The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - The Magic of Terry Pratchett (an interview with Marc Burrows)

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan-Young and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, a glorious bonus episode! We talk to Marc Burrows about his new Pratchett biography - The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Buy The Magic of Terry Pratchett here:Hard copy from the publisherKindle Apple BooksMarc’s online stuff:AskMeAboutTerryPratchett.com@20thcenturymarc (Marc Burrows’ Twitter)Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Other things we blathered on about: Thy Last DropThe Museum of CuriosityNo Such Thing As A FishNigel Planer - IMDb Colin Smythe’s extensive Pratchett-related materials archive

Hey guys, welcome to a special edition of The Truth Shall Make You Threat. Today we're interviewing Mark Burroughs, the author of a superb biography called The Magic of Terry Pratchett. I've put links in the show notes, that's too hard copy and the e-book, because it just happens to be released today, the 30th of July 2020. Anyway, I mention that now because I completely failed to mention it at the start of this episode, which is why I'm so rudely interjecting. It's not that I've got designs on the episode intro or anything, don't worry about that Joanna. But you know, while I'm here, shall we make a podcast? Hello and welcome to a very special edition of The Truth Shall Make You Threat, a podcast in which

we usually read and recap Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I'm Joanna Higgin Young. And I'm Francine Carroll. And today we're doing something a bit different. We've managed to capture a proper expert on Terry Pratchett. Yes, he's ended up on the podcast. Quick note, before we dive in, spoiler warning, obviously normally we're a spoiler-like podcast, but assume heavy spoilers in this episode. Although we will note some time codes if there are any Shepherds Crown spoilers in case you've been listening, coming on the journey with us. Today we are joined by Mark Burroughs. Hello Mark, thank you for joining us. Hiya. Thank you for having me. This is very exciting. We're all very

excited. Mark is the author of, am I right in saying the first full biography of the great man himself, Terry Pratchett? Yeah, there were a couple that I don't think count. But technically, technically there are two of the books you could sort of think of as biographies, but one of them isn't basically a load of press releases stitched together. And the other one isn't a biography. It's one man shouting into the void about his opinions on books. So this is the first one where anyone's made a proper attempt to tell the story of his life and found stuff out that isn't sort of public knowledge and easy. And that makes sense because you are a journalist by trade, am I right? Yes, yeah. I think it's my music journalist mostly.

That's the, most of my writing is about music and culture and occasionally myself. But I'm not a stranger to digging into a library. I'm not a stranger to spending ages in a zen-like state on Google or bugging people for answers and then hating myself when I listen to it back. But Pratchett would have approved, I think, of having somebody with the proper journalistic ethics digging into his past if anyone had to. I think he would, although I think he would have disapproved of the fact that I didn't write any of it in shorthand. There was not a single interview I did in shorthand. I used an app on my phone to record all of my interviews and he would never have stood for that. Apparently he used to give interviews quite a hard time about that. He

used them for cheating and then he would test them on random bits of kind of journalistic copyright law to see if they knew what they were talking about. But yeah, I think I'd hope that he'd be happy that somebody who knew what they were doing was handling it. And you're also a musician, punk musician. Yeah, you said that punk, a punk musician. What do you use that for? Because I nearly said rock and then more specific. I mean, it's all shouty loud guitars really, isn't it? I mean, I'm in a punk band. I can play in other genres. But I just like the way you use punk as like a disclaimer for it. It's not the cello, he's not playing Mozart. Yeah, I'm in a band called The Men That Will Not Be Blame For Nothing that we do sort of shouty Victorian themed punk rock and

should put me down. We would basically be Boyce von Lippwick's favourite band. Absolutely. Yeah, we're very into Victorian shouty punk. Weirdly enough, we have a local band of that exact genre. What are they called? Thy Last Drop. No, I'm not aware of that one. And Victoriana Grimm witchcraft themes. Very good. I'll send you a link. With Shoutsuit and Jumping. And as well as writer, musician, you are a stand up comic as well. So pretty much the Renaissance man. One man Renaissance. Yeah, I'm a one man disappointing Renaissance. I am a master of literally no trades. I get bored easily. And I just like creating things and writing things. And actually, there is a sort of, there's a middle ground between all of those things. Because I

tend to write with humour. I tend to apply a certain amount of storytelling and sort of pathos to my stand up. And the music I make, certainly as a band tends to have more of a storytelling, lyrically, certainly, not necessarily outright comedy, but certainly with tongue-tongued cheeks and a little like trippin' at step. So the things all do kind of overlap, they do sort of make sense. You find much topic overlap or is it kind of overlapping skills rather than? I try and, if I can, I'm going to do a stand up show based on this book because I have the skills to do, which won't be more of a lecture, I suppose. But I'm going to try and make it, I mean, I've got to look into the rights and stuff and see what I am actually

allowed to do. But I try and write, I wrote an article for The Guardian about mental health and about stuff I'd been through. And then I turned that article into a stand up show. So and then me and Andrew O'Neill, the guitarist in our band, who's also a comic, we did a show at the Edinburgh Fringe where we called Andrew O'Neill and Montmore is Do Music and Comedy and Hideous Murders, where we did acoustic songs from our band and then we interspersed it with stand upsets. So we try and, and then we support, you know, me or Andrew often are often in the opening acts, if you come and see us live. And so everything kind of bleeds together a little bit. It's like alt culture cabaret. Yeah, basically, like extremely stupid cabaret. That's the best

find. For anyone who's got super lost and ended up listening to this, could you introduce the subject of our show today? People have come across this podcast because they're really interested in detailed woodwork and an honest approach to it. Yeah, that's, I'd imagine. I've got, I did these extras booklets for my special editions of unedited transcripts of the interviews from the book, it was basically the DVD extras. And I wanted to put, because they look like little magazines, so I wanted to put a quote on the spine, like, like they do with like Empire and Q and things like that. So I put the truth show might you fret as the quote on the spine. So there you go. So I wrote, yeah, I wrote a book. I wrote a biography of Terry Pratchett. It's called The

Magic of Terry Pratchett. It's, like you say, the first proper biography, the first person who's really tackled it. I tell the story of his life, researched through basically spending hours and hours and hours going through old newspapers in various libraries and talking to people who knew him and immersing myself in Terry's head as much as I could for pretty much the last year. And the result, yeah, is is an actual proper real life book that you can hold and smell and preferably read. It's a really good book to read. I haven't got smelly yet because we had a digital version, but it is a very enjoyable read. Thank you. It's one of the drawbacks of the Kindle format. It is. Yeah. I did work out how to convert the PDF to Kindle, though, which was a proud moment.

It's a very satisfying thing to achieve. I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, I have I have written a book. That's my introduction. Terry Pratchett. How did you get some note, Terry Pratchett? How did you come to discover him in the first place? Pretty young? Yeah, really young. I'm despite looking like a 12 year old boy. I'm actually 39. And my parents got given the colour of magic and guards, guards and paperback by very appropriately a bloke down the pub in it must have been like 1992 or 1993 when I was 12, 13. And so I read those they gave me those because they knew that that was my sense of humour and that I liked fantasy. And I devoured them and I didn't stop devouring after that. I just I'd never

I've never looked back. And yeah, I was the kind of card carrying fan in the mid 90s. Well, it's probably from then onwards, basically, ever since I could afford to buy a book in the week it came out, I bought I bought the books the week they came out. I obsessively collected them all and read and reread and reread and reread them. And to the point that some of the particularly some of the earlier ones I've probably read in excess of like 15, 20 times. And yeah, I've just been a massive Terry devotee ever since. Do you remember reading them for the first time? Do you have? Yes, I do very vividly. Mostly I remember the swearing that happened in the first few pages of both books. And there's not that much swearing in Pratchett stuff, like surprisingly little. But

there's a bit in the toward in the first 10 pages of the colour of magic about standing on the top about standing on the top of a hill in a thunderstorm wearing copper armour and shouting all gods are bastards. And when I when you're 12, that is hilarious. And then there's a there's a passage at the beginning of guards guards when basically from the gutter where Vimes talks about how the city is a woman, but she's a bitch, I can't remember the exact phrasing in. And so like, I remember kind of like being awake at night in my bunk bed with my brother asleep, like in the bed below me reading guards guards and kind of having this sense that probably shouldn't be reading something that was quite this rude. And there was quite and I was like this, there's that kind of sense of

this is a little bit more grown up than I'm normally allowed to be. And that'd be really exciting. And then just being I think the thing with those early books, especially is for all that he is parodying and satirizing and poking fun at a certain type of fantasy. He's also writing pretty unabashed fantasy. And you can you can see him really enjoying writing writing fantasy and they get particularly guards guards will just just that the story will carry your way. And you the layers of the jokes you appreciate as you get older. But as a 12 year old boy, I like, I found it superficially very funny and silly, but also, you know, it's a ripping yarn. And so I remember just I devoured those books in a couple of days each. And then once the library and demanded more.

Oh, that's very Pratchett themed, isn't it going to the library and demanding piles of books, please? Yes. And then because that's the one I was reading about his when I was learning about his childhood, that's what he did. He basically discovered reading and then discovered that the library was a place you could go and get as many books as you wanted. And I really, you know, I really charmed with that. That was me as well. I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere. And I went to the library once a week of the librarians name it no be my name. And mostly as that kid that never brings books back on time. But I was, you know, I was I worked my way along the sci fi and fantasy shelves and back and forth and then discovered you're allowed to order books

from other from other libraries. And like the type basically the entire world in the pre internet era, the entire world of every book ever written was available. I remember how massively exciting that is. And Terry had that as well. I really could relate to it. He was younger than me and in the 60s. But it was a very similar feeling, I think that's where l space came from. Oh, very much so. Yeah, exactly. Well, partly partly, I think that's partly where that came from. But also, by the time he invented l space, so what guards guards 1989, he was already very comfortable with network computers by then. So he would have also have had that idea of nodes being connected and information passing between them. So I think there's there's some

that some of that of just libraries and some of that is kind of a proto internet stuff. What's your favorite Pratchett novel? I have to think I'd have a stock answer for this by now because it comes up every interview. But I think my official answer is Night Watch. I think Night Watch is a masterpiece. How far are you along in your podcast? We're just talking about guards guards at the moment. Okay, so right. Because I know you said there'll be spoilers. I'll try not to go for spoilers too much. But I imagine a lot of your listeners will have read ahead. I think I think Night Watch is a masterpiece. I really do. And I think it's it's the start of like this accelerated speed bump in

his writing. But it's also it's such an exciting moving book. And it says so many interesting things. If you watched the news of the last month, and you watched the George Floyd protests in America, the amount of people I saw sharing quotes from Night Watch, because they they they sink perfectly because he understood that that mindset and from both sides of it, both the kind of idiotic side of it and the people sincere need for justice and and decency. And it's yeah that so I think that's the most powerful one. But I have affection for pretty much all of them at some point. I genuinely love most of them. So it depends on the day of the week. But Night Watch is the official answer. And do you have a least favorite worth mentioning? I talk about this in the book.

I think sorcery is the least interesting purely because he didn't really want to write sorcery. Like sorcery came about because after the light fantastic and the color of magic, he tried to write some more interesting stuff and he'd gone down a different a slightly darker route with with equal rights and then mortars of totally different set of characters again. And it has a very different tone. But whenever we met fans, they're all they always asked when he brings Rincewind back when and if you were getting into the books, you automatically start from the beginning. So people knew Rincewind and the luggage and they wanted another Rincewind book. So he wrote one for them. And if you listen to his interviews, if you read his interviews at the

time, when he's supposed to be promoting sorcery, he can barely talk about it. Like he skips along to the books he's working on the moment. Neil Gaiman interviewed him at a convention in in 1989 just before sorcery came out and he was meant to be talking about sorcery. He spent the entire interview talking about pyramids. He starts off by talking about how he didn't really want to write it. And then he goes off and talks about pyramids, which was an idea in his head at the time. It was the thing that he was working on. So I kind of get why it's quite an unsatisfying book. It retreads the character arc from from the light fantastic. Rincewind is basically reset to how he is at the beginning of the light fantastic and goes through exactly the same process again of finding

himself and and having the courage to save the world again. And none of the supporting characters are particularly interesting. And the plot is really convoluted. The most interesting characters in it, Ipslaw and coin are barely you barely get to explore. So I always found that a little bit unsatisfying. That said, sorcery is really funny. Yeah. So it's so you know, there isn't really it's difficult to have a least favorite of a selection of books that is so good. I'm sure if I think about it, those are the ones I don't go back to as much, but I usually find something in them to enjoy. Particularly I reread everything. I like I in preparation for the book, I reread all 60 of Terry's books. And I found something in in pretty much all of

them. I think the Long Earth series dips a bit in the middle. And the unadulterated cat is the kind of thing that you leave on the loo. But not in the kind of last year's Almanac way. No, no, no. Reading. Yeah. Yeah. So I think sorcery is the least satisfying of the novels anyway. I think that makes sense. You never met Pratchett in person, did you? No, I didn't to my eternal regret. I nearly did. My my mate, Dan Shriver, who produced the Museum of Curiosity was the QI spin off radio show, now presents No Such Thing as a Fish, the podcast. I've got the No Such Thing record up on the wall. That's lovely. Me and Dan used to work together. It's a comedy website. We were both involved in

10 years ago now called Comedy Box with John Lloyd, who was the curator of the Museum of Curiosity and the creator of QI and Blackadder and all sorts of other things. And Dan was working on this radio show, the Museum of Curiosity in sort of almost in his spare time. And it was Radio 4. And I knew, because I'd been to a few of them, that if you go down to recording, usually a load of the guests would end up in the pub afterwards around the corner. And so Dan was very excited because he knew what a big Pratchett fan I am. And he was like, you've got to come to this one. It's going to be amazing. And I, this was 2010. And I cannot for the life of me remember why I didn't go. I had no idea. I can't remember anymore. I must have had a good reason. But for

whatever reason, I didn't go. But I kind of console myself by thinking, well, you know, Terry is, he's a bit older now. He's not a well man these days. This is, you know, this is the beginning of his illness. He probably didn't hang around. I imagine he probably got off straight back to his hotel or straight home after the show. And it turned out he actually went to the pub and was there for hours. And they all had a right merry old time. Dan and Rob Wilkins are still friends from having gotten so well that night. And I missed my chance to sit at the table and not just meet somebody in a fan sense or an interview sense as a journalist, but on a kind of person to person, bloke in the pub sense. And I've never, never quite forgiven myself for missing that

opportunity. And I kind of after that didn't really want to go back to that conventional way of meeting somebody. It felt like if I queued up at a signing, compared to the opportunity I'd missed, I would have been, it would have been, it felt unsatisfying. So I never met him and I blew a really, really good opportunity to meet him. That's a real shame. I get they're not wanting to do the kind of half measure after this, at least this way, it is narratively satisfying in like the worst way. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, it's, it gives me a story. And one, another thing I think I have

in common with Terry is a desire to always have a good story. Do you think you were able to be more objective because you didn't know the man in person? Yeah, I do. And that's something I was very keen about doing because if, because obviously I knew that Rob is working on the official biography of Terry, and that's going to come out at some point and it's going to be large, a lot of it's going to be based on Terry's notes. I imagine there'll be, there'll be passages of Terry's writing because he'd been working on his autobiography for a couple of years. And so I knew I was never going to be able to tell a story, the story in that way, because that's always going to be the definitive one. That would be the, the model that

the rest of any of the biography is going to be measured against. So what I wanted to do was to do something that had a lot more sort of journalistic rigour to it. And that really went deep and investigated and tried to find out this kind of very linear journalistic way of looking at his life. And I kind of feel like if I'd have known him a little better, if I'd had, if I'd known him properly, or I'd had some connection, even though I'm very fond of Terry as a sort of, as a figure, as a writer, and what I think I know of him as a person, I'm still not as fond as I would be if I really knew it. And that meant that I could take a step back. And that was important. It would have been more important if I, if there'd been something less, something unpleasant to

point in the book, if I'd found out stories about, I mean, and spoiler alert, there isn't anything. But I had to be free to go there if there was, because it's journalism. I wasn't looking for anything like that or expecting to find it like that he'd been horrible to people or something. But you have to be free to write the truth. The truth is you find it. And because I don't have a connection, it meant that I didn't have any qualms about that. I could tell, I told myself that I was telling the story honestly. And, and whatever came out of that is what came out of it. It's an interesting thought process to think if I did know him, would the book be different? And I honestly don't know. But I think it was important to have that little extra bit of,

of distance. Did it feel, did you have mixed feelings about things like having to fact check him and contradict some of what he said? I was very impressed by the objectivity you showed throughout considering you also made it very clear how much you liked the work. Not really, actually. Partly because I think as much as I'm a fan, I'm also a journalist and a storyteller. So I felt like if I hadn't done my due journalistic diligence, I mean, I'd have been letting him down for a start. There's no way he'd have let me get away with that. You know, he, journalistic integrity was something he held really, really highly. I know what you're referring to, which is that Terry had a tendency in his life to

give his anecdotes a little polish. And it's something I actually really like about him. In the, a lot of the things he said, and if you're a fan, a lot of the stories you've heard quite a lot that he said trotted out in interviews aren't necessarily an accurate representation of what really happened. And I didn't go into those things knowing that. I didn't expect that. Those things kind of became apparent as I went along when I tried to go, okay, I know that this happened to him. So I'm going to go and research this and find the truth out. Like the story that he tells in the introduction to one of his pieces in a blink of a screen about how the Bath Evening Chronicle, he worked in a garden shed on the roof. He just says that, he just

presents that as fact. And he says it twice, he says in another introduction in a slip of the keyboard. So I interviewed some people he worked with at the Bath Evening Chronicle and I kind of asked him about, so I, Terry worked in a garden shed on the roof then and they were baffled by that because, and then you think about it for five seconds and you go, of course he didn't. Of course they didn't put sub editors in sheds on the roof at a major regional newspaper. I know it was the 1970s, but it wasn't the Dark Ages. It makes perfect sense. But he liked creating those stories about himself. And he liked, because he preferred the narrative to be more interesting. And I love that. But also that, so when those things popped up,

actually he starts to really enjoy kind of going, okay, right, what's the truth here? And it gave me a framework for the book because I returned to this point quite a lot of going, look, this is what Terry said happened. This is what I've been able to find out happened. These are the facts as far as I can tell them. Make up your own mind. Which leg of the trousers of time would you like to live in? Because you can choose to believe this or you can choose to believe this or you could take all of this evidence and work out your own version. And that was actually quite joyful. And I actually really liked that. And yeah, so I never felt that I was letting him down or that I was sort of betraying him in any way by looking into those things.

Because first, yeah, like I said, I think he'd appreciate the bit that I was doing proper journalism. And secondly, I don't think he comes out of those stories badly. I think it's understandable. And I like I said, I actually really love that he gave his anecdote that kind of spin and he taught the end of his life. So it's nice to find out the truth. Yeah, as part of being a storyteller. Yeah. And also, he often told contradictory stories anyway. So, you know, if you've got the same anecdote twice from somebody and they've told different and it's been told a different way, then you're itching to find out what the real version is. Did you find that the people you interviewed were happy to be candid about

their time knowing Pratt? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The people who knew him in the past especially, I talked to a couple of people who worked with him in the 60s and the 70s, who were just overjoyed to tell those stories. And you know, they obviously had a lot of affection for him. And remembered really enjoying working with him and were really pleased to tell those stories. And they were all journalists as well. So they were quite happy to get involved and mostly retired journalists. So I suspect they had a lot of time. But you know, people were people were always happy to talk about him. I don't think, you know, if I think if people if anyone wasn't particularly happy to talk about him,

they wouldn't have agreed to be interviewed. I don't think anyone had a grudge or anything. But and a few people did decline because I think they didn't feel comfortable talking about someone they knew well to a ridiculous, like, jobbing writer they'd never heard of, claiming to write some sort of biography. But people people were very honest. I don't think I spoke to anyone who I felt was skirting around issues. And if they were, I was always happy to say like, you know, I into Joe Fletcher, who was his editor at Victor Golland's in the mid 90s, but was a really close friend of his and she knew him for his entire life. And I asked her a little bit about the end of his life. And she just said I'm not I don't really want to talk

about that. It's not something that's very it's you know, it's not it was it was a horrible thing to see. And I, you know, that point you back away, you don't I'm not going to push that push those points. So I let the I let the people who were I was talking to set the agenda. And I just kind of followed them. And everyone was pretty forthcoming. And I think because most of the people in his life loved a good yarn as well. So it worked out quite well. Was there anyone who it really particularly stood out to interview? Um, I really really liked talking to particularly the the guys that from the who worked for the The Bath Even Chronicle, they were really, really nice. And because it was a perspective on him,

I'd never have got like you that that period of Terry's life is undocumented. You got the work he did, you got the articles he wrote, they exist, and you can read them. But if you know where to find them, but he didn't give interviews in that period of his life. When he talked about it in later years, it was a stylized version of it. So I was talking to people like Martin Rainwright and Gerald Walker, who knew him. Tony Bush worked with Terry at the Western Daily Press in 1971, and worked with him on and off until the end of the 70s and knew him really well. And I got, I really wanted to get the sense of time and place about the periods I was talking about. And you could only get by talking to people who were there. And, you know, I got

stories out of them. And, but more than that, I got the sense of what it was really like. And that was really, you know, that was really, really invaluable. So I think those more than someone like Joe Fletcher, who is lovely, a really, really nice person to interview or David Langford, who were really helpful and really helped fill in some gaps. But it was those people who had never, if you Google Terry Pratchett, you might eventually find the names Joe Fletcher and David Langford. You wouldn't find the names Martin Rainwright, Gerald Walker and Tony Bush. And so those are the ones that I really, that were really, really meaningful and really helpful. Although the most fun into, the most fun into I did was with Nigel Plain,

which was probably the least useful of all of them. But because a lot of good information, but not much in the way of quotes, but I just got to have dinner with Nigel. I had to have lunch with Nigel Plain. And as a like comedy nerd who watched the Ones obsessively as a kid, that was just, I still, I still can't quite believe I got to do that. So that was, I was on cloud nine about that. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. There's some jealousy there. So did you have a passage of the book you'd particularly like to highlight for us today? Yeah, I thought I'd read you the section in the book that got me the deal. Because when I pitched it, they asked me to write, you know, 1000 words sample. And I didn't want to start at the beginning. I wanted to, because I just felt,

I didn't want to do the end because I felt like I could need a good run up to do anything in the last bit Terry's life. And I thought the beginning was too obvious. So having done a lot of research, I thought the good place to start was his first job as a journalist and how he got that got that job. So I thought I'd do that bit if you like. Fantastic. So this is a bit so I'm going to read you a bit out this is from chapter three, the story so far. So Terry is at this point, 17, he has gone back to school to do his A levels. He didn't like his school very much. He had a horrible time there. While he'd been away over the summer, he'd really he'd gone to science fiction conventions. He'd met Arthur C. Clarke. And he was he really knew he wanted to be a writer. He'd

really cemented that he'd already got a story published, two story published, actually, by this point. So that's where we're kind of entering the story. So chapter three, the journalist's apprentice. Terry returned to Wicom Tech after the summer break of 1965, unaware he was entering his final few years in full time education. His dislike of school had turned into a simmering resentment. Though the idea that he could bail on academia and throw himself into the real world wasn't when he was taken seriously just yet. He wasn't sure what awaited him on the other side of his A levels, but it was unthinkable not to take them at all. Still, ideas about his future had begun to form, a professionally published story under his belt and several more in the school

magazine, alongside the lessons in touch typing that his mother had paid for, had given him confidence in his abilities. Writing wasn't just the only thing he was good at, as he would later claim in an interview with the BBC. It was something he was very good at. And knowing this gave him a clear focus. All those vague ambitions, the astronomy and the electronics had fallen to the wayside. Writing was the only way he could see himself spending his life. Terry began to research a career in the written word. He read several books on the subject and learned quickly that penning sci-fi stories was unlikely to provide a reliable living. Luckily, his skill with words left another path available. In September, he wrote to the editor

of his local newspaper, The Books Free Press, optimistically claiming that he was going to graduate the following year with three A levels and asked if a job would be available in the summer. There's an idea that recurs in discworld novels about the trousers of time. Those moments when two possible futures open up and you're forced to pick a leg. History bifurcates. Go one way and your life will be completely different from the other. The young Terry's only trousers of time experience so far had been choosing High Wickham Technical School over the local grammar. He would always claim it was his first real mistake. He was six years older now and teetering on the edge of adulthood.

The trousers had become much bigger and the stakes much higher. Against all biological and metaphysical expectation, another leg was about to open up. Arthur Church, the respected editor of The Books Free Press, replied almost immediately. He had no idea if a position would be available months down the line, but the paper was looking for a trainee reporter right now. Would he be interested in interviewing for the role? Terry jumped at the chance. The interview took place on Saturday afternoon. Terry, a man always keen to self-mythologize, would tell people he turned up in his school uniform. In a curious detail, after all the practice weren't so badly off that David,

that's Terry's father, wouldn't have owned a tie his son could borrow. And since it was Saturday, it's not as if he was coming straight from class. That said, using your uniform for job interviews was common at a time when not everyone owned a smart getup. Another Free Press alumni, Janice Raycroft, who would be mentored by Terry in the early 1970s, remembers attending her own interview at the paper in her grammar school approved skirt and school tie. Whatever his attire, the young writer clearly made an impression. Terry was fond of telling people that his new boss had remarked, I like the cut of your jib, usually adding that this was the last recorded use of that

phrase in Britain or this was the last time anyone was heard to say this without being arrested. 45 years later, during a lecture at Trinity College Dublin, he admitted he wasn't certain whether the church had really uttered the line or if he'd added the detail himself to spite of the anecdote. The story had grown in the telling. Terry Pratchett's stories often did. The trousers at the time had opened. Should he endure another year of school and leave in the summer with a safety net of three A-levels in his pocket or more likely two A-levels actually, or roll the dice, turn his back on wick and tech and see if he could cut it as a reporter. The decision was made substantially easier thanks to one last insult from his headmaster,

Harry Ward. Terry had been appointed the school's student head librarian, an unpaid position which he, a self-described library boy, worked diligently at, staying behind every Thursday evening to tidy up and repair books. Traditionally, the head librarian was also made a prefect and having school prefect on your CV could be invaluable. It indicated trustworthiness, someone who had gone above and beyond in their academic career. It could swing the balance and job offers and university placements. Ward was adamant that Terry Pratchett, a student who wrote weird fiction, had once been caught stealing an encyclopedia out of a bin and brought in scurrilous magazines like Mad and Private Eye would never become a prefect at his school. He prevented the appointment.

Terry saw it as a holly malicious act which he never forgave his headmaster. In his 2010 speech at Trinity College, Terry claimed he walked into school on the Monday, following his interview, handed back his textbooks and left somewhat satisfyingly via a visitor's entrance, which only teachers and prefects were allowed to use, and presumably, visitors. The story is a neat symmetry and obeys what on disc road is often called the law of narrative causality. The truth is likely a little less narratively tidy. For starters, David and Ily and Pratchett were on holiday at the time and their son respected them far too much to make a decision without their approval. Besides which, at 17, he legally needed his

father's consent to embark on an apprenticeship. On their return, Terry was surprised how quickly his sensible, practical parents came round to the idea. David was simply relieved that his son wasn't going to spend his entire life looking at the undercarriage of a motor car, while Ilyne had lofty visions of Terry editing the times. Pratchett began his three-year apprenticeship in journalism in the September of 1965 on a wage of £8.10 shillings per week. Alongside, on-the-job training, he worked in his spare time to achieve his National Council for the Training of Journalists qualification, which he claimed to have got the best grade in the country at, and an A-level in English. While his former headmaster was undoubtedly happy to see the back

of him, other students felt that Pratchett at the school was a sadder one. The head of the debating society wrote in Technical Sign at the school magazine to say, Regrettably, Pratchett's premature departure has meant the loss of one of our great characters. Yeah, I actually went back and rewrote a bit of that after that. Well, that's not quite as it was when I first pitched it because there are little details there that I found out later. You put this stuff together by reading everything you can get your hands on, and I probably read every interview Pratchett gave between 1979 and 2015, and a load of them would be identical. He'd be talking to a series of reporters across a week,

and he'd be promoting a book. He'd be out promoting one specific book, so mostly he'd be talking about that book. So most of these interviews were pretty similar, mostly because he prided himself on being good at interviews, and he used to work out quotable, pithy phrases beforehand that he elbow in, he'd shoehorn in so that there'd be great pull quotes, because he understood journalism, he understood writing. But every second or third interview, you'd find one fact that you didn't know, like one little aside where the journalist managed to break through to get an extra fact out, or something that the conversation had gone down another pathway, and you'd find out, you know, how tall he was, or the name of his

tortoise when he was a kid, or the like, or the make of car he's dad owned, or the things like that, and you pick up these little extra details, and so every once in a while I'd find something, I'd find out something new, and I'd have to go back and insert it in and rewrite a bit, and it was a constant sort of evolving process. So your filing system looked like for all this stuff. Is it a spreadsheet? It's a spreadsheet, it's a fairly messy spreadsheet. The first thing I did was put a index together as a spreadsheet, and it was kind of like, so if I wanted to, I'd basically like, find out a subject, you know, parents, relationship with mother,

that kind of thing, birth of daughter, or the color of magic, and then every, and then I'd just note all the references. So if I wanted to find out that he talked about, if I wanted to get, well, I did talk about equal rights, someone didn't talk about feminism, and his opinions on feminism, and whether he thought it was a feminist book, I know that he talked about that on this website, on this date, or in this magazine from the mid-1980s, and I just, you know, as I did the research, I had everything collated like that. I don't know if that's how other people do it, but that was the system I used. It was messy, but it worked.

Joanna, you did your own bit of random research, didn't you? Yeah. I want to point out this is very much in the spirit of fun, but as you were so rigorous with fact-checking, I thought I'd do some fact-checking. And if I can find the actual quote, it was, one of your footnotes was that actually most editions of Lord of the Rings are thicker and heavier than the average house brick. Yeah, there's possibly a little bit of artistic license there. Well, I did some incredibly rigorous research, and I mean, I googled the average weight of a house brick, very thoroughly, and got the result back of 2.7 kilos, so I then decided to look at

the average weight of an edition of Lord of the Rings. So I weighed my copy and had two Twitter followers do it, which I think is adequately rigorous. Absolutely, yeah. There's not a science, there's not a peer review board in the world. Of course I know. I was going to plot this on a graph, but I realized that's not a great idea for a podcast. And unfortunately, the average weight of volume of Lord of the Rings is only 815 grams. It doesn't quite match up to the average house brick. Yeah, but the narrative worth of that house brick is negative. Very true. It's very difficult to weigh.

Whereas Lord of the Rings contains three millennia of combined average weight. Very true. Not as effective as swung around in the sock. What was the weirdest tangent or rabbit hole all this researching sent you down? Beekeeping. Terry was a prolific beekeeper, but I was trying to find out about his life in the 70s. Like I said, I really wanted this sense of time and place. And so one of the things that we wanted is I really wanted to know where he lived

and what it was like. I knew from Gerald Walker, one of his old colleagues, he told me that he lived in a place called Gay Cottage in a town called Robero. Don't Google Gay Cottage. Well, absolutely Google it. You'll make friends and there's plenty to enjoy, but don't do it in Starbucks. But actually, I eventually, after ages of trying to find this out, looking into it, found out that he actually lived in Gay Cottage, G-A-Y-E-S. So once I had that, you kind of go into the zen-like state where you're plowing 10 pages,

20 pages deep in Google, just searching things. And eventually, I managed to come across references in old records. So I actually got his address. I found the address of where he lived, because it was listed in tax records and things like that. So I started googling the actual address and I found a magazine he'd written a letter to. Somebody just uploaded, I can't remember the name of the magazine. It was a magazine dedicated to sort of new age principles and new scientific methods. And they had an article about beekeeping and somebody had uploaded all of these magazines

and converted them to PDF so the text was searchable. And one of them had a letter in, it was in 1973, completely not mentioned in any of the blurb around it, but it was a letter from one Terry Pratchett of Gay Cottage Robo Somerset. And I found this little letter that he'd written complaining about the advice they'd given about beekeeping in the previous issue and talking about how he did beekeeping and what his techniques were. And no one found that. Colin Smyth didn't know that existed Terry's agent and he's got everything listed on his website. Yeah, it's beyond comprehensive. Although I'm proud to say that it's a little bit more comprehensive now because I kept

calling up today of anything that I found that was interesting. So yeah, just to read that sort of stuff and go like, which is a total window into who he was and how he lived that had nothing to do with his writing and nothing to do with his kind of public persona or the person he kind of portrayed himself as, you know, that was always delightful. Reading his stuff from the 70s as well, reading the stuff he wrote in newspapers, because if you go to the British Library, it's all there. They've got archives of most local newspapers. It's a lot of work to find them, to find the right pieces. You have to read hundreds of issues to find practical bylines. But he wrote really funny stuff. He wrote really funny columns and stories,

most of which haven't been read. No one's looked at them for years. And to read that sort of stuff and see little links to stuff he'd write later and see him developing his voice through those, that was really fascinating. I don't know about surprising, but it was that it was really, really fun and really, you know, sitting there knowing I was reading a bit of Terry Pratchett writing. And I was probably one of the only a handful of people that had read this since the late 1970s was was pretty amazing. Yeah. So you spent a lot of time sitting in the British Library then? The British Library and the Senate House Library, the University of London, which Colin Smythe donated his entire, basically gave his entire archive to the Senate House Library,

which includes all of the press clippings. So although, you know, you can go in there, there's lots more valuable stuff to read. But the stuff I was interested in was the folders and folders and folders of photocopied press clippings. Because like I said, that's how I find those, that's how you find those details. You really have to go hunting. And you read the same story hundreds of times, but it's, and it was very, very labor-intensive. That's the job. That's what you do. That's how you do the job that's in front of you, as it were. That's what makes it stand out from the, yeah, articles full of copy pasted press releases. Yeah, basically. I mean, there was no point in doing that. There was no point in writing

writing the easy version of his life. I could just glue together a couple of anecdotes and press releases and the stuff that he repeated in interviews and that everyone knows. And I could have made a passable book that people would have bought and it would have been easier. But I wanted to write the kind of book I would have wanted to read. And I didn't feel like I could, I didn't feel like I could let Terry down by doing a half ass job of it. I didn't want to prove, like the Pratchett estate will worried when they found out I was doing it in case that's what I was doing. In case I was doing this cash in easy, lazy version and just ripping off fans by sticking the name Terry Pratchett on the front of a book. And I didn't want to prove them

right. I just thought I knew how disappointed I would be if I picked up a biography and that's what it was. So I tried really hard. That's awesome. What made you want to write this book? Like, obviously, you're a big fan and you are a writer. So it kind of goes together. But was there like a moment of how I'm going to write a whole damn book about this? There's two answers to that question, I think. There's the official answer and then there's the slightly more cynical answer. The official answer I cannot, I don't know why I'm doing this because I'm saying this now because it invalidates the point of an official answer. But if I was doing the Pratchett answer, the party line answer is and it's true. It is completely true. I wanted

to know Terry. I wanted to know this story. I knew it was a good story and no one had written it before and I could taste it. And I really wanted to be the one that told that story. And I knew I could be. I saw the opportunity. I was like, I could do it. It could be me that writes this. And that was really, really exciting. When you realize there isn't a biography and I was like, I can be the one that gets in first and writes it. And that's true. And I really wanted to do it. And that's why I chose to write about Terry. How the biography came about, which is a little bit more kind of, not exactly cynical, but it was a sensible choice because I was approached by a friend of a friend saying, this publisher is looking for somebody to write a biography of Tolkien.

And they knew I'm a massive nerd. And I really wanted to write a book. Basically, I want to write a book. It's really difficult to write your first book just to get your foot in the door, to get someone to pay attention. So I pitched a Tolkien biography, even though I know that you have to be an expert like PhD level in Tolkien to write a book about Tolkien. And also, I know that there are a million books about Tolkien and there's very little new to say. But I want to write a book. So I pitched it anyway. And they came back with, thanks for this, really like your writing and stuff. We've got this Tolkien expose going to write this. And I was like fair enough. That makes sense. But they said, is there anyone else you'd like to write about?

And so I gave it some, Terry was the first person I thought of. Because I wanted to, I wanted to write something I knew about a little already. And then the cynical bit is I realized, A, no one had written about him before. So there was, and B, he has a large fan base of people. Which made a very sense, which made it a sensible, canny choice. I knew if I pitched it like that, the publisher would be like, Oh, well, that makes perfect sense. So there is, you know, there was a, it was a smart choice for that reason. But it was all and it has proven to be because like, I don't think if I'd written a book about Rick, male was my was the other person I really wanted to write about. And I think I would have had just as much fun writing that book. But

I don't think people would have been as excited to read it. So, so there's the two answers. But they're both equally true. And I, this is a story I really wanted to tell. People are obviously like super keen to read it, because Pratchett is so, so loved. What do you think it is about his writing that makes it so special, such a crap word, but special? It is special, though. His writing is splendiferous. But he is special. And I mean, the root one answer to that is the thing is his writing changes a lot over the years. So I think the answer to that, if you're talking about Night Watch and Monsters Regiment and Nation and I shall wear Midnight and Thud is a different answer to if

you're talking about Mort. But the thing that the root one, the first entry point is they're really funny. Like they're just legitimately really, really funny. And like, I'm, you know, I'm a comic. I spent my entire life obsessing over humor. And it was the humor that links me in combined with the fantasy because I'm a massive nerd. But there's more to, but I think it was just that they, if it was just somebody who knew an awful lot writing a lot of clever jokes. It wouldn't, you know, there are plenty of authors that are like that. Robert Rankin is a great author, but he's not a millionaire. He writes really funny books, but he was never, but he wasn't knighted. Tom Holt is a really funny writer. The world is full

of really, really funny writers. But I think what makes Terry more, more than that is partly the sense of pure moral decency that's the heart of his work. It's, it's almost, the moral core of Terry's work is a world you want to live in. It's a world where fundamentally people do the right things for the right reasons. And if they do the things the wrong reasons, it's bloody well pointed out. And people are really, it's like, it is, you know, it's fucking clear that that you are wrong. And everyone in those books is extremely well drawn, less so in the early ones. Like the reason he's the, those early, the very early books work, the reason the color of magic works is because rinse wind is a really good character. And it's

sort of if you, if you, if you peel back everything else about the color of magic, if you take away the jokes and you take away the fantasy, rinse wind is a bloke you meet in the pub. Like you met rinse wind. It could have been like your worst teacher at school, or the crap village policeman or something, but you've met him. And he's like, and he, and he's kind of bewilderment and frustration with the world of seeing how it should work. And yet quite, it doesn't quite work like that, which is a theme that runs through a lot of Terry's writing. That's really relatable and really, really appealing. And some of Terry's earlier characters aren't quite as relatable. Like, if you look at, you know, tepid in pyramids or Victor in moving pictures, who are basically

the same character, they're not quite so relatable. The women, the female characters in those books, even less so. Essentially, they're one that they're basically a character trait and a costume. But he got much better at that as he went along. But as you go along, that trait in his writing becomes stronger and stronger. Like you've met Nanny Ogg. If you go to a pub in the countryside, you meet Nanny Ogg. You might meet Granny Weatherwax, but you'd probably not be quite so pleased about her. But you know, like, Vimes is almost the way you wish you think. And as these people feel so real. So underneath the jokes, underneath these brilliant Neil Gaiman described project books as plots that tick like Swiss watches. And that's true, they do. Like, later on,

they become really intricate, really beautifully plotted. But underneath those is this kind of really solid, really decent, really relatable set of characters that make perfect sense in their world and in our world. And you want to know them more. And I think partly the reason of that is because you already know them. And I think that that is kind of the heart of it. And that's why they endure. And that's why he continued to write, to do so well. And leveled up. Comic fantasy leveled off. Comic fantasy was huge in the late 90s, but leveled off. But Pratchett continues to level up. So to finish off, do you have a kind of a hook line? If you could sum up why people should buy your book, which we will link to ever so conveniently in the show notes.

Why would a Pratchett fan want to read this book if we haven't made it incredibly clear already? Because you will find out things about Terry Pratchett you didn't already know. And it will make you appreciate the richness of his books more, which he did for me. The more about him I read, and then went back and read his books, I didn't find them. I didn't find it was a glimpse behind the curtain that ruined it. I felt that it made me get more of the jokes, understand more of the themes and feel like I knew him a bit better. And that made me feel like I could appreciate his work a bit more. Fantastic. Also, because they're worked really hard on it, guys. It's very good. It is very good. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. We really genuinely enjoyed the book a lot

and really appreciate you coming on to chat to us about it. And being our first official interview. Great. Yeah. I'm honoured. Just before you go to pack up the last year's books and a really nice bit of narrative satisfaction for us. Yeah. The rest of the night will be spent putting books into envelopes and then fixing the wrong label to them so someone can shout at me about it on the internet later. Oh, you've got to give people those little bits of joy, haven't you? Exactly. Thank you for listening to this very special episode of The Trees Shall Make He Fret. You can buy Mark's book from all good retailers and from the link in the show notes. You can also follow him on Twitter at 20th Century Mark. You can follow us on Instagram at the

Trees Shall Make He Fret, on Twitter at Make He Fret pod, on Facebook, The Trees Shall Make He Fret. You can send us your thoughts, queries, castles, avatars and snacks at the Trees Shall Make He Fret pod at gmail.com. As we said, we are going to have a little break next month. So follow us on all these places to find out when we're returning to your luggles. But in the meantime, don't let us detain you. We're just not going to be sitting down and chatting about practice that well we might, but we won't record it so screen. We will still be very much on the internet. Francine stopped saying screw you, the listeners. Oh, we should have got Mark to do it. Don't let

us detain you. Well, we couldn't detain him. What's the problem? I actually had two to do. I'm off to eat some reheat burgers. I'm not about you. No, I'm going to go make noodles. Noice. Noodles. What are you going to have in your noodles? I'm finally doing the cumin lamb and aubergine thing so I couldn't be bothered to do it the other night. So we better get in a food tangent there. Yeah, definitely.