💰 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 ...

The exigencies of tear-jerking but improbable plot, dahling.

Not sure how often Ruairi went to stay with his Irish family - I'd assumed more than once - but I'd rather taken it for granted that there would have been plenty of gathering around boxes of slides and videos while he was there.

You'd think so, wouldn't you. Except plot, y'know?

Those myriad Irish relations must have actively deprived him of any knowledge of his mother, for some reason best known to themselves. After all, as he so poignantly said, he had nothing of her at all. (cue violins)

iPhones came out in the summer of 2007 (I don't really remember any competitors, just Blackberrys).

We'd had a camcorder for a couple of years before that and I don't think it was THAT unusual for people to have one (particularly if you've had a well paid job and realise your son will never see you again in a few months' time).

Oddly enough techy DH and I were chatting about the CD over lunch. We definitely had a CD burner in 2006/7 but we are pretty certain that none of our laptops or computers had a camera and microphone.

I also think it unlikely that Siobhan would have said she didn't mind whether he had a boyfriend or girlfriend. Oh well.

Friday and Sunday evenings feel very rudderless without the Archers - I wish they would skip some of the midweek ones instead.

If I'd died suddenly in 2007, my family would have had nothing, but nothing, by which to remember my voice. Not many photos either. We never had a camcorder. We didn't have a smartphone in the house for quite some time after 2007. Mid 2010s?

I expect if I'd found out I was dying we'd have made efforts to do something about 'making memories' (icky phrase).

I believe one of the challenges facing archivists at the moment is the rapidity with which technology is changing. Paper has been in use for millennia and they know how to preserve it. Nobody needs any special technology to read messages committed to paper. Anybody committing their final thoughts to a cassette tape or a CD is taking the chance that there will be no way for their message to be heard within a few short years. Emails are ephemeral too.

She didn't die suddenly though,Gasp0de. She had the time to get a few things together evidently.
Tech was alive and well in 2007,including uploads, and I'm amazed that Ruari didn't know what his own mother sounded like.

I do realise that it would spoil the storyline though!

I feel somehow that Siobhan being a translator/interpreter means she might have had to record voice files for her work sometimes so possibly had that equipment anyway. In my mind it was a dictaphone and the recording was transferred to a CD later. You’re probably right that the Irish family might have had some footage but not necessarily from before she became ill- we were quite middle class and had stuff like Walkmen but never had a camcorder. My Dad died in 2000 (OK, quite a while before Siobhan) and I do not have any video footage of him. Siobhan’s family could quite feasibly have never filmed her I think the arrival of small children is often what prompts people to start filming things. Possibly Tim had some footage of their honeymoon or something. But given how long she knew she was dying it probably is a bit far-fetched that Ruari had never heard her voice. However I can live with the slight dramatic stretch. As to whether Niamh should have handed over the recording sooner- hmm, dunno, it was very 18th-specific.

Why do you think it unlikely Siobhan might have mentioned a boyfriend @Madcats? Being gay was pretty mainstream in 2007 and Siobhan would have been naturally thinking “I have no idea how this boy will turn out” and the type of partner they might have is one that you do turn your mind to when contemplating the future. She was a bit behind the times though- she didn’t say “maybe you’ll be identifying as Rachel”

Ho hum.

Another Friday evening.

Another 'rushing to get everything ready for 7 o'

Oh ..

Anybody committing their final thoughts to a cassette tape or a CD is taking the chance that there will be no way for their message to be heard within a few short years. Emails are ephemeral too
My dad was always quite techie (RAF wireless operator in thd war) and took loads of cine film from the 1950s, when I was born, onwards. He edited these and put them on video cassettes and later on to Dvd. When they become obsolete I will, no doubt, get them transferred to another format. One of my grandsons was born at home in 2009 and I recorded his first cry on my phone (not an iPhone) and it's now on my laptop. I could easily have put it on a CD at the time.

@campion, I know Siobhan didn't die suddenly. I was thinking about my own situation. If I'd died suddenly there would have been no recording of my voice left. If I'd had some notice we might have found a way to leave a message for my children. I would more likely have gone for a letter than anything involving audio or video, though.

@CaptainMyCaptain, you make my point for me. You are having to transfer your film from one format to another every time a novel piece of technology becomes obsolete. Nobody will have to do that for a painting or a manuscript. They will need to be looked after but they will remain accessible with no need to own a specific device in order to access the content.

And if the battery of your phone leaks, you are likely to lose all those sentimental messages from people who have died, as well as all your telephone numbers.

CaptainMyCaptain, you make my point for me. You are having to transfer your film from one format to another every time a novel piece of technology becomes obsolete Yes, but my point was that it is possible and I do have film of my parents when they were young and I was a baby. I do make a point of getting some photographs of family printed off once a year for a paper record. I doubt if anyone will be interested in my scenic holiday photos years from now.

We bought a digital camera in 2007 when dc1 was born but had no way to record before that.

It’s immaterial what kind of recordings Siobhan’s family may or may not have had, to my knowledge (and I’m sure AskingQuestions will correct me here) Ruairi never saw her family. I can’t ever recalling him going to Ireland or any of his Irish relatives coming to visit him. He was either at boarding school or silently doing something at Home Farm - there weren’t any pointed references to explain his silence (while he lost his Irish accent) along the lines of Ruairi being away in Ireland visiting Siobhan’s family (which would in fact have been a plausible explanation for his absence).

But I thought I remembered exactly that, Lil'G. I'll be disappointed if I've invented it - but my impression was that he had at least once (and I assumed more often) spent part of a holiday in Ireland with his family.

(And boarding does leave an awful lot of time at home. I thought they quite often did that quite well, mentioning who would be picking him up for weekends / half term / etc.)

I may be wrong, but I can't see a reason why Brian and Jenny would have felt any need to separate him completely from the other side of his family.

(It did seem odd that his Irish grandmother and aunt apparently never once came over to any school event - though perhaps that was more about the SWs not being particularly aware of how involved parents and wider family can be in boarding school life.)

@PoulePouletteEternellement

(It did seem odd that his Irish grandmother and aunt apparently never once came over to any school event - though perhaps that was more about the SWs not being particularly aware of how involved parents and wider family can be in boarding school life.)

Or maybe just not mentioned on air?

Sorry!

And, in keeping with that beyond ridiculous story of Rob wanting to send five year old Henry to boarding school (!), they did Ruairi's school a disservice by using it simply as 'away' - we never heard anything about his talents and interests did we? Sports, choir, orchestra, plays, debating, foreign trips, positions of responsibility, prizes ... Nothing. At all. Listeners would absolutely be wondering what on earth Brian and Jenny were paying for.

The main thing I recall about Ruari’s school was that they chose a Catholic one in order to reflect his mother’s Catholic background.

Before coming to Ambridge, Ruairi had been living in Germany with his mother, and speaking German at home with her German bidie in? Boyfriend? Lover? Dieter between September 2003 and July 2006. I don't think we were told whether or not Siobhán and Ruairi ever visited Ireland during the years between going to Munich and her final illness, but we were told that she had been made to feel unwelcome there so it's quite possible that they didn't during that three-and-a-half years. After Dieter left her in July 2006, she and Ruairi remained in Munich until some time in March 2007, when she took the child to Ireland and then crossed to Borchester on 4th April, 2007 to tell Brian she had cancer, diagnosed the previous month. That started the "look after Ruairi, Jennifer" saga, and I think Ruairi was in Dublin with his eighty-year-old granny Bridget from late March until Siobhan's funeral on 8th June, 2007; then he came to Ambridge, with a Donegal accent (don't ask me how he came by that: his mother was from Dublin and so were his family), on 25th June, 2007.

I still don't know what happened to the German that he knew; it vanished completely, along with any trace of a German accent or a Dublin accent. Later on he went to boarding school and came back the following holidays speaking RP English. That school was chosen to suit not Siobhán, who was not at all RC in her beliefs or behaviour, but Bridget, who didn't think Loxley Barrett was good enough for her grandson and demanded he be sent to a Catholic school.

Hearing nothing about Ruairi's school was just the same for all Ambridge children who went away to school: we heard nothing about David's or Elizabeth's time at school, nor Adam's, Debbie's, Kate's and Alice's. We heard that Elizabeth and Kate both managed to get themselves expelled, and that was all we ever knew about the places.

After Siobhán's death Brian did pack Ruairi off to visit his granny in Ireland while Jennifer was having a weekend break in Barcelona in September 2007, and again in 2011 while Jennifer was away visiting RSA -- and Bridget eighty-four years of age to be looking after a lad of eight, I'm surprised she felt able for it... That second visit was what led to Bridget insisting Ruairi had to go to a Catholic prep school instead of the local state one like the Pargetter children and the Archer children and come to that the Aldridge children before they were sent to boarding schools. That's apart from Adam, who was sent to a local prep school at his own request, in 1977 when he was ten.

Perhaps Niamh lived near Bridget and would have been visiting or staying temporarily when Ruari visited?

At one point we were told that Niamh lived in London. I wonder if she'd have taken a weekend to go to Dublin just because it was convenient for Brian -- of whom she had a low opinion. She did go there in 2011 for two weeks, though. And I should hope so: Elizabeth said in 2007 that Bridget was over eighty and having a hard time looking after Ruairi, and she won't have been getting any younger since.

then he came to Ambridge, with a Donegal accent (don't ask me how he came by that: his mother was from Dublin and so were his family)

Perhaps Dublin accent mixed with German accent = Donegal accent?

At least it wasn't a Kerry accent...

m.youtube.com/watch?v=0HoNJxpnD-M