the human circadian rhythm, when absent of outside stimuli like light and knowledge of time skewed more towards 25 hours, but later studies dispute this. Need more people to volunteer to sleep whenever they want for further study? We’re available!
  • Two-up is a traditional Australian gambling game. A designated “spinner” throws two coins into the air from a special paddle or board called a “kip”, which has recesses to hold the coins. Players bet on which way the coins will land: obverse (both heads), reverse (both tails) or “Ewan” (one of each). It’s often played on ANZAC Day, when it is officially legal (at least in the state of New South Wales), as it was very popular among soldiers during World War I. Modern games still often use old pre-decimalisation pennies from a significant year like 1915, the year of the Gallipoli campaign.
  • According to the Stratocaster Guide, Keith Richards once said “The Strat is as sturdy and strong as a mule, yet it has the elegance of a racehorse. It’s got everything you need, and that’s rare to find in anything.” Basically? They’re the quintessential cool guitar.
  • In the TV series Gilmore Girls, Dean and Jesse are, respectively, Rory Gilmore’s first and second boyfriends. Dean is an absolute garbage heap of a human being which only becomes more apparent as the show progresses. Jesse starts out only marginally better, but he improves. In the end it doesn’t actually matter though, as the re-boot proves that Rory herself is actually the worst of them all.
  • Popular Scottish indie group Belle & Sebastian are named for the book and television series about a boy and his dog. Their namesake is about as charming as the music they produce.

#Pratchat19 – It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In

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In our nineteenth episode it’s back to the Discworld as we join Death, and meet his granddaughter Susan, as writer and illustrator Fury joins us to talk about Terry Pratchett’s 1994 Discworld novel, Soul Music!

Susan Sto Helit doesn’t have time for anything silly – not for grief, not for tiny skeletal rats who are here to inform her of SQUEAK, and most definitely not for this new craze sweeping the Disc. But “music with rocks in” has other ideas, and doesn’t care who gets swept up in the swell. With her long lost grandfather (the one with the bony knees) missing in action, Susan has no choice but to take on the family business and try not to….erm…rock the boat.

Pratchett is never one to shy away from the big themes and Soul Music packs a lot of punch into a deceptively simple plot. It explores grief, family, teenage obsession and showbiz. It also continues the story of Mort, and introduces us to some new characters that we quickly grow to love (and sadly never see again). With more music references and jokes than a Spinal Tap album, Soul Music is Imp-possible to put down. Got a favourite Discworld band name? Or an idea as good as “My Little Binky”? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat19 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest Fury is a writer and author based in Naarm/Melbourne. Their book, an experimental graphic novel memoir titled I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work, is available here.

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

As mentioned this episode, we recorded our first live show at Nullus Anxietas VII, discussing the short story Troll Bridge with author Tansy Rayner-Roberts! It’s in the podcast feed as #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”.

Next month we head to the skies and cling on for dear life as we finish the Bromeliad trilogy with Wings! Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat20.

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.

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat17 – Midsummer (Elf) Murders

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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.