Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch

These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “The Snail Trick”, discussing Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent’s 2023 Discworld book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch – in front of a live audience at the Australian Discworld Convention in Sydney!

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

• The episode title blends Ben’s favourite new detail from the book, Petulia’s “snail hotel” purse, with the most infamous – her “pig trick”. But you knew that.
• We’ve previously appeared at several other Nullus Anxietas events, and released the results as episodes in one way or another:
  • “A Troll New World” about “Troll Bridge”, was our first live episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in Melbourne in 2019, with guest Tansy Rayner-Roberts.
  • “Twice as Alive” was a special live online episode recorded for Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con, the online convention held in 2021. It revisited Men at Arms for the first time since #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”, in 2017.
  • “A Tale of Two Carpets” was a pre-recorded discussion comparing The Carpet People (1971) and The Carpet People (1992). It was broadcast as part of the Virtual Discworld Fun Day in 2022, as a replacement for the sadly cancelled Nullus Anxietas 7a. The original Nullus Anxietas version is available on YouTube, and there’s also an annotated version (i.e. Ben added text-caption footnotes and a few other extras) available only to podcast subscribers.
  • “Unalive from Überwald” about “Death and What Comes Next” was our second live in-person episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 9 in Adelaide in 2024, with guests Tansy Rayner-Roberts and Karen J Carlisle.
• Our interview with Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent about Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was released as Pratchat74, “Hogswitch”, in December 2023.
• Paul Hogan (1939-) is an Australian actor and comedian who leveraged appearances on a television talent show into his own sketch comedy series, before finding international fame as Mick “Crocodile” Dundee, the titular character in the 1986 Australian film Crocodile Dundee. It’s essentially a romantic comedy in which Sue, a journalist from New York, travels to the Northern Territory to meet Mick, a “legendary” white bushman who fights off snakes and crocodiles with ease. It hasn’t aged well in many respects, but several of its scenes and lines became iconic, including one in which Mick scares off a would-be armed mugger by drawing his much bigger knife. The film was a major hit at the time, and established the modern American “outback fantasy” idea of what Australia (and Australians) are like. Hogan went on to become a tourism icon for Australia, famously inviting Americans by promising to “throw another shrimp on the barbie”. The film had two sequels, neither of which is highly regarded, though 1988’s Crocodile Dundee II – in which Sue’s ex-husband sends evidence against a drug cartel to Sue before being murdered, putting her and Mick in danger – was also a box office hit.
• James Eoin Stephen Paul McKeown, better known as Jimeoin, is an Irish comedian who rose to prominence in the 1990s in Australia. His self-titled television show, Jimeoin, ran from 1994 to 1995, and featured the snail joke Ben re-tells in this episode.
• The Fifth Element is a 1997 sci-fi action film directed by Luc Besson, starring Bruce Willis, Mila Jovovich and Gary Oldman. Set a few centuries in the future when the Earth is threatened by the return of a “great evil”, the weapon that can defeat it made up of the four classical elements, and a mysterious “fifth element”, represented by a young woman who is destroyed and then re-built using futuristic technology. The film is visually incredible, but is perhaps the poster child for the problematic narrative trope dubbed “born sexy yesterday” – a “blank slate” young woman who is magically or technologically created as a physical adult, but with limited maturity and life experience.
• The Fifth Elephant is the 24th Discworld novel, published in 1999 when The Fifth Elephant was still fresh in everyone’s memories. Aside from the title, it doesn’t really have any connection to the film. We discussed in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, in 2021.
• The 1990s hit TV series Charmed originally starred Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano as “the charmed ones”, a trio of sisters who discover they are witches, each with a magical superpower, who can combine their magic to cast spells and vanquish demons. It ran for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006, though Shannon Doherty left after the third season and was replaced by Rose McGowan as a secret half-sister of the other three. They don’t seem to ever seriously claim that zippers were invented by witches, but in an early episode from the first season, “The Witch is Back”, a witch summoned through time from 300 years earlier is so impressed with the zipper on a dress she is loaned that she declares “a wise witch made this!” A reboot of the series with a new trio of charmed ones ran for four seasons from 2018 to 2022, though it had no involvement from the original cast and crew, and wasn’t as successful as the original.
• We covered The Witches board game in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. In the game, players take on the role of Tiffany or one of three other trainee witches, visiting various locations in the Lancre area to solve “problems” like sick pigs, pregnancies and deaths. Successfully solving a problem involves rolling dice, but there are various ways to improve the result, including using magic – though this and other missteps earn you “cackle counters”, which track your progress to becoming like Black Aliss. You can only remove cackle counters by sacrificing a turn to move to a location with another witch, “taking tea” and talking about your problems to keep you both grounded.
• We discussed Raising Steam in #Pratchat90, “Mind the Ginnungagap”.
• The pig trick first appears in A Hat Full of Sky, where the audience at the Witch Trials are amazed that Petulia intends to do it “without a pig” and “using only a sausage”. This may indicate that “the pig trick” is something infamous from witch lore, and the sausage version is Petulia’s unique spin on it. Since Tiffany and Granny are staring at each other at the time, the narration from Tiffany’s point of view only notes “a squeal”, followed by a “gasp of amazement” and applause from the crowd.
• Willow is a 1988 fantasy film directed by Ron Howard and produced by George Lucas, starring Warwick Davis as the titular character, a wannabe wizard from a village of humble farmers. Early in the film, Willow botches his “disappearing pig trick”, which as Ben mentions is stage magic rather than actual sorcery. The movie stands up pretty well, and also stars Val Kilmer as the swordsman who helps Willow protect a baby who is prophesied to be the doom of an evil sorceress, played by Jean Marsh.
• “The pissing boy in Brussells” is the famous statue Manneken Pis, a bronze of a small naked boy which is part of a fountain located not far from the main square in Brussells, the capital of Belgium. Some version of the fountain dates back to the 15th century, though the version known now was sculpted by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder in around 1619, and upgraded in the early 18th century. The one on public display is a replica, as the original was frequently stolen, and is now in a museum. He’s a popular tourist attraction and is often dressed in various clothes made for him – there’s even a museum of his outfits (which number in the hundreds) down the street.
• Gnomes is the English title of the 1976 book, Leven en werken van de kabouter (‘Life and work of the gnomes’) by Dutch writer Wil Huygen, and based on the illustrations by Dutch artist Rien Poortvliet. The book pretends to be a biological and historical study of a species of tiny humanoids known as gnomes, based on European folklore, and credited to a gnome named David. It was a huge hit, including in the United States and Spain. It was adapted for television, first in 1980 as a one-hour telemovie in the US, and later as several series for Spanish television, starting with David, el gnomo in 1985 (dubbed into English as The World of David the Gnome).
• Mage: The Ascension was first published by White Wolf in 1993, with later editions in 1995 and 1999, plus a Twentieth Anniversary Edition (M20) published in 2015. That last edition contains a brief bit about magic vs magick on page 41, under the heading ‘That “M” Word with that Funny “K”’. The fictional author addressing the player’s character, a new mage, says:

Many people find the word pretentious… but then, a certain degree of pretention is inevitable when you play games with reality. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretense only if you can’t live up to the power of your claims. And since living up to such power is what magick is all about, that spelling seems appropriate to me.

• The snail purse does appear to be new to Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch; it’s not mentioned in any of the novels in which Petulia appears, and snails are generally only mentioned in the context of being farmed and eaten by Feegles.
• For the record, the gear Ben used to record this episode was a PreSonus AudioBox 44VSL digital interface, three Shure SM58 microphones, and a 2019 13” MacBook Pro running Reaper (the software Ben still uses for all his audio editing). When we meet in person for board game episodes, he currently uses a set of RØDE Procaster microphones instead, and is hoping to upgrade to a newer digital interface or mobile digital mixer/recorder in the near future. (The AudioBox works, but is getting a bit old.)
• You can read the Modiphius media release about their upcoming board games on their website. As of the publication of this episode, no updates have been given about either Readers Digested or Kill Sam Vimes, though we’ll note that the former is also the title of
• We were pressed to mention a few of our favourite guests, and while we hasten to say “splendid chap, all of them”, the specific mentions go to:
  • Will Kostakis, who appears in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”, about The Dark Side of the Sun, and later #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem”, about Johnny and the Bomb.
  • Richard McKenzie, who appears in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House” about Pyramids; #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, about The Fifth Elephant; and #Pratchat87, “Exclusive Possession: Ankh-Morpork Edition”, about the board game Discworld: Guards! Guards!
  • Cal Wilson, who appears in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”, about Men at Arms; #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”, about Sourcery; and #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”, about Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook.