There are lots of things that I am grateful about when it comes to my wife. She’s beautiful, clever, tactful, organised, compassionate, practical and said ‘yes’ both when I asked her to marry me and to the idea of having a baby. You could put my wife in a nightclub or a Buckingham Palace garden party and she’d instinctively know how to dress and behave in both situations. In short she’s a walking, talking living embodiment of the ideal woman of the type described in the Jewish Eshet Chayil prayer, (although without the planting a vineyard bit), which can be found in Proverbs 31:10 onwards.

One of the things that I’m extremely grateful to her for doing for me is belatedly introducing me to the Discworld novels of the late and greatly lamented Sir Terry Pratchett. I read a fair number of them over the years, with the exception of the last one which I have not read yet and have been entranced with the world that Sir Terry created. Reading the Discworld books and recognising the fantasy cliches that he parodied or the real world stuff like religion that he tackled via analogies has been extremely rewarding.

These books could be great material for adaptations and in some cases they have been, such as with Going Postal, Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, but those adapting them can sometimes, as the BBC did, get things badly wrong. The problem with bad adaptations, and in particular the BBC adaptation of the City Watch series, has caused the Pratchett estate to become more wary of adaptations of Sir Terry’s books.

There’s an interesting article in The Gamer magazine written by Ben Sledge that digs into the subject of adaptations of Sir Terry’s books and particularly the BBC adaptation of the stories involving the City Watch.

Mr Sledge said:

The best series to adapt, surely, would be The City Watch as it has recognisable characters, huge popularity, and an easy premise for newcomers to grasp. A corrupt police force in an even more corrupt city. The looming threat of dragons returning to Ankh-Morpork. A six foot six dwarf named Carrot. How could it go wrong?

Except it all did go wrong. The Watch premiered in 2021 to almost universal criticism. The BBC series did away with the fantasy setting in favour of a pseudo-modern punk rock vibe, removed any of Pratchett’s iconic wit, and eschewed interesting characters for stories described by reviewers as “generic”, “crushingly rote”, and “one-dimensional”. The adaptation was so bad that Pratchett’s daughter, game developer Rhianna, said that the show “shares no DNA with my father’s Watch”. Not even Matt Berry voicing a talking sword could save it from mediocrity.

About three or four decades ago, you used to be able to rely on the BBC doing a reasonable job of a book adaptation with some of those adaptations, such as that of I,Claudius by Robert Graves, really standing the test of time. That doesn’t seem to be the case now. The BBC had fabulous source material from Sir Terry’s Discworld work and surely they should have been able to produce something that was not so bad that the author’s daughter felt that it had to be slagged off and to distance herself from the adaptation?

I agree with the author in that the Discworld books make for great source material for adaptations and also that the Pratchett estate should keep a close eye on Sir Terry’s intellectual property lest poor quality adaptations mar the public’s image of Sir Terry’s work, just as Sir Terry closely monitored potential adaptations during his lifetime. The Pratchett estate should, in the aftermath of the BBC’s adaptation debacle, be very very wary about future adaptations and should pick future adaptation partners with care, lest they end up with something similar to the BBC’s product or even worse, an abomination of an adaptation such as Rings of Power, an adaptation that is only vaguely and loosely connected to the work of Professor JRR Tolkien.