It’s been known that a Discworld television show based in the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork and the cast of characters it is associated with has been in various stages of preproduction discussion for more than a year now. In fact, there’s even video evidence of Sir Terry Pratchett talking with writers about coppers starting up an inter-species band, the trickiness of humane prisoner treatment, and what it might be like to have the undead coming in to file reports on their own murders.
But last weekend the annual Discworld convention was held in Birmingham, England, and it promised a panel hosted by the team behind BBC Worldwide’s fabled Discworld project, and an announcement.
Diane Duane, author (of such close-to-my-childhood books as So You Want To Be A Wizard) and attendee had this to say about the panel’s contents:
The new Discworld series “The Watch” (AKA CSI:Ankh-Morpork) has been approved by Terry Pratchett and will go into production with BBC Worldwide.
Pratchett’s Discworld series, for those unacquainted, is a rambling and wide ranging collection of books that craft an expertly put together universe of fantasy tropes embodied in nuanced characters, wicked puns, and more political, racial, gender and culture allegory than you can shake quite a large stick at. He’s given us characters like Granny Weatherwax, Susan D’eath Sto Helit, and the three most central female characters of the Ankh-Morpork Watch books: Angua von Überwald (a werewolf of considerable pedigree, pictured above), Cheery Littlebottom, and Sybil Ramkin, all formidable women in their own right.
Probably the most unique to television, however, would be Cheery, a young dwarf on the forefront of the modern dwarvish gender revolution. See, on the Discworld (like in Middle Earth) male and female dwarves are indistinguishable from each other, right down to the beards. Most of dwarvish courtship is actually spent making sure your intended is, in fact, the desired gender through close observation of their habits. Of course, dwarven culture doesn’t encourage androgyny… it encourages everybody to appear as male. Cheery, on the other hand, is a member of a younger generation of dwarven women who really prefer drinks with tiny umbrellas over mead, wouldn’t mind a little lipstick or some steel-toed high-heels, and wear their leather skirted armor a little too short for their elders’ tastes, and would rather not be bothered about it.
So color me excited for this new adaptation. Especially judging by this year-old peek into the writers room. Seems like this adaptation is off to the right start. Now if they could just cast my dream Sam Vimes, Hugh Laurie, I’ll be over the moon.
Come on! House is over, he’s got to do something!
(via Diane Duane on Tumblr.)
