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.

Mike They have always used a few scriptwriters but those people must have worked together to make TA a seam free story. Now it's as if each one is like a pupil with an arm around her exam work hiding it from spying eyes.

That reminds me did anyone attend the Academic Archers meeting? Was the abysmal standard of TA discussed openly?

Apparently there's been 15 different scriptwriters this year so far!

WHAT !!????? Though I suppose it wouldn't matter if they were being properly edited, managed and made to research and include the good existing plots before making up new ones. It's not too bleedin' difficult is it?????????

Jeremy Howell (I think that's right) was named last night as the editor. What has he done apart from ruin TA I wonder.

Yes, someone on the Spoilers thread has trawled through the weekly synopses and counted them!

Howe not Howell

And why is Lil, so interested in Vince's lovelife? Is she going to have an affair with him? Yeah, that's what I thought it sounded like. I'd forgotten she had Justin. Probably because it's a long while since they've sounded anything like a couple.

My take was that Lilian is quite wily and will not pass up the chance to manoeuvre herself into a position where someone powerful is indebted to her and she can call in a favour later, so she was probably just thinking about whether she could encourage her friend to hook back up with Vince. Same with the pony advice. I don’t think they’ll go down the Lilian affair route again.

I don’t think they’ll go down the Lilian affair route again. I think it's telling that so much of our discussion is "I don't think the SWs will do this" rather than "I don't think Lillian would do this".

Very good point Aardvaark .
Lilian doesn’t do something for nothing. But we really don’t need any new characters.
Lily (who got such great A levels) deciding she’d rather stay at home and work in a call centre is probably due to Russ having a job that suits him. See my username for thoughts on that.

You don't just point a clueless buyer at the perfect pony that just happens to be for sale and the same yard as the first unsuitable one. SO many things wrong with that, was the agricultural advisor asleep?!

You do if you're mindlessly creating 'drahma dahling" Coffee and it looks like that is what is going on in TA at the moment.

The 'Agricultural advisor' Has probably been put out to grass forgive the pun.

The new agricultural advisor is Sarah Swadling. She tweets from time to time and sometimes presents the early morning farming broadcast at the weekend.

I don't think she is on Mumsnet (certainly not this bit!).

Two months. TWO MONTHS that child has been riding!!!

still fuming

The 'Agricultural advisor' Has probably been put out to grass

Very good 😂

On the subject of TA liking to tap into current ISHOOs, how about a sweepstake on how long it will be before we get a trans storyline?

And totally agree about the painful nonhumour element of late. Just. Stop. It.

If you read up about the personal history of the Editor you would see why a Trans storyline in the Archers is unlikely.

MollyButton - I must be reading a different narrative from you, I don't get anything trans-related from that sad history. I think you've mentioned this before and I didn't get it then, either.

Jeremy Howe has been the BBC Radio 4 Commissioning Editor for Drama and Fiction for ages. He is this man: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/25/jeremy-howe-wife-elizabeth-murdered

Before that he was head of drama for Radio 3.

Yes, but that article doesn’t go into detail about the murderer. I read a different one which explained that he was a cross-dresser and wearing women’s clothes when he committed the murder, hence @MollyButton’s comment, @BirdOffTheWire.

Ah. Cross-dressing doesn't make him trans.

What he was wearing when arrested that night was his victim's swimming-costume and skirt, which is not necessarily indicative habitual cross-dressing anyhow, and his wife doesn't seem to have thought that he was trans. He was also high on amphetamines, and seems to have drunk between half and three-quarters of a bottle of vodka at that point.

I think that the point here is that any storyline around blurring male/female boundaries is likely to be a bit close to the bone for this editor, poor guy. Not sure much to be gained from getting into specifics. Anyway it would be quite a challenge to do trans on the radio, it would all have to be done via characters describing the trans character’s appearance since the voice would not be a giveaway.... can of worms! They already did it on Corrie, let’s leave it at that.

I was rather surprised that they did a storyline about a man whose wife died young leaving him with small children to bring up alone, in a way. I suppose it was planned and even recorded before Howe was in post, but it seemed strangely hard on him: his appointment was announced in February 2018, and Nic died on the 23rd of that month. So he arrived straight into it.

@BirdOffTheWire - I also have never posted about this before!

But if any soap did a Trans story it should really be about a teenager girl who is struggling - to be at all fresh. And would struggle massively to not be extremely controversial and to explore the issue in sufficient depth. (Really it needs something like EastEnders back in the day of Mark Fowler's aids story.)

As editor surely the broadcast episodes and their eception aren't a large part of his role, his remit would be the stories in the pipeline and being written/ recorded.
Still ghastly though.

Eastenders touched on a FTM story but the hard part had all happened off screen prior to the character's arrival and they didn't stay long. Probably only occurred for inclusivity points anyway so they could say they'd had one. No tackling of issues, not the I'd trust the beeb to do that with a trans story anyway.