Martin Jameson reflects on BBC America’s fresh take on Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch through the prism of his own experience of adapting Discworld for the small screen.

I could smell trouble in the air. Rumblings that ‘they’ were messing around with ‘Discworld’. ‘They’ being BBC America and ‘Discworld’ being the new iteration of the adventures of Sam Vimes and the hapless Ankh-Morpork City Watch. I felt a shudder of déjà vu, a certain tightening of the stomach…

Scroll back a quarter of a century to 1996, and a young writer by the name of Martin Jameson scores his first ever TV gig adapting Terry Pratchett’s sixteenth Discworld novel, Soul Music as a seven-part animated series for Channel 4.

I should make two things clear straight away.

One: It was a great job (Hey! I got to work with Christopher Lee!!). I shall always be very grateful for the opportunity Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall gave me, kick-starting my television career.

Two: Before anyone says anything, yes, I know – I know, all right! – it was not a great series.

I don’t want to devalue the work of anyone involved with that production. We were all grafting our butts off, but the truth is, it was doomed from the word go. It was massively under budgeted and under resourced; it was the wrong project at the wrong time aspiring to dreamed of ‘economies’ from the new world of digital animation, but without the technology to achieve that. Soul Music stumbled onto our screens tripping over a whole succession of obstacles far too tedious and ‘industry’ to go into here.

But the biggest obstacle to a TV newbie like the younger me was the phenomenon of Discworld itself.

When I started adapting Soul Music, Hogfather had only just hit the shelves, the twentieth in a series that would eventually run to double that number. Discworld was already a ‘thing’, a club of sorts, a cult, almost a rite of geeky passage – the intimate knowledge of which was already a virtual masonic handshake for enthusiasts. And lordy, lordy what a long shadow that cast over the writing process.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Discworld series as much as the next geek (although some are definitely better than others) but when the reference point for every notes session is the book, or the fans, you learn very quickly that your script is never going to have a life of its own. As the process continued, I would happily have thrown the original novel out of the window. I came to dread getting notes from a certain exec at Channel 4 (who shall remain nameless). It wasn’t that they were critical of my writing. Oh that they had been! No, their notes were a list of page numbers, and comments such as: ‘That joke isn’t in the book’; ‘Why have you changed this bit?’ and ‘Where’s the joke from page 167?!?’

Sigh.

Of course, if I’d been more experienced, and one tenth of the arsy bugger I am now, I would have fought my corner, but I wasn’t and so the final script looked like little more than a lame transcription of the book into haltingly moving pictures, doing neither me, nor the original any favours.

To be fair to myself, I have felt similarly about most of the other attempts to drag Discworld off the page. Good Omens was the rare exception amongst Pratchett TV adaptations, but then that wasn’t really Discworld which perhaps gave it more license to plough its own stylistic furrow.

Thus it was, I sat down to watch the first two episodes of The Watch.

So? What did I think?

Here’s the thing. When we recorded the dialogue tracks for Soul Music twenty-five years ago I got to work with Christopher Lee (Did I already tell you that?), and everyone squealed: ‘Wow! Who else could possibly play Death? He’s perfect!!’ And of course he was.

But when The Watch’s Death intoned from under his shadowy cowl with the Louisiana drawl of Wendell Pierce, I punched the air, and I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be GOOD!’

They’re free. They’ve shaken off the suffocating yoke of ‘Discworld’, the phenomenon. The title slate doesn’t even mention it, choosing instead to announce: ‘Somewhere In A Distant Second Hand Set Of Dimensions.’ This is great because no-one is left feeling they have to ‘catch up’.

The show has been thoroughly reviewed elsewhere on these pages and I’m not here to argue with my colleague, or pronounce on every detail of the production, but is it a good adaptation? You bet it is – precisely because it is an adaptation. More than that, The Watch is a reinvention, which is exactly as it should be because the books are the books and if you feel protective about them, rest assured that the books aren’t going anywhere. But when you move those characters and those stories from one medium to another they need to take on their own life, and in Simon Allen’s adaptation he clearly loves and respects the original, but this TV series is a work of entertainment, beautifully executed, that stands strong and proud in the schedules in its own right.

I contend that if you’ve never heard of Terry Pratchett or Discworld then all the better. Everything you need to enjoy this is here. It defines its own world with economy and confidence, throwing off the beardy English eccentricity of the novels and replacing it with a variation of steam-punk that is definitely more punk than steam, more tequila slammer than real ale.

In this respect, I’m put in mind of the BBC’s other fantasy epic, His Dark Materials, frequently promoted as ‘based on Philip Pullman’s award-winning trilogy’. Friends who know and love Pullman’s books have assured me it’s a pretty good adaptation, but never having read a word of them I had literally no idea what was going on and gave up after two episodes (well, one and a half). I felt excluded as if there was something I was supposed to ‘know’.

To be honest, I’m jealous to my boots of The Watch. They’ve made the right decisions at the right time. Shocking though the march of time may seem, Discworld is already ‘old’ – I meet more and more young people who have never heard of the books – and it’s starting to show its age. The stage is clear for them to remodel the source material for a new audience, and I for one applaud that, especially as, on the basis of the first two episodes, they’ve done it very well indeed. And if this piques the interest of a whole new generation, drawing them to explore Pratchett’s original vision then it’s a cultural win-win.

By the way, if anyone feels that I have been disrespectful to the late Sir Terry in anything I’ve written here, let me conclude with this. When I was working on Soul Music I got into a particularly acrimonious dispute with the aforementioned Channel 4 exec after I dared to replace several pages of the book with a single gag of my own invention. Emails were exchanged. My line had to go because IT WAS NOT IN THE BOOK!!!

In the end, the matter was settled by Terry himself, who sent his own email observing that in his opinion the new gag was funny, and that he wished he’d thought of it himself.

I’m not a religious person, but to this day it’s nearest I’ve got to having a blessing from the Pope. Thank you, Sir Terry. Thank you for Discworld. And thank you to the producers of The Watch for finally enabling Discworld to find its own beating heart on our telly boxes.

My mark for The Watch: 9/10