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The Bagthorpe Saga

128 statements
24 feature instances
15 referencing feature instances

The Bagthorpe Saga	type	TVTItem
The Bagthorpe Saga	label	The Bagthorpe Saga
The Bagthorpe Saga	page	TheBagthorpeSaga
The Bagthorpe Saga	comment	The Bagthorpe Saga is a series of ten comic novels by Helen Cresswell that follows the misadventures of the Bagthorpes, a family of Insufferable Geniuses (with one exception) who live in Unicorn House in the fictional English village of Passingham (near the also fictional market town of Aysham) and whose self-absorption and ultra-competitive nature leaves a trail of chaos, destruction, and hilarity in their wake.Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })Father Henry Bagthorpe is a scriptwriter for The BBC, mother Laura is an agony aunt and part-time magistrate, and they encourage their children in all pursuits academic, athletic, and artistic, which Mr Bagthorpe refers to as "strings to their bow". Three of their four children have risen to the challenge - 16-year-old William excels at mathematics, plays a mean set of drums, and dabbles in electronics and ham radio; 14-year-old Tess has a black belt in judo, plays the piano and oboe brilliantly, and speaks French with such fluency that she is determined to translate the complete works of Voltaire into English; and 10-year-old Rosie is catching up with William as a mathematician, plays the violin and the cello, and is a talented painter and photographer. The fourth Bagthorpe child, 12-year-old Jack, is the only "ordinary" one among them, excelling at nothing (except, perhaps, for storytelling) and thus falling neatly into the role of the Only Sane Man in his family.Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_2'); })Among the other regular characters, Grandma Maud and Grandpa Alfred Bagthorpe moved in with Henry and Laura ten years ago on what was supposed to be a "temporary" basis, and they respectively revel in and try to ignore the arguments and chaos that constantly envelope the family. Their other children include Cloudcuckoolander Celia, who dabbles in poetry and pottery while meandering between reality and the world in her own mind; Celia is married to Russell Parker (usually referred to only as "Uncle Parker"), who is independently wealthy from "something in shares" and splits the role of Only Sane Man with Jack. Their four-year-old daughter Daisy is fast growing into an Enfant Terrible, going through phases of pyromania, flooding, graffiti, and obsession with death, driving all of the Bagthorpes except Rosie and Grandma to the brink of insanity.Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_3'); })Other family members include Henry and Celia's dull vicar brother Claud, his ultra-religious and Super OCD-afflicted wife Penelope, and their two children Luke and Esther (who share Insufferable Genius tendencies with William, Tess, and Rosie; Luke has won Young Brain of Britain, Esther is a published poet). As both Bagthorpe parents work, Unicorn House is looked after by Royal Family-obsessed housekeeper Mrs "Fozzy" Fosdyke, who may be a Book Dumb Malaproper but is an immensely talented cook; her adult son Max is just plain Book Dumb and has had several brushes with the law. Finally, there is Zero, the Bagthorpe family dog, who may possibly be the stupidest canine in history, but Jack loves him just the same.In order of publication, the books are: Ordinary Jack (1977) Absolute Zero (1978) Bagthorpes Unlimited (1978) Bagthorpes Versus the World (1979) Bagthorpes Abroad (1984) Bagthorpes Haunted (1985) Bagthorpes Liberated (1989) The Bagthorpe Triangle (1992) Bagthorpes Besieged (1995) Bagthorpes Battered (2001)The first two books were adapted into a six-part mini-series by The BBC in 1981 starring Edward Hardwicke and Angela Thorne as Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe.
The Bagthorpe Saga	fetched	2020-09-03T18:55:44Z
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_24321e44	type	Only Sane Man
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_24321e44	comment	Only Sane Man: Jack may not be an academic, athletic, or artistic prodigy (though he does prove to have a fertile imagination), but this means that, in contrast to his Insufferable Genius siblings and wildly eccentric parents, his feet are planted firmly on the ground, and he can see just how self-absorbed, vindictive, and self-destructive the rest of his family can be. His Uncle Parker is likewise well aware of how demented the rest of the family can be, and sometimes joins Jack in scheming to put one over on them.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_3126c34a	type	Insufferable Genius
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_3126c34a	comment	Insufferable Genius: William is a maths, drums, and electronics prodigy; Tess is a French, judo, piano, and oboe prodigy; Rosie is a maths, violin, cello, painting, and photography prodigy. Unfortunately, they know it, and while they're convinced of their own genius, almost everyone they know finds them impossible to be around. The headmaster at their school is so sick of their egotism that he leaves the comments section on their end-of-term reports blank for fear that anything complimentary will just inflate their egos further; they respond by steaming open the envelopes before Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe read them and forging gushing comments themselves. Ironically, even the Bagthorpes seen as self-absorbed prats by their schoolmates can't stand Claud's children, Luke and Esther. Luke has parlayed his command of trivia into a Young Brain of Britain title, while Esther is a published poet. The other Bagthorpes loathe them, although this is at least partly jealousy in the case of William, Tess, and Rosie.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_33d5b7f2	type	Adapted Out
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_33d5b7f2	comment	Adapted Out: The 1981 mini-series pared the Bagthorpes down to three children by dropping Rosie and giving most of her dialogue and plot threads to Tess.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_4192763e	type	Malaproper
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_4192763e	comment	Malaproper: The English language runs screaming whenever Mrs Fosdyke opens her mouth; her verbal stumbles include "vegetinararians" for "vegetarians", "syllabubs" for "syllables", "barbicans" for "barbeques", "silver handshake" for "golden handshake", "cow in a manger" for "dog in a manger", and so on.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_4623b3bb	type	Why Couldn't You Be Different?
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_4623b3bb	comment	Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Mr Bagthorpe vocally encourages his children to develop "strings to their bows" by engaging in all pursuits academic, athletic, and artistic for which they demonstrate natural ability. Jack's bow appears to have no strings whatsoever, and his parents don't do a particularly good job of hiding their disappointment at this, leading him to pretend to be a prophet as an attention-grabbing gambit in Ordinary Jack. His ruse is eventually exposed when Mr Bagthorpe stumbles across the diary he used to plan his "visions", but the gambit succeeds anyway thanks to the obvious creativity that went into it, an early sign that his true talent is telling stories.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_47fea76b	type	Butt-Monkey
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_47fea76b	comment	Butt-Monkey: Mr Bagthorpe. Yes, he brings a lot of it on himself, but fact remains he's bedeviled by more disasters, wrong bank statements, goats and awful relatives than anyone else in children's literature. If he doesn't break his arm trying to stand on his head he's accidentally bidding for hundreds of pounds of junk in auctions. And he's suspected of being a terrorist and murdering his wife in the later books. To quote, "I am the archetypal can carrier of all time!"
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_49f6a9e4	type	Most Writers Are Writers
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_49f6a9e4	comment	Most Writers Are Writers: Why else would Mr Bagthorpe be a scriptwriter for The BBC? Helen Cresswell was writing what she knew.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_52350162	type	Father, I Want to Marry My Brother
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_52350162	comment	Father, I Want to Marry My Brother: In Bagthorpes Liberated, Daisy is convinced that since her uncle Mr Bagthorpe is by far the wickedest man she knows, he must be responsible for 'putting the baby in Mummy's tummy'. Her grandma is alarmed and instantly sets the record straight.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_52a8d3dc	type	Pyromaniac
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_52a8d3dc	comment	Pyromaniac: After accidentally starting a fire in the dining room at Unicorn House one Christmas, Daisy becomes fascinated by fires and starts setting them every chance she gets - quite an accomplishment for a four-year-old. And this is just the first step on her path to becoming an all-round Enfant Terrible.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_53136954	type	Book Dumb
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_53136954	comment	Book Dumb: Mrs Fosdyke has a spotty command of the English language, but compared to her son Max, she's William Shakespeare; having been treated like a child until he was well into adolescence, Max has a reading age of seven and can't even reliably remember the alphabet. As an adult, he has no career ambitions and leeches off his mother while hiding from the law after having stolen £50 from his landlady's cash card after threatening her with violence.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_5cc04812	type	Fainting Seer
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_5cc04812	comment	Fainting Seer: In Ordinary Jack, Jack, worried about falling through the cracks in his family by virtue of being merely ordinary academically, athletically, and artistically, is persuaded by his Uncle Parker to get their attention by pretending to be a prophet. He is instructed to swoon after every "vision" he manages to pull off.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: Zero the dog is quite possibly the thickest animal on four legs. In Ordinary Jack, Jack tries teaching him to fetch sticks, and he ends up mistaking two of Mr Bagthorpe's microphones for sticks and destroying them. However, he is cast in a series of TV advertisements in Absolute Zero, and he ends up earning more money than either Mr or Mrs Bagthorpe.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_7ae00dcc	type	Driven by Envy
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_7ae00dcc	comment	Driven by Envy: If there's one thing the Bagthorpes (Jack excepted) can't stand, it's seeing other people doing better at something than them. This is at the heart of Mr Bagthorpe's seething hatred of the wealthy Uncle Parker. In Absolute Zero, when Uncle Parker wins a Caribbean cruise in a caption competition (and compounds the family's misery by leaving Daisy with them while he and Celia are away), Mr Bagthorpe leads the entire clan in entering countless competitions in the hope of winning something even more impressive than a Caribbean cruise. Bagthorpes Unlimited sees even the three Insufferable Genius Bagthorpe siblings left feeling inadequate after a visit by their even more insufferably precocious (and dull) cousins Luke and Esther, so they spend the rest of the book hell-bent on achieving fame and immortality far beyond that of their cousins by trying to break as many Guinness World Records in a summer as they can.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_7d6cda49	type	I Can't Hear You
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_7d6cda49	comment	I Can't Hear You: Grandpa Bagthorpe often stands back from the boasting and arguments that dominate family conversations by pretending he can't hear them. At 85, he has lost some of his hearing, but not as much as he claims; in Ordinary Jack, Uncle Parker refers to him as "S.D." - not, as Jack initially guesses, "Stone Deaf", but "Selectively Deaf", only hearing what he wants to hear.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_82b4f38e	type	Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_82b4f38e	comment	Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: No other children's character comes near Mr Bagthorpe for arrogance, misanthropy, and sheer awfulness — but he's still hysterically funny.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_906d5d1f	type	Quirky Household
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_906d5d1f	comment	Quirky Household: The Bagthorpe family almost all have one or more screws loose - Mr Bagthorpe is an arrogant, misanthropic disaster magnet, Mrs Bagthorpe seems to be able to dispense advice to anyone except her own family, William, Tess, and Rosie are regarded as Insufferable Geniuses by everyone who knows them, Grandma Bagthorpe decided she and her husband should move in with Henry rather than Celia or Claud because she loves provoking Henry into loud arguments, and Zero the dog is so monumentally dim that he keeps mistaking Mr Bagthorpe's dictaphone microphones for a stick after being taught how to fetch. Unsurprisingly, the books are mostly told from the bemused perspective of the Only Sane Man among them: self-declared "Ordinary" Jack. The fact that, for all their personal faults, they still clearly love each other and are quick to defend each other against outside threats stops them from being a Dysfunctional Family.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_927cce5e	type	Accidental Bid
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_927cce5e	comment	Accidental Bid: In Bagthorpes Haunted, Mr Bagthorpe chooses the worst possible bidding sign for someone who spent the night before staying up hoping to see ghosts — a half-stifled yawn. Predictably, he ends up buying a large amount of useless items, including an ancient gramophone that plagues them for quite some time. Due to a lack of coordination, he also accidentally gets into a bidding war with his wife over several pieces of bad furniture they want for the house.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_a6123b72	type	Enfant Terrible
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_a6123b72	comment	Enfant Terrible: Daisy is a vortex of destruction who is detested by everyone at Unicorn House (Mr Bagthorpe most of all; he regularly presents exaggerated bills for property damage to Uncle Parker) except Rosie and the schadenfreude-indulging Grandma Bagthorpe; Daisy's friendship with the latter is described by the rest of the family as "the unholy alliance". In Ordinary Jack, Daisy becomes a Pyromaniac after accidentally setting fire to the Bagthorpe dining room, and eventually takes to answering the phone by reciting how long it has been since she last set a fire. In Bagthorpes Versus the World, she develops an obsession with death and other morbid topics, leaving even the usually mild Jack wishing her "dead and buried". She also scrawls elegies for the dead (including lamb chops and mice) on the walls as graffiti, leading Mr Bagthorpe to declare that if she writes poems on his walls, she will be the one in need of an immediate elegy. In Bagthorpes Liberated, she disposes of curdled milk by dumping it into the Bagthorpes' goldfish pond, killing all of the fish in it. Mr Bagthorpe flies into a murderous rage upon finding out. In Bagthorpes Besieged, she takes to locking people in the garden shed and other outbuildings on the Bagthorpe property, including her own mother - who has such a hysterical, screaming breakdown at the thought that she has been abandoned that even Uncle Parker finds himself contemplating filicide.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_b503102e	type	Terrified of Germs
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_b503102e	comment	Terrified of Germs: The Bagthorpes' Aunt Penelope is so afraid of germs that she insists on putting library books in the oven to sterilise them before she lets her children read them. On one occasion, she forgot about them, and they were burned to a crisp.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_c63e5338	type	It Runs in the Family
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_c63e5338	comment	It Runs in the Family: Tess, Rosie and William are all somewhat eccentric, and their parents and grandparents might edge into mildly deranged, as might Daisy. They all (well, except Daisy) believe wholeheartedly in their genius as a family and individually, and take themselves very seriously. In Bagthorpes Unlimited, they try to break as many Guinness World Records in a summer as they can. And in keeping with the trope, Jack and his ally Uncle Parker are the only sane ones people can bear to have anywhere near them. Grandpa is less developed as a character, but shares with Jack and Uncle Parker the wisdom to recognise that the rest of the family are so bonkers that the best thing to do is tune them out.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_caa28b82	type	Cloudcuckoolander
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_caa28b82	comment	Cloudcuckoolander: Celia's grip on reality varies between "tenuous" and "non-existent". She maintains her figure with barefoot, Isadora Duncan-style dances in the morning dew, believes in fairy tales, and in Bagthorpes Liberated believes herself to be pregnant with twins after a visit by an angel. When her daughter Daisy locks her in the Bagthorpes' garden shed in Bagthorpes Besieged, she sees a game of noughts and crosses that previous "prisoners" Grandma Bagthorpe and Max Fosdyke scratched into the dirt and believes them to be primaeval symbols dating from the beginning of time.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_dfb77c08	type	Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_dfb77c08	comment	Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: It's not entirely clear what Uncle Parker does for a living, but whatever it is, it's lucrative, and it seems to involve his doing the Times crossword every afternoon.
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The Bagthorpe Saga / int_f96f188c	type	Drives Like Crazy
The Bagthorpe Saga / int_f96f188c	comment	Drives Like Crazy: Uncle Parker has a habit of driving expensive cars very fast; Grandma Bagthorpe has never forgiven him for running over her cat, Thomas, years before the events of Ordinary Jack. He also has strong opinions about other categories of drivers; for example, according to Uncle Parker, hat-wearing drivers invariably drive pitifully slowly, and if the driver in front of you is wearing a flat cap, you can drive back home, start out along a different route, and still save time.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Accidental Bid	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Children's Literature	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Epunymous Title	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Fainting Seer	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
I Can't Hear You	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Insufferable Genius	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
It Runs in the Family	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Most Writers Are Writers	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
My Hero, Zero	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Pyromaniac	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Quirky Household	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Terrified of Germs	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga
Why Couldn't You Be Different?	processingUnknown	The Bagthorpe Saga

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