Paul Simpson speaks to the best-selling author of the Discworld novels…

Sir Terence David John Pratchett – or Terry, as he is still better known – continues to maintain the busy lifestyle which led to his becoming the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s, despite the onset of posterior cortical atrophy, a form of Alzheimer's Disease. In addition to chronicling life on Discworld, he is campaigning for an increase in funding for research into Alzheimer's, and overseeing (or “mucking about with”, to use the description from the opening credits) The Mob's production of Going Postal for Sky 1.

In person, he's as witting and charming as ever. "As a man over 60, I am allowed to twinkle roguishly – it's a rule," he maintains, as he flirts with an attractive tabloid journalist, and he makes light of the occasional times that he uses the wrong words. After saying something is "larger than wife", he quickly adds, "actually my wife isn’t that large," and he deals with what one journalist calls 'the elephant in the room' by saying, "As you can see, I'm half blind, I cannot talk, I cannot finish a sentence, and I can't pronounce words like marmalade. Has that got rid of the elephant?"

His main problems, he says, are "topographical. If you go to a men's toilet, there are loads of doors. Coming out, I'm lucky if I haven't gone into the cleaner's cupboard once! I find it hard, unless I concentrate, to remember the way back. Curiously enough, though, where there are major problems, I'm coming up with workarounds that actually work."

The author loves being involved with the screen versions of his books. "I love hanging around with the tech guys," he says. "I totally ruin Going Postal by being a Postman at the end of it, and they took off my wire rim spectacles, because they weren't proper wire rim spectacles, and gave me a Victorian pair. They're going down to that level of detail – it's not as if anyone is going to care. It's all to do with the sort of people who rang the BBC to say, 'The billiard table they used in Pride and Prejudice wasn't actually built until after that date...' and instead of writing letters that say, 'Piss off' they have to do something about it."

The Fans and the Mob

For him, "the nice thing about working with the Mob and Sky is that we're not working with Hollywood. Believe me, that's a big plus! Mort is still stuck in development hell in Hollywood – but sometimes there, if people sit around a table, they can deal with 'insuperable' problems. All the money that X owes Y disappears, because sufficiently important people have sat around a table."

Fans hoping that the City Watch will feature prominently in a future production may have a long wait. "I don't want to release any rights to that series," Pratchett says. "There's more than seven books in that now, and they really have to be taken and done as a lot."

He enjoys the interaction with the fans, who, as he points out, "can be anybody. I know they include nuns! The Gospel according to St. Terry: fantasy and science fiction is no longer a ghetto medium. It's out there in the mainstream. In a sense the Booker Prize novels are off to one side, because the genres are taking over. There are grandparents who can speak Klingon. When Doctor Who returned, how many people watched it, or grew up running around the play yard going 'Exterminate!'? It's all part of the culture; people understand the language.

"It may or may not surprise you that 70 per cent of the fans appear to be women... when I say 'appear to be', I'm sure nearly all of my fans who are women really are women! But I've known people come out in fandom, because they're among friends. When science fiction and fantasy was more of a ghetto genre, people involved were not too bothered about what shape, sex, or race you were.

"At recent conventions, there were several pairs of women coming along, who had left their husbands at home. Of course traditionally, since mid-Victorian times, women were the readers in the house, not the men. Reading was considered soft indoor work for women to do: men learned enough to read and write, but the women read what in those days were considered sexy, cheap novels, which were passed around the village under cover. The men might otherwise ask, 'Why are you reading that? Why are you teaching our daughter?' 'Possibly so our daughter will grow up and not be a shepherd's wife?'"

Mortality and the Past

Pratchett's interest in the difference between the way we live now and in past times communicates itself through his writing. His next Discworld novel continues the adventures of Tiffany Aching, an apprentice witch. "Being a witch in my universe is being a midwife, and the lady who lays you out when you're dead," he explains. "Tiffany has a skill she learns from Granny Weatherwax: she can take away pain. She sees this man every day and takes away his pain, tucking it away somewhere, but when he becomes so old and frail, she lets him die. She watches Death come for him and is able to assure his son he had a good death.

"What got me on this path was talking to a woman about 90 who had been a district nurse – she and another woman sat on that woman's husband, pillow over the face, because he was screaming himself to death with terminal cancer. She said it was always a good thing if a vicar turned up because he would keep the rest of the family occupied downstairs while she got on with 'what needed to be done'. That's what witches do – they do what needs to be done. It's a quiet way of making kids understand that the olden days are not as they are now."

But as his recent Dimbleby Lecture showed, Pratchett has given a lot of thought to the process of dying and his own mortality. "One expert said we can only conquer Alzheimer's by conquering death," he concludes. "And on the whole I'm not sure that’s the best deal the human race can do."

Going Postal is on Sky1 HD and Sky1 on May 30th and 31st. You can read the review here.