Don your paisley tabards, feel the static crackle, and join our Archers thread team hug.

[PseudoBadger]

Chocolate Chip cookie anyone?

Or that a scientific lab failed to recognise that they were testing bull sperm?!

Well, Magickal baby was a turkey-baster conception!

I'm merely speculating on what might be another one of those sw juxtapositions.
Rob is not the father of Ethan so Jess conceived from a ONS after years of marriage to Rob. He must be worried that he's firing blanks.
I think Helen's 'glow' is not a sign that she's pregnant but a sign that she's physically in peak condition.
She's proved already that she can have a child. He hasn't and the chances are that he can't.

Charlie's jangling his nerves in more ways than one by constantly questioning fertility levels.

Or maybe low fertility at Berrow has a chemical/hormonal cause ........

Charlie's jangling his nerves in more ways than one by constantly questioning fertility levels.

What an utterly brilliant observation!

Though I wonder if it has ever come up in editorial meetings ...

So how do we reckon Kenton and on and on is going to end? J'lene chucks him out or he gets ADs from the doc.?

If he's smelling and drinking I'd bloody chuck him aht.

I think they are building up to a proper breakdown story with Kenton rather than cursory handing out of prescription for ADs.

I feel we are not 'done' with the Jess/Ethan story line she says hopefully. Not sure why I am so keen for more, but I feel there is too much we don't know. And also think wrong for Jess to be painted as so evil given that she was quite a sympathetic character when she finally pitched up in Ambridge and had to try to live with the utter arse that was her husband.

Notdeadyet I don't know, IMO Jess is portrayed as a little unhinged, (esp. where the baby is concerned,) with a very high pitched voice and trying so desperately to fit in to a village that she had refused to even visit before.

I mean she'd been with knob since young and had put up with him for a long time. Like Hell, she isn't normal IMHO .

Maybe you're right ppeat. She certainly sounded deeply unhinged in the most recent episodes, but I wondered whether he'd just driven a perfectly normal woman round the bend. Maybe I am remembering incorrectly, but around that time when she was trying to throw the party and generally get to know people I seem to remember she sounded entirely reasonable.

Over-invested? Moi?

Moi aussi

Yes I can't believe the SW are done with Jess. Once Hellin wakes up I want at least 1 full episode where she and Jess realise they've both been duped by knob and how similar they are (whilst quaffing several bottles of prosecco!)

Wasn't Jess a psychiatrist or something? I do remember thinking at one point that she shouldn't have been quite so naive and trusting, given what she must see through work. But I might have totally imagined it (and in any case, seeing it through work doesn’t make you identify with something.)

I think she was a social worker wasn't she?

Agree Peppapig. They can bond over their shared hellish experience and Hellin can become godmother to Ethan etc.

Yes she was\is a social worker. interestingly the ones I know in RL are also a bit 'odd'. Then we all are aren't we ?

I just have missed the episode where the divorce came through... The way Knob and Helen talk to each other is just strange. No one talks to their partner like that - do they?

Many threads ago someone (PetulaG perhaps) wrote a stupendous analysis of how Helen and Rob were both guilty of "performing" the relationship they believed they should be having.

Was extremely illuminating.

I suspect Nob has had a vasectomy on the quiet or is infertile and that's why he knew he hadn't fathered Jess' baby. He's the kind of nasty bastard who would keep that information to himself and make his wife feel it was her fault with nasty little digs. No doubt Hellin will feel that she isn't fulfilling her side of the marriage bargain as she's not produced mini-Nob (or some such bollocks) and will up the simpering and elaborate classical French dishes for supper.

Quite enjoying tabard-gate

I need one of the folks with a good memory: was Jess a VW idea, that SOC has now done away with?

yes bozzle, that's what I was thinking - didn't hear anything about the divorce being finalised.
can we add bigamist to the list of misdemeanors...?

I think so, yes, R4. The Beetle (VW) left in May 2013 and the party salmon fiasco was in December 2013, I think. Storylines are sketched out 6 months in advance, I think?
I have always believed that Jess wanted to visit Ambridge before she moved there, but Rob kept putting her off for his own nefarious reasons (having an adulterous affair with Hellbent, for example). I also still believe that Rob is Ethan's father and Rob found a way of falsifying the results from the CSA. The timing of Valentine's night, or whenever it was round then that Jess and Rob slept together, was right for Ethan's birth, wasn't it? Also, Jess will have been spun tales about Ambridge in the same way as Helen has been about Jess and Rob's family. Rob really didn't want Jess to live in Ambridge and wasn't at all keen when she got a job as a social worker in Felpersham.
I think the divorce was finalised a couple of months ago. Helen started talking about getting married, I think.
I know too much for someone who has more or less stopped listening!

"No one talks to their partner like that - do they?"
Only when one is living in LaLa Fantasy Land and the other one wants to keep her there.

I can't help thinking he falsified the DNa test too but can't think how!

Need to get Knob, Hellbent and Jess on Jeremy Kyle ????????

Can I just chip in and say that I think the surrendered wife/EA storyline is a really good thing that the SWs are doing.

DS (18) listens often and I am glad to hear his comments about what an utter villian Knob is regarding the way he treats Helen.

If this storyline highlights what emotional abuse is really like, and how it can be hidden from public and even family view, then it's helping the cause.

Helen is insufferable but she is also vulnerable and many people have been in similar manipulated situations.

I really hope that the SWs tell this cautionary tale properly.

By which I mean tie up all the loose ends and not let it fade away. ..