The Archers #109: Pulp Fiction! Hammer Horror (Tracy), Carry On (Brian & Neil), Call the Midwife (Adam, Ian, Lexi) - but no political thrillers, Ambridge remains Brexit-free. Nitpick here!

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed. We don't all agree on all points and most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you'd like to be Susan's best friend or other unusual views. grin

Spoilers: not on this thread, please. We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3439443-keep-it-to-yourself-the-archers-spoilers-thread-4, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, @DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

Thanks to Bucking Frolics and LillianGish for the title ideas, which I had to edit down a bit to get under the character limit.

I wonder if Lily will have gone back to Manchester by the time we've filled this thread.

SWs, please, please, stop with the comedy routines, you aren't any good at writing them. Stick to the one liners. Also, no new characters like Joy when you have three established ones who have been sitting on their hands at Lower Loxley for many weeks now, just dying to tell us what has been happening.

To be fair, the SWs probably very cleverly made the only “altruistic” offer be from Kate so that listeners would be totally on board with the alternative. If they had had a genuine “genuine altruistic offer” it would have opened up exactly this discussion...

I don’t think it would know or care that that body was not genetically related to it I think that is certainly the case for the mother, but I’m not so sure about the child. Not at birth or as a young child maybe, but as a teenager when it starts questioning its sense of self maybe (and also maybe not). I don’t know. It’s not a perfect science, but nor is conceiving your children naturally always perfect.

Agreed @LillianGish, I was thinking of a newborn baby when I said that.

Aaaannnnyyyway

I can't decide whether scrap cakes sound nice or revolting. I think the SW must have read exactly this website recipe when writing the Jill/Leonard bit www.foodsofengland.co.uk/scrapcakes.htm

Did Jill say Teasmaid? I hope they don't throw that away

Very sought after, and worth £££s!

No I don't think only fertile hetrosexuals should have children, but I do think removing a child from its mother in order to meet the needs of those who can't is prioritising adult needs above the needs of children. It's not a niche point of view, and I do think it interesting that European countries which are known to have more progressive policies towards women and children have banned surrogacy.
We don't 'allow' women to have unwanted children, we do everything we can to avoid that, contraception, sex ed, social care etc. We don't purposefully create a situation where those women have children.
Whoever tried to act as thread police about surrogacy has failed but they were probably right

C8H10N4O2
Do we know how many acres LL has?

Yes; Lower Loxley Hall and gardens are surrounded by 400 acres of parkland, according to The Book of The Archers.

But as has been mentioned, it is in the village of Lower Loxley not the village of Ambridge, so it ought to be disqualified as a site for Peggy's Parochial Project.

Maybe the surrogacy debate could go on another thread.
A teasmaid? At Brookfield? Whatever next.

Whoever tried to act as thread police about surrogacy has failed but they were probably right.

That was me. There were quite a few surrogacy discussions on FWR and iirc AIBU around the time of Tom Daley and then a discussion going through parliament. Main issues people didn't agree on were:

• is it always exploiting if it is a commercial arrangement
• is there 'harm' to the baby to be removed from the woman who carried the baby even if that woman was not biologically related

I come from an adoption background on this, and have my own views, but I come on to this thread for light hearted discussion which is why I am trying and obviously failing to stay out of the surrogacy pros/cons debate.

Why does it need to go on another thread, Mike ? Which other thread?
It's a very pertinent topic and the storyline is building up to the inevitable showdown.

Surely you don't think Lexi is just going to hand over the baby and disappear into the sunset . Or do you?

Well, in for a penny and all that.

My suggestion would be:

• debating the Lexi storyline and what might happen / how we think other characters could react (or should have been acting to be more realistic) - fine
• debating what we as individuals think about the morals of surrogacy - a bit stressful.

I think Lexi will get stressed by Jenny and then after the birth cross at how little attention Adam is paying the baby, and before the legal stuff is completed she will up off with the baby and go back to her home country. Ian will be furious and leave Adam. After a while Lexi will come back but she will want the baby to go to Ian and not Adam.

prioritising adult needs above the needs of children isn’t all fertility treatment involving donor eggs and sperm essentially doing that? No one needs to have children. Those couples are going out of their way to have children to meet their own needs. Of course it goes without saying that they will love and care for those children - possibly with even greater love and care than someone who hasn’t had to give it so much thought. Are those children worse off than if they had been conceived naturally? And if they are not then why, by extension, should the child of a woman who cannot carry her own children (for whatever reason - or in this case a man) be any worse off for being carried by someone else. Does anyone actually remember being born?

In relation to the TA - I think the other chacters’ reactions are quite realistic because IME when you actually know the people who are going through the process (whether it’s using a surrogate or a donor egg etc) it immediately becomes much more understandable. You are thinking of real people - in this case Adam and Ian - who would make great parents (certainly as good as any of the other parents we see in TA), using a surrogate who is a friend - in this case Lexi - and it all seems rather wonderful that this is now a possibility for people who not very long ago would not have been able to have children. Particularly when you look round at all the other families - Pip and Toby, Helen and her two, Ruari with Brian and Jennifer, Kate and her various children and you see that there’s no longer a one-size-fits all way of going about things and actually the sky hasn’t fallen in for that.

I think the baby will either have a disability or a serious illness, that's why we had the fundraiser the other day.
The thought of TA trying to handle that makes me anxious! There are big signposts at the moment of lexi being unhappy, I presume they intend to go somewhere with that.

when you actually know the people who are going through the process … it immediately becomes much more understandable.

I agree with you there. When you know people, you look at the individuals and stop worrying so much about the wider issues.

No the sky never falls in when women and children are treated as commodities, it's too common place for that to happen.
I presume it's also a cultural thing in that a soap in Sweden for example would portray it in a completely different way as it's illegal.

I have to say that I agree with @TeenPlusTwenties. I come on here to discuss TA, and any issues it brings up, in context of how the characters behave, or how good or bad the scripts are.

I understand that threads go off on a tangent at times, but this one is going on and on, and round in circles.

I also remember we were asked a little while ago to try to keep to the topic of TA (by DDD, I think), when the thread was going way off topic. I know people mention Lexi or Adam occasionally, but the majority of posts are commenting about the morality of surrogacy, rather than the story.

Now, back to TA, and Leonard's plan to make the cakes, is flawed. He doesn't know what "XXX" the secret ingredient is, and surely, due to his relationship with Jill, shouldn't qualify, for the same reason Jill can't enter it.

Just scroll on by if a discussion isn't of interest to you. I frequently do that on TA threads but wouldn't dream of silencing other posters.

Plus, I would think Jill might be quite put out at his stealing the recipe. Bad idea all round.

The trust money. Are they going to pay the farmers to rewild like the European set-aside scheme? Presumably they can't buy the land with the money (I'm thinking the money won't go very far). it all seems a bit pie-in-the-sky to me.

I'd like to here more from Ben, and Johnny.

And I'd like to know what's going on with Lily.

I am surprised that Tracy, who is clearly in the programme to rattle windows and upset applecarts, hasn't voiced the opinion that Adam and Ian are too old to look after a baby and Lexi must be mad to give them one. Her experience of children, after all, is that they happened to her whether she wanted them or not, and she has no reason to consider the outlook of the infertile or the gay. What's more, she hardly knows those two and has no reason to spare their feelings.

I think the Lexi/Adam/Ian storyline is by far the most interesting at the moment. I’m wondering if Lexi will be rekindling her relationship with Roy after the baby is born. There ought to be some Brexit implications there, but of course that is one issue which will never be tackled. Do we think it is going to be a boy or a girl? As Adam’s child it’s another person in line for a Home Farm inheritance. I certainly don’t think she’ll be trying to run off with the baby - if she had wanted to do that then why come back at all?

I certainly don’t think she’ll be trying to run off with the baby - if she had wanted to do that then why come back at all?

Because until she has the baby in her arms she won't feel so strongly?
Or because she sees how rubbish Adam is as a dad?

Or because drama . I think she may get back with Roy but then she would remain in ambridge and I can't imagine that's the plan.

I also remember we were asked a little while ago to try to keep to the topic of TA (by DDD, I think), when the thread was going way off topic.

So ...?

From my point of view (having been here from the beginning) the thread is often most interesting when it broadens out from the script and prompts a wider (phone says ‘weirder’) discussion. (Whether on real life or flights of fancy.) Am I strange in not seeing it primarily as ‘light relief’? For me this is a place to indulge an obsession. I’m perfectly happy with superficial chit chat, but it’s the dark pathways of obsession that make it irresistible.

(Sadly I have no clear feelings either way on surrogacy.)