The (Night) Watch

[Hroth]

8 hours ago, Ian J. said:

I did see parts of the not so recent BBC version of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency with Stephen Mangan, and that missed the mark by miles as well. It wasn't even trying to be faithful to Douglas Adams' book either, and his style is also in his narrative

 

Which is why the radio original of HHGTTG (the books came later!) worked so well. I've still got the LP record releases. The TV and Film adaptations were atrocious.

 

It might be that The Watch may have worked better as a radio/streamed audio production?

 

[Ruffnut Thorston]

In my opinion, the recentish continuation of the HHGG book series by a new author was quite good.

 

One thing about the Radio, book, and I believe the record, versions of HHGG is that they were all different in some ways, though the general story remains the same.

 

TV and Movie versions have certain constraints. It isn’t really politically correct to have a space alien or robot played by a human these days. 
 

 

Edited August 15, 2021 by Ruffnut Thorston
Typo

[Welly]

I've just ordered myself a copy of Nightwatch just so I can see for myself - I expect the book will be different and I hope I can get into it!

[Roddy Angus]

8 minutes ago, Welly said:

I've just ordered myself a copy of Nightwatch just so I can see for myself - I expect the book will be different and I hope I can get into it!

The book is very different, the TV series takes bits from a number of books and changes the characters significantly, for example Detritus is alive and well in the discworld book series.  That having been said, Nightwatch is one of my favourite books, so read and enjoy.

Regards

Roddy

[Roddy Angus]

Ps. Some useful tricks to do with a bottle of ginger beer.

 

R

[bimble]

1 hour ago, Welly said:

I've just ordered myself a copy of Nightwatch just so I can see for myself - I expect the book will be different and I hope I can get into it!

 

The tv series is more based* upon the early books 'Guards! Guards!' & 'Men At Arms', though the villain Carcer is from the book 'The Night Watch' as is Captain (though he's only a sergeant-in-arms in the book) Keel.  

 

 

* - I say "based", the story ideas of a dragon, Carrot coming to the city, Detritus & Angua, the meeting of Lady Sybil; the actual plots of the books are wildly different.  Cheery Longbottom was introduced in 'Feet of Clay'.

[Hroth]

21 minutes ago, bimble said:

I say "based", the story ideas of a dragon, Carrot coming to the city, Detritus & Angua, the meeting of Lady Sybil; the actual plots of the books are wildly different.  Cheery Longbottom was introduced in 'Feet of Clay'.

 

And her "forensics" department was pretty basic.  An old toilet facility, to be precise.  Igors, and their skills in medical matters, bio-artificing and so on, only appeared after the events of "The Fifth Elephant".

[zarniwhoop]

I ripped one of the later episodes (the Ook one) last night to check if my update to a package used when ripping the huge downloads from get_iplayer to a more manageable size was working, and noticed that at the start it said something like "in a secondhand dimension" which sounds pretty accurate.

[BR60103]

If you are just starting to read the novels, this is a diagram of how the storylines are set up.

https://imgur.com/a/Yqipw

 

The novel Night Watch comes very far into the series and relies on a lot of what comes before.

 

[Reorte]

On 15/08/2021 at 00:21, Ian J. said:

I've not yet watched a Pratchett Discworld adaptation that works for me - too much of Pratchett's style is in his narrative, something that doesn't translate well into characterisation.

 

The ones I've seen (which doesn't include this series) have been... OK. There's a lot of good dialogue which should make the task easier.

 

An adaption is a fine line to walk, between paying only lip service to the source material and being over-faithful. It sounds like this is very much the former. Good Omens, on the other hand (and despite not being a solo Pratchett story) suffered a bit from the latter, with large amounts of unnecessary narration.

[Ian J.]

5 hours ago, Reorte said:

 

The ones I've seen (which doesn't include this series) have been... OK. There's a lot of good dialogue which should make the task easier.

 

An adaption is a fine line to walk, between paying only lip service to the source material and being over-faithful. It sounds like this is very much the former. Good Omens, on the other hand (and despite not being a solo Pratchett story) suffered a bit from the latter, with large amounts of unnecessary narration.

 

(my bold)

 

IMO that's the problem with Adams and Pratchett - when anyone has attempted to do an at or near faithful adaptation of their books, they tend to try and put the narrative comedy into the dialogue, and it doesn't work. The only time it ever worked was intentionally on Adams' part - the narration of the guide in HHGTTG on first radio then on TV and in film.

[Vistisen]

On 12/08/2021 at 20:16, bimble said:

The entire series has been on the iplayer for a while.  The Pratchett estate has distanced themselves from this production, and having watched it I'm not surprised why.  Apart from the names there is nothing in common with the books.  Even the character of the characters is totally different.  There is no similarity to how the city is run in the books (the guilds, the Watch, the Unseen University, Vetinari), there is no suggestion that the books have been read in detail and the timelines of the stories followed.

 

If you're expecting anything like the books you will be disappointed.   They obviously had a decent enough budget, they had the rights to Discworld, and I can only assume that the scriptwriter got themselves the vaguest of character descriptions and then made their entire own world/story up.

 

At least the Sky films tried to follow whichever story they were adapting, but this...

I was really wanting this to be good. But it was terrible. Now I am pinning my hopes on the televising of the excellent 'Rivers of London' book series by Ben Aaronovitch. If you have not read these I can recommend them. There are actually important roles played by railways in these stories. The obvious tag line is Harry Potter is now a detective. But there is so much more going on. 

[Reorte]

Just had a very quick look for some pictures of it. Erm, a strange choice indeed. But hey, a complete restyling of the setting could work (although I'm not sure what the point would be), but you'd still need to get the characters and interactions feel right, and it sounds like they didn't.

[johnlambert]

14 hours ago, Vistisen said:

I was really wanting this to be good. But it was terrible. Now I am pinning my hopes on the televising of the excellent 'Rivers of London' book series by Ben Aaronovitch. If you have not read these I can recommend them. There are actually important roles played by railways in these stories. The obvious tag line is Harry Potter is now a detective. But there is so much more going on. 

Oh yes, I got the first two Rivers of London books for Christmas and I'm now on book six.  Some of it might be a bit gruesome for BBC/ITV, more likely to be an HBO or similar if it ever got made.

[Vistisen]

4 hours ago, johnlambert said:

Oh yes, I got the first two Rivers of London books for Christmas and I'm now on book six.  Some of it might be a bit gruesome for BBC/ITV, more likely to be an HBO or similar if it ever got made.

Simon Pegg has the rights to a series

https://www.denofgeek.com/books/rivers-of-london-tv-series-news/

 

[PaulRhB]

On 16/08/2021 at 16:27, Ian J. said:

they tend to try and put the narrative comedy into the dialogue,

Yes it needs to be realised, much like the shock of realisation after putting one of Dibblers creations in your mouth, not hung up on a banner while you’re chained to the wall a la Vetinari. 

[Welly]

On 15/08/2021 at 18:07, Welly said:

I've just ordered myself a copy of Nightwatch just so I can see for myself - I expect the book will be different and I hope I can get into it!

Just finished reading it and I enjoyed it very much! I can see that the TV adaption made a mistake in killing off Sargeant Detritus so early on, in the book he had adapted a crossbow to fire off a bundle of explosive arrows at once and that Vimes had to ban him from using it on people! The visual effect of Detritus using that weapon to bust down a wall would have made good TV.

 

Should I get a copy of "Guards, Guards"?

[Ian J.]

6 minutes ago, Welly said:

Should I get a copy of "Guards, Guards"?

 

You have to ask...?

 

I'd say just get all the Discworld novels. Most are good enough that getting through the odd weaker one isn't a chore. Also, it's not essential to read them in published order, but it helps.

[Hroth]

9 hours ago, Ian J. said:

I'd say just get all the Discworld novels. Most are good enough that getting through the odd weaker one isn't a chore. Also, it's not essential to read them in published order, but it helps.

 

If you want to explore themes, there are "reading order" charts.  This one seems to be pretty complete.

 

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld

 

 

[Reorte]

On the reading order charts it's helpful to read them in some sort of order - it helps explain who the characters are and why they're where they are and how they got there and events of previous stories are mentioned from time to time, but it's rarely essential for following the plot.

[Welly]

On 28/08/2021 at 09:47, Welly said:

Just finished reading it and I enjoyed it very much! I can see that the TV adaption made a mistake in killing off Sargeant Detritus so early on, in the book he had adapted a crossbow to fire off a bundle of explosive arrows at once and that Vimes had to ban him from using it on people! The visual effect of Detritus using that weapon to bust down a wall would have made good TV.

 

Should I get a copy of "Guards, Guards"?

I have just read "Guards, Gaurds" and love it! It turns out that Detritus used to be a "Splatterer" in this book!

 

I'm now on "Men At Arms"...