Younger Readers – Pratchat

#Pratchat44 – Cosmic Turtle Soup

08/06/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We’ve waited two and a half years for its 35th anniversary, but finally Joel Martin rejoins Liz and Ben to resolve the Discworld’s first (and most literal) cliffhanger in The Light Fantastic, the second Discworld novel, first published on the 2nd of June, 1986.

When we last saw them, failed wizard Rincewind, Twoflower the tourist and Twoflower’s magical Luggage – a living chest on legs – had fallen over the Rim of the Discworld. But instead of tumbling forever through space, they mysteriously find themselves in the Forest of Skund, surrounded by talking trees, gnomes and gingerbread cottages. The senior wizards of Unseen University – including Chancellor Galder Weatherwax, and the second of his Order, Ymper Trymon – soon discover what’s happened: the Octavo, the Creator’s book of spells, wants to keep Rincewind alive. One of its spells is inside his head, and all eight need to be read to avert an impending apocalypse heralded by an ominous red star…

While the usual story is that Pratchett only returned to the Discworld because The Colour of Magic proved popular, he did set himself up for a sequel by dropping his protagonists off the edge of the world. Unlike its predecessor, The Light Fantastic has a pretty straightforward plot about averting the end of the world – but that doesn’t stop Pratchett from parodying everything from fairytales to druidic sacrifices and the conventions of fantasy writing. Plus this book introduces some concepts, and especially characters, who will come back later, including a certain no-longer-human Librarian, Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and octogenarian barbarian Genghiz Cohen. (The rest of the supporting cast are less fortunate…)

Does this feel like a “real” Discworld book yet? How do we reconcile these versions of Death and Ysabell with the ones we come to love later? Is it really a bad idea to start with the early books – or is it fun to begin with the early versions of ideas Pratchett would later develop more fully? And what on the Disc happens to Rincewind between this book and Sourcery? Use the hashtag #Pratchat44 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Joel Martin is a podcaster and writer who has joined us twice before: way back in #Pratchat14 to discuss The Colour of Magic, and then again in #Pratchat31 for The Long Earth. While his podcasts are currently on hiatus, there’s soon to be exciting news regarding his speculative fiction writers festival, Speculate! You can watch for Speculate news on Twitter at @SpecFicVic, and join the festival’s mailing list via specfic.com.au. Find Joel online at thepenofjoel.com or on Twitter at @thepenofjoel.

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

Next episode we go back to another second book of a series, as we take a little break from the Discworld. Yes, it’s book two of Pratchett’s five novel collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long War! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat45, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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#Pratchat43 Notes and Errata

08/05/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

Dad thought Nation was his best book and it’s one of my favs too. I’m a huge fan of the Witches series in particular (Equal Rites was the first book of his I read) particularly Witches Abroad, Carpe Jugulum and the Tiffany Aching tales. https://t.co/jWdENxQLJt
— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

More than a little 😉
— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

#Pratchat43 – Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home

08/05/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Poet and writer Sally Evans joins Liz and Ben as they rejoin Tiffany Aching for a trip up into the mountains to meet the next generation of witches in A Hat Full of Sky, the 32nd Discworld novel, first published in 2004.

Note that while this episode discusses a book for younger readers, it does contain swearing and we discuss concepts only appearing metaphorically in the book, including puberty and (briefly) masturbation. Parents may wish to listen first before listening with their big wee ones.

Tiffany Aching’s life is all change: she’s off into the mountains to apprentice with Miss Level, a research witch who even other witches find a bit weird. She’s left behind her home, her family, and everything she’s ever known. Even the Nac Mac Feegle – the drinking, fighting pictsies who’ve become her fierce protectors since she was briefly their Queen – aren’t coming with her. Tiffany soon finds that fitting in among other new witches, and learning the craft, are far harder than anything she’s done before. And that’s before the one bit of magic she knows brings her to the attention of a hiver – a bodiless, mindless, invisible creature looking for someone with power to inhabit…

While a certain other magical young person was attending a school of magic and magic (as the copyright lawyers insist we call it), Pratchett’s own Tiffany Aching sets out on a very different journey of discovery. While only 11, she must grapple with her own burgeoning powers (barely under her control), new social dynamics, the affections of someone who is merely less annoying than he used to be, and all the perils of growing up, including the monster in your own head…

Is this book too grown up for 11-year-olds? Are we on the money about the metaphors? How great would it be to have an ondageist? Is it just the younger Earwig devotee witches who are into appearances, or are the hats and black dresses of other witches a sign that it’s important to all of them? Are the Feegles still fun, or has Tiffany already outgrown them? Er…so to speak. Phew! So many questions this month. Use the hashtag #Pratchat43 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Dr Sally Evans is a poet and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. As part of her PhD, Sally created four chapbook-length sequences of poetry, including a modern reworking of The Odyssey by Homer, and giving Fifty Shades of Grey the blackout poetry treatment. You can hear Sally talk Mad Max: Fury Road on the apocalyptic fiction podcast Catastropod, hosted by previous Pratchat guest Marlee Jane Ward, and follow her on Twitter at @SalacticaActual.

Next episode we fulfil our stupidest promise: yes, two and half years after we discussed The Colour of Magic, and around 35 years after its first publication, we finally resolve Pratchett’s most literal cliffhanger. Join us as we read the second ever Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat44, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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

#Pratchat37 Notes and Errata

08/11/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“, featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the third and final Johnny Maxwell novel, 1996’s Johnny and the Bomb.

The episode title, inspired by Will and Liz, is a reference to the famous ethical dilemma called “the trolley problem”. The short version is that a cable car trolley is going to hit and kill a bunch of people, but you are standing next to a lever that could shift it onto another track, where it will only hit and kill one person. The ethical debate centres around whether it is right to cause someone’s death, even to save others. It features fairly heavily in the television series The Good Place, especially in the episode titled…er…”The Trolley Problem”.
For our discussions of the previous Johnny Maxwell books, see #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
The Big Mac is one of the main hamburgers on the menu at McDonald’s Restaurants, at least in English-speaking countries.
In Good Omens, Famine – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – goes by the name of Dr Raven Sable, famous dietician and author of Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful. He invented the hamburger and owns the biggest fast food chain on Earth, though its name is not revealed. See #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“, for more.
The TV adaptations of the Johnny books are entirely unrelated to each other. Johnny and the Dead was produced for Children’s ITV in 1995, only a year after the book was published, and featured Brian Blessed as Marxist ghost William Stickers. Johnny and the Bomb was made much later, in 2006, by CBBC, and featured Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon. They were released on video and DVD in the UK, but are very hard to get ahold of now. (While there’s not yet been a television adaptation of Only You Can Save Mankind, it was adapted for radio by the BBC in 1996.)
Foul Ole Ron is the, er, greatest of the beggars of Ankh-Morpork and a member of the so-called Canting Crew, who show up in many of the books. As well as his distinctive catchphrase (see below), he is also famous for his Smell (which exists independently of him), and for having a “thinking brain dog”, most likely a side gig for Gaspode the talking dog. Ron features most prominently in Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Hogfather, Jingo and The Truth.
The phrase “Buggrit buggrit millennium hand and shrimp” was first uttered by the Bursar of Unseen University during his trip to Lancre for the royal wedding in Lords and Ladies. (Foul Ole Ron first says it in Soul Music.) As noted in the Annotated Pratchett File for that book, Terry used a computer program to generate nonsense phrases from a bunch of source texts, including a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song “Particle Man” – just one of many TMBG references scattered throughout his books.
Timecop is a 1994 science fiction action film directed by by Peter Hyams and based on a comic book story of the same name. It does indeed star Jean-Claude Van Damme, and is in fact his highest-grossing and probably most popular film as a lead actor. He plays a cop fighting time travel crime named Max Walker, though as far as we know he is not modelled after the beloved Australian cricketer and commentator of the same name.
Cassandra or indeed Kasandra was a princess of Troy and priestess of Apollo. He fancied her, and gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she spurned him (or just wasn’t into him) he twisted the gift so that no-one would believe her. It’s almost as if Kirsty had seen her own future…
Johnny is twelve years old in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead, and fourteen in this book. It probably makes more sense to imagine that he’s actually thirteen in the middle book, meaning he has one big weird adventure a year, in between the other smaller ones (see a later note).
We’ve previous mentioned Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in #Pratchat22, “The Prat in the Cat” and #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The protagonist, Richard Mayhew, does indeed send his life off on an unpredictable course when he stops to help Door, a seemingly homeless woman who is actually a member of a noble house in the fantastical realm of “London Below”.
Ben’s time travel show from six years ago is Night Terrace, and the episode about evil robot Hitlers is the fifth from season one, “Sound & Führer”, by John Richards. You can find the show at nightterrace.com.
We discussed The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids” with Michelle Law. In between this episode being recorded and released, on November 5, there was a major announcement regarding the film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice: it has a confirmed release date of 2022, will now premiere on Sky Cinema (in the UK at least), and has several roles cast, including Hugh Laurie as Maurice! Check out the full announcement on the Narrativia web site.
We’ve previously talked about famous English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968) many times, but especially in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat and The Amazing Maurice. Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine discusses many of the tropes in her work we’d now consider harmful.
The 3rd of October appears in the 2004 film Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, about the social dynamics of high school girls. Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) asks new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who has a crush on him, what day it is in class, which she sees as a milestone in their relationship. The date was October 3rd.
The fax machine – short for “facsimile” machine – has roots in much older technology, but the version that transmitted pictures over a standard telephone line was first patented by Xerox in 1964. In many places they are still in use, especially for transmission of medical records in hospitals, medical practices and other public health organisations. In the UK’s National Health Service, they were planned to be phased out by early 2020, though it’s unclear if that goal was met. Fax machines are still widely used in Japan, and found in many convenience stores. In many countries, however, non-medical businesses have adopted email and other forms of Internet-based communication instead.
Will is thinking of the reaction image meme known as “Math Lady“ (or “Confused Lady”), which features Brazilian telenovela star Renata Sorrah thinking intensely, with superimposed mathematical diagrams.
Liz is a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series, which spans seven books published between 1977 and 2006. They chronicle the adventures of Christopher Chant and others who magically travel between alternate worlds. We’ve previously mentioned Jones many times, but the Chrestomanci books come up mostly in our discussion of parallel worlds book The Long Earth, #Pratchat33, “It’s Just a Step to the West“.
We talked about white feminism only last episode. It’s a term for feminism practiced from a privileged perspective that is not intersectional – it doesn’t consider how discrimination based on factors other than gender (race, sexuality, disability, class etc) complicate sexism and put many “solutions” out of reach.
“The classic” Will is referring to is the Grandfather Paradox, which was considered “age old” as long ago as the 1930s. It describes a situation in which time travel into the past a logically impossible or at least inconsistent sequence of events. The name comes from the most frequently cited example of going back in time and killing your own grandfather as a child, meaning you never existed.
English singer-songwriter Kate Bush known for her distinctive style which mixes electronic and acoustic sounds, and for drawing on literary inspiration for her lyrics. Her very first single, “Wuthering Heights”, was released when she was 19 years old and hit number one in the UK and Australian charts in 1978. “Running Up That Hill” is her second most successful single, making it to number three in the UK (and number six in Australia) in 1985, the first single from her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love. A remix of “Running Up That Hill” released in 2012 made it to number six in the UK.
We mentioned Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) bacon in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”. The film stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, an immortal being who cannot die unless decapitated. He and others like him are drawn to fight and kill each other, concentrating their magical powers in fewer and fewer immortals until only one is left, who will claim “the Prize”. Spoilers: the star of the film claims the Prize at the end, and exclaims “I can see through time!” It makes him mortal, but also “at one with all living things”.
Dad’s Army was a long-running and popular BBC sit-com about a fictional platoon of the real Home Guard, a volunteer militia (originally called the the Local Defence Volunteers, or LDV) made up of men exempt from conscription during World War II, mostly for reasons of age. Set in the fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea, the local chapter is led by local bank manager Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) and a clerk from his bank, Sgt Wilson (John Le Mesurier). Their platoon is filled with elderly misfits, as well as a young man excused from service because of his rare blood type; the humour largely resolved around them incompetently attempting various schemes to protect the town, and they rarely engaged the enemy, though they were certainly game to try. It ran for 8 series between 1968 and 1977, though it was repeated well after that in the UK and Commonwealth countries. There was also a film in 1971, and a new film in 2016 with a new cast, including Toby Jones and Bill Nighy as Mainwaring and Wilson.
Bakelite was the first synthetic plastic, developed in 1909 by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland (hence the name) in New York. It became widely used in the casings of electrical equipment since it was non-conductive and relatively resistant to heat. The first Bakelite telephone handset was designed by Eriksson in 1930, and various designs were produced through to the 1960s. Many stayed in service until the introduction of touchtone-dialling in the 60s and 70s saw them gradually replaced by handsets with push-buttons, made of newer plastics like polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
We’ve been unable to determine what exactly the rules were around unauthorised use of air raid sirens during the Blitz, but they would have been under the control of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens.
“Had a stressful day? What you need is a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down” was the 1950s and 60s advertising pitch for “Bex”, a popular Australian painkiller sold as tablets and powder. It combined a little caffeine with the analgesics aspirin and phenacetin; the latter was banned in the early 1970s, as it was discovered to be addictive and caused kidney problems. In 1965 a Sydney comedy revue titled A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down, starring future television stars Ruth Cracknell and Reg Livermore, ran for over 250 performances, further cementing the phrase in Australian popular culture. It’s sometimes used as a directive to calm down or relax.
The study of psychological trauma was advanced greatly, unfortunately, by the plight of British soldiers from World War I, as many as 10% of whom were identified as suffering from “shell shock”. The condition was first formally described in The Lancet in 1915 by Charles Myers. This evolved into a broader diagnosis of “gross stress reaction” in the 1950s, and then more modern idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was first listed as an official psychiatric diagnosis in 1980.
Pratchett sometimes gave hints about his future writing plans, and had said in interviews he had a sequel to Dodger in mind, but he never mentioned as far as we can find anything about further Johnny books. Ben might not be right about him planning the last two books together, though, as he wasn’t sure in 1994 when the final one would come out, and it at one point had a working title of Johnny and the Devil, which suggests a very different plan indeed… Vague details of some of the future Discworld plans he had were revealed in an afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown: a whodunnit with goblins starring Constable Feeney, a story of elderly heroes battling failing memories to defeat a dark lord, and the return of the Amazing Maurice – now a ship’s cat! When the hard drives containing Pratchett’s unfinished writing were destroyed by a steam roller, his personal assistant Rob Wilkins revealed they contained ten unfinished novels, though it’s unknown whether these match up to the afterword. The manuscripts were probably “draft zeroes”, the term Pratchett used for the first versions of his books; these were entirely unedited, and no-one else was permitted to see them.
As we mention, the “naff epilogue” Will refers to is the widely derided one from the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, set nineteen years later as the now married (to each other) protagonists send their own children off to Hogwarts.
Pratchett’s thoughts on J K Rowling are actually more guarded than Ben remembers, but what he doesn’t say speaks volumes… We’ve linked to this 2004 article from The Age, “Mystery Lord of the Discworld“, before, but it seems very timely to do so now as he was in Australia on a tour to promote the next book we’re reading, Going Postal! He also mentions his initial meeting with Snowgum Films, makers of the Troll Bridge short film which was finally released last year.
Many towns and cities become “twinned” with another, usually in another country, as a form of cultural exchange. In the UK and much of Europe these are known as “twin towns“, whereas in the US and Australia they’re often referred to as “sister cities” (in Australia perhaps because there are at least two prominent towns split into two at state borders, which are sometimes referred to as twin towns). At the start of chapter five of Johnny and the Bomb, it’s mentioned that Blackbury is twinned with “Aix-et-Pains”, which is indeed a fake-French pun for “aches and pains”.
We couldn’t find a real “Bonza Feed” award, but the term itself is still in use in Australian slang (indeed fast food chain Red Rooster used in advertising around Australia Day as recently as 2018). “Bonza” itself is a slang term roughly meaning “excellent; deserving of admiration”, and dates back to at least the early 1900s. Its origins are uncertain, but some suggest it comes from the French “bon ça“, which means “that’s good”. Another almost certainly fabricated story suggests it comes from a Cantonese phrase meaning “good gold”, used by Chinese immigrants in the gold rush, but there’s no evidence for this, or indeed matching words in Cantonese. A more likely explanation may be that it is a localised contraction of “bonanza“, a Spanish word meaning prosperity that was used in America when finding a good vein of silver to mine. That might place it back in the gold rush, though how it came to Australia (when few Americans seem to have made the trip at that time) is uncertain.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is a 2012 Australian crime drama set in 1920s Melbourne, based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood. Essie Davis stars as Miss Phryne Fisher, wealthy socialite and private detective, who solves various crimes. It ran for three series between 2012 and 2015 on the ABC, and enjoyed some cult success overseas. The original cast and crew made a feature film set after the TV show, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, which was released in February 2020. There was also a 2019 series of spin-off telemovies for Channel 7, Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries; these were set in the 1960s and starred Geraldine Hakewill as Phryne’s niece Peregrine Fisher, who joins a secret society of women adventurers after her aunt disappears. While all three screen adaptations were made by Any Cloud Productions, the differing production partners may make licensing all the content for a streaming service quite difficult, and at the moment the series seems to be only available to stream on AcornTV, a streaming service specialising in British television.
A “stobie pole” is a kind of power line pole made of two steel joists separated by concrete, invented by James Cyril Stobie in 1924. They were a workaround for the fact that termite-resistant timber was in short supply, and were mostly used in Adelaide in the 1930s and 1940s, though some are still standing today.
In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger is given permission to use a magical Time Turner so that she can attend multiple classes that are scheduled at the same time. She, Harry and Ron use it to go back in time, eventually realising they are responsible for several weird occurrences they had previously noticed.
The time travel heavy episodes of Night Terrace written by Ben are season one’s “Time of Death”, which is both a parody of Phryne Fisher and a murder mystery that happens out of order, and “Ancient History”, in which the protagonists land in ancient Europe but can’t figure out when or where they are, complicating their efforts to avoid changing history.
Sliders was a 1990s American science fiction TV show in which genius physics student Quinn Mallory invents a method of travelling between parallel universes, but accidentally transports himself, his lecturer, his nerdy friend (who has a crush on him) and a passing soul singer into another universe. To escape a disaster he is forced to modify his “sliding” device, which means it now counts down a random amount of time before opening a portal to a random parallel universe. Many episodes revolve around them either losing the timer or trying to find a safe place to hide until it opens a portal to take them home.
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a way of explaining the macro-level consequences of quantum theory. According to quantum theory, fundamental particles like electrons do not occupy a definite position in spacetime, but can only be represented by a wave function, which gives a probability of their location. In the many-world interpretation, such particles literally exist in all of the possible positions, giving rise to many different universes in which each possibility plays out. Those changes are small in local effect but would add up to an infinite number of universes with large-scale differences – the classic idea of parallel universes (though they’re not parallel, as they branch off from each other).
Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is one of the most famous time travel movies. In the film, teenager Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally uses a time travelling car invented by his eccentric scientist friend Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), landing in 1955. He inadvertently changes history so that he might never be born, and he seeks out the younger version of Doc for help putting things right. The sequels, Back to the Future Part II and Part III, were filmed back-to-back. In Part II, Marty buys a Sports Almanac in the future with the intention of using it to win horse races in the present, but it is stolen by Biff, the antagonist of the first film, who gives it to his young self. Marty and Doc must go back to 1955 and interact with events from the first film to put history back on track. In Part III, Marty discovers Doc, who is trapped in 1885, will be killed by Biff’s outlaw ancestor, and goes back to save his friend. We’ve previously talked about the films in our discussions of Reaper Man, Diggers, Good Omens, Johnny and the Dead and The Science of Discworld.
About Time (2013) is a romantic comedy written and directed by Richard Curtis, starring Domhnall Gleeson as Tim, Rachel McAdams as Mary and Bill Nighy as Tim’s father James. James reveals to Tim that men in his family can travel back in time to any moment they have lived before, but warns him not to use the gift to become rich or famous, so he tries to use it to improve his love life and gradually learning the limitations of his gift. It got a lukewarm reaction from critics, but did pretty well with audiences, especially – to everyone’s surprise – in South Korea.
Unfortunately there were many actors shafted by the modern Star Wars sequel trilogy. John Boyega, who plays ex-Stormtrooper Finn, has talked openly about his experience of facing racism from fans, something also experienced by Kelly Marie Tran, whose chartacter Rose Tico was all but dropped from the third film. Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson’s characters were also given short shrift in the final film.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989; dir. Stephen Herek) follows two Californian high school slackers, Bill S Preston (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan. Their dreams of being rock stars are threatened as they are about to flunk history, which will result in Ted’s Dad sending him away to a military college. They are visited by Rufus, a time traveller from a future were Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns has brought world peace through their music, who lends them the time machine to research history so they can pass their final oral presentation exam. The sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991; dir. Pete Hewitt), is Ben’s favourite of the two, though it involves less time travel and more weird afterlife shenanigans, including a comedic version of Death not a million miles away from Pratchett’s. (We previously mentioned the sequel in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.) Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020; dir. Dean Parisot) is a “legacy film” sequel which was written in 2010, but took a decade to secure a production deal; in the film, an older Bill and Ted are struggling to live up to the legend of themselves they’ve been told awaits them.
Ben mentioned a few other time travel stories that he loves, but we cut them for time. Obviously there’s Doctor Who, but also the films Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009, dir. Gareth Carrivick), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, dir. Colin Trevorrow) and 12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam), and the television series Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982), Quantum Leap (1989-1983) and Continuum (2012-2015), plus many many more.
The Time Traveller’s Wife is the 2003 debut novel from American author Audrey Niffenegger. It tells the story of Henry, a man who has a genetic condition which causes him to randomly travel through time, and Clare, an artist who meets him many times throughout her life. They have a romance which each experiences in a different order. The film adaptation from 2007 starred Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, but was not a success. Stephen Moffat is currently writing a new television series adaptation for HBO.

#Pratchat37 – The Shopping Trolley Problem

08/11/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Author Will Kostakis returns to face time travel, unexploded bombs and a tangle of timelines in the final Johnny Maxwell book, 1996’s Johnny and the Bomb!

When Johnny and his misfit friends look after homeless eccentric Mrs Tachyon’s shopping trolley, they soon discover she has a complicated relationship with time. Johnny, Yo-less, Wobbler, Bigmac and Kirsty travel back to World War II, on the eve of the “Blackbury Blitz”. Johnny knows bombs are meant to destroy Paradise Street – but can he and his friends do anything about it? Do they even have the right? And how will they get back ho- hang on. Where’s Wobbler?

Pratchett’s first book focussing on time travel also touches on the worries of teenagers, local history, racism, sexism and the nature of fate and destiny. It might seem weighty for a children’s book, but children think about this stuff all the time! Did you follow all the time travel shenanigans? How do you think Pratchett’s handling of these issues compares to modern middle grade fiction – or even his own previous Johnny books? And if you could go back in time, would you try and change things for the better? Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat37.

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Returning guest Will Kostakis is a writer and award-winning author. Since we last saw him in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, he’s published his first fantasy YA novel, Monuments, and its sequel, Rebel Gods. His new novella, The Greatest Hit, is out now from Lothian Children’s Books as part of the Australia Reads initiative. Find out more about Will at willkostakis.com, or follow him on Twitter at @willkostakis.

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

As mentioned at the end of this episode, the fiction anthology Collisions from Liminal Magazine is out now, featuring Liz’s story “The Voyeur”! Order it from your local bookshop. And we also announced that the Australian Discworld Convention in Sydney has had to be postponed from 2021 to 2022. Find out more at ausdwcon.org.

Next month we see out the year with a favourite, as we time travel about ten Discworld books ahead to meet Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal! We’ve invited two experts on con artistry to discuss it with us: writer and magician Nicholas J Johnson, and comedian and actor Lawrence Leung! Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat38.

#Pratchat33 Notes and Errata

08/07/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“, featuring guest Michelle Dew, discussing the 2001 Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

The episode title references both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie’s first feature film from 1998, and the common refrain of unmasked villains in the cartoon series Scooby Doo – a show Malicia would probably have mixed feelings about.
Überwald is located about 1,500 miles Hubwards and Widdershins of Ankh-Morpork, according to The Discworld Mappe. The name “Überwald” is a pretty direct German translation of “Transylvania”, both meaning “beyond (or over) the forest”.
Hermione is an ancient Greek name meaning “Princess of Hermes”; in classical mythology, Hermione is the daughter of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and is a child at the start of the Trojan War. Hermione Granger is the most notable contemporary character to bear the name, but others appear in the works of P G Wodehouse, D H Lawrence and Pee-wee Herman.
This book was the first standard Discworld novel with cover art not by Josh Kirby. (The Last Hero, published earlier the same year, was a large-format illustrated book with a cover and internal illustrations by Paul Kidby, who would take over the Discworld covers from the next book, Night Watch.) It was published only a month or so after Kirby’s death, so we’d speculate the change was mostly due to it being a children’s book – while Kirby did covers for the re-issue of The Carpet People and the original Truckers trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books each had art by a different artist, though Kirby illustrations were used for some foreign language editions. The original cover was by David Wyatt; Ben’s edition has a cover by Paul Kidby; and Michelle’s edition of the audiobook has a cover by Bill Mayer. The newest edition has cover art by Laura Ellen Anderson. You can see all of these on the L-Space wiki entry for the book.
“Crazy Old Maurice” is the nickname of Belle’s father, an “eccentric inventor”, in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Gaston calls him by this derogatory nickname in song. The inventor angle is a departure from the original fairytale, in which Belle’s father is a failed businessman who has lost all his money. While there are certainly a few Beauty and the Beast references in The Simpsons, we couldn’t find any evidence of this one.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin – or Hameln, as the real German town’s name is properly spelled (thank you Sven) – is a folk tale with origins that go back to around 1300 CE. The basic story is that the town is plagued with rats and hires a piper with magical powers to get rid of them. (The “pied” part refers to the fact that he was dressed in multicoloured clothing.) Once the job is done, the town refuses to pay the piper; in retaliation he uses his music to lead all the children of the town into a crack in a nearby mountain, which seals shut – leaving only one young boy, with a lame leg, behind. In the Aarne-Thomspson-Uther index, which categorises folk tales, it is classified as ATU 570, “The Rat-Catcher”.
The Netflix show Liz remembers is 2019’s The Society; it’s a weird modern twist, loosely inspired by the legend. A second season is due late this year.
Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is probably the most famous English language version of the story, and is still popular thanks to it’s dynamic rhythm and catchy rhymes. It was first published as the last poem in his 1842 book Dramatic Lyrics. (Ben is wrong that Pratchett quotes it directly; he closely paraphrases it.)
Pet rats are usually domesticated Norway Rats (Rattus norvegicus), aka laboratory rats or “Fancy Rats”. Michelle is spot on about their lifespans: they live on average for 2-3 years, but can live up to 4-5 years if well cared for (and lucky). The oldest known pet rat we could find was Rodney, who lived in Japan and died at the age of seven years and four months in 1990. (We couldn’t verify this for sure but it seems legit.)
Überwald is first mentioned by name as the home country of both Angua and Cheery Littlebottom in Feet of Clay (discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays”), and plays a major part in both Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant (both published shortly before The Amazing Maurice in the series). But Granny Weatherwax and her Lancre coven visit a small town in the shadow of a castle on their way to Genua in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“), and while neither the town nor country are named, it’s clearly the same place.
Scrote is a small town in the Sto Plains, and like most places there makes most of its money from cabbage farming. It features briefly (but memorably) in Soul Music, when The Band With Rocks In stops there for the night while on tour at the Jolly Cabbage. Death also visits Scrote during the events of Hogfather.
“Rathaus” – pronounced “RART-house” – is indeed the German term for Town Hall. It comes from the words “rat” meaning “council”, and “haus” meaning…er…well you can probably figure that one out.
The Rat Name Game is the invention of Pratchat supporter Joel Molin. (We mention him later in the questions section, but felt it was remiss of us not to mention his name at the time when we played it.) Send us yours using the hashtag #Pratchat33!
We’ve mentioned The Good Place before; the short version is that it’s a sit-com in which Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies, ends up in a heavenly afterlife, and quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake. Her supposed soul mate, an ethics professor (William Jackson Harper), agrees to help her learn to be a better person.
The film adaptation of the book, titled The Amazing Maurice, is a co-production between German studio Ulysses Filmproduktion and the Irish Cantilever Group. It was announced in June 2019, with the more recent news in October 2019 that it had scored a global distribution deal. What we know so far is that it has an “unexpected” script by Terry Rossio, who wrote Shrek and has worked with Disney; character designs by Carter Goodrich, best known for Ratatouille and Despicable Me; and the directors will be Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, whose previous work is not well-known outside of Germany. Ulysses Filmproduktion list it as “in production” on their web site, and the announcements gave an expected release date of 2022. There’s no word on how COVID-19 delays or the exclusive Narrativia/Motive Pictures deal have affected the production, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
The “if a dog wore pants” meme stormed the Internet in 2015 and spawned many imitators and extrapolations.
The theatre cat in the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical Cats is Gus, invented by T. S. Eliot in the poem “Gus, the Theatre Cat”. His full name is “Asparagus”; he was played by Stephen Tate in the original West End cast in 1981, and by Ian McKellan in the 2019 film.
The musical version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is available only as a package for schools that includes photocopiable scripts, limited performance rights and supporting materials. It was written by Matthew Holmes, who also created a similar adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb. We’re informed that the musical sacrifices a lot of the humour, though – perhaps they thought kids dressed as rats would be funny enough? – and that the Stephen Briggs adaptation is superior.
In the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek, Lord Farquaad is the ruler of Duloc, a city-state where he has outlawed fairytale creatures and the citizens live in austerity. (The Pied Piper appears in the fourth film in the series, Shrek Forever After.)
We’ve previously talked about Enid Blyton in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven” and #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”. Her Famous Five and Secret Seven books are the most obvious inspiration for Malicia’s adventurous notions.
We last mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”. Many of his worlds break down the walls between reality and fiction, but this is especially true of his Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair.
We’ve talked about Neil Gaiman many times. A fantasy writer who started as a journalist and first made his name in comics, he was a long-time friend of Terry Pratchett.
Goosebumps is a series of horror novels for middle grade readers, all written by Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine. We previously mentioned them in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”.
Rllk is clearly the pre-Clan rat sound for “fuck”.
Hieroglyphics are the characters of the ancient Egyptians form of writing, though the term is sometimes applied to other cultures’ similar forms. While each character was an image, and could represent the object they resembled – making them pictograms – they also represented sounds, making up the syllables of longer words, and clarified the meanings of other adjacent heiroglyphs. The Clan’s written language is not quite the same.
A guru, from pan-Indian tradition, is a spiritual guide and teacher. The term applies to teachers and mentors in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism.
We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s obsession with Lobsang in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written by American professor of literature Joseph Campbell in 1949; in it he argues that there is a common mythological hero story across many cultures. The book is hugely influential on modern fiction – it’s effect on Pratchett is perhaps felt most in Only You Can Save Mankind – but has been applied in a very reductive way, and its popularity has led many to view the stories of other cultures through a very classical, Western lens.
Pratchett’s love for the lone wagon wheel rolling out of an explosion appears most prominently in Soul Music, but also in several other books as an aside.
Secret Valley was an Australian kids’ adventure show, co-produced with Spanish and French companies, first aired in 1980. It was about the kids who worked and played at the fictitious holiday camp, Secret Valley, and their ongoing rivalry with a gang of bullies led by Spider McGlurk (no really). Spider – who despite Ben’s insistence off-air was not played by a young Russell Crowe – was paid by developer William Whopper to ruin the camp so he could buy up the land. The series was repeated often on the ABC throughout the 1980s, and was created by Roger Mirams, who went on to create the spin-off Professor Poopsnagle’s Steam Zeppelin. Ben never saw the latter show – it ran on Channel Nine, before his country town had more than two television stations – but it apparently has quite a cult following in the UK, even today. The Secret Valley theme was indeed sung to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”.
The Doctor Who serial with the giant rats and overt racism is 1977’s Victorian-era adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela, and introducing two fan favourite guest characters, theatre proprietor Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin) and pathologist Professor George Litefoot (Trevor Baxter). The other one, with the character screeching “Ratkin!”, is 1989’s Ghost Light, from the show’s final season before being cancelled in 1989.
Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy Neverwhere was originally a television series, produced for the BBC in 1996. It introduces the idea of “London Below”, an alternate city invisible to those who live in “London Above” and where various aspects of London take on supernatural forms. In London Below, rats are revered as intelligent beings, and the Rat Speakers are an entire sect who serve them. Neverwhere was turned into a book, and followed by the short story How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Gaiman is currently working on a full sequel.
The film in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson leaps off a tower is 2018’s Skyscraper, in which he plays a war veteran and former FBI agent who is frankly seems over-qualified to take on a security job in the new tallest building in the world, being built in Hong Kong. It’s attacked and set on fire by terrorists while his family are inside, instigating the jumping.
Eight (it’s okay, it’s safe to say on Roundworld) is established in the very first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as the number of occult significance on the Discworld. Wizards avoid saying it out loud, using euphemisms like “7A” and “twice four”, as in the wrong time or place it can summon evil creatures, notably Bel-Shamharoth, aka the Soul Eater or the Sender of Eight.
Cranium Rats first appeared as part of the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons’s second edition in 1994. They are not natural creatures, but are created from regular rats by the evil psychic beings known as Mind Flayers. You can find details of Cranium Rats for the game’s current, fifth edition in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, published in 2016.
“Deus ex machina” is a narrative cliche in which the plot is resolved suddenly by an unlikely or overtly supernatural occurrence. It comes from ancient Greek theatre, and means “God out of the machine”; the playwright Aeschylus invented it as a way of ending plays, and they literally brought Greek Gods onto stage using machines – namely a trapdoor or a crane – to end the story.
For an explanation of the Gonnigal, and the origins of the name, see our previous episode, “Meet the Feegles”.
Truckers is the first in Pratchett’s “Bromeliad” trilogy about a society of Nomes, tiny creatures who live in the cracks of the human world. We’ve previously covered all three books in the trilogy: Truckers, Diggers and Wings.
Phillip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1998 (which won that year’s Carnegie Medal). After a moderately successful film adaptation of the first novel (under it’s American title The Golden Compass), the trilogy is now being adapted for television by the BBC and HBO, beginning with a season covering the events of the first book in 2019. Pullman is currently working on finishing The Book of Dust, a sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. His other work includes the Sally Lockhart novels, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke, which was also adapted by the BBC starring Billie Piper.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the Harry Potter series, is the first after the proper return of “wizard Hitler” Voldemort. It features the horrendously cruel teacher Dolores Umbridge and the death of a major, beloved character. So…you know, pretty heavy for a 7-year-old.
There have been a lot of adaptations of Oliver Twist, but not that many cartoon versions: the two most recent straight versions are a 1974 American production, and a 1982 Australian one. The 1989 Disney film Oliver & Company loosely adapts the story to be about a lost kitten who joins a gang of street dogs, though Sally doesn’t die (or indeed appear) in that one.
Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 novel which serves as an allegory for the communist revolution in Russia. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm depose the human farmers and take over, creating a fairer society before falling prey to greed and corruption. The “glue factory scene” also involves the death of a beloved character.
Burgo’s Catch Phrase was a popular Australian version of the US/UK gameshow Catch Phrase that ran from 1997 to 2003 on the Nine Network. Contestants viewed animated picture puzzles, not unlike a rebus, and had to determine the phrase they represented. It was renamed to include “Burgo” in the title in 1999, to capitalise on the popularity of host John Burgess, a media personality known as “Burgo” or “Baby John”, who was previously famous as the Australian host of Wheel of Fortune.
The “dab” is a dance move in which a person ducks their head into one bent elbow while stretching out and raising their other arm. Exactly where it originated is hard to pin down – similar moves appear in Japanese anime – but it seems pretty clear the worldwide fad, especially amongst teenagers, was inspired by American footballer Cam Newton, who dabbed after a goal, though he was taught the move by his teenage brother. It’s popularity was pretty long-lived for a fad, only having waned in the last couple of years; it was partly kept alive by inclusion in the immensely popular videogame Fornite: Battle Royale.
Graeme Base is an English-Australian children’s author and illustrator, most famous for his picture books Animalia and The Eleventh Hour. Animalia has an illustration for each letter of the English alphabet, and “M” features “meticulous mice monitoring mysterious mathematical messages” on computers while monocles and headsets. It’s glorious.
“He protec, he attac” – originally “he protec, but he also attac” – is a meme that started in 2016. It’s been used for all sorts of things but the earliest origin seems to be two images of a nude man wielding a lightsaber. The more you know…
Zoom is a popular videoconferencing application which has grown in popularity in the last year, especially since the start of mandated isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom’s popularity has largely come from it’s easy to use design, but this approach has been criticised for causing multiple security problems, leading some major corporations and governments to ban its use. Many of the major security concerns have been addressed in updates since May 2020.
Lord Vetinari befriends the intelligent (but not talking) rats – not mice – in Guards! Guards!, communicating with their leader Skrp in their own language and using them as spies when he is temporarily deposed and imprisoned. We loved Skrp, as you’ll hear in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
Magneto is a character in the X-Men books from Marvel Comics. Usually a villain, he is the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (they leave the “Evil” out in later versions), and one of the most powerful mutants in the world, able to create and manipulate power magnetic fields, primarily to move metal objects. He is played in the films by Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender.
“Yeet” is a modern slang word meaning to throw something with a lot of force, though it can also be used as an exclamation, something that seemingly started with basketballers who were sure they would score when shooting, and briefly as a dance, which seems to have been where it spread most widely. Like a lot of such fads, it originated with African Americans before quickly becoming appropriated into general “youth culture”, a pattern that has repeated many times.
Jurassic Park III (2001) features Alan Grant returning to the abandoned secondary site where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were created, where he meets a Spinosaurus, a huge predatory dinosaur. Michelle may also be thinking of the Indominus rex from Jurassic World (2015), a hybrid dinosaur created by combining DNA from multiple species.
Margo Lanagan is a multiple award-winning Australian author. Her 2008 YA fantasy novel Tender Morsels draws inspiration from the Grimm fairytale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”, though note it deals with themes of family violence, sexual assault and miscarriage. 2012’s Sea Hearts (published outside Australia as The Brides of Rollrock Island) explores the consequences of a witch selling seals transformed into women as brides.
Jeremy Lachlan is an Australian author. His Jane Doe series for older children (13+) begins with Jane Doe and the Cradle of Worlds, and continues with 2020’s Jane Doe and the Key of All Souls.
The Call is a 2016 horror-fantasy YA novel by Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín, in which people are abducted to another world, where they hear the call of a hunting horn… It has one sequel so far, 2018’s The Invasion.

#Pratchat34 Notes and Errata

08/08/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“, featuring guest Oliver Phommavanh, discussing the 1993 Johnny Maxwell novel Johnny and the Dead.

The episode title is a cheeky reference to the first Johnny Maxwell book, Only You Can Save Mankind, in which Johnny similarly finds he is the only one who can save a group of otherworldly beings. We discussed it in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
Oliver’s Quentin Blake-style cover for this book was illustrated by Mark Beech, who we mentioned in our Only You Can Save Mankind episode. He has illustrated the covers for the newest editions of all Terry’s non-Discworld children’s books, as well as the recent collections of his very early stories – including the upcoming The Time-Travelling Caveman, due out in September this year. David Walliams’ books are rather less like Blake-like, and are illustrated inside and out by Tony Ross.
You can find Liz’s essay “Grave Concerns“ from February 2020 online at Kill Your Darlings.
Johnny Maxwell’s other adventures include saving the alien Scree-Wee fleet (Only You Can Save Mankind; see #Pratchat28), seeing “a Loch Ness Monster” in his goldfish pond, finding a lost city of the Incas behind Tesco’s, meeting the dead (all of those mentioned from this book) and the not-spoiled-here adventures of Johnny and the Bomb.
We previous talked about the hidden nature of supernatural things, particularly in British fantasy, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“. The TARDIS perception filter is a modern application from Doctor Who, explaining why people don’t notice the TARDIS even when a 1960s British Police Box doesn’t exactly fit in with its surroundings. (It looks like that because it’s chameleon circuit changes its outward form to blend in, but malfunctioned upon landing in 1963, causing it to become stuck. Now the Doctor likes it that way.)
Beetlejuice is a 1988 comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton. It stars Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as a young couple who die in a car accident and subsequently haunt their own house, forced to deal with the annoying new owners and a highly bureaucratic afterlife. The Handbook for the Recently Deceased is supposed to help them adjust but raises as many questions as it answers. Michael Keaton also stars at the titular Betelgeuse, a crude, wise-cracking “bio-exorcist” ghost who is an expert on scaring the living, while Winona Ryder plays goth girl Lydia, who befriends the nice dead people.
“Doorbelling” is the practice of ringing someone’s doorbell and then running away before they answer, as a prank. The Pratchat team have never done such a thing, of course.
“Thriller” was the title track from Michael Jackson’s sixth studio album, released in 1982. The single, released in late 1983 in the UK (early 1984 in the US), featured an extended music video directed by John Landis (of An American Werewolf in London fame) that featured Jackson becoming undead and dancing with a horde of Romero-esque zombies. The song also famously features a spoken-word section voiced by classic horror film star Vincent Price.
The Satanic panic was an outbreak of moral panic over supposed Satanistic abuse. It began in America, inspired in part by the publication Michelle Remembers, a biography based on “recovered memories” of child abuse linked to Satanic rituals. The book’s claims could not be verified by multiple journalists and investigators. It was followed a few years later by some highly publicised trials, Senate hearings and conspiracy theories that resemble McCarthy-era communist witch hunts. The panic particularly targeted Dungeons & Dragons and, later, heavy metal music, and by the 1990s had spread to other countries.
The West Memphis Three were three teenagers convicted in 1994 of the killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Tennessee in 1993. The investigation, trial and conviction were all highly controversial, including the claim that the teenagers were engaged in Satanic rituals. In 2011, after even some of the victims’ families protested that the men were innocent, they were released from prison, using the unusual “Alford plea” (in brief, they pled guilty to lesser charges but were still allowed to profess their innocence). To answer Liz’s question: the first edition of Johnny and the Dead was published on May 27, 1993, only three weeks after the crime was committed, so Pratchett couldn’t have heard of it while writing it.
The Beatle who left before they got famous is drummer Pete Best. He joined them in 1960 (when they were still “The Silver Beatles”) for their Hamburg tour, and was fired in 1962 by producer Brian Epstein at the request of John, Paul and George, who later regretted the way they handled it. He failed to find another successful band and left the music industry for twenty years, before an interest in the early history of the band finally made him famous and he formed his own band. He’s active on Twitter, and recently replied to a tweet from the official Beatles account asking “Do you remember the first time you ever heard a Beatles song?” with: “Yeah, I was playing on it.”
As Liz mentions, the Queen Victoria Market was built on top of the site of the Old Melbourne Cemetery. The bodies buried underneath still cause problems with modern plans for the expansion or development of the markets. There’s plenty been written about the cemetery; you could start with the cemetery’s official page on the City of Melbourne web site.
Public housing in Melbourne was in the news around the time of our recording this episode, as three prominent public housing estates were locked down with police presence and little notice after major outbreaks of COVID-19 were traced there. Much criticism was levelled at the Victorian state government for their police-first response, and the fact that they had ignored previous requests for assistance from residents, who had already realised that the cramped conditions and inadequate cleaning of common areas were exposing them to much greater risk of infection. As in the UK, public housing in Australia is an essential service that has suffered from neglect.
“Ryan from the O.C.ing” refers to Ryan Atwood, the main protagonist of 2000s teen drama The O.C., played by the other Ben McKenzie. Ryan is a rough kid from Chino, who steals a car and is abandoned by his mother after being arrested. He’s adopted by the lawyer representing him, and moves to Orange County, where he slowly reforms and adapts to his new surroundings.
Harry Houdini (1874-1926), born Erik Weisz, is probably the most famous stage magician in history. He performed many escapes that resemble Mr Vicenti’s final trick, though he died of peritonitis. Will Alma (1904-1993), born Oswald George William Bishop, was not only a magician, but also a maker of magical apparatus and a magical historian. The name doesn’t appear to have any direct connection to Houdini, but the WG Alma Conjuring Collection, held by Melbourne Museum, is famous and has occasionally been displayed. Pratchett could perhaps have seen it during one of his many trips to Melbourne.
Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian Bombshell”, was a singer, dancer and movie star from the 1930s through to the 1950s. After finding fame in Rio, she moved to Broadway and then to Hollywood. In 1943 she starred in the Busby Berkely film The Gang’s All Here, wearing a costume that included a number of fruit hats, which became her trademark. It’s important to note, however, that Miranda was not herself Brazilian, but a Portuguese woman who emigrated to Brazil with her family as a baby. This makes her one in a depressingly long list of white folks who have gained fame for their expression of BIPOC cultures, though in Miranda’s case she was at least beloved by many Brazilians and inspired a new surge in national pride and interest in traditional samba.
Suffragettes were women devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage, i.e. the right and ability of women to vote in democratic elections. While the term became widespread and used across the world, it originally applied to the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU was founded in the UK in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, ten years after New Zealand became the first country to extend voting rights to women. They had to fight hard, going beyond loud public protests to chaining themselves to railings inside the houses of parliament and, when imprisoned, staging hunger strikes. Mrs Liberty is clearly inspired by Emily Davidson, who in 1913 ran onto the course at the Epsom Derby to gain publicity for the movement, and tried to grab the reins of the King’s horse. She was struck by the horse and died from her injuries. The suffragette movement paused at the start of the war in 1914, and in the UK partial suffrage was gained for women over 30 in 1918; it wasn’t until 1928 that women in the UK won the same voting rights as men.
Edward VIII, aka “Edward the Abdictator“, was indeed a famous womaniser. In January 1936, his father died and he became King. He was already the source of scandal as he was in a relationship with Wallis Simpson, a divorced American still married to her second husband, and his behaviour as King caused further controversy. When he revealed his plans to marry Simpson in November, the Church of England and the governments of the UK and Commonwealth nations were outraged at what this would mean for the succession. Edward abdicated to avoid constitutional crisis, having been King for less than a year, and married Simpson, becoming Duke of Windsor. While he should be afforded some sympathy, it is also worth remembering that he harboured pro-Nazi or at least pro-fascist sentiments, and was friendly with Adolf Hitler in the lead up to World War II. History does not seem to record him as being “particularly large”, lending weight to Liz’s later comment.
Ben remembers correctly that Edward VIII is played by Guy Pearce in the 2010 film The King’s Speech, in which George VI (Colin Firth) seeks help from Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) to overcome a stammer and deliver a live radio announcement of the declaration of World War II. Other actors who have played Edward VIII include Oliver Dimsdale (Downton Abbey), Alex Jennings (The Crown seasons 1 and 2) and non less a personage than Derek Jacobi (The Crown season 3).
For more on gravestones and their epitaphs as the only evidence of someone’s life, Ben recommends episode 110 of The Allusionist podcast, “Engraving part 1: Epitaph“.
Pals battalions were indeed a real thing during World War I. One of the most famous examples was the “Gimsby Chums”, a group of nearly one thousand young men from Grimsby, Lincolnshire and its surrounding towns. 810 of them died during the war.
Royal protocol does seem to dictate that two potential heirs to the throne may not fly together, to avoid a succession crisis should the plane be lost. In a similar fashion, the President and Vice-President of the United States never fly together on Airforce One.
Nominative determinism is the idea that a person’s name subtly influences their interests and decisions in life, explaining why some people have names appropriate to their occupations or achievements. This is the opposite of how things worked prior to the 14th century, when European names were only hereditary for nobility. Common folk instead took a name from a parent (e.g. Williamson, Sigridsdottir) – a tradition that persists in some Scandinavian countries – or their profession (e.g. Smith, Cooper, Fletcher or Carpenter).
Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease responsible for around two-thirds of dementia cases. It usually occurs in those over the age of 65, and proceeds faster as it progresses, affecting memory, causing death in less than a decade. It is still relatively poorly understood; the causes are uncertain and there is no effective treatment. Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with a variant of Alzheimer’s, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), unusually early, with the disease affecting him from the age of 56. PCA attacks the posterior part of the brain first, causing primarily physical and vision-related symptoms while leaving cognitive ability and memory intact. He referred to the condition as his “embuggerance”, and was able to continue working until not long before his death in March 2015.
The Onion article about George R R Martin referenced by Liz is from their spin-off site, the clickbait parody Clickhole: “When I Started Writing ‘Game of Thrones’, I Didn’t Know What Horse Looked Like“.
Rod Serling was the creator and host of the science fantasy anthology TV show The Twilight Zone. The original series ran from 1959 to 1964, and each episode had an intro and outro narrated by Serling, who also wrote many of the scripts. There was a Hollywood movie based on four of the TV episodes in 1983, and revived series in 1985, 2002 and 2019, none of which were hosted by Serling. It may have been repeated on television in the early 1990s in the UK, as many 50s and 60s series were; otherwise it’s a bit weird that Johnny knows who Serling is…
Roald Dahl was a prolific and beloved children’s author from the UK, whose most famous works include Charlie and Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda and The Witches. His books were illustrated by Quentin Blake. In The Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular chicken thief is hunted by three farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean.
The Returned and Services League – not “Returned Servicemen’s League” – is an Australian organisation formed in 1916 dedicated to the welfare of current and retired military personnel. They’re best known to many Australians for the licensed RSL Clubs which are social hubs in many rural and regional towns. Mr Atterbury belongs to the similar Royal British Legion, or British Legion for short, founded in 1921.
David Attenborough is the famous wildlife presenter and international treasure. Ben can’t find the English actor he imagined when thinking of Mr Atterbury, but he looks a bit like John Hillerman, the Texan actor who played the British Army Sergeant Major Jonathan Higgins in Magnum, P.I. (If you have any suggestions, please send them in!)
Cobbers is clearly a spoof of popular Australian soap opera Neighbours and/or Home and Away. It’s also mentioned in Only You Can Save Mankind.
“The Village Green Preservation Society” was the leading and title track on The Kinks‘ sixth studio album, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. A great cover by English folk singer Kate Rusby was recorded in 2006 as the theme song for the BBC sit-com Jam & Jerusalem. It was a bonus track on her 2007 album Awkward Annie.
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) is Jules Verne’s 1872 adventure novel in which precise and reserved English gentleman Phileas Fogg attempts to win a bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days, assisted by his newly hired French valet Passepartout. Neither of them are ghosts, so they travel via train and steamship. (Despite what you might think, they don’t travel in a balloon; that was added for the 1956 film starring David Niven, and has become a fixture of later adaptations, including the 2004 Disney version starring Steve Coogan as Fogg, and Jackie Chan as Passepartout. The award-winning 2014 interactive fiction game 80 Days, available on mobile phones, is great.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is Joe Dante’s 1990 sequel to his classic 1984 horror comedy Gremlins. The sequel is much more cartoony – in one sequence, quite literally – and makes heavy use of parody, including poking fun at its predecessor. Notably, the film is set inside “Clamp Tower”, a skyscraper in New York owned by Donald Clamp (John Glover), a parody of both Donald Trump and Ted Turner.
In October 2016, developers demolished the Corkman Irish Pub in Carlton without seeking building or planning permission. The pub was originally the Carlton Inn, and was one of the oldest buildings in Carlton, built in 1856, and while not heritage listed, it was protected by heritage rules. The developers were fined more than $1.3 million in 2019 after failing to rebuild the pub as promised. They later appealed these fines, which were reduced, and the Victorian Planning Minister dropped the requirement for them to rebuild the pub, allowing them to seek permission to build a 12-storey apartment building (easily worth far more than the fines). There were calls in 2019 for the government to compulsorily acquire the site, but no more recent update.
Skinhead subculture first emerged in the UK in the 60s, and went through a revival in the 1980s, initially as part of punk. By the 90s, skinhead culture became associated with far-right, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi ideals, and spread across Europe, though there’s also an anarchist strain which is usually anti-fascist and anti-racist. neo-Fascist skinheads are famously depicted in the films American History X (1998) and Romper Stomper (1992), among many others.
Boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson famously bit off part of rival Evander Holyfield’s ear in their re-match fight in 1997. Tyson actually bit both of Holyfield’s ears during the fight, and claimed it was in retaliation for Holyfield headbutting him in the first round. Tyson was fined $3 million (US) and had his boxing license revoked, but got it back the next year.
In case you’re listening to this in the far future, this episode was recorded during the second six-week lockdown of Melbourne due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. It followed a second major outbreak of community transmissions in the state, contrasted with relatively low case numbers in the rest of the country. Not long after the recording, Melbourne moved from stage 3 to a new stage 4 level of restrictions, which included mandatory mask wearing in public, the closure of a broader range of businesses, and a curfew.
By “special alphabet“, Liz means a spelling alphabet, sometimes called a phonetic alphabet: a list of distinctive words, one for each letter, used in aviation, military and other radio communications to avoid confusion when spelling out vital information verbally. The current English spelling alphabet was standardised in 1969.
The famous flying cars Liz mentions are the hover-converted DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future (and the sequel), Greased Lightnin’, the Ford convertible from Grease which flies at the end, and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the magical car created by Ian Flemying for the book (and later film, adapted by Roald Dahl) of the same name.
Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian children’s author whose books have often tackled serious topics. His second novel, 1990’s Two Weeks with the Queen, was about Colin, an Australian twelve-year-old who visits London and tries to break into Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to help find a good doctor for his brother, who is being treated for cancer back home. The only sympathetic adult he meets is Ted, a gay Welshman whose partner is dying of AIDS. The book was controversial at the time.
The term “political correctness” began in the 70s and 80s as a way to satirise overly cautious language, but it is now often used as a pejorative to describe any language designed to avoid offensive or be more inclusive.
Oliver mentioned A. F. Harrold, an English poet, performer and children’s author. The first of his so far twelve novels for children, Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (and Joined the Library), was published in 2012.
The practice of adding reversed sounds to audio recordings is called backmasking. Pioneered by The Beatles, who used reversed musical instruments to create unique sounds on their album Revolver, the 1980s Satanic panic claimed that rock bands were using backmasking to hide Satanic messages, and that they could be understood subconsciously. These claims may have been inspired by the film The Exorcist (1973), in which a girl possessed by a demon speaks gibberish which, when reversed, reveals a message from Satan.
Johnny and the Dead was published in 1993, the same year as Men at Arms (see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“), and the year before Soul Music (#Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“), Interesting Times (#Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“) and Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“).
We talked a lot more about Neil Gaiman in our episode about Good Omens, the book he co-authored with Pratchett; that was #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)“. American Gods, published in 2001, is one of his most popular novels, and now also a television series. It tells the story of ex-convict Shadow Moon, who is caught up in a war between old and new gods over America. The Graveyard Book (2008) is a young adult novel about Nobody, a toddler wanders into a graveyard following the murder of his family, and is subsequently raised by ghosts.
We previously talked about Steven King’s famous 1983 novel Pet Semetary in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“. It’s been filmed twice – once in 1989, and again in 2019.
Gogglebox is a UK reality TV show which films the reactions of families and other groups as they watch television. It debuted in 2013, and has been replicated in many other countries – first of all Australia, where it is soon to return for its twelfth season since 2015. The title comes from a British and Australian slang term for television.
The Mary Celeste was an American merchant ship – a brigantine, if we want to get specific – discovered deserted in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores Islands in 1872. It was bound for Genoa in Italy, but when it was found all the crew were missing, their belongings and the ship’s cargo left behind, the sails still rigged, and the ship’s log empty for ten days. The crew were never seen again, and no-one has been able to discover their fate. As listener Steve Leahy remarked on Twitter, the 1966 Doctor Who serial The Chase explained the mystery by claiming the Doctor’s TARDIS briefly landed on board while being chased by Daleks in their own time machine; the crew leapt overboard to escape the aliens.
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, about 25km North of Terry Pratchett’s home in Broad Chalke. It dates back over 5,000 years, though the famous standing stones are not quite as old as that. The site itself is a burial mound and was clearly significant for many thousands of years, but the standing stones are a long-standing mystery. How and why the ancient Britons built it is uncertain, as the larger stones would have taken incredible effort and ingenuity to carve and move, and the smaller stones seemed to come from 200km away in Wales. A recent paper, publicised between this episode being recorded and released, has revealed that the larger stones come from 25km North of Stonehenge and must have been moved on purpose.
The Loch Ness Monster is a famous cryptid, sometimes claimed to be a marine reptile like a Plesiosaur, supposed to live in Loch Ness, a large lake in the Scottish Highlands. While some earlier sources have been cited, it first came to the world’s attention when a sighting was reported in July 1933. You’ve probably seen the famous “surgeon’s photograph” of 1934, but while it was touted as proof until the 1990s, it is now known to have been a hoax.
Oliver recommended his books Con-Nerd and Super Con-Nerd for fans of Johnny Maxwell.
Ben mentioned the other Pratchett and Discworld podcasts out there; the oldest active one is Radio Morpork, which launched in August 2015. Like most of the others it’s a read-through of the Discworld books in order, and at the time of writing has done up to Thud! (That puts them about a year ahead of us, if such a thing can be measured easily.) There are several other newer ones, including The Truth Shall Make You Fret and The Compleat Discography. Ben maintains a list of Discworld read-throughs on Podchaser, and this list of all Pratchett-related podcasts on the L-Space wiki. Let us know what you think of them if you listen – we deliberately limit our listening of other commentaries, so we can go into our discussions fresh.

A bonus note: Ben was sure he used the phrase “life is wasted on the living” in this episode, but didn’t spot it during the editing process. In any case, it originates with Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (it appears in the second radio series and also in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Like many things he wrote that people see as deep, it’s a joke. Said by one of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s dead ancestors during a seance when disappointed with Zaphod, it satirises the cliche “youth is wasted on the young”. The original phrase is usually (though possibly not accurately) attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who supposedly said “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world—and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

08/06/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

#Pratchat34 – Only You Can Save Deadkind

08/08/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz and Ben (who suffered from microphone issues this episode) introduce children’s author Oliver Phommavanh to the world of Pratchett with Johnny Maxwell’s return, in 1993’s Johnny and the Dead.

Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell is enduring Phase Three of the Trying Times between his parents, which involves living with his Mum at his Grandad’s place. His shortcut home from school takes him through an old rundown cemetery, where he knocks on a tomb door – and discovers he can see dead people. As Johnny gets to know them, the dead discover the Council has sold their cemetery for development – and they want Johnny to put a stop to it. While the gang delve into the history of Blackbury and discover a whole new side to their boring hometown, the dead begin to wonder if there might be more to life after life – earning the disapproving scowl of Mr Eric Grimm…

Content note: this episode contains discussion of (fictional) suicide, from around 1:34:00 to 1:40:00. If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Johnny Maxwell and (most of) his friends are back, this time dealing with the mundane as well as the fantastical. Touching on themes of history, tradition, belief and capitalism, Pratchett makes a very different kind of “boy sees dead people” story as Johnny tries to save the local cemetery. There’s lots of Pratchett philosophy in here, like his well-known positive attitude towards death as a part of life. It’s also full of his trademark little jokes and asides, some of which feel very, well…early nineties.

So what do you think? Has this aged well since 1993? Do the lessons about the past and present, living and dead still ring true? Do the trials and tribulations of a small English town translate to 2020 and wherever you live? Use the hashtag #Pratchat34 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Oliver Phommavanh is a children’s author, teacher and stand-up comedian based in Sydney. He’s written ten books, including the semi-autobiographical Thai-riffic and Con-Nerd, both of which have sequels. His next book the short story collection Brain Freeze, due out in September 2020. (Please consider supporting your local bookshop by ordering his books from them!) You can find out more about Oliver at his web site, oliverwriter.com, and find him on Instagram and Twitter as @oliverwinfree.

Next month we’re celebrating National Science Week in Australia by reading Pratchett’s collaboration with science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld! We’ll be joined by science communicator and chemist Anna Ahveninen of the Australian Academy of Science! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat35 by science week, which starts August 15, 2020.

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

#Pratchat33 – Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids

08/07/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz, Ben and writer Michelle Law go on a surprisingly dark ride in Pratchett’s skewed take on the “Pied Piper”, 2001’s Discworld for Younger Readers book, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

Everyone knows that the best way to get rid of a plague of rats is to pay the Piper. Even Maurice, and he’s a talking cat. So when he met a Clan of similarly smart talking rats, all he needed was a stupid-looking kid who could play, and he had the makings of the perfect con. But the rats (and the kid) are smart enough to decide that what they’re doing is unethical. Maurice convinces them to pull one last scam in a tiny Überwald town. But all is not well in Bad Blintz: the mayor’s daughter immediately sees there’s something odd about Maurice and the kid, and the town is convinced they already have a plague of rats – but the Clan can’t find a single one…

After two trilogies of children’s books set in our own world, and before he invented Tiffany Aching, Pratchett tried getting kids into the Discworld with a story of talking animals, plucky kids…and unspeakable evil. The Amazing Maurice explores some weighty ethics, punctures the safety of Enid Blyton, questions the lessons taught by the Brothers Grim, and goes to some very dark places, metaphorically and literally. All born out of a jokey footnote he wrote for Reaper Man a decade before!

Is this really a children’s book? Would you let your kids read it? Is it a terrible mistake, or is it maybe the greatest book Pratchett ever wrote? And most importantly: what’s your rat name? Use the hashtag #Pratchat33 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Michelle Law is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and actor based in Sydney. Her work includes the 2017 smash hit play Single Asian Female, the SBS TV series Homecoming Queens and contributed to numerous magazines and books. Michelle’s next play will be Miss Peony for Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, and she has a story in the anthology After Australia from Affirm Press. You can find out more about Michelle at her web site, michelle-law.com, and follow her on Twitter at @ms_michellelaw.

Next month we complete our hat-trick of Pratchetts for younger readers by returning to the English town of Blackbury to catch up with Johnny Maxwell in 1993’s Johnny and the Dead! We’ll be joined by children’s author Oliver Phommovanh! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat34 by July 21st 2020.

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