Episode transcript:
Rachel: The best way to do this I think is rapid fire. I'm going to start it off. "Missing link."
Charli: "Listen to this."
Chris: That's so bad!
Charli: You said rapid fire!
Sam: I mean we have this European element, we're in Europe...
Chris: "This European Life."
Rachel: So it turns out naming a podcast is pretty hard. I'm Rachel Stewart, and I'm going to be hosting this podcast for DW. The idea is, we'll travel around Europe, tracing the hidden history of everyday things and their bumpy ride around the world. Think history but with a cultural twist and a pinch of controversy just to spice things up a little bit.
But we still need a name. So, let's get back to that brainstorming session with producers Sam, Charli and Chris.
R: We want to start in Europe, but we don't want it to stay focused on Europe, right? So, it’s supposed to be a worldwide story.
Sam: Right, global. Or something about translation. I mean, "Lost in translation" is kind of lame...
Rachel: "Found in translation!"
Sam: Ooo!
Rachel: I do like the idea of something that gets passed, right?
Chris: What's the name of that object that you pass, when you're running and you have to pass that thing?
Sam & Charli: Baton.
Sam: Then people are going to think it's a sport podcast.
Rachel: And also the baton doesn't change as it goes, right?
Charli: Yeah and it really is about the evolution of this thing, whatever we decide to focus on.
Rachel: Did you ever play that game when you were younger, where you all had to sit in a circle at kids' parties and you started of with, I don't know, a stupid sentence or something and then you whispered it to people in the circle?
Sam: Yeah, "Telephone."
Rachel: I called it "Chinese Whispers."
Chris: "Telefono senza fili."
Rachel: What does that mean?
Chris: Cordless phone? Which I guess at the time maybe was meant not to work well! They were playing the game when phones had cords attached to them.
Sam: We just lost all of our Gen Z listeners.
Sounds of telephone beeps, dial tone, hanging up
Rachel: So, in the US this game is known as "Telephone," I grew up calling it "Chinese Whispers" in the UK. I never really thought about why it was called that. But now I'm kind of intrigued about this and all of the other names the game seems to have picked up around the world. Who knows, maybe there's actually a podcast title in there. So hold onto your party hats, we're heading back in time!
Music, sound of horse trotting and carriage
Rachel: Take a peek behind the frilly curtains of middle or upper-class Victorian Britain and you'd often find families gathered together acting out scenes, donning blindfolds and costumes and getting competitive with wordplay. Welcome to the Golden Age of parlor games. "Pass the Slipper," "Blind Man's Buff," "The Minister's Cat". The Victorians didn't necessarily invent all of these games, but they did give them delightfully silly names.
Sounds of book pages turning
Bob Nicholson: "The blind man" – we're already off to a promising start – "kneels with his face hidden on a lady's lap on the seat of a chair and holds his open hands laid one on the other behind his back. The company then advance one by one and each gives a slap, light or heavy as he pleases, on the extended palms, and the blind man is required to say whose was the hand that struck the blow." Why he needs his head buried in a lady's lap for that I'm not entirely sure! But this is kind of typical of Victorian parlor games – there are a lot of them that are, for wont of a better word, just excuses for men and women to flirt. A lot of them involved kissing. It would be tricky ones like "kiss your own shadow." And that doesn't sound that flirtatious, but if you’re careful of course you can cast your shadow onto the person that you fancy.
Rachel: Sneaky.
Bob Nicholson: Another one was "kiss a candlestick" – at which point you hand the person that you fancy a candle, and they are now a candlestick, right, so you can kiss them.
Rachel: The things that go on behind closed doors in the Victorian era!
Bob Nicholson: Yeah, who'd have thought parlor games were so saucy, right?
Sound from pub in Liverpool - wood, carpet, toilet flush
Rachel: I'm in Liverpool to meet historian and host of the "Killing Victoria" podcast, Dr Bob Nicholson. And where better to step back in time than at one of the oldest pubs in town? The Philharmonic Dining Rooms is like a fancy, traditional British pub on steroids. Ornate wood furnishings, carpeted floors throughout, pink marble in the men's bathroom. I mean, I didn't visit it myself, but I've been told. After enquiring about a rather random-looking picture of John Lennon on the wall, I'm told the Beatles actually used to drink here. But anyway, I digress...
Rachel: As you know, I'm actually specifically on the hunt for the origins of the game "Chinese Whispers" – that's what I called it as a kid. What's the earliest reference to the game that you've found?
Bob Nicholson: Well certainly the earliest I've seen it being described as "Chinese Whispers" I think was maybe the 1930s or sort of the middle of the 20th century. But that is not what it was called in the 19th century. In the 19th century this game was known as "Russian Scandal," or sometimes "Russian Gossip." The earliest reference I’ve found to "Russian Scandal" is round about 1861. It was in a periodical called "The Quarterly Review," which is like a very serious periodical – this is not where you’d go for fun and games! But in the middle of that, in the middle of a really lengthy article, as an aside he says: "Oh, by the way, there’s a very funny game called ‘Russian Scandal’ where you do this and this." And he uses it as a way to kind of illustrate the evils of gossip, and of misinformation spreading. So, he’s using it in a very moral way. But then what happens is newspaper editors around the country, they don’t look at all the serious stuff, they just clip out that little paragraph that says "There is a very fun game you can play…" – and that starts to appear all around the world.
Rachel: It feels to us a little bit uncomfortable to use these names, right? Because I’ve definitely read suggestions that it might have some kind of racist undertones or certainly harbor some kind of prejudice against these countries that are referenced. Where do you think these names come from?
Bob Nicholson: We often reference other countries to describe behavior that we see as "other," as different from us. Condoms are known as "French letters" in the 19th century. Syphilis is "the French disease" – but in France it’s the Italian disease! Right so, we often find ways to kind of attribute slightly scurrilous or disreputable behavior to a foreign other. In Britain, Russia was a good example of this. They’d just come out of the Crimean War in the 1850s, where the two countries had literally been at war. So, I guess it was an obvious choice to describe behavior that we would maybe not like to do ourselves. With this one in particular though I think there were also quite a lot of stories that came out of Russia in the newspapers that would often be based on rumor and would reach Britain often through translation, through multiple second or third-hand sources. And I wonder if it was a bit of a reference to that. The idea is: You can’t trust Russian gossip because who knows what the truth of it really is. It’s probably gone through several hands, several mouths, before it’s got to you.
Sound leaving the pub, Liverpool streets, music from a club
Rachel: Ok, so I'm back on the streets of Liverpool – which has very much brought me crashing back to the modern day! It was super interesting to dig into the history of "Chinese Whispers" – or rather "Russian Scandal" or "Russian Gossip." But I think it's pretty clear now that we don't want to use any of those as a podcast title. So, I'm gonna head home and spread the net a little wider.
Sound of a telephone ringing
In Russian we say "испорченный телефон". That means broken telephone.
In France, we call that "téléphone arabe," which means Arab telephone.
"Stille Post" – that’s German for silent mail.
In Poland, it’s "głuchy telefon" or deaf telephone.
In Bulgaria we say "развален телефон" and this means broken telephone.
"In Turkey, it's "kulaktan kulağa" – that means from one ear to another ear.
Rachel: There are so many different names for this game all around the world. That was just a few of them, and maybe you know the name by a completely different name. But before I get ahead of myself and start planning a world tour to investigate all of them, it seems Charli has come across something interesting.
Voicenote notification sound
Charli: I decided to Google this game that we were talking about, the whispering game. I came across various different lists and there are a few bland names for it, like "Telephone," "Operator," "Grapevine" – "Grapevine" is more interesting… but anyway. There was this one name that I came across that I’d never heard before: "Don't Drink the Milk." And I’m not sure where they say that, if they say that. But I thought it was the weirdest, most interesting of the lot.
Sam reads quotes from "The Little Rascals" (1994)
"Quick, what’s the number for 911?"
"Wrong sign, Porky."
"Dear Darla, I hate your stinking guts, you make me vomit, you’re the scum between my toes, love Alfalfa."
"We got a dollar, we got a dollar, we got a dollar, hey hey hey hey!"
Rachel: That’s so good, thank you Sam – really good acting skills! Do you recognize any of those quotes, Charli?
Charli: I don’t.
Rachel: So, after you sent me that voice note where you said: "Don’t Drink the Milk," I went into a bit of a research rabbit hole and landed here, which was the 90s absolute classic film "The Little Rascals." As you can tell from Sam's acting just then, I think you kind of liked this film?
Sam: Yeah, I feel like it was one of those classic movies we watched when we were having sleepovers in middle school.
Rachel: Yes! But, as with so many things from the 90s, it’s actually a remake. It turns out it was all based on this series of black-and-white short films from America around the 1930s, which also followed the adventures of a group of children. The quote "don’t drink the milk" comes from the film entitled "Mush and Milk." Let me tell you the plotline: the kids end up milking a cow using a vacuum cleaner…
Charli: Smart.
Rachel: But – plot twist – then their dog knocks over the bucket that they’ve just gathered and they don’t want to go back empty-handed, they think their headmistress is going to punish them, so they mix up a bucket of plaster of Paris and water.
Sam: Ew.
Charli: Of what?
Rachel: Plaster of Paris – I think it’s the thing that you use to make plaster casts.
Charli: Powdery white stuff?
Rachel: Yes. Tasty, huh? So then, later on, there’s this scene where they’re all sitting around the dining table and they whisper to each other "Don’t drink the milk."
Clip from Our Gang "Mush & Milk" (1933)
"Don’t drink the milk"
"Why?"
"It’s spoiled"
"Don’t drink the milk"
"Why?"
"It’s spoiled"
"Don’t drink the milk"
"Why?"
"It’s spoiled"
"Don’t drink the milk"
"I'm way ahead of you, sister. I know."
Back to studio
Rachel: Now we know where "Don't Drink the Milk" comes from. But what do we think of it as a podcast title?
Charli: I like it! It’s a little abstract, a little whacky. But there’s something about it that is appealing.
Rachel: That’s the kind of direction we wanted to go. It’s memorable, it’s intriguing. It’s still got this same idea of this message being passed on, but it’s also got more of a warning element to it.
Sam: Yeah, it’s a little skeptical. It’s kind of got that "Don’t drink the Kool-Aid..."
Rachel: Yes, exactly!
Charli: Don’t take it at face value.
Rachel: And then if we do this, this kind of means that this whole episode has sort of been like a game of "Telephone" – because we started off with the idea of "Chinese Whispers," we’re gonna end up with "Don’t Drink the Milk"?!
Sam: Somewhere we didn’t expect to go.
Rachel: So, I'd like to officially welcome you to our new podcast: "Don't Drink the Milk." It’s a quirky name, but it's gonna be a quirky show. Join us in search of historical curiosities, cultural nuggets and plenty of plot twists. Hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and we'll take you along for the ride.
Phone ringing
Montage: "развален телефон", "Chinese whispers", "telefono senza fili", "telephone", "kulaktan kulağa", "Stille Post" , "испорченный телефон", "téléphone arabe", "głuchy telefon", "Russian scandal", "Don't drink the milk"...
Dial tone