Short Fiction

#Pratchat77 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 77, “How to Get Below in Advertising”, discussing the 1963 short story “The Hades Business” with guest Lucas Testro.

Iconographic Evidence

The specific Bob Newhart advertising sketch that Lucas was thinking of is this one about Abraham Lincoln. (See also the further note about Bob Newhart below.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the 1989 British black comedy film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard E Grant and written and directed by Bruce Robinson (both of Withnail and I fame).
  • You can find a digital copy of the August 1963 issue of Science Fantasy magazine at the Internet Archive here.
  • The Unfriendly Future was published in October 1965 by Four Square Books, edited by Tom Baordman, Jr. (As Ben guessed, Pratchett was indeed 17 at the time.) The book included the following stories, mostly previously published in John Carnell’s magazines:
    • Russkies Go Home!, a 1960 novelette by Mack Reynolds
    • “The Food Goes in the Top”, a 1961 short story by Will Mohler (as Will Worthington)
    • Danger: Religion!, a 1962 novella by Brian W. Aldiss
    • “Rescue Operation”, a 1964 short story by Harry Harrison
    • “The Hades Business”, a 1963 short story by Terry Pratchett
    • The Seed of Violence, a 1958 novelette by Jay Williams
  • Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is best known as the author of the fantasy novel Titus Groan and its sequels, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, usually referred to as the Gormenghast series. Peake intended to write many more books in this series, but only completed the three novels and a novella, Boy in Darkness, before he died from Parkinson’s Disease. Titus Alone was republished in 2007 in a new version reconstructed from his handwritten manuscript, the original version having errors produced from misreadings of the manuscript. Peake was also a poet, playwright and illustrator, and illustrated editions of many books including his own, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. If you want to know more, as of April 2025 our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret are discussing the Gormenghast books during the first year of their post-Pratchett second season.
  • Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a prolific British science fiction writer best known for his Helliconia trilogy of novels (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, published between 1982 and 1985) which chronicle the history of a civilisation on an otherwise Earth-like planet with incredibly long seasons. He also wrote the 1969 short story “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” which decades later inspired the Stanley Kubrick/Stephen Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like Pratchett, his first published story was published by John Carnell in Science Fantasy, 1958’s “Criminal Record”, though he was considerably older, having spent his younger years in the army and working as a bookseller and editor. He was was a long-time collaborator with Harry Harrison, and the two were part of the “British New Wave” of science fiction. As related in A Life With Footnotes, Terry and his mate Dave met Brian Aldiss (and Harrison) at the 1965 Eastercon in Birmingham.
  • We previously mentioned Harry Harrison (1925-2012) in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”. Harrison was an American science fiction author best known for his character the “Stainless Steel Rat”, an interplanetary con man and rogue who first appeared in an eponymous novel in 1957. He also wrote the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted (very loosely) into the film Soylent Green in 1973. (If you know one thing about the film, it’s not in the novel.) Pratchett is known to have been a fan of Harrison’s work, considering Bill, the Galactic Hero to be the funniest science fiction novel ever written over The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which he also rated, to be clear), considering that the former novel wasn’t a big hit because not enough readers were familiar with the source material being parodied. He also met Harrison at science fiction conventions as a teenager.
  • “Stagger soup” doesn’t seem to be a Pratchett invention, but existing slang for whiskey – though most sources we could find say it’s from North America (some say it’s still in use in Canada), perhaps dating from the prohibition era. Our guess would be that Pratchett found it through American sci-fi writing. “Joy-juice” has similarly American origins, perhaps inspired by “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, a fictional beverage from the comic strip Li’l Abner, and which was later turned into a real life soft drink by the Monarch Beverage Company in 1965.
  • The Good Place is one of Ben’s favourite sictoms, following Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell), a terrible, selfish young woman from Arizona who dies and ends up in “The Good Place”, a heaven-like afterlife. Eleanor quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake, and convinces her supposed soul mate, ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to help her learn to be a better person so she can belong there. Over it’s four short seasons the show evolves a lot and has many twists and turns it’s more fun to discover yourself, but it is a plot point in later episodes that there are many more people in The Bad Place than The Good Place.
  • Donald Cotton (1928-1999), the subject of Lucas’ documentary Myth Maker: The Legend of Donald Cotton, was a British writer for radio, television and stage. He is best known for the early Doctor Who stories he wrote which took the show in a more comedic direction: “The Myth Makers”, in which the Doctor travels to the Trojan war, and “The Gunfighters”, in which he gets mixed up in the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He’d likely have written more, but the new producers of the show decided not to do so many historical episodes. He also helped create the television program Adam Adamant Lives!, a later project of Doctor Who co-creators Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman.
  • Bedazzled is a 1967 film written by Peter Cook in which George Spiggot (played by Cook), a man claiming to be the Devil, offers meek and depressed cook Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) seven wishes. None of them, of course, go as planned – it’s more or less a parody of Faust. While there’s some very witty and clever stuff in there, it should also be said that the entire premise revolves around Moon wanting to date a waitress (played by Eleanor Bron) at the hamburger place where he works, and it has some very 1967 ideas which don’t really stand up today. A 2000 remake, also titled Bedazzled and directed and co-written by Ghostbusters’ Harold Ramis, starred Brendan Fraser as Elliott Richards, an equivalent to Stanley Moon who pines for a woman he works with at a computer company. Elizabeth Hurley played The Devil, who doesn’t go by an alias.
  • Bob Newhart (born 1929) is an American comedian who found fame in 1960 when his album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to reach number one in the American charts (it also reached number two in the UK). The advertising sketch mentioned by Lucas is “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” from that album, and in a 2005 interview Newhart claimed it was his own favourite. Newhart went on to a successful screen career, with his own sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990), and subsequent appearances in films and other shows, including the recurring role of “Professor Proton” in The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon.
  • Bewitched (1964-1972) is an American fantasy sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch who against the wishes and advice of her mother and community, marries a “mortal” man, Darrin Stephens (originally Dick York; he was replaced by Dick Sargent for the last three seasons due to illness). The series was created by comedy writer Sol Saks, based in part on the 1942 film I Married a Witch. Like the ad man in Newhart’s sketch, Darrin works on Madison Avenue for the fictional firm of McMann and Tate, his boss being one of the named partners, Larry Tate.
  • We get into a bit of business jargon familiar to Australian freelancers here, so let us explain. A sole trader – not a “soul trader”, though we considered that as a title for this episode – is a business classification used in Australia. It’s basically a one-person company, and costs very little to set up; the downside is that there’s no limited liability as there is in other structures. All Australian businesses require an Australian Business Number, or ABN, to identify them. GST is the Australian Goods and Services Tax, a 10% value-added tax introduced in 2000 on most goods and services sold in Australia. Companies (including sole traders) with revenue of more than $75,000 a year are required to register for GST, which means that they have to charge GST to their customers and pay that to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), but can also claim the GST they pay on good and services bought to run the business as a credit, reducing the GST payment they make to the ATO.
  • The story about Pratchett almost buying a DeLorean appears in chapter 15 of A Life With Footnotes.
  • Geryon was a giant in classical mythology said to have three heads. The name was later used by Dante in his Inferno as the name of greater demon, the Monster of Fraud, who is more like a dragon; Dante and Virgil ride on its back into the eighth circle, where those who committed fraud in life are found.
  • A “noodle incident” is a comedy fiction trope in which a past incident is referred to by characters but never explained. It takes its name from an example in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which the characters often refer to “the noodle incident” but writer Bill Watterson decided to never explain it since the readers’ imagination will always be better than than anything he could come up with. Pratchett is fond of them, the major Discworld example being what happened to Mr Hong’s restaurant, The Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar, which seemingly disappeared from Ankh-Morpork after being build on an old Temple of Dagon.
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British public intellectual best known as a philosopher and political activist. A lifelong pacifist, Russell opposed Britain’s participation in the First World War, leading to him being convicted under wartime censorship acts in 1916. He was fined £100 and when he refused to pay, hoping to be sent to prison to further attention for the cause, his books were siezed and sold at auction; most were bought by his friends and returned to him, some stamped as confiscated by the police. He was subsequently dismissed from his position at Trinity College London, though this was an unpopular decision and he was reinstated in 1919. He generally regarded religion as a form of superstition and an impediment to moral and social progress, describing himself as an agnostic or atheist, publishing an essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” in 1927. His most famous work is Principia Mathematica, a book laying out the principles of mathematical and symbolic logic, written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. It was a follow up to Russell’s earlier 1903 work The Principles of Mathematics. His other famous works include the essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and the books Power: A New Social Analysis and A History of Western Philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
  • Satan in the Suburbs was Bertrand Russell’s first work of fiction, published in 1953 – rather earlier than Ben remembered. It collected three novelettes, Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here, The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X (which had been previously published anonymously) and The Infra-Redioscope, plus two short stories, “The Guardians of Parnassus” and “Benefit of Clergy”. The book was apparently well-received at the time, but modern readers aren’t so kind. The titular story is more or less a variant on “The Monkey’s Paw”, in which four ordinary people respond to a plaque on the suburban house of the mysterious Dr Mallako, and don’t get what they bargained for. Russell’s journey to fiction writing was sort of opposite to Pratchett’s, coming near the end of his life – he was 80 when he wrote these stories.
  • Hades is a hit videogame developed by Supergiant Games, previously best known for their breakout hit Bastion. It’s a rogue-like game, meaning the player enters a series of randomised levels of increasing difficulty and likely dies before reaching the end, which sends them back to the start; but they improve in skill each time, making them able to get further on subsequent attempts. The player character is Zagreus, a reasonably obscure figure from Greek mythology who in some stories is the sone of Zeus, and in others the son of Hades. In the game he is the latter, and journeys through the Underworld in an attempt to find out how and why his mother, Persephone, has left. In the game, Cerberus is seen having a rest next to the desk of Hades where he receives new souls; the player is able to speak to him and pat and scratch his heads. A sequel, Hades II, is in early access; the player is no longer Zagreus, but instead his sister Melinoë, another character who is said to have been fathered by Zeus.
  • Heck is a 2013 graphic novel by Eisner Award-nominated American comic creator Zander Cannon, published by Top Shelf Comix. It collects the original comic which first appeared in Top Shelf’s digital magazine Double Barrel. In the novel, protagonist Hector “Heck” Hammarskjöld inherits his estranged father’s house and discovers a portal to the Underworld in the basement. He initially uses it to settle disputes around wills by contacting the souls of the dead, but eventually gets drawn into a bigger adventure that sees him travel through the Circles of Hell. Cannon’s most recent series is Kaijumax for Oni Press, about a prison for giant monsters, published in six volumes between 2015 and 2022.
  • We discussed Faust Eric way back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”, with guest Georgina Chadderton.
  • We discussed Good Omens (the novel) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World (and I feel Nice and Accurate)”, with guests Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray.
  • The traditional marketing mix was introduced by American marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The original version, itself an evolution of earlier ideas, was “the Four Ps of Marketing”: product, price, place and promotion. It was extended in 1981 by Booms and Bitner into the “Seven Ps”, adding not just “people” but “process” and “physical evidence”. Modern usage seems to vary with anything between four and seven “P”s, depending on who you ask and what industry is involved.
  • Matt Damon’s 2021 crypto ad, “Fortune Favours the Brave”, featured the actor walking between exhibits of supposedly great human endeavour and exhorting the viewer to be bold…and invest in cryptocurrency using the exchange crypto.com. Damon later said he only did it to support the charity water.org, which tries to improve access to safe drinking water to communities worldwide. American actor (and ex-economist) Ben McKenzie, who wrote the book Easy Money about the crypto fad, gave his highly critical opinion about the ad (and what it was trying to sell) in many places, including a January 2022 episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD.
  • The “comma, for the use of” jokes are primarily seen in Men at Arms (as discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”) when Fred Colon is handing out equipment to the new recruits, though it returns as a callback once or twice.
  • Fallout: New Vegas is the sixth game in the satirical post-apocalyptic Fallout series. The games are set in the wastelands of a future America, decimated by a nuclear war with China in 2077, though the pre-War America of the games was a 1950s retro-futuristic vision of nuclear-powered cars and household robots. The first couple of games were made in the late 1990s by Black Isle Studios (originally under a different name), but following a couple of spin-off games, the license for the franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks, makers of the hugely successful Elder Scrolls series of fantasy roleplaying games. They made Fallout 3 in 2008, the first game to have a modern first person perspective, but some fans thought it lost too much of the satirical tone of the originals. Obsidian Entertainment, another studio which included developers who’d worked on earlier Fallout games, pitched an idea for another game using the Fallout engine set in a different part of the game’s America; it was accepted and released in 2010 as Fallout: New Vegas. In the game, the player is a Courier given the job of delivering a special poker chip to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas, but they are waylaid by a gangster working with the Great Khans, a local tribe of raiders, who steal the chip, shoot the character and leave them for dead. They survive and try to find the chip and complete the job, along the way altering the future of the entire Mojave Wasteland, which is being fought over by the Khans, the New California Republic, and the mysterious Mr House, who controls New Vegas itself.
  • Monty Python, as we’re sure you probably know, were a British comedy group formed in 1969, best known for their television sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus which ran from 1969 to 1974, and their films, which most relevantly here include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), in which God appears to King Arthur as a cut-out animation of bearded man in a cloud, created like all the Python animations by Terry Gilliam. Their next film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), follows the mis-adventures of a man born at the same time as Jesus and mistaken for a messiah; God does not appear, though Jesus is seen from a distance giving the Sermon on the Mount.
  • Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) is an overtly patriotic American action film about an alien invasion starring an ensemble cast including Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. When the immense alien saucers arrive in Earth’s atmosphere (launched from an even bigger mothership in high orbit), they create clouds to shield themselves from view.
  • Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999) is a fantasy film in which two exiled angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) plan to re-enter Heaven by exploiting an open offer of indulgence from an American Cardinal. Early on in the film, protagonist Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) is visited by Metatron (Alan Rickman), a Seraphim who is the Voice of God. As he explains: ‘Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God’s true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.’
  • Pandæmonium – not Pandæmomium, as Ben mis-speaks it here – is the name invented for the capital city of Hell by British poet John Milton in his famous 1667 epic Paradise Lost. It draws on Greek, and translates roughly as “place of all demons”.
  • The “sand ropes” stories can be found in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale index as type 1174, “Deceiving the Devil with a Rope of Sand”. Examples can be found in Scotland, England, Ireland and Germany. Some of the stories star Michael Scot, a thirteenth century mathematician and astrologer.
  • The issue of Science Fantasy in which the story first appeared was volume 20, number 60, published in August 1963. A digital version of the issue is available via the Internet Archive; the link will take you to the first page of “The Hades Business”.
  • Janet is one of the major characters of The Good Place, played by D’Arcy Carden. While she frequently has to remind the human characters that she is “not a robot” and “not a girl”, Janet is the afterlife equivalent of a computer interface, able to access all knowledge and providing the means for Architects of the afterlife to create the Neighbourhoods in which human souls live out existence. Carden also plays other versions of Janet, including Bad Janet (the Bad Place’s ruder equivalent), and Neutral Janet (the very bland version who works in the “Accounting Department” responsible for deciding who goes where after death).
  • Benidorm isn’t the kind of place Ben is thinking of – it’s not even in the UK! It’s a municipality on the southeastern coast of Spain. It became a major tourist destination in the 1980s, has three world-renowned beaches, and has a famous hotel which is one of the tallest buildings in Spain. There’s also a popular British sitcom set there, also called Benidorm, which ran on ITV from 2007 to 2018. It follows a large ensemble cast of British holidaymakers from various social classes who make repeat visits to an all-inclusive holiday resort in Benidorm, though the cast changed significantly over the ten series.
  • Skegness is more the kind of place Ben is talking about. Located on the Lincolnshire coast on the East of Britain, Skegness was formerly one of the most popular holiday resort towns in the UK, but went into decline from the 1970s as overseas holidays became cheaper. It’s the home of the original Butlin’s holiday camp, now known as Butlins Skegness, and one of only three still in operation, the rest having closed in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a bit fancier than our description makes it sound, with pools and activities and entertainment, and a range of different types of accomodation.
  • Better Than a Poke in the Eye is the British fantasy newsletter formerly known as Discworld Monthly. Its creators, Jason and Rachel, appeared in our special Discworld anniversary episode, “How Did Discworld Get to 40?” The Llamedos Holiday Camp now runs every two years, with the next one in 2026, themed as “The Llamedos Hogs Ball 2026”.
  • The Prisoner is a 1967 television series created by Irish actor Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009), best known at the time for starring as spy John Dake in the earlier spy series Danger Man. Danger Man initially only lasted one season in 1960, and afterwards McGoohan was offered the role of James Bond, and Simon Templar in The Saint; he turned both down on moral grounds, mostly because as a Catholic he objected to those characters’ promiscuity (he famously insisted on no kissing in Danger Man). The popularity of Bond led to a Danger Man revival in 1964 that made McGoohan the highest-paid television actor in the UK. The show was a hit in the UK and America, where it was re-titled Secret Agent and had the popular theme song “Secret Agent Man”. It inspired various copycats and spoofs, including the cartoon Danger Mouse. McGoohan’s star power also got him more control over the show, and when he was announced he was quitting, was able to negotiate to make a new series of his own devising: The Prisoner. The premise was that a spy angrily quits his job, but after leaving the agency’s office is abducted and taken to a weird, almost surreal holiday camp known as “The Village”, where everyone is referred to only by number – the protagonist is “Number Six”. The secret controllers of the camp use all kinds of bizarre gambits to try and find out why Number Six quit the agency, but he refuses to tell them, and makes repeated attempts to escape and discover who is in charge – the mysterious and never seen Number One. Each episode features a different Number Two, who acts on behalf of Number One. Though originally conceived as a mini-series of just seven episodes, The Prisoner was extended to seventeen episodes, broadcast in 1967 and 1968. It got behind schedule, though, and a final two colour episodes of Danger Man (shown in the US as a telemovie) were broadcast in the first two weeks of its timeslot, instead of after the finale as originally planned. The finale is…well, it’s a whole other discussion, but let’s just say opinion is fairly sharply divided on the ending. But the show itself is otherwise seen as something of a weird masterpiece, and Ben highly recommends you check out some of the best episodes.

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

#Pratchat81 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 81, “Only Fowls and Horses”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1990 short story “Hollywood Chickens”, and 1972 short story “From the Horse’s Mouth”, with guest Dr Laura Jean McKay.

Iconographic Evidence

We’re hoping to find the illustration from the original version of “Hollywood Chickens” from More Tales From the Forbidden Planet; if you have access to a copy, please let us know!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on Only Fools and Horses, a popular BBC sitcom which originally ran between 1981 and 1991, and continued to show up in the form of Christmas specials until 2006. It starred David Jason (known to Discworld fans for playing Albert and later Rincewind in The Mob’s adaptations for Sky Television) and Nicholas Lyndhurst as “Del Boy” and Rodney Trotter, two half brothers living in south-east London. The show revolves around their various get rich schemes, mostly to do with buying and selling dodgy goods. It holds the record for the highest ratings for a UK sitcom, with 24 million people tuning in to watch the supposed last ever episode in 1996.
  • If The Animals in That Country sounds familiar it may be because it’s won many awards, including the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Fiction, being named a Slate and Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title might also be familiar – it’s named after a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.
  • Thelma & Louise – the regular one, without a dingo – is a beloved 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott (yes, the Alien guy) and written by Callie Khouri. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the titular friends, whose holiday road trip goes horribly wrong…which isn’t a great description of the film, but it’s considered a modern feminist classic for good reason. David and Sarandon were both nominated for Academy Awards, and it was also nominated for several others, winning for Best Screenplay. A musical version is currently in development.
  • Pratchett’s most prolific year was, in fact, 1990 – the same year he wrote “Hollywood Chickens”. That year he published five novels: Diggers (#Pratchat13), Good Omens (#Pratchat15), Wings (#Pratchat20), Eric (#Pratchat7) and Moving Pictures (#Pratchat10).
  • Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-American writer best known for her prolific personal journals, which she started writing at the age of 11.
  • Pratchett actually says that “short stories cost me blood” twice – and in the same book! In A Blink of the Screen, he says this in the author’s note for “Turntables of the Night” (see #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”) and “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”).
  • Pratchett’s meeting with Arthur C. Clarke is detailed in Chapter 3 of A Life With Footnotes. It did indeed happen in the toilet.
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award for the year’s best science fiction novel. It was established in 1987 via a grant from Clarke; the winner is chosen by a panel made up of members of three prominent British science fiction organisations. The Animals in That Country won in 2021; the most recent winner is Martin McInnes for his novel In Ascension.
  • Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, best known for the Young Wizards series of fantasy novels, as well as decades of work on Star Trek as a novelist, screenwriter and more. But that’s just scratching the surface of her work. As Diane was kind enough to point out to us in a comment below (when this note was sadly left very unfinished), she was also a long-time friend of Pratchett’s. We’ve previously linked to Diane’s blog post about the Maggi soup ads incident, as well as this post about it on the Stuffed Crocodile blog; both of them have pictures of the affected books. The previous mention of the soup story was in Eeek Club 2023.
  • The Hollywood Freeway Chickens are absolutely real, though their origins are a mystery. The original colony lives near the exit to Vineland Avenue, and they seem to have been there since 1969 (so a bit earlier than Diane’s story). There’s also a second colony, the “New Freeway Chickens”, a couple of miles away. Several people have come forward over the years claiming to have put them there (via truck accident or otherwise), but none of these stories have been verified. Attempts to remove the chickens have never managed to catch them all, so while we couldn’t find definite confirmation of this, it seems likely that they’re still there now. Listener Natalie was kind enough to ask Diane Duane about it via Tumblr on our behalf; and Diane was a good sport and gave a lovely answer. You can read the original discussion on Tumblr, but in brief: Diane had seen the chickens “often”, and mentioned that “when the subject came up in some convention bar or other, (a) we were in Telling Another Writer About A Cool if Unlikely-Sounding Thing mode—at which time you do not “pull the long bow,” just lay out the facts as known to you—and (b) I knew quite well Terry’d later do his fact-checking and possibly find out more about the story than I knew: which would be fun. …Thus (eventually/accidentally) leaving me with one of the greatest blurb slugs ever seen. 😄”
  • The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-2018) is a classic sci-fi crime drama. It follows two FBI agents, weirdo Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptical Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned weird unsolved cases – the “X-Files” – which usually (but not always) have a supernatural explanation. We’ve previously mentioned the show in #Pratchat35, #Pratchat36, #Prachat42 and #Pratchat69.
  • The Ursula Le Guin story about ants Laura mentions is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, first published in the 1974 anthology Fellowship of the Stars. The phrase being debated in the story is indeed “Up with the Queen!”
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat80 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 80, “Always Believe in Your Golems”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money, with returning guest Stephanie Convery.

Iconographic Evidence

The Count’s first appearance on Sesame Street, from the fourth season in 1972. He was created by long-time Sesame Street writer Norman Stiles, and was the longest running character performed by veteran muppet performer Jerry Nelson. Matt Vogel took over performing the Count in 2013, though he was made much less sinister fairly early on.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a riff on British pop group Spandau Ballet’s hit song “Gold”. It was released in 1983, the fourth single from their third studio album, True, and is probably their most famous song, though at the time the title track from the same album was more popular. ”Gold” was heavily inspired by the film music of John Barry, including his work on many James Bond themes; the original lyrics from the chorus are: “Gold! (Gold) / Always believe in your soul / You’ve got the power to know / You’re indestructible / Always believe in…” It’s been featuring in subsequent pop culture; Ben remembers it from the 1998 comedy Four Men in a Car where a CD gets stuck, looping the line “you’re indestructible” as the car’s occupants try and fail to destroy the car CD’s player.
  • Ben covers some Pratchett news at the end of this episode, but we’re putting the notes about them up front to make them easier to find. (Notes below continue in the usual chronological order.)
  • William Morris (1834 – 1896) was a British artist, poet and novelist. His “terrible utopian novels” include News from Nowhere (1890), in which a member of the Socialist League falls asleep after a meeting and wakes up in a future society built on socialist and Marxist ideals. Morris is also known for his fantasy novels, which were among the first such popular novels to include supernatural elements and were hugely influential, including on J. R. R. Tolkien. These books include The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles; many of these included socialist themes as well.
  • Making Money comes just three books after Going Postal. Moist doesn’t appear in any books in between, but he is mentioned briefly (though not by name) in Thud! He shows up again in the penultimate Discworld novel, Raising Steam, but doesn’t make any cameos in other books.
  • Robert E Howard’s Conan stories are set in the fictional “Hyborian Age” of Earth, estimated to be somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. It’s meant to represent prehistoric Europe and Northern Africa, and thus Cimmeria is the ancient home of Celtic peoples, but it’s based on ahistorical stereotypes and is functionally a collection of fantasy analogues for modern nations. The real Cimmeria was an ancient “micro continent” that was originally part of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. It became detached around 250 million years ago and moved north as part of continental drift, eventually colliding with and becoming part of Eurasia around 150 million years ago. It now forms part of the Middle East and western and south-eastern Asia.
  • “WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN” is from a heartbreaking scene towards the end of Feet of Clay, and the words are from Dorfl.
  • Squashing bread does not make it sweeter, but chewing on it does. The missing ingredient is saliva, which begins the process of breaking down the complex carbohydrates in the bread into sugars.
  • The compulsive need to count is known as “arithmomania”, and is a feature of European vampire lore. It was usually other kinds of grains, rather than rice, though this may also be the reason for throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off the Devil – he would be compelled to stop and count every grain.
  • The jiāngshī (殭屍) or Chinese hopping vampire is a form of undead from Chinese folklore, similar in some ways to both vampires and zombies. There are many varied accounts of their powers, limitations and vulnerabilities, but they don’t seem to have to count grains of rice – instead, one method for stopping them is through a ball of sticky rice at them which will draw out the evil in their soul. They have inspired an entire genre of films, most famously the Mr Vampire comedy horror movies made in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. These popularised the hopping version of jiāngshī, gave them a standard look (traditional mandarin robes from the Qing dynasty), and established some common ways to deal with them (e.g. placing a spell written on a piece of paper on their forehead) in much the same way as early vampire films solidified European vampire lore.
  • Bram Stoker (1847-1912) drew on various bits of vampire folklore when creating Dracula, but he also incorporated real life science, beliefs about disease, recent events, and other unrelated supernatural stories. The most prominent vampire-adjacent belief at the time was that contagious diseases were caused by corpses which still contained blood in the heart. This led especially poor folk in rural areas to dig up corpses and destroy them to try and halt the spread of illness, a practice which seems to have directly inspired parts of the novel. Stoker wrote fifteen novels, the second most famous being his last, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), another horror story incorporating various elements from folklore.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat81 – Only Fowls and Horses

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Author and poet* Dr Laura Jean McKay joins Liz and Ben for two of Terry Pratchett’s short stories about intelligent animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (1990) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (1972).

In 1973 Hollywood, a truck full of chickens overturned on a busy highway, depositing a population of chickens on the verge. A decade and a half later, scientists try to piece together the story of how they developed and evolved in pursuit of a very specific goal…

In the town of Blackbury, rag and bone man Ron is amazed to discover that his carthorse, Johnno, can talk. Will their relationship be forever changed by the adventure they share together?

These stories don’t share too much in common beyond being about animals, but they are a nice sample of Pratchett’s writing from two interesting points in his career: towards the end of his early phase of children’s stories for newspapers, not long after his first novel was published; and at the height of his early fame – the year, in fact, that he published five novels. You can find “Hollywood Chickens” most readily in A Blink of the Screen, and “From the Horse’s Mouth” in A Stroke of the Pen.

Do you have a favourite Pratchett short story? What do you think of the way he writes animals? Should we have inserted an ad for Maggi noodles into this episode? What are your best horse pun names, and how would you get to the other side? We’d love to hear from you whether you’re a horse, chicken, human or have mutant powers: join the conversation for this episode via email, or by using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media.

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Dr Laura Jean McKay (she/her) is an author, poet* and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University. Her novel The Animals in That Country – “like Thelma and Louise with a woman and a dingo” – has won multiple awards, including the Arthur C Clarke Award. Her latest book is the short fiction collection Gunflower, published in 2023. You can find Laura as @laurajeanmckay on Twitter and Instagram, and find out more about her books on her website, laurajeanmckay.com.au.

* Even if she doesn’t know it.

You’ll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website, and you can hopefully still get tickets for Guards! Guards! at the Roleystone Theatre in Perth, which opens on 22 November 2024.

Next episode we’re back on track to crack the Clacks in the most recent Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us ASAP by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat82 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat79 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 79, “Unalive from Überwald”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2002 short story “Death and What Comes Next”, with returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts and new guest Karen J Carlisle.

Iconographic Evidence

If you also took photos of us at the convention, please get in touch – we’d love to see them and add a few here!

You can also find photos of the convention at the official website.

A photo of Ben and Liz, in costume as Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig, attempting to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo.
Ben and Liz attempted to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo, with costume and iconographic assistance from Danny Sag.
A photo of a small piece of white paper on a green surface. Handwriting in black pen reads: “dead and not dead” Schrödinger’s cat What if the cat is Greebo? Next to the writing is drawn a small cartoon cat with prominent whiskers and an eye patch.
The audience question with the very cute illustration of Greebo!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme for Nullus Anxietas IX, “Come Alive in Überwald”, but since we were talking mostly about Death, “Live from Überwald” didn’t seem quite right.
  • Nullus Anxietas IX is, as you probably know, the ninth bi-annual Australian Discworld convention. As mentioned at the end of the episode, the next convention will be in Sydney in 2026, and you can already get a supporting membership for the next convention. For details, plus information on past conventions and Discworld fan clubs across Australia, head to ausdwcon.org.
  • Our previous live shows are:
  • Liz mentions two of her short stories:
    • The story about women turning into cleaning equipment is “Call Him Al”. You can read it in Meanjin, where it was published in 2020.
    • The story about an immigrant splitting into two people is “One’s Company”, originally published in the anthology Best Australian Stories 2017. It was published online at InterSastra in an Indonesian translation (“Cukup Sendiri”) by Nicolaus Gogor Seta Dewa; the original English version is also available there.
  • “Pantsers and Plotters” are widespread terms for “the two types” of writers, embraced to varying degrees by writing communities and individuals. The classification is based on whether a writer works out a plot in advance (a plotter), or writes by the seat of their pants (a pantser), making it up as they go along. It’s not entirely clear where these terms originated, but these days some writers refer to themselves as “plantsers” (a combination of the two), and other terms exist for roughly the same ideas. For example, in 2011 George R. R. Martin used the terms architect (similar to a plotter) and gardener (a variation on pantser in which the emphasis is on the weeding, i.e. editing).
  • Tansy’s stories that get mentioned include:
    • Musketeer Space, the gender-swapped Three Musketeers in space;
    • Teacup Magic, the Regency-inspired fantasy mystery series (we’ve linked to the collection);
    • We don’t think Tansy has written “Beauty and the Beast with cyborgs”, but she has written Curse of Bronze, a novella which riffs on Beauty and the Beast. It’s available for free as an ebook via BookFunnel (you’ll need to sign up to Tansy’s mailing list), or in audio form on her podcast Sheep Might Fly.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat79 – Unalive from Überwald

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Recorded live at the Australian Discworld Convention in Tarntanyangga (Adelaide), Karen J Carlisle and Tansy Rayner Roberts join us on stage to discuss short fiction, Death and the (sort of) last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld short stories, 2004’s “Death and What Comes Next”.

Somewhere in time and space, a philosopher lies on his deathbed…and Death has come to collect. Only the philosopher isn’t convinced he’s real, or that any of this is even happening. Will “quantum” and cats in boxes be enough of an argument to dissuade Death from his job?

Created for the now defunct Time Hunt puzzle website, “Death and What Comes Next” was written somewhere between 2002 and 2004. At under 1,000 words it’s one of Pratchett’s shorter pieces of fiction, and contains several jokes he’d go on to re-use elsewhere, as well as a word puzzle which provided a code word for Time Hunt site. You can read the story for free at the L-Space Web, which also hosts fan translations in many languages.

Despite its placement in A Blink of the Screen, is this truly a Discworld story? Have you tried to solve the puzzle? How would you challenge Death to delay the time of your passing – and have you thought about what an encounter with the Discworld Death might be like for you? And is Death at his funniest here, or do you have other favourite Death moments? Join the conversation by using the hashtag #Pratchat79 on social media.

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy, cosy crime and much, much more. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men, “Men Who Respect Witches”, can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Her latest novel is a time travel comedy called Time of the Cat, and you can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media. Tansy was also a guest on our previous live episode, “A Troll New World”, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.

Guest Karen J Carlisle (she/her) is a writer and illustrator based in Adelaide whose work spans Victorian mystery, steampunk, fantasy and yes, even (mostly) cosy murders. She has some new writing in the works, but her recent “Jack the Ripper thing” is Blood Ties, which you can find via her website, karenjcarlisle.com. You can also find her on Instagram, Twitter and various other social platforms as @karenjcarlisle.

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

Next month it’s back to the books as we rejoin Moist von Lipwig for Making Money! Send us your questions about the book ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat80.

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.

#Pratchat77 – How to Get Below in Advertising

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Writer, filmmaker and creative director Lucas Testro joins Liz and Ben on a trip down under to the Other Place as we discuss Terry Pratchett’s first ever published short story, 1963’s “The Hades Business”.

Shady advertising man Crucible arrives home to find none other than old Nicholas Lucifer waiting for him in his study. But he hasn’t come to take him to eternal damnation. Instead, the Devil has a business proposition for Crucible: he want to make the public conscious, Hell-wise…

At age thirteen (actually fourteen), the young Pratchett scored full marks for this story as a school assignment, encouraging him to try his luck with the editor of his three favourite spec fic magazines. And it worked! As the legend goes, he used the whopping £14 he was paid for the story to buy his first typewriter, and the rest is history…with a few bumps and detours along the way, of course.

Was the young Pratchett a genius? Do you know any fourteen-year-olds who’ve been published alongside Michael Moorcock and Harry Harrison? Are we way too harsh on a story written by a teenager, or is it fair game as an exercise in working where the author of Night Watch and Nation got his start? And what afterlife would you sell – and with what slogan? Get down with this episode’s conversation using the infernal hashtag #Pratchat77.

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Lucas Testro (he/him) is writer, filmmaker and creative director based in Melbourne. He’s worked in theatre, television and short film, including the time travel farce I’m You, Dickhead and superhero comedy Capes. He’s worked in a variety of capacities with youth creative writing centre 100 Story Building. In 2022 he founded Social Storylab, a media production house that seeks to use persuasive marketing techniques for social good. (He’s kind of the anti-Crucible.) You can find Lucas online at manwithajetpack.com, and his excellent three-part audio documentary about mysterious Doctor Who writer Donald Cotton is available via donaldcotton.com or to stream on Soundcloud.

As usual you’ll find comprehensive notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next episode we finish a long-term goal: the end of the Long Earth series, with the fifth and final novel, The Long Cosmos! We’ll be joined by previous Steppers Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins. Get your questions in by ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat78 on social media, or email us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat73 – This Christmas Goes to Eleven

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In this very special Christmas episode, Liz and Ben fly without a guest as they turn the seasonal silliness up to maximum and discuss all eleven stories in Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short Christmas stories, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

It’s not always easy being Father Christmas. You might be forced out of home by a rogue submarine or the harsh reality of a job where you only work one day a year; you might be sent fifty thousand identical letters by a computer or put on trial for three thousand counts of breaking and entering. But at least you don’t live in Blackbury, where giant pies explode, the snow falls so thick you have to dig tunnels to see your granny, and where weird creatures show up every other day. And you won’t believe the true stories behind some of your favourite Christmas songs…

While he later claimed short stories “cost me blood”, Pratchett wrote scores of stories every year while working in his first newspaper jobs between 1965 and 1979, and continued to sell them to his old papers even after he went to work for the Central Electricity Governing Board. These included plenty of Christmas stories – and eleven of them (well…eight plus three wintery ring-ins) from between 1967 and 1992 are collected in this third volume of his early work for children.

Have you read Father Christmas’s Fake Beard? Is “Father Christmas” more British than Santa Claus? Do you prefer these (close to) original versions of the stories, or some of the later re-written versions unearthed for A Stroke of the Pen? Have you ever seen one of these stories in their original habitat, the Southwestern British Newspaper? And what should we name our Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh team? Join in the conversation on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat73!

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“Guest” Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor, and also currently Arts Editor for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. You can find out where Liz’s short fiction has been published via her website, elizabethflux.com.

“Guest” Ben McKenzie is a writer, game designer and educator who doesn’t usually work in short fiction. But you can find a few short Twine games on his website, benmckenzie.com.au.

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

Next episode we have two actual very special guests: Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent! They’re joining us for a chat about their new book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. This will be more an interview than an in-depth discussion about the book (which, we feel we should warn you, include spoilers for some key events and characters for The Shepherd’s Crown, but we’ll try to keep those spoilers to a minimum). As well as asking our own questions, we want to ask them yours! So send them in using the hashtag #Pratchat74 or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, but be quick: we’ll be recording on the 15th of December!

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.

#Pratchat73 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 73, “This Christmas Goes to Eleven”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the Instagram photo of Richard from Cracked and Spineless bookshop in Hobart, showing off his Ineffable Edition of The Definitive Good Omens in 2019!

We’ll be sure to add photos of some of the Christmas food we mentioned here when we can.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a reference to the famous scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap. The film follows famous metal band Spinal Tap on a fairly disastrous tour; at one point guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) shows off his amplifiers which he has had custom made with dials that go to eleven rather than ten, which makes them “one louder”. When asked why he didn’t just “make ten louder”, he replies: “This one goes to eleven.” It seemed a perfect reference for the extreme Christmasness of Father Christmas’ Fake Beard, which also contains eleven stories.
  • The twelve days of Christmas are a Christian celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Some traditions have it starting with Christmas Day, and some the day after, which is Boxing Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Australia, and also St Stephen’s Day (the “Feast of Stephen” referenced in the other song featured in this book, Good King Wenceslas). The season is also called Twelvetide, though “Christmastide” is technically a different thing that doesn’t exactly match up, depending on your church. The last night is “Twelfth Night”, as in the Shakespeare play.
  • Father Christmas is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but this wasn’t always the case. He was the folkloric personification of Christmas in Britain, going back a few hundred years, but by Victorian times began to more resemble the modern Santa Claus, especially after the American version was imported in the mid 1800s. As Ben mentions, Santa Claus’s origins lie with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas (not German as Ben misremembers), but the modern version also incorporates bits of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas. Ben did once know this, but it’s as if he’s forgotten everything he learned for our Hogfather episode back in 2019! And Pratchett certainly dove deep on the folklore and history when he was writing the novel. But we’re still keen to know what modern sentiment is around the names, because there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between the traditions – Father Christmas has been fully Santa-fied.
  • The book is still in print as far as we can tell! But this isn’t as easy to determine as it once was…
  • Pratchett’s other collections of children’s stories also contain a few stories seen elsewhere. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner both had deluxe slipcase editions which contained a couple of additional stories, and those stories are included in all editions of the fourth volume The Time-travelling Caveman (though it too had a deluxe edition with a story so far not collected elsewhere). In addition, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner also includes “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, which also appears in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
  • Some of these stories were originally published without any title, especially those from the Bucks Free Press. The titles were made up for the purposes of this book. But then again, according to the list in the book, that includes some of the stories which had been previously published in earlier collections under other titles, like “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas”.
  • Father Christmas’s Fake Beard includes the opening section of Truckers as bonus material. It’s in that book that “Arnold Bros (est 1905)” (not 1903) is revealed to be owned by Arnco Group, along with a great many other businesses, when Gurder, Masklin and Grimma travel to the Top of the Store to learn the truth about the Thing’s warnings of it being demolished. You can hear more about that in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • “Old man yells at cloud” is a meme derived from The Simpsons, specifically the 2002 episode “The Old Man and the Key”. In one scene Homer’s father Abe Simpson needs a photograph for a driver’s license, and uses a photo from a newspaper story about him; it shows him shaking his fist at a cloud in the sky, with the headline “OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD”. It’s been used as a meme since around 2008, usually to denote someone complaining about something for no good reason.
  • Clinkers are a lolly (or sweet or candy, depending on which flavour of English you speak) manufactured by the Australian confectionary brand Pascall (now owned by Cadbury, in turn owned by Mondelez International). They consist of brightly coloured oval-shaped hard nougat, much like the candy honeycomb you find in Violet Crumble or Crunchie chocolate bars, coated in Cadbury chocolate. We’re not actually sure what Liz’s Dad thinks “Clinker” means, but Ben is pretty close: it’s a generic name for industrial waste products formed by the burning of coal or working of metal, which usually forms small, brittle glassy round shapes – much like the candy.
  • Isembard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was an English engineer best known for his work during the Industrial Revolution, especially with steamships, railways, bridges and tunnels. There’s a lot to say about him – way more than we can fit in a note – but remember that “Great Man” histories are always over-simplified and leave out a lot of people who were vital to whatever the man in question did, even if he was very great.
  • It’s been a while since we mentioned the steamroller story, but the short version is that his hard drives containing his unfinished work were destroyed by a steamroller, according to his wishes, in 2017 – the same year Father Christmas’s Fake Beard was published! You can read about it in this Guardian article.
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook back in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. B S Johnson’s giant pie was also a disaster. Described informally as “the Great Fruit Pie” (it was made mostly of apples), and under the title “Bloody Stupid Johnson’s Individual Fruit Pie”, Ben remembers rightly that Johnson thought of making a giant pie whistle; however it wasn’t finished until a week after the explosion, and the 30-foot-high “whistling blackbird” is said to be a memorial to those lost to the pie, situated in Hide Park. (The dish created for the pie is now the roof of a house.)
  • While there is more detail to be found at colinsmythe.co.uk, Ben entirely missed that the book does include original titles and publications for each of the stories in it – they’re in small text on the imprint page, just before Rob Wilkin’s introduction.

More notes to come!

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

What’s in Father Christmas’s Fake Beard?

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We’ll shortly be discussing the third collection of Terry Pratchett’s early short stories for children, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, for our December episode #Pratchat73! This is the first time we’re discussing an entire book’s worth of short stories, and we’ve realised this book isn’t as readily available as others, so we thought we’d better come through on our promise to list the individual stories we’ll be discussing.

Ben’s deluxe edition of Father Christmas’s Fake Beard in its fancy red slipcase.

Here they are, in the order they appear in the book. We’ve noted where else they appear, in case you want to read one you have access to and ask about that!

  • “Father Christmas’s Fake Beard”
  • “The Blackbury Pie” – this is a slightly revised version of the original 1967 story; a different version from 1970, retitled “The Great Blackbury Pie”, appears in A Stroke of the Pen. (It’s largely the same, but a lot of the specific details are changed.)
  • “Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh!”
  • “A Very Short Ice Age”
  • “The Computer Who Wrote to Father Christmas” – also appears, under the title “FTB”, in Once More* *With Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
  • “Good King Wences-lost” – Pratchett seemingly significantly rewrote this story a few years later to produce “How Good King Wenceslas Went Pop for the DJ’s Feast of Stephen”, which appears in A Stroke of the Pen.
  • “The Weatherchick”
  • “Judgement Day for Father Christmas”
  • “The Abominable Snow-baby” – adapted for television for Channel 4 for Christmas 2021.
  • “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas” – also appears, under the original title of “The Prince and the Partridge”, in A Blink of the Screen.
  • “Father Christmas Goes to Work at the Zoo” – also appears in special editions of Dragons at Crumbling Castle, in the US version as “Father Christmas Goes to Work”.