Unfortunately, these references only confused the new audience The Watch hoped to attract and further irritated Discworld fans in the wake of the random changes from the books. Much of the humor of the series was based around knowing winks to the audience whenever a reference was made to something from the books, such as the librarian of Unseen University being an orangutan. The cruel irony is that, for all the efforts the producers of The Watch made to separate themselves from the source material to present a ' punk rock thriller,' the show was entirely beholden to the original Discworld books. To give one example, the character of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, who was originally a peddler of questionable sausages in a bun and anything else that might be hurriedly sold out of a suitcase on a street corner, was transfigured into Throat a drug-dealer and police snitch, played by Ruth Madeley from The Rook. This was because The Watch took character names and concepts from the original Discworld novels, but applied them haphazardly to wholly new characters.

Indeed, the credits for each episode of The Watch described it as being ' inspired by' the works of Terry Pratchett rather than being ' based on' them. The Watch ranks dead last on the list of Terry Pratchett adaptations because it can't properly be said to be an adaptation.

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