🧚‍♀️ Archers thread #120: Magic time. Dialogue! Good Fairy Lilian made Lynda’s wish come true. Will Phil vanish in a puff of smoke? Join the Magic Circle in Alice’s shed, where time is never called!

[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 hear more about the Naughty Milkman, 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 @Roysnewshirt for the excellent title suggestion, which I tweaked a bit.

I wonder how much dialogue we're going to get in the coming weeks. They're back to normal recording, I believe, albeit socially distanced. Also, when will we get our Friday and Sunday episodes back? I know I'm not the only regular to miss TA a lot more on Friday than on Sunday. The Sunday episode is still an incomer, of course, having only been introduced some 20 years ago, of course.

(My parents retired to a village and some features of Ambridge life are very familiar from their experience, the 'incomer' label being one.)

Gosh, this episode is excrucuating ...

Kirsty is unbearable.

And Gavin simply doesn't have the brains to keep this up.

What is it he knows he's got to do? Confront Philip? Hand himself in to Harrison? Set the horses free?

The phone conversation between Alice and Emma was good.
It won't be long before Em mentions FAS.

Some hefty parallels there on the theme of doing the right thing....

And good for Emma. She says it like it is!

Never having liked Alice is certainly true. She never has. But then, Emma never likes any other woman she is forced to see as a sexual being, does she.

Emma gets on ok with Helen and Fallon.
It's only Nic and Alice that's she's not got on with, and they are or were SILs. Hannah was too odious for anyone to get on with, apart from Tom and Johnneh.

Posting as an Omnibus listener it occurred to me could Alice have a liver test as surely damage to her liver or not would help inform decisions /put minds at ease?

Incidentally, does anyone happen to know where the Seven Bells (a grotty pub) may be? I haven't come across it before, or at least I don't remember it if I have.

does anyone happen to know where the Seven Bells (a grotty pub) may be?
No. It seems a strange, inaptly nautical name for a pub in landlocked Borsetshire. Unless it's the sort of really grotty pub when they knock seven bells out of each other in the car park after closing time.

That was a good chat between Alice and Kate, but I was willing Alice to confess all. I laughed so hard at ‘it got her off the weed’ I had to rewind a few seconds. The Kate actress is so good.

Vince Casey is skin itchingly awful isn’t he? Elizabeth handled him perfectly, in sharp contrast to David who should never ever be allowed to meet wedding clients! I think Vince will be sliding dick pics into Lizzie DMs forthwith 🤢.

I think Gavin is going to try to do ‘the right thing’, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that will involve confronting Philip, which won’t go well. I would very much like him to just go to the police and report the whole sorry mess, willing to take any consequences, but that won’t happen will it? I just feel so so sorry for Kirsty. There aren’t actually many worse things you could find out about a partner, I don’t think.

Relationships with sisters-in-law are generally very strained. That’s not the first time I have heard one say ‘I’ve never liked you.’

Alice should be relishing the impending silence and limited contact with Emma rather than feeling embarrassed and full of regret. She should instead be working out how to extricate herself from her very unsuitable marriage- with or without the crysalis.

Philip has clearly been bullying and exploiting Gareth all his life. He seemed almost as vulnerable as the horses as he opened up to Alistair. I don’t think the cops will see him as a victim though. He doesn’t appear sufficiently scared of Philip to claim coercion.

I think he is limbering up to phone the anti-slavery helpline.

I suspect that it's fairly normal to dislike someone who tells you that your husband fancies her and thinks of her when he is in bed with you, that you are a walking episode of the Jeremy Kyle show, that half your family are criminals and that your children have no chance in life. In fact I can't think of anyone who would particularly like someone who did that. They'd need to be a saint, which Emma isn't.

Alice absolutely should be ashamed of herself. Embarrassed and regretting that she said what she did is precisely what she should feel, along with guilty for getting so drunk she doesn't exactly remember what sort of bile she spewed forth.

The sibling-in-law relationship isn't easy anyway. It's not like a sibling where you have grown up together and are blood related, but instead you have an adult 'sibling' foisted on you.

Throw in that your SIL has been given a house when you struggled and failed to buy one, then accuses your husband of fancying her and leaves you a drunken message slagging off you and your family...

I think Emma was quite self-restrained given the circumstances.

I think Gavin has had more support and validation in the last few days than he has had for most of his life.

Go Gav

Go Em.

I would like Em to playback the voicemail for Alice to hear.
Although it sounded like Alice remembered some of it.

I grant you the voicemail wasn’t great but we all have our moments...

Emma is going to be like the Ambridge elephant and grind on about this for decades. Forgive and forget is a pretty alien concept in her book.

Only part of the message was saved, due presumably to Alice's battery running out, so Emma didn't hear the worst of it where Alice basically accused Em of being a slag. The bit that Emma did hear, was quite tame in comparison.

I thought Emma might be witholding the worst of the message when she played it to Susan. Would you really want to play all that stuff about Ed in bed to your own mother?

Emma said that the battery had run out when she was playing it to Susan, but since at the time what she wanted was for Susan to admit Alice blacked out because she was drunk not dehydrated, she may have stopped it before the things Alice said were ones which would have really made Susan unhappy.

I admit that is not all that like Emma, and at the time I thought the battery running out was true, but it makes a certain amount of sense out of Emma being so absolutely furious; what she played back to Susan wasn't bad enough to be utterly unforgivable, just drunken unpleasantness of a less horrible sort.

I think that at this point we are not meant to know how much Emma actually heard, and if at some later point she plays somebody the whole thing I shan't be surprised.

@Roysnewshirt

I grant you the voicemail wasn’t great but we all have our moments...

Emma is going to be like the Ambridge elephant and grind on about this for decades. Forgive and forget is a pretty alien concept in her book.

I don't think I'd be able to forgive Alice for saying what she did.

The things Alice said wouldn't be particularly easy to forget, either, even if one were a person who found it possible to forgive them.

I wonder if Philip is going to do a runner?