Nobody Panic - Bonus Episode - Tessa Coates: Resting Witch Face

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

As a bonus episode, and as it's Halloween, please enjoy Tessa's Radio 4 stand up special 'Resting Witch Face'. It's all about the rise of witchcraft, and was created, written and recorded during lockdown, so please bear that in mind as it starts off a little unhinged. (But then it gets really good) A Tiger Aspect production for BBC Radio 4.Subscribe to the Nobody Panic Patreon at patreon.com/nobodypanicWant to support Nobody Panic? You can make a one-off donation at https://supporter.acast.com/nobodypanicPhotos by Marco Vittur, jingle by David Dobson.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/nobodypanic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Carriad. I'm Sarah. And we are the Weirdo's Book Club podcast. We are doing a very special live show as part of the London Podcast Festival. The date is Thursday, 11th of September. The time is 7pm and our special guest is the brilliant Alan Davies. Tickets from kingsplace.com. Single ladies, it's coming to London.

True on Saturday the 13th of September. At the London Podcast Festival. The rumours are true. Saturday the 13th of September. At King's Place. Oh, that sounds like a date to me, Harriet. Hello, it's Tessa. As a bonus episode, we thought we would put out as a Halloween special, my half-hour stand-up special, an episode I recorded for Radio 4 last year, which is called Resting Witchface,

and is about witchcraft. As a little intro, I will do the impression of the Radio 4 announcer before it came on, which went something like this. And now it's time for our Sunday stand-up special. Is Witchcraft on the rise? I don't think so. But apparently it is, according to comedian, Tessa Coates. That's genuinely what she said. Okay, please enjoy. It's called Rest in Witchface. It was written by me and produced by Amy Annette and Simon Nichols

and is a Tiger Aspect production for BBC Radio 4. Thank you so much. Hello. Thank you so much for coming. Hello, welcome to my stand-up special. My name is Tessa Coates, and I know that my voice makes it sound like I'm a radio four announcer who's just really trying to fill for time,

but I promise you that I'm meant to be here. This is my first ever radio four show, and my grandma is so worried about me. She keeps going, oh, but who's going to write it? And I say, oh, I'm going to write it, grandma. And she goes, oh, you'll be ever so sad when nobody comes. But people have come. You're here. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about me.

I tried to think about how best to describe myself, and up until about two years ago, I used to very confidently say that I was a grower, not a shower. And I've had to stop saying that, because that expression does not mean what I thought it meant. I thought it was about, like, perennial plants. It was about, like, a wallflower who sort of, like, took a while to get out of their shell.

That's not what it means. What else about me? I failed my driving test five times. No, don't woo. at school they called me five test tessa if you've done your driving test you know that they tick on a piece of paper every time you get a minor or a major or indeed a dangerous

but I thought the ticks were like well done so he kept ticking his paper and I was like I am absolutely smashing this even when I was driving the wrong way round a roundabout so this is a show it's called resting witch face and it's going to be about witchcraft, there's going to be some science, there's going to be some history, there's going to be some stuff about magic, there's a stuff about a poltergeist, and the show is half an hour long. My mother,

Debbie Coates, Debbie always says, well, tell them how long they have to sit there for. So if you'd like to stay, the show is going to be half an hour. Debbie also says that my show would be improved if I included more of a dance. So do enjoy the dance section, Radio 4. We'd been to the theatre for her birthday and she was saying that on the way home she was going you know with your show why don't you make it more like that you know more of a something you know more of a show you know more involved

we'd been to see Tina Turner the musical what did she think I was going to be able to achieve you know and so I can't offer you the Tina Turner story but what I do have is a degree in anthropology and so what I can offer is some very intense academic research which is surely what everyone wants from their comedy

anthropology is the study of humans. And it asks these enormous questions, like how did we get here? How did we evolve? Why are we the way that we are? Why do we love? Why do we hate?

Why do we tell stories? And you think, oh my goodness, yes, please. I want to know all the answers. And I will save you three years and 20,000 pounds of debt. The answer is, we don't know. We've no idea.

So I'm going to be using that anthropology degree to answer a question that I've been thinking about all year, which is why are we so obsessed with witchcraft? And by we, I mean me. I've always wanted to be a witch. When we graduated and everyone else went to work for Deloitte,

my only plan was to audition to be the witch of Wookie Hole in Somerset. It's a real job. You have to pretend to be a witch and live in a cave for a year. But I didn't have a job or anywhere to live, and so I could live in the cave rent-free. And the salary was £50,000. Unbelievable. So I went to the open audition.

I didn't get in, but I may still maintain I'd be a fantastic witch-of-witch of a witch-of-werey. Wookie Hole. I'm obsessed with witchcraft. I love rituals. I love spells. I love the moon. I don't know if anybody saw the super blood moon a couple of weeks ago, but I went out on the street to look for it,

and it was so cloudy that I couldn't see the moon, but what I could see was three other women on the street going, the moon, have you seen the moon? The blood moon. We love the moon. And maybe it's just my friends, but increasingly I find that I get to parties and people are like, oh, come in, do you want some crisps? Do you want some wine? Do you want to go outside and do a ritual? And the answer is, yes, yes, I want to go outside and do a ritual. I'm not even asking any questions.

Yes, I want to go to a wood and take all my clothes off, you know. The last three parties I went to before it became illegal to go to parties ended with everyone in the living room doing light as a feather, stiff as a board. Actually, not everyone at the party was into it. so some people were very much trying to keep the party atmosphere going around us. So it was more sort of light as a feather, stiff as a board. Can you pass the cheese board? And also you might be thinking like, I don't know anything about witchcraft. And that's also totally okay.

Just like anthropology, the answer is we don't know. And anyone's allowed to have a go. A lot of the books about magic say that witchcraft is whatever it means to you. And the initiation spell to be a witch is just saying, I'm a witch, I'm a witch, I'm a witch. easy and also witch is a gender neutral term so anybody can be a witch thank you for coming to my TED talk in this show I'm going to be using the word the occult and I'm just clarifying there I am saying the occult because I told people I was doing a show about the occult and everyone thought I was saying yakult the probiotic drink so just to clarify the occult and by the occult I mean the whole umbrella everything sort of witchcraft paganism tarot cards psychic abilities, the supernatural, like wicker, ghost, ghouls, the whole gamut, anything that we might

consider to be beyond our understanding. And wicker, if that's a new word to you, wicker is WICCA, and that is a branch of witchcraft that believes in doing no harm. Not to be confused with the wicker man, the film, with a k, that's wicker, the basket weaving material, where they put Nicholas cage in a big basket, or wicker with an h, which is the noise of horse makes. Or wimper with a which is the noise Nicholas Cage made in the big basket. And all of these occult things have been around for as long as they've been humans. We've always been interested in it,

but there is a general rise in interest over the past few years. Everyone is getting more and more into witchcraft. Sales of the original tarot card deck are the highest they've been for 50 years. A quick search of best-selling books that came out this year include hexing the patriarchy, spells for change, spells to hex my ex. The modern witch, the hedge witch, the urban witch, the kitchen witch, which witch are you?

A guide to releasing your inner witch? And you can look these all up if you want to on witch, the consumer guide. I mean, they're best-selling books because I've been buying them. I own them all. And there are books on candle magic, chaos magic, black witchcraft, white witchcraft, green witchcraft, which is spells about plants,

and orange witchcraft, which is spells for Trump. I mean, I know he's not the president anymore, but when he was in office, Trump managed to spawn his own whole branch of witchcraft called the Magic Resistance. And every waning crescent moon, the magic resistance did a spell called Bind Trump so that he may do no harm.

20,000 people were doing this. People really took it seriously. The Bind Trump spell, the instructions say that you put an orange candle in a jar and then you seal it with wax and then you bury it at a crossroads at midnight. The instructions also say that if you don't have an orange candle,

you can use a carrot or a wats it. And the spell ends, if you're interested, it ends by going, bind Donald J. Trump, bind him in chains, bind his work, bind his wickedness. You're fired, you're fired, you're fired. I know we shouldn't be talking about him

because he's not the president, but one more thing about Trump. When he was in office, Trump tweeted the phrase, witch hunt, all capitals, 183 times. And he got in real trouble for doing that because when he uses that phrase witch hunt, it's because there is no word in his own history for oppression

or persecution. And so he steals, a word that doesn't belong to him when really the word he was looking for was just being held accountable for his actions. But I think in his defense, maybe he didn't mean it like that. Maybe he wasn't saying that he was the witch that was wrongly accused. Maybe he was looking out his bedroom window

every waning crescent moon and realizing the witches were hunting him. And so I think a big part of the enthusiasm for magic and witchcraft right now and maybe what I'm so interested in being a witch is it's about finding power when you feel powerless. And I think this year we have all felt absolutely

powerless. Politically, socially, environmentally, like never has everything felt more out of our control. A global pandemic, you know, political chaos, the environment, Bitcoin, what is Bitcoin? The real world has let us down, and so I think we're trying to find faith in the abstract. And there's nothing new in that. There's always been a link between political unrest and the occult. So in the first World War, seances really kicked off, and everyone became obsessed with contacting the dead. In the second World War, Wicca was created W-I-C-C-A, and Wicca was genuinely created by a man called Gerald. And just sort of give you an insight into what Gerald was like.

Gerald wrote a book called The Book of Shadows. And the first rule is, to work magic, you must be naked. So I think that sort of sets the tone. He called it being sky-clad. But, you know, just because you give it a cool name, doesn't make you any less of a pervert, Gerald. And so the Wiccans claimed that, Hitler never invaded because they were doing a spell to curse his mind every waning moon from the cliffs of Dover.

I mean, in their defence, Hitler didn't invade, you know. But maybe just the Nazis were like looking through their binoculars at Gerald's nude butt and being like, not for me. Florence Birdseye of the Birds Eye Fish Finger Empire claimed that she was part of the group stopping Hitler from invading by doing a voodoo ritual every month. And I think with Florence, we really should have known that she was a witch because the clues. is in the name, bird's eye, fish finger, eye of bird, and finger of fish. In 1968, on Halloween, a group called Witch, W-I-T-C-H,

who called themselves Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, took over Wall Street so they could hex the financial district and protest capitalism, and, to their credit, the Dow Jones did drop 13 points.

The year after that, which protested a television, phone company and they called themselves which women incensed at telephone company harassment. If you see them at protest today, they call themselves which, we interrupt those choosing hate. I think those are called an acrostic, I'm not sure, but they're fun. If they'd like to have this one for free, I was thinking, we insist that change happens. See, a bit of fun. There's also a T. There's also a T. I think you can do, we're interested in Tessa Coates is. humour. This is how I feel every time I go into Pratt. What's in that quasson? Ham?

You can do it anything. So my name is T-E-S-S-A. This is also how I feel in Pratt. Take every salt sachet available. Their food is bland. I can do it with anybody. What's your name, sir? Yes, you... What, sorry, Lerlachie. Ashley? Ashley. Yeah.

Thank you for coming. Matthew. Okay. What's your name? Tom. Thank God. The other mitts. Two T's in Matthew.

I don't know why I thought I could do this. We'll be here for 20 to 25 minutes, okay? Marvel at the terrible haircut Evans wearing. Claude me, that feels very piteous. Okay. I think the sort of sensible anthropologist answer is that in times of stress, we turn to the occult,

both politically but also personally. In my experience, you do not have your cards read or walk into an occult shop or buy sage or crystals or pay to have your palm read if you are having a fantastic time. You do it in times of crisis. I once paid to have my tarot cards read in a psychic shop, called The Magician Reversed, and I cried the whole way through.

And she was so American, and when she turned my cards over, she went, Yikes. A lot of bad energy. That was in January of 2020, and she was very clear that I was going to meet a spoiled, rich boy from the south three days after the full moon. But she did not say, by the way, there's a global pandemic coming, and you need to stop a man in a wet market from eating a bat. He didn't mention that.

That was the first time I'd ever had my cards read from this woman in The Magician Reversed, but after that I got very heavily into tarot cards. I think they're really exciting and cool. It was my birthday recently, and word had got out that I liked tarot cards, so I received too many. I got Moon Tarot. I got Game of Thrones tarot. I got erotic tarot.

It's genuinely too stressful for me to look at. They're all just like paintings of people having sex, and I don't like it. It's like the three of cups, you know, two girls, one cup. No, thank you. Yeah, tarot, if you've never sort of heard of tarot cards, there are 78 cards in the deck, and you've got the major arcana and the minor arcana, and the minor is like the cups, the pentacles, the wands,

and then the major arcana is the cool stuff, like the hanged man and, like, justice. I've brought my cards today, and I'm going to do a tarot card reading, and I cannot do magic. So this absolutely won't be a magic trick. I'm obsessed with magic. Like, if I could do slight,

of hand, I would 100% be on a cruise ship right now being a close-up magician. You know, like I wouldn't be a stand-up. Anyway, so I'm going to read the cards and just see how the show is going. And so it's traditional to get three cards because three is a nice magic number, the past, the present, the future.

You know, three witches, the three musketeers, Hansen. All the classics. Okay, let's see how we're doing. The Empress. Hello. Oh, what a witchy card. The star.

Oh, it's a nude, blonde lady. Pouring a jug into a river. No one needs that. The lovers. Is anybody here on a date? Oh. Why have they sent us this, then? Is anybody on the dating apps?

Nothing. Tinder? LinkedIn? On the dating apps? You got the lovers card. If you don't like tarot cards, by the way, you are not alone. I was once explaining my enthusiasm for tarot cards to a boy that I fancied on a date

and he did not like it. The straight men do not like to talk about tarot cards. No, sorry. I was telling him all about it and he said, yeah, but like, do you think you're a magician or do you think you're a wizard? And I get it. Like tarot cards are, you know, they're fun.

Like tarot is, well, it's golf for women, you know. Or to be more clear, cryptocurrency is tarot for men. And so he said, do you think you're a magician or do you think you're a wizard? I wanted him to sleep with me. So I said, oh, magician, but the answer is wizard. I think it might all be a bit magic. I've always thought that maybe there's sort of more going on with the world than we know, then we can possibly understand.

When I was little, we moved to this house in the country. this little old cottage in the middle of nowhere, I was about five, my parents had to have the house exercised. In the middle of the night, at the same time every night, there was the sound of a man walking up the stairs, and then the house would fill with the smell of cigar smoke. And they were trying really hard to be like, oh, it's pipes, it's maybe it's anything, like, what's the rational answer for this? And then my little sister, who's about three, at the breakfast table, said, who is the man with the hat at the top of the stairs? Sorry, too much, too much, back in the room.

Otters hold hands while they sleep so they don't float away. Baboons sometimes put a blade of grass behind their ear to be trendy. Okay, so yeah, they had a ghost, and we had to do an exorcism, and we had to walk around the house and bang a pan, and we had to say, this is a happy home, you can go now. And he did, he did go. But what remained, and what we still have today, is, a poltergeist and the poltergeist constantly takes our things and I can hear myself I know how that

sounds but also we have got a poltergeist my mum once came to meet us and she was late and she went oh god sorry I'm late the poltergeist took my trousers and no one even battled an eyelid everyone was like yeah I believe you she said that she couldn't find her trousers so she stood on the landing and she said oh give me back my trousers and then she opened a drawer and there they were And that's the thing, like, I'm a scientist. Like, I have a science degree. Like, I care very passionately about objectifiable, testable, evidence.

And at the same time, I firmly believe the poltergeist took my mum's trousers. I was very convinced that I was magic as a child. When I was little, sort of same time as the exorcism, we were walking along the beach, and we were throwing stones into the sea. What a fantastic British holiday. And I picked up a stone,

and with it came 20 other stones that all had a hole in them, and they had been threaded together into a necklace. Can you imagine? So I held this magic necklace, and I was like, oh my God, well, this is my calling. You know, presumably I'll shortly be notified and turn into some kind of mermaid and then sort of take my rightful place

with my true family beneath the waves. And I used to sleep with this thing, and I was very, genuinely very stressed because I was like, I'm doing quite well at school. How will I sort of split my time? running the sea. I really thought that was what was going to happen. And I think that's a really, really human thing to do, you know, to think of the scariest possible option, to jump right over the rational answer, straight to the spookiest, because we've got this incredibly overactive

imagination. And we have that as a result of being this amazingly empathetic species. We're unbelievable at it. It means that we can read each other's faces, read each other's emotions. It helped us evolve so fast. It's why we're so social. It's all to do with our ability to understand what other people are feeling. And the result of that of being so good at reading faces is that we see faces everywhere, in clouds, in trees, in anything. We're constantly seeing faces and we're giving emotion to things

that don't have emotion. The other day, I found a spoon under the bed that had obviously been there for a year, and I went, oh, sorry pal. And on top of that overactive imagination and that empathy, you know, we're scared all the time. And we love to be scared. What keeps us safe? If you're scared, you're safe. But as a result, that fear has gone into our imagination,

and it's made up all kinds of things. So for me, when I'm falling asleep, my brain, like if you could see a heat map of my head, it would be like here is just like general health concerns, things to Google in the morning. And then here is things I said at school between 2004 and 2007. And then here is how I'm incredibly hot,

but I can't put my foot outside the duvet in case it's gently stroked by a small, dead Victorian child. And then here is just, have I been missal, PPI? So what do we believe? Because the scientist in me says that we've got this huge fear and this imagination and we know we're going to die, we've got this fear of death. Of course

we've invented ghosts and ghouls and magic and all of this. But the scientist in me also says, we're an ape and we don't know how we got here. We understand a fraction of everything there is to know about the universe. Of course there's more going on than we could possibly understand. So maybe, with all of that, the really interesting question isn't, why do

I want to be a witch? But why did I wait so long to admit that I want to be one. And I think the answer to that is Walt Disney. Walt Disney has got a lot to answer for. They said that woodland creatures would be much more involved in the cleaning than they have been.

And my personal sexual awakening was Robin Hood, but when he's a fox. So no man will ever come close to that. And I think I'm not alone when I say, I've never felt disappointment like when the beast turned back into a man.

But mostly my issue with Disney is that they told us the witches were the baddies and the only way to be the leading character in your own story was to aspire to be a Disney princess. And I think this new generation have got like Moana and Brave and Frozen

and like quite cooler girls but we had Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. Listen, I love those films. I think they're amazing. But the princesses should not be the heroes. Like Snow White is a child bride and the first time her husband kissed her, he thought she was dead.

Sleeping Beauty in her own movie has 11 lines. Three of them are the word no, and one of them is, but I picked berries yesterday. And so we have sold the line that the best your life can go is that you're 16 and you're incredibly good at whistling. And then someone will find you in some kind of Glenn and then marry you later that day. They're 16 years old.

The heroes are teenage girls. Imagine making them the heroes. Have you ever met a teenage girl? When it was sunny, I sat beside some teenage girls in the park, and they discussed whether it was more naked to be tops no bottoms or bottoms no tops for 45 minutes. I wanted to go up like an old crone and be like, the most naked is totally naked, just shoes. And you can't really blame us for identity.

with the princesses, like they didn't give us anyone else to identify with. Like, it's not called Snow White and the seven other fully formed female characters. And they told us there's only space for one of us. Like, look at any kids' movie, and there's either no girl or one girl. Like, look at Toy Story. Like, they're toys. They could have been any gender. One of them is a potato, you know, but they're all boys.

And the girls that do get to go on the adventure are the tomb boys. Like, Jesse, the cowgirl, or Max, in Stranger Things. like the boys girl. When you're little, your options are the princess or the tomboy. And then you get a bit older and you realize there's a third option. You can be the witch. Because Walt Disney accidentally gave us the perfect role model. Look at Ursula or the Wicked Queen or Maleficent or Curella DeVille.

Here are these powerful, educated, qualified, highly trained women at the top of their game in the dark arts or the fur trade or whatever Ursula does for a living. And they're funny and they're clever and they're amazing and their makeup looks brilliant. And their everything was supposed to hide. Lust, money, education, power, sexuality. Those should be our heroes.

Because the witches had it right all along. Because what stands between you and being a princess is being chosen by a prince. And what stands between you and being a tomboy is being chosen by the boys. But what stands between you and being a witch is just putting in the time and training in the dark arts. And then you get to go on your own adventure.

And they're spaced for all of us. It's a coven. everyone's invited. In witchcraft, witches famously work in threes, the maiden, the mother, the crone. And I think we all had a good go at being the maiden, and I'm not ready to be a mother yet, so I've gone straight to crone,

and I'm really into it. We're really close to the end of the show, and I think the only way for this to end is for all of us to become witches together. I know you thought you were coming to a light-hearted comedy show, but I'm afraid you're now in a coven. I'm going to become a witch, and you're all going to become a witch with me. For this to be a true initiation spell,

the book says we're supposed to be doing it under a waning crescent moon, and tonight is waxing gibbius, but we'll work with what we've got. Okay, so... Moon fans in. So we need to draw a circle and light our candles, and we're going to burn some parsley, because sage is actually incredibly expensive. Okay, and then we need to open up the Book of Shadows

to feel the benefits of the occult take one twice a day as part of a healthy probiotic lifestyle sorry, sorry, sorry, that is yakult sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Witchcraft initiation spell. Eye of nute and toe of dog, yeah, this is the stuff, wool of tongue and blah blah blah, blah, yeah,

bird's eye and finger of fish, yes please, okay, darkness gathered, hear our wish, okay, now we're talking. It said we can ask some small requests. So my requests are for the assurance of a disson, witch. I ask for the poltergeist to please give back my mum's trousers and ask for somebody to please explain what Bitcoin is. Repeat three times in loudest pitch. I'm a witch, I'm a witch, I'm a witch, I'm a witch. Okay, here we go. On the counter three. One. Oh, sorry, my God, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

The first rule of witchcraft, to work magic, you must be naked. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, it said skyclad. So if everybody could please get skyclad, everybody, take the clothes off, please. If it's too overwhelming to be completely naked, you can do top, snow bottoms or bottom I'm gonna go for totally naked just shoes okay so okay and then it says we need to make a salt circle where are we gonna get enough salt um oh wait here we go take every salt sachet available The oven is all skyclad under the waxing gibbius moon. All together, one, two, three. I'm aware so much.

Welcome to the coven. Good night! Thank you.