Discworld: revisiting the Sky adaptations

By the third one, Sky's Discworld adaptations really started to work. With a new series in development, one fan revisits them...

Going Postal: Gets our stamp of approval

DVD review: Terry Pratchett's Going Postal - Limited Edition, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 12, £24.99.

A nicely packaged drama that really delivers

Here's one of life's little conundrums: what is the correct procedure to follow when you see a grown-up reading the work of JK Rowling or Terry Pratchett on a train?

Sky doesn't make many dramas, but when they do they make them well. Going Postal is Sky's latest Terry Pratchett adaptation, a big budget extravaganza in two parts, filmed upon elaborate sets and exquisitely costumed, that lovingly recreates Pratchett's weird and wonderful alternative universe of Discworld.

Richard Coyle stars as confidence trickster and irrepressible charmer Moist Von Lipwig, spared from the gallows to perform the equally lethal task of reviving the Ankh-Morpork postal service. Postmaster General is an office with a one hundred per-cent mortality rate, with several fingers of suspicion pointing firmly in the direction of ruthless entrepreneur Reacher Gilt (David Suchet) who will stop at nothing to impose his Clacks communication system upon the populace.

Frantic, funny, romantic, silly and frequently touching, Going Postal delivers in many, many ways.

Nearly always it's the quiet ones that surprise you with their anger. Terry Pratchett's delightful series of surreal Discworld novels have long bewitched readers. Pratchett novels have always acted as gentle satires of our world, but Going Postal, the latest of his novels to be filmed by Sky was, by Pratchett's standards at least, monumentally angry.

Porcine bankers, the celebration of corporations, the moral vacuity of the concept of victimless crime and, er, the incorrect use of apostrophes, were all fed into the novel that was the source for this Sky adaptation. The anger was mollified for family viewing - but only slightly.

David Suchet, almost unrecognisable as a villain who resembled an ageing, heavy metal star, played Reacher Gilt - the rapacious owner of Clacks, a network of semaphore towers which are Discworld's take on the internet.

This was a man who had taken advantage of a banking crisis to move in and steal Clacks from its inventor. Gilt was enraged when the patrician Lord Vetinari (Charles Dance) pardoned conman Moist von Lipwig (Richard Coyle) on the understanding he revive the Discworld's postal service to provide some competition to Clacks.

Part of the glory of this fabulous chunk of entertainment was that Sky eschewed CGI in favour of lavish sets, constructed with lashings of sparkling invention. Going Postal looked amazing. Luckily, everything else about the production was dazzling too.

Coyle was roguish but sympathetic, and Andrew Sachs, as his assistant, bumbled along like a cross between his Fawlty Towers duffer Manuel and the original grandfather from Only Fools And Horses. Claire Foy, as Adora Dearhart, smouldered convincingly.

Cable Girl: Going Postal

Sky's new adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Going Postal is lovingly detailed and fantastically good fun - bank holiday weekend telly done to a tee.

With its teatime scheduling and raft of fabulously named characters, you could have been forgiven for supposing Going Postal was intended as a family-friendly fairy tale. But there was a delicous darkness about this handsomely mounted adaptation of the 33rd novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series that definitely needed a parental advisory sticker.

Corrupt bankers, the mindless adulation of progress, the absurdity of 'victimless crime'; this was Pratchett aiming two barrels at a galaxy of pet hates - including, delightfully, missing apostrophes - all gathered around the yarn of conman Moist von Lipwig and the accursed Ankh-Morpork post office. And he was well served with a richly rendered visualisation of Discworld, from avalanches of unsent letters to a menagerie of curious characters, that made for a Delicatessen-style visual feast.

And you could have a lot of fun wondering where Dickens and Tolkien ended and Pratchett began, such was the weight of literary influence. But it went deeper than that. Drawing on first-class performances - Richard Coyle excellent as a believably conflicted von Lipwig; Claire Foy a sneering delight as Adora Deerheart, the perfect anti-love interest for the perfect anti-hero - Going Postal sent out a heartfelt plea to celebrate the individual over the corporate, the human over the machine. On that score Going Postal was a special delivery.

Fantasy delivered at speed of snail mail

Ever since the success of the Harry Potter franchise, it seems as though every British thespian worth their equity card has been desperate to don a wizard's hat in the name of fantasy fiction. Whereas once an actor boasted of his Hamlet, today they're more likely to ask if you'd ever seen their Dumbledore.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal delivers for Sky1

Drama is most-watched multichannel show of the day with 879,000 viewers.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, a two-part special from Sky1 which concludes tonight, had a pretty distinguished cast too. Presumably the thesps in question were attracted not just by the money, but also by the always-welcome chance to don some eccentric facial hair and shout a lot. Then again, they could even have been attracted by the script - because the programme is enormous and imaginative fun.

Needless to say, with its origins in a Pratchett novel, the imagination does tend to the bonkers. Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, a con man rescued from hanging by the mysterious Lord Vetinari (Charles Dance, salt-and-pepper beard and moustache). He was then given the job of reviving the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, much to the fury of the man who runs the Discworld equivalent of the internet, Reacher Gilt (David Suchet, Fu-Manchu moustache, beard and eye-patch). Moist's allies include the elderly junior postmaster Mr Groat (Andrew Sachs, huge moustache) and the toothsome Adora Belle Dearheart (Claire Foy, no facial hair but obviously enjoying putting Little Dorrit behind her by smouldering sexily and generally carrying either a cigarette or a riding crop).

With these - and plenty more - elements in place, last night's episode rattled along nicely, easily passing the key test for all programmes that seek to create another world: we gradually stopped noticing how mad that world was. By the end, in fact, it seemed perfectly logical that a seven-foot clay robot should have persuaded Moist to confess that he'd been responsible for the forged cabbage bonds which ruined Adora's family - while back at the Post Office a young man obsessed with pin-manufacture was attacked by a flying monster.