Santa on his slay - TV and Radio - Times Online

The season of goodwill may be upon us, but something is deeply wrong. The jolly old fat man has gone missing. The Grim Reaper has donned a fake white beard, mounted a hog-drawn sleigh and is ready to deliver the presents.

A lethally loopy assassin is at large, having applied himself to a study of ways of killing Death . And, on a winter wonderland film set in East London, the distinct feeling persists that Christmas has taken a reality-lurch sideways. A fireplace suddenly belches out David Jason, who lands in a soot-covered heap.

A fairytale ice-castle made of polystyrene blocks is revealed, on closer inspection, to be the Castle of Bones . The yuletide spirit is turning darker by the minute . .

. Or rather, it is in Terry Pratchett s reality-skewed universe. This isn t Christmas at all, less cynical readers will be relieved to hear, it is Hogswatch and as any of the phenomenally successful author s fans will know the basis of his 1997 Discworld novel, The Hogfather.

What Pratchett-heads may be more surprised to read is that Death is about to have a new lease of life as a Christmas TV star on Sky One.

Expect Sky to hype to the rafters the way it has bagged the first liveaction, big-budget adaptation of a Discworld novel in fact, of any Pratchett tome. With 35 Discworld volumes to date (translated in 36 countries; 41 million sales and counting; 3 per cent of the entire books trade in the UK), what is remarkable is that it has taken this long for one to be screened.

There have, though, been animated adaptations and plays; Pratchett once described how he laughed like mad all the way through one astonishing stage production in Prague. The writer is on set for the day and, as ever, looks every inch the fantasy author: a black leather coat, a trim white beard under his black fedora, a stream of briskly intelligent, entertaining answers to questions he must have predicted as soon as he signed on Sky s dotted line. Actors lurk around the set.

Marc Warren (the cheeky chappie in BBC One s Hustle) has acquired a dark glass eye for his role as the assassin Teatime, and is delivering lines in sinisterly effete tones located somewhere between Peter Lorre and Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka (toned down, he admits, after Pratchett expressed early reservations). A Gothic Mary Poppins drifts past, actually a young actress, Michelle Dockery, in full make-up for the role of Susan. The writer-director Vadim Jean appears to be running on super-strength caffeine; he admits he s been working from 6am to midnight every day for weeks.

So to the burning question of why now, after all these years? Pratchett explains in his reedy voice: Vadim came down to talk to me about the idea of adapting Hogfather and was very enthusiastic, which I instantly distrust among movie people! But he seemed to have got the novel.

I was asking all the little test questions and he was answering them, and I kept thinking: Any minute now the top of his head s going to split open and the tentacles will come out. Then he came round with the script and I thought, This guy really has got it. Praise indeed, but why Sky?

Add into the equation the success of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movie adaptations, and it would be frankly amazing if Hollywood moguls hadn t been knocking, Discworld having the potential to be an even deeper seam of fantasy to mine. Pratchett reasons: It s remarkably easy to sell film rights. Selling film rights to someone who s actually going to make the film is hard, selling to someone who s going to make a good film is practically impossible.

I ve bought back the rights to two books that I sold, which wasn t cheap. Pratchett formerly a news journalist and a press officer answering for three nuclear power stations is fiercely protective of his work. Perhaps having noted the animosity expressed by Philip Pullman or by the graphic novelist Alan Moore towards big-screen adaptations of their work, he sees television as a more accommodating medium for his intricate narratives there is simply far too much going on in an average Discworld novel for a two-hour movie to do it justice.

You can get more involved, Pratchett agrees, comparing it with a boy being allowed to play with a father s train set. I went to see the wizards Hogswatch party some weeks ago and it looked so beautiful. The obscure corners of London are becoming the city of Ankh-Morpork.

For all Pratchett s enthusiasm, you suspect that the more ardent fans, as with the devotees of any cult fiction, will view the idea of a film with a mix of anticipation and suspicion one wrong detail and it is easy to envisage Pratchett s website under siege from disgruntled geeks. Jean admits: I ve made one small mistake so far, which I m really annoyed about. Pratchett fans will spot it.

So I hope Terry forgives me for occasionally requesting information like I can t get a wren! Would a lark work? We have actually had people out trying to catch one.

Overhearing this, Pratchett remarks: A thrush would be better. Someone else suggests a robin, prompting furrowed brows all round. Work with me on this, Albert For the uninitiated, The Hogfather goes something like this.

On the night before Hogswatch (ie, Christmas), mysterious shadows known as the Auditors have put a contract out on the Hogfather (ie, Santa). With the big man out of the picture, his place is taken by Death, the 7ft, unfailingly polite skeletal entity whose words in the books are ALWAYS SPOKEN IN CAPITALS, however mundane they may be, and which in the film will be graced by the baleful tones of Ian Richardson. It s up to Death s frosty granddaughter, Susan, to rescue the real Hogfather and put a stop to the madness.

It is quintessential Pratchett, upending conventional concepts and satirising petty jobsworths, its nimbly complex humour having much in common with G. K. Chesterton s philosophy of fantasy turning the everyday on its head in absurd fashion to point out the profound as it does the mind-bending inventiveness of Lewis Carroll.

On the evidence of an early cut of The Hogfather, Pratchett s decision to go small-screen would appear to be justified. The tone is dark yet humorous, the CGI effects don t feel intrusive, and there are enough quasi-scientific curveballs present in Pratchett s text to please the converted without baffling newcomers. And then there is David Jason as Albert, Death s sherry-guzzling factotum or, as Jason describes him, a bit like Peter Mandelson used to be to Tony Blair .

Jason sees this as a return to the more comic roles that made his name. You couldn t get more off-the-wall than being Death s assistant, really, could you? To understand the comic element, it is important to realise that in Discworld, Death is a loveable eccentric, reliably courteous in his curiosity about the human condition, even as he takes a person s soul.

He and Albert make a peculiarly cuddly odd couple. It s not a working relationship that I have normally with actors, Jason agrees. I played a couple of scenes with Death the other day, and I find it intriguing because you don t get much back from a skull.

What is the spirit of Hogswatch? But at the heart of all the curious absurdities and comical grotesques (Bilious, the bleary God of All Hangovers, is a personal favourite) is a more subversive riff on the nature of belief. Death warms to the more magical spirit of Hogswatch while Albert has a cynical view of the seasonal rituals.

Lurking in the pair s discussions are ruminations on ancient secular folklore connected to the dark turn of the year: of the sun dying, of electing a king for 12 days, letting him feast before slaughtering him, of blood on the snow, red on white. Mankind s need for myth at this time of year as fundamental to what constitutes humanity. Pratchett explains: The background to The Hogfather is the ceremonies of the dark time of winter.

I m sure everyone knows that Christmas, as it were, became pasted on to what was already a tradition in the heart of mankind. Hogswatch is clearly the difficult version of Christmas. But it deals with an idea that is close to my heart that it is our fantasies that make us real.

Without our fantasies we re just a blank monkey. We start off believing things like the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, and that educates us to believe in bigger fantasies like justice. You can grind down the whole universe into a powder and you will still find no single atom of justice.

We created it, we created all kinds of things and wove them into the world around us. As far as we know no other animal does this. Yet people will fight and die for something called justice.

It s one of the nicer things about humanity that we do live by our sword. Of course, the Hogfather film, like the book, is close enough to our reality to be enjoyed simply as a fantastical seasonal adventure. Which raises the question: are the traditional festivities celebrated chez Pratchett?

What do you mean? Having none of the family talking, or running around looking for a shop that s open for batteries?!

Yes, I enjoy Christmas you can t help it. Warming to the theme, he concludes with a rather enchanting seasonal contemplation: There s a lovely poem by Thomas Hardy, which works best as song, in which someone suggests on Christmas Eve that the animals can speak. The poem is about how they actually go out into the stable in the hope of this being true.

Christmas is the one time when you want to come to some accommodation with magic. Actually, you need a better word than magic the numinous would be a better word. And on that note I swear that a long, skeletal finger taps him lightly on the shoulder and a low voice resounds NOW WE REALLY MUST BE GOING, MR P.

HAPPY HOGSWATCH. ER, OH YES . .

. HO! HO!

HO!