Do you want to see a picture of Angua and Cheery from the BBC new Pratchett adaptation?

[BarkandCheese]

The program is called The Watch, from what I understand it’s a distillation of the watch novels. The blonde actor is Angua, the dark haired one is Cheery. I’m trying to wrap my head around the casting choice for Cheery, who in the books is spoiler alert a female dwarf who due to all dwarfs having beards is assumed to be male by her colleagues.

Cheery will be a ‘non-binary native recruit in the Night Watch ostracized by their kin’

So they’ve taken a story arc about a woman learning to be proud of who she is and mangled it beyond recognition. Well done BBC well done.

I quite enjoyed Going Postal and The Hogfather adaptations. There were some bits that didn't work so well but they managed to keep the spirit of the books.

I feel this is just going to make me cross. And it really doesn't need added 'wokeness'. TP was an excellent satirist. There was enough material to work with there.

Not everyone gets Pratchett though. It strikes that the people in charge here fall into that category - ‘People like this so we should make money, but we’re not sure why they like it’. So they haven’t respected the source material. Because secretly they think it’s a bit crap and they could do better.

Yes, exactly, spudlet.

Oh no, they're completely wrong. 😢

No. No no no.

I can see that they’d have political/technical problems dealing with the Dwarf characters in The Watch. They don’t have the budget to cast average height actors and shrink them digitally, and they might feel that using short human actors to represent a different species isn’t what they want to do. Sometimes a plot that works fine in a book presents problems in real world casting: the black genocide in Handmaid’s Tale leaps to mind.

But honestly Cheery’s plot is inextricably linked with the idea of Tolkien’s Dwarves and what Pratchett has built on that. If you take that aspect away then you might as well not bother.

I can see that they’re not easy books to adapt, so much of the story is in the footnotes and narration and they certainly weren’t written with one eye on selling the film/TV rights (like a lot of contemporary books are).

The Hogfather and Going Postal are decent if not stellar adaptations, they at least only abridged the books and didn’t try to change them too much.

As a PP so aptly said "Buggrit" Also "Millenium hand and shrimp"

I enjoyed Going Postal, which had a pretty perfect cast, but it seems to be currently unavailable to watch except on very rare and expensive DVDs. Your best bet is to wait until Sky decides to repeat it and then get a free month of Now TV.

@Penners99, entirely agree. Can we add messing with Dickens and Agatha Christie to scorpion pit offences as well?

Nailed to a post by the ear. Graciously.

Any universe you love, someone messes with it, immediate relocation to scorpion pit. Seems fair.

I think it looks like a terrible adaptation of the books BUT, I think if I go into it not associating them back to the books, it could be good. I personally think Cheery looks great. She's not the book character, but it's taking the gender discussion forward and the character could be fun and pretty relevant. Vimes is good, as is Carrot. Angua looks fine. Sure, it's not the books (and don't get me wrong, I live for Discworld) but if you take a step away, the essence of the thing itself could be good for its own sake.

Literally my favourite series of books ever (see name) but am gutted that these adaptations don’t just stick to the books. Probably won’t watch! Cheery is a dwarf! Her surname is Littlebottom!!

It looks absolutely fucking terrible.

What kind of "gender discussion" needs to be had, it's discworld...

The scorpion pit is too good for those involved in this adaptation.

They literally had a character who was female but acted and looked male right there, but Instead they decided to go down the crap gender non binary nonsense route.

Sacrilege! Cheery is a dwarf with a beard. That's literally the entire point of her story arc.

The thing is, the books already had some really interesting themes, including about gender roles, but they've thrown them out in favor of something that seems really superficial.

Book Cheery challenges expectations; tv Cheery is yet another androgynous pixie girl - a trope that has already been done to death in films.

What’s really bugging me is, TP wrote strong, intelligent, female characters who don’t conform to stereotypes. Angua, Cheery, Lady Sybil, Susan, Granny Weatherwax et all.
I’m reminded of an interview TP gave where someone wanted to turn Mort into a film, only “we need to get rid of this Death character”!!

Let’s just hope the BBC never get their hands on Monstrous Regiment...

Oh hell no, Bark! Or anything to do with Granny Weatherwax.

Copied and pasted this, because it’s worth sharing I think:

‘Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, and his long-term friend and assistant Rob Wilkins, who still runs Pratchett’s Twitter account, did not comment directly (they’re not involved in the adaptation). But both – in an impressively subtle piece of shade-throwing – shared a link to Ursula LeGuin’s legendary take-down of the appalling adaptation of her Earthsea books.

“I don’t know what the film is about. It’s full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense,” wrote LeGuin. “When I looked over the script, I realised the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.”’

www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jan/17/discworld-fans-are-right-to-be-nervous-about-the-bbcs-punk-rock-the-watch