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Tiffany Aching

#Pratchat32 – Meet the Feegles

8 June 2020 by Pratchat Imps 5 Comments

Liz, Ben and librarian Meaghan Dew come down from the mountains to a land of sheep, chalk and tiny blue warriors, and meet the youngest witch ever, in Terry Pratchett’s 2003 Discworld for Younger Readers book, The Wee Free Men.

Nine-year-old farm girl Tiffany Aching lives on The Chalk, a lowland area famous for its sheep and…er…sheep products. It’s not famous for attacks from mythical river monsters, so when one turns up she lures it with her brother as bait and hits it over the head with a frying pan. Searching for answers, she meets the very real witch Miss Tick, and realises that’s what she wants to be. In her first truly witchy move, she disobeys Miss Tick’s advice and tries to take on the Queen of the Fairies, who has kidnapped her baby brother. Luckily she’s already met and impressed the Nac Mac Feegle – a clan of tiny blue “pictsies” with a love for fightin’, stealin’ and drinkin’…

After the end of the Witches series in Carpe Jugulum*, Pratchett launched a new protagonist destined to become one of his most beloved characters. Tiffany Aching is practical, serious, thoughtful and wilful, with a steely gaze and a mind so sharp she might cut someone else (she certainly knows which bit to hold onto). Pratchett weaves the story of a young girl stepping into some big – and tiny – shoes with themes of grief, family, community, belief and the stories we tell…oh, and a tiny blue and red whirlwind of swearing, violence and other Scottish stereotypes known as the Nac Mac Feegle.

Do these two things mesh well for you? Is this Tiffany’s finest hour, or just a taste of what’s to come for her? And was Granny Aching a witch, a shepherd, or something else entirely by the end? Use the hashtag #Pratchat32 on social media to join the conversation!

* Carpe Jugulum is coming soon(ish) to a Pratchat episode near you!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_32.mp3

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Guest Meaghan Dew is a librarian and podcaster. For around seven years, Meaghan hosted and produced the podcast for Australian arts and culture magazine Kill Your Darlings. Meaghan currently works as a librarian in Melbourne, and produces her library’s podcast program.

Ben was reading the The Illustrated Wee Free Men, the 2008 hardcover edition of the book with full-colour illustrations by artist Stephen Player – and a few extras from Terry. Player advises that the colours are off in the printed book, but you can see many of the original illustrations on his web site.

Next month we travel to an entirely different rural area of the Disc for more younger readers adventure, in 2000’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. We’ll be joined by writer and screenwriter Michelle Law! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat33 by June 20th 2020.

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

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Meaghan Dew, Miss Tick, Nac Mac Feegle, Nanny Ogg, Queen of the Elves, Rob Anybody, Tiffany Aching, William the Gonnagle, Younger Readers

#Pratchat67 Notes and Errata

8 May 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 67, “The Three-Elf Problem“, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2013 Discworld board game, The Witches, with returning guest Steve Lamattina.

Iconographic Evidence

As promised, here are some photos of the game.

A photo of the board, components, rules and box of The Witches board game.
The board, components and the box.
An annotated photo of the box for The Witches board game, showing the names of each of the characters on it.
Which witch is which? Get your answers here!
A photo of the board, cards and other components of The Witches board game.
A pile of components. The pink tokens featuring townsfolk are Crisis tokens; the yellow ones featuring a witch with crazy eyes are Cackle tokens; and the larger square ones are Black Aliss tokens. The green square tiles are Easy Problems, and the purple ones are Hard Problems.
A photo of The Witches board game during play.
Ben’s hand during his first, four-player game of The Witches.
A photo of four cards depicting more obscure characters.
A photo of the cards from The Witches board game we mentioned as our favourites in the episode.
Some of our favourite cards, as discussed in the questions section near the end.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title takes inspiration from the 2008 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The novel in turn takes it’s title from the three-body problem of physics, which refers to the difficulty of calculating the relative motion of three bodies whose masses will interact thanks to gravitational force. In the game, three elves are a problem because they cause everyone to immediately lose.
  • Steve last appeared on Pratchat for Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, discussing Only You Can Save Mankind, back in February 2020 – the second-last time we recorded regularly in person.
  • The last in-person episode was #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”, with Fury. We moved to remote recording from episode 30 (“Looking Widdershins”), though Ben did record in person for “The Troll’s Gambit” with Melissa Rogerson, in November 2022.
  • Dimity Hubbub is not actually known for being talkative, but rather being clumsy; in her first appearance she has set fire to her own hat, and steps on a piece of Annagramma’s occult jewellery. Dimity appears in A Hat Full of Sky (where she appears in two scenes), Wintersmith (in which she gets a whole two lines of dialogue) and The Shepherd’s Crown (again, only very briefly).
  • Tiffany’s time in Lancre is covered in A Hat Full of Sky (#Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home”) and Wintersmith (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“).
  • Lancre Gorge features fairly prominently in Wyrd Sisters, and is where Lord Felmet eventually ends up. In Lords and Ladies, its described like this: “Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.” (A footnote admits that “Lancrastians did not consider geography to be a very original science.”)
  • Garth Nix, who was our guest for #Pratchat51 a bit over a year ago, is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Old Kingdom series of young adult fantasy novels. In the books, the “Old Kingdom” is a place of sorcery and monsters, separated from its neighbour Ancelstierre by a wall which keeps the magic out. The first book is 1995’s Sabriel, while the latest is the prequel Terciel and Elinor, published in late 2021.
  • The various editions of The Witches (which is called The Witches: A Discworld Game on BoardGameGeek) include:
    • The Treefrog Games’ Collector’s Edition, published in an edition of 2,000 copies, featuring the pewter miniatures and a cloth bag to keep them in, an A1 poster of artwork from the game, different artwork on the box cover, a different shaped box, and a larger map. (We presume this just means physically larger, not that there are any additional locations.) While you can’t buyt the minatures separately, you did used to be able to buy a set of coloured plastic miniatures for the game from Micro Art Studio in Poland, who still produce a line of Discworld miniatures – though the young witches are no longer available.
    • The Mayfair Games Standard Edition, the one we played. It has wooden witch’s hat pieces for the players.
    • The game has also been published in several other languages: German, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech and Spanish. These all appear to use the same art, with only the text translated.
  • Mayfair Games was
  • Martin Wallace is an English game designer who now lives in Australia. After getting his start in wargames in the 1990s, he became a very well-known game designer. His games include the heavy train games Brass: Lancashire (originally just Brass) and it’s successor Brass: Birmingham; two quite different editions of A Study in Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up based on the short story by Neil Gaiman; and most recently the fantasy war game Bloodstones. (Ben is mistaken, however, about Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which were designed by the entirely different (if similarly named) James Wallis. Sorry James!) Martin’s company Treefrog Games was active until 2016, when he closed it down to focus on working as a designer. Bloodstones was his first new venture in self-publishing since then, this time under the name “Wallace Designs”.
  • The very brief Martin Wallace interview about The Witches can be found in the BoardGameGeek forums for The Witches. Read the interview here.
  • When Nanny visits the Long Man in Lords and Ladies, she takes Casanunda along with her. His mind is boggled both by the Long Man, and the resemblance of the King of the Elves within to “his picture”.
  • The Felmets appear in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”), and they do indeed both die by the end of the book. Lord Felmet plunges to his death in Lancre Gorge, while Lady Felmet is cast into the woods, where the woodland creatures, acting as the soul of the country itself, er…take care of her.
  • Ben hasn’t been able to think of any other games that split a dice roll in half, though there are many that use a “push-your-luck” mechanic. This is usually achieved by allowing a player to re-roll one or more of their dice with an escalating level of risk and reward.
  • Melbourne’s public transport network, created by the “Octopus Act” in the late eighteenth century, has a large number of train and tram lines radiating out from the Central Business District. While there used to be two “circle lines” that connected stations on these lines to each other, nowadays to change from one to the other you generally have to travel into the city and back out again. Only buses travel in alternate directions, but they are generally less frequent and less reliable, thanks to traffic.
  • Agnes Nitt and Perdita X Dream appear briefly in Lords and Ladies, but are best known from Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”).
  • Ben’s favourite board game Pandemic was designed by Matt Leacock and first published in 2008. It’s a fully co-operative game (see below) in which players are members of the Centre for Disease Control, trying to keep four global pandemics in check while they find cures for them all. The current edition of the game is published by Z-Man Games.
  • Fully cooperative games are ones in which players do not compete, but instead win or lose (and sometimes score) together. Board game examples include Pandemic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Spirit Island. Semi-cooperative games feature some cooperation, but the players also compete against each other in some way. In Ben’s experience, most such games feature strong player cooperation, usual through a high chance of everyone losing, but add in secret personal goals that might put them into conflict. This is a feature of “hidden traitor” and social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter, though these might also be considered team games. The Witches is different in that the competitive side of the game dominates; the cooperative element is relatively light, with the threat of losing fairly slight.
  • Solo board games are very popular in the “print and play” scene – cheap games you can download and print on paper yourself. They include Bargain Basement Bathysphere (since published as a boxed game), Utopia Engine and RATS: High Tea at Sea. Nemo’s War is at the other end of the scale: it’s a large game with a big board, hundreds of components and several expansions. Other boxed solo games include Under Falling Skies (which started life as a print and play game), Final Girl, Coffee Roaster and Deep Space D-6.
  • We discussed Good Omens back in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
  • The Discworld Emporium is the most famous officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise which grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who started doing Discworld miniatures in the early 1990s. We most recently talked about them in #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”. They are credited as the author of many of the more recent spin-off books, like The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Nac Mac Feegle Big Wee Alphabet Book, so you’ll no doubt here some more about them before we’re done.
  • The fans whose likenesses were used for the box art witches were Kate Oldroyd (Tiffany Aching), Victoria Lear (Petulia Gristle) and Pam Gower (Granny Weatherwax). As we mentioned, Pam sadly passed away in January 2023. She wasn’t just the inspiration for this box art, but also Paul Kidby’s bust of Granny Weatherwax. You can read Bernard Pearson’s thoughts about Pam in his Cunning Artificer blog in 2015, including an anecdote about her meeting with Terry which also appears in the biography.
  • Rowlf the Dog was one of the original muppet characters, originally performed by Jim Henson. He notably achieved solo fame in the early 1960s as a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show, before becoming the piano player in The Muppet Show and subsequent movies. His big number in The Muppet Movie is a duet with Kermit, “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.
  • Wilfred is the title character of a short film and two television series, all created by Australian comic actors Adam Zwar and Jason Gann, and starring Gann (in a costume) as “Wilfred”, an anthropomorphic dog, who is suspicious and jealous of his owner’s new partner. The original short won awards at Tropfest, Australia’s biggest short film festival, in 2007, and became a series on SBS which ran for two seasons in 2010. It was then adapted for the US market, starring Gann as Wilfred and Elijah Wood as Ryan, a depressed man who befriends Wilfred when his neighbour asks him to look after the dog. In this version the question of whether Wilfred can truly speak, or even really exists, is much more present. The American Wilfred ran for four seasons on FX between 2011 and 2014. There was also a Russian adaptation, retitled Charlie.
  • The board games we recommended are:
    • Wingspan
    • Dominion
    • Castles of Mad King Ludwig
    • The Palace of Mad King Ludwig
    • Pandemic
    • Pandemic: Fall of Rome (now called Fall of Rome: A Pandemic System Game)
    • Thunderbirds

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Annagramma, Ben McKenzie, board game, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, games, Martin Wallace, no book, Petulia Gristle, Steve Lamattina, The Witches, Tiffany Aching

#Pratchat66 Notes and Errata

8 April 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

More notes coming soon!

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

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

#Pratchat43 Notes and Errata

8 May 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, featuring guest Dr Sally Evans, discussing the 32nd Discworld novel, and the second to feature Tiffany Aching, 2004’s A Hat Full of Sky.

  • The episode title is a parody of the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, released in 2019. Tom Holland starred as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, who tries to leave his superhero life behind when he goes on a school trip to Europe. It…doesn’t work out.
  • Bonus episode note: Ben’s working title for this episode was “I’m Gonna Be the Big Man Who’s Hivering to You”, a reference to Scottish band The Proclaimers biggest hit, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)“, from their 1988 album Sunshine on Leith. It was initially only a big hit in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (it reached number 1 in the charts down under), but had a second lease on life in the US when it was featured on the soundtrack to the 1996 film Benny & Joon. The second verse includes the lines “And if I haver/Then I know I’m gonna be/I’m gonna be the man who’s haverin’ to you”; Ben always thought “haver” was Scots slang for vomiting (the preceding lines are about getting drunk), but actually it means to speak nonsense, especially when flirting or complimenting someone. So also something you do when drunk.
  • Red Dwarf is a British science fiction sitcom, created Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for the BBC. It stars Craig Charles as David Lister, the lowest ranked crew member of the deep space mining ship Red Dwarf, who is placed in suspended animation for refusing to hand over a cat he smuggled on board. He wakes up to find that a radiation leak has killed the rest of the crew and that Holly, the ship’s now-senile computer (Norman Lovett and later Hattie Hayridge), kept him in stasis for three million years. He is joined by a descendant of his cat, evolved into humanoid lifeform known simply as Cat (Danny John-Jules); his hated bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), who died and is now a hologram computer-simulation; and later Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), a domestic service android. It originally ran for eight series on the BBC between 1988 and 1999, and was resureccted by UK digital channel Dave in 2009 for a mini-series, “Back to Earth”, and three more series and a telemovie between 2012 and 2020. In the early years of The BBC series, Grant and Naylor – under the pseudonym Grant Naylor – wrote two Red Dwarf novels, essentially a revised version of storylines from the first few series without the limitations of a television effects budget.
  • Ben Elton was a star of the 1980s alternative comedy scene, who later gained success as a television personality, sitcom writer (he joined Blackadder from the second series) and comic novelist. His science fiction novels include Stark (1989; also adapted for television in 1993), This Other Eden (1993) and Blind Faith (2007).
  • The Last Continent was first published in May 1998, and Jingo in November 1997, so Sally’s guess is right on the money. We discussed those books in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land” and #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés” respectively.
  • We’ve spoken before about Enid Blyton and Liz’s feelings on loving an author whose work we can now see contains a lot of problematic stuff. Her school story books included the “Naughtiest Girl” series, starring spoiled rich girl Elizabeth Allen, who is sent away to a progressive boarding school when her bad behaviour at home causes her governess to quit. They started with The Naughtiest Girl in the School in 1940, and followed by three more in the 1940s. Six more, beginning with The Naughtiest Girl Keeps a Secret, were written by Anne Digby between 1999 and 2001. She also wrote the “St Claire’s” books about twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan, who go to the titular boarding school. The original series consisted of five novels written between 1941 and 1945, beginning with The Twins at St. Claire’s. As with the Naughtiest Girl books, they were later continued by another author, with Pamela Cox writing two more books in 2000 and another in 2008.
  • The Baby-Sitter’s Club was a series of novels by Ann M. Martin (and later several ghostwriters) chronicling the adventures of four teenage girls – Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia and Stacey – who run a babysitting service in their (fictional) home town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, later joined by many other characters. The original series was published between 1986 and 1999, and included 131 books, of which the first 35 were written by Martin herself. There were also a huge number of specials and spin-offs, including the popular Baby-Sitter’s Club: Mysteries series. The main series was adapted for television in 1990, and ran for 13 episodes; a new series was released on Netflix in 2020, with a second season expected in 2021. There are quite a few Baby-Sitter’s Club podcasts re-reading the books; if you’ve listened to any, we’d love to hear which ones you rate!
  • The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories is a series of mystery novels starring fictional teenage detective Nancy Drew, beginning with the 1930 book The Secret of the Old Clock. Nancy herself was originally 16, headstrong, impulsive and sometimes violent, but in later books – and revisions of the earlier ones – she was changed to be nicer. The series was created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer and ghostwritten by various authors as “Carolyn Keene”, with around 175 books published between 1930 and 2003. This setup was the same strategy Stratemeyer used for his earlier Hardy Boys mystery books. There have been several screen adaptations, including several short “B-films” in the late 1930s, a 1970s The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries crossover series for television (considered by some the most faithful adaptation), a 1995 television series which updated Nancy as a 21-year-old criminology student, the 2007 feature film Nancy Drew, and most recently, the film Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and the unrelated television series, a modern re-imagining titled Nancy Drew, in 2019. There’s still plenty of life in this investigator!
  • Tom Swift Jr was, it turns out, another series of ghostwritten children’s books created by Edward Stratemeyer! They were a continuation of the original Tom Swift series, in which the younger Tom’s father was the main character, though many supporting characters appear in both. The original series was written under the pseudonym Victor Appleton, and the Tom Swift Jr books under Victor Appleton II. In all there are over 100 Tom Swift books, beginning with the original series of forty books published between 1910 and 1941, and the 33 original Tom Swift Jr books, published between 1954 and 1971. (These are the ones Ben read as a kid.)
  • We previously discussed Just William and the William Brown books, and Pratchett’s love for them, way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh” (and especially in the notes for that episode). Written by Richmal Crompton between 1922 and 1969 (with the last one published after Crompton’s death in 1969), each book is a collection of short stories chronicling unruly schoolboy William’s various adventures. He is always eleven years old, but the stories are always set in the present day – i.e. the time at which they were written. So as well as scrumping for apples, William – along with his band of friends and accomplices, the “Outlaws” – also “Does His Bit” during the years of the Second World War, pretends to be on television and discovers the wonders of the National Health Service in the late 1950s, and get confused by a bunch of hippie spiritualists at the end of the 1960s.
  • Paul Jennings is an Australian author best known for his collections of short stories, often with fantasy elements and always containing a twist. His most famous books are the first nine volumes of these, published between 1985 and 1998, with titles like Unreal!, Uncanny!, Unbelievable! and Unmentionable! (Ben still has his copies of the first five or so.) He’s also written a large number of children’s chapter books, picture books and novels, some in collaboration with another famous Australian author, Morris Gleitzman. Based on the popularity of his short stories, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation created Round the Twist, a television show adapting stories from a variety of Jennings’ books. It revolved around the Twist family – widowed father and sculptor Tony, teenage twins Pete and Linda, and youngster Bronson – who move into an old lighthouse, where all kinds of weird stuff happens to them. It ran for four series between 1990 and 2001, moving from Channel 7 to the ABC, though with lots of cast changes as the child actors grew up. It was a massive hit in Australia and the UK, remembered for its theme song as much as the show itself.
  • Paul Jenning’s memoir is Untwisted, published in 2020. The title is a play on his most famous books, and the TV series they inspired.
  • Primary school happens at roughly the same age in most places, but the way the years are numbered are quite different. It’s not even consistent between Australian states! But it is common across Australia for children to enter year 1 (also galled grade 1, or first grade) in the year they will turn 6, usually after a year of pre-school that goes by various names (kindergarten, prep, reception etc). Most states consider high school to run from years 1 to 6 (when most children are 12 years old), and high school from years 7 to 12 (most students turning 18 in their final year). So in year 11, most Australian students would be in their second last year of primary school, year 5.
  • We’ve often talked about British author Diana Wynne-Jones; see #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26 and #Pratchat30 for more about Howl’s Moving Castle, plus #Pratchat22, #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat37, where we discuss her other books, especially the Chrestomanci series. In the original Howl novel, protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three sisters who all work in their father’s hat shop. Sophie, aware of the fairy tale conventions of the world she lives in, expects to live a boring life compared to that of her sisters. The middle child Lettie, the most beautiful, becomes an apprentice pastry chef, while the youngest and smartest, Martha, becomes apprentice to Mrs Fairfax, a witch who would probably get along very well with Nanny Ogg. They do indeed have some adventures of their own, but we won’t spoil those for you here.
  • Anges Nitt is a young witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (see #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“) as a member of a goth-like “coven” who meddle in the powers of fairies. While a minor character in that book, she nonetheless catches the eye of Granny and Nanny as one with true talent. In Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“), she has gone to Ankh-Morpork to become an opera singer, and the elder two witches just happen to be going there anyway, and of course they wouldn’t dream of telling her she should come home and take up witchcraft. By the time of Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“) Agnes is more-or-less the third witch in Granny and Nanny’s trio, though she doesn’t appear to be officially being taught or apprenticed by either of them. She has however taken over the cottage in Mad Groat which once belonged to Magrat and Magrat’s mentor, the research witch Goody Whimper.
  • Tiffany’s “see me” trick is described in Chapter 1 like this: “It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of ghost body that could walk around.”
  • On “hiver” being a reference to acne or pimples, the closest word is probably “hives” – itchy, swollen and often red areas of skin, usually caused by an allergic reaction. They can indeed sometimes resemble acne, though they’re not often mistaken for each other.
  • Liz makes a reference to the horror film It Follows (2014, dir. David Robert Mitchell), in which college student Jaime (Maika Monroe) is pursued by a supernatural creature which wants to kill her – a curse passed on to her by a boy she sleeps with. A key unnerving thing about the creature is that it can appear as any person, but only the victim of the curse can see it.
  • Queen Elizabeth first met Prince Philip in 1939, when she was 13 and he was 18. They were engaged in 1947, at ages 21 and 26.
  • The Uffington White Horse, briefly mentioned by Pratchett in his author’s note, is the oldest such “hill figure” in Britain, dated as being around 2,500 to 3,300 years old. Though called a horse for around 1,000 years (the oldest written history of any hill figure in the UK), there’s some debate over whether it was originally meant to be a horse. It’s made of crushed chalk, laid in trenches dug into the hill, and needs to be regularly maintained or it becomes difficult to see. The Uffington White Horse inspired many other similar horse figures around the UK, though the others are all much newer; the oldest is the Westbury White Horse in Pratchett’s home county of Wiltshire, which can’t be reliably traced back before the late 18th century.
  • The “beetle” in Disney’s Mulan (1998, dir. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook) is actually a lucky cricket named Cri-Kee, bought by Mulan’s grandmother to give her luck in her visit to see a Matchmaker. After that goes horribly, she tries to release him, but he sticks around, becoming a sidekick to her family’s guardian spirit, the dragon Mushu. You’ll be pleased to know he doesn’t explode during the film, but survives to feature in the direct-to-video sequel. He doesn’t appear in the 2020 live-action remake, but an archer character named Cricket does appear as a reference to him.
  • Anne Geddes is an Australian photographer who rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s with her photographs of cherubic babies involving elaborate props and costumes. These were incredibly popular, and her photos sold millions of greeting cards, calendars and coffee table books. She lived in New Zealand for much of the height of her fame, and in 2004 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit by the Queen for services to photography, though she also has a history of philanthropy. Since 2015, though, she’s made much less work – with social media all but killing the calendar and greeting card market, like many artists Geddes has turned to Patreon to continue making a living.
  • Mr Sheen is the tiny, bald-headed and bespectacled mascot of the Mr Sheen household cleaner, invented in Australia in the 1950s. It was the first aerosol-based cleaner to be sold in Australia, and continues to be popular in Australia and several other countries. His theme song was quite memorable, too, and remained largely unchanged for decades.
  • Black Books is a British sitcom created by and starring Irish comedian Dylan Moran. Moran plays Bernard Black, a misanthropic, drunk bookshop owner, who in the first episode hires an optimistic and naive assistant, Manny (played by one of Ben’s all-time favourite comedians, Bill Bailey). Together with their friend Fran (Tamsin Greig) they have various misadventures. The show won wide following and ran for three series between 2000 and 2004, broadcast on Channel 4. In the third episode, “Grapes of Wrath”, Kevin Eldon plays a distinctly creepy Cleaner hired by Manny to tidy up the shop. This YouTube clip of his first appearance will give you the idea…
  • The “hive mind of mushrooms” Liz mentions is known as a Mycorrhizal network. Some species of fungus grow large structures underground, connecting to other forms of plant life, transferring nutrients and water and possibly information of a sort between trees, leading to the nickname the “Wood Wide Web”. See this Science article from 2019 for more.
  • On Roundworld the Doctrine of Signatures dates back to ancient Greek and Roman physicians, but was popularised in the 15th to 17th centuries, especially via Jakob Böhme in his book The Signature of All Things. It’s perhaps most obvious in the common names of many (supposedly) medicinal plants, including eyebright, lungwort and birthwort (thought to resemble the uterus, and unfortunately a carcinogen). Modern thinking suggests that those medicines that do work were probably attributed a physical similarity after the fact. In any case you have to squint pretty hard to see the doctrine at work…
  • We’ve previously talked about shape-changing teenagers the Animorphs and their foes, the parasitic alien Yeerks, in #Pratchat19, #Pratchat25 and #Pratchat35. They are the stars of several related series of books written for teens by K. A. Applegate (a psuedonym for Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant),and published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001.
  • The Body Keeps the Score is an influential 2015 book written by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, about the causes and possible treatments for trauma.
  • The “Cloak of Billowing” appears in the 2017 sourcebook Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Its only magical ability is to “billow dramatically” on command.
  • Tree of Life is an Australian chain of “boho fashion” stores cultivating a “carefree hippie ethos”. It began in the early 90s in Balmain, Sydney, and was started by John and Wendy Borthwick, followers of the Indian spiritual leader, Meher Baba. ISHKA is a similar store started by Michael Sklovsky in Melbourne in the early 1970s, initially selling both Michael’s own craft as well as items sourced from overseas. Both sell a variety of clothing, knick-knacks and accessories made in India, Nepal, Thailand and other countries in the Middle East and Asia. While both brands have statements on their websites outlining a strong ethical stance, it’s unclear how they maintain this, and they do not seem to use any standard FairTrade practices (e.g. labelling goods with details of their supply chains).
  • Sigmund Freud believed that the reason we don’t remember our births is that it was too traumatic (and sexual, because, you know, Freud). But while that’s been debunked, it is definitely true that humans have “infantile amnesia” – an inability to remember facts and personal events from our first few years of life. We still don’t have a definitive explanation, but it does seem likely to be related to the enhanced rate of brain development that goes on at that time.
  • While the experience of phantom limbs – the sensation of feeling from a limb one no longer has – is common in amputees (even non-human ones), it’s not a “syndrome”. Ben is using the word incorrectly.
  • In Equal Rites (discussed in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“) a wizard passes on his staff to the eighth son of an eighth son…who is actually a daughter. The child, Esk, is sent to apprentice with Granny Weatherwax, who eventually realises that regardless of gender, wizard magic and witch magic are not the same. Granny takes Esk to Ankh-Morpork to convince the Unseen University to take on their first co-educational pupil. Nonetheless, Annagramma – and Mrs Earwig herself – are perhaps exhibiting some internalised misogyny when they say that witchcraft should be done in the wizard manner to be “proper”, since the two traditions are still largely split along gender lines. (This is a theme that will be revisited in later Tiffany books.)
  • We previously mentioned the Country Women’s Association (CWA) while discussing the short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
  • Ben is conflating two folk tales in his explanation of the third wish. The talking fish is from “The Fisherman and His (Greedy) Wife”, (catalogued in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 555), and importantly they don’t have a limited number of wishes, nor do they undo them with a final one; instead the fisherman is pushed to ask for grander and grander things until they go too far, and the wishes are undone with a crack of thunder and no explanation. The story with the sausage on the nose is “The Ridiculous Wishes” (ATU 705A), in which a poor woodcutter is given three wishes; his wife urges him to wait and think about the wishes, but while hungry that night he idly wishes for sausages. His wife is understandably upset, but when they argue he unthinkingly wishes the sausages were attached to her nose; in the end they must use the third wish to undo the second, leaving them only with the sausages.
  • While it’s clear that Granny has experience of the Black Desert, this book is the only time we see her actually go there. Her conversations with Death in Witches Abroad and Carpe Jugulum occur in the real world, and her metaphysical struggles in those books occur in the weird mirror dimension and inside her own mind.
  • Willow is a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas, written by Bob Dolman and directed by Ron Howard. It stars Warwick Davis as Willow Ulfgood, a farmer and aspiring sorcerer of the Nelwyn people. He and his family find a Daikini (i.e. human) child set adrift on a river, which unknown to them is part of a prophecy that will dethrone the evil sorcerer-queen Bavmorda (played by Jean Marsh). Along the way Willow and his friends recruits the Daikini mercenary Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and have various fantastic misadventures. While the film wasn’t a big box office success, it won a firm place in the heart of nerds everywhere. A television series returning to the world of the film is coming to Disney+ in 2022, with Davis reprising his role as Willow.
  • We previously explained the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen meme, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. It’s taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino), in which DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, points at a movie screen when he sees himself.
  • Yes, we goofed: Tiffany does not keep Granny’s old hat; she keeps the one she bought from Zakzak Stronginthearm, though it is also temporary. Granny shows her the new hat she is constructing to make the point that witch’s hats aren’t permanent.
  • The Secret of Monkey Island is the classic 1990 graphic adventure videogame created for LucasArts by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. A comedy (and one of Ben’s favourite games), the player takes on the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who wants to become a “mighty pirate” during the golden age of piracy. Pratchett was certainly playing videogames by this time and it was such an influential and popular game its hard to imagine he wouldn’t have played it. In the game, he meets the “Amazing, Adventurous, Acrobating, and Exceedingly Well-Known, Fabulous, Flying Fettucini Brothers”, Bill and Alfredo. While it’s clear some of their appearance is just an act, it’s not specified if they changed their names as Ben misremembers. In the 1992 sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, there’s also a reference to the “Linguini Brothers”.
  • The Monster Book of Monsters, a magical school textbook for third year Care of Magical Creatures students, first appears in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, published in 1999. That’s five years earlier than the LIBER IMMANIS MONSTRORUM in this book, though surely bonus points are awarded for the Latin.
  • The historical John Snow (1813 – 1858) was an English doctor who is famous for his work in epidemiology and anaesthesia. In a time before germ theory was accepted and understood in Europe, he was skeptical of the prevailing “miasma theory”, and as well as disabling a pump to prevent further cholera infections, also mapped cases to help determine how they were spreading. His work was influential enough to inspire the John Snow Society, who hold an annual “Pumphandle Lecture” at which a pump handle is symbolically removed and replaced. His work also influenced the design and use of public drinking fountains, and you can hear more about that in episode 188 of the podcast 99% Invisible, “Fountain Drinks“.
  • Modern vaccines use a variety of methods to create an active agent which appears to the body to be a specific virus or bacteria. This allows the body to develop an effective immune response to the real thing, without having to actually contract the disease. The precursor to vaccination was variolation, which goes back at least 1,000 years when it was first used in China. This is deliberate infection with a small dose of the actual disease, originally smallpox, with hope of achieving immunity after a mild illness, and it was used up until the 18th century. Modern vaccine agents do not use a live sample of the actual disease, but instead an agent created in a number of ways. These methods include material from dead or irradiated pathogens (known as “ghosts”), modified or naturally occurring viruses which are very similar to the dangerous one but do not harm the host (as in the case of cowpox being used to in smallpox vaccines), or most recently RNA vaccines, which use messenger RNA to more directly help the body create appropriate proteins that can act as antibodies.
  • Wittgenstein’s Ladder was described by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein () in 1921. In his own words (or at least, in an English translation of his own words): “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”
  • You can see Prince Philip’s self-designed Land Rover hearse in this BBC article.
  • You probably already know we love The Mummy, the 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser as adventurer Rick O’Connell, and – most relevant to this discussion – Rachel Weisz as librarian and historian Evie Carnahan. We’ve previous talked about it in #Pratchat11, #Pratchat19, #PratchatNA7, #Pratchat21, #Pratchat23, #Pratchat36 and #Pratchat42. And yes, we are seriously considering a short spin-off series of podcasts discussing those films.
  • On the subject of Esk being based on Rhianna Pratchett, less than a week after this episode was released, Rhianna Pratchett replied to a tweet asking what her Dad’s favourite of his books was, and for her own favourite. She replied that the witches and Tiffany books were among her faves, as was Nation (Terry’s own choice), and further that Equal Rites was the first of his books that she read – probably why it was dedicated to her! She confirmed that Esk is based (in part) on her in reply to a follow up tweet, in which she said that there was “more than a little” of her in the character… We’ve included the relevant tweets below.

Dad thought Nation was his best book and it’s one of my favs too. I’m a huge fan of the Witches series in particular (Equal Rites was the first book of his I read) particularly Witches Abroad, Carpe Jugulum and the Tiffany Aching tales. https://t.co/jWdENxQLJt

— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

More than a little 😉

— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Annagramma, Awf'ly Wee Billy Big Chin, Ben McKenzie, Daft Wullie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Jeannie, Lettice Earwig, Miss Level, Miss Tick, Nac Mac Feegle, Petulia Gristle, Rob Anybody, Sally Evans, Tiffany Aching, Younger Readers

#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

8 June 2020 by Ben 1 Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 32, “Meet the Feegles“, featuring guest Meaghan Dew, discussing the 2003 Discworld novel The Wee Free Men.

  • The episode title puns Meet the Feebles, an early film from the career of Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. It is an extremely inappropriate parody of the Muppets in which animal puppet characters engage in fightin’, thievin’, drinkin’ and many other things that even a Mac Nac Feegle might thing twice about… You’ve been warned!
  • Aimee Nichols was our other librarian guest; she joined us for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
  • The weird time contraption in Doctor Who is the “time flow analog”, which was indeed featured in the television series; the Third Doctor built one to disrupt the time experiments of the Master in the 1971 serial The Time Monster.
  • A Rube Goldberg Machine is a device which is far too complicated for its simple function; traditionally they involve a lot of balls, levers, ramps and so on. It is named for Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970), a cartoonist and engineer who drew cartoons of contraptions that gave rise to the name. By contrast, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (aka “The Notorious R.B.G.”) is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, well known as an outspoken liberal voice on the court. (That’s liberal with a small l, for Australian readers.)
  • Trout tickling is indeed a real and very old method for catching trout, often associated with poachers and the poor, as it’s quiet and requires no equipment. Basically if you rub a trout lightly with your fingers on its underbelly it becomes docile, and you can fairly easily pull it out of the water. In Scotland the practice is known as “guddling”, though it is apparently illegal in the UK. (Thanks to listener Vlad, who let us know of a similar practice in the US for catching catfish known as “noodling”!)
  • Ben discussed Animal Crossing – specifically the latest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch – in episode 30, “Looking Widdershins”.
  • The Wentworth Detention Centre is an entirely fictional women’s prison located in the equally fictional Melbourne suburb of Wentworth. It was created by Reg Watson for his surprise hit Australian television show Prisoner – known in the UK as Prisoner: Cell Block H – which ran on Channel Ten from 1979 to 1986. A modern reimagining, titled Wentworth, premiered on the pay TV channel SoHo in 2012 and has proved equally popular, with more series planned into 2021. Both versions explore political themes including feminism, LGBTIAQ+ rights and the efficacy of prisons.
  • Susurrus is pronounced “SUSS-ur-us”, so Ben was pretty much right. It’s a straight up loan word from Latin. Terry’s piece about it for The Word, a promotional collection for the 2000 London’s Festival of Literature, was reprinted as “The Choice Word” in A Slip of the Keyboard, the 2014 collection of his non-fiction writing.
  • “The Tinderbox” is a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, apparently inspired by a Scandanavian folk tale, though it’s a bit like the start of versions of Aladdin that include the magic ring. If you want to find other similar stories, check out the Aarne-Thompson tale index; “The Tinderbox” is type 562, “The Spirit in the Blue Light”.
  • Aldi is a German budget supermarket chain now found in many countries across the world. They are famous for two things: mainly selling their own products, which are imitations of more famous brands like “Bran & Sultanas” cereal, “Cheezy Twists” snacks, and “Hedanol” paracetamol; and for the “Aisle of Wonder” (not a name they use), which features their weekly collection of “Special Buys” which can include anything from inflatable beds to fire extinguishers and Blu-Ray players.
  • We’ve not found any historical accounts of itinerant teachers roaming the countryside and gathering in fairs like the one depicted in the book, so as far as we can tell it’s an invention of Terry’s – probably drawing on other traditions of itinerant workers. If you know differently, please get in touch!
  • “Neville would have got it done in four books” is now such a ubiquitous meme that it’s hard to find its origin, but to summarise: Neville Longbottom is a minor wizard character who goes to Hogwarts with Harry Potter, and often the butt of jokes about his incompetence. Then you find out his tragic backstory and in the final novel he rises up as a hero. All this combined with the actor who played him in the films growing up much more handsome and buff than anyone could have expected, winning both a huge number of devoted fans.
  • We mentioned Pratchett’s opinion of J K Rowling back in #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. You can read about it in this interview from The Age: “Mystery lord of the Discworld”, by Peter Fray from November 6, 2004.
  • Carpe Jugulum introduces the Nac Mac Feegle in its first few pages, though they are not named until much later. (We’ll link our episode covering that book when we get up to it.)
  • “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is, as described by Terry in his author’s note, a painting by English artist Richard Dadd completed in 1864 while he was incarcerated in the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam. (See our episode on Dodger, “A Load of Old Tosh”, for more on that place.) As Terry points out, it’s unfair to reduce Dadd’s life to the fact that he painted this and killed his own father, so we’d encourage you to read more about him. You can also listen to episode 65 of Dr Janina Ramirez’s Art Detective podcast, featuring guest Neil Gaiman, as they talk about the painting – thanks listener Amy Keller Kaufman for the suggestion! The painting talk starts at around the 20 minute mark, and while this book only gets a passing mention, Neil does talk about Terry and their shared love of the painting, and shares a touching story about one of the last times they spoke.
  • The Queen song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is featured on Queen II, which you have probably correctly guessed is the band’s second studio album. Freddie Mercury was inspired by the painting, and while we can’t be sure if Terry discovered the artwork via Queen, Neil Gaiman certainly did, though he says the album sleeve reproduction made no impression on him – it only struck him when he saw the original. (See the Art Detective episode linked above for more on that.)
  • As mentioned in our Good Omens episode, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”, in that novel Pratchett and Gaiman claim that any album left in a car’s glove box will transform over time into Queen’s Greatest Hits.
  • The Headless Horseman is nowadays best known from the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, written by American author Washington Irving. Many older versions of such characters exist, including the Irish fairy known as the dúlachán, a Scottish ghost (whose horse, Liz will be glad to hear, is also said to be headless), and the Green Knight who cuts off his own head in the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Irving story has been animated by Disney and made into the film Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton.
  • In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and its 1972 film adaptation, one of the most infamous scenes has movie producer Jack Woltz waking up covered in blood from the severed head of his prize-winning racehorse – left in his bed as a message from the Corleone crime family that he should do what they ask and make the Godson of the family’s Don the star of his next film. Horrifyingly they used a real horse’s head for the film, sourced from a slaughterhouse.
  • The Star Wars Anthology films are movies in the Star Wars franchise which are not part of the main “Skywalker Saga”. So far they include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story, both closely connected to the original 1977 film Star Wars.
  • Braveheart is the 1995 film depicting the life of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace, directed by and starring Mel Gibson. Despite being written by a Wallace – unrelated American Randall Wallace – the film has been heavily criticised for its historical inaccuracies, and especially its treatment of Scottish king Robert the Bruce. A spin-off sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019. The original’s most famous scene is of Wallace rousing Scottish warriors before a battle, in which he shouts “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” This is echoed by the Feegles’ “They can tak’ oour lives but they cannae tak’ oour trousers!” – which might explain why the Feegles don’t have trousers.
  • The Wee Free Church, or “Wee Frees”, was the nickname of the smaller Free Kirk branch of the Scottish Prebyterian Church, distinguishing it from the much larger United Free Kirk branch. (“Kirk” is the Scottish word for church.) It came about in protest against the 1900 union of the original Free Kirk church with the United Presbyterian Church, which was much more liberal. Like a lot of church history it’s intertwined with politics, but the term “Wee Free” has stuck around and is still used to refer to various smaller denominations of Scottish churches. The modern ancestor of the Wee Free is the Free Church of Scotland, now one of the larger Presbyterian churches in the country. Pratchett denies any connection between the Feegles and the Wee Free, but then he also likes to remind us all that there’s no Scotland on the Discworld either…
  • Woad is a natural blue dye made from the leaves of the plant Isatis tinctoria, also commonly known as woad. It’s been known since Ancient Egyptian times, and the Romans noted that celts would paint their bodies blue. The term “pict”, for the ancient peoples of northern and eastern Scotland, comes from this practice, and that of tattooing; in Latin it means “painted ones”.
  • The really mediocre Keira Knightley movie to which Liz is referring is probably Princess of Thieves, a 2001 Disney telemovie in which Knightley plays the daughter of Robin Hood. 
  • Zebras do indeed have black skin, with the stripes caused by selective pigmentation of their fur. There are many reasons posited for the stripes’ evolutionary benefit; a 2014 study showed that flies have a hard time landing on and biting stripey zebras, perhaps confused by the high contrast or an optical illusion. There are many other competing ideas, and indeed many of them may be correct.
  • Yan Tan Tethera counting systems come from Northern England, and are derived from an early Celtic language, similar to Welsh. There are many variations, most of which fell out of use a century ago; “yan tan tethera” most closely matches the ones found in the Derbyshire Dales and Lincolnshire. Neither of those use “jiggit”, though it – or some variation of it – is indeed the number 20 in most versions.
  • The Kelda refers to herself as a queen bee as an analogy, but while she has hundreds of sons who form her army and workforce, it’s worth remembering that in a beehive, all the workers and warriors are also female bees. The only males are drones, whose primary (if not quite only) purpose is to fertilise the queen.
  • The idea of the “perception filter” – a device or effect that causes people to see something unusual as something they can more readily accept – is an explanation from the revived Doctor Who series to explain why no-one seems to notice the TARDIS, even though a 1960s London police box is hardly inconspicuous. It’s also used to explain other things in the series, including the entrance to Torchwood HQ in Cardiff. The Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field is a similar concept introduced by Douglas Adams in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, 1982’s Life, the Universe and Everything; it does what it says on the tin.
  • William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902) was likely born in Ireland, moving to Scotland with his family and later pretending to have always been Scottish. He wrote his first poem in 1877, claiming a moment of firey inspiration to create, and was consistently deluded about his own talent. He would perform his poems in a variety of contexts, including polemics against drinking read in pubs, and reading his poetry as a circus act in which the crowd were allowed to throw eggs and food at him. His poems were collected in Poetic Gems and several sequels, published with assistance from friends to help him out of financial difficulties. But while he had an extraordinary life it ended quite sadly, as he died penniless and ill. We’d encourage you to read about him – if not his actual poetry.
  • The story of the bird wearing down a mountain with its beak is an old, old one, but modern versions are mostly descended from Grim’s Household Tales Volume 2, specifically the very short story “The Shepherd Boy”. The boy is posed three seemingly impossible questions by a King, and answers the third one – “How many seconds are in eternity?” – with: “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.” This story is recalled by the Doctor in the ninth season of the modern series, in the critically- and Ben-acclaimed episode “Heaven Sent”. 
  • In the legend of the Titan Prometheus, he is punished for stealing the secret of fire and giving it to humanity by being chained to a stone, and every day having an eagle tear out and eat his liver. Being an immortal, Prometheus’ liver grows back overnight and the torture is repeated. He is eventually freed from his torment by Heracles.
  • In C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four children find their way to the magical land of Narnia, which has been under the rule of the White Witch for centuries – resulting in an endless Winter where Christmas never comes. She famously tempts one of the children, Edmund, with his favourite sweet, Turkish delight. The Witch’s backstory is revealed in the later prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew.
  • Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception is about a group of professional thieves who steal information by entering the subconscious of their targets. In the film, they are tasked to do the opposite – to “incept” an idea into someone’s subconscious – and they go several “layers” deep in dreams within dreams.
  • Roland is, of course, the Baron’s lost son – there’s no Duke of the Chalk! Pratchett denies the name Roland has anything to do with the fairytale Childe Rowland, which dates back to at least 1814. The story includes many tropes common to legends of Elfland, including a kidnapped younger sibling, chopping off the heads of fairies, and not eating fairy food lest you be trapped in their world forever.
  • “Ohnoetry” is a popular term for terrible poetry; it’s impossible to track its origin, as it likely has many more than one. The cartoon Liz refers to might be this one from “Toothpaste for Dinner?”
  • The “Marshmallow Test” is a famous psychological experiment devised by American Walter Mischel in the 1960s. A 4-year-old child is given a marshmallow (or other favourite lolly) and told that they can eat it now, but if they wait for 5 minutes without eating it, they’ll get another one and can eat both. It’s been replicated by hundreds of parents on YouTube, none of whom had to deal with ethics committees. It supposedly showed that children who could delay gratification did much better in life, but the findings were questioned and – as is so often the case with psychological experiments – the situation is likely much more complex. The 2014 “Let Them Eat Marshmallows” episode of The Indicator podcast does a great job of summarising the updated findings.
  • Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple is an elderly amateur sleuth from the village of St Mary Meade. The 1932 short story collection The Thirteen Problems includes her first ever appearance, “The Tuesday Night Club”.
  • The 1997 John Woo film Face/Off stars John Travolta  and Nicholas Cage as an FBI agent and a terrorist who swap faces using experimental transplant technology. It’s about as terrible/great as that makes it sound.
  • A “tidal wave” is any wave that’s created by tidal forces – the gravitational effect of the Moon on sea level. A tsunami is a wave created by a seismic disturbance, usually an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and mostly occur out to sea. It’s true that the water recedes from the shore before a tsunami hits – this is known as “drawback” – but it usually only happens very shortly before the wave hits.
  • “Super Opera Man” was our tongue-in-cheek description of Walter Plinge in his guise as the Opera Ghost in our discussion of Maskerade, in the episode “The Music of the Nitt”.
  • There is a millennia-long history of the “Scotch Irish”, Scottish peoples who migrated to Ireland. The Ulster Scots are a particular group of Presbyterians who migrated to escape religious persecution. As a result there are many Irish families with Scottish surnames (like, say, “McKenzie”) and who thus have tartans and can trace their history back through both countries.
  • The most famous type of bagpipes are the Great Highland bagpipes seen in military bands in many English-speaking countries. Bagpipes are found in various forms across the world, however, and may have been around for as long as three thousand years. The most common kind of Irish bagpipes are called the “Uilleann” pipes, and are distinguished by an elbow-operated bellows used to inflate the bag, and a chanter – the pipe fingered by the player – with an unusually broad range.
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster occurred on December 28, 1879. A severe storm hit the rail bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between Dundee and Fife, just as a train was crossing; the bridge collapsed and the train fell into the Firth, killing all 70 passengers and crew aboard.
  • There’s no shortage of comedy Irish folk songs, usually about a disaster or some other gruesome subject. Ben’s favourites include Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad”, The Scared Weird Little Guys’ “Miners”, and – from the film A Mighty Wind – The Folksmen’s “Blood on the Coal”, which combines a train crash with a mining disaster.
  • William McGonagall was most famously lampooned by British radio comedy group The Goons, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers both playing the character “McGoonagall” in The Goon Show. The Monty Python sketch Ben mentioned is “The Poet McTeagle”, from the sixteenth episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
  • Vogons appear in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a species of horrible officious bureaucrats tasked with demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. One of the most famous entries from the Guide specifies that Vogons are the third-worst poets in the Universe, behind the Azgoths of Kria and “Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings” of Greenbridge, Essex. (This was an alteration from earlier versions which named real poet and friend of Adams, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, as the worst poet in the Universe. He requested his name be disguised.)
  • Liz remembers correctly that in traditional Chinese massage, it is said that the ears are the sensory organ related to the kidneys. Several sources recommend massaging the ears to promote good kidney health, while the kidneys themselves store “pre-natal Qi” inherited from your parents. So now you know! 
  • New Zealand-Canadian actor Anna Paquin was just eleven years old when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1993 for her role as Flora in Jane Campion’s film The Piano.
  • In Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wildling who really likes Brienne of Tarth is Tormund Giantsbane, played by Norwegian actor Kristofer Hivju. He might not be Scottish, but he is the very image of a human-sized Feegle.
  • “Crivens” is an archaic exclamation that comes from Scots, where it was originally spelt “crivvens”. It’s derived from the earlier “criffens”, which like many archaic swearwords was a form of blasphemy; it’s supposedly a contraction of “Christ fend us”. In terms of how strenuous a swear it is, think of it much like other stand-in terms for “Christ”, including “cripes” and “crikey” – i.e. not very, except perhaps to the strictest conservative Christians. It hasn’t entirely vanished from use, but is mostly used for mock surprise; it is sometimes survived via the phrase “well jings crivens and help ma boab” (approximately, “Jesus Christ, help my Robert!”), which was popularised in books and comic strips in the 1920s and 30s.
  • Red hair in humans is influenced by genes on chromosomes 4 and 16. The more prominent gene is MC1R on chromosome 16; red hair is caused by one of a number of recessive alleles (an allele is one of the possible variations of a specific gene) – i.e. a person needs to have two copies of it for it to express itself. Ben mentions partial or incomplete dominance, which is where a gene will express partly even if a dominant allele is also present. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the most prominent red hair gene, but might be explained by other alleles on chromosome 4. As is usual with biology, it’s not as simple as you might think.
  • Fraggle Rock is Jim Henson’s 1983 Muppet series for children about the Fraggles, small furry creatures that love radishes and live below the human world in a huge cave complex from which the series takes its name. The young Fraggle protagonists deal with a variety of social, emotional and philosophical issues, and occasionally travelled to “Outer Space” – the world above Fraggle Rock, populated by “Silly Creatures” (humans). Fraggle Rock was also home to the Doozers – tiny green humanoids who spent all their time making constructions out of “doozer sticks”, which the Fraggles would eat, forcing the Doozers to rebuild. There was also a third world, the Land of the Gorgs, enormous creatures who consider themselves rulers of the Universe; they have a large radish garden, and also a sentient Trash Heap who the Fraggles often visited for advice. A reboot is apparently coming soon from Apple TV+.
  • He-Man is the absurdly hyper-masculine protagonist (in name at least) of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a 1983 sword and sorcery cartoon series with science fiction elements based on a toy line created by Mattel. He often rode into battle on his giant green tiger-like companion, Battle Cat. Both gain their magical strength after being transformed by He-Man’s magic sword, and until then have alter egos – the feckless Prince Adam, and cowardly Cringer.
  • Tartans – cloth woven in distinctive patterns of criss-crossing colours – were originally associated with places, much like other patterns (Argyle, for example). The idea of clan tartans came into vogue during a visit to Scotland by King George IV, thanks mostly to Walter Scott. They’ve since become quite a fad, and it’s possible to request your own family tartan and have it officially recorded. The podcast 99% Invisible have a mini-series about fashion, Articles of Interest, and the episode “Plaid” (which is not synonymous with tartan, by the way) has a great summary of the history of tartan. In any case, Ben’s objection to the multi-tartan wearing Feegles doesn’t have much historical backing, though as they’re all from the same place you’d still expect a bit more uniformity.
  • The Narrativia web site now only lists the exclusive deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content for screen adaptations. It’s unclear what this means, if anything, for the films that were in production, namely the Henson adaptation of The Wee Free Men and the animated version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
  • The association between certain sounds and physical shapes is the “Bouba/kiki effect”. The excellent puzzle videogame Baba Is You, in which you manipulate the rules of the game world in order to progress, is named for this effect.
  • Ben still can’t find the earlier Pratchett book which talked about “gl” words and the equivalent of visual onomatopoeia; it’s not The Colour of Magic, Sourcery!, Moving Pictures or Soul Music. If you know which one it is, please let us know!
  • Magrat’s mentor was the research witch Goodie Whemper, based in the Lancre town of Mad Stoat.
  • We covered all three books in the Bromeliad trilogy in the previous episodes “Upscalator to Heaven”, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and “The Thing Beneath My Wings”. 
  • By Young Sam, Ben means Sam Vimes Jr, not Sam Vimes Sr when he was younger, as in Night Watch.
  • The other Pratchett books for younger readers that Ben hasn’t read yet are Nation, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (though we’re covering this next episode), and the rest of the books in the Tiffany Aching series: A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • Listener Bethany wondered on Twitter if “Fairy Nettle” was one of the aliases used by the witches in Witches Abroad, but while they did claim to be “flower fairies”, Magrat called herself “Fairy Tulip” and Granny “Fairy Daisy”, while Nanny called herself “Fairy Hedgehog”.
  • We didn’t end up talking about this in the episode, but Ben had a question he felt wasn’t answered clearly in the book: is the Queen of Fairyland the Queen of the Elves we met in Lords and Ladies? They have many similarities, including missing husbands, but she has no other elves, only smaller fairies. What do you think? 
  • In Harry Potter, the Grindylow is depicted as a small green squid-like creature with a more humanoid face, small horns and two arms ending in tentacled fingers, though the prose descriptions note that their physical forms can vary considerably. They are featured most prominently in the third and fourth books.
  • Drop Bears are mythical very real and dangerous Australian creatures. Their Discworld equivalent appears in The Last Continent, as discussed in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • Eisteddfods in Australia are traditional performance competitions with common sections or events including poetry recital, public speaking, dramatic performance and readings of various kinds. Their origins lie in Wales. (We’ve previously mentioned them on the podcast in a footnote; we’ll add a link to that episode when we remember which one it is!)
  • Kasabian are an English rock band, formed in 1997. Bien is French for “good”.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons reference web site Ben refers to D&D Beyond.
  • You can find the Kill Your Darlings podcast here. The magazine takes its name from the advice given to writers: you must be prepared to give up your favourite ideas – to “kill your darlings” – when they don’t work.

 

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Meaghan Dew, Miss Tick, Nac Mac Feegle, Nanny Ogg, Queen of the Elves, Rob Anybody, Tiffany Aching, William the Gonnagle, Younger Readers
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#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
Listen to us discuss the in-universe Discworld books The Ankh-Morpork Archives volume I and II, collecting the Discworld diaries, and The Discworld Almanak. Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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