💰 Archers thread #121: Brookfield digs for treasure, Alice & Philip try to bury the truth. Dish the dirt here if you dig The Archers. PS Send nudes.

[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 long to hear Pip again, 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 @LillianGish and @PersephonePromotesEquanimity for the title suggestions.

Current events: as @Bailey0703 has astutely spotted, it's Anti-Slavery Day tomorrow - could this herald the beginning of the end of the horses storyline? I do hope so. Horrible stuff, but what a blow for Kirsty. They're laying on the dramatic irony with trowel at the moment.

What do we think will happen to Alice and Chris? I can't see this pregnancy going to term and ending well. I don't think the marriage will survive either, giving Brian a chance to revisit his classic line about having to treat this as Alice's starter marriage.

Will Elizabeth end up on a date with Vince Casey? That would put the cat among the pigeons at Lower Loxley.

Over to you ...

I actually hate phone-ins. I can't bear Any Answers in particular, which is usually a platform for ill-informed bigots to share their views, and have to switch it off.
I love Any Answers. Probably for the same reasons.

GQT, More or Less, etc are great.

I got talking to a dad at the park yesterday about TA - he said he works for the Wildlife Trust and I asked if they were annoyed at being rubbished by Kirsty. He said no, he didn’t really listen... “but is that annoying woman who does the pantomime still in it?”
😀

@ErrolTheDragon

I think Freddie's is showing glimmers of maturity, in not rejecting Lily's idea just because it was hers. I wonder if longterm he'll turn LL into a real family business, encouraging Lily to get a business education and run that side of things. Whilst he is the Marquis of Bath kind of ideas man who draws in the punters (without wife let's please).

That would be good - I'm sure I wondered a couple of years ago why she wasn't doing a business type degree at Manchester rather than eng. lit.

I thought she was doing geography?

I don't get why Philip is so cross about Gavin not going to the GA meeting. I thought the sole purpose was to con Kirsty, and as she's obviously totally sucked in surely that's job done?

I've got a feeling that the 'dodgy stairs in the bell tower' are going to turn out to be very significant in this plot...

I don’t think Philip knows how to behave in trying to sustain his deception. At the point where he flew off the handle he didn’t know Kirsty wouldn’t be sympathetic to Gav. He needs her to believe Gav is a gambler and that he is taking this seriously - he’s beginning to realise that while Gav being a compulsive gambler might be a good cover for the overheard horse references, it is not a particularly simple deception to maintain - especially when there is a recovered gambler (and the people who supported him) in the village. I think this is the classic example of telling a lie to cover another lie and ending up tying yourself in knots.

Real "oh what a tangled web we weave" stuff, you mean? I hope it bites him in the bum sooner rather than later.

Ben's doing Geography and Politics. Lily was doing Eng Lit.

@WheresThatCatGoneNow

I've got a feeling that the 'dodgy stairs in the bell tower' are going to turn out to be very significant in this plot...

Can Philip come crashing down onto Shula please?

(And have that nice Patrick the organist on hand to console Kirsty).

That would be perfect, ErrolTheDragon

Maybe it's pencilled in for the Christmas Day episode!

Philip cannot understand that Kirsty is supporting Gavin even though he's not doing as he's been told .

@Taswama

Philip cannot understand that Kirsty is supporting Gavin even though he's not doing as he's been told .

Maybe Kirsty needs to have a chat with Helen about the Moss family dynamics... they might together have a lightbulb moment.

Genuine question here, but do many churches have wooden steps up to their bell tower?

Not that I make a habit of going up bell towers, but they are all stone spiral things here apart from 4 or 5 wooden steps up onto the roof gutters.

What's happened to Joy, BTW? I felt sure that she would be coming to Kirsty's rescue.

Kirsty is too busy rescuing Gavin to need rescuing.

I know one church which has ladders from landing to landing up the bell-tower: nobody is allowed up them except people officially having a look to make sure the bells are safe. The ringers stay at ground level.

I seem to remember that anyone at all is allowed to climb the tower at St Stephen's, though: didn't Lynda get stuck half-way up it dressed as a Fabergé egg on one occasion, and end up in her undies?

It has been mentioned elsewhere that for Church repairs there is a lot of bureaucracy, and it's not a case of the Vicar giving the job to a local builder he feels sorry for. In fact it wouldn't be someone from the Parish discussing the repairs.

It's a Diocesan matter, isn't it? Or does it depend in whose gift the living falls? I know that some churches near Oxford used to have their livings in the gift of various of the Oxford colleges (I think the one in my mother's village was in the gift of New College), but I don't know whether the colleges were involved in repairs for those churches.

Genuine question here, but do many churches have wooden steps up to their bell tower?
I can confirm that St Mary's, Hanbury St Stephen's does have a wooden staircase.
We've had similar discussions before - remember that Ambridge is in the midst of ancient forests (Arden, Feckenham) so we have a lot of wood but not much stone (the local stone is sandstone).

Lower Loxley Hall has been riddled with both dry-rot and deathwatch beetle, within about ten years of each other. It would be quite refreshing if all that ailed the church were wet-rot.

There was an occasion in the seventies (Malcolm Lynch was editor at the time) when one of the bells crashed to the floor inside the bell-tower and missed hitting someone (I forget whom, possibly Tom Forrest, it usually was in those days if it was a church story) by inches. The story was repeated when one of the weights from the church clock crashed through the floor in 1990 and failed to hit William Grundy by about the same margin.

Third time lucky, then?

Could Pip take up bell-ringing please.

If Philip gets deaded, are the horses released.?

I may have made this up, but didn't Pip take up bellringing some years ago?

Does anyone thing this is building up to Gav eventually confessing to Kirsty and then they hook up ? Or am I imagining it.

I just think Kirsty is incredibly invested in Gav

Yes he will confess to Kirsty but them hooking up would be a step too far. Kirsty might, at a push, have a shred of sympathy for any sob story Gav may spin about how he was pushed into it by his bullying Dad but to get to that point she’d have to have had a huge revelation that Phillip is not the man she thinks he is and that will be utterly devastating to her. No way would she want to pursue a relationship with that family after that. Plus both will probably end up in jail anyway.

I do find the idea of a modern slavery storyline interesting but I hate how poor old Kirsty is yet again bearing the brunt of a topical story, like they did with GM crops and her late miscarriage, or an Archer-family-centred high drama one like the jilting. I wonder if Anabelle Dowler finds it all wonderfully challenging as an actor or just thinks “here we go again..”. She is the unluckiest woman in the country.