Terry Pratchett

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 40:08

Elements of this programme may offend or upset some listeners. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is a writer. He's unlikely to be nominated for the Booker Prize. Indeed, critics can be rather dismissive of his work. The fact remains, however, that he's one of the most successful authors in the English language. One in every fifty books sold by WH Smith is written by him, and he's sold at least ten million books worldwide. The secret of his success is the Disc World, a fantasy land of wizards, witches, and other strange creatures whose antics are designed to make you laugh, but also to make you think.

Presenter1:05

It's a world which has made its creator very rich, but commercial success is not the only thing that drives him. Every book that he writes will, he hopes, be as beautiful as it is entertaining. He is Terry Pratchett. What do you mean by that,

Terry Pratchett1:22

It's very hard to get across the Terror.

Terry Pratchett1:24

with which you sit down

Terry Pratchett1:26

and tackle that first page. And it doesn't matter how many books you've done.

Terry Pratchett1:31

Before.

Terry Pratchett1:32

Every new book is a first book.

Presenter1:34

But you've produced so many books. I d how how many Discworld books are there?

Terry Pratchett1:37

Well, there's a there's twenty disc roll books, yes.

Presenter1:40

And you've done th those over, what, thirteen years?

Terry Pratchett1:43

I think about fifteen.

Presenter1:45

Yes. I mean, I know you you try on the whole to write two a year, don't you?

Terry Pratchett1:50

To happen, I don't try.

Presenter1:51

But that doesn't sound like a man who has terror when he sits down to write. I mean, they s seem to flow quite freely, it seems to me.

Terry Pratchett1:57

They're very difficult.

Terry Pratchett1:59

But I know how to do them. I I think that that that's the key thing. It's it's very hard to make a table with dovetail joints if you don't know how to do carpentry. If you do know how to do carpentry, it still may be difficult, but it's something that you can do.

Presenter2:14

I'm interested in that analogy because you said that you are of the the school of carpentry.

Presenter2:19

What does that mean? That it is a a craft?

Terry Pratchett2:22

Absolutely. I don't know what literature is, but literature is clearly a vote taken probably after you are dead. I don't think I write literature. I think I write I hope I write entertaining books that are good value for money.

Presenter2:22

I'm sorry.

Terry Pratchett2:37

If they're read in fifty years' time that will be a bonus, but it's not something that has to worry me very much.

Presenter2:42

You think they might be called literature one day, do you?

Terry Pratchett2:45

I I doubt it. Um I don't think people would call P G Woodhouse literature. I I personally would, but I I doubt if people would.

Terry Pratchett2:54

But you crossed the corner. Yes, I try to make certain that I'm doing it as well as I can, and there are techniques.

Presenter2:55

I think you can't do it.

Terry Pratchett3:01

in writing in the same way that there are techniques in carpentry, but you might be able to turn out a a passable kitchen chair or something that's going to become a valuable antique. It's how the techniques are applied.

Presenter3:16

Now it it just happened, it seems, that you struck a a chord in a kind of mass readership, and you have, as we've said, become phenomenally successful. Did you feel when you wrote the first book about the disc world

Presenter3:30

Did you know in your bones, somehow, that that you were writing about something that other people would find attractive?

Terry Pratchett3:36

No, I didn't. I wish I could say that I that that I did. I I wrote it as an antidote to to what I called the belike he will wax wroth school of fantasy. At that time there there was a lot of fantasy written by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by Tolkien.

Terry Pratchett3:58

And it was getting a little bit silly, and everything was recursive, and everything was feeding off itself. And I just decided to create a world which was clearly ridiculous, designed to look ridiculous, but make certain the people reacted like people do in the twentieth century. And that automatically became funny, because they didn't react like cliché fantasy characters. They had ideas of their own. And much to my surprise, what started off as a parody of fantasy became a a a fantasy series in its own right.

Presenter4:33

More of that in a moment. But first of all welcome to our fantasy land, which has no people. It's it's a dis deserted island.

Presenter4:40

Tell me about the uh first of the eight records you want to take.

Terry Pratchett4:43

I have to say that I listen to all music as if it was pop music.

Terry Pratchett4:48

I've always known what I liked, but never known very much about it. But the first time I I heard Symphony Fantastique I got that icy shiver.

Terry Pratchett5:00

Which which it tells me that I'm listening to good music.

Terry Pratchett5:04

and uh when the Diaz Eere rings out and the witches begin to dance, by then I was just sitting there in the chair, transfixed.

Speaker 45:10

B

Presenter6:13

Part of the fifth movement of Belio's Samphonie Fontastique, Dream of a Witch's Sabbath, played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Eugene Gussens.

Presenter6:22

Terry Pratchett, if people know about the Disc World, they seem to know a tremendous amount about it, because your your readers can become fanatical. To others it's a complete mystery. So describe it to me. Where and what is the Disc World?

Terry Pratchett6:36

Geographically, this world is a flat planet which goes through space on the back of four elephants, which themselves stand on the back of an enormous turtle, uh which I didn't make up. I I I just stole this from world mythology. It turns up in various forms in various mythologies. But the action takes place on the surface and and f for

Terry Pratchett7:00

For practical purposes it could take place on the planet Earth if magic existed. For for example, there there's a the the the main city that I write about is Ankhmorpork, and it is what London would be if no one had really built any new buildings since about the year sixteen hundred, no one had discovered electricity or steam, and all the the trolls and the dwarves

Terry Pratchett7:25

Of folklore had not actually gone away, but had come into the city and started to work.

Presenter7:29

Medieval. Oh, yeah.

Terry Pratchett7:31

Yes, the the the the structure is mediaeval, the politics is definitely twentieth century.

Presenter7:37

And the the language and vocabulary is 20th century. With with medieval

Terry Pratchett7:41

It becomes medieval when I wish it to be. Ultimately, humour has to drive the whole thing.

Presenter7:47

But that's the nice thing, really. It can be anything you wish it to be.

Terry Pratchett7:50

Yes. Well, no. Fantasy doesn't mean that you can do anything you want. There must be a structure. There must be limits that you cannot overstep. But you can set those limits yourself. You can set those limits yourself, but in a sense that makes it harder.

Presenter8:01

You can set those

Terry Pratchett8:05

If you're writing a book set in London in the present day, the limits are already defined, and everyone knows what they are. In a fantasy universe you are responsible for the entire construction, so you must build all the underpinnings of the world even before the the story can really commence.

Presenter8:22

And then, when your readers get to know it as well, if not better than you do, you're in trouble. And I want to ask you about them. But let's just talk about some of the characters for a second first.

Terry Pratchett8:29

First.

Presenter8:30

First of all, Rincewind, a kind of inept wizard who can't spell, I think he's got two Zeds in his wizard. Tell me about him,'cause he's allegedly the character most like you.

Speaker 18:31

Yeah.

Terry Pratchett8:32

Yeah.

Speaker 18:32

Yeah.

Terry Pratchett8:40

He really is is is Joe normal, but in this fantasy universe he he is incredibly cowardly, because it seems to me that is probably the normal response when when faced with with fire breathing dragons and and and vast outpourings of of magic. He just runs away from things. Of course he tends to run in the best editions of literature he he runs into worse situations than those from which he is fleeing.

Presenter9:04

And he's followed around by a character called Luggage.

Terry Pratchett9:07

Well, it's not exactly a character, but it's certainly very popular. Yes. He's it's it's a chest on legs, a typical magical ac accessory. Um you can put anything in it. Uh it's fiercely protective of its owner, quite homicidally so in in some cases.

Presenter9:22

Psychopathic suitcase, are you?

Terry Pratchett9:24

Yes.

Terry Pratchett9:25

It seems to have caught people's imagination. I n I just invented the thing. I in in in a couple of in in a couple of seconds I thought that was a funny thing to follow him around.

Terry Pratchett9:35

And it's become some kind of icon.

Presenter9:37

And so has the librarian of the Unseen University, who is in fact an orangutan because it's easier to get round the shelves, who's become very popular with librarians around the library.

Terry Pratchett9:48

Yeah, surrounding it.

Presenter9:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Terry Pratchett9:50

Yeah, this this is

Terry Pratchett9:51

The terrible um

Terry Pratchett9:54

threat that that that hangs over an orsa.

Terry Pratchett9:57

In the space of 15 seconds in the second Disworld book, I thought of the idea of turning the librarian of Unseen University, who was then a perfectly normal wizard, into an orangutan. There was a magical explosion and I thought, what something funny he can be turned into. And suddenly it's as if he always was an orangutan and librarians write to me saying that I have enhanced the face of the profession. Being an orangutan is obviously a positive thing for a librarian.

Presenter10:25

Have they not noticed that all he can say is one word, which is kind of ooh.

Terry Pratchett10:29

It's a very wise word. It can mean practically anything. And uh and and he he's clearly extremely intelligent. And uh oddly enough,

Terry Pratchett10:39

Characters that cannot s speak coherently often can appear far wiser than the characters which can expound at length.

Presenter10:50

That's one of life's great lessons. Open your mouth and don't get found that.

Presenter10:55

Tell me about your second record.

Terry Pratchett10:57

I've always been a bit of a folky.

Terry Pratchett10:59

The first folk album I ever bought was a Steel Eye Span one and I've collected everything of theirs ever since. And I was particularly thrilled when I heard their version of Thomas the Rhymer, where Thomas the the Bard is taken away by the Queen of the Elves.

Speaker 411:24

You see on bone, bony road, That lies across the Ferny Bray That is the road to Fairfland, Where you and I this night must go

Speaker 411:41

Bye bye.

Speaker 411:43

Hello?

Presenter11:51

Steel Ice Band and Thomas the Rhymer from their album Now We Are Six.

Presenter11:56

You've created this fantastic soap opera, which trades on humour in the main, as we've said. But as I said at the outset, you also want to make us think.

Terry Pratchett12:02

The design

Presenter12:06

How do you set about doing that? What do you want us to make us make us think about?

Terry Pratchett12:10

Sometimes even I don't know at the beginning, and sometimes the characters.

Terry Pratchett12:15

Define it for themselves. In one of the books, there's, of course, dwarves make marvelous metalwork. We've always known this.

Terry Pratchett12:24

Um so so a a an iron master in Ang Morpork changes his name to a dwarf name, and he grows his beard and he wears an iron helmet, although he is six foot tall.

Terry Pratchett12:34

But the campaign for equal heights doesn't know how to deal with him. He can sell his iron for a lot more because he's got a dwarf name and he looks like a dwarf, and it's it's not really correct to point out that he's six foot tall, because that indeed would be sizes in itself. Now it's

Terry Pratchett12:51

easier to deal with that sort of thing in a fantasy world, but you can say things and do things which would be quite difficult if you tried to do it in the real world.

Presenter13:03

Now you've mentioned Tolkien'cause as you say fantasy and Tolkien and Lord of the Rings and so on is the first thing that people would think about. But there are other comparisons that crop up in reading um about you. PG Woodhouse and Monty Python, to to name but two. Do do you lay claim to them as antecedents in any way?

Terry Pratchett13:21

Only in the sense that there is a British

Terry Pratchett13:24

comic tradition.

Terry Pratchett13:27

I I d I don't know so much about Woodhouse. That that was a a comparison which was wished on me.

Presenter13:32

The other comparison that's been wished on you is is uh with uh Dickens, saying you're the Dickens denoujour that's pushing it a bit.

Terry Pratchett13:40

Um yes, I think that uh at a time uh at a time like this an author should just go and hide behind the word processor screen and and let the critics get on with it. I make no claim there at all.

Presenter13:51

I think

Presenter13:53

What about when the critics become abusive? Because if they're not saying deeply flattering things like that, then they can be ab abusive and they use such adjectives as fatuous and amateur. Why do you think you attract those kinds of terms?

Terry Pratchett13:57

Something like that.

Terry Pratchett14:05

The odd thing is, bad reviews normally attack my readers rather than me, you know, Anorax and and and uh

Presenter14:12

No, uh

Terry Pratchett14:13

Nerds, that sort of thing. As if nerds are a bad word. I mean, nerds are the only people that know how to operate the video.

Presenter14:19

But there is a certain disdain for the genre of fantasy, isn't there? Isn't that what it is?

Terry Pratchett14:24

Yes, I think so. And I I think I'd have done better had had I declared that I was writing magical realism, because magical realism is fantasy in a collar and tie. But I've said I write fantasy, and it's and it's the it is the oldest literature. It is the literature that underpins all the other genres of which Booker Prize-winning books are a particular type of genre.

Presenter14:47

Record number three.

Terry Pratchett14:49

I heard this record when I was about eleven or twelve and and

Terry Pratchett14:55

It it is probably in it in its in a sense one of the ancestors of Discworld. It it is just a beautifully drawn-out joke which initially appears to be going on for too long, and and then

Terry Pratchett15:09

merely because it's going on for so long, becomes even funnier. It is The Ride of the Valkyries with horse racing commentary.

Speaker 115:21

Same order. Waltrout, Gerhild walked in, Brownhilda with only another hundred yards to go. Oh, oh, oh, something's happened there. It's Gerhild, she's dropped her warrior. I think his tapes must have come undone. He's falling all his crapper. Oh, there's a tremendous pile up there, about six horses and their riders all pile up on top of one another. This is sensational. Look at the porn. Here's Ros Wise coming up from behind with a tremendous burst. She's closing up on the outside. She's past Brownhilda. Only 60 yards to go and the crowd are on the feet here. Now she's closing up on Waltrout. Oh, oh, this is tremendous. This is really tremendous.

Presenter15:50

Bernard Miles and the Race for the Rhine Gold Stakes. When did you decide to become a writer, Terry? Was there a moment when you thought, I could do that?

Terry Pratchett15:58

I became a reader fairly late in my childhood when I was about 10 or 11 and I discovered science fiction and fantasy and that led me into other things. When I was thirteen I persuaded my parents to let me go to a science fiction convention. I expounded at length about the literary advantages and I also tasted beer for the first time and not long afterwards I was in the gents and standing next to me was Arthur C. Clarke who was acknowledged then and still is now I suspect as the greatest science fiction writer in the world. And I realised that writers weren't some distant beings on a cloud somewhere and very soon afterwards an opportunity arose at school.

Terry Pratchett16:45

When a teacher asked us to write short a short story for English, and I wrote one, which she liked, and it got put in the school magazine, and the kids liked it.

Presenter16:54

What was it about?

Terry Pratchett16:54

It was about, I'd say it was quite ahead of its time, that the devil had got very worried that no one was going to hell anymore because everyone was going to heaven. And an enterprising advertising man explained to him that he could turn it into a theme park, that the torments that people would not wish to experience for eternity, they would be very pleased to experience for about thirty seconds and would pay money. And if you go into some theme parks, you can see I was quite prophetic about that. What did your parents

Presenter17:22

parents think of this very bookish son they seem to have uh given birth to because I think you were constantly in the library, weren't you?

Terry Pratchett17:30

I oh, yes, I I I I conned the library staff. I worked there on Saturdays for no reward, at least so they thought. And what I used to do was was write myself out hundreds of free tickets, and I think sometimes half the books in the library ended up on my shelves at home. They always went bad.

Terry Pratchett17:45

But no one was telling me what I should read and what I shouldn't read, and my parents weren't.

Terry Pratchett17:50

that they thought if I was reading that was a good thing.

Presenter17:53

What did they do, your parents, for a living?

Terry Pratchett17:55

My mother was a company secretary and my father was a motor engineer and they both got where they got by hard work because like a lot of people of their generation Adolf Hitler had intervened at a fairly crucial point in their lives and World War II sort of meant that you didn't do what you might have wanted to do. And they believed, as lots of people believed in the fifties and sixties and were able to believe, that hard work and education moved you up.

Presenter18:29

And they very much wanted you to move up. I mean, they they weren't particularly affluent, were they?

Terry Pratchett18:35

No. Um um we we we lived in a cottage with one cold water tap, but this this was after the war where if you had a a house with a roof on it you were still quite lucky.

Presenter18:46

Next rate

Terry Pratchett18:46

Cool.

Terry Pratchett18:50

When I heard the Arieta Voce Sepete for the first time, I just burst out laughing. It it just sounded so right. I have no musical vocabulary to describe why I like things. It's just you get that white hot line searing across your brain and you know you are listening to genius.

Speaker 419:16

He saw greatly.

Speaker 419:19

Miracles are young.

Speaker 419:27

Say

Presenter20:03

Part of the Arieta Voice Sappete, from Act Two of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, sung by Petrolang with the Royal Concert Gabar Orchestra conducted by Nicolaus Arnancourt.

Presenter20:14

You don't sound, Terry Pratchett, as if you were particularly ambitious. You left school at seventeen. You went to work as a journalist on the local paper, the Bucks Free Press. And then when you were thirty two, after those fifteen years in journalism, you went to work as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. That's right. Was that exciting?

Terry Pratchett20:33

Exciting is exactly the right word for it. This was just after Three Mile Island, which put the whole of the nuclear industry in a new light, which was a rather green and glowing one. And there were four nuclear power stations on my patch. And I was there for the better part of eight years, all the way through Chernobyl and other more local upsets. And I was more or less on call 24 hours a day, which usually meant I was woken up by the early morning man on Great Western Radio saying, Hinkley Point nuclear power station has blown up again. What have you got to say?

Presenter21:12

So you did enjoy your work. You did get up in the morning and want to go to work. I had the impression that actually you were always writing, as I said, and that the. By then I was.

Terry Pratchett21:19

By then I was. Yes, I I was. I uh in fact it it was then that this world started and and it it was as a release from the pressures of the day.

Presenter21:30

And by the age of thirty nine I think you were able to give up work.

Presenter21:34

and um part company from C E G V and uh write for a living.

Terry Pratchett21:36

Evasion

Terry Pratchett21:38

That's right, I had my farewell party at a nuclear power station.

Presenter21:41

Record number five.

Terry Pratchett21:42

This is going to be Bat Out of Hell, written by Jim Steinman and sung, or possibly I should say performed by Meat Loaf. All I can offer the court is that one day

Terry Pratchett21:54

I was driving along the motorway, this came on, and by the time it was over, I was considerably further along the motorway and wasn't quite certain how I'd got there.

Speaker 422:11

I'm going down in the moonlight shining through my heart go sing

Speaker 422:19

Yeah.

Speaker 422:21

The gates are heaven I'll come rolling home

Speaker 422:26

Damn.

Presenter22:30

Meatloaf and bat out of hell. Let's talk about these fans and followers then, Terry. Who are they? They say that when you do a book signing, the queue stretches out down the street, and this is quite frequently because you publish two books a year. Who are they?

Terry Pratchett22:42

Yeah.

Terry Pratchett22:44

Well, according to the mail,

Terry Pratchett22:46

Uh fifty per cent of the fans are women, and of those probably fifty percent again are over the age of thirty-five. I became aware of a very strange phenomenon early on. Uh I I was getting letters uh on the lines of um our Kevin is a great fan of yours and I wondered what he was laughing about and now I've started reading the books and it would be Kevin's mum who was writing to me.

Presenter23:08

But they are deeply loyal to you, they write to you, and you write back.

Terry Pratchett23:11

Mm-hmm.

Terry Pratchett23:13

Mostly, yes. It's getting very, very hard to do that.

Presenter23:16

But you obviously have an enormous sense of responsibility towards them.

Terry Pratchett23:19

It is a kind of after sale service, I suppose.

Terry Pratchett23:22

What did have a great effect on me when I was young was that I wrote to JRR Tolkien, not about Lord of the Rings, about one of his other books, and he replied. Now for all I know it was typed out by a secretary and he signed it. But those were the days when his mail bag you know must have been massive. There were kids in in California being christened Galadriel on Bilbo.

Terry Pratchett23:42

So I do my best. What he didn't have to cope with, of course, was email, and and now that accounts for for at least as as much mail as the post bag.

Presenter23:52

So it's always sitting there waiting for you whenever you log in.

Terry Pratchett23:54

There's always another one along in a minute.

Presenter23:56

Um

Terry Pratchett23:56

Yeah.

Presenter23:57

Um and the the problem it seems to me for you now is that these fans, I think as I said earlier, almost know more about the world, the disc world than you do on occasions.

Terry Pratchett24:07

They think they do.

Presenter24:09

But wasn't there an instance when you when they knew what you'd written before you'd written it?

Terry Pratchett24:14

More or less, I think I'd been discussing something informally on the internet and and suddenly this this had gone around the world and it it became a a question in a in a quiz. They asked me this question and I said, How did you know this? and they said we know everything about it. What was it? It was a fairly simple little cliché that there is a creature called the eater of socks. This is why you can only only ever find one sock in in the wash and it it sort of lives at the back of the washing machine and it eats socks. And I'd just muse, because I half believe that's real in any case. And I'd mused about it and so the fans had picked this up because I'd mentioned it and and and it became a question in the quiz and it was stuff we had.

Presenter24:54

So you'd use on the internet, is that what you do?

Terry Pratchett24:56

Brought you to the game.

Terry Pratchett24:58

Actually it can often be very useful.

Terry Pratchett25:00

Uh when I was writing the book Interesting Times, which is set in the Discworld equivalent of China, I I put out a plea for any Chinese speakers among you and and you know f for for weeks afterwards I was fighting them off because within a day I found someone that could give me all the information I wanted about the the structure of the language.

Terry Pratchett25:21

More music.

Terry Pratchett25:22

Many years ago there was a a series on television very late at night called The Silk Road, and I very much enjoyed the music from this. And I remember sitting down one day

Terry Pratchett25:33

putting the C D on and just sitting back and and and for three quarters of an hour I simply unraveled.

Presenter26:10

Kitaro and Silk Road. You've uh written more than thirty books, all told, Terry, some of them for children, including the Obligatory Cat book. Um it's not as if money is a problem any more. Has your attitude changed to money, now that you don't have to think about it too much?

Terry Pratchett26:27

Uh

Presenter26:27

Uh

Terry Pratchett26:27

Yeah.

Terry Pratchett26:28

I knew I was weish.

Terry Pratchett26:30

When I I went into a shop to to buy a video and I saw the the videotape that I wanted and I saw another one that I that I liked.

Terry Pratchett26:39

And I was starting to choose between them, and suddenly I thought I could have both and I felt quite wicked. You know, I've actually bought two. I've I've gone a bit past that stage now.

Presenter26:50

What's the wildest thing you've ever spent money on?

Terry Pratchett26:55

I'm not really that wild a person when it comes to money. I I I like to get

Terry Pratchett27:01

value for money, even if it's something as simple as a a box of floppy disks. I like to think that they're they're worth the money that I'm actually paying for them. I I don't splash out hugely.

Terry Pratchett27:14

There is money.

Presenter27:15

And the work ethic is obviously very strong, right down

Terry Pratchett27:18

But it's mixed up with the pleasure ethic as well. I enjoy writing. I really do. And I would get in fact I do get very neurotic if I am not writing. So I I'm not doing it out of of some kind of stern Puritan ethic. I'm doing it now as a as a a reflex action, as as naturally as as putting on my trousers in the morning.

Presenter27:40

Record number seven.

Terry Pratchett27:42

It took me a long time to discover this, but I love deserts.

Terry Pratchett27:46

And

Terry Pratchett27:47

Three or four years ago, I went on holiday to Australia.

Terry Pratchett27:52

And the piece of music which says Australia to me is Great Southern Land by Icehouse.

Speaker 428:07

Worry about a journey any longer ago

Speaker 428:11

Listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains. Maybe you can hear them talking like I do.

Speaker 428:19

They're gonna betray you, they're gonna forget you Are you gonna let them take you over that way? Break so the man

Presenter28:31

Icehouse and Great Southern Land.

Presenter28:35

So the desert island beckons. Terry Pratchett alone without his books, or his followers, alone with his fantasies. That's all right, isn't it?

Terry Pratchett28:44

That's fine by me. No telephone, no mail.

Presenter28:46

Yeah, no

Presenter28:47

What will you do, old day?

Terry Pratchett28:50

I'm a fairly practical kind of person. I I I'll probably be grubbing for food and and and and fishing in the lagoon.

Presenter28:57

But will you miss it? Will you miss the fame and the material comforts that all of this success has provided?

Terry Pratchett29:04

No. I hope it's a nice warm desert island with plenty of opportunities for just sitting there and looking out at at sea. I think for a writer, fame is something that happens on the outside. It it doesn't affect you very much because you you're always sitting down and things are taking place in in the space behind your eyes and the reviews and and all all the rest of it happen to somebody else, some kind of outer shell. So no, I don't think that will um I don't think I'll miss that at all.

Presenter29:40

Last record.

Terry Pratchett29:41

As I've said, I I listen to music more or less at random.

Terry Pratchett29:47

And I remember when I first heard Itjak Pearlman playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. And there's a point in summer

Terry Pratchett30:01

where he makes the the violin sing like an angel and then curse like a demon.

Terry Pratchett30:07

I I got into Vivaldi just because of a few notes of music.

Presenter31:07

Part of Summer from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played and conducted by Itzhak Pellman with the Israel Philharmonic. If you could only take one of those eight records, Terry, which one would you like to take?

Terry Pratchett31:16

I think it would be Thomas the Limer by Steele I span, because it speaks to me of

Terry Pratchett31:22

damp twilights and uh I don't think there's going to be very many of those on my desert island. What about your book?

Terry Pratchett31:29

There's bound to be something with a title like Edible Plants of the South Seas. Now I know you disapprove, but I'm a fairly practical person and and I realize that behind every plant that we now eat

Terry Pratchett31:42

There are all the unsung cavemen that proved that the other ones were poisonous.

Presenter31:47

And your luxury.

Terry Pratchett31:50

Cheating, I know, but the Chrysler Building from New York, built in nineteen thirty, it's a a marvellous piece of Gothic art deco with

Terry Pratchett32:00

Eagles' heads and gargoyles and a a summit which looks like some kind of uh Isoldo cinema and just this marvellous silver creation. It's the ultimate skyscraper.

Presenter32:13

We shall have it shipped out immediately. Terry Bratchett, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Terry Pratchett32:15

Thank you.

Terry Pratchett32:19

Thank you.

Speaker 432:27

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.