Getting all steamed up

The whole reason early explorers trotted across to the New World was money. It made them rich. The Dutch were particularly adept at cottoning onto this and many expeditions were sponsored to achieve just this. Men who had the money, bought the ships, had them kitted out and crewed. Off they went, and if they came back, you got richer. If they didn’t come back, you lost out. It was the beginning of a Price Revolution which led to a high level of gold and silver coming back to Europe, and resulting in inflation rates of around a six-fold increase in just 150 years. But it was the little island to the north, that led to the really really big next step, the one that started making the modern world.

In England, there was a fundamental problem. Lots of people lived in cities, because they were the major trading centres. Everything was available there. But nothing was really made there – if you wanted to be in the manufacturing industry, you had to live far away up in the hills. Why? Because the main source of power for industry was simply water wheels. Whatever you wanted to do – make flour, beer, textiles – any raw material, if you wanted to make it in any sort of economic bulk, you had to have some sort of basic system to produce the energy you needed. The fantastic demand for all this raw material in the cities led to the establishment of canals all over England. At least things could now get from where they were made to where they were needed much more quickly and efficiently. But this wasn’t really enough – more goods simply led to more demand.

So they turned to drink – whisky. After the the Treaty of Union was agreed upon in 1707, England, Wales and Scotland merged into what we now call the United Kingdom. Favouring the Scots was the nice hilly country side – they had plenty of raw power in the form of streams and rivers to produce goods, but were desperate to cash in on everything happening further south. One of the biggest industries happening in Scotland at the time was distillation – making scotch whisky. And the fact that the Treaty of Union led to a heavy taxation on the stuff meant that all that was wanted was someone to be able to make whisky making cheaper. A bit of science was braught to the party, in the form of a Scottish medical man called Joseph Black.

Although almost unheard of, he sat down and actually did the maths behind how much energy was needed to boil water into steam, and condense it back again. Or the same thing from ice to water and back again. Or vice versa. And as such, he discovered a brand new concept called latent heat. Impressive, and he satisfied all the distillers, but not hugely significant. Funnily enough, it was the young bloke who made the instruments Black needed, and kept them calibrated that made the change that everyone so badly needed. His name was James Watt.

Watt wasn’t the first person to think of a steam engine. That title probably goes to a Greek mathematician called Hero around the first century AD. Its possible that he designed a boat powered by steam (much like the one used in Terry Pratchett’s book Small Gods), but its not known weather it was ever built and quite unlikely that it would have worked effectively. The first person to use the effect of boiling water making steam, and its possibility for generating power to any degree of success was Tomas Newcomen, an Ironmonger and Baptist preacher who lived in Devon, England. His engine was used fairly successfully to pump water out of mine shafts.

Watt’s contribution was, however, significant. He made a separate condenser, improving the steam engines efficiency so much that it now used 75% less coal. In 1777, a man called John Wilkinson (of Ironbridge Gorge fame) invented a machine designed to drill smooth barrels in canons. This meant that cannon balls would have a snugger fit – the cannons were more accurate and more powerful. But Watt was able to use this over-sized drill to make highly efficient pistons, and turn the steam engines power into rotary motion.

Steam engines could now drive anything. Weather you had a factory for weaving cloth, or a mine full of coal (which was then used to power steam engines…) Watt’s engine could make it better. There was no longer a need to have industry up in the hills, far away from all the people. Production could happen in cities, where labour was available, and markets for goods were rampant. This drove costs down, and people were able to buy exotic goods from faraway places that they had never been to before – like the next county.

The industrial revolution really did change the world. It is perhaps the most significant phase of change, between what mankind was before, to what mankind is now. It now just remains to be seen if and when our modern society all boils over.

The Chinese Empire Should Never Have Run On Tea

A popular saying is that the British Empire ran on tea. Its possibly rubbish, but it also has a fair point. The demand for it led to advances in trading, colonisation of distant lands, alliances, wars, and sticking your little finger out when you drink it. And somehow, they actually started on coffee – tea only arrived later. It didn’t arrive in Asterix’s pocket when he crossed the Channel to fight the Romans.

As it happened, the Chinese are largely thought to be the people that started it all off, around the 10th century BC, possibly even earlier. By way of comparison, this is about 7 500 years before work finished on the Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt. Perhaps this just shows that tea does help you get up in the morning and get on with the day.

But the funny thing is that the development of tea quite possibly held back Chinese advancement for one small, but very significant reason. The made tea-cups.

Here’s why: Over in Europe, everyone was absolutely mad on wine. It pretty much was the only thing to drink (apart from beer) for hundreds of years. The water certainly wasn’t very safe. And wine, being a nice thing to look at, allowed for the invention of glass. This was used as a practical container forthwith, and we’ve never looked back. It was easy to mould into complicated shapes, it didn’t affect the taste of whatever it held, it was easy to clean, and it didn’t rot or fall apart very easily. Glass in turn led eventually to lens grinding. Something that even Da Vinci cottoned on to.

Lens grinding led to telescopes and microscopes. A crucial part of the Scientific Revolution. You could also put two lenses in a little frame, and wear them on your face when your eyes started to give in. This allowed the thinking minds of the day to have an extra ten or twenty years of reading and contribution in their relevant field. Glass also provided the perfect medium for making beakers, stills and retorts, and all the other scientific paraphernalia that makes a laboratory look important, because its pretty chemically inert. Needless to say, mine doesn’t have any of that nonsense. Early electronics used glass in valves and things. The list goes on and on.

So just because they were perfectly satisfied with the tea cup, the Chinese – who were (and still are) a very intelligent race – would very likely have developed an amazing array of inventions decades  or even centuries before anyone else did.

And the irony of it is that today, most of them prefer coffee anyway.

Sex and Plate Tectonics

Ive been turning this idea over for a while – its only now that Ive got a good title for it, so I thought I could post about it.

To start with, a bit of biology. Reproduction is a shared feature of every organism that we as humans have ever come across. Animals, plants, fungi, from the biggest trees to the smallest single-celled organisms. Across this massive spectrum of different lifestyles, there are many variations of replicating oneself. At one end, you’ve got asexual reproduction. This is what a lot of simple critters do – things like bacteria and so on – and involves basically copying your DNA, and splitting into two bits, with each piece containing a strand of DNA. At the other end if sexual reproduction – this is employed by animals like ourselves. You need males and females, sperm and eggs, a candle-lit dinner and end up with a few embarrassing stories. Between these two extremes are a wealth of intermediates – some animals can alternate between being male and female (such as fish) and some are both at the same time, and able to mate with other individuals, or themselves.

But there is a puzzle to all of this. Evolutionarily speaking, asexual reproduction has a significant advantage over its sexual counterpart. Imagine an environment in which two species co-exist.  Imagine that they are identical in all aspects, except one reproduces sexually, and the other asexually. The asexually reproducing species will quickly outnumber the other – all members are able to reproduce, and al offspring are effectively clones of their parent. Natural and gradual genetic mutations would mean that this species adapts to its environment fairly quickly, and stays that way. The sexually reproducing species would be at a severe handicap. Only females would be able to have offspring, so population growth would be much slower. Secondly, the offspring would have a scrambled mix of genes from each parent, and genetic variation would be much higher. Thirdly, because of this, offspring might not be suited to the environment, and be less able to reproduce in their turn.

So how does sexual reproduction still exist? Billions of years after life began on this planet (exactly how this happened is still a matter of some debate), we still find a wide range of reproductive strategies. Why? Because of plate tectonics. The fact that the Earth’s surface is constantly changing and shifting means that environmental conditions are not static – they change and shift as well. Sometimes we have very warm weather – like in the Carboniferous period, which ended about 290 million years ago. The warm weather resulted in massive amounts of plant growth. These plants died and made fossils – very carbon rich fossils. And today, we’re digging it out of the ground as coal, and burning it to make electricity. Other times we have colder weather, like during the last ice-age, when humans spread out from the African cradle and wondered to every conceivable corner of the planet. This constant varying of the environment means that things have to change to keep up. And that is where sexual reproduction has the advantage. The scramble mix of genes in each offspring of two parents means that, yes, it might be very badly adapted to its current environment, perhaps even worse off than its parents were. But it also means that it might be much better.

So on one hand, organisms that produce asexually have sheer numbers on their side. How many bacteria are currently living on you? Millions? Billions? I have no idea, but I would bet my legs its more than you can count in your lifetime. But these organisms also typically have very short life-spans. Maybe a few hours, or even days. But not much more than that. Those that have longer life spans – things like giraffes and penguins – must be in their given environment for a longer period, and dont have numbers on their side. So adaptation is the best option for them.

Pulling away Nature’s veil

The idea of timing is so deeply embedded in our concious that we usually aren’t even aware that its there at all. You go to sleep at night, wake up in the morning. Prepare soil, plant crops and harvest at certain times of the year. Go fishing when the tide is just right. Even going for a Sunday drive. Why Sunday? Why not any other day?

The functionality of medi-evil churches depended entirely on the faithful doing what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it. And this is where the art – and I will call it an art, because that’s what it was back then – of astronomy. Looking into the sky to determine the timing of events. Building a calender. In the words of James Burke “what you did in church, lent, Easter, February the 29th, depended on what the date was. And that was just it – they didn’t know exactly. For instance, if Easter was supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the beginning of the Spring equinox which depended on a moon/sun cycle which couldn’t be checked correctly, except every three hundred and twelve and a half years, and anyway that night the moon didn’t come up and the calender you were using was nine days out, which it was, I mean what?”

And church authority was what held the whole of society together. So it needed to be right. Enter the Catholic cleric and generally inquisitive bloke Nicolaus Copernicus. Born to a German family in Prussia in 1473 (the same year a fellow German, Didrik Pining, possibly landed in Newfoundland), he soon showed keen prowess in languages, learning Latin, Greek, German, Polish, and Italian. His uncle entered him into the University of Krakow, where he studied for some years, but never actually managed to finish a degree. It was there that he began to turn his gaze skyward and track and record the motions of the sun, moon, planets and stars. What he saw and wrote down shifted heaven and earth. The Earth was not the centre of the universe, as Aristotle had said – it orbited the sun. And so did all the other planets. And some of them had moons of their own. And he published it all in a book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium – On the revolution of heavenly spheres. The hypotheses it proposed were so radical that the printer – unbeknownst to Copernicus – put in a short preamble, suggesting that the reader may be offended by its works, but should read it and then choose his or her own explanation for the observed planetary motions based on whichever is easier to grasp.

Copernicus had brilliant timing. He avoided potential criticism by dying the day the final draft was approved and printed. Legend has it that it was brought forth and placed in his hand and he then closed his eyes for the last time with a happy smile. But it was another man – an Italian – who also did not complete his university degree, who championed what Copernicus had said. He didn’t just chat about it amicably with a few close friends over a cup of Florentine wine, he did what Italians tend to be so good at: he flaunted it hugely, researched it, and backed it up with his own observations. His name – mentioned in Bohemian Rhapsody – was Galileo Galilei. And this is where all the trouble started. The church agreed that a bit of an astronomical re-think was necessary. But they didn’t want it to explode into public view: tell them slowly, keep it minor. Galileo wasn’t interested. He wanted everyone to know now. The church did the obvious – they told him he was a naughty boy, gave him a slap on the wrist, and told him not to do it again. But he did. So they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

It was this breakaway from Church doctrine that really got the Scientific Revolution off to a flying start. By looking at the universe around you, and seeing how it works, questions suddenly begin to arise about how it was all put together. You observe, look, calculate, monitor, measure, analyses, statistically compute, manipulate and eventually you end up with an answer (and usually more questions than you started off with).  By starting with something simple, like 1 + 1 = 2, we can end up with everything from the hydrodynamics of battleships, to Isaac Newton being hit on the head by a gravity-obsessed member of the Malus genus. Its an earnest attempt to pull away Nature’s veil, and see what lies beneath.

The Greatest Game… in the World (with apologies to Mr. J.C.R. Clarkson)

Im a big fan of Age of Empires 2. Yes, its been out for over a decade, and there are very few people who still play it. But I think its still an all-time epic. The simply fact that you can play the game again and again and again (and trust me on this, because Ive done just that) and you’ll never play the same game twice. Its different every time.

The first version of the game came out in 1997. This was set during the initial rise of civilization, from the Stone Age through to the Iron Age. Shortly after that, the Rise of Rome expansion was added, improving some features in the game. You could now do things like que up units, rather than building them one at a time. Then the second edition of the game came out – Age of Empires 2. This was set during the middle ages, and drew on elements of Fuedal and Imperial living. This again improved on particular aspects of the game – each civilization now had its own unique unit, civilizations had much more pronounced strengths and weaknesses, you could get units to gather at certain points after they were created, and walls could be built with gates. When the Conquerors expansion came out, the game reached its all time peak. The game play was at an absolute premium, both in single and multiplayer.

In 2005, Age of Empires 3 hit the stands, and I was expecting more of the same. The timeline had so much promise – it focused on the Age of Exploration, and the colonisation of the Far East and the New World. But unfortunately, there was too much of a shift in gameplay style. Dont get me wrong – it’s a pretty cool game – but it’s no longer Age of Empires. Its a new game altogether.

In Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, my personal gameplay strategy is some sort of rush. In multiplayer games I really enjoy a highly specialised attack called the Slingshot, in which a Chinese “sling” donates food to a Frank ally – the “shot”. This leads to an extremely fast Imperial Age time, castles, knights and trebuchets. In a 2v2 environment is it extremely vulnerable to an enemy rushing the Chinese player. But in a 3v3, coupled with a third ally doing a simple standard archer and ram castle age rush (also known as a Crush), playing as the Britons, Mayans or even the Huns, this can lead to a very early but very effective “late”-game advantage. But this has gotten a bit too technical, perhaps.

Im the famous Eccles

The 27th of April 2002 was a pretty unremarkable day for most of us. NASA recieved its last ever communication from the Pioneer 1 spaceprobe, and Frank Abignale had a birthday. For Spike Milligan, it was the day he died. In the course of his life, he did just about everything. He faught in World War II, wrote poems, plays, acted, spoke, wrote thousands of letters, and inspired Monty Python to the point where they gave him a small part in the Life of Brian, simply because he was visiting their film set in Tunisia. But he was probably most famous for writing the scripts for the BBC (Big Brother Corporation…?) radio series The Goon Show.

Ideally, I should be too young to be saying all of this. The Goon Show ran from 1951 to 1960 – before my parents were even born. But by a strange twist, Ive ended up in a position where I have most of the recordings. Over the past few weeks, I have quietly been working my way through them – one or two episodes an evening – while quitely playing some mind-numbing computer game, like Civilization 2.

Each episode revolved around the voices of the three actors: Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike himself. Each story enivitably involves the shows hero, Neddie Seagoon, being tricked into some bizaare bit of fraud by the villians, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and his side-kick Count Jim Moriarty. The supporting cast of the extremely elderly couple, Henry Crunn and Minnie Bannister, and the brilliant piece of military expenditure in the form of Major Denis Bloodnok would provide small sidelines. And then the shows favorites, the idiot Eccles and the tiny coward Bluebottle, would inevitably show up towards the end, and blow something up with dynamite, allowing Seagoon to triumph after all. Interestingly, Bluebottle would usually die (you have deaded me!) by the end of the episode, providing an interesting modern parallel.

The humor of the Goon show was utterly original, and I dont think there has ever been anything quite like it since. A few, most notably the English commedian Peter Cook and Monty Python drew heavy influence from them, but that’s about as far as it got. The Beatles were famously a bit silly when they first went to the other side of the pond – when John Lennon was asked by a journalist how he found America, true to Goon form, he replied “you turn left at Greenland”.

I think its the reason today I tend to prefer what I call “British” humour from “American” humour. Commedians like Eddie Izzard, Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran all have a bit of a habit of talking in a show, stopping, losing the thread, going “errrr… what was I talking about?”, and then talking about something utterly different. That could never happen in America.

Call it silliness – the Goons had it in spades. And it could only happen on the radio – the Goons could never have done what they’d done if they didn’t leave a lot of the visualising up to the power of the imagination. One of my favorite scenes (I think it’s during the play entitled The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill on Sea), when Ned Seagoon says “And then, by the light of a passing glue factory, I saw that the soldier was only wearing one boot”. Something like that could never be left to cinimatography. And it was this silliness that made it brilliant. Even now, years after all the main conspirators have died, there are still people who enjoy all the fun that they had – in the words of Harry Secombe – “wishing that every day, always, was a Sunday”.

Pressed for printing

Since people were first started being people, there have always been things that were OK to do, and things that weren’t. The difference between murdering your neighbour or eating an fried egg, for example. One is generally allowed and pretty boring, the other somewhat untidy and more difficult to explain. But it was a code of laws which first started governing the first cities. And like any laws, you want them to be instituted and controlled by someone important and in charge, who knows what they’re doing. Someone who could happily carry out some sort of cause and effect system – if you did this, then you would have to do that.

The people around the AD/BC changeover, when everyone had to get a new watch (tribute there to Mr. E.J. Izzard), who were in charge of all of the lawmaking were basically those in churches. And as these doubled as places of teaching, they soon became the first Universities. And the first of these – the ones we can today relate to – was the one in Bologna, Italy, in 1088. I only just found this out with a bit of research – I had always thought that it was Oxford, but apparently that’s a bit down the list a way. And I suppose this makes sense – after all the early stuff happening in Greece, Italy was the next big place to be, what with the Roman Empire and all.

Back in those days, the passing of knowledge was done by painstakingly copying books. This was done by church scholars who sat for hours and hours on end in specially designed little alcoves, carefully remaking page after page of a particular book. In fact a single book could take as long as an entire year, just to copy out. And the process was also incredibly subjective – we have some books today which are clearly coppies from others. But its difficult to tell which was first. Copiers might copy exactly what was written – spelling mistakes and all. Others might do a little correcting. Others would throw in their own ideas, saying things like “well that is clearly wrong”, and updating the work as they went along. Coupled with this was the fact that once the books were written, they were placed in a room with other books. There was no real system of ordering or cataloguing these texts, and anyone looking for something particular had a fair bit of searching to do.

In steps a middle-aged German goldsmith, a man called Johannes Gutenberg. In a sudden flash of insight, he came up with an idea that would revolutionise Europe – printing presses using movable type.

It would be nice to credit him with it, but the Chinese had been at it for about 400 odd years already. Nevertheless, the Church immediately fell over themselves when they saw the potential of this new invention. Bibles were probably the first books to be printed on any sort of significant scale – because the Word of God was the most important thing. But soon it was the Word of the People Who Had The Money which determined where things would go. Letters of patent, ledges, tables of insurance premiums, exchange rates, accounts and balance records. Very suddenly, copying was out. Books could now be completely standardised – each copy was the same. The inflation of information meant that it was no longer only the elite and rich who could get there hands on it – education was attainable for anyone who wanted it.

It found its way north, to a country that had been emptied of the sea, so that people could make a living from the land – the Netherlands. The city of Amsterdam was once the most important trade centre in the world. Movable type and printing presses enabled financiers to all speak the same language: they all had books filled with tables of rates of exchange for everything that were – importantly – all the same. A private sector of the nouveao riche arose: people who built companies using money in order to make money. There was no connection with the Church. It was all about exploitation something for cash. A new world order – capitalism – was born.

Overlord, your master, not your God

Operation Overlord was the code name given to the Battle of Normandy – the famous landings by the Allies on the northern coast of France. This started on the 6th of June, 1944. It involved moving – from England, across the English Channel to France – about 300 000 men, 12 000 sea-borne vessels, 10 000 aircraft, and thousands of tons of tanks, bulldozers, ammunition, food, fuel, equipment, medical supplies, and on and on and on. I read recently that it was something like moving the city of Birmingham over to France, with enough of a follow up plan to keen it moving once it was on the other side. And keep it secret before it got there, so no-one knew where or when it was going to arrive. Every man had a position in a unit, every unit had objectives to carry out by a certain time, and counter objectives to undertake after that, or if the primary objectives failed. Units meeting up with other units, in order to secure objectives to assist other units. Each unit equipped with the stuff it needed, and not the stuff someone else needed. And you cant tell them what they’re all going to do until – literally – a few hours before they have to go and do it. Multiply all of that by thousands.

Probably one of the most complicated undertakings ever done by man

How do you plan for that? Every objective placed into a specific hierarchy, every man in his unit, every piece of equipment to a man, for 300 000 men. And that’s just D-day itself. The follow up stuff the day after that, and the day after that, and the week after that, and the month after that – that was all accounted for. Everyone remembers that Operation Overlord started on the 6th of June. No-one remembers that the entire operation was planned to last 90 days, and end when the Axis troops had been pushed back to the other side of the River Seine. All of it was planned to the smallest detail.

And the planning was done by men with pencils, paper, delegation, skill and initiative. Computers had only just been invented, and weren’t used for this sort of thing – they were for cracking Nazi codes. And all the planning was done in about six months.

That’s not the bit that impresses me. OK, that’s a bit of a lie. It impresses the clocks off me, I think it’s incredible. But the fact that it was all kept secret from the Nazi high command… That was all down to a brilliant deception plan called Operation Fortitude. The idea was to “leak” information to the Axis parties, saying that a bluffing attack would take place at Normandy, before the main force landed around Pas de Calais. This worked so well that Hitler tied up his best troops in the wrong place – and didn’t release them – until July. By this point, the Allies had landed in France, and in the words of Ronald Reagan, “began to take back the continent of Europe”.

One of my greatest ambitions is to visit those beaches one day. I want to stand on that sand, feel the wind, and the chill in the air, and imagine what it must have been like to arrive there early one morning and fight not for freedom, your country, a man, a feeling, an ideal, but for your life.

Somehow they did it. The men with pencils planned it, got it ready, and made it work. I think its probably the most complicated task a group of people have ever undertaken. Forget building the concord, or sending twelve men to the Moon. These men – these boys who became men – they changed the world.

The Ultimate Discworld Movie

In 1983, Terry Pratchett published The Colour of Magic, the first of the Discworld series. Since then they’ve become amazingly successful. I, for one, am hooked. I find them increasingly hard to put down, and the later ones I have to try really hard not to read them too fast, otherwise I’ll get to the end of the book.

If you aren’t a Discworld fan, you might as well get back to work. You just wont understand much of what you’re about to read.

The idea is pretty straightforward. And also pretty old (Im deffinately not the first person to do this). Its the ultimate wish list of actors and actresses to play in a Discworld movie – not one necessarily based on any of the books. Or a number of movies – one doing a City Watch story, or the Witches, or Death and Susan, or the Wizards. I haven’t decided on that yet, and chances are, Im not going to. In the meantime, this list has taken me literally weeks to compile.

Here we go:

City Watch:

1. Sam Vimes – Liam Neeson

Everyone says it should be Clint Eastwood. And yes, the motto of the City Watch is Fabricate Dium Punk – a tribute to Dirty Harry. But he’s getting a bit old, and I prefer Neeson anyway.

2. Carrot Ironfounderson – Matt Damon

This is, in my opinion, one of the harder bits of casting. Matt Damon looks right – but he’s too small. A bit of false perspective camera work can fix that. He managed to pull off a South African accent fairly well (for an American) in Invictus, so Im pretty sure he could do a Welsh accent for Carrot. Just make him a ginger.

3. Angua – Sarah Alexandra

Her role in Coupling was what Im after. Sort of nervous, but level headed at the same time. And I think she could do the hostile death glare very well. The bit where Angua absent-mindedly is squeeking Mr Fusspot’s rubber bone in Making Money is one of the funniest Discoworld moments as well.

4. Nobby Nobbs – Tony Robinson

He played Baldrick in Black Adder. Make him look ugly, and he’d nail it. “Me sir – I have a cunning plan…”

5. Fred Colon – Terry Jones

I can very easily imagine him being terrified of anyone with authority, explaining in detail to Lord Vetinari exactly where he can put it, and telling Nobby how teeth fit together so well, and how tins of sardines aren’t sardine shaped.

6. Detritus – Lawrence Dallaglio

Yes, he’s a rugby player, not an actor. But Detritus is not a very difficult part to play. And I think Dallaglio would really do “feel fick, sah” really well. And just look at that face.

7. Cheery Littlebottom – Cathy Burke

I only really know of her from the I told you I was ill Spike Milligan Tribute. She did a pretty passable Minnie Bannister.

8. Constable Cuddy – Sean Astin

Deffinately has the right build to pull off a dwarf. Cuddy only appears in Men At Arms, but Sean Astin could do any dwarf role, like the Low King in Fifth Elephant, or Glod in Soul Music.

9. Reg Shoe – Hugh Lowrie

These days he’s gone over to the bad side, and plays in American sitcoms. But he did a lot of stand-up stuff with Rowan Atkinson, and – of course – Black Adder. As a zombie… I dont think you’d even have to put that much makup on…

10. Constable Dorfl – Michael Clarke Duncan

Im not going to beat around the bush here – the man is huge. I think his voice is even right for a Golem. Computer graphics or something could do the rest.

The Witches:

1. Granny Weatherwax – Judy Dench

Alright, Granny Weatherwax is tall and skinny, and Judy Dench isn’t. But the attitude and everything… She makes a very sharp, snappish M in the newer James Bond movies, and I think that counts more than anything.

2. Nanny Ogg – Jo Brand

I only really know her from a few episodes of Stephan Fry’s alternative quizshow QI. But she has everything Nanny Ogg needs – a wry smile, certain toothiness, and a wicked sense of humour.

3. Magrat Garlick – Lisa Kudrow

Think Phoebe in Friends – ditsy, forgetful… A modern equivalent of Magrat. But she needs a bit of a Pommy accent.

4. Verence – Colin Firth

Really good in The Importance of Being Ernest and utterly brilliant in The King’s Speech. The ease with which I can see him being slapping in the face with a pie is somewhat worrying though.

The Wizards:

1. Rincewind – Simon Pegg

This was a tricky one… The thing that sold me was an episode of Top Gear (season 9, episode 4 if memory serves…) where he drove the car around the track, and said “Help!” in a particularly… Rincewind way.

2. Mustrum Ridcully – Sean Connery

I think the best part about him is imagining him yelling “Burshar! How many timesh have I told you not to fly higher than the wallsh?!”

3. The Dean – John Cleese

Stick a pillow up his robe – make him fatter. “I’ll save you Mrs Whitlow!”

4. The Bursar – Rowan Atkinson

I was never a huge fan of Mr Bean, but I do think the man is the greatest master of modern slapstick. His facial expressions are simply incredible.

5. The Chair of Indeffinate Studies – Stephen Fry

I just really want him as a wizard. And I think of Stephen Fry in an argument scene would be brilliant.

6. The Lecturer of Recent Runes – John Rhys Davis

Again, John Rhys Davis is someone who I think would make a really good wizard, and Ive just sort of slotted him in. I think he would make a pretty good Churchill as well, come to think of it.

7. Ponder Stibbons – Alan Cumming

This has probably been the hardest of the lot. I bounced around everyone from Steve Coogan to Gabriel Thomson via Alan Cumming. I really didn’t want to have a previous wizard playing another wizard, but he is actually a decent actor. He looks right, has worn round glasses before and I think would do a comedic role very well.

Ankh Morpork Miscalaneous:

1. Lord Vetinari – Pierce Brosnan

Not the obvious choice, I think. Most people know him as an almost comical Bond, but I think he could do sharp, serious and the death-stare very well. Capital.

2. Moist von Lipwig – Ewan McGregor

He’s a very… smiley actor. I think he just smiles very easily (although the picture above is a bad example). Moist needs to be a likeable character – people must see him and trust him immediately. But he needs to have a hidden, sharper persona as well.

3. Adora Belle Dearheart – Natalie Dormer

Honestly, I do not think there is a better looking actress. She melts my clocks. Well known for playing Anne Bolyn in The Tudors, and does a very good smouldering temptress.

4. William Da Worde – Jack Davenport

Well known for Pirates of the Caribbean. But his part in Coupling is more of what Im after. Does a panicky, highly strung bachelor pretty well.

5. CMOT Dibbler – Mackenzie Crook

His role as Ragetti in Pirates of the Caribbean is exactly what Im looking for. I think he could also do a pretty passable Nobby.

6. Leonard of Quirm – Bill Bailey

Well, I mean, look at him. He already is Leonard of Quirm. Make him a bit older, yes, but I think he really does the forgetful-genius pretty well already.

Harry King – Ray Winston

A cockney mobster? He’s one already. Nuff said.

Death and co:

1. Death – James Earl Jones (voice)

He did Darth Vader in Star Wars. Trying to watch him in Dr Strangelove, or Hunt for the Red October and not seeing Vader is like trying to watch the Lord of the Rings and not see Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith. Impossible.

2. Susan (young) – Tamzin Merchant

Yes, she’s as old as I am, but she looks pretty young. Well known playing Katherine Howard in The Tudors, she can do girlishly immature, but also serious and knowing. A good mix, I think.

3. Susan (older) – Helena Bonham Carter

A brilliant actress – just look at the diversity between her roles in Fight Club and The King’s Speech. She does angry/snappish very well. Could even do Granny Weatherwax if you made her look older.

4. Albert – Eric Idle

One of the sharpest and funniest actors alive. The man is a master. Its just a pity Albert isn’t a more prominant character.

Other characters:

1. Cohen the Barbarian – Ian Mckellen

Trying to get him to act in some leather underwear could be tricky… But he would be awesome.

2. Igor (all of them) – Andy Serkis

A brilliant voice artist. Turning a lisp on and off half-way through a sentance? He could deffinately do that!

3. Twoflower – Masi Oka

He had a very short part in an Austin Powers movie, where his line was “It looks like Godzilla, but due to international copyright laws, its not!” He’s been in some other stuff as well. Not a very difficult part to play, but I dont think Sean Astin did a very good job…

4. Lord Downey – Nick Dunning

Best known for playing Thomas Boleyn in The Tudors. He just looks right.

5. Arthur Winkins a.k.a. Count Notfaroutoe – Jack Dee

Henpecked vampire. Done. Just need a bit of a goth look, and its all there.

6. Otto Chriek – Dylan Moran

Yes, OK, he’s typically a drunk Irish comedian. What really swung me was a very brief shot of him in some of Black Books un-aired out-takes, with his hair brushed, a cigarette, and a suit. I saw that, and Otto leapt to mind straight away.

Heading south, or Heading: south

Technology guarantees speed and accuracy, apparently. Just never tell your computer that you’re in a really big rush, or it’ll break down, turn itself off, fail to recognise your password, order a pizza on your behalf that you didn’t want, or leave altogether. Today, if you want to get from somewhere to somewhere else, you put in your destination into a GPS, and it tells you – in a silly Audrey Hepburn voice – how to get there. It dosn’t matter how you’re travelling, car, ship, plane, even walking, but a few little satellites and a gizmo that fits in your hand are all you now need to get to any place in the world, give or take a meter or two. What Im getting at is that hardly anyone knows how to navigate anymore.

Back in the long-long ago “I where a toga because we havn’t invented anything else” era, navigation was a simple matter of sticking to the coastline. If the bloke on board ship who was in charge of getting you to the right place lost sight of that, you were lost. They had a thing called a Porterland Chart, which showed all the headlands and bays along a desired stretch of coastline. They had a piece of string, with some knots tied in it, to measure how fast they were going (and Ive never managed to figure out exactly how that worked…) and a compass to tell them which way North was. Cellestial navigation – looking at the stars as you went – was still in its infancy. The idea there was to keep a good fix on the Pole star – the one that, if you’re at the North Pole, sits directly overhead. The further south you go, the closer it gets to the horizon. And by measuring the angle between the star, yourself, and the horizon (using a thing called a cross-staff), you can figure that out pretty accurately.

Thus we come to the Portuguese. Known today for football, rallying, Lisbon, and getting their language to Brazil. But a royal prince, called Henry the Navigator, is perhaps their greatest contribution ever. He was born in 1394, the son of King John I. When he was only 21 he captured a fort filled with barbery pirates in present-day Morocco. This little move impressed his father, and initiated a life-long interest with the African continent. He commissioned a fellow countryman, Gil Eanes, to head south as far as he could. And this is where the trouble starts – and where there is classic implementation of that horrible saying “there are no problems, only challenges to overcome”.

Eanes headed south alright. Although he didn’t know where he was going, it was a simple matter of keeping the pole star behind him. But the further south he went, the closer it got to the horizon, and the more difficult navigation became. So he went home again. It was with the invention of an early sextant, and thing called a a mariner’s astrolable, that Eanes was able to return, and push further on. Then came Cape Bojador, a slight bump in Africa’s west coast, a little way south of the Azores. The water around that headland is very shallow, and the local fish have a habit of ganging together in large shoals and bashing the surface of the water with their tails, making it appear to be boiling. Couple that with the fact that the local geology has a high iron content, making compass needles spin around erratically, and you begin to understand why those early explorers were weary of the area, and came home with stories of monsters and things. But in 1434, Eanes managed to get around all that by, well, by going around it – giving it a wide berth. He pushed on a little further before deciding to call it a day and come home, but he came back with information about what was on the other side.

Money.

The initial attraction of Africa was that on the other side was India, and the spice trade. Find a way to get into that without going through Turkey, and you were in for the good life. But accidently, Henry the Navigator had stumble on a continent filled with slaves, gold, and all sort of exotic plants and animals, just ripe for the picking.

And with that came the Age of Exploration. The Portuguese were right at the front when it came to mapping sea currents, water depths, headlands, prevailing winds, coastlines… They found strange little islands, which could be used as fresh water re-supply points. If you dumped a few goats or chickens there as well, they could multiply and provide a store of fresh meat. The world was their mollusc. Except that everyone else felt the same way as well.