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.

Oh, I dunno ... I’m as introverted as they come - but I’d be ashamed if, in those exact circumstances, I turned away an apparently harmless new neighbour.

All Kirsty was doing was drinking tea with a friend. They probably had hours to spare and Joy need only have taken a little of that time.

The main reason I might have for shutting my door on a stranger would be fearing for my own safety - but there was another person present and Joy doesn’t sound as if she looks dangerous.

Etiquette is about making the other person feel comfortable - where possible and reasonable. It’s what makes the world go round.

Is it possible that the cake Jill's squeeze makes will inadvertently get entered for the vegan cake? What with it being 50% pig fat.

Liked Pip and Josh teaming up as brothers and sisters do so often - the underlay of the family relationship as it were supersedes the Axminster
If the family dynamic.

No view here on lexi or indeed surrogacy. May have to stop listening tho if Jenny takes grandmotherly cooing to Olympic standards.

Love Lynda and her determination to really learn cricket theory. She's a woman who knows herself.

Tracy's humour, ghosts aside, is great because it is her character, not stupid injections of "something funny", that is at play.

The thing to remember is that this was the first time Kirsty and Joy had met - had Kirsty encountered her before I feel sure she would have kept the curtains closed and pretended to be out 😂. Neither she nor Lexi knew what they were letting themselves in for.

Doors have been annoying me this week (Ambridge Hall's door and knocker didn't sound nearly sturdy enough), so I was surprised to hear Joy entering Kirsty's house through what I assume were sliding patio doors. All the new builds near me have high fences or walls around the back gardens.

I think putting Tracey and Lynda together is brilliant. Underneath the sniffing and snobbery Lynda is actually lovely, and it was nice to hear her being helped by Tracey rather than the other way around.

The David turning 60 nonsense is a bit daft, but Brian's 'Running? From what?' made me chuckle.

I'm guessing there is side gate into the back garden, to enable easy passage of things needed for the garden, without having to go through the house.

And Joy is obviously from a community where they all use the back doors to visit each other.

Or Joy is from a community that the writers imagine all use their back doors for visiting.

Haha, yes, I liked Brian's comment too!

I'm hoping that Tracey and Lynda become close friends. It would be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Same thing really Birds, seeing as she's a fictional character! Those communities do exist, and not just among the working class in their terraces, but also rurally.

Didn't we discuss side gates when Ed and Emma were looking at their plot and talked about having sheep in the back garden?

They do exist but as she named the community where she lived, it means people who know the area will be aware that it is not particularly the case for that area. It feels a bit stereotypical northern to me. I don't mean from you, I mean from the writers

The weird thing I noticed was David having a business conversation with Brian while still out of breath.

I think Kirsty talked before about having met Joy, off air. I don’t think it was the first time they had met, probably just the first time Kirsty felt the full force of her!

Ah, I see Birds. I don't know the area she's supposed to be from, so I was going by my experience. I've only lived in a couple of places where it was easy to access the back, one of them being the terraces in Stoke, with the alleys between the backs of the houses, and now, rurally, surrounded by farmhouses, where nobody uses the "front" door.

I agree that it does feel stereotypical Northern though.

It feels very stereotypical Northerner to me. If the SW are going to go to the bother of giving a character as specific a hometown as 'Shieldfield' you need to get the details right. Shieldfield is a pretty small area of Newcastle, in itself not exactly a large city (by area). Joy's accent is wrong. She should sound like. .. Um... Don't know how to say this... A less polished version of Cheryl Cole. I've attached a fairly representative picture of the area.

Yes, Kirsty had met Joy before.

I don't know if they have a new foley artist but lots of the sounds are wrong recently, especially footsteps.

I wonder if Lower Loxley is on the Register of Historic Parks & Gardens - if rewilding was suggested on a designed parkland in my patch, I'd have something to say about it! I also assumed the ha-ha was an original one. The illustration above was a good one - it's basically a big long ditch with a wall built into the house side.

If you were seen wandering around to someone's back door in Shieldfield someone would call the police. Or post your picture on Facebook.

It's really quite a small area in Newcastle, seems odd for them to be so specific.

You would have to be on foot as well, impossible to get parked there.

birds I'm glad it's not just me being driven up the wall by this!

It's really quite a small area in Newcastle, seems odd for them to be so specific.
Almost as odd as being specific about Prudhoe. Does one of the SW hail from the area?

Actually that's true. Although Prudhoe is at least a town. If they hailed from Newcastle they would know that people would say I come from Newcastle not name the specific couple of streets you live in. My dad has lived 10 miles from Newcastle for the last 40 years I would be amazed if he has heard of shieldfield. This is more of a derail than surrogacy

Table and Birds yes you are right! Nearly all the housing is towerblocks (indeed I spotted a couple of tower blocks for sale!) with a few old terraces.

So why would Joy choose to "up sticks" and move to the other side of the country from her darling daughter and grandchildren from a fairly cheap ordinary house to an executive home in Ambridge?

I'm going to listen carefully to the sound effects tonight - the actors must have been really busy biting their tongues of late.

This is more of a derail than surrogacy I think it’s perfect illustration of Quater’s point that derailment is half the charm of this thread

Yes lillian and its also made me realise there are a few Northerners on here which has made me all warm and fuzzy.