Discworld Documentary

in a distant and secondhand set of dimensions in an astral plane that was never meant to fly the curling star Mists waver and part great at you in the turtle comes swimming slowly through the interstellar Gulf through eyes that are crusted with asteroid dust he stares fixedly at the destination in a brain bigger than a city with geological slowness he thinks only of the weight most of the weight is accounted for by the four giant elephants upon whose shoulders the disc rests garlanded by the long waterfall of its vast circumference this is the disc World in 1987 a man armed with nothing more than a hat a beard and a typewriter wrote a book it was a book about a wizard a book about death a book about insurance bar brawls and the first ever tourist it was called the color of magic and it was the first dis World novel and now 14 years 26 books and 2,148 bottles of wine later this man is known globally he is of course Mr Terry pret obbe I came up with the idea I suppose in the early 80s when there was a huge fantasy boom uh and there was a lot of bad Fantasy around there was some good stuff but it was a lot of cliched fantasy and I thought it was about time to have some fun with it pretty much in the same way that Douglas Adams had some fun with science fiction in the mid 7s so it began as a a simple parody of both the good and the bad fantasy that was around and then it just kept going and and became sort of fantasy in its own right I like doing it the reward to myself for finishing a book finishing a book is always a tedious business is to be allowed to start another one so the cycle goes round and round and round Stephen Briggs phoned me up and said he'd like to make a play of I think it was weird sisters um and I said I completely insane but yeah fine sure I'll let me come along Terry came to see weird sisters and um they did and it was good and people laughed and they had an audience the kind of people that they didn't normally get and so they said um can we try more I said yeah fine wonderful lovely and so it went home at the time he was just in the beginning of discussions about a film of mort which as it turns out hasn't happened and is still in sort of know production hell but I said him it's a real pity you're going to do this film of mort because we just had this experience with Tom Sharp and I guess it'll all be embargoed and we were to do it as a play and he said no no no no he said if you want to do it you do it now what difference is a group of amateurs doing a play in a 9 Theater going to make to any kind of International Film she said go ahead and do it so we started doing M and this kind of a friendship has built up and um yeah that's it it's always been like like most things in my life it was completely unplanned it just happened and I just emailed him and and said here's an idea you might want to run away with why you do a disco companion I'm sure there's enough stuff there now for for you to have one I hadn't got any idea of writing it and he just came back and said are you suggesting you ought to do it um and I sort of stopped and thought I've got no idea at all what's involved in indexing a large series of books but I thought this is obviously one of those big decisions so I said yeah I'll have a go and he said if you do it it's not having a go it's got to be done properly because if you don't do it properly it'll kill it Stone de for publishers but he said I'd like to start by mapping ank more por and I forget stuff and I rely on him to to to tell me in fact the current manuscript is with him and I've said look just check that I'm doing it right I think I am you know someone goes along this street and they turn the corner do they end up in that street you know it looks to me that's how it is Terry was just around and used to listen to radio Bristol and he he really liked the kind of humor that I was presenting and then later on when he saw the kind of things that I was doing on the television he became a bit of an offici Ardo just as I was of him and so when the idea came up for Random House to put the books on tape he said they asked him who would be his choice and he said me which is just one of the most flattering things that's ever happened to me and now we come to the part of the show where we look at your top six and a half disc World characters the Grim squeaker yay uh it's a little creature that comes up when when death decides to retire and all the death in the world has to try and find its own like identity and the death of rats turns just it's just made out of the minds of rats what rats think death looks like he was created for a specific plot reason and then I had this picture of you know the tiny tiny little robe and and and the little bony nose coming up which was instantly a funny image he's like he's like death's pet isn't he he's funny I love to I love have have a little pet pet death rat that be funny he cool Grio is Nanny 's cat it's a gray ball of fluff it's evil bloody minded little thing that is just nasty nasty nasty oh you have to love gbo don't you oh gbo the evil cat evil cat with one eye there's nothing special about G I think he got a lot of extra fans when when he the power to turn into a human being in in states of emergency seems to be linked to almost every generation of cats in the entire Ram toop mountains um but nanog doesn't see him 40 years I have a friend like nanog she's lovely when you suddenly get to a bit of a book and you realize that she's there you kind of go r a bit don't you even though you know that uh she would be a terror if she was in the same room as you too many children but somehow seems to be just muddling through life and just generally having a good time even though she's getting on a bit probably one of the most lwd characters on the disc world really um you actually need to think a bottle or two to think like nny uh the liberan I believe he's he's a monkey or or a gorilla but he hates being called a monkey if he gets called a monkey he just gets stressed out and um start attempted to kill people okay he's an a that's right yeah he beats people up monkey oh what a great moment that was when I came up with him I just wanted something funny to turn a librarian into time yay I like the librarian the librarian's good fun I think it's a really interesting and fun concept to have a librarian that's a primate he's a just a really violent ape living in the library plus he's kind of C rincewind rincewind is one of the Wizards um he's not the brightest wizard on the disc world I I believe um I just who spells wizard w i z a r d please he's just a silly card gets things a little wrong occasionally and tends to screw up but he just seems to he seems to be the most important wizard out of anyone I can see he is to meet weird and interesting characters as he as he usually runs away from situations um he's a useful character to have around but he's not one that I personally rate very highly I've never really got rinn totally I mean Mo for most people he's he he's the character who started off the disc World Series um he's he's the character that got them into it in the first place rincewind is a top Geer what can I tell you about rincewind I I think he probably lives in in this flat the L the luggage is like my my videotape recorder it's it can consume everything it's totally remorseless listen it's just is kind of it's this chest with you know with loads of kind of legs and it just seems to be indestructible and it just follows him around what I don't like about luggage is he's a real bugger to try and do on stage they're quite cute because people just get really really scared by like wow what's that travel accessory um Vince SP and the luggage have become sort of icons for the whole series in fact they don't feature very much people like the luggage because it has no rules it just attacks things and and you don't know what it's thinking and creeps up behind people and it's more or less indestructible and I think people enjoy that tends to eat people that it doesn't like and follows rincewind everywhere it's very cute I I could do with one of those cuz I'm constantly leaving my my lugage everywhere he's a great character and he he he turned up in color of magic just for the purposes of a joke death is um this huge 8ot skeleton in a black cloak with a huge side that rises White Horse Called Binky it was the first thing that really attracted me to disc world was this concept of a 7 foot talking skeleton that looks like the medieval version of death but liked Curry and cats and cared about people and was confused about what he was doing it's just so outrageous you don't expect death to have a personality and he's like got family problems and that and it's just abely silly the fact that he can't quite understand human beings and he's constantly trying to find out what makes them tick is also interesting because this is not the death we've been led to expect but no one's kind of characterized death as this kind of lonely man doing this kind of uh day-to-day grueling job one of the things that Terry does best and it probably comes from the fact that he worked as a journalist for such a long time is he's very good about people and their jobs particularly men and their jobs and there was something I think very inspiring about the fact that he saw death not in terms of some great metaphysical power but someone who is lumbered with the craist job in the whole world it's always impossible to tell precisely why a series is as popular as it is if we knew that we'd all be millionaires because it has depth because it has um a sound but not overstated moral background to it because right always triumphs because the characters are real rather than than just being stereotypes every time I finish a book and it goes out and it gets to number one I think wow I've got away with it one more time and just maybe there'll come a time when I don't I think it's just because he's better than the vast majority of other fantasy writers there was an article in the Daily Telegraph at the end of last year saying Terry packet sells so well because uh all his fans are 14-year-old boys called Kevin and I mentioned this at a at a literary Festival I went to and this elderly lady with white hair in the front row stood up and said I'd like to announce that I am Kevin and someone else stood up and said no I am Kevin and one bloke bless him who knew exactly how it should go stood up and said no I am Kevin and so is my wife orangutans failed Wizards drunken witches suspicious sausages in the bun despite the anti- fantasy prejudices of the publishing world and the literary press this world has gone on to become one of of the world's great success stories I don't suppose we'll ever know how that truly happened perhaps it's the beard but I think we can safely say that so long as Terry pratchet keeps on writing the disc world will keep getting more and more popular until who knows one day it might actually [Music] exist

Channel: Sharon Jennings

Views: 20,828

Keywords: Discworld (Literary Series), Documentary (TV Genre), Terry Pratchett (Author), Discworld (Fictional Universe), Discworld, Fantasy, Terry Pratchett, Interview

Id: kVj7uC-kc8A

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2015