PTerry pays tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

In a partial BBC transcript, Terry Pratchett says goodbye to Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday:

Most notably he was the first British science fiction writer to break out of the genre ghetto. I mean, everyone had heard of Arthur C Clarke — The Goodies made jokes about him, Terry Wogan made jokes about him. He became a national treasure like Patrick Moore.

Before 2001 [the film based he created with Stanley Kubrick], you could see the string, you could see what was holding the rocket ships up. It seems almost a historical thing to relate it now, but just the first time you saw it you thought, "here's something totally new".

The amount of work and effort and research that went into that movie was just astonishing.

What I particularly recall was Arthur complaining the reason the apes never won the Oscar for best make-up was they were so good the judges thought they really were apes.