Hogfather

If you told me that the first major Terry Pratchett story to make it to the screen would be on Sky One, I’d have been . . well . . . very surprised. However, unless I'm very much mistaken, TV has claimed a victory over the big screen and it's a Pratchett first.

Frankly, I thought he’d be one of the first major beneficiaries of the post-Potter rush to find light hearted fantasy with which to fill the cinemas. But last night Sky One screened the first part of its two part Pratchett adaption – Hogfather. Pratchett is an international best selling author, and his many many Discworld books sell by the skip load.

Sky has been carpetbombing its various channels with promos for this for weeks, but I’d mostly not noticed, as I hadn’t heard of the book and thought Pratchett had cynically written a ‘Christmas Carol’ type TV special. I was wrong, Hogfather was the 20th Discworld novel and that means this is actually a Discworld story. And it’s a biggy.

The first half was two hours long, or 90 minutes allowing for adverts, and presumably the second part, on tonight, will balance it out at four hours of transmitted programme. This takes this past the usual length of a feature film, and into epic TV mini series length. It features Ian Richardson as the voice of Death, David Jason as Death's manservant Albert and Marc Warren as assassin Mr Teatime.

And the best news is that Hogfather is fantastic. The Discworld looks exactly as you would visualise it and Pratchett’s characters are as nuts as you would hope. It looks great with fantastic use of CGI in a way that adds to the story without distracting from it.

Probably the only criticism I would lay at this movie’s door is that the overly-bookish and wordy humour of the books doesn’t always translate well onto the screen.

The producers of this had a choice to sweeten it up and emasculate the story or do a faithful version that would appeal to the fans, and artistic integrity won out. As a result, I was surprised at how dark it was. In general, the Discwolrd books are light-hearted reads, but possibly I hadn’t really noticed how sinister they can be.

In particular, Marc Warren’s Mr Teatime is as deeply disturbing as any character Stephen King has come up with. And come to think of it, the body count is probably as high as in a King blockbuster.