Pratchat - a Terry Pratchett and Discworld book club

By: Splendid Chaps Productions
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  • Summary

  • Join writer Elizabeth Flux and comedian Ben McKenzie on their six(ish) year mission to read every Terry Pratchett novel – not just the Discworld ones! They’ll read one a month, and discuss them with special guests, puns and footnotes. Episodes released on the 8th of each month (Australian time); check pratchatpodcast.com and the end of each episode for notice of the next book, and send in questions to us via social media! The explicit tag represents a fairly average Australian level of coarse language.
    Elizabeth Flux and Ben McKenzie
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Art Comedy & Humour Literary History & Criticism Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • This Time for Ankh-Morpork (Unseen Academicals)

    This Time for Ankh-Morpork (Unseen Academicals)
    Jan 7 2025
    Liz and Ben are joined by guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) to chat about fashion, faith, food...oh, and football. Yes, join us for an episode that goes well into extra time (i.e. it’s over 3 hours long) as we discuss Terry Pratchett's 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals. The Wizards of Unseen University are still recovering from the Dean’s defection to become Archchancellor of rival Brazeneck College, but they have a bigger problem: if they don’t field a foot-the-ball team, they’ll lose the bequest that supplies most of their dinners. But the sport has become lawless and violent - a game of the streets in which matches last long into the night and players die. And then there’s the fans... But something’s in the air. The game’s about to change, and at the centre of it are an unlikely quartet of junior University staff: Glenda the sensible baker; beautiful and fashion-conscious Juliet; Trev, son of the game’s greatest player; and Mr Nutt, a goblin who’s good at everything - except explaining who and what he is... The last of the Discworld books to “star” the wizards, and the longest in the series by a fair margin, Unseen Academicals repeatedly says that it isn’t really about football. And, indeed, there’s a lot else going on: new ways for both dwarfs and trolls to express their femininity; the internal voices which hold us back from reaching our potential; the struggle between progress and fairness, of power and the people. And at the heart of it, four brand new characters who represent a side of Ankh-Morpork we don’t usually see in our protagonists: the regular people, caught up in the Shove. What did you think of Unseen Academicals? Does it have enough football in it, or too much? What are your favourite takes on orcs? What other sports would you like to see come to the Discworld? And do you know where we can get a megapode? Shout out from the Shove using the hashtag #Pratchat83! Guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy and cosy crime. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Tansy recently reprinted her “Teacup Magic” series of cosy mysteries, and her newest novel is the time travel comedy Time of the Cat. You can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media; you’ll also find her in our previous live episodes: “A Troll New World” (from Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019) and “Unalive from Überwald” (from Nullus Anxietas IX in 2024). You can find episode notes and errata on our web site. Next month we’re looking at a stack of Discworld ephemera - namely both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! If you’ve read any of those, please send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat84.
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    3 hrs and 17 mins
  • Clack Go the Gears (Clacks board game)

    Clack Go the Gears (Clacks board game)
    Dec 7 2024
    Puzzlers and previous guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung return to play and discuss Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw's 2015 board game Clacks, based on Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal. Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig has come up with a plan to prove the Ankh-Morpork postal service is still relevant - a race against the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company! The Grand Trunk has a monopoly on the “Clacks”, a system of optical telegraph towers which transmit messages using patterns formed by a grid of six lights - surely they can beat a man on a horse? But the Grand Trunk knows Moist has something up his sleeve, and they’re taking no chances - the fastest and best new Clacks operators will have to prove they’re worthy of the job by racing each other first... The fifth (and so far final) Discworld board game, Clacks is the second Discworld design by Boyd and Brashaw’s BackSpindle games (following Guards! Guards!). Clacks turns the race at the climax of Going Postal into a logic puzzle where up to four players must use punch cards to turn patterns of lights on and off in a grid, hoping to form another pattern which equates to a letter in Clacks code. It’s a race to finish your word (or words) first, either against each other, or as a team against Moist von Lipwig - but sharing the same grid of lights makes this puzzle very unpredictable. Is it Discworldy enough? Does it feel like the Clacks technology of the books? Do you find it fun or funny, and do you prefer it collaborative or cooperative? And what else would you play to get your logic puzzle fix? Oh, and if you want to try making the longest sentence you can out of our Clacks words, the ones we drew were SHINE, SONKY, MAGIC, URIKA, ADORA, TOMAS, GUILD, QUIRM, RUFUS, GROAT, MONKS, GNOME, PIXIE, TROLL, TURVY, ANDRE, AHMED, CELYN, THIEF and KLOTZ. Let us know how you went using the hashtag #Pratchat82. Guest Nicholas J Johnson is an author, magician, educator and expert in deception, who goes by the nickname "Australia's Honest Con-Man". You can find details of Nick's shows and workshops, including his upcoming magic show for children at the 2025 Melbourne Comedy Festival, at conman.com.au, or follow him on Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook as @honestconman. Guest Lawrence Leung is a comedian, screenwriter and actor, known to Australian audiences for live and screen comedy, including the 2015 feature film Sucker, and more recently appearances in My Life is Murder, Aunty Donna’s Comedy Cafe and Time Bandits. For all the latest about Lawrence, including his upcoming research into seances and mediums in Victorian Melbourne, visit lawrenceleung.com, or follow him on Instagram at @mrlawrenceleung. You can find episode notes and errata on our web site. One quick correction: Marc Burrows’ one man show The Magic of Terry Pratchett is on in Adelaide from 21 February to 7 March. See the full notes for details. We’ll be kicking off the new year with one of the few Discworld novels we have left - and why not go large with the longest Pratchett novel of all, Unseen Academicals? We’ll be lacing up our football boots and dusting off our mortarboards alongside returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts! Send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat83.
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    1 hr and 26 mins
  • Only Fowls and Horses (“Hollywood Chickens” and “From the Horse’s Mouth")

    Only Fowls and Horses (“Hollywood Chickens” and “From the Horse’s Mouth")
    Nov 7 2024
    Author and poet* Dr Laura Jean McKay joins Liz and Ben for two of Terry Pratchett’s short stories about intelligent animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (1990) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (1972). In 1973 Hollywood, a truck full of chickens overturned on a busy highway, depositing a population of chickens on the verge. A decade and a half later, scientists try to piece together the story of how they developed and evolved in pursuit of a very specific goal... In the town of Blackbury, rag and bone man Ron is amazed to discover that his carthorse, Johnno, can talk. Will their relationship be forever changed by the adventure they share together? These stories don’t share too much in common beyond being about animals, but they are a nice sample of Pratchett’s writing from two interesting points in his career: towards the end of his early phase of children’s stories for newspapers, not long after his first novel was published; and at the height of his early fame - the year, in fact, that he published five novels. You can find “Hollywood Chickens” most readily in A Blink of the Screen, and “From the Horse’s Mouth” in A Stroke of the Pen. Do you have a favourite Pratchett short story? What do you think of the way he writes animals? Should we have inserted an ad for Maggi noodles into this episode? What are your best horse pun names, and how would you get to the other side? We’d love to hear from you whether you’re a horse, chicken, human or have mutant powers: join the conversation for this episode via email, or by using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media. Dr Laura Jean McKay (she/her) is an author, poet* and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University. Her novel The Animals in That Country - “like Thelma and Louise with a woman and a dingo” - has won multiple awards, including the Arthur C Clarke Award. Her latest book is the short fiction collection Gunflower, published in 2023. You can find Laura as @laurajeanmckay on Twitter and Instagram, and find out more about her books on her website, laurajeanmckay.com.au. * Even if she doesn’t know it. You'll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website, and you can hopefully still get tickets for Guards! Guards! at the Roleystone Theatre in Perth, which opens on 22 November 2024. Next episode we’re back on track to crack the Clacks in the most recent Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us ASAP by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat82 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.
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    1 hr and 57 mins

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Profile Image for Shell. b

brilliant listen

love how have different guest,and everyone has different take on the same subject. keep up the brilliant podcast.

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