The Archers Thread September 2015 - The One Where Helen Kicks Rob In The Balls?

[PseudoBadger]

Wishful thinking. I think she's in it for the long haul

Bertrand is right. It may not have been mentioned much but there's been palpable tension when Grace/Fairbrother names have popped up. I'm sure Gypsy is right about the reason for Jill's inferiority feelings.

Sorry to hear that, frostyfingers. Welcome to the thread and I hope the HP storyline isn't proving too close to home for you.

Jill also hates the fairbrother boys dad because he strung lizzie along

Oh yes- he was horrible to Lizzie, wasn't he?

Nut she has not mentioned that once. Not once.

The affair with their sleazy dad was mentioned and Jill thinks tiny takes after his dad. Lizzie asked how old Rex was and I think his mum must have been pregnant at the time of the affair

Long time lurker here. Just caught up on a marathon reading from May when for some reason life got busy and I forgot about these wonderful threads.

Why does Rob have to be the 'Project Manager' - I know it's a business but he makes it sound like getting HS2 started.

And I don't understand - I thought Roy was all happy about being Manager while Caroline was away. I'd forgotten about Kathy. I'd like a staffing chart for GG please.

emerald welcome, welcome!

Rob has to be the 'project manager' because it makes it sound like he has a job. Otherwise he's a 'house husband' and he has faaaaaar too much testosterone for that!

Pip is destined to marry a Fairbrother so there will be Fairbrothers farming at Brookfield (if David and Ruth have a similar will to Phil - though presumably then Jill will be gunning for Josh or Ben to take over so it can remain in Archer hands!)

I'm so sorry frostyfingers - that must be really hard and incredibly disappointing :(

ruth hates cooking and is crap at it. that is probably why they ate a lot of tuna.

it seems she also hates paperwork and is going to be stuck in doing that... as pip sort of prompted her to realise...

sibu to have a strop about being left out of the farm. things can not go on hold because she is away. yes she could be asked about stuff, and I think she should have been about the fairbrothers and the track (was she asked before?), but can hardly complain about stuff like the stubble turnips.

she may decide she can not cope and put heather in a home permanently. everyone else may discover they miss jills cooking and cleaning too much. there is potential for some nice juicy story lines there. will heather have an accident at home as she is left alone while ruth buggers off to see the cows?

I think she was rather unfair demanding that jill move out so her mum could move in, without considering everyone else in the equation... who are now going to have to eat ruth's crappy food the natural person to move out would have been bert or pip. pip could have moved into rickyard, as could have bert.

wtf is with Jill's giggling in the car

Like Neil stringing Susan along!!

A new village hall eh - do they have the space for all this? Maybe Hayley will be back to run the nursery. Justin Elliott has a terrible name for naming things after.

Guess Neil is getting chilli tonight

Blackeyed I have a strange sense of deja vu.

Pip in rickyard - well isn't she a lucky madam

Why not move bert and Jill in there until the bungalow is ready

I always wonder if Jill feels/knows that Phil preferred Grace and basically did settle for second best and Grace was always the love of his life. I reckon that's probably what he used to go and talk to his favourite pig about, whatever her name was. Maybe Jill heard him and put on a brave face but it will all come out in her dotage.

I'm sure phil told Jill she was his number one so to speak. I think grace and phil weren't well suited for a long marriage but more a coup de feu (probably why she was killed off) whereas Jill was his soulmate

Phil and Jill (IIRC) did have a conversation where she admitted to always having felt second best ...

Yes hats the one I'm thinking of - I'm sure he reassured her she wasn't

Who is Lizzie? Is that Elizabeth Pargetter? What has she got to do with the
Fairbrothers?

Mystery of the amusing tomatoes is solved!

Yup tomatoes solved. But Rickyard, why didn't we think of that? Oh...we did.
However Bert cannot live there I believe difficult stairs were mentioned. Although Jill gives the impression of being up to stairs.

No wonder Justin Elliott wanted to buy Brookfield; it turns out to have a spare house in every field.

Joskar, yes, Lizzie is Elizabeth Pargetter. Her late lamented husband Nigel called her Lizzie. You may not have been listening while Nigel was around. He fell to his death from the roof of Lower Loxley in the early hours of 2nd January 2011, which happened to be the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Archers on national radio. A BBC functionary made an ill-advised promise that something would happen on that day that would Shake Ambridge To The Core. That turned out to be a bit more literal than we had been expecting - given the length of Nigel's scream he must literally have shaken the ground. To everyone's surprise Lower Loxley turned out to be as tall as York Minster.

Possibly the biggest mistake the production team has ever made.

I used to have a couple of tapes of vintage Archers moments. There was one fab bit when Phil and Jill were having a tender supper and talking about the school for the children. Jill favoured the village school and Phil announced that 'actually' he'd inherited some cash from Grace and had out it aside when remarrying to educate any children so ta-da Kenton and Shula could go to private school! Jill HIT THE ROOF and made a number of remarks dissing private schools and saying that a woman who Phil had 'known intimately' before he met her was NOT going to be educating her children. They made it up in the end and I don't know what happened to the cash but it didn't get spent on schools. Jill also HIT THE ROOF again when a stained glass window in memory of Grace was installed at St Stephens though she came round to that in the end recognising that Grace was dead and it was her Jill who was popping out Archer sprogs at a rate of knots. There was a very painful point I remember when she said to Phil that if Grace hadn't died he would have ever even looked at her and he had to agree that was true.
It was definitely quite a theme in their early married life. I suspect it receded as Dan and Doris etc died and there were less and less people to compare Jill and Grace.

i am sure I have read/heard elsewhere that 'competing' with a deceased former partner is impossible because they are dead & therefore, now & forever, effectively perfect & unflawed,

Makes perfect sense to me. Whatever Grace might have become in her future, once dead she was frozen in perfection in Phil's & everybody else's memories. I really understand how Jill felt about her

Pip to David - "How would you feel about me moving out?"

Oh yes, very good, Pip...make it look like its YOUR idea, before you get turfed out anyway when Heather Pet moves in!
Seriously though, I am very surprised that they let her move back in straight after her ridiculous career U-turn. She came back so quickly, I wonder if she even got as far as the end of the farm road.

Such a wet blanket, that one.

That's fascinating NorthernLurker.