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#EeekClub2021 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus episode Eeek Club 2021, answering questions from our Eeek tier subscribers.

  • In Ankh-Morpork, the “Glorious 25th of May” is the date of the “Glorious Revolution”, commemorated only by a small number of people who were there. They wear lilac in memory of those who died. It is covered in much detail in Night Watch, which we’ll be reading for our December 2021 episode. On Roundworld, Pratchett fans have adopted the date as a celebration of Discworld and Terry Pratchett, often wearing lilac (the flower or the colour), and sometimes raising money for Alzheimer’s research. May 25th is also Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams, which began two weeks after his death in 2001, and “Geek Pride Day”, which was started in Spain in 2006. That the Ankh-Morpork revolution shares a date with the former may not be a coincidence, since Night Watch was published in 2002.
  • We did indeed start offering subscriptions in January 2019; we announced them in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Our big open slather questions episode was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, released on the 8th of April, 2020.
  • James Spader provides the voice of robot protector-turned-exterminator Ultron in the 2015 Marvel superhero film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • The lockdown-related Discworld questions in #Pratchat30 begin around 1 hour, 5 minutes and 41 seconds in.
  • The first lockdown in Melbourne – and the rest of Australia – began on March 29, 2020. Melbourne had subsequent lockdowns from July 9 to October 26 2020, February 12 to 17 2021, and from May 27 until – at the time of last update – at least June 10, 2021.
  • Dragon King of Arms appears in Feet of Clay, which we discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.
  • We also discussed the difference between vaccination and variolation in the notes for #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben says The Truth, but means The Times, as in The Ankh-Morpork Times, the first newspaper on the Discworld. It features in the novel The Truth, which we discussed in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • The Sto Plains – which occupy the area directly hubwards of Ankh-Morpork, on the opposite side to the Circle Sea – include many city-states, like the kingdom of Sto Lat (ruled by Queen Keli), the Duchy of Sto Helit (as in Duchess Susan Sto Helit), and the protectorate of Sto Kerrig. Sto Lat is probably closest, only about 20 miles from the Hubwards Gate of Ankh-Morpork. Their populations aren’t known, but it seems likely the plains’ residents don’t outnumber the million people who live in Ankh-Morpork. The various kingdoms and smaller towns and cities of the plains are all independent of the city, but most of them use Ankh-Morpork dollars as their currency, and certainly look to Ankh for guidance in matters of culture, technology and commerce.
  • The Trans-Tasman Bubble is the quarantine-free travel arrangement between Australia and New Zealand, countries with similarly low COVID-19 cases, separated by the Tasman Sea. It was announced as a possibility early on in the pandemic, but officially took affect on April 19, 2021. The day this episode was released (May 25, 2021), new cases were announced in Melbourne, leading to the reinstatement of some restrictions and a 72-hour pause on the bubble for travel from Melbourne.
  • “Young Igor” is our affectionate name for the Igor who joins the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in The Fifth Elephant; he is the nephew of the Igor who worked for the Morporkian embassy in Überwald. We last saw him in The Truth, where he was tending to the wounds suffered by the Patrician and his clerk, Drumknott.
  • Rincewind’s age isn’t definite, but a good guess is that he was 32 during the events of The Colour of Magic, and 57 by the time of The Last Hero, so Ben is probably right about him “pushing 60”.
  • Melbourne’s second lockdown lasted 112 days, from July 7 to October 28, 2020. During most of that time, residents were only allowed to leave their homes under very limited conditions, and restricted in how far they could travel from home. It’s probably stretching it a bit to say these were some of the harshest lockdown conditions in the world, but it was reported that way at the time.
  • Liz’s comment about “trips to Aspen” refers to multiple incidents from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when wealthy Australians returning from a skiing holiday in Apsen, Colorado tested positive for the virus but did not self-isolate, causing a cluster of new cases.
  • Though he does walk with a cane, the Patrician is not as old as he seems; clues from various books (primarily Night Watch) place him as somewhere between 50 and 55, but it seems the assassination attempts of Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and The Truth have taken their toll and he’s not as strong as he used to be. Or at least, that’s what he’d like his opponents to think…
  • The Bubonic plague is a disease caused by infection of the lymphatic system with the bacteria Yersinia pestis. Usually a human is infected by a flea bite; several flea species can carry the bacteria, and spread among human populations via rats. The plague is responsible for three major pandemics: the plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed around 25 million people; the Black Death of the 14th century, which may have killed as many as 200 million people in Europe – about a third of the population; and the plague of the mid-19th century, which caused the deaths of around 15 million people in mainland Asia. (For comparison, as of May 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has officially caused 3.6 million deaths, though the estimated total death toll is 7.7 million.) Untreated, Bubonic plague is very deadly, killing half or more of those infected. Thankfully it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, reducing its mortality rate to 15% or much lower. These days cases are very rare, though the disease has not been entirely eradicated.
  • Here are some links to the very excellent The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret head canon Twitter threads:
  • Aunty Donna are an absurdist sketch comedy group based in Melbourne and formed in 2011. Their latest work is the Netflix series Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. You can find out more about them at auntydonna.com.
  • Equal Rites is the third Discworld novel, and the first to feature Granny Weatherwax. It tells the story of Eskarina Smith, a girl based in (large) part on Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, who becomes the Disc’s first female wizard. We discussed it in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. The subject of the gender split in magical society comes back in the later Tiffany Aching books.
  • Ben mentions VCAL, which is the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is a more practical alternative to the standard Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), a qualification which is more likely to lead to a university degree; VCAL is instead intended to prepare students for an apprenticeship, TAFE course or similar directly vocational training.
  • Most of the captains depicted in the numerous Star Trek television series go on “away missions“, i.e. missions in which they leave their ship (or equivalent). This is especially true of Captain James T Kirk of the original Star Trek, though it’s hinted that this practice is frowned upon by the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard’s first officer, Riker, leads most away missions. Mind you, Picard’s contemporary captains Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager) and Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) go on plenty of missions too…
  • Speaking of Star Trek, the episode Ben is thinking of is indeed called “The Measure of a Man“. It’s the ninth episode of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally broadcast in February 1989. It’s frequently cited as one of the show’s early greats, even if the legal proceedings are a bit suspect. The book The Metaphysics of Star Trek, which uses Star Trek scenarios to illustrate various metaphysical concepts, was later republished as Is Data Human?, as one of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of “personhood”.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld back in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Final Death is the term used in the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (and its cousin, Vampire: The Requiem) for the ultimate destruction of a vampire, who is already undead. They are not nearly as impossible to kill as the vampires of the Discworld; see for example our discussion of Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The Sesame Street song about being alive – or at least the one Ben is thinking of – is “You’re Alive“, first broadcast in 1980. It’s not quite how Ben remembered it, but Sesame Street has tackled the topic several times, always using the measures of eating, breathing and growing.
  • Alan Alda, best known for his years playing trauma surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, established the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in 2009. The Flame Challenge launched in 2012, with the aim of answering the question “What is flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old could understand, as judged by actual 11-year-olds – all because Alda himself received an uninspiring answer from his sixth grade teacher when he was eleven. The winner was announced at the World Science Festival, and the competition was successful enough to inspire several more over the next few years. Each answered a new question picked by 11-year-olds, including “What is time?” and “What is colour?” Sadly the websites for the challenge and the Alan Alda Center no longer exist, but you can find the winners on YouTube with a bit of effort.
  • We’ve previously talked about Beauty and the Beast villain Gaston and his fate, perhaps most significantly in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • The Beast’s age can be worked out from two bits of evidence. First, the enchanted rose, which will only bloom “until his 21st year”; this implies he is aging during his curse, and the rose is wilting during the events of the film. Second, Lumiere – the maître d’ of the house, transformed into a candelabra – says that they’ve been waiting for “ten years” since being cursed. Why the curse affected the servants is not clear, but muddying the waters is the portrait Belle finds of the Beast, in which he looks exactly like his 21-year-old self. Regardless of the Beast’s true age, Chip’s birth remains a mystery.
  • The original Beauty and the Beast was written in 1740 by Parisian novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her version is long, detailed and contains and many characters, including Belle being one of twelve children. Most later retellings are based on a greatly pared back version rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and first published in 1756. These originals draw on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and do not include an equivalent of Gaston, who was added in some later versions. Assuming the Disney version happens around the time the oldest stories were written, Liz is right that they would have lived to see the French Revolution in 1789.
  • Anti-racism is is active opposition to racism, and can take many forms. While the idea has gained more visibility in recent years, with books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and renewed momentum behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s certainly not a new idea.
  • The Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness appears in Men at Arms, which we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited Men at Arms in #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“, a live appearance at The Lost Con online event run by the Australian Discworld Convention.
  • Diggers is the second of the three books of the Bromeliad, Pratchett’s trilogy about the diminutive Nomes. We covered Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, Diggers in #Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and Wings in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • We discussed The Long Earth and (briefly) The High Meggas in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
  • Thanks to listener Steve Leahy, who reminded us that there is at least one alien on the Discworld: Tethys, the sea troll, who crash-landed there after falling off his own watery world of Bathys. He appears in The Colour of Magic, which we discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation.” (We discuss the sequel, The Light Fantastic, in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“.)
  • “Literary fiction” is basically a synonym for “high brow”, “serious literature” or “worthy of awards”, and is used to distinguish supposedly more sophisticated and “important” writing from so-called “genre fiction”. As we discuss, it can get in the bin.
  • Ben finally found a source for the story of the student with the Terry Pratchett book who was dismissed by a lecturer, only to turn things around by revealing they’d written a thesis on his work. It was related on Tumblr by the user thebibliosphere in a comment on this post about “people I still want to stab more than a decade later”. We’ve embedded that exchange below.
https://fistinginferno.tumblr.com/post/187226941007/people-i-still-want-to-stab-over-a-decade-later

#Pratchat40 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, featuring guest Richard McKenzie, discussing the twenty-fourth Discworld novel, 1999’s The Fifth Elephant.

  • The episode title is a play on the repeated phrase from the book, “the thing and the whole of the thing”, used to refer to the Scone of Stone. While “the thing and the whole of the thing” sounds like it’s a reference to or riff on something, it originates with Pratchett as far as we can tell.
  • Magic: The Gathering is the world’s first and still most popular trading card game, designed by Richard Garfield in 1993. Each player collects the cards for the game in randomised (or themed) packs, and creates their own deck. Each card represents a creature, spell, source of power (known as “mana”) or other part of the game’s multiverse, and contains rules text that explains its effect when played. There are now more than 200,000 different cards, and so the number of possible decks – and strategies – is massive.
  • Scrabble – the classic word game in which players place letter tiles that form interlocking words to score points – was originally invented in 1938 by American architect Alfred Mosher Butts. There are thousands of dedicated Scrabble clubs, and in serious competition things can get fierce. Knowing the two-letter words helps because it lets you lay two words parallel by connecting them with shorter words – letting you score all those connecting letters twice. But as Liz points out (and which we elaborate on in a longer discussion which might end up in a future Ook Club episode), this makes you a “Scrabble dickhead”, since it also makes it quite hard for your opponent to find space for longer words.
  • We previous talked about the dinosaur-killing comet of the KT extinction event in our The Science of Discworld episode, #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Raising Steam, the fortieth and second-last Discworld novel, does indeed introduce steam trains to Ankh-Morpork and the region of the Circle Sea, completing the Disc’s journey into steampunk. We’ll probably be discussing it in another year or two.
  • The most obvious inclusion of the “treacle mine” joke in the Discworld is the name of the street on which the old Watch-house sits: Treacle Mine Road! The building even used to house an entrance to the mine, which accessed deep deposits of treacle below the city. The Fifth Elephant mentions deposits of treacle as well, formed from ancient compressed sugarcane.
  • We discussed the previous Watch book, Jingo, in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, a little over a year ago.
  • For more about the Clacks, see our Going Postal episode, #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“.
  • Police boxes were basically small blue sheds of various sizes used by police officers throughout the UK in the 1950s and 60s. Some housed a telephone which the public could use to summon aid, but they also served as a dry place for officers on duty to wait out the rain, contains various useful equipment, and some could even be used to temporarily hold an arrested suspect. They are no longer in use, but their memory is kept alive by Doctor Who, whose title character’s miraculous vehicle is disguised as one. (Ben somehow resisted the urge to mention this when Liz brought it up, which maybe means he gets to take a drink?)
  • WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and iMessage are instant messaging apps which offer end-to-end encryption – meaning that no-one, not even the company who makes the app, can see what you’re writing. There’s some variation in their levels of security, but even on WhatsApp – owned by Facebook since 2014 – you can be sure Facebook isn’t collecting keywords in order to advertise to you. (At least, not as of when this was written in February 2021…)
  • On the subject of dwarfs vs dwarves in Tolkien and Pratchett, it seems Pratchett might have been correcting an error – though Tolkien used “dwarves”, he admitted it should have been “dwarfs”. In his defence he noted that the really old archaic plural of dwarf was “dwarrow”, and used the same word in an in-universe explanation for the use of “dwarves”. You can go down the rabbit hole (dwarf mine?) on this one via this great question and answer on the Sci-Fi StackExchange.
  • Llamedos is the Disc’s equivalent of Wales, located immediately turn wise of the Sto Plains, the area surrounding Ankh-Morpork. While none of the stories are set there, it is the home of Imp “Buddy” Y Celyn, musical protagonist of Soul Music. We talked about that book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • There are a lot of different types of fat; here are a few we mention or which appear in the book:
    • Rendered fat is any meat fat turned to liquid by being cooked slowly over a low heat. (Faster, hotter cooking makes it crispy instead.) It’s also known as dripping, since it drips off the meat.
    • Lard is rendered pork fat; it is usually clarified, a process in which the liquid fat is strained, then boiled and allowed to cool (via numerous different methods), resulting in greater consistency and fewer impurities (BCBs?). The equivalent made from the meat of cattle or sheep is called tallow.
    • Ghee is a form of clarified butter which has been made in India for centuries. It is sometimes flavoured with spices.
    • Suet is the raw, hard fat from around the loins and kidneys of cattle and sheep.
  • As promised, here is Liz’s vegan recipe that tastes like bacon – which, it turns out, is a recipe for vegan bacon, aka facon! (Ben has tried it, and can confirm it’s delicious.)

Ingredients:

  • firm tofu
  • soy sauce
  • smoked paprika

Method:

  1. Slice the tofu quite thinly then dab as much moisture away as possible with paper towels
  2. Marinate slices in soy sauce
  3. Sprinkle smoked paprika on both sides, rub into the soy sauce
  4. Fry until a little crisp
  5. There it is – facon!
  • The Scone vs Scone debate has been going on for decades, alongside the newer debate over whether you should put the jam or cream on first. We won’t wade into the second one, but as mentioned in the footnote, the split in pronunciation is geographical. You can see a great map of where people say what in the UK, created by Reddit user bezzleford based on data from Cambridge university. As noted in the accompanying description, Australians predominantly rhyme scone with “gone”, while it seems Americans prefer it to rhyme with “cone”.
  • The clan Mackenzie (in Gaelic MacCoinneach, “son of the fair bright one”), dates back to at least the 15th century and possibly the 12th. Their ancestral lands are in Kintail and Ross-shire in the Highlands of Scotland. The current clan seat is Castle Lead, but the castle Richard describes is their oldest one, Eilean Donan Castle, which was ruined but later rebuilt during the twentieth century. It is indeed on an island, Eilean Donan, which is on the western Highland coast, at the meeting of the three sea lochs Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh.
  • In addition to the potted history given by Ben in the footnote, the Stone of Scone has many similarities with the Scone of Stone, not least that it is rumoured to have been destroyed and replaced more than once. But always the current Stone is considered the true one – “the thing and the whole of the thing”, one might say.
  • Greek migration to Australia started in the 19th century, but the biggest wave of migration occurred in the aftermath of World War II, from the 1940s until the early 1970s. This was initially part of Australia’s encouragement of mass immigration under the banner “populate or perish”, which made it easy for citizens of specific (and mainly European) nations to come to Australia. This was under the “White Australia policy”, a series of immigration initiatives specifically designed to stop people of colour from settling in Australia, beginning shortly after federation in 1901. The last of these policies was only removed in 1973.
  • The population of Ankh-Morpork has several times – including in Small Gods, Mort and Guards! Guards!, to list those books in chronological order – been given as around one million, though it’s usually framed as a joke involving souls:

“Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people.”

Guards! Guards!
  • In the 2017 TV series Star Trek: Discovery, the USS Discovery‘s crew complement has varied considerably. It’s original standard crew numbered 136, but during the “red burst” crisis of 2257 it accommodated more than 200 personnel, many from the USS Enterprise. In 2258, it underwent a risky mission and only 88 of the original crew remained aboard; they only seem to have added two more to the crew since then, but its possible we just haven’t met any further additions.
  • Jurassic Park’s gamekeeper is Robert Muldoon, portrayed by the late English actor Bob Peck. He is one of the few characters employed by John Hammond who never underestimates the dinosaurs, but even he is outsmarted by the velociraptors.
  • Surprisingly, trope-listing sites All the Tropes and TV Tropes don’t have an entry for someone being continually interrupted when trying to convey important news. Sybil’s attempts in this book to tell Vimes of her pregnancy are listed under the trope “Hint Dropping”.
  • Trolls in the WarCraft videogames created by Blizzard Entertainment are an ancient species of tall, lanky humanoids with long ears and large tusks. They have adapted to many environments, and have a tribal culture. They are depicted as speaking with various Caribbean or African accents. They are notable for possessing regenerative abilities, healing quickly from all but the most serious wounds – something they have inherited from the trolls of Dungeons & Dragons, in turn inspired by the 1950s fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also provided D&D with its version of Paladins and the concept of alignment. Pratchett’s trolls owe more to Tolkien’s, who turned to stone in sunlight, but they weren’t creatures of living stone. None of these fictional trolls are particularly close to the ones of Scandinavian folklore, where the word and concept originate – though to be fair, like a lot of ancient monster stories, they aren’t big on detailed or consistent descriptions.
  • Caligula was the nickname of third Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who ruled from 37 CE until he was assassinated in 41 CE. Sources from the time – while not entirely trustworthy – say he turned cruel, sadistic and erratic after his first six months in the job. The most famous stories are of his sexual perversions and his attempt to appoint his horse as a Consul. We’re not sure what he’d do with an orange…
  • “Sonky” seems to have become a genericised trademark – a brand so successful it has become a common synonym the product it represents. Real world examples include biro (for ball-point pens), Aspirin (an early trademark for the painkiller acetylsalicylic acid) and in the US, jello (for jelly, from the brand Jell-O). We’ll talk more about this in #Pratchat56, our discussion of Pratchett’s sci-fi short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”; see the notes for that episode for more detail.
  • Condoms have been around since the mid 16th century, but were first made from rubber in 1855. These days most are made of latex, but “lambskin” condoms are still available, made from sheep intestines; they are primarily used in cases of latex allergy.
  • “Black cat freak-out” is Richard’s term for that moment in a film when the character is spooked by something seemingly horrible…but it turns out to be something innocuous, often a black cat. Weirdly this doesn’t appear on the tropes sites, but we did find this supercut on YouTube of moments in film where it happens.
  • The CSI franchise began in 2000 with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, featuring a CSI team led by Carl Grissom in Las Vegas. Its theme song was indeed “Who Are You?” by The Who, and it ran for 15 seasons and a two-part telemovie finale, finishing up in 2015. It launched the sping-offs CSI: Miami in 2003 (which used The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as its theme) and CSI: Cyber in 2014 (which used “I Can See For Miles”), spun off via “backdoor pilots” – an episode of an existing program doubling as a proof of concept for a new show. CSI: Miami introduced another spin-off, CSI: NY in 2004 (with the Who song “Baba O’Reilly”). CSI: Miami‘s lead investigator was Lieutenant Horatio Caine (played by David Caruso); he famously removes his sunglasses when making a dramatic statement about a murder. Also of note: the early working concept for what became The Watch TV series was, indeed, CSI: Ankh-Morpork, a show which would feature new stories about the established characters of the books.
  • The red briefcases Ben is thinking of are the distinctive despatch boxes – aka “red boxes” – used by government ministers in the UK to carry official documents – and not just briefing notes. “Despatch box” itself refers to a number of different types of box used for governmental purposes. The red boxes are required for transport of anything with a security level above “Confidential”, and are still in use, though travel versions are not necessarily red.
  • The modern briefcase evolved from satchels, carpet bags and gladstone bags, first appearing around 1850. The name dates back to around 1925, and is just a compound of case and brief, in the sense of the kind of document often carried inside. The attaché case – what we’d now recognise as the dominant briefcase design – is indeed called that because it was traditionally carried by attachés.
  • Ben’s quip about “The Real Werewolves of Überwald” references The Real Housewives franchise, which began with The Real Housewives of Orange County in 2006. It and its various American and international sequels were conceived as reality television versions of the drama Desperate Housewives, and follow the relationships and tensions between wealthy socialite women.
  • The Osbournes was a reality show documenting the lives of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne and his family – his wife and manager Sharon, and their children Kelly and Jack. It ran for four seasons on MTV from 2002 until 2005.
  • The Jackal (1997, dir Michael Caton-Jones) stars Bruce Willis as an international hitman hired to kill a powerful American target. It’s a remake of the 1973 French film Day of the Jackal, itself an adaptation of the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth. In the French film, set in 1963, the target is the French President. As well as Jack Black as the typically ill-fated weapon maker, the 1997 version also stars Richard Gere and Sidney Poitier, but it was not well-received.
  • The term “latte-sipping liberal” is, surprisingly to us, an American import! It rose to prominence after a 1997 article by US conservative writer David Brooks about “latte towns” where “liberalism is a dominant lifestyle”. It’s part of a longer campaign that seeks to paint left wing politics as elitist and out of touch. Comparable phrases are “champagne socialist” in the UK, and gauche caviar in France. This strategy was named the “latte libel” by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, What’s The Matter with America?
  • “That scene” in Beauty and the Beast is the one in which Belle, berated by the Beast for going into a forbidden area of his castle, runs outside and is attacked by wolves; he saves her but is injured in the process.
  • While we mention the term “alpha wolf“, its important to note that the theory that wolf packs have “alphas” – a specific leader – is at best controversial, and more likely a load of nonsense. It was popularised by David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf, but he later learned that the sources he relied on were based on observation of unrelated grey wolves in captivity, and no reliable. In the wild wolf packs are generally family groups with the parents more or less in charge.
  • We previously discussed the Mary Celeste in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. In brief: the American merchant brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. The crew were all missing and never found, but the ship was oddly untouched –
  • The Hulk holds up an entire mountain range – not just a single mountain! – to save the Avengers in Marvel Secret Wars issue #4 from 1984. As well as appearing within the issue, it’s also on the cover – accompanied by the caption “Beneath 150 billion tons, stands The Hulk — and he’s not happy!”
  • Several Twitter users compared the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with Nicholas Cage’s antics in the 2004 adventure film National Treasure (dir. Jon Turteltaub). In the film, Cage plays an historian and amateur cryptologist named Benjamin Franklin Gates who believes a huge cache of invaluable artefacts and treasure was hidden by the Freemasons during the Civil War and never claimed. Most of the clues that lead to the stockpile are hidden in code on the Declaration of Independence, the document signed by representatives from various American colonies in 1776 which formed the United States of America and declared it independent of Great Britain. Cage’s character opposes stealing it, but the authorities don’t believe him when he tells them his partner Ian (Sean Bean) intends to do so, prompting him to steal it himself from the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. There’s a 2007 sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, in which Cage’s character defends accusations of his ancestor being part of a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln by kidnapping the current President (no really), and after many years of speculation and “development hell”, a third film is said to be currently in the works.
    Here’s the iconic tweet, from US sportswriter Adam Herman:
  • “Chad” is Internet slang for a typical “alpha male”. While it’s become more generally used, often in a mocking way, the term has awful, eugenicist origins in the misogynist incel movement. We previously discussed incels in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • The Hunt was released in March 2020, just before cinemas closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s politics seem somewhat confused; the hunter characters are “elitists” and describe their prey as “deplorables”, which seemingly casts them as caricatures of “latte-sipping liberals” rather than Republicans. Their motives are revealed as non-political, however, and critics seem to agree the film fails as any kind of satire.
  • We had Amie Kaufman as a guest for #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, discussing the first book of the Bromeliad, Truckers.
  • In chapter 13 of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, protagonist Katniss hides from the “Career” contestants thanks to her superior tree climbing abilities, meeting and befriending the youngest contestant, Rue, who is hiding in the same tree.
  • In the original 1969 British heist film The Italian Job, Michael Caine’s Charlie Croker organises a sophisticated plan to steal gold in Italy. While preparing his team, one of them tests explosives on an armoured car and blows the whole vehicle to bits; Croker responds with the iconic line “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” It became one of Michael Caine’s best-known lines (at least in the UK; the film was not initially a big success in the US), and he later titled his 2018 memoir Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life.
  • An “Agatha Christie moment” as Liz means it is the moment in a mystery where the surprising solution is revealed. An “Aldi version” is a cheap knock-off of a better known brand, as sold by the German discount supermarket chain Aldi. We previously discussed them in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
  • Ben entirely misunderstood Liz’s dogfighting joke, for which he apologises. Its origins in describing air fighter combat come from its previous use to describe any kind of deadly close combat, originally between people. The modern official military term is “air combat maneuvering”, or ACM.
  • Liz and Ben make reference to the Sherlock Holmes story The Final Problem, in which Holmes tracks down criminal mastermind Moriarty. The pair fight at Richenbach Falls and seemingly perish when they both fall over the edge. We’ll later revisit this chapter in Holmes history in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch“.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 videogame from CD Projekt Red starring Keanu Reeves, and based on Mike Pondsmith’s 1988 tabletop roleplaying game, Cyberpunk. It features all the tropes we now identify with the genre, including cybernetic body modification.
  • The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical thought experiment derived from the legend of Theseus, the Athenian who defeated the Minotaur. He returned home in a ship but forgot to change the sails as a signal to his father that he had succeeded, resulting in calamity. The ship was supposedly preserved for many generations, with its old planks replaced over time such that philosophers were divided over whether it was truly the same ship in which Theseus had sailed. Similar quandaries include the “grandfather’s axe” (as explained by the Low King), and modern examples also use bicycles. Pratchett talks about the ship of Theseus in both the Bromeliad and The Carpet People.
  • The trope in which someone hates others like themselves is identified by All the Tropes as the “Boomerang bigot“. They also list several other Discworld examples. In the real world, this idea is often used – potentially quite harmfully – to accuse conservatives who label homosexuality as evil as closeted themselves.
  • The unstoppable horror film villains Jason and Freddy are undead machete-wielding, hockey mask-wearing slasher Jason Vorhees, of the Friday the 13th franchise (1980-2009), and demoniac dream murderer Freddy Kreuger, of the Nightmare on Elm Street films (1984-2010). The pair faced off in the crossover film Freddy vs Jason in 2003.
  • Young Igor’s pet “Eerie” is a reference to the Vacanti mouse, which became headline news in the mid 1990s after photographs of it went viral via email. The hairless laboratory mouse seemingly had a human ear growing from its back, and led to protests against the misuse of genetic engineering, but in actual fact the ear was formed from cartilage cells in a biodegradable mould, placed under the mouse’s skin and supported by an external splint which was removed for the famous photo. It was not an actual human ear, and no genetic engineering was involved.
  • The Hurt Locker (2009, dir Kathryn Bigelow) is a war movie about an American bomb disposal squad during the Iraq War. It was written by journalise Mark Boal, based on his experience being embedded with soldiers during the war.
  • In the sci-fi TV series Firefly, the future human society who have colonised another solar system speak English and/or Mandarin. The main characters mostly speak English peppered with Mandarin curse words and other short phrases.
  • Lisa Simpson gets lost in Springfield’s “Russian district” in the 24th episode of The Simpson’s ninth season, “Lost Our Lisa”.
  • Twilight, the first in the series of vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer, was not published until 2005, six years after The Fifth Elephant. For more on those books, see the notes for #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The inspiration for “heart in a box” is song “Dick in a Box“, the first single from comedy trio The Lonely Island (Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone). It features Samberg and Justin Timberlake crooning the instructions they used to make a Christmas present for their girlfriends by…well. It does what it says on the tin. It’s on YouTube here.
  • “Gold” is by Spandau Ballet, from their third album True, released as a single in 1983. You can watch the music video on YouTube.

#Pratchat54 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 54, “The Land Before Vimes“, discussing the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch with returning guest Nadia Bailey.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns on the 1988 animated feature film The Land Before Time (dir. Don Bluth), in which an improbable group of very cute baby dinosaurs who are separated from their parents and search for a safe haven known as the Great Valley. It was quite the sensation at the time, and spawned no fewer than thirteen direct-to-video musical sequels. (Ben tried out several different time/Vimes puns and liked this one the best, since the Ankh-Morpork of thirty years ago is effectively the land before Vimes.)
  • Nadia last appeared on Pratchat just over three years ago, in March 2019, for #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“, discussing Lords and Ladies. (Not including “pandemic time”, that’s only about twelve months ago.) The last time we recorded in person was a year after that, for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, released in March 2020.
  • Will Alma (1904-1993) was a Melbourne magician and historian of magic. Liz did indeed create the Wikipedia page about Alma; we’ll let you read it to find out more. You can also find information about the W G Alma Conjouring Collection on the State Library of Victoria website.
  • Iceland spar is a transparent form of crystallised calcium carbonate, or calcite; it looks a bit like chunky glass, and crystals are usually rhombus shaped. It’s found in many parts of the world, but the most famous source is the the Helgustadir mine in Iceland – hence the name. It has birefringence, which means that it refracts light differently depending on its polarisation. (Polarisation describes the direction in which a wave oscillates. Light from the sun and most natural sources is said to be “unpolarised”, because it’s made up of a mixture of waves oscillating in all directions.) In practical terms, Iceland spar splits unpolarised light into two distinct beams when it passes through the crystal. It’s thought to be the crystal known as sólarsteinn (“sunstone” in Old Norse) by the Vikings, who used the birefringence effect on sunlight to find the exact position of the sun – a vital bit of data in navigation – even when it was obscured by cloud.
  • Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is the classic comedy time travel movie, and we’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. In the film, teenager and wannabe rockstar Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally activates a time travelling car built by his mentor, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and gets stranded thirty years in the past. When trying to get home, he interrupts the event that caused his parents to meet, and spends the rest of the film trying to get them together before he alters history and wipes himself from existence. This is a form of the Grandfather Paradox – a time traveller interfering with the past in such a way as to cause themselves not to exist.
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is actually the Discworld book immediately before this one; it’s the first explicitly written for younger readers, and also the first not to have a cover by Josh Kirby after he was established as the regular cover artist. (The Colour of Magic was initially published with a cover painting of Great A’Tuin by Alan Smith; Kirby was brought in from that book’s second edition.) We discussed The Amazing Maurice back in July of 2020, in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. An animated film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice, is scheduled for release some time in 2022.
  • We discussed Men at Arms, including Vimes’ possible retirement, back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited it (rather shambolically) for the live recorded episode #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
  • There are many fan-produced Discworld timelines but the most famous is the one developed by members of the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup, and published on the L-Space Web. You can find the latest evolution of that timeline on the L-Space Wiki.
  • Sergeant Abba Stronginthearm was recruited by Carrot as part of his militia in Men at Arms, and subsequently mentioned in Jingo (where he is the next senior Corporal after Nobby) and features briefly in The Fifth Elephant (where’s he’s made Sergeant, and takes part in the Ankh-Morpork investigation into the theft of a model of the Scone of Stone).
  • Poppies are the symbol of Remembrance Day (November 11, marking the armistice that ended hostilities in World War I) and, in Australia and New Zealand, ANZAC Day (April 25, marking the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in Turkey, and the subsequent campaign in which thousands died). They are mostly worn in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. Pins of artificial poppies are sold to raise funds for veterans, and are worn by anyone who wishes to remember the dead of World War I (and, later, World War II). The poppy as an emblem was inspired by John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”, which refers to poppies growing in what were the battlegrounds in France and Belgium. The first lines of the poem read:
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, 
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
  • We’ve mentioned the end of Disney villains like Gaston before, in Eeek Club 2021, and #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“. The trope is that the hero doesn’t kill the villain, but they die anyway because they act on their own wrath or greed, causing their own death (often by falling). This simplifies the story by preventing the need for any kind of forgiveness or punishment, giving the heroes an easy happy ending. (TV Tropes calls this a “Disney Villain Death”, which is specifically for the falling off of something version.)
  • We’ve mentioned the dimension-hopping TV show Sliders before, mostly in episodes about Pratchett’s own multi-dimensional epic, The Long Earth series (see #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat46), but also in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“. The specific episode Ben refers to here is “Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome”, from about halfway through the second season in 1996. The title also refers to the framing device of one of the sliders, soul singer Rembrandt Brown, telling his story to a psychiatrist. Arturo’s final line that episode was indeed “Oh, my God…”
  • While Ben still questions applying it to time travel, Liz is right in that realistic theories of teleportation involve destroying a person and building a copy of them at their destination. This is because the transmission of actual matter is impossible, but it’s at least theoretically possible to transmit the information about the physical state of a person or thing and then recreate it perfectly at the destination. In such a setup, the original is disintegrated, possibly as part of the scanning process, or just to avoid creating copies of people and collect raw material for the return journey. There’s some disagreement over whether this is how transporters work in Star Trek – some explanations say it is, while others claim they transmit the original matter at a “quantum level”, though it is definitely broken down first. The philosophical implications of either version are usually ignored until it goes wrong, perhaps most famously in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix”. Some other stories which explore these ideas include Australian author Sean Williams’ Twinmaker trilogy of YA novels, a film we won’t name because it’d be a spoiler, and Ben’s own audio comedy mini-series Hello! My Name is Eddie, specifically in the episode “The Psychological Experiment of Death”.
  • Buggy Swires, gnome watchman, rides a heron for this kind of operation. He prefers a sparrowhawk for crowd control, but doesn’t seem unhappy with his heron, which he tames through a combination of concussion and a secret potion. If this feels a bit like the bird-riding antics of a certain Nac Mac Feegle, don’t worry – all will become clear in several books’ time.
  • For more information about the lightning strike from Thief of Time, see our episode about the book: #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • In The Terminator (1984; dir. James Cameron) and its sequels, characters from the future explain that the “time displacement equipment” they use requires a bioelectric field to work, which is why only living organic beings or things which mimic them successfully can travel through it. This includes the T-800 terminator, which has real flesh covering its metal endoskeleton, or the later models which are either composed of or covered in “mimetic polyalloy”, described as “living metal”.
  • We previously discussed the rules that come with the mogwai creatures in Gremlins (1984; dir. Joe Dante) in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. We’ve also mentioned the sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990; dir. Joe Dante), in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.; in that film, a minor character derides protagonist Billy’s explanation of the “don’t feed them after midnight” rule.
  • Doctor John “Mossy” Lawn makes his only major appearance here, but he does return in a cameo role in several later books, notably Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“).
  • The “vet” Vimes relies on in other novels is Doughnut Jimmy. He makes his major appearance in Feet of Clay, when he is called upon to treat the poisoned Patrician, but is also mentioned in Jingo and The Last Continent.
  • We talked about germ theory, hand washing and Semmelweis in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“. We’ll again point you to this episode of NPR’s Shortwave podcast, which shows that even after Semmelweis’ intervention, doctors did not want to admit that they might be causing sickness or death.
  • Granny Weatherwax explains her goblin-shaped germ theory to Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. We previously discussed this in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • As Ben will remember later in the episode, John Keel’s real-world counterpart is Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), a British Member of Parliament, and twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, though he remains most famous for founding the Metropolitan Police Force. He’s considered the “father of modern policing”, but his other achievements include the establishment of the modern Conservative party, free trade and modern banking in the UK. While we’re not a fan of his politics in general, it’s worth noting that he often started out with a traditional conservative opinion on a matter, but would later change his mind. Most famously, while he initially supported high tariffs on imported goods, he eventually moved to repeal the “corn laws” that made imported staple foods expensive in order to help alleviate the Great Famine in Ireland – acting against the wishes of most of his party, and leading to his resignation as Prime Minister.
  • To be clear, “Mrs Palm and Her Five Sisters” (and variations thereof) is a euphemism for the hand when used for masturbation, the five sisters being the fingers. The phrase is most prevalent in the UK, but is pretty common in Australia too.
  • Fred and Nobby’s ages are not specifically mentioned in the books. In Guards! Guards! Fred is said to have been married for thirty years, which certainly tallies with his younger self in Night Watch. Nobby is never described in a way that gives much of a clue as to his age, but given Fred is probably in his early twenties at most in Night Watch, the age gap between them is probably only a decade or so – not much of a consideration after thirty years.
  • Fred’s military service is more-or-less first mentioned in Guards! Guards!, where he is said to have “served in foreign parts”, though the nature of that service is not described. We say “more-or-less” because also in that book is the famous passage describing him as one of life’s Sergeants, which specifically says “if he took up a military career”, though Nobby also says towards the end that Colon had told him stories about winning archery contests in the army. In any case the Watch is not treated quite as distinctly from the military in the first couple of books as it would be in later ones, with the distinction first being very clearly made in Jingo. Nobby’s adventures in stealing stuff, meanwhile, also get a minor mention in Guards! Guards!: in the aftermath of Carrot’s brawl in the Drum, Nobby is sizing up the boots of some of the unconscious brawlers and is described as a “veteran of of a score of residual battlefields”, suggesting quite ruthlessly that they could cut the throats of the fallen. There’s no mention of this experience being on literal military battlefields, though, and in Men at Arms, when Fred is comparing Detritus to his old drill sergeant, Nobby makes no mention of having been in the army with him, so it seems likely only Fred went into military service.
  • Lu-Tze’s first re-writing of history occurs in Small Gods, and you can hear us discuss it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Sam spends about four days and one night in the past – a limit imposed by Qu, due to the situation and strain of both the magical and bureaucratic kinds, meaning Vimes arrives on the night of the 21st (or the early morning of the 22nd). This seems to be about the same amount of time Keel had in the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch before the 25th of May, so his lifelong impact on the younger Vimes took him only a few days to establish.
  • The Gestapo – short for Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police” – were established in 1933 by Herman Göring through a merger of the political and intelligence arms of the Prussian police force, making the new body national. They were responsible for sniffing out and eliminating any opposition to the Nazi regime, both in Germany and Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. They were disbanded in 1945, after being declared a criminal organisation in the Nuremberg trials, both for their involvement in the Holocaust and their ruthless and brutal suppression of any potentially anti-Nazi organisation. Their legacy of using informants and appearing to be all-knowing and around every corner were taken up by the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, “State Security Service”), the secret police of East Germany from 1950 until the reunification of Germany in 1990.
  • There’s no single consistent definition of “psychopath“, nor is psychopathy a recognised mental illness or condition. It’s often described in terms of a lack of “usual” characteristics, primarily fear, inhibition, impulse control and empathy, though the definition is still very broad. The modern concept of the psychopath is shaped largely by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, whose famous Hare Psychopathy Checklist has been roundly criticised. As for whether Carcer and Swing would fit the bill, the answer is – probably, depending on who was asking the questions. UK journalist and writer Jon Ronson examined a lot of these questions (in general, not about these characters specifically) in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, which brought the questionnaire to broader public attention, though the book itself did not avoid criticism either.
  • In Men at Arms, Vimes thinks during the book that it is much better to be threatened by an evil man, since he’ll want to see you squirm and will gloat and talk, giving you a chance to escape, whereas “A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” At the climax of the book, Carrot kills Dr Cruces in order to save Vimes and destroy the gonne, without saying anything, prompting Vimes to think his earlier thoughts again. (For more discussion of Men at Arms, see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The “revolution” in Les Miserablés is the real-life June Rebellion of the 5th and 6th of June in 1832 Paris. It has similarities with the events of Night Watch, but doesn’t seem to be the primary inspiration. At the time, Parisians were experiencing great hardship, with crop failures and economic problems causing a huge amount of suffering, alongside repeated attempted insurrections by supporters of the previous royal line deposed in the 1830 revolution (the one which followed the most famous one). A cholera epidemic swept through the city, killing more than 100,000 people – including the conservative Prime Minister Perier, and, on June 1, General Lemarque, an influential ex-military commander. Lemarque was involved in the 1830 revolution, and was one of the few members of the French parliament openly critical of the monarchy, making him hugely popular with republicans. After the massive state funeral for Perier, critics of the regime saw Lamarque’s funeral as a chance to show massive support for the republican movement, and turned out in huge numbers. Lafayette (yes, the one from Hamilton) was there, and called for calm after giving a speech for Lamarque, but to no avail. The republican movement was organised by secret societies like the “Friends of the People”, on which the fictional “Friends of ABC” from Les Miserablés is based (their name is a French pun). They raised flags with the famous revolutionary slogan “La Liberté ou la Mort” (“Liberty or Death”), and violence broke out between them and government troops. The insurrectionists put up barricades and claimed parts of the city. Fighting killed hundreds on each side, but the rebels were outnumbered and eventually defeated. In the aftermath, they were portrayed as an extremist minority, and the republicans would not have a true revolution until 1848 – but that’s a whole other story.
  • Javert is the antagonist of Les Miserablés, a guard at the prison from which Jean Valjean escapes, and later a police inspector in the town where Valjean has made a new life as mayor; he is the one who realises Valjean’s true identity, and becomes obsessed with bringing him “to justice”. In the end, Valjean offers to surrender to Javert, but Javert is overcome with confusion and regret when he realises the brutal criminal he’s hunted for so long is actually a compassionate man seeking to do what’s right, and unable to reconcile the law with his morals, drowns himself. In the famous musical adaptation of the story, he is changed little from the character in the book. He was perhaps most famously played on stage – in English at least – by Australian actor and former Playschool presenter Philip Quast, while in the 2012 film version of the stage musical, he is played by another Australian, Russell Crowe. Quast’s vocals are legendary, but Crowe’s were less well received, though it should be noted that the film was unusual for a musical in that the actors’ singing performances were recorded live on set rather than mimed along to studio recordings, as is usual practice. (It wasn’t the first film to do this, but it was a big deal at the time.)
  • Findthee Swing is described in the book as “a small, thin figure” and “a pale man with the screwed-up eyes of a pet rat.” Considerably more attention is given to the way he moves, which is summed up with the sentence: “There was no rhythm to the man.”
  • Corporal “Mayonnaise” Quirke is here kicked out of the Night Watch by Keel/Vimes, sent to join the Day Watch instead. Along with Sergeant Knock and Ned Coates he’s part of Carcer’s troop who attempt to capture John Keel towards the end of the book, though his exact level of participation in the fighting is not noted – presumably he is wounded or flees during the first ambush by the Night Watch, before Ned Coates changes sides. He remains in the Day Watch, and by the time of Guards! Guards! has been promoted to its Captain – an equivalent rank to Vimes, but much more prestigious. During the events of Men at Arms, Captain Quirke wears his obvious racism on his sleeve, arresting an innocent troll for the murder of a dwarf, starting riots across the city. The Night Watch continue to investigate the crime, leading to them being told to stand down; Quirke is the one sent to take the Watch’s weapons, and thinks that once Vimes is retired the watches will be combined under his command. When Carrot later forms a citizen’s militia, Quirke arrives to stop him, but Carrot announces he is relieving Quirke of command and knocks him out cold with a single punch, much to everyone’s delight. Quirke is never mentioned again, the Day Watch being dissolved and merged into a single Watch under the command of the newly promoted Vimes.
  • Winsborough Knock is the duty sergeant of the old Night Watch, a new character in this book. He is shown to be a thoroughly dirty copper, known to accept bribes and also attempting to frame Keel after he is demoted below him. He is also a coward, dropping his weapons and running away from the fighting at Treacle Mine Road.
  • As noted in #Pratchat51, Pratchett was officially diagnosed in 2007 with Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA – a rarer form of Alzheimer’s), announcing it publicly on the 11th of December that year, slightly more than five years after the publication of Night Watch. The earliest he and his close friends and family realised something was up was in 2006, though they would retroactively trace his symptoms back as far as 2005. Perhaps his official biography will shed light on whether he had any personal experience of dementia in others, or otherwise why it so often comes up in his work well before his own diagnosis. See also our episode about Johnny and the Dead.
  • “The powers that be” – meaning a group or organisation etc that has authority – dates back to at least the sixteenth century, where it appeared in the Tyndale Bible, the first in English to be mass-produced via printing press, and the first in Modern English to be translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, rather than from later Latin translations. The phrase features in Romans 13:1, which states that “There is no power but of God. The powers that be, are ordained of God.” This wording was preserved with only minor changes in the later King James Bible, still the main English Bible used in the world today, and from there into common usage. These days its probably best known from the Public Enemy song “Fight the Power”, whose chorus is a repetition of the title followed by “We’ve got to fight the powers that be”. Ben learned it there, but also from its usage in the TV series Angel, where the titular vampire with a soul and his team of demon hunters use it as a euphemism for the entities aligned with good which grant them visions and other powers. In the series the name is capitalised The Powers That Be, and sometimes abbreviated (as in real life) to TPTB.
  • The seamstress who is actually a seamstress is Miss Battye, aka “Sandra the Real Seamstress”. While played for laughs in the Discworld, “seamstress” has been a euphemism for sex worker on Roundworld for centuries – there’s a pun along these lines in Shakespeare’s Henry V, for example. As usual, though, Terry has done a deep dive into history and based his jokes on something much more specific. As noted in a great Twitter thread by writer Gabrielle Kent, Men at Arms features a gag where the census finds that seamstresses in the Ankh-Morpork docks vastly outnumbered needles. This is a reference to a real occurrence in Seattle in the late nineteenth century, where a census revealed 2,700 seamstresses in one small part of the city; they were, of course, sex workers. The city, on the edge of bankruptcy after closing down many of the vice industries which had previously paid it big taxes, worked out a deal with the sex workers that they pay a $10 per week “sewing machine tax”, solving the city’s revenue problems and allowing the seamstresses to continue working without interference. (Thanks to Stevonnie Ross for their corrections to this note!)
  • Dibbler’s full name is given as Claud Maximillian Overton Transpire Dibbler in Making Money, making his failure to coin his own nickname even weirder. While the phrase is most associated with Dibbler, though, he’s surely not the only salesman to have used it, so it’s also possible that in the original timeline Keel might have heard the phrase somewhere else and passed it on in the same way as Vimes does here, without having got it from future Dibbler. (And it’s also possible that Dibbler changed his name in order to allow him to legally be CMOT Dibbler, which is probably useful for brand recognition purposes.)
  • If you want to learn more about the militarisation of police and armed police response to peaceful protest, this 2020 article from The Conversation is a good starting point. While its most often discussed in the context of the US, it’s also been happening here in Australia for years, as noted in this ABC article from 2019. Protests around the time of the book’s publication included huge ones in early 2003 against the war in Iraq, which were held around the world…and soundly ignored by most of the involved governments.
  • You can hear more about Pyramids and the “Assassin’s School Days” section at the start of the book, in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • Vimes does indeed tell Madam Roberta his thoughts about her motives for supporting the change of Patrician; he can see Lord Winder and his associates are bad for business, and tells her he doesn’t want to join her revolution. Vetinari is hidden in the room and watches the whole exchange.
  • In the Batman comics, the young Bruce Wayne spent years travelled the world training with martial artists, detectives and trackers in order to become the ultimate crime fighter. A good use of his fortune? Probably not, but it has given us some great stories. The recent series Batman: The Knight revisits some of this time of his youth, and you can read more about his mentors in this DC Comics article.
  • Vimes contributions to the Widows and Orphans fund are a plot point in Men at Arms, when Angua discovers why Vimes never has any money. His notebook has many names of women and how much money he gives them; it turns out they’re all widows and orphans of dead Watchmen.
  • For more on Pratchett’s love of Dickens, see #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, our episode discussing his Dickens pastiche Dodger.
  • As quoted in the Annotated Pratchett File, Pratchett described the ginger beer trick like this: “To save debate running wild: I’ve heard this attributed to the Mexican police as a cheap way of getting a suspect to talk and which, happily, does not leave a mark. The carbonated beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. Hint: expanding bubbles, and the sensitivity of the sinuses. I seem to recall a brief shot of something very like this in the movie Traffic.” Traffic is a 2000 Stephen Soderburgh movie about the illegal drug trade. In the scene Pratchett mentions, a killer who worked for the Tijuana Cartel is tortured by police officers who mix soda water and chilli powder and put it up his nose.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about the end of The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
  • Lord Ronald Rust appears in primarily in Jingo, but also crops up regularly as a typically awful example of Ankh-Morpork’s aristocracy, including in Men at Arms, The Fifth Elephant, Monstrous Regiment and Snuff.
  • We’ve previously mentioned sitcom character Hyacinth “it’s pronounced Bouquet” Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances many times, including in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer,” #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
  • We know a little more now about the likely origins of “All the Little Angels”, thanks to reddit user armcie! On the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup in November 2002, Pratchett was asked about the song, and said he based it on one he could only vaguely remember from his youth; to quote the man himself: “consensus of opinion is that it may be a WW1 trench song which became an early version of what are now known as ‘Rugby songs.’ Whatever the tune, it should be simple and swing along. it’s only ‘sad’ in context.”
    Armcie also found that Terry seems to have asked folk song expert Steve Roud about the original song not long before the book’s publication; Steve hadn’t heard of it, but put out word for more info. Jacob B, in this old forum thread from the Mudcat folk and blues website, had the closest answer: a song sung to the tune of the German children’s song “O du lieber Augustin” (“Oh, you dead Augustin”), which puns “ascend” and “arse-end”, and has very similar lyrics.
    You might not know the name of that German song, but you’ve almost certainly heard the tune, as its been re-used by dozens of songs, mostly for children, since it was published around 1800. In Australia or the UK, you might know the Scottish-themed “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?”, while American versions include “The More We Get Together” and “Willy Had a Goldfish”. Most likely, though, you’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons featuring the song “Hail to the Bus Driver”, which seems to be a genuine American schoolyard song using the tune.
    In any case, “O du lieber Augustin” is in 3/4 time, so it’s not much use as a marching song – it’s clearly not the tune used on the Discworld. But it does seem a likely contender for the song Terry remembered from his youth. Terry’s quote above suggests he had no specific tune in mind for the song Dickson and the others sing, though, so feel free to make up your own. Thanks again, armcie!
    Here are the lyrics to the possible inspiration for “All the Little Angels”:
All the little angels ascend up to heaven
All the little angels ascend up on high
Which end up?
Ascend up.
Which end up?
Ascend up.
All the little angels ascend up on high
  • There are multiple recordings of the more upbeat version of “All the Little Angels” on YouTube, all based on the arrangement by Sunday Comes Afterwards. It’s not a million miles away from “O du lieber Augustin“, but definitely its own thing. Here are the links:
  • Another, very different version of “All the Little Angels” is by US-based musician Genviel. It’s not trying to be the song sung by the characters in the book, but uses the Little Angels chorus to make a song referencing the events of the Glorious 25th of May and more generally being critical of war. You can find “All the Little Angels, Night Watch & Terry Pratchett Tribute feat. Marcello Vieira” as the final track on Genviel’s 2019 album “Chronicles of a Collapse”, available on their website as well as Soundcloud, YouTube music and more.
  • Stevonnie Ross – Sunday Comes Afterwards themselves! – contacted us to let us know about another arrangement of “All the Little Angels” they thought our listeners might enjoy. This one is from Discworld-themed Celtic/German folk band “The Band with Folk In”, and definitely has a more “authentic folk music” kind of feel – especially the way they end. You can listen to it here on YouTube, and find some of their other songs there too; many of them are Discworld-themed “filks” – traditional or classic songs (including popular Tik-Tok sea shanty “The Wellerman”, and the Beatles’ “Let It Be”) with new, nerdy lyrics.
  • One more for the road, added after the fact: community choir Liber Chorus recorded another very different choral version of “All the Little Angels”. We can imagine this might be how it might be sung many years after the fact in a temple on the Glorious 25th, by any religious folks who remembered that day. It’s certainly not how the Watch members would have sung it at the time, but it is worth a listen; you can find a video of the song on Youtube, released in early July, 2022. The video shows members of the choir, but also features some gorgeous illustrations of some of the participants from the barricades of the Glorious Revolution.

More notes for this episode coming soon!

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

Eeek Club 2022

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It’s a second instalment of the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we release a bonus episode discussing topics selected by our “Eeek” tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • What was good, fun and enjoyable about The Watch?
  • Is Vimes a Cynic, a Stoic, or an Epicurean?
  • What was Granny Weatherwax and Ridcully’s relationship like, and why didn’t it continue?
  • What pop culture would you have liked to have seen referenced in a Discworld novel?
  • What moments from the series hit you personally because of a personal experience?
  • If democracy came to Ankh-Morpork, what political parties would we see?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:58 — 47.0MB)

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Graham, Frank, Cath (and Eddy), Steph, Jess and Ellie, Karl and Soren!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat54 – The Land Before Vimes

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The Trousers of Time end up in a knot as writer Nadia Bailey rejoins Liz and Ben and we go back to the Glorious Past in the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch.

While pursuing dangerous killer Carcer across the rooftop of Unseen University, a magical bolt of lightning (or something) sends Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh, thirty years into the past – along with his quarry. Carcer kills Vimes’ old mentor, Sergeant John Keel, and Vimes steps into Keel’s thinly-soled shoes; he’ll have to show himself the ropes to keep history intact. But he’s not just reliving any old past: it’s almost the Glorious 25th of May. The day the people deposed the paranoid Patrician Lord Winder; the day hundreds were killed in violent clashes across the city; and the day John Keel died…

Night Watch is beloved by Discworld fans, no least because it gives a double dose of everyone’s favourite “honest copper”, Sam Vimes. But he leaves Sybil in labour as he’s thrust back intp the best and worst days of his early career, forced to grapple with the darkness in his and others’ souls with only the technobabble of a few time boffin monks for guidance. It’s possibly Pratchett’s darkest book, and certainly takes us into one of the darkest corners of the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork before the rise of Vetinari and the Guilds.

Does Vimes knows where to draw the line in this book? Is Carcer an intriguing villain, or a cookie cutter evil psychopath? Could you teach your younger self everything you needed to know to become you? And is this book in your top five, or do you fail to see what all the fuss is about? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat54 on social media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:29:37 — 68.9MB)

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Guest Nadia Bailey is a writer, editor and critic. She’s published a number of pop-culture related books about such diverse subjects as Stranger Things, Frida Kahlo and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her latest publication is The Deck of Crystals, a deck of cards which looks into the history, superstition and lore of gemstones. Nadia has just begun a PhD researching (among other things) the lives of queer women during World War I. You can find Nadia on Twitter as @animalorchestra, or visit her website at nadiabailey.com.

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

Next month we’re joining a ragtag crew of misfits on a desperate mission to save the Disc in the second big illustrated Discworld adventure, The Last Hero! And to help us navigate Paul Kidby’s astonishing illustrations, we’re welcoming back illustrator and comic book creator Georgina Chadderton. Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat55, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat52 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 52, “A Near-Watch Experience“, featuring guests Fury and Patrick Lenton, discussing BBC America’s 2021 television series The Watch.

Iconographic Evidence

This is the best still we’ve found of the assassin Karen from Finance:

Karen from Finance in her distinctive headwear on the left; on the right is Sex Party Ben (no relation).

The Watch cast and crew

As mentioned in the footnote, we are not good at naming the cast and crew of the show this episode. Here are the key creative folks:

Crew

Head Writer and Executive Producer
Simon Allen

Writers
Joy Wilkinson (“Twilight Canyons”)
Catherine Tregenna (“Not On My Watch”)
Amrou Al-Kadhi (“The Dark in the Dark”)
Ed Hime (“Nowhere in the Multiverse”)

Directors
Craig Viveiros (episodes 1-2)
Brian Kelly (episodes 3-5)
Emma Sullivan (episodes 6-8)

Cast

Richard Dormer (Vimes)
Lara Rossi (Sybil)
Adam Hugill (Carrot)
Marama Corlett (Angua)
Joni Ayton-Kent (Cheery)
Samuel Adewunmi (Carcer)
Bianca Simone Mannie (Wonse)
Anna Chancellor (Vetinari)
Wendell Pierce (voice of Death)
Ralph Ineson (voice of Detritus)
Craig Macrae (Death/Detritus)
Matt Berry (voice of Gawain)
Ingrid Oliver (Dr Cruces)
Natalie Walsh (Karen From Finance/Goblin #4)
Ruth Madeley (Throat)
James Fleet (Archchancellor)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is pretty obvious this month, right?
  • The other podcast which covered The Watch episode by episode – yes, we’ve heard you and we’re going to do it too – is Who Watches the Watch. Their discussion of the show starts with the podcast episode “WE WATCH THE WATCH“, which covers the first two episodes of The Watch. (We’ve not listened to these, to remain fresh for this episode and also the episode-by-episode proper recap, so do let us know if you listen and enjoy them. Watch the website for details on our mini-series!)
  • Fury previously joined us in May 2019 for #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“, discussing Soul Music; and in March 2020 for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, to discuss The Last Continent.
  • Patrick’s roles at Junkee included Entertainment Editor, Deputy Editor and then proper, capital E, he’s the boss of what people write Editor. (That’s not how he described it.) He’s also written for the publication; here’s a page listing all his work for the site.
  • All the heterosexual nonsense I was forced to endure started out as a series of recaps by Patrick and Bec Shaw (aka @Brocklesnitch) of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette for Junkee. They’ve since taken it independent; you can find it on the newsletter platform substack. They have also branched out to cover various Netflix Christmas films and now Married At First Sight (though this latter experiment was cut short as the show proved too horrible to continue with – see below).
  • Married at First Sight (aka MAFS) is an Australian version of the Danish reality television show Gift ved første blik (er…”Married at First Sight”) in which contestants who’ve not previously met are paired up by “experts” and carry out the “social experiment” of being “married”. Those last scare quotes are especially warranted in the Australian version, as contestants can’t legally be married – the Australian Marriage Act 1961 requires a minimum of 28 days’ notice before a wedding. (Contestants have a non-binding commitment ceremony instead.) The original and its clones – which have appeared in fourteen countries around the world – are depressingly popular (the Australian MAFS is in its ninth season), even though they often showcase the worst traditional heterosexual gender roles have to offer. Another contributing factor to the tone of the show is that the contestants are often older and seemingly genuinely desperate in their search for love – as opposed to contestants on lighter shows like The Bachelor, where many of them are more interested in becoming a reality television star or increasing their reach as an influencer.
  • Below is the logo for The Watch; as you can see from the poster, Ben’s wrong – it’s not the same as the lettering on the Watch House in the show! The same font is used on the Watch badge, though, which is displayed as part of the title card, so that might be where he got confused (though the logo is also shown there).
The Watch promotional poster
  • Black Books is a Channel 4 sitcom about misanthropic drunken bookshop owner Bernard Black (co-creator Dylan Moran) and his friends, the naive and optimistic Manny Bianco (Bill Bailey) and neurotic Fran Katzenjammer (Tamsin Greig). It ran for three series between 2000 and 2004.
  • Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace was a 2004 spoof horror television series created for Channel 4 by by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness. The titular show is treated as a classic 1980s series – largely a spoof of the work of Steven King and other popular horror of the 80s – which was never broadcast. Scenes from the original show (made to look as though shot on cheap video) are played alongside modern day interviews with its writer and star, Garth Merenghi (played by Holness) and his agent, Dean Learner (played by Ayoade). The show was inspired by the pair’s prior stage shows Garth Merenghi’s Fright Knight and Garth Merenghi’s Netherhead, the latter of which one the Perrier Award at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe. The television series also features Matt Berry (more about him below), and was followed up by the spin-off Man to Man with Dean Learner, a chat show in which Ayoade’s character interviewed various fictional characters played by Holness, including Merenghi.
  • “A near-Vimes experience” is indeed from one of the books – specifically Thud! But as we’ve not covered it yet, we won’t say any more.
  • A “ring light” is used in photography and film as a way to provide even illumination to a subject fairly close to the camera, which is placed in the middle of the ring. Modern ring lights, which use LEDs and can operate without using much power at a variety of intensities and levels of warmth, are an inexpensive way to light yourself when taking your own photos, and so have become popular with influencers, cosplayers and Instagram users. When the subject is close, a reflection of the ring light often appears in their pupils – and effect seen on Vimes in the opening moments of A Near Vimes Experience.
  • The Wire was a critically acclaimed crime drama produced by HBO between 2002 and 2008. Set in Baltimore, each of its five seasons focusses on a different group and their relationship to the police, who appeared in all five seasons. Wendell Pierce was the first actor to be cast for the show, as homicide detective William “The Bunk” Moreland, who like many of the characters was based on a real person.
  • The original “second-hand set of dimensions” are the very first words of the Discworld series, appearing at the start of The Colour of Magic. Of note: the early trailers for The Watch, including the New York Comic-Con teaser, used the more verbatim version “In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions”; it was truncated to “Somewhere in a secondhand dimension” for broadcast.
  • The best article to read about the the development of show is Marc Burrows’ “Calling time on The Watch? What went wrong (and right) with the latest Terry Pratchett adaptation” for the pop culture website heyuguys.com. You might also be interested in this timeline researched by Discworld Monthly, though note it was mostly compiled before the show was released.
  • SyFy is a cable channel owned by NBC Universal, specialising in (yes) science fiction. It was launched in 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, dropped the “Channel” in 1999, and changed the spelling in 2009. Before the rise of streaming services, SyFy often picked up sci-fi and fantasy shows which were cancelled by other networks, including Sliders and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. They are also noted for making lower budget sci-fi series.
  • Killjoys is a 2015 sci-fi series following the adventures of three interplanetary bounty hunters, made for the Canadian channel Space (now known as the CTV Sci-Fi Channel) and SyFy. It ran for five ten-episode seasons, and starred Hannah John-Kamen, Aaron Ashmore and Luke Macfarlane.
  • Sucker Punch is a 2011 action film directed and co-written by Zack Snyder. It stars Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens as young women committed to an insane asylum in the 1960s who retreat into a fantasy world of guns, aliens and robots, which represents their attempt to escape before they are lobotomised. Snyder described it as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”, which is…look, not entirely inaccurate.
  • Torchwood was a 2007 spin-off from Doctor Who in which the Doctor’s immortal companion Captain Jack Harkness leads the Cardiff team of Torchwood, a secret organisation who protect Earth against extraterrestrial threats. It was meant to be a more adult show, and that’s more or less true if you assume “adult” means swearing and fucking. Torchwood had its moments, but like The Watch suffered from a wildly fluctuating tone and a seeming lack of knowing what kind of show it wanted to be, especially in its first season. (The third season is basically a different show altogether, and very good (if very grim); the fourth season was an American co-production that isn’t as good, but is still interesting.) Only Catherine Tregenna worked as a writer on both shows, but in Fury’s defence she does represent 20% of The Watch’s writing team. In addition, Ed Himes and Joy Wilkinson have both written for Doctor Who under its current showrunner, Chris Chibnall, who was also the man in charge of Torchwood for its first two seasons, so there’s some of the same DNA there.
  • The extremely faithful adaptation of Good Omens, made for Amazon Prime in 2019, was written by Neil Gaiman, who also served as the show runner alongside a production team headed by Terry’s assistant Rob Wilkins (who also has an executive producer credit on The Watch) and Rob Brown (who was one of the original producers for The Watch, working on it from the early days of the project until around 2015). Fury describes it as “so bad”; we’ll cover it eventually and let you know what we think. A second season is currently in production, based on ideas Neil and Terry had back in the day for a potential sequel – as explained in this post on Neil’s blog.
  • The Wheel of Time is a 2021 Amazon Prime TV series based on Robert Jordan’s best-selling fantasy book series, which began in 1990 with The Eye of the World. The full series comprises fourteen novels, the last three of which were finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death in 2007. There’s also a prequel, New Spring, which was originally published as a novella in the 1998 collection Legends – which you might remember was where Terry Pratchett first published “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39).
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is another Amazon Prime TV series, set to be released in 2022. It is set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings novels; Bilbo and Frodo’s adventures take place in the Third Age of Middle-earth, while The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, a period only loosely detailed by Tolkien. (The Silmarillion, which tells of the history and mythology of Middle-earth, mostly deals with the First Age, with only one of its five parts detailing the Second Age.) Based on the deal struck by Amazon to secure the rights to The Lord of the Rings, it will run for five seasons and have a total budget of $US1 billion, making it the most expensive television series ever made.
  • Ben says a few times that we’ll talk about the issue of “copaganda” and the “police as resistance” theme of The Watch, but we didn’t get there in the end. We’ll be sure to talk more about it in the episode by episode mini-series, and probably also in our episode about Night Watch. But in brief, “copaganda” – a Portmanteau of “cop” and “propaganda” – is the tendency for media outlets to run stories of heroism and bravery in the police force over stories of corruption, incompetence or systemic prejudice. In recent years, as the problems with policing grow worse (especially, but not only, in America), this has been extended to the kinds of fictional shows that promote police officers in an always-friendly light. The lighthearted comedy Brooklyn-99, set in a police precinct in New York, wrapped up its last season trying to deal with some of the real issues with American policing, with mixed results. In this context, the idea of police being “the resistance” when in reality they are part of the oppressive system is a bit…off. (Even if it is true to the spirit of the Watch in the books, especially Night Watch.)
  • Ben’s got things a bit mixed up around when we first see Carcer, condensing the flashbacksa bit, but the first twenty years ago sequence ends with Captain Keel walking out to confront Carcer at about the 2:40 mark. Vimes then spots Carcer in the Drum at around 10 minutes, prompting the flashback of him shooting Keel. So that’s about seven and a half minutes later. (We don’t see the chase that ends with him falling from the University tower until Vimes is tracking Carcer via the iconographs at around the 18 minute mark.)
  • There are eight books featuring the Ankh-Morpork City Watch (or mostly just Vimes, in some of the later ones): Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud! and Snuff. They also star in the short story “Theatre of Cruelty”, set between Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, and – in additional to cameos in many books set in Ankh-Morpork – make significant appearances in The Truth and Monstrous Regiment.
  • The episode where Vimes goes off into the desert is episode five, “Not on My Watch”; Vimes is heading off to destroy Wayne by throwing him in the lake which destroys magical artefacts. The sequence starts at around the 7:53 mark. The “Miami Vice music” plays until he falls down a sand dune around 30 seconds later. Miami Vice was an American crime drama that ran on NBC between 1984 and 1990, produced by Michael Mann and telling stories of vice cops who used the confiscated belongings of drug dealers to go undercover. It drew heavily on the New Wave – a cultural movement that followed the punk era, but more quirky and weird than post-punk, with an emphasis on stylised visuals. The show was also famous for its synthesised soundtrack; the title music was by Czech-American composer Jan Hammer, and Vimes’ accompaniment definitely has a similar vibe, though it’s not the actual song.
  • Wingspan is published by Stonemeier Games (in English) and designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. The gorgeous art of the birds is by a number of artists including Beth Sobel, Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez. Two expansions for the game add European and Oceanic birds into the mix – the original game is mostly North American species.
  • New Girl is an American sitcom that aired on Fox for seven seasons between 2011 and 2018. It stars Zoey Deschanel as Jess Day, a quirky teacher who after coming home to find her boyfriend teaching on her immediately moves out into a New York apartment with three guys.
  • Oath: Chronicles of Exile and Empire is published by Leder Games (in English) and designed by Cole Wehrle, with very distinctive art by Kyle Ferrin. The pair previous worked on the hit looks-cute-but-is-actually-cutthroat game Root, about cats, birds, foxes, bunnies, mice and other cute critters warring over their woodland home.
  • Disney isn’t just considering making a live-action Snow White and Seven Dwarves – it’s in pre-production and has cast West Side Story‘s Rachel Zegler as Snow White, and Gal “Wonder Woman” Gadot as the Evil Queen. The news was met in late January with outrage by disability activists, including actor Peter Dinklage – both for the treatment of dwarf characters in the film, and the plans that they would be CGI characters, presumably voiced by famous able-bodied actors. This opinion piece on MSNBC by Eric Garcia sums up where things are at.
  • The scene in which Carrot calms down a tavern full of dwarfs occurs in Guards! Guards!, though he doesn’t sing – he merely speaks to them in dwarfish and chastises them, wondering what their mothers – “who first showed you how to use a pickaxe” – would think of their behaviour.
  • Matt Berry (Gawain/Wayne, the sword) is an English actor and comedian who gained fame for supporting roles in The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd before starring in his own shows including dark weird sitcom Snuff Box, showbiz spoof Toast of London (and its recent sequel, Toast of Tinseltown) and landing on of the main roles in the US television version of What We Do in the Shadows. He’s no stranger to voice work, appearing as a recurring character in Matt Groening’s fantasy animated show Disenchantment and as the voice of the dried 8D8 in Disney’s latest Star Wars show, The Book of Boba Fett.
  • We’ll see if we can source that clip of the New Zealand LARP golem costume from Fury, but it’s worth noting in case of any confusion that Detritus is not CGI – he’s entirely a practical effect, a costume using stilts and arm extensions worn by performer Craig Macrae, who also plays the physical form of Death. (LARP, by the way, is short for live-action roleplay – a form of roleplaying game in which people dress up as and physically act out their character’s adventures, rather than sitting down around a table and imagining them.)
  • Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal was an adaptation made by The Mob for Sky One in 2010, following their adaptations of Hogfather in 2006 and The Colour of Magic in 2008. Mr Pump, the golem tasked by the Patrician with keeping an eye on Moist von Lipwig, is portrayed physically by Dutch actor and stuntman Marnix Van Den Broeke in a pretty awesome costume that looks like its made from terracotta. (Van Den Broeke also wore the Death costume in The Mob’s other adaptations.) Mr Pump’s voice is provided by English actor Nicholas Farrell.
  • Danger 5 is a 2012 Australian action-comedy produced for SBS by Dinosaur, a production company formed by the team behind hit web series Italian Spiderman, a spoof of 1960s Italian action films. Danger 5 is a campy spoof of “boy’s own” and spy adventure serials of the 1960s, like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Danger Man. The first season sees the “Danger 5” team of World War II Allied agents thwarting a number of Adolf Hitler’s schemes, though Hitler himself always escapes via the same footage of him jumping through a window. The second season, broadcast in 2015, gets more absurd and moves the characters into the 1980s, though Hitler is still their nemesis.
  • Boromir is a human, a military commander from Gondor who accompanies Frodo and his companions on their quest in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. As Ben mentions, he dies after being shot by three arrows, and in the film version is played by Sean Bean; this role and a few others in which his character dies prompted the frequently quoted bit of lore that he has died more on-screen deaths than any other actor, though that isn’t true. (At one point the actual winner of that title was said to be John Hurt, but Ben thinks Christopher Lee probably has a better claim.)
  • Fury likens carrying the rocky bit of Detritus around to the famous scene in Hamlet, Act V Scene i, in which Hamlet comes across the skull of Yorick, the king’s Fool, whom he knew as a boy.
  • The games Ben is talking about are Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, part of the original World of Darkness from White Wolf Games. In Vampire, each character has been turned into one of the undead and must fight a nightly struggle between the animal desires of the “Beast Within”, learning how to feed it enough to sate it without becoming monstrous. The tagline of Vampire: The Masquerade is “A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror”, with the in-character motto “A Beast I am, lest a Beast I become.” Werewolf: The Apocalypse’s tagline was the slightly different “A Storytelling Game of Savage Horror”, but this was dropped from later editions; werewolves had to balance their human and wolf sides, the latter represented by their supernatural Rage.
  • CCTV – short for Closed-circuit Television, meaning a camera that transmits a single signal to a specific and usually small number of monitors – has become the shorthand term for video surveillance. In most precedural crime dramas, as well as older police dramas like The Bill, it’s common for police to request CCTV from the area where a crime was committed. This mirrors real life, where police in many countries have the power to request footage from the owners of security cameras, which are primarily private businesses and individuals.
  • Various estimates put the number of CCTV cameras in London at around half a million, though only around 25,000 or fewer of those are operated by government authorities. They were first introduced in large numbers in the late 1980s, so Ben’s estimate that London has been one of the most heavily camera-monitored cities for 30 years is probably about right.
  • The writers of The Watch are indeed all British.
  • Miranda Hart is an English comedian and actor best known for her television work, including her brilliant self-titled BBC sitcom Miranda. (On a side note, Miranda co-stars Tom Ellis, now better known for playing the title role in the Netflix series Lucifer, based on Neil Gaiman’s version of the character.) She’s also played dramatic roles with a bit of comedy in them, including in the hit medical drama Call the Midwife, and Autumn de Wilde’s 2021 film adaptation Emma. starring Anna Taylor-Joy. We previously talked about her playing Lady Sybil in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“.
  • It’s true that in television programs – and especially American ones, both dramas and comedies – the majority of characters are upper-middle-class, professional people. They are usually lawyers, doctors, advertising executives, police officers, writers, broadcasters and so on. While this has changed in the last decade or so, there’s still an imbalance – perhaps more so than the improved (but still not great) situation for characters who aren’t straight white men.
  • There have been many “generic fantasy world maps” like the ones Ben mentions; one of the fancier ones is “Clichéa” by DeviantArt map maker Sarithus. You can also find a much earlier version of the same idea in a book we’ve mentioned before: Diana Wynne-Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
  • “Tulip and Pin” is a reference to the characters Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, who appear in The Truth (see #Pratchat42, “Truth, The Printing Press and Every -ing“). The poster appears about twenty minutes into the episode, and reads:

Pin & Tulip’s Goblin Labour
Enquire at the docks for an immediate quote
Cheap, Reliable, Disposable

  • The character of Throat is indeed credited as “Throat Dibbler”. She never says “And that’s cuttin’ me own throat,” but the character’s catchphrase does appear on a poster in episode two.
  • Blindspotting is a 2021 American comedy-drama television series on the Starz network, which forms a sequel to the 2018 film Blindspotting. It’s set in Oakland, California, and stars Jasmine Cephas Jones as Ashley, a supporting character from the film, who is forced to move in with her mother in law when her partner Miles is sent to prison. It was created by Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame) and Rafael Casal, who also appear as their characters from the film (Casal plays Miles).
  • On the question of whether the writers have written comedy before, the answer does appear to be no. Mostly they have previous credits on drama and fantasy shows. (We don’t think no-one should be allowed to work on comedy without prior experience, but The Watch‘s mix of absurdism, satire and farce might have benefitted from some; it’s a tricky assignment!) Though it’s worth noting is that showrunner Simon Allen wrote for both New Tricks and M. I. High, both shows with a mix of action and comedy.
  • See the top of this discussion for a photo of the fictional Karen From Finance, but the real life version is the drag persona of Richard Chadwick. This more famous Karen – in Australia at any rate – has been around since at least 2017, and has toured internationally with her shows Death Drop and Out of Office. You can find out more about her at karenfromfinance.com.
  • Karen From Finance was indeed a contestant on the first season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race Down Under in 2021. Various commentators criticised the show, not least for its choice of contestants. Past photos of Scarlet Adams showed her performer appearing on stage in blackface in a parody of Aboriginal Australians, and Karen From Finance was revealed to have a tattoo of a golliwog, a type of doll based on (or at very least associated with) racist depictions of Black people. Both gave seemingly sincere apologies for their past actions, but it highlighted the majority white cast of the show – especially after both non-white contestants were eliminated, while one of the eliminated white contestants was allowed to return with little explanation. It’s generally seen by Drag Race fans as a low-point, but perhaps they’ll do better in season two, which is coming in 2022.
  • The “a wizard did it” trope is when something that doesn’t makes sense in a fantasy show is explained away by saying it’s the result of magic, which supposedly doesn’t have to make normal logical sense. (Pratchett’s magic, at least in the Discworld, specifically doesn’t work like this and always makes at least narrative sense. In many books – especially the early ones – it relies on principles of conservation of energy similar to physics, which gives it many limitations.)
  • Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was the debut film from English director Guy Ritchie. It’s a crime caper film in which a number of plots start separately and converge at the end on a pair of expensive antique shotguns. We last mentioned it in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”, and used it as inspiration for the title of #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“.
  • In Guards! Guards!, Lupine Wonse was Lord Vetinari’s secretary, and the author of the plot to summon the Noble Dragon and depose him in favour of a King. One detail we neglected to mention is that in the novel, Wonse is a childhood friend of Vimes – something seemingly missing from The Watch version, even though they were both members of Carcer’s gang. (Though presumably this Wonse was much younger than Vimes, as we discuss regarding the potential age gap between Wonse and Carcer.) We discussed Wonse, and the resemblance of his cult, the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, to modern-day members of the “manosphere”, back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • Jocasta Wiggs appears as a minor character in one of the opening scenes of Night Watch – so expect to hear more about her in our Night Watch episode!
  • If you want to learn more about punk, you could watch the documentary Punk Attitude, or – for more on the visual style – listen to episode six of the podcast series Articles of Interest, “Punk Style“. In brief, punk rock was a DIY counter-culture response to 1970s rock music, which was perceived as having sold out for money. It drew on 1960s garage rock as a musical influence, and was explicitly anti-establishment and provocative.
  • The “Rule of Three” (not usually the “rule of threes” plural) in comedy and writing is basically the idea that a collection of three things is usually the funniest. The reason for this is that three is the minimum number of things that can establish and then break a pattern, one of the basic premises of joke writing.
  • Simon Allen is credited as an associate producer of the 2012 BBC spy drama Hunted (starring Australia’s own Melissa George), and the 2018 German war drama Das Boot for Sky One, which forms a sequel to the 1981 film of the same name. His credit on The Musketeers is as executive producer for the third and final season in 2016. Whether he was the show runner on any of these is a little hard to discern, since it’s not a specific credit in the UK, but the executive producer title makes it likely for at least The Musketeers, and this is corroborated by info we found elsewhere.
  • The BBC’s 2014 series The Musketeers is not actually very steampunk at all, though its first season does feature Peter Capaldi as Cardinal Richelieu. (He was unable to return in later seasons as during filming on the first one in 2013 he accepted the role of the Twelfth Doctor, a dream of his since childhood.) Ben is really thinking of the 2011 film version, The Three Musketeers, which stars Orlando Bloom, Milla Jovovich and Mads Mikkelsen (though not as the musketeers, who are played by Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson, Luke Evans and Logan Lerman).
  • Dan Harmon is the creator of the television series Community and Rick & Morty. We couldn’t find a specific essay in which he talks about characters needing to have one core trait that doesn’t change, but he’s mentioned similar advice many times in blogs and interviews.
  • Ben mentions the Summoning Dark, which is the concept from the novel Thud! on which “the Dark in the Dark” is based. It has a very different nature and story in the book, so we’ll leave that for our future Thud! episode.
  • The 2016 Netflix series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is very loosely based on Douglas Adams’ 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was itself largely a mash-up of Adams’ two Doctor Who scripts, City of Death (from which he takes a plot about an alien spacecraft exploding in the distant past and sparking the creation of life on Earth) and Shada (from which he takes the idea of an alien time traveller hiding out as a professor in an obscure Oxbridge college). The series uses almost none of the characters or situations from the novel or its sequels The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul and the unfinished Salmon of Doubt, though there are little Easter eggs and nods to all of them. Dirk in the TV show (played brilliantly by Samuel Barnett) is much younger and the product of a government conspiracy, but somehow the essential spirit of the original remains while being welded to a bunch of new supporting characters and the infrastructure required to sustain two seasons of episodic television. Tonally and stylistically it has a few things in common with The Watch, especially in the second season, but it’s based in a real world with an extra layer of very weird stuff, which helps ground everything. Ben kind of loved it, and to be honest preferred it to the earlier English adaptation Dirk Gently (2010-2012), which starred Stephen Mangan and was much more similar to original novel.
  • Pratchett’s first few Discworld books – in which, as Fury puts it, he “set up a bunch of shit, flails a bit, and finds his feet” – include the early Rincewind books, which are still largely based in parody of the fantasy genre as a whole, and Equal Rites, in which we get an early and mostly fully-formed version of Granny Weatherwax and another witch who seems like a prototype of Nanny Ogg. There’s also a huge shift in the series in which the fantasy fades into the background to support the stories about stuff like war, class, racism and violence, rather than being the point.
  • The exclusive Narrativia deal was announced on the 28th of April, 2020. It’s with distributor Endeavour Content and production company Motive Pictures, the latter of which was launched in 2019 by Simon Maxwell, backed by Endeavour. Maxwell was previously Head of International Drama at Channel 4 Television, while the Motive Pictures team also includes Executive Producer Sam Lavender of Film4, who worked on The Favourite and The Lobster. It’s not clear if that definitely means no more of The Watch – the licensing deal between BBC Studios and Narrativia isn’t exactly public knowledge – but it’s possible, as Marc Burrows suggests in the article we linked earlier, that the screen rights to the Watch books specifically might still belong to them.
  • Ben will share as many Easter eggs as he can when we make the episode-by-episode mini-series podcast, but here’s a quick list of a few of his favourites:
    • Carcer’s surname is never mentioned in the published version of Night Watch, but “Carcer Dun” is his full name in an earlier preview of the book.
    • Lady Sybil’s “school” is called “The Sunshine Rescue Centre for Broken Bedraggled Things”, a variation on the various “Sunshine Sanctuaries” Sybil runs in the books.
    • Vimes drinking Bearhugger’s whiskey (we never see the label up close, but the design is cool).
    • The song “Gold”, and the number of words in dwarfish for kinds of gold and rock, are mentioned several times in the books. (Ben also loved the brief moment when Carrot and Cheery bond over the song, one of the few times Carrot’s dwarfish heritage comes out.)
    • Twilight Canyons is named after an idea Pratchett had for a story about retired heroes who were losing their memories, mentioned in the afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown.

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

#Pratchat52 – A Near-Watch Experience

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This month, we’ve put down the books and picked up the remote control! Guests Patrick Lenton and Fury join us to discuss a show “based on characters created by Sir Terry Pratchett”: 2021’s The Watch.

Sam Vimes was a street kid in Ankh-Morpork who joined the Watch to kill its Captain and free the imprisoned members of his gang. But he had a change of heart. Twenty years later, he’s still there – a washed-up drunk of a Captain, whose force of misfits have almost nothing to police since the criminal Guilds were all legalised. But during his latest assignment – to find a missing library book – he sees someone who died twenty years ago. Soon the Watch is up to their necks in dragons, ancient artefacts and magical experiments gone wrong, and it’ll take all their cunning and heart to get to the bottom of it…plus a little help from noblewoman-turned-vigilante, Lady Sybil Ramkin.

After a long road through development hell, initially with Pratchett himself at the helm, The Watch eventually emerged as a surprisingly “punk rock police procedural”; a brightly-coloured Dungeon-punk explosion which wears its queerness on its sleeve. The Watch remixes characters and concepts from the books into something so different that fans and friends of Pratchett quickly disowned it. The critical reaction was middling at best, and it took six months for it to be released on Pratchett’s home soil.

But is it any good?

Could you divorce yourself from the source material? If so, does The Watch work on its own terms? Is it funny? Is it comprehensible? Is watching it a good time? Which bits got up your nose, and which did you love? Who was your favourite character, and why was it Cheery? And given we barely scratched the surface of talking about it this episode – should we do a bonus mini-series, discussing it episode by episode? Let us know by joining the conversation, using the hashtag #Pratchat52.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:18:13 — 63.7MB)

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Guest Patrick Lenton is currently Deputy Editor: Arts + Culture for The Conversation, and was previously a senior editor at Junkee. He is also a freelance writer whose work has spanned journalism, theatre, fiction and comedy. His most recent short story collection is Sexy Tales of Palaeontology from Subbed In, and he writes the newsletter All the Hetereosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure with Rebecca Shaw. You can find Patrick on Twitter as @PatrickLenton, and his handy LinkTree will help you find his other stuff.

Guest Fury is a writer, illustrator and performer who previously appeared on Pratchat in #Pratchat19 (Soul Music) and #Pratchat29 (The Last Continent) – our last in-person episode, recorded in the before times! Their live multi-disciplinary show Gender Euphoria toured Australia in 2019 and 2020, and their book I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work is (probably) still available. You can find out more about them at furywrites.com, or follow them on Twitter as @fury_writes. Their first TV show, Crazy Fun Park, is currently in production and scheduled to premiere on ABC ME and ABC iview in late 2022.

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

Next month we’re heading to one of the books that (sort of) provided a big chunk of inspiration for The Watch, and a fan favourite, frequently topping rankings of the Discworld series: Night Watch! Meet the original Carcer Dun, Jocasta Wiggs, young Sam Vimes, and – eventually – Young Sam Vimes… Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat53, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat1 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the notes and errata for episode 1, “Boots Theory“, featuring guest Cal Wilson discussing the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms.

  • We did indeed have Cal back to discuss Sourcery! See #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind“.
  • For more on our decision to start with Men at Arms, see #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and also Liz’s post, “Let’s Start From the Very Beginning (but not actually)“.
  • Men at Arms is indeed the fifteenth Discworld novel, and the second to feature the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Ben does now write these things down (and, indeed, has a very comprehensive spreadsheet).
  • What Ben meant about the copyright on “Discworld” is that this is the first book in which “Discworld” appears on the copyright page as a registered trademark. Intellectual property (or IP) law is a complex topic, and can differ greatly from region to region, but basically:
    • Copyright (denoted by ©) is the protection of original works from being copied or otherwise used without the creator’s permission. This mostly applies to literary, dramatic, musical or other artistic work (including visual art), lasts for a fixed period (70 years in Australia), and is automatically applied without a creator having to do anything. A creator can extend it to others, as Terry later did by assigning copyright to he and his wife Lyn, and then Dunmanifestin Limited. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, only the specific expression of ideas, which is where some of the complexity comes in.
    • A trade mark (denoted by ™️ or ®) is a “sign” that shows a product was made by a certain person or company. The sign can be almost anything: a word, a specific colour or style of packaging, a logo, a design, even a sound. It’s an old concept, similar to the “maker’s mark” used by artisans that gets pointed out on on Antique Roadshow on silverware, jewellery, ceramics and so on. Anyone can start using the ™️ symbol, which suggests a common law trade mark, but the ® denotes a registered trademark which is more easily enforceable by law. These are managed by government agencies (e.g. IP Australia). Also worthy of note is that if you have a trade mark, you have to actively be using it, and you must defend it if someone else starts using it, or you will likely lose it.
  • You’ve probably heard of the Thames, but the Yarra is the common name for the river Birrarung or Biarrarung Marr, which flows through the heart of Melbourne, or Narrm. It runs for nearly 250 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges in inland Victoria to the ocean in Port Phillip Bay, though its course and nature has been changed extensively since European colonisation. It was previously nicknamed “the upside down river” due to the golden-brown muddy colouring it acquires by the time it flows through Melbourne. This is also the product of colonisation, as land clearing and mining have increased the erosion of surrounding fine clay into the water.
  • The negative reviewer of Pratchett’s work to which Ben refers was Northern Irish poet and literary critic Tom Paulin, who appeared on BBC2’s Late Review television program and derided Pratchett, writing him off as a populist: “… selling thousands of copies – a complete amateur – doesn’t even write in chapters – hasn’t a clue.” This seems to have been in around 1993 or 1994; Pratchett proudly reproduced the quote in the front many of his books, with the earliest example Ben can find being in the 1995 Corgi paperback of Interesting Times.
  • Terry Pratchett’s debut novel, The Carpet People, was first published in 1971, when Pratchett was 23 years old. However an earlier version of the story was serialised as some of his very first published fiction in the Bucks’ Free Press in 1965, when he was only 17! Most of the instalments of that version appear in the second collection of his early stories, Dragons at Crumbling Castle, published shortly after Pratchett’s death in 2015.
  • While the Vimes Boots Theory is articulated in the way of Pratchett, the idea behind it is of course not new. We’d like to thank Jeanette Hall on Twitter, who shared a link to an earlier version of the Boots Theory! In 1914, Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan wrote published the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, “Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell.” (Tressell was the pen-name used by Noonan.) Based on his life working in Hastings between 1906 and 1910, the book contains a passage about the price of stockings and coal and how they are the means by which “the working classes are robbed.” We’ve included an excerpt below, but you can read the original text at the Union History website shared by Jeanette. You can also see the original manuscript! (This feels especially poignant because Ben’s own Great Great Grandfather was a painter in Belfast until his death in 1910 prompted the McKenzies to migrate to Australia.)

Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price.

Six weeks previously Owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. Nora’s shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine.

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, 1914
  • Also of note: the Vimes Boots Theory has influenced the work of UK equality and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who in January 2022 created the Vimes Boots Poverty Index. The Index is a record of prices of staple foods (and perhaps other items) over time, to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of inflation on the poor. This Guardian article has more detail, and note that the Pratchett Estate – and Rhianna Pratchett particularly – have wholeheartedly endorsed this use of Vimes’ name. You can follow Jack on Twitter at @BootstrapCook, and look for the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex for more. (We’ll add a link if it’s published in online form.)
  • Scooby-Doo is a children’s adventure show which began in 1969 with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! It centres on a group of mystery-solving teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Shaggy’s dog, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. Sometimes calling themselves “Mystery Inc.”, the group travel America in a mini-van called the Mystery Machine investigating supposedly supernatural occurrences. Famously most of their adventures end by revealing that the ghost, monster or other weirdness was a hoax all along, perpetrated by an old man in a costume. The show was hugely influential – not least because it helped fill the gap left after more violent superhero cartoons of the 60s like Space Ghost and The Herculoids were cancelled following protests from parent groups. There have been numerous animated series and films, and even live-action films, since 1969, and more are still being made. The characters are not usually explicitly romantically linked; Cal references a reboot that had genius Velma and dorky hippie Shaggy dating, and this has happened at least a couple of times. They are shown to try dating in both the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and the 2011 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster (a sequel to the 2009 reboot of the previous live-action films from 2002 and 2004). For the record, in both versions they quickly realise they don’t have a spark and remain “just friends”.
  • It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King in which a group of teenagers face a nameless evil creature, the titular “It”, which changes shape to evoke fear in its victims. It primarily appears in the shape of a clown named “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”. In a memorable sequence from early in the novel – replicated in both the 1990 TV mini-series adaptation and the first of the two-part film adaptations in 2017 – the Clown appears in the town sewer. In both versions Pennywise has primarily white-face makeup, not dissimilar to Paul Kidby’s version of Dr Whiteface. (“It” was portrayed by Tim Curry in 1990, and Bill Skarsgård in 2017.)
  • Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed, though we were unable to discover whether the UK or US registries still exist. We’re sorry again, clowns.
  • Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
  • Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed, though we were unable to discover whether the UK or US registries still exist. We’re sorry again, clowns.
  • Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
  • 99% Invisible is a podcast all about design, hosted by Roman Mars. The episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben while discussing the Alchemist’s Guild is The Post-Billiards Age from May 2015. (This episode will get mentioned again in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.)
  • There are indeed ghosts on the Discworld, appearing in several of the novels. We’ll be meeting some of them fairly soon, as one plays a major role in Wyrd Sisters. (See #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.)
  • The final Discworld book is actually The Shepherd’s Crown; I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth-last, and the second-last to feature young witch Tiffany Aching. (We try to keep our spreadsheet handy in future episodes to avoid such basic mistakes.)
  • “Shoot” is used for arrows, as the term predates guns by many centuries.
  • CMOT Dibbler is pervasive once he arrives, but is not in The Colour of Magic. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“.) In fact he first shows up when the Watch does, in Guards! Guards! (See #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.)
  • Not only are Lord Vetinari’s plans for the future unknown, but it has also never been revealed how he ascended to the position of Patrician in the first place.
  • We are aware that despite being asked “which Guild would you join“, we decided we would be wizards, witches or members of the Watch, none of which have an official guild (at least at the time of Men at Arms; see #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, for the creation of at least a temporary guild of Watchmen in The Fifth Elephant).

#Pratchat1 – Boots Theory

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In our first full-length episode, Elizabeth and Ben are joined by comedian Cal Wilson to discuss the winner of our poll – Men at Arms (1993)! The fifteenth Discworld novel, Men at Arms is the second to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, following Guards! Guards! (1989).

Captain of the Night Watch Samuel Vimes is only a week away from retirement – so of course “ethnic tensions” between dwarves and trolls are at boiling point, something explodes in the Assassin’s Guild, and there’s a murderer on the loose. Luckily the Watch has expanded, with three unorthodox new recruits…

It’s a real smorgasbord of Discworld stuff and a great introduction to the world, especially the quintessential Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:12 — 85.5MB)

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Guest Cal Wilson is a Melbourne-based New Zealand stand-up comedian and author. You can follow her on Twitter at @calbo. The children’s book she couldn’t yet name was George and the Great Bum Stampede, illustrated by Sarah Davis. It’s the first in a series about George’s family, the Peppertons.

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

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Eeek Club 2021

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Welcome to a new tradition: the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we will release a bonus episode discussing topics selected by our Eeek tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • How would Ankh-Morpork deal with COVID-19?
  • What would happen if Granny Weatherwax was head of Unseen University – or if Angua commanded the Watch?
  • Are golems alive? (For that matter, is fire alive?)
  • How has Pratchett and/or the Discworld informed our personal philosophies?
  • If Pratchett had kept writing the Discworld series, would it have evolved into science fiction?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:27 — 46.0MB)

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Karl, Catherine, Soren, Jess and David, and Frank!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.