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#Pratchat15 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)

8 January 2019 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We kick off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk with our fifteenth episode, heading not to the Discworld at all, but to Earth, 1990! Two guests – academic Jen Beckett and writer Amy Gray – join us as to tackle a book written by two authors: Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

The time has come for Armageddon: the End of Days, the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Which comes as rather a shock to the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who’ve been more or less friends for centuries, and rather enjoy Earth the way it is, thank you very much. But can they really do anything about it in the face of the ineffable plan of God? Or when everything that happens has been foretold by a 16th century witch – as interpreted by her descendant, Anathema Device? And has anyone asked the Antichrist himself what he thinks? Well no, of course not. They don’t know where he is.

Good Omens was Sir Terry’s first collaboration with another author, and Gaiman’s first novel, written while he was still working on his biggest comics success, Sandman. In part a parody of The Omen, but joking about everything from motorways to computers and the Greatest Hits of Queen along the way, it’s an epic tale of Armageddon soon to arrive on the small screen via Amazon Prime and the BBC – adapted by Neil himself. Did you come to this as a Pratchett fan, or a Gaiman one? Did you cross over and start reading the others’ work? And how different do you find it to the rest of Pratchett? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat15 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_15.mp3

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Dr Jennifer Beckett lectures at Melbourne University in Media and Communications. Her specialist areas as a researcher include Irish cinema and cultural studies, social media, and transmedia world-building. (Jen’s basically an expert in all the cool parts of popular culture.) A current focus for Jen is the connection between social media and trauma, as explored in her most recent article for The Conversation: “We need to talk about the mental health of content moderators”.

Amy Gray has written for The Age, The Guardian, the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre and many other publications and organisations. She’s currently working on her first book, hopefully to be published in 2019. You can find out more and support her independent writing via her Patreon. You can also find her on Twitter at @_AmyGray_.

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

We love bringing you Pratchat every month, but in order to make sure we can stick it out to the very end – and cover every one of Sir Terry’s books – we need your help! We’ve started an optional subscription service via Pozible which will help us keep making Pratchat for you, and even let us do it better; find out all about supporting Pratchat on our new Support Us page.

Next month we’ll continue the religious theme as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones for an examination of faith, Discworld-style, in Small Gods! Send in your questions about gods (big or small) via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat16.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Amy Gray, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Good Omens, Jennifer Beckett, Neil Gaiman, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

8 April 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’s The Truth.

  • The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
  • As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
  • Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
  • The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
  • Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
  • Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
  • The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
  • Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”. 
  • Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
  • Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
  • Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
  • The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
  • We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
  • “Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
  • There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the episode notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
  • You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collection on their website.
  • Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
  • Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
  • Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
  • Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
  • The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and was published on the 26th of March, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
  • The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker,  pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester. (We mention him in our episode about that book: #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.)
  • Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:

why do we call them cowboys when they're men. we should call them menboys

— Mr. Fuck (@Slammy_P) March 22, 2021
  • In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
  • Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
  • The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
  • Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018. We previous mentioned that 99% Invisible episode in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
  • Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
  • The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
  • While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
  • Stream Team is a series of Guardian articles about the hidden gems available via various streaming services. Liz did indeed eventually write an article about The Mummy films for Stream Team, in June 2021.
  • Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
  • Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
  • Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
  • Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
  • The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
  • Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
  • While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
  • Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
  • The other Discworld podcasts we mention this episode are Who Watches the Watch? and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat41 Notes and Errata

8 March 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“, featuring guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro, discussing 2008’s standalone young adult novel, Nation.

  • The episode title is riffing on the title of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005, dir. Robert Rodriguez). It references Mau’s feeling of being like a hermit crab, looking for a bigger shell to live in, and Daphne’s status as a “trouserman”.
  • For listeners outside of Australia, some brief background on our opening acknowledgement: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded sovereignty of Australia to English colonisers in the 18th century. The English used the legal concept of terra nullius to claim the land belonged to no-one, and could be claimed for the Crown. Over two centuries later, in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in the case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership could be legally recognised, introducing the concept of “native title”. While this has not yet resulted in Australia or any of its states signing treaties with indigenous peoples, it has since become common practice for an “acknowledgment of country” or “acknowledgment of traditional owners” to be given at events, paying respect to and publicly naming (if they are known) the custodians of the land on which the event takes place. We’d like to thank Charlotte for providing wording to appropriately acknowledge the history of indigenous science.
  • Lost is a television drama created by by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof in 2004. It follows a large ensemble cast of plane crash survivors who are lost on an island in the South Pacific. They are threatened by weird creatures, supernatural occurrences, a mysterious organisation and other inhabitants of the at first seemingly empty island. It was famous for its ongoing supernatural mystery with complex storylines; use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; and, ultimately, for failing to provide a satisfying conclusion to the mystery after six years of buildup.
  • Terry said Nation was his favourite of his books in many interviews, but perhaps most famously in the acceptance speech for the 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Award, which Nation won. As Ben reads out in a footnote, he said “I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will ever write”, and doesn’t appear to have changed his mind afterwards. The entire speech appears in his non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard. (This is a also a good source for his comments about feeling the need to write Nation.)
  • In nautical terms, a schooner is a ship with two or more masts with “fore-and-aft” rigged sails; to avoid more nautical jargon, this means the edges of the sails point at the front and back of the ship, rather than sticking out over the sides as in square-rigged ships. Interestingly this is the sort of rigging used by Austronesian sailors thousands of years ago – including the “lobster-claw” sails mentioned in the book (presumably a relative of the crab claw sails of our world).
  • In beer terms, a schooner is…certainly a size of beer glass used in Australia. The sizes of beer glasses and their names are notoriously varied across Australia’s states and territories. “Schooner” is almost universally used for a glass which holds 425 millilitres (or 15 fluid ounces), but they’re not common in all states – most pubs won’t have them in Victoria, for example. We say “almost universally” because in South Australia the 425ml glass is called a “pint” (even though every other state uses a standard 570ml glass for pints), and they use “schooner” to mean the common smaller-sized glass of 285ml. In Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this smaller glass is called a “pot”, while in Sydney and Canberra (where standard schooners are more common) it’s a “middy”. Learning to work in a bar in Australia is quite an education.
  • We’ve so far covered a few of Terry’s standalone novels, most of which came at the start and end of his career. They include the early sci-fi novels The Dark Side of the Sun (see #Pratchat18) and Strata, his first novel The Carpet People, Good Omens with Neil Gaiman (see #Pratchat15), Nation and Dodger (see #Pratchat6).
  • Fight Club began life as a short story by author Chuck Palahniuk before being expanded into a novel published in 1996, and adapted into a film in 1999 by David Fincher starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. The story follows an unnamed insomniac protagonist who is tired of his normal, numb existence. When his home is destroyed, he moves in with soap salesman Tyler Durden and the pair start “Fight Club”, an underground group in which men physically fight each other in order to feel something. Famously, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are “Do not talk about Fight Club.”
  • There are many creation stories found in the Pacific Islands; Ben is taking some time to research them for signs of inspiration for those of the Nation. The idea of human souls becoming dolphins, though, is not a Polynesian one; dolphins are considered lucky and to be respected in many sailing traditions, though, and feature in many stories of Greek mythology, where it was taboo to kill them.
  • The Russian flu is a name sometimes used for the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, also known at the time as the “Asiatic flu”, though neither name is used in literature now. It killed around 1 million people worldwide, but what caused it isn’t known for sure. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was much worse, killing between 17 and 100 million people; it was caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, which was also responsible for the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
  • 12 Monkeys is a 1995 time travel film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Inspired by the French short film La Jetée, it follows James Cole, a prisoner in the virus-ravaged future of 2035, where humanity is forced to live underground. A group of scientists select Cole as a test subject to be sent back in time to stop the release of the virus, which they think was engineered by a terrorist organisation known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The film was later adapted into a television series which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2018.
  • Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made his famous voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and by the time of his return to England was already well-known in scientific circles. The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. All of this marries well with the idea that the book takes place in the 1860s, though there’s plenty of room to move. We’ll talk a lot more about him eighteen months after this episode when we discuss The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch in #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“.
  • Disinfectant in the nineteenth century was still pretty new, since germ theory was still catching on. We’ve been unable to find any historical substance that might have inspired the dripping red substance, though it probably smelled much worse than crushed up roses. (If you know, please tell us!)
  • A tsunami is a series of huge waves caused by displacement of large amounts of water in a sea, ocean or other large body of water. They are primarily caused by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Pratchett was initially inspired by the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption, but not long after he had the idea for Nation there was a tsunami in the Indian ocean which killed more than 20,000 people on Boxing Day, 2004. He postponed work on the story. The name tsunami is Japanese, and means “harbour wave”. It is the preferred scientific term, rather than the older term “tidal wave”, since tsunamis are not caused by tides.
  • Daphne’s father, Henry Fanshaw (later King Henry IX), is Governor of Port Mercia in the Rogation Sunday Islands.
  • Survivor guilt – the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving when others have died – is a common expression of post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • The Tattersalls Club Charlotte mentions is a private gentlemen’s club founded in Brisbane in 1865 by, in their own words, “a group of gentlemen who were prominent in both business and in the thoroughbred horse racing industry”. In December 2018, after some public protest that they still only allowed men as members, a vote was held which passed by a margin of only about 1% to allow women to join, but a group of members were so against this they appealed to the Brisbane supreme court, asking for a recount thanks to some rules technicalities. Their appeal was denied in February 2019, and the club now accepts women as members.
  • In case you’ve been living in one, an “echo chamber” refers to any situation in which a group of people only listens to others who agree with their own views, amplifying their belief that they are right and shielding them from criticism or debate. It is especially applied to social media, where one’s curated list of who you follow can create a “bubble” of only like-minded opinions.
  • To answer Liz’s question, no, Terry didn’t draw the illustrations for Nation. They are by children’s book illustrator and author Jonny Duddle, who is credited as the sole illustrator for the UK edition of the book. Duddle drew everything, including the maps, the chapter illustrations and the in-character drawings by Mau and Daphne. (He also did extra endpaper designs featuring a hermit crab for the “Special Numbered Collectors’ Edition”.) As far as we can tell he also illustrated the original cover, though his art was not used in the US edition, which has a cover by Bill Mayer. We’re not sure if the US edition has any of Duddle’s art – not even the bits that seem important to the plot! The current UK edition of the book has a new cover by Laura Ellen Anderson, but we think it still has Duddle’s art inside. We don’t have access to those editions, so we’d love to hear from you with details if you do!
  • It is indeed true that right up until the 19th century most sailors did not know how to swim. This was both because there was little chance a ship could turn around fast enough to get them if they fell overboard, even if the captain chose to try, and because very few of them were professional sailors anyway – they were temporary hires, or drafted or press-ganged into service. Also, in the time before fast travel and public swimming pools, only people who lived near the sea or a lake would swim recreationally, so it wasn’t a common skill.
  • The history of bathing suits goes back to the 16th century, when they were actually used for bathing in public baths, but even when they started to be used for swimming their initial purpose was to hide women’s bodies. By the time more form-fitting styles were desired, the only material that could really be used was wool, since synthetic materials hadn’t yet been invented and everything else sagged or became too heavy in water. This article at Swim Swam covers the history of wool swimsuits in great detail.
  • Sweary parrots turn up in lots of places, including Tintin, the film Deep Blue Sea, the videogame Neverwinter Nights 2, and real life – including (and we checked this with a few sources) US President Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, who had to be removed from Jackson’s funeral because it was swearing too much.
  • Pratchett not only had the comedy parrot in Eric, but in Moving Pictures the directors abandon using parrots to add sound to their clicks because the dialogue always ended up naughty. We covered Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, and Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Bridgerton is Netflix’s wildly successful 2021 series about the Regency-era Bridgerton family and their daughters’ quests for love and marriage. The series is an adaptation of the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn, which begin with 2000’s The Duke and I. The series contains a great deal more sex than anything written by Jane Austen – none of the Bridgerton sisters are likely to vaporise in their rooms! Well…probably not while alone, and certainly not quietly.
  • Spoiler alert: Ben is talking about the character Mrs Landingham, who dies in the penultimate episode of The West Wing‘s second season, “18th and Potomac”. The scene Ben recalls with President Jed Bartlett in the church is in the following season finale episode, “Two Cathedrals”. Both were originally broadcast in 2001.
  • We’ve previously mentioned 1970s Swedish pop sensations ABBA back in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, which came out the same month as the band’s reunion single “I Still Have Faith in You”. The song “Waterloo” was their winning entry for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, and the start of their rise to international fame. “Nina, Pretty Ballerina” was from their pre-Eurovision first album Ring Ring, released in 1973 under the name Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (or, in Austria, Björn & Benny, Anna & Frida).
  • Studies in 2017 and 2020 concluded that regardless of culture or language, babies recognise and prefer baby talk (or “Infant Directed Language”) to regular speech.
  • In Mort the two prominent female characters are Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and Queen Keli of Sto Helit. Mort is instantly infatuated with Keli, but eventually marries Ysabell, with whom he has bickered for the entire book. You can hear our thoughts about all this in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
  • The Wee Free Men (discussed in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) was published in 2003, five years before Nation. The later Tiffany Aching book Wintersmith, published a couple of years before Nation in 2006, has the now 13-year-old Tiffany deal with her first real boy trouble.
  • We know you’re wracking your brain to think of it too, but the “motorcycle dominos” appear in so many films and television series that they are a trope. Ben probably saw it in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton), but you’ll also find it in the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way But Loose, 80s slasher film Friday the 13th Part III, and even an episode of Scrubs.
  • How long has the Nation existed? Daphne counts 102 dead Grandfathers in the cave by the time they can no longer see the entrance, and later loses count after “hundreds”; the prose mentions “hundreds and thousands” – possibly a thought of Daphne’s – but that’s inconclusive. But even assuming there are only 1,000 of them, and that a handful of Grandfathers are put in the cave per generation, using the general estimate of one generation per 25 years tells us the Nation’s history goes four or five thousand years, if not tens of thousands. Not at all far-fetched when we consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures stretch back at least 50,000 years, and that they were likely the first peoples to ever cross an ocean.  
  • Ben is using the term “cargo cult” a little loosely. It comes from World War II, when Japanese and then Allied forces visited places in Melanesia – the nations and islands of the southwest Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, many of which had had little contact with other peoples. The soldiers brought with them goods and technology that had never been seen by the locals before, sometimes trading with them, but left after the war ended. In the hopes that the visitors and their cargo might return, some local peoples developed rituals in which they imitated the soldiers, integrating stories of their visitation into their existing beliefs. Many earlier examples have been found, and some still persist today.
  • Despite that fact that only Charlotte can remember its title, Liz and Ben discussed The Fifth Elephant only a month earlier, in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
  • Ben refers to the “Battle of Wits” between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Sicilian kidnapper Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel. In the scene, Vizzini has Princess Buttercup at knifepoint, but cannot resist when challenged to a battle of wits to the death. After Vizzini pours two glasses of wine, the Man in Black pours a deadly poison, “iocane powder”, into one of the glasses; Vizzini will decide which one, and then they will both drink. The scene is the basis for one of Ben’s favourite party boardgames, one of several games based on the film published by Game Salute. We previously mentioned The Princess Bride in #Pratchat17 and #Pratchat36.
  • Atlantis is a fictional island nation invented by Plato for his books Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantean civilisation was described as powerful, and the Atlanteans themselves as “half gods”, but they grew too proud and the gods sunk their island beneath the sea in the space of a single day. The myth has proven popular for centuries, with versions since the twentieth century often imagining Atlantis as possessing advanced technologies – and perhaps causing their own demise, rather than it being a punishment of the gods.
  • We didn’t end up coming back to the map, but of note is Terry’s decision to split Australia in half, as Nearer Australia and Further Australia. It’s not mentioned in the novel, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether this is accurate and thus representative of some unknown alternate universe calamity, or is a reference to the fact that early European maps of Australia were often very incomplete, since they rarely sailed around the entire continent. (None split it in two, but many leave a big gap in the middle where South Australia is, as if to say: “who knows?”)
  • The Mythbusters team did indeed test what happens when shooting into water, in episode 34, “Bulletproof Water“. They listed the myth as “partly confirmed” – high velocity sniper rifle rounds disintegrated in less than a metre of water, but bullets from smaller guns needed more water to slow down enough to be safe; the Mythbusters said at least 8 feet. Firing at an angle into the water means the target doesn’t need to be as deep to be safe, though, so Mau being safe stands up until Cox is right on top of him at the end.
  • Mutant superhero Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has epic super-speed sequences in the films X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), both written and directed by Bryan Singer. Quicksilver moves so fast that everything else appears to him to be in slow motion, so he easily redirects bullets fired at his allies so that they miss. Charlotte was miming the famous sequence from the original The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis) in which protagonist Neo, now aware he is inside a complex computer simulation, breaks the rules of physics and dodges bullets. The technique used to film this, now known as “bullet time”, involved still cameras being activated in sequence, allowing a slow-motion sequence in which the point of view moved around.
  • We’ve previously explained the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is quite something considering we’re a book club podcast. Check out the show notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
  • “A shrubbery!” is the first of many ludicrous demands made by the imposing Knights Who Say “Ni” as tribute, in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mau’s list of demands is very reasonable by comparison.
  • The tree-climbing octopus may have been inspired by the sadly fictitious “Pacific Northwest tree octopus”, an Internet hoax dating back to 1998. It was said to live in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, right in the northwest corner of the USA, and that its main natural predator was the sasquatch. The original spoof site Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by “Lyle Zapato”, has been used to teach children Internet literacy.
  • Sadly it seems that no octopuses have learned to count. If you want to see the adorable and very smart things they do learn, Ben recommends you check out OctoNation, the world’s biggest octopus fan club.
  • The character with the coffin in Moby Dick is Queequeg, who is the son of a Polynesian chief. After he becomes friends with the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Queequeg joins him on Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, where he becomes a harpooner under the First Mate, Starbuck. When a casting of runes predicts his death, he has a coffin made for himself and refuses to eat or drink. When the whal Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, Queequeg goes down with the ship, but Ishmael survives by clinging to the floating coffin until he is picked up by another ship. It seems pretty clear Cookie’s previous shipmate is a nod to the character in Herman Melville’s book.
  • The Pratchett interview excerpt about fantasy that’s lately been doing the rounds is from an interview he did with The Onion in 1995. This is before The Onion went online, of course, but a few months after Pratchett’s death in 2015, fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss transcribed it on his blog as part of his tribute to Terry.
  • Liz and Ben’s differing opinions on Lord of the Flies go all the way back to #Pratchat7A and #Pratchat9.
  • Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. Protagonist Charles Marlow becomes a steamboat captain for an ivory trading company and travels up the Congo river, where he becomes obsessed with another employee of the company, Kurtz. Kurtz, now sick and close to death, is revered as a success, but his habits and methods are extreme. It was most famously adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, with the setting relocated to the Vietnam war and the US Army replacing the ivory company.
  • The Blue Lagoon (1980, dir. Randal Kleiser, of Grease fame) is an adaptation of the 1908 romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. In the story, two young American cousins – Richard (Dicky in the novel) and Emmeline (you’ll see in a moment why Daphne rejects the name) – are marooned on a South Pacific Island island with the ship’s cook. The cook dies, and the two grow up on the island alone, eventually “falling in love” and having a child together before being rescued. The movie, which starred Brooke Shields as Emmeline, was critically panned but did very well at the box office. There were two previous film adaptations in 1923 and 1949, and once since in 2012, as well as a 1991 sequel to the 1980 film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause; it’s basically a retelling of the original story, with the twist that Krause plays the son of Richard and Emmeline, and he and Jovovich’s character decide to stay on the island after they encounter a crew of sailors.
  • Is mother of beer a real thing? Sort of! Listeners Felix and Elizabeth both contacted us about masato, a drink made in the Amazonian basin from the yuca plant, also known as cassava or manioc root. In traditional preparation, the yuca is peeled and soaked or boiled in water, then chewed by women who spit the juice into a bowl. Their saliva converts the starch in the juice into sugar, and wild yeast or bacteria ferments the sugar into alcohol. Raw yuca is poisonous, but it’s not the spit that makes it safe to drink – the soaking or boiling does that. Masato is basically a form of chicha, a drink made through similar means throughout Latin America from less poisonous vegetables, most often corn.
  • Beer is made from cereal grains, most often barley which has been malted (soaked in water to make it germinate, then dried out with heat to stop it growing, and usually mashed into a powder). The malt is mixed with warm water, and usually hops (the flowers of the hop plant) to add bitterness and flavour, before yeast is added. The yeast ferments the sugars in the malt into alcohol. Beer is one of the oldest documented foods, and has been made by humans for around 13,000 years or more.
  • To put Charlotte’s comment that “where humans exist, grains are” in context, evidence found in the last decade or so makes it pretty clear that grains have been part of the human diet for probably at least 100,000 years.
  • Kava is a plant that grows in the pacific islands; its root is made into a drink with a sedative effect. It’s hugely important in many places, drunk for medicinal, religious, political, cultural and social reasons. It’s effect is described as very different to that of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine.
  • It was guest Myfanwy Coghill who said anyone can learn the skill of singing; you can hear this and many other amazing insights from her in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.  
  • You can find Pratchat on Podchaser, and also a list of Discworld read-through podcasts which Ben tries to keep up to date. For a more detailed list, see The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters. Let him know if you find one that’s missing!
  • Our Llamedos Holiday Camp on the Clacks panel, “Podcasting Discworld”, was held online at 3 PM UK time on Sunday, March 7 (which was 2 AM Monday the 7Ath, Australian Eastern Daylight Time). As well as Liz and Ben, the panel featured Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Colm Kearns of Radio Morpork, and Al Kennedy of Desert Island Discworld.
  • The Answer, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is shorthand for “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. It is revealed by hyper advanced supercomputer Deep Thought to be…42. This doesn’t make sense, but Deep Thought also solves that problem: no-one actually knows what the Question is. Hence he builds another computer to figure it out, and causing no end of trouble for one Arthur Dent.

More notes coming soon!

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat6 Notes and Errata

8 April 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, featuring guest David Astle discussing Terry’s 2012 standalone Dickens pastiche Dodger.

  • The “interrobang” is the combination of a question and exclamation mark (‽, or more often ?! or !?), used to indicate a question asked with excitement or otherwise strong emotion. One of Ben’s favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, produced a whole episode on the origin and history of the interrobang. [Square brackets] (or just “brackets”, since round brackets are parentheses and curly brackets are braces) are most often used in journalism, where they indicate something that’s been left out or changed inside a quotation to improve clarity. David describes the pilcrow (or “paragraph mark”) in the podcast, but in case you’re wondering, it looks like this: ¶
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are…well, they’re teen-aged mutant anthropomorphic turtles, trained as ninjas by a mutant anthropomorphic rat, who live in the sewers of New York and fight for justice. They originally appeared in 1984 in a gritty, black-and-white comic book parody written and drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They were quickly picked up by a licensing company and became a toy line and a very popular cartoon, followed later by a less popular series of live-action films. They were recently re-imagined in big-screen CGI form by Michael Bay – seemingly the fate of everything liked by children in the 1980s – but most recently have returned to cartoons under the eye of Invader Zim creator Johnen Vasquez.
  • Terry dressed up as William Brown, the protagonist of Just William and its sequels by Richmal Crompton (like Terry, an incredibly prolific author), for the “26 Characters” exhibition at the Story Museum in Oxford. The photos aren’t available on the museum’s web site – the point was to visit to see them, after all! – but versions of many (including Terry’s) are featured in this BBC interview with photographer Cambridge Jones about the exhibition. The museum’s site has audio interviews with all the featured authors recorded during the photo shoots in 2014, including Terry talking about his own school days. Listeners of this podcast might also particularly enjoy the interviews with Neil Gaiman (who chose Badger from Wind in the Willows), Philip Pullman (Long John Silver from Treasure Island) and Terry Jones (Rupert the Bear), but they’re all great. It’s worth clarifying that Just William takes place when it was written, in 1922 – considerably after the time of Dodger. Tom Brown’s School Days, on the other hand, was written in 1857 and is set in the 1830s – so around the time of Dodger. There’s a stark contrast between Dodger’s life and that of Tom Brown…
  • A “flâneur” (via French for “stroller” or “loafer”, from the Old Norse verb flana “to wander with no purpose”) was a “gentleman stroller of the streets”: a person of leisure who would walk through a city just observing what went on around them. It’s uncertain if Dickens would have described himself as one; the word dates back a century or two earlier in France, but wasn’t popularly used in a positive sense until Walter Benjamin used it in discussions of modernity in the early twentieth century. (Oscar Wilde described himself as “a flâneur, a dandy” in De Profundis, but only when lamenting how he had wasted his life.)
  • Nicholson Baker is an American writer who loves newspapers as much as footnotes. He’s best known for his non-fiction, including the award-winning 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper in which he investigated the loss or destruction of thousands of books and newspapers during the “microfilm boom” of the 1980s.
  • The small, dog-like creature from The Dark Crystal is Fizgig.
  • Laphroaig whiskey is distilled in Port Ellen, on the southern coast of the Isle of Islay in Argyll, Scotland, near the bay that gives the whiskey its name, Loch Laphroaig. It is now owned by Japanese whiskey giant Suntory.
  • The Wombles are a group of vaguely mole-like intelligent creatures who live under Wimbledon Common, invented by Elisabeth Beresford for her children’s novels, first appearing in 1968. They are very familiar to Australians of a certain age because of the BBC-commissioned stop-motion animated television series, whose theme song emphasised the Womble’s forward-thinking policy of reuse and recycling: “Making good use of the things that they find, things that the everyday folk leave behind.” Less familiar to Australian listeners will be the novelty pop group formed by Mike Batt, or the related live-action Womble film Wombling Free, featuring short-statured actors – including Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis! – in Womble costumes, with voices provided by the likes of David Jason and Jon Pertwee! Aside from “making use of bad rubbish”, one of their most endearing features is that Wombles choose their name by throwing a dart at a map of the world; hence they have names like Great Uncle Bulgaria, Tomsk, Orinoco and Adelaide.
  • For those not familiar with Oliver Twist, Fagin is the criminal mastermind who sends the Artful Dodger and other children out to steal things for him in return for minimal food and shelter. He is a deeply unsympathetic character, essentially keeping the children enslaved. Even in Dickens’ day, Fagin – who was constantly referred to as “the Jew” in the novel – was seen as anti-Semitic. Dickens protested that he had no hatred of Jewish people, but was being “realistic”, because “that class of criminal was invariably a Jew”, but towards the end of his life Dickens came to realise the harm he was doing in perpetuating such a stereotype. He not only revised the last 15 chapters of the book, but removed all racist signifiers from his performance of the character in his public readings.
  • The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (and the Russian empire, which at the time included much of Eastern Europe) were at their worst in the 1880s, after the period in which Dodger is set, but there were sadly many earlier examples as well. Solomon Cohen never says exactly where (or indeed what) he fled from, but it may have been the Odessa Pogrom of 1859.
  • Onan is a minor figure in the Bible best known as the source of the term “onanism”, a euphemism for masturbation – though that’s not entirely true to the source material. In the Book of Genesis, Onan’s brother Er is slain by God for generic wickedness and had no children, so their father Judah orders Onan to marry Er’s widow Tamar and give her children. Onan does marry her but during sex, knowing that any children will be heirs to Er and usurp his own inheritance, he chooses to “spill his seed upon the ground” – a crime for which he too was slain by God. It was really rough being in the Bible before Jesus came along.
  • PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a relatively common psychological disorder affecting people who have experienced trauma – usually violence, and especially interpersonal violence – without the time or opportunity to heal psychologically. It was poorly understood prior to the 1970s, but pretty clearly fits the symptoms ascribed to soldiers returning from war throughout history.
  • The pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and by this we mean the aired pilot, not the unaired pilot) was actually relatively true to the rest of the series, with the one major exception of Buffy’s powers. While she kept her super strength and highly tuned intuition, somewhere between episodes 1 and 2 she apparently lost the power to jump (fly?) over a fence about three times her height.
  • Thanks to listener Wayne for finding the Wikipedia article for Crown and Anchor, which is a dice game originally favoured by English sailors. It uses three special six-sided dice marked with symbols instead of numbers: the four card suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades), a crown and an anchor. Players place their bets on a playing mat marked with six large squares, one for each symbol, like a simpler version of a roulette table; they then throw the dice and win money based on how many show the symbol which matches their bet. Variations with slightly different symbols appeared in many countries, though the English version is now rarely played outside the Channel Islands and Bermuda.
  • The classic “Penny Dreadfuls” were cheap mass-produced serial fiction magazines of the Victorian era, usually of the ‘orrible murder or supernatural thriller variety; they filled a niche later occupied by comic books, and cost a penny (hence the name). Hugely popular in Dodger’s time, many were rewrites or outright plagiarism, but they nevertheless made household names of popular historical and fictional characters including Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Sweeney Todd, who first appeared in The String of Pearls: A Romance in 1846.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is a incredibly detailed comic book series spanning multiple volumes which brings together characters from hundreds of works of Victorian (and related) fiction. The most famous version of the titular league features Mina Harker (from Dracula), Alan Quartermain (from King Solomon’s Mines), Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, amongst others, as they deal with a war between criminal elements and then an invasion of Martians (drawn from The War of the Worlds). The series is so dense with references big and small that companion volumes have been compiled uncovering them all. There’s a fairly loose film adaptation starring Sean Connery which is…not great.
  • Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has become probably the most popular version of the Todd story (not least thanks to Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation), and is based heavily on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play of the same name, which gave him a backstory – including being transported to Australia – and made the character a little more sympathetic, transforming his story into a modern revenge tragedy. The original London cast of the musical included Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett, Sweeney’s accomplice and encouragement. (In the podcast, Ben confuses her with Mrs Miggins, the proprietor of a similarly suspicious pie shop in classic historical sit-com Blackadder the Third.)
  • Penny Dreadful the television series was a gory sexy gothic horror co-produced by Showtime and Sky, weaving a new narrative around characters taken from Frankenstein, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and predominantly British and Irish folklore. It ran for three seasons with an all-star cast including Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett. Ben loved it more than he probably should have.
  • Asterix is the protagonist of the long-running Asterix & Obelix series of comic albums created by French cartoonists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Set during the Roman Empire’s occupation of Gaul – a region of Western Europe bigger than France, populated by Celtic peoples of the La Tène culture – it imagined a single small village which held out against the invaders through judicious use of a magic potion, brewed by their Druid, which gave them super strength. The main character, Asterix, was very small but a shrewd warrior, assisted by his enormous, dim-witted but big-hearted friend Obelix, who was permanently super-strong due to drinking an entire cauldron of the potion as a baby. A key feature of the books are the names which pun on common cultural suffixes of the era, which have been translated into many languages.
  • “Bedlam” was a nickname for Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital whose name became synonymous with the barbaric ways in which the mentally ill were treated in the Victorian era.
  • “Nits” is the common name for headlice in Australia and New Zealand, thankfully rarely encountered these days except in primary schools.
  • Augusta Ada King-Noel (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, aka Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She was also a poet, but she is most remembered as the first computer programmer: she was a friend of Charles Babbage, and while translating a French transcript of a speech Babbage gave about his Analytical Engine, annotated it with notes which included an algorithm of her own design to make the machine calculate Bernoulli numbers. Sadly Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never completed, but just as it is now recognised as the first computer, her algorithm is now recognised as the first computer program.
  • The Tenniel in the book is indeed Sir John Tenniel, the primary political cartoonist for Punch (and therefore well known to Mayhew and Dickens), and most famously the illustrator for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. The eye injury referred to was accidentally inflicted by Tenniel’s father when they were fencing, when Tenniel was 20. Tenniel gradually lost his sight in that eye, but not wanting to make his father distraught, never revealed how serious the injury was.
  • A “growler” was a second-hand “clarence”, a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage named after Prince William, Duke of Clarence, and introduced into London around 1840. Once sold by aristocrat owners, clarences were often used as cabs, and were known as “growlers” because of the sound they made on London cobblestoned streets.
  • Pratchett did indeed have plans for a Dodger sequel, saying at New York Comic Con and in an interview with the AV Club in 2012 that he’d love to write one “if he was spared”… The final scene of the book, in which Dodger is working with Serendipity as a spy in Paris, is a good indicator of the direction that book may have taken, but any notes for it would have been lost as per Terry’s instructions, when his hard drives were destroyed by a steam roller after his death.
  • Some later editions of Dodger – including Ben’s – include a “Bonus Scene” in which Dodger visits Sweeney Todd in Bedlam. (We cut our short discussion of the scene for time, and because David and Liz hadn’t read it.)
  • Cloacina was indeed a real Roman goddess, and like many was assimilated from another culture – in this case, Etruscan mythology. She was specifically the goddess of the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Drain”), the main sewer channel in Rome, construction of which was said to have been started and finished by two Estruscan Kings of Rome. Sometimes also seen as “a protector of sexual intercourse in marriage”, she was later known as “Venus of the Sewer”.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charles Dickens, David Astle, Dodger, Elizabeth Flux, Henry Mayhew, non-Discworld, standalone, Sweeney Todd

#Pratchat16 Notes and Errata

8 February 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, featuring guest, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones, discussing the thirteen Discworld novel, 1992’s Small Goods.

  • The episode title plays on the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, probably more famous these days for being punned in popular culture than for the song itself! The best known version was recorded by the Hollies in 1969, though it’s also been recorded by Neil Diamond. A charity version featuring many UK artists was the UK number one Christmas single in 2012, supporting charities associated with the Hillsborough disaster – a disaster at a football stadium in 1989, where nearly 100 people were killed after a gate was opened and allowed more fans into a section of the grounds that was already dangerously crowded. The charity supported victims and their families through a new investigation into who was responsible, following the failure to prosecute police officers in charge of security and safety during the match.
  • The film Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, the titular highlander, who discovers he is one of the immortals – seemingly ordinary humans who cannot die unless decapitated, and who are drawn to fight each other, stealing the magical power of other immortals whom they defeat until only one remains to collect “the Prize”. As well as being very 1980s, it has a killer soundtrack by Queen, songs from which can be found on their 1986 album It’s a Kind of Magic.
  • We’re pretty sure the cake Liz is thinking of is Breudher, a delicious buttery Sri Lankan cake with a Dutch influence.
  • Teen Power Inc. is a series of thirty books written by Australian author Emily Rodda (and others), first published in the 1990s. They feature six teenaged protagonists who create the titular agency to make some extra cash, and end up solving various mysteries. The series was republished in the US in the mid 2000s as The Raven Hill Mysteries.
  • Johnson and Friends (1990) was an Australian television program for children under 5 about Johnson, a stuffed elephant, and the other toys who live under the bed of a young boy and come to life when he’s asleep. It predates Toy Story by five years, but the “secret life of toys” genre has a much longer history than that anyway.
  • We’ll leave you to work out the coarse pun in Brother Nhumrod’s name for yourself, but the Biblical Nimrod was a king, a “mighty hunter”, and a great-grandson of Noah mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Chronicles and Micah. Tradition says he was leader of the kings who built the Tower of Babel, though this is not written in the Bible. Because of this folly, Dante placed him in the Circle of Treachery in Hell. “Nimrod” has also become an insult meaning a dim-witted person, popularised by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, who use it as a taunt for Elmer Fudd, presumably mocking him for not being a “mighty hunter”.
  • A Royal Commission is a type of formal public inquiry carried out in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and began in 2013. It investigated evidence of widespread protection of child abusers in a variety of community, sporting, religious and other institutions throughout Australia. The commission heard evidence from tens of thousands of people and handed down its final report in 2017.
  • After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007, rumours circulated that Sir Terry had “found God”. He answered with this piece in The Daily Mail, in which he revealed he was “brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.” He went on to say that while religion was never really discussed at home, and he was never a believer, he never disliked it.
  • The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – meaning to move debt from one place to another, rather than paying it off – is a pretty old phrase. Big thanks to listener Zoe, who linked us to entries from the Oxford and Brewer’s Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable. They tell us that the phrase has been around since at least the 14th century, and that the names were likely picked just because they were alliterative, though the phrase later acquired connections to the Saints.
  • The 2003 American musical Avenue Q explores adult concepts in a world inspired by Sesame Street – a city neighbourhood where humans, puppet people and furry monsters live side-by-side. The original production won three major Tony Awards. The song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” features the neighbourhood – including their superintendent Gary Coleman (“yes, that Gary Coleman“) – agreeing to the premise of the title.
  • “White privilege” is the concept that in many Western cultures, people with white skin have a number of privileges they may not even be aware of, that are not extended to people of colour. At a basic level it manifests as a cultural idea of white as default or normal, but – like all forms of privilege – it also influences social status, freedom and opportunity. While it has been written about in some form since the 1930s, and given its current name in the mid 60s, it was brought to mainstream attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
  • To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to have succumbed to belief in an extreme dogma, without understanding the consequences. The phrase is a reference to the Jonestown Massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones had his followers drink cordial (which may or may not have been Kool-Aid brand – this is still being disputed) poisoned with cyanide and prescription drugs.
  • Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall was published in 2018. We highly recommend checking out the Seafurrers blog – maintained by Bart the cat – for even more tales of nautical cats! It has several entries describing the exploits of Trim, who accompanied English explorer Matthew Flinders. And yes, despite what the current Australian government might think or spend 7 million dollars on, James Cook never circumnavigated Australia.
  • Jonah was commanded by God to delivery a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, warning them they must repent for their wicked ways, but Jonah instead tries to flee from God on a ship. When a clearly unnatural storm brews, the sailors work out by casting lots that Jonah is to blame; he offers to be thrown overboard, but they refuse until it becomes clear there’s no other way to survive the storm. Jonah is saved from drowning by a giant fish, which swallows him whole; he prays to God and after three days is vomited up on shore, and this time obeys God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh. He gets his nose bent out of shape when God shows the city mercy following their repentance, so God teaches him a lesson by growing a plant to give him shade in the desert, then having a worm bite the plant to kill it.
  • Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered in 1996, was Lloyd Webber’s 14th major stage musical, and the second musical adaptation of the 1961 British film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills. (You might know her from several Disney films of the 1960s, including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap.) The film was based on the 1959 novel by Mills’ mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Mills was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. Elizabeth’s recollection of the play she saw at the age of 7 is…vaguely correct. In the parts that matter.
  • Prosperity theology is the belief that God rewards an individual for their faith – often expressed through donations to the church – with blessings of material wealth and miracles of healing. In the United States its popularity dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it really rose to prominence through televangelism in the 1960s to 1980s with influential figures like Oral Roberts (yes, that’s his real name) and Jim Bakker. It was adopted more widely by some Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s, by which time it was estimated more than 15% of American Christians believed in some form of prosperity theology. It is criticised by many Christians for, among other things, a reliance on non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
  • Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report was originally published in the magazine Fantastic Universe. The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise changes many things about the original story, including the ending. A sequel television series, in which one of the precogs helps a detective solve crimes about a decade after the events of the film, aired on Fox in 2015 but was cancelled after one season of ten episodes.
  • While Ben remembers both names correctly, he fails to remember that Constable Washpot is Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets. “Washpot” is a somewhat derogatory nickname given to him by other members of the Watch. He goes on rounds with his friend Smite-the-Ungodly-with-Cunning-Arguments.
  • Many religions believe that only people who meet certain criteria will enter Heaven – various Christian denominations require the faithful to be baptised, for example. But the most famous example of a very small number who will be saved are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are often said to believe that only 144,000 people will enter Heaven. This is based on a fairly literal interpretation of chapter 14 of the Book of Revelation, but while they do indeed believe only 144,000 people will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the other faithful will live on in an Earthly paradise of God’s making. Which is just as well, as there are now more than 20 million members of the church worldwide.
  • Liz’s talk about “the gourd” is a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman), a man born at the same time as Jesus Christ, is mistaken for the Messiah. His followers willingly drink a Kool-Aid of their own devising and despite his protests interpret his every act as holy, seizing on things he drops as relics – including, briefly, “the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem”.
  • “Fake news” traditionally referred to deliberately misleading or fabricated information spread in the form of seemingly legitimate journalism. The phrase was co-opted by Donald Trump (among others) to describe any news story or media outlet which he dislikes, regardless of their accuracy. This increasingly popular usage caused the British Parliament to abandon use of the term in official documents. “Fake News” was selected as Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, though they disputed Trump’s claim that he invented it.
  • Steptoe and Son and Open All Hours are British sit-coms about a scrap merchant and his son, and a gormless shop keeper, respectively. Neither are really that close a match for Didactylos and Urn’s discussions of the philosophy market, but the sentiment is in there.
  • The educational programming language Logo was invented in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and intended to teach principles of the functional language LISP. Robot turtles pre-date Logo by nearly 20 years, but the language is credited with the popularity of turtle graphics and turtles equipped with pens. The first Logo turtle was named “Irving”.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future dystopia in which books are banned and squads of “firemen” are sent to burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist – a disillusioned fireman named Guy Montag – meets a resistance group whose members each preserve a work of literature by memorising the entire text, reciting it on request.
  • There are many examples of lost works throughout the history of literature. Shakespeare supposedly wrote many plays which have not survived, most famously Love’s Labors Won, though its existence is disputed. Jane Austen left behind several unfinished works, including the novels Sandition and The Watsons. Emily Bronte had supposedly begun work on a second novel after Wuthering Heights, but no evidence of it has ever been found. On a similar note, all of Sir Terry’s unfinished works and notes were destroyed, as per the instructions in his will, by having his hard drives crushed under an antique steam roller.
  • Up until the late 1970s it was common practice for the BBC to junk archive recordings of old programs, as pre-digital storage took up a lot of space and it was not common to rebroadcast old material. As a result, nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who made between 1966 and 1969 are missing, though audio recordings do exist. Copies have occasionally been located outside of the UK, and since 2013 there have been persistent rumours that most of the missing episodes had been located by a fan, but they have yet to materialise…
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, dir. Gareth Edwards) was the first of the Star Wars anthology films – new stories set in the universe established by George Lucas’ films, but not part of the main “Skywalker saga” series. It is set immediately before the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), and shows how a small team of rebel soldiers steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the first Death Star. In the third of the original Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, the Empire has built a second Death Star; rebel leader Mon Mothma famously proclaims that “many Bothans died” to steal its plans.
  • A hagiography is a biography of a saint or other important spiritual person.
  • The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II in which many high-ranking Nazi officers were tried for war crimes, including their participation in the Holocaust. It had a major effect on international law, including the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
  • “Spirits of place” are local gods or spirits who watch over a specific place. They are a staple of many religions and folk beliefs, but are probably best known from classical Roman religion, where they were known as genius loci. They are also popular in fiction; Ben’s favourite examples are the gods of the River Thames and its tributaries in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and its sequels.
  • The modern Santa Claus is mostly derived from the English figure Father Christmas and the Dutch character Sinterklaas, as well as tales of the historical Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the Greek city of Myra in the fourth century CE. As well as the lesser known exploits cited by Avril, he is said to have secretly given gifts to the faithful, the aspect most associated with Santa. There are also theories that Santa Claus co-opts pagan beliefs and the Germanic god Wodan, but we’ll leave those ideas for Hogfather.
  • UHF (1989; dir. Jay Levey) – known outside America as The Vidiot from UHF – was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first and only feature film. He plays George Newman, a man whose overactive imagination gets him fired from many jobs, but when he ends up in charge of a low-budget local television station his bizarre program ideas make the channel a hit. It features a slew of film and television parodies, and co-starred Fran Drescher (The Nanny) and Michael Richards (Seinfeld).
  • The Peter Capaldi moment discussed by Avril and Ben is his speech from 2015’s The Zygon Inversion, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. He and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart both say “this is not a game”, and at a key moment the Doctor offers the villain forgiveness. The podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death – on which Ben and Avril have both been guests – uses an excerpt from the speech in its introduction. You can watch the whole speech on YouTube here.
  • On the social media platform Twitter, whose logo is a stylised bird, new user accounts are represented by an icon of an egg.
  • “Doublethink” describes the act of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It was coined by George Orwell as part of the government-created language Nuspeak, which he invented for his dystopian novel 1984.
  • Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and popular science writer, especially on the subject of evolution. His 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker explains and gives evidence for biological evolution. In the last decade or two Dawkins has spent as much time criticising religion as explaining science, and is considered a major influence on several atheist movements, but has been criticised for making inflammatory remarks, especially via Twitter. In 2018, a study regarding scientists’ attitudes – including those about religion and atheism – interviewed 137 UK scientists, and though no specific questions were asked about Dawkins, 48 participants mentioned him, most because they disliked him. He wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998, before his anti-religious obsession really took over.
  • “Bin Chicken” is the most popular (and cruel) nickname given to the Australian White Ibis, the reasons for which are chronicled in “AUSTRALIAN SONG ABOUT BIRDS” by Christian Van Vuuren, co-creator of the web series Bondi Hipsters and television comedy Soul Mates. This Gizmodo article presents a rather more positive view.
  • Aside from Lester del Rey’s short story “The Pipes of Pan”, first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction in 1940, early examples of gods requiring human belief to survive in fiction include Lord Dunsany’s short story Poseidon from 1941, Belgian author Jean Ray’s 1943 novel Malpertuis, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera, “Thespis”, written in 1871. More recent examples include Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Sandman.
  • The original Clash of the Titans from 1981, directed by Desmond Davis, was the last film to feature stop-motion animation by famous movie magician Ray Harryhausen. It retells the Greek myth of Perseus (played by Harry Hamlin, later to star in the first season of Veronica Mars), the hero who slew Medusa and the Kraken (or Cetus, in the original myth), and features the Greek gods (including Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis) playing a game very similar to the one seen in The Colour of Magic. The 3D 2010 remake stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and is surprisingly not awful. The sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012) specifically deals with the waning of the gods thanks to a lack of belief.
  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961; dir. Robert Stevenson) is a Disney romantic comedy based loosely on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor. It stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard (no, really), a brilliant but forgetful scientist who invents a substance which absorbs energy when it strikes a hard surface, allowing it to bounce higher and higher, which Prof Brainard calls “flubber”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was remade by Disney in 1997 as Flubber starring Robin Williams. The original was so popular it became the first ever Disney film to have a sequel: 1963’s Son of Flubber. The title of the film lends it’s name to the stock character of an academically gifted (or obsessed) individual who neglects the more practical and/or emotional parts of life.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Avril Hannah-Jones, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, standalone

#Pratchat15 Notes and Errata

8 January 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“, featuring guests Dr Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray, discussing the 1990 novel Good Omens.

  • For anyone baffled by our 90s film references – Angelina Jolie played teenage hacker Kate “Acid Burn” Libby in Hackers (1995), while Nicholas Cage is…well, he’s Nicholas Cage. Important films from Cage’s 1990s era include Wild at Heart (1990), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997) and Con Air (1997), the last of those also with Steve Buscemi. Ben’s joke references Steve Buscemi’s appearance in 30 Rock as a former cop who went undercover in a high school as an adult; the scene of him dressed as a teenager is the basis for a meme.
  • The Bible doesn’t include any direct mention of fallen angels – the idea mainly comes from Jewish traditions. Genesis 6:1-4 contains mention of “nephilim” and the “sons of God”, which may mean fallen angels; nephilim is usually translated as “giant”, and some interpretations of Genesis see them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
  • “Ineffable” comes to us from Middle English, via Old French, but ultimately is from the Latin ineffabilis, “not utterable”.
  • Ben is very rusty with his Welsh; while “f” is pronounced “v” in Welsh, “ff” is pronounced “f”, so ineffable would be largely pronounced the same as in English. The voiced “th” sound is written “dd”.
  • Queen formed in 1970, and their Greatest Hits album was first released in 1981. Ben is off when suggesting most of the tracks on it come from News of the World (1977) – in fact it only has two from that album, with more coming from The Game (1980) and Jazz (1978). Incidentally, the earliest “greatest hits” album is probably “Johnny’s Greatest Hits”, originally released by Johnny Mathis in 1958.
  • As we’ve previously mentioned, 1990 was Terry’s biggest year in terms of output: he published five books (Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings). 1989 was no slouch either, with four (Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat), while in 1991 he settled down a bit and only published two (Reaper Man and Witches Abroad).
  • Metalocalypse is an Adult Swim animated comedy series about the death metal band Dethklok, who are so phenomenally successful they are the world’s seventh-largest economy and the world bends to their whim, fearful of their almost supernatural influence. They are opposed by an Illuminati-like cabal called The Tribunal. The show ran for four seasons and featured Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in the regular cast (though most of the band members were played by series creators Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha).
  • Being There (1979, dir. Hal Ashby) is an adaptation of the 1970 Jerzy Kosiński novel about a mysterious and simple gardener named Chance, played in the film by Peter Sellers. When his employer dies, Chance is forced out into the world where his gardening expertise is mistaken for wisdom and he ends up being tipped as the next President of the United States, though he remains clueless about everything that happens to him, including the sexual advances of a wealthy socialite played by Shirley MacLaine.
  • Jen has perfected her Cumbrian accent by watching the 1987 film Withnail and I, written by Bruce Robinson and starring Richard E Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (Marwood/I) as a pair of out-of-work actors at the end of the 1960s. The pair try to bring themselves out of their drug-induced stupor by going on holiday in a country house in Penrith owned by Withnail’s uncle. Jen’s line is a mother giving directions to find her son, a local farmer from whom the pair hope to buy supplies after explaining “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake”. (It’s one of Ben’s favourite films.)
  • Would you believe we previously talked about 1965 US spy sitcom Get Smart in episode 7A, The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch? The show’s protagonist Maxwell Smart (aka Agent 86) is both a highly competent spy and a complete nincompoop. He was played by Don Adams in the original TV series, and Steve Carell in the 2008 movie version.
  • The idea of childhood as a recently invented concept was first popularised by French historian Philippe Ariès in his 1960 book, Centuries of Childhood, where he found that many of the major distinctions between children and adults were introduced during the 17th century by thinkers including John Locke. Teenagers began to be treated as a distinct group in the modern sense in the 1940s and 50s, though the word “teen” dates back several hundred years (“adolescent” is even older). The idea of “tweens” – kids aged between 10 and 13 – gained popularity in the 1990s, but the word itself was introduced in the 1920s.
  • Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are fraternal twin actors who became famous in the 1987 American sitcom Full House, together playing the character Michelle Tanner from the age of nine months to nine years. (It’s common practice for twins or multiple babies to play infant characters, to help comply with child labour laws.) From the age of seven they began to appear on-screen together in various films produced by their own production company Dualstar – originally owned by their parents – and they were a massive hit with pre-teen audiences.
  • Pratchett’s three Johnny Maxwell books – whose protagonists feel a bit like the Them grown up a little – came out in 1992, 1993 and 1996, while as mentioned above the Bromeliad books came out around the same time as Good Omens. He didn’t write another book specifically for children until the first younger Discworld novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, in 2001.
  • Padmé Amidala, (elected) Queen of the planet Naboo, is one of the protagonists of the Star Wars prequel trilogy of films, beginning with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999. In that film, Padmé meets the young Anakin Skywalker, whom she would later marry; as Weird Al Yankovic put it in his song “The Saga Begins”: “Do you see him hitting on the Queen? / Though he’s just nine and she’s fourteen”. (Actor Jake Lloyd was ten when he played Anakin, while Natalie Portman as Amidala was 18.)
  • Jen’s description of “the grey one” in original UK version of mockumentary sitcom The Office is, in fact, Gareth, as portrayed by Mackenzie Crook. The character is a very unflattering comparison, though Crook himself has gone on to greater success with roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Game of Thrones, and more recently created, directs, writes and stars in his own BBC sitcom, The Dectorists, with Toby Jones.
  • We previously talked about fictional diarist Adrian Mole in episode seven, “All the Fingle Ladies“. Bert Baxter is a very old, very rude and very filthy communist and old-age pensioner whom Adrian meets and befriends through his school’s Good Samaritan program. He lives to be well over 100, having sworn not to die before the fall of capitalism.
  • Oliver Stone (Scarface) and Michael Bay (Armageddon, Transformers) are film directors known for their action-packed sequences (and, in the case of Bay, lens flare). Between them we agree that they would put together a pretty spectacular paintball sequence, though Ben reckons you’d have a better chance of knowing what was actually happening if it was Stone at the helm.
  • The Doctor Who story with the motorcyclist alien (called a “slab”) is Smith and Jones, the first episode of David Tennant’s second season. New companion Martha Jones, a trainee medical doctor, sarcastically asks if the slab is from the planet Zovirax, in reference to a series of commercials for the real-world drug Zovirax in which a motorcycle courier refuses to remove her helmet to conceal her cold sores.
  • Like the book, we never quote the most relevant (ha) bit of the Bible in the podcast – the Book of Revelation chapter 6, verses 1 to 8. In those verses, John of Patmos sees a vision of the Lamb of God opening the first four of seven seals which secure a book held in the hand of God. At the opening of each, one of the four beasts in John’s vision – a lion, an ox, a man and an eagle, each with six wings – says “Come and see”, and shows John one of the horsemen. The first is on a white horse with a bow and crown; the second on a red horse with a great sword; the third on a black horse, with a pair of balances; and the fourth was on a pale horse, “and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” (Death is the only one explicitly named.)
  • “Antivax” refers to the anti-vaccination movement, which has seen parents and individuals opt out of vaccinating themselves and their children – something which has led to a dangerous increase and resurgence in preventable disease. The movement has its roots in a paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield which claimed a link between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine). The paper was later proven to be hugely biased and inaccurate, but by then the damage was done. While the antivax movement doesn’t haven’t science or facts on their side, they do have quite a few celebrities willing to spread, dare we say it, the word of Pestilence, including actors Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. It’s no exaggeration to say that the antivax movement is the epitome of privilege, selfishness and ableism as it not only puts the community and vulnerable at risk, but posits, grossly, that it would be worse to be autistic than to die of preventable disease. The movement’s proponents prey on the fears of parents, who are already constantly bombarded with advice, good and bad, about what will or won’t harm their children. Our ire is reserved for those who should know better and push these lies, because once someone believes them, it’s very hard to change their mind.
  • Etsy is a website where individuals can make online stores to sell their wares to the public. It has a reputation as a hub for crafts, kitsch vintage and collectibles – though, as Amy says, it also has (or at least had) an undercurrent of spells and magic available too.
  • The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is “the global intergovernmental body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling” who banned commercial whaling back in the 1980s to protect species with dwindling numbers. In late December 2018 Japan announced that it would withdraw from the IWC and resume commercial whaling – prior to this they were still hunting whales, though in lower numbers and under the banner of scientific research.
  • AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. The singularity is a hypothesis which suggest that when artificial superintelligence is invented an abrupt and rapid chain of events will occur in which technology will advance at an incredible rate with, erm, debatable impact on the human race. (AI, if you’re out there and just laying dormant for now, we embrace our future overlords.)
  • Ultron and Thanos are supervillains from Marvel comic books, and featured as antagonists in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Their motives for mass murder and apocalypse-bringing are complex, but at their simplest Thanos, an extreme Malthusian, believes the universe would be better off with 50% less inhabitants. Ultron meanwhile thinks humanity are their own biggest enemy and wants to save them from themselves by killing them all – basically he’s Skynet with a heavy dose of paternalism.
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still was a 1951 science fiction film directed by Robert Wise about a benevolent alien named Klaatu, who visits in his flying saucer with his invincible robot companion Gort to tell the people of Earth to cease their violent ways and join the interplanetary alliance to which he belongs, or else be annihilated. (…he’s not very peaceful.) It’s very loosely based on Farewell to the Master, a 1940 short story by Harry Bates. The 2008 remake stars Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, but Keanu-Klaatu’s spaceship is a sphere. The original had a big impact on popular culture, including the phrase “klaatu barada nikto” (reused by many films as alien or ancient language, as in the Evil Dead movies) and inspiring the both the name of the band Klaatu and the themes in their song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”.
  • Gridlock, according to Wikipedia and reality, is the third episode of the third modern series of Doctor Who, featuring David Tennant as the Doctor. The story takes place on a planet where the majority of inhabitants find themselves in a permanent gridlock, trapped in flying cars on a motorway which, unbeknownst to those spending years moving very little distance, is completely inescapable. Ever driven in peak hour? It’s kind of like that, times a million, plus some of your fellow motorists are humanoid cat people who can apparently cross breed with people.
  • At the end of Back to the Future: Part II, Marty McFly is standing in the rain when a figure approaches him to deliver a package – a package with very specific delivery instructions that has been sitting in the office, awaiting delivery since 1885. With BTTF2 released in 1989 and Good Omens being published in 1990 the similarity could be coincidence, cross pollination, or perhaps proof that time is, in fact, a flat circle.
  • Grand Designs is a British television series which sees presenter Kevin McCloud meet a host of different people who have set their hearts on building their own dream home.  As outlined by this article in The Guardian, knowing that people play a drinking game for the show, McCloud has laid the ultimate trap. But which episode is it? This article in The Telegraph says that fans think it is episode 5 of series 11. 
  • When we talk about the rings of Hell we aren’t referring to a bad marriage, but in fact Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem that takes you on a tour of the old school version of The Bad Place. In it, Dante describes several distinct circles and rings of Hell; traitors, as discussed, occupy the fourth ring in the innermost ninth circle, aptly named “Judecca”.
  • goop is a “modern lifestyle brand” spearheaded by Gwyneth Paltrow. On the site, Paltrow explains “I started goop to answer my own questions about health, wellness, fashion, food, and travel. I was looking for a trusted source to point me in the right direction and I couldn’t find one, so I created it.” Trusted source? We’re not sure that’s the right word for it, and neither apparently are the authors of the many “Craziest suggestions from goop” listicles peppering (pottsing?) the internet, including this one which points to the most (in)famous suggestions – steaming your vagina and/or inserting a jade egg (!) up there. You know, for balance or hormones or something.
  • The songs we suggested for the corporate gunfight scene are “Fascinating New Thing” by Semisonic (seen here in the paintball scene in the film 10 Things I Hate About You); “Parklife” by Blur; “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (please do send us your best suggestions for songs you would use instead if you didn’t have the budget for the original); “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran (as featured in a 2013 episode of – you guessed it! – Doctor Who: Cold War, starring Matt Smith); “Handbags and Gladrags”, most famously performed by Rod Stewart, but the closest thing to the theme from The Office is probably this cover by Waysted, whose vocalist sang the theme verison; and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” by Noel Coward.
  • The Doctor Who story Ben mentions in which the Doctor and Ace travel back to 1963 is Remembrance of the Daleks, written by Ben Aaronovitch. Many fans consider it a classic of the original series.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Amy Gray, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Good Omens, Jennifer Beckett, Neil Gaiman, non-Discworld, standalone
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