Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett's Snuff snaffles top spot with ease

Terry Pratchett's Snuff (Doubleday) has become one of the fastest-selling novels since records began, shifting 54,687 copies at UK book retail outlets in its three days on sale last week.

Preview: This is Jinsy (Sky Atlantic)

If Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer made The League Of Gentlemen, it may have resulted in something similar to Sky's latest homespun comedy, the peculiar This Is Jinsy. Or perhaps if Terry Pratchett was asked to write a lighthearted version of The Wicker Man?

Trollied is the first of several new comedy shows being made by Sky this season.

The show is set in a supermarket, looking at the lives of a north-western branch of Valco ("Serves you right"). The characters include Julie (Jane Horrocks), the current deputy manager who currently is holding the job temporarily, or as she puts it "interimming" (and not "into rimming"); butcher Andy (Mark Addy), a man who can tell a type of sausage by simply resting it on his shoulder; and Margaret (Rita May), a pensioner who appears to be away with the fairies.

The series began with a double bill, which probably helped as it gave viewers who weren't sure about the show the chance to see how it would develop.

Before the series began some questions had already been thrown up by the critics. For starters, how come no-one had set a sitcom in a supermarket before, as it seems an ideal location - an environment from which the staff cannot escape from, with various layers of hierarchy, including managers, checkout staff and stockers. I think I know why such a setting has never done before - cost. Supermarkets are large buildings, and normally there is no way a supermarket would let a TV crew in there for fear of disturbing the business, so you have to build a huge set.

Luckily, when it comes to creating big-scale TV shows, Sky has experience. They're responsible for bringing Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels into real-life. Compared to creating a world resting on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a giant turtle, a supermarket should be simplicity itself. Mind you, it is easy to do when your channel is owned by the world's second largest media company (after Disney), a group which owns two of the most popular animated sitcoms in the world (The Simpsons and Family Guy), some of the biggest scale dramas currently on TV at the moment (House), and owns more newspapers than you can shake a hacked telephone at.

Trollied also has other problems when it comes to critical reception. Namely, as it is a workplace sitcom it will be compared to The Office and therefore everyone will look down on it. But why stop there? It is also a retail sitcom, so you could compare it to Open All Hours or Are Your Being Served? for that matter. Just because there are similar sitcoms to it does not mean that it will be rubbish.

In terms of laughs, there were a few - enough to give it promise - but whether or not it can sustain that I don't know.

Video - Stephen Fry: 'Pope should not have state visit'

More than 50 public figures have added their names to a letter in The Guardian newspaper saying the Pope should not be given the "honour" of a UK state visit.

Authors Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman and actor Stephen Fry are among those critical of the Vatican record on birth control, gay rights and abortion.

Stephen Fry told the BBC why he signed the letter.

Video - Meet The Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

In the latest in the BBC News Meet The Author interviews, Sir Terry Pratchett discusses I Shall Wear Midnight, the latest in his best-selling Discworld series.

Sir Terry talked exclusively to Nick Higham about his latest book, his writing techniques and how he tries to make serious subjects funny.

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.

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.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal delivers for Sky1

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