💥 Archers thread #119: Has the Bull reopened? Will Ambridge pull through? We’ve all dozed off and haven't a clue. Moan about the monologues 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 think we should have monologues all the time from now on, 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/3853783--The-Archers-spoilers-thread-5-Cant-wait-for-7-02pm-Join-us-here, 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 PPE on the last thread for the title suggestion, which I tweaked a bit.

As for the current state of affairs: here's how it could have been done. www.youtube.com/channel/UCvRSVdfQWAjNhNu1AtABYjw Nigel Pargetter returns, albeit in spectral form. I loved these.

I don't love the current set up. Very, very hit and miss for me - but I am too much of an addict to give it up. Looking for a silver lining, maybe the rather clunky trot through the Aldridge family tree last night was helpful to newer listeners. It is rather convoluted. In 12.5 minutes they managed to explain that Adam and Debbie are Jennifer's children by different fathers, that Debbie's father Roger Travers-Macy adopted Adam, that after he and Jenny divorced she married Brian and that he (secretly) loves Adam and not nearly so secretly adores Debbie. I don't think they explicitly stated that Kate and Alice are Brian's children with Jenny, but they did manage to squeeze in a mention of Siobhan and Ruairi, and explain that Xander is Adam's son by a surrogate and has no genetic connection to either Brian or Xander's other father Ian. Phew!

What happened? I'm agog, which doesn't often happen with TA nowadays.

She moved wrong, in the garden, and was unable to straighten her back; she was in great pain. Rather than submit to it, or worry Robert (who was out) she managed by force of will to get back to the house, and not let him know what had happened, though she found it painful. She then shut herself in the loo to cry in peace. Massively brave, even while doubting that she would ever be better again.

RRRRR.

Why can't Lynda tell Robert that she's in pain? Of course he shoud know. It's bonkers.

Because if she lets him know, he will go back to wrapping her up in warm flannel and trying to prevent her from doing so much as making a cup of tea. She doesn't want (or need) to be mollycoddled, and that seems to be the only way he knows to "support" her. All it does is lessen her when he does.

I'm posting less because: a) I'm bored of people moaning about monologues - there have always been boring bits.
B) now I don't drive every morning it can take me days to catch up. But I do catch up and haven't unsubscribed unlike "Woman's Hour"

That was a much better episode. They could change the title to The Snells and I wouldn't complain.

Alice's casual snobbery about Emma - eurgh. The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.

I think dislike of Emma is a fairly normal feeling among people who have anything to do with her, and been the butts of her classist attacks: Emma has long been absolutely vile to and about Alice and her mother for the crime of not being trailer trash like Emma.

I like Emma. She's trapped by the system - the real ones in the real world, and Archers conventions.

Alice was vile. I think that this is her self doubt and disappointment in herself creeping in. Trying to reassure herelf that she's still ahead.

Alice spoke as she saw -- something which has been being used as an excuse for Emma's rude unpleasantness since forever.

Emma was actively encouraged by her mother to do well at school, but instead got married young to Will Grundy, despite having slept with his brother. As a student she was involved in a car accident and the compensation was spent on a honeymoon in Mexico.

She is trapped by the system, but had she not split up from Will, she would be living in her childhood home, owned by her husband.

I neither like nor dislike Emma, but she's interesting, as she is a lot more 3-dimensional than some of the other characters.

Emma was indeed actively encouraged by her mother to do well at school, but Susan herself didn't have much of an education, and I don't think Neil did either. Lots of parents want their children to do well, but it can be hard to grasp how much is involved and how to help your children achieve. It's not just about sitting quietly in a lesson and listening, doing all the homework and turning up for the exam.

Cultural capital is the phrase I've heard used in discussions like this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_capital

People often say that confidence comes from attending private schools. I think it's got at least as much to do with family background.

If Emma had been super-bright she would no doubt have had at least one teacher taking her under her wing, advising her on reading, perhaps modelling how to be a high-achieving professional woman from a working class background. She wasn't though, so she slipped through the cracks, like so many other working class kids. She bears some responsibility for this, as it's the end result of choices she made, but come on - she never had the choices or support that someone like Alice could count on.

[Emma] never had the choices or support that someone like Alice could count on.
Indeed. Alice was sent to Private School, had all the confidence that cultural capital gave her and could afford to rebel. She decided on State provision for sixth form, despite Brine's protestations. Still came up smelling of roses.
Though I'm not quite sure, despite the Contacts List, how yesterday's self-pitying whinge-fest fits into that narrative.

I'm someone who was expected to listen in class, do my homework and excel in exams.
Sailed through primary schools and went to a state comprehensive with large mixed ability classes, and was left to coast.
Parents left school at earliest opportunity and were supportive, but hadn't been through the system.

I would have benefited from grammar school or private schooling, as Emma would.

Colleagues and acquaintances who went to Oxbridge, Durham, York, Bristol etc have a confidence about them.

I hear and read about how the 11-plus made children feel like failures at 11, but is that worse than being made to feel a failure at 17+?

The predicted grades system in the news at the moment brings it back to me how teachers could have prejudices (first names, socio-economic background, sex, colour etc) and how that can affect one's life chances.

Sometimes, schoolmates were picked out and praised erroneously because the pool of names was small.

There was one teacher is particular who seemed to have it in for children from a rural background. My unusual name and being from a small village probably meant that I was some sort of inbred hick.
I was encouraged to apply to the local college, which I would have got into through clearing anyway.
A relative was discouraged from applying to study Medicine and went for a NHS-professional qualification.
Another relative was told to not waste their time applying to uni because even if they got in they wouldn't be able to cope.

Classmates whose parents were doctors, solicitors or teachers were considered to be highly intelligent, but my friend whose mother was a GP managed to slip the net as her father had a less vocational occupation.

Boys doing A-levels were generally considered to be likely to do well, and we girls wouldn't understand whatever theory we were doing.

I can think of many school related anecdotes. A friend's younger brother forced to write with his right hand when he was left handed. A older boy given detention by a nosy teacher for lying about there being a new baby at a local farm (there was - she's about 13 years older than me).

Girls who didn't do well in their A-levels were encouraged to go to the local tech to do 'seckitarial' or to teacher training college . Boys who didn't do well, were encouraged to do IT.
They did OK out of it.

I'm older than Emma, more Debbie's age, but the events I'm describing happened in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sorry for the off-tangent rant, but it seems topical. Maybe we could have a tropical insert for Ben's A-level result.

Did Alice go to private school? Debbie and Kate went to the local comp, although Kate first went to CLC, I think.

Alice may have gone to a local private school, I think her friends were from the county set.

I can well believe it, @DanDean. I'm in my late 50s and have often met women of my age who didn't stay on for A levels, although they were bright and capable and could have done well. It just wasn't an accepted thing to do unless you were scholarship material, and often not even then.

Two in particular I'm thinking of ended up in a succession of lower-paid jobs largely through lack of qualifications. They could have gone back into education but at the time I knew them they had caring responsibilities for young children so that would have been a big decision and I suppose they felt they didn't have the time or the spare cash to do that. (I wasn't close enough to ask about it.)

Yes, Alice was sent to St Margaret's, which seems to have been a fee-paying girls' school.

I don't know where Debbie went as a child but when she was older she boarded at Cheltenham Ladies' College and then went on to Exeter University to do French and English, but she dropped out after having an affair with a lecturer (whom she later married).

Kate went to CLC too but was expelled and then went to Borchester Green for a bit.

Did Alice not transfer form “St Mags” to Borchester 6th form to do her A levels? I have a vague recollection of Jenny being horrified at that. Or was that Lily? (I know Ruari did, but that was because Brine could no longer afford the fees for his Catholic boarding school).

Wasn't Borchester Green?

Cultural capital, that's it.

Back in the 1980s, there wasn't the internet. We had a library but it was a van that came round. We had lots of books at home, but I read them alone, as stories really, not as literature. My parents did their best but didn't have the experience.

To add to my earlier rant, the relative who was advised to not bother filling the UCCA form ended up a (red-brick) university lecturer,and the relative dissuaded from studying medicine has also done fine, but I can't think it was a bit of a waste. I can't really ask and they might be perfectly ok about it, but I can remember in my A-level year being in a pool of despair at being a failure, and it has affected my confidence, and I've not entirely got rid of it.

Schools are probably nothing the same now, and as a white, (lower) middle-class, healthy person, I should not feel hard done by.

Sorry, only managed about 2 hrs sleep last night - my bedroom is about 30 degrees.

Or was that Lily?
Lily also did Private -> State but IIRC it was in solidarity with Freddie because she knew that he would never get the grades for Private SF. It also meant we could have the drugs / CMR storyline.

Freddie had already been told that he would not be accepted for sixth form at their private school when Lily decided she would also go to the school he now had to go to, so that she could carry on telling him how useless and unpopular and generally not as good as her he was. She certainly didn't help him there in any way, just carried on rubbing his inferiority into him as per.

But do you think Alice went state for 6th form too @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime?

We’re Freddie and Lily not at the Cathedral School before Borchester Green? I had in my mind that was a grammar, not a private school. Seem to remember talk if Pip going there if she could play the piano well enough. Or was it that Phil was going to pay her fees?

Autocorrect “were” not we’re aargh.

The Cathedral School is private I think. Didn't Dan go there?