Archers thread #114: Bull banished, Bali beaches beckon, bickering bullshitters burgeon

[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 Gavin to stay around, or other unusual views.

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 for all thread title suggestions! I've gone with a B theme which with a bit of luck will seem odd and irrelevant by the end of this thread. Here's hoping, anyway.

Haven't caught up with tonight's episode yet, so off to do that shortly.

I'd be surprised if every single one of them had been to drama school

Well since Robert was a GP presumably he didn't spend 4 years at RADA.

I think the craft of acting is generally underestimated (like teaching, everyone thinks they could do it) but I'd also love to know if the actors I think are rubbish are the pros or the semi-pros!

Isn't Susan a psychologist? She is one of the best actors in it!

Actually to drone on about the acting thing, do drama schools train young actors for voice acting these days? I remember Jill being interviewed and talking about having to coach the younger actors in voice acting as it was a another skill set which some of them lacked.

Gnasher runs a fruit farm and has done for some years well yes - that’s the premise of her character, but the SWs haven’t exactly gone out of the way to make this feel at all believable. Where is this farm that she can just pop over for the day on a whim and prune all her trees with only Tom to help? I don’t find it unbelievable that a fruit farmer would know how to prune his trees, I find it unbelievable that Natosha is actually a hands-on fruit farmer. She obviously doesn’t farm locally because Tom met her through Nuffield - if she was a Borsetshire farmer he would have already been acquainted with her however faintly. I’ve always found it hard to believe that if she had her own farm she would have so willingly upped sticks and moved to Ambridge. The only way this would have been believable was if she had someone else looking after the trees while she looked after the rest of the business (juicing, marketing etc). All we’ve ever heard her doing until yesterday is giving make-overs, attending conferences, shopping and going on holiday - if she needs help in the office then she must need help on the farm.

I remember Jill being interviewed and talking about having to coach the younger actors in voice acting as it was a another skill set which some of them lacked.

That’s interesting C8H10N4O2. I think one of the reasons why Pip is so dreary is that the actor who plays her can’t seem to convey different emotions via her voice. Charlotte Martin (Susan) went to drama school and then trained as a psychologist. One year Radio 4 broadcast Lynda’s production of Blithe Spirit and Charlotte played the maid. She got the chance to really show off her comic timing skills which are often one of the best things in The Archers.

But, but Jill ?

I wonder if the actress who plays Kate really was full of a cold?

If not, I must say she did a very convincing job of sounding like it 🤧😩

I am sure Natasha does know how to prune a fruit tree. That is a tree.

She runs a business selling fruit-juice all over the country. So how many trees does she need? It took an expert a week to prune the ten fruit trees we had in the garden when I was a child. Natasha seemed to be planning to prune her trees, with Tom's help, in a day. I find that my disbelief, far from being suspended, has had to go down to the pub and get slarmy, and is now singing to itself in a corner.

but the SWs haven’t exactly gone out of the way to make [Gnashers background] feel at all believable

Yes very true although having been brought into the programme as a good example of starting up a fruit business and diversifying maybe they feel "job done".

I'd like to hear more about it though - particularly more about how she manages it without being on site all the time and how she scaled up. That would be interesting background.

I thought the fruit farm was Herefordshire/borders which could well be within an hour's drive of Ambrdge but ICBW.

Yes, I thought Kate's cold sounded very real. There were only a couple of mentions of it, so easy enough to slip in a couple of extra lines when recording it.

What about all the trees she had Tom planting at Bridge Farm at the end of 2018: what is being done about them?

Robert's actor trained at the Bristol Old Vic (I think he went back to being a GP when he had a family).

Jill's character went to the Central School of Speech and Drama (although it was probably les naturalistic in her day).

I was thinking Herefordshire too.

All the identiclone-voiced young men introduced by Sean O'Connor will have had Drama School Training, but it didn't make it any easier to tell Charlie from NuTom from TobenRex from Dan Hebden Lloyd from Josh Archer -- and those are just the ones he brought in during 2014.

Yes it’s ridiculous that she’s getting fazed by a bit of admin

Having been in that situation myself till relatively recently, this is one of the things I find most believable. It's been an absolute pain doing my own work plus some of the admin's work plus trying to juggle other balls to keep things going. I don't like Natasha normally, but that's one area where I had a lot of fellow-feeling with her.

I'd like to Boop people on this thread please.

@BoreOfWhabylon for the 🦇 Ambridge suggestion

@MadameButterface for the genius that is an escape room made out of the R4 TA closet

And I can't bloody find it again to tag the right person but whoever suggested an escape room be the thing for CMR and Lizzie to do (boop to you to) uppit missed the minor detail that they should involve Freddie and make it get out of gaol themed

Oo! I've never been booped before!

Thank you

@nettie434 I wasn''t complaining, just amused. No official abbreviation. Just don't cut across words as in mered

It took an expert a week to prune the ten fruit trees we had in the garden when I was a child. How big are the trees? With today's trees, which are on more dwarfing rootstocks to facilitate picking, I can't see how you spin out a tree to occupy a whole morning. Couple of hours maybe. But I'm sure I could get my 8 pruned in a day if I actually spent a day at it, instead of doing a couple of trees when I feel like it.

I really don't like Lillian. She was particularly unpleasant tonight.

My first boop! Thank you so much ☺️

A minute’s silence pls for poor jamie and kathy perks who have totally failed at escaping the cereal cupboard escape room 😢

My nephew is doing tree surgery at college atm, however he is allowed to communicate with the outside world and even come home sometimes, unlike poor jamie 😢

And how would you get on with twenty or so acres? That is the least you'd need for a commercial enterprise of any size, and Natasha is supplying lots of specialist shops -- if she is to be believed. There's a little place in Ireland has forty acres, and sells the whole lot from their own farm shop and on line...

After they've finished Natasha's acreage they can start on the ten (I think it was) acres of fruit trees and nut trees they planted at Bridge Farm in December 2018. I mean, I do beg Tom's pardon, the "agriforestry" he went in for to try to woo Natasha.

Oh and BOOP Shula and Alastair and Jim

... and on second thoughts i’ve realised i was wrong about the admin - this is actually a bit embarrassing in fact because one of my ‘portfolio’ of jobs is freelance admin person so i actually make (half) a living out of helping people whose ‘bits of admin’ get in the way of their actual jobs

So i thought i would fess up to this in the spirit of one of this week’s archers themes, which seems to be people climbing down off their high horses and admitting they were wrong (alistair, kate)

Actually that reminds me of something that jarred me earlier in the week. Does anyone else find it BIZARRE that the resolution to the big ‘pheeble and pip fall out’ storyline all happened off mike? have i missed summat? Is this lazy script writing or is something else at play here (ie they didn’t really make up, pip’s either remembering it wrong or just giving rex a load of flannel to make him shut up) ?

I think I need therapy. As soon as Shula opens her mouth the word “sanctimonious” starts bouncing round my head. It drowns out the actual dialogue.

Does anyone else find it BIZARRE that the resolution to the big ‘pheeble and pip fall out’ storyline all happened off mike?

Odd but something for which I remain profoundly grateful.