🎄Archers thread #122: Deck the Hall with Eddie, Freddie 🎵 'Tis the Season to be jolly (but orange juice for you, Alice)

[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 love Bert Fry’s poetry (as I do), 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 @C8H10N4O2 for requesting an annoyingly cheerful thread title which might take us up to Christmas and to @Prestissimo for the title suggestion. I was strongly tempted by @LillianGish’s suggestion: Eddie’s turkeys, Freddie’s show, village green with lights aglow, Stir Up Sunday, Deck the Hall, Merry Christmas one and all - with apologies to Bert Fry and @R4’s suggestion Wassail to the Ambridge Not-A-Panto where Freddie gets nine LESSONS in directing from CAROLe Lynda. Top work, all!

Three days to go until we can return to Ambridge.

My list for Father Christmas

In the next few weeks I’d like:

• Freddie’s show to be a huge success

• Philip and Gavin to be driven out of the village with pitchforks into the waiting arms of the police, and the three ‘horses’ rescued and taken in by kind people who will help them turn their lives around

• Pip to take a perpetual vow of silence and leave for a nunnery

• a terrific Grundy Christmas (although the travails of Alice and Chris will overshadow things)

• Alice to lose the baby, as this seems the least grim option for us listeners; she leaves Chris and makes a fresh start of some kind

What do you all want for Christmas from The Archers?

Also presuming councils don't charge full commercial level rents for their farms?

Madcats
I'm not sure I'll be able to cope with Roman's rehearsals for another month, though I am sure they wouldn't have bothered to mention that Alice was going to be in the show unless something "shocking" happens.

But what they mentioned was that she wasn't going to be in the show because she'd backed out, so that can't be why we are being subjected to Roman.

The "council farm" is on the Loxley Barrett road, so it's probably about as far away as Lower Loxley is in a slightly different direction. Not more than four miles or so, anyway.

I knew there were some council rented smallholdings near where I used to live so I looked them up. They are, apparently, one of only two such projects. Maybe the other one is close to Ambridge.

www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/explore/items/oxcroft-settlement

I'm not sure how many are still owned by the Council, this one seems to have been sold.
www.uklandandfarms.co.uk/rural-property-for-sale/east-midlands/derbyshire/chesterfield-b3ydntbl/

The Oxcroft Settlement was houses with five or six acres each, so the house with 75 acres council farm that Neil is suggesting for Rex is rather larger.

This sounds more like what the TA team are suggesting: www.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/planning-buildings-land/county-farms/about-the-county-farms-estate.aspx

and this gives a bit more:
www.fwi.co.uk/business/business-management/tenancies-rents/how-to-become-a-county-council-farm-tenant

I didn't catch that about the 75 acres, I didn't know how big it was or, indeed, how big (small) the Oxcroft ones are. They just sprang to mind as I used to drive through the area from time to time feeling slightly envious. If there really are council farms then that is a good thing.

I think it was 75; may have been 70, I'll have a quick listen and check.

75 acres it was, with farmhouse and outbuildings, on a ten-year tenancy.

The hectare never reached Ambridge, but that would be slightly over thirty hectares. I'm surprised that Rex, who would never have thought in acres because he is under forty, didn't have to do that conversion.

Council farms sound like a brilliant idea - I don’t doubt they will be on the latest list of things-the-government-plans-to-cut-immediately...

Most councils have been cutting back on council farms immediately. The government would be behind the trend.

I didn't mean immediately, I meant for years.

Most councils have been cutting back on council farms immediately

Sorry to be so behind the curve on this. They just seem such a sensible idea. Like council houses, I suppose, but I’d better not go down that road...

I Listened again this morning. It struck me the Gavin spent all day playing on an Xbox when he first split with his fiancee; why didn't he loan that to Blake?

I think because he's trying to do this behind his Dad's back. Philip would notice the X-box not being around but not an old PS which was packed away in the garage. there was a lot of talk about how retro the graphics were.

It was a Nintendo N64, which had Mario Kart, the game they mentioned. About the same time, Sega brought out the Mega Drive, with Sonic the Hedgehog.

(My DH is a retro gaming geek. We have most of the consoles, plus the old pcs, like the Commodore 64, Amstrad, and Spectrum. There's quite a large retro gaming community, which means the prices are rising on games and kit. Just take a look in the windows of CEX, whereas you used to be able to get a Dreamcast for a tenner a few years ago, they're nearer £100 now.)

I have a cunning plan for Rex. Why doesn't he sell his existing pigs and then use the rewilding land to have some heritage pigs like Tamworths?

I'd like:

• Alice to lose the baby (sorry), her drink problem to be out in the open, but her & Chris to stay together
• Freddie to take back the show and it be a roaring success
• Philip to be exposed, Gavin to be charged but not have prison sentence
• Russ to get lost

I'd like:
Shula to enter a silent order of nuns,
Phillip to drop dead of a heart attack and Gavin to properly employ the horses and make a success of the business using a huge life insurance pay out shared with Kirsty to do so,
Brian and Jenny to win the lottery and buy back home farm and restore balance to Ambridge,
Elizabeth to marry Vince and be ecstatically happy, him to move into LL and go head to Head with CMR.

Phillip to drop dead of a heart attack this would amount to getting away with it, I want him to pay for his actions.

Gavin to properly employ the horses and make a success of the business I think he has to accept his part in it unless he is a 'horse' himself.

I'm OK with the rest of it, though.

Gavin to properly employ the horses and make a success of the business. I think he has to accept his part in it unless he is a 'horse' himself.

I don’t think Gavin is a horse exactly, but I think there’s a pattern of coercive control/intimidating behavior that’s made him afraid of his Dad ( just as the horses are). He’s now starting to realize that he doesn’t have to/want to do what Phillip says... I think he’ll get a lesser sentence because of this.

I still want Phillip to get a concrete overcoat, but it needs to be accidental...slips and falls into the mixer perhaps?🤣

Rob got away with his sins by disappearing. I don't want Philip to get away with this, I want him to be publicly shamed and get a long jail sentence not just conveniently die. Gavin should get a lesser sentence because, I agree, he was coerced but he should still have to pay in some way.

Also, Kirsty needs to realize what an evil sod Phillip is. If he has an accident, he’ll be sanctified and mourned forever.

I still don’t understand why Kirsty is always unlucky in love, she’d better have a happy ending at some point.😡

I still want Phillip to get a concrete overcoat, but it needs to be accidental...slips and falls into the mixer perhaps? What would have been fair was for it to have been Philip not Lynda walking into the kitchen at the critical moment, and for him not to have had the benefit of the Ambridge health fairy. And then the ensuing investigation to have found out exactly what was going on ...

Brian and Jenny to win the lottery and buy back home farm and restore balance to Ambridge,

Ambridge does seem a bit ... rudderless at the moment, doesn't it? No Aldridges at Home Farm (House) throwing enormous parties and lording it over everyone.

And Will leaving the shoot is another huge loss - a whole area of country life: rhythm and detail and incidental plots, just gone from the story we hear.

What is William doing atm? I recall him leaving the shoot but missed a few episodes around that time. Odd jobs?

I think he mentioned doing deliveries for Bridge Fresh? Don't know if Tom and Natasha had the capacity for that to have become a full time job over lockdown.

Thing is, I could have understood his wanting to work fewer hours if he still had three children to bring up in his own house, but now he only has Poppy and they're living at Grange Farm with family all around. It would be good to hear exactly how he is now, mentally - he can't possibly spend the next forty years on odd jobs; he has too much energy and ambition. Or at least, he did ...

Odd jobs.

It never seems to occur to William that there are other shoots in the country, that Brian would give him a very good reference, and that he is a fully qualified keeper well worth someone's employing. Not feeling able to leave Ambridge and preferring to be bossed about by his wastrel father, while having to live in the same house as his ex-wife and her new husband (who happens to be the brother he disliked even before that betrayal) is seriously strange.