Embedded Files
The stories of the JugginsVerse would not repay close textual analysis but some points of reference may not be obvious to the reader. Beware, there are spoilers to the various plots below.
The idea of a ‘JugginsVerse’ is inspired by the ‘MonsterVerse’ of the Godzilla franchise. Apparently, the recent coining of the brand name ‘Whoniverse’ for the whole of Doctor Who is based on the critical, though not commercial, success of the JugginsVerse. Both look likely to run out of steam at about the same time.
The name ‘Juggins’ for the whole narrative world (metonymy, perhaps) comes from popular reaction in the trade papers to the first story / season of what has become a longer running series than had been initially planned by the production company, though it now faces cancellation. In fact, for reasons that become clear quickly in the narrative, ‘Juggins’ more or less drops out of the story in, perhaps, the way that Blake quickly dropped out of Blake’s 7 once a better RSC career became available for Gareth Thomas.
It is possible that the name ‘Juggins’ (a name with connotations of being foolish or a simpleton) is here supposed also to suggest its close relation ‘Muggins’ – which is a self-deprecating self-reference – while simultaneously throwing the reader off the scent / sense of its self-reference. It is as though Masongill both wants to, and does not want to, reveal that it is really him.
The suffix ‘... the False’, though fully narratively justified here, may have been influenced by the Alan Garner character Pelis the False, a sophisticated and charismatic rogue dwarf in The Moon of Gomrath (which is itself an influence on the JugginsVerse story The Order of the Sponge).
The Potting Shed’s name may refer to those episodes of the BBC Radio4 series Gardeners’ Question Time in which readers’ letters are answered. These are, apparently, broadcast from ‘the Potting Shed’.
An initial element of this story is inspired by the excellence of Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest and the efficacy of the cleaning service in the hotel in which he stays after the murderous assault by a crop duster. It may be that the entire plot of the Curious Case... was reverse engineered to address a background question about this film, in much the way that Ian McEwan is supposed to reverse engineer his novel’s plots to give him reason to write one scene. For Enduring Love, it is the balloon release. For The Innocent, it is the lengthy description of dismembering a corpse. In this story, the question being asked is why anyone would become a travelling valet or launderer. The answer is a sketch of a ‘form of life’ that involves ‘following one’s sponge’, not unlike the towel in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Todd McEwan has an excellent essay on the central importance of the suit in North by Northwest in is book Cary Grant's suit: nine movies that made me the wreck I am today.
It is a matter of regret that the newsletter of the professional organisation of travelling valets contains some nuance of smut but such may be the nature of life on the road with sponge and iron. (A business studies academic colleague of the author assumed on reading it that it was a genuine trade newsletter, which perhaps suggests that such an unfortunate tone is commonplace in similar professional publications.)
The Westmorland Gazette is a real local newspaper whose stories are very much as depicted here.
pTravis’s name is pronounced with a silent ‘p’ not unlike the P.G. Wodehouse character Psmith. It may reflect his species (a pteropterodactyl) and the philosopher Charles Travis.
The denouement picks up a much repeated theme in children’s fiction and Sherlock Holmes stories that no one recognises a person in disguise, no matter how feeble the disguise. Watson never recognises his oldest friend when disguised. The unmasking is familiar from Scooby Doo (where, for example, ‘The Creeper’ was the physical disguise of Mr. Carswell, a bank president) but is widespread. In this case, it is also linked to the dissociation suffered by the central character in The Manchurian Candidate.
There really is a mole catcher in Skipton.
Alfred Wainwright, who left his money to an animal sanctuary, describes a ‘massacre [of moles] at Masongill’ in his book Walks in Limestone Country.
It will transpire that trauma is a sad leitmotif of the whole of the JugginsVerse. In 6.16 pTravis is described as thinking:
‘Lois was right to say that the Potting Shed seems to specialise in trauma! Nearly all his colleagues seem to carry some inner pain and sense of irreparable past failure. It sometimes seems that they were all made for pain. As though that were some sort of organising principle for their identities thought up by a pessimistic creator.’
The second story is again an unmasking of sorts. Indeed, its derivative plot is discussed by two of the characters in the final episode with the metatextual suggestion that it was only awareness of the plot’s lack of originality that permitted one of the characters, Alcock, to solve the mystery. One might find this style a little arch. One might find that last sentence a little arch. And that one!
The title apes very many Paul Temple stories in which, delightfully, the characters themselves almost immediately recognise that they are involved in some named escapade. They literally think their lives a story, as some philosophers claim is a necessity of the human form of life. In this case, Alcock, unlike Temple, struggles to identify his own adventure, like many a client of psychotherapy.
The story starts with a linking of Poor Tom’s life in a hovel on King Lear’s ‘Heath’ with the Minkey's loss of work and accommodation during closure of pubs in the Covid pandemic. In fact, the Minkey really was discovered in a box ten years after being placed there on the clearance of the author’s parents’ house after their death in 2014.
The poems submitted to the newspaper, a copy of a genuine local newspaper of the same name, were all written by the author’s brother in about 1980. Extreme youth removes all blame.
Froggie is clearly imitating Donald Trump. But there is also a hint of an original informal tale from the author’s childhood in which, almost biblically, Froggie threatened to destroy his beloved pub and rebuild it in three days. Neither in the author’s childhood, nor in this story, is that destructive instinct satisfactorily explained.
Miss Climpson is Lord Peter Wimsey’s occasional helper and information gatherer.
The object on the desk of the newspaper is in fact the prop supposedly containing Satan from the John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness. No one knows why.
Just as Tolkien created Elvish, so the author has created a fully working language which the frogs speak and, also like Tolkien, inflicts it needlessly on the reader.
The denouement is based, as the character Lottie explains, on the conclusions of both Paul Temple and also Hercule Poirot stories. It is never clear what the point of the false accusations is except outside the plot to induce suspense and tension for the reader. Within the plot it makes no sense.
The drug cited here is based on a Sherlock Holmes short story: ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’.
The raison d’etre of this story was an eccentric attempt by the author to process his own S.A.D. based depression, when left alone for much of the Autumn of 2019, via the notion of haunting. That element has slight echoes of the novel Dark Matter, an adaptation of which was broadcast unhelpfully on BBC radio at the time. But the other main theme – that of attempting to buy time from Death by challenging him to a game of strategy (whether chess or Connect 4), in order to undertake one last meaningful redemptive act – is the key theme of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The need for such an act, in this case, is set out in The Herbert Whodunnit.
Two of the pictures (3.5 and 3.6) are almost exact replicas of scenes from The Seventh Seal (as is the text in the latter about using a combination of bishop and knight in order to, in the next move, expose Death’s flank).
There really is a Death the Frog (or ‘Death Froggie’ as one of the author’s younger chums delightfully calls him) made by the author’s mother in 1993 but hidden away out of superstitious concern. In much the way that in the early days of computing, programs were sold with a proof of consistency (often taking more effort than the writing of the program), so it seems natural that a favourite creature ought to come, for metaphysical completeness, with their own species-specific version of Death.
The idea of Froggie only gradually understanding his own predicament while/because suffering it is taken from the Kafka short story ‘In the penal colony’.
Froggie’s avoidance of Death by disguising himself as a shoe a) echoes the theme of disguise/masking of the first two stories and b) really happened in 1990 in Cambridge. The world is not yet ready, however, for other real but extra-JugginsVerse events such as ‘Leather shoe: the pervert!’.
This story is obviously an echo of the 1977 BBC children’s TV series The Changes (itself based on a trilogy of novels) but now with a more explicit link to the climate disaster.
Rear Window, the 1954 Hitchcock film.
The aside in 4.7 – where the consequences of finding a genuine contradiction in Western mathematics is ignored once it is not thought to require changes to bunk occupancy in the Potting Shed – is a playful allusion to Wittgenstein's relaxed attitude in his 1939 Cambridge lectures on mathematics (in response to Turing) to the possible discovery of an inconsistency or contradiction in mathematics (Wittgenstein, L. (1975) Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics Cambridge 1939 p211).
The theme of a larger group (here twelve) becoming two while attempting to save the world is a momentary echo of the fellowship of the ring in the Lord of the Rings (where nine become two). There are a couple more echoes of LoR, later.
The idea of pTravis’ broken compass has been stolen from The Changes.
Towards the end of The Changes, much precious episode time is used up watching the two central characters ride around on horseback to a soundtrack of cloying sentimentality.
Mr Furbelow was a real, acted, character in The Changes, removed, except as the name of a variable, for reasons of costs in this retelling.
pTravis’ objection to the logic of the sign mirrors a problem with a corresponding diary entry in the TV series.
Something very much like the Merlin Stone, woken by Furbelow, appears in the climax of that series, found in a quarry in Wales.
This story combines the accidental summoning of the Wild Hunt through fire on some particular evening from Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath with a plot device – the insignia of sponge and iron and an ancient Order – to make suggestive links back to the first story, though these links are not yet explained nor (yet) really deployed.
There is nothing significant about the inexplicable connection of St Joseph of Arimathea to the Order of the Sponge beyond the obviously fictitious suggestions already made in the story. As Paul de Man says: The text deconstructs itself. Clearly, the fable that he travelled to Britain helps explain the presence of the Order here. There is also an echo, in the Order, of the role of the Knights Templar, from the twelfth century, in protecting pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land, though the idea of the focus being cleanliness, in response to the grime of travel, is a (Harold) Bloomian strong misreading of actual history. (The Knights Templar have also been connected to Joseph of Arimathea in legend via the Holy Grail. Fortunately, there is no hint of that far-fetched notion in this story. No, we like facts!)
5.1 copies characteristic images in WW2 films of ‘plotters’, usually members of the WAAF, tracking aircraft using models pushed about on maps by rakes.
The bulb spiders’ carousing song in 5.5 is in fact from the 1970s children’s television programme Rainbow. In the original, the sense of animal threat and rapacious potency is strangely missing.
Hipparchus’ ‘correspondent in East Molesey’ sounds very much like Robert Robinson’s references to correspondence from a ‘friend from East Molesey’ on the 1980s Radio 4 programme Stop the Week (a reference to Michael Ember, who produced the programme).
Lottie’s realisation (almost) that ‘by nightfall the hills may be swarming with bulbs’ echoes Aragorn’s reason for haste in moving on the newly grieving Company of the Ring after Gandalf’s death in Moria, at least as explained in the film.
Masongill’s chants during the ritual are from the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Musgrave Ritual’.
That the iron gives out no heat, at least to the scarf, is a direct echo of The Moon of Gomrath in which the protagonists suddenly discover that the fire they have lit on the ‘Eve of Gomrath’ gives out no heat. The challenge “Who dares...?” is also taken from that scene. The words: ‘It is not yet! It will be. But not yet’ and ‘with anguish in her heart’ in episode 5.16 come from later in the same book.
Although of more general use, the phrase ‘Giddy up, Dobbin’ may echo Homer Mallow in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.
Lois-the-Hippo’s gnomic remark about T.H. White reflects the question in The Once and Future King of how to counter the idea that ‘might’ is ’right’, that King Arthur’s power might enable him to disregard justice and equality. Alcock, who, we are told, left the army in the 1970s, struggles to reconcile his rejection of might or power with the urgent need to resist an alien incursion of murderous bulb spiders. His struggle ends in failure.
The idea of the Wild Hunt – from Jacob Grimm’s 1835 book on German mythology and borrowed by Alan Garner – is explained by Hipparchus in 5.19 and thus needs no help from us here.
Google lens has rather undermined the suspense concerning the plot of this season: hinted at in the final episode of The Order of the Sponge 5.20. Still, it is interesting to know that Salvador Dalí had a favourite mathematician (René Thom).
Speculation in the trade papers has suggested an obvious contrast between the Order of the Sponge, which, as well as being an organisational ‘order’, takes order as its aim, with the grammatical discomfort of the nominalised ‘Disorder of Catastrophe’, as though the catastrophists, whoever they are, wish, following the German madman, to rid themselves of order and grammar at the same time.
The Seldon Plan is a key notion from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy in which it is the name of the application of a predictive mathematical theory of societal evolution: ‘psycho-history’. The Plan is a specific desired outcome of the maths with particular input conditions. There is a helpful account of this by the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman here.
The specific echo of the Foundation here seems to be a worry in the third book of the original trilogy: Second Foundation. In that, the real upholders of the Seldon Plan – the Second Foundation – are concerned that the main subject of that plan – the First Foundation – has lost its necessary self reliance because its members have come to learn of the existence of the Second Foundation, whom they now assume will protect them. The drama of the book concerns the attempt by the Second Foundation to dissuade the First Foundation of this.
A second influence on this JugginsVerse story is René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, much discussed in salons of the West Riding of Yorkshire in the 1970s. What would it be if the predictive mathematics of psycho-history were ‘catastrophic’? Quite how well the two themes interact in the story arc will become clearer later. Close scrutiny is not recommended.
Although the narrator often mentions the species of the creatures (such as ‘pTravis the pterodactyl’), Lois-the-Hippo seems to be unique in that her species is actually part of her proper name (though it is also sometimes abbreviated to merely the first part). It is possible that this stems from a longer standing need to distinguish her from some other as yet unidentified Lois.
Hipparchus does indeed quote Wikipedia.
Chivers did make a range of 7 marmalades ranging from No1: ‘mild and gentle jelly’ to No7: ‘strong and challenging Georgian’ marmalade.
Some readers may be wondering how Fabian tackles hot coffee and brittle toast with equal aplomb. Sadly the next frames of the ‘dailies’ or ‘rushes’ are missing.
Lottie’s cry of “Grew it’s horrible. Toucher... ucher” is an unreliable memory of a moment in a Dan Dare story in the Eagle Annual 1970 (published 1969).
Masongill has obviously been watching The Flashing Blade. Saturday morning television at its best.
It seems likely that the description ‘a folded surface, drawn in three dimensions, with an X, Y, and Z axis’ will become as famous as the description of the various mystic signs – ‘a circle, quartered by a cross’ – from Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series of books.
‘Cusp’ in the story, the landscape and the name of one Catastrophe Theory graph, obvs.
Hipparchus’ talk of a ‘distributed faculty’ of colleagues echoes the experience of many a lone scholar either excluded from UK academia or based in a shrinking department. In this case, it suggests his putative background in British Intelligence hinted at in The Order of the Sponge. Given that his philosophy lessons for Lottie suggest an affinity with J.L. Austin and given the latter’s role in wartime intelligence, only the likely lifespan of a hippopotamus threatens the obvious connections here.
Even casual followers of the JugginsVerse can hardly have failed to spot that the Court of Governors of the peace-loving Potting Shed includes, at Chairman Alcock’s invitation, both a large, apparently psychopathic, cat and also a mysterious Pod, who/which seems unbound by any civil sensibility.
Patron-level subscribers can attend a special seminar entitled “Iron Fist or Velvet Glove?: the hidden implications of strategic governance of the Potting Shed: 1977 to the present day”.
Reception and meetings:
Potting Shed under-drawing (bring stout waterproof shoes and a plastic bag to sit on).
Accommodation:
Standard Patron-level subscribers: third tier bunks, Potting Shed.
Gold level Patrons: Swan Hotel guest suite.
It is surely some surprise that Lottie seems to be familiar with the lyrics of Led Zeppelin. While she is correct to say that snails have tentacles, one pair comprise the eye stalks and the other act as olfactory organs. Neither are likely to be sufficient for the throttling of an axolotl.
The relationship between pTravis and Masongill has been suggested to contain some of the tensions of a fraternal relationship. The older here born to the air; the younger born to crawl almost blindly underground, eating worms. It is no wonder that, despite the general good nature of their friendly cooperation, Masongill’s resentment of pTravis’ popularity among the great and the good of the Potting Shed occasionally comes to the fore.
Ted Hughes’ poem ‘The Racing Snail’ is not in fact in the collection Crow but that has the prettier book-cover.
The reference of episode 6.17’s title to ‘unmasking’ picks up a debt of the first two stories to unmasking: figuratively in murder mysteries such as Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories or Paul Temple series and literally in such things as Scooby Doo (where, for example, ‘The Creeper’ was the physical disguise of Mr. Carswell, a bank president).
The final few episodes highlight the peculiar consequences of a predictive social science for both free will and narrative jeopardy. It is a strange feature of the earlier stories in the Foundation trilogy that there is, in fact, no jeopardy because the narrative relies on a predictive social science which in turn means that the characters have no freedom to act. Indeed the mark of a ‘Seldon Crisis’ is taken, by the characters within the narrative themselves, to be having no choice. That they so construe themselves echoes the narrative self-awareness in Paul Temple mysteries in which the characters almost immediately regard themselves as taking part in the ‘Madison Mystery’, the ‘Lawrence Affair’, the ‘Gilbert Case’ etc but with which Alcock struggles in The Herbert Whodunnit.
Compatibilists will have their own views on whether this really affects free will.
The Pod’s account of the metaphysical status of the Disorder is a poor variant of ontological arguments in theology and philosophy.
The ‘Curious postscript’ (6.22) expresses an unfortunate anti-national prejudice that is in no way endorsed by the JugginsVerse studio. Such is the danger of what is a genuine documentary rather than, for example, a rather safer ‘scripted reality’ show (such as the ground-breaking The Only Way Is Essex and Made in Chelsea). It is hoped that Scottish viewers will balance this infelicity with the positive fact that one of their lesser known national badges is at least receiving some of the attention generally lavished solely on the thistle motif. (It is also a response to the author’s Scottish sister-in-law thinking our brave heroes were not wearing honourable emblems of the Order of the Sponge but fish fingers. Tsk!)
Keen eyed readers will have noticed that the episodes of this story are littered with ‘reduplicatives’ or ‘tautonyms’ including all of the following:
Identity: goody-goody, knock-knock, softly-softly,
Initial consonant(s) change: clap-trap, fancy-schmancy, fuddy-duddy, harum-scarum, heebie-jeebies, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus, hodge-podge, hoity-toity, hokey-pokey, mumbo-jumbo, nitty-gritty, pell-mell, pow-wow, razzle-dazzle, roly-poly, super-duper, willy-nilly
Consonant added: airy-fairy, argy-bargy, arty-farty, easy-peasy, itsy-bitsy, okey-dokey
Mid-vowel change: chiff-chaff, chit-chat, criss-cross, fiddle-faddle, flim-flam, mish-mash, shilly-shally, tittle-tattle, zig-zag, criss-cross
Children's forms: handy-dandy
Shakespearean examples: skimble-skamble
A group of patron level subscribers has set up a regular subscription to keep Hipparchus in good quality Bas Armagnac and calvados. Another group, also keen to support the taciturn tutor, is raising funds to have Lottie sent away to a secure compound in Central America for unwanted orphan axolotls. Details in the normal places for donations to both these excellent causes.
The Left-Right, Up-Down Inversion
The Left-Right, Up-Down Inversion
The proposed 2024 autumn season (traditionally when the JugginsVerse adopts a darker tone), now due in late 2025, appears to be stuck in pre-production limbo. Industry observers suggest that the number of paying ‘patron-level’ subscribers has fallen despite the critical success of The Order of the Sponge.
It seems likely that the set of of the Potting Shed will be sold off and the creatures made homeless long before the possible seventh season adventure. Since the adventures of the JugginsVerse are not scripted, nor even ‘structured-reality’, but documentaries, the loss of the Potting Shed will be a real loss.
Anyone as yet undecided whether to become a Patron-level subscriber should keep these harsh financial realities in mind.
The Storytime
The Storytime
Despite the widespread rumours of cancellation, a further teaser episode for a completely unknown story has appeared on the dark web. Whether this is some sort of mischief or a real idea in early stages of development is not clear. Some witless observers have suggested a similarity between the image and the fleeting appearance of Billie Piper at the end of the last series of Doctor Who.
It is dearly to be hoped that the JugginsVerse will not take the idea of storytelling itself to be the subject of one of its own stories leading, all too predictably, to a childish piece of meta-textual play.
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