🍾 Archers thread 123: Goodbye & good riddance to 2020 – to Philip too? The Archers is 70 on New Year’s Day – celebrate or vent about it 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 wish we heard more from Shula, 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.)

So! 2021 beckons. Big anniversary next Friday, 1.1.21 (and to mark that we have episodes Tuesday-Friday next week). What would we like to see happen? I may be in a minority of one, but I'd like a nice gentle character-driven episode. I don't think we'll get that, but I really, really hope they don't kill someone else off, just for the headlines.

[Title edited by MNHQ at OP'S request]

Impressed but not surprised by the latin knowledge. No latin available at my school. My brother took one year of it at secondary (different school, but both state) before it was dropped from the curriculum. Mid 1980s.

@StillDumDeDumming, I had a year of Sanskrit but to my shame can remember next to nothing about it now. It's fascinating how similar it is to Latin and Greek in vocabulary and grammar, I do recall that. I believe it was a British colonial administrator who wrote about this in the late 18th or early 19th century and kickstarted comparative philology as a discipline within Classics. I'm hazy about how Linguistics developed as an academic subject but surely it must owe a lot to this branch of Classics.

Back to TA! Does anyone think we will ever hear from Kathy Perks again? I don't, personally, but it would be good to have some acknowledgement of her weird absence from Pat's life after a couple of decades as her best friend. It would have been the most natural thing to mention Pat going for a heart to heart with Kathy when they were worried about Helen, but not a sausage, Tom Archer or otherwise.

I can't recall when we last heard her son Jamie's name. He's another one who could have been mentioned here and there - e.g. 'Dad, have you rung Jamie Perks to arrange about getting those trees pollarded?' Does he play cricket? His Dad was very keen.

In 2012 Jamie Perks won the Single Wicket competition, and while his dad was alive he was a keen cricketer. There was a touching scene after Sid's death in which Kenton talked Jamie round from being rather afraid of the cricket ground because it was haunted by Sid, I seem to remember.

Does anyone think we will ever hear from Kathy Perks again?

No. But you're right we should hear passing mentions, even if no active, speaking storyline. Likewise, Carol Tregorran, Auntie Chris and so on. Just the occasional mention that Jill or Peggy has been to tea with one of them, things like that, as it would happen in real life when you might not see someone for years, but do talk about their last email or whatever.

TV soaps are worse, because it's almost like they never existed- at least in Ambridge you get occasional mentions of people having been seen in the background of a wedding or funeral, whereas on TV, they move to the next town and never manage the 20 minute journey back home even for major events, and don't even get mentioned. And then you get some big storyline where they come back as if they never went away, even though no one ever spoke about them in the intervening years.

Oh god, we have to hear Ruth say social meeeedia

Wouldn’t the Grey Gables health club be closed for a while anyway?

I listened to an interview with Kathy/Heidi Niklaus during the first lockdown. It wasn't ruled out that she might return. Here is a link (warning: the actress is pictured): dumteedum.com/dumteedum-does-zoom-with-hedli-niklaus-aka-kathy-perks/

Going back many years, I felt sure that the cast had been "pruned" to a keep costs down (be it per year, or per episode), but that really wouldn't explain why we have had characters like Joy, Roman, the Trustee etc.

Kathy, Jamie, Usha, Amy...would have been a good fit in the current storylines.

(PS: dropped Latin at the earliest opportunity, but teen daughter is doing Latin and Greek).

I was right about the Brookfield wedding venue.

I felt sure that the cast had been "pruned" to a keep costs down (be it per year, or per episode)

They certainly cut from maximum 9 per episode to the current 7, but that could have been 20 years back - quite a long while, anyway. SOC had a thing about cutting down mostly to actual Archers and their direct connections, but don't remember what he actually did.

In any case, I thought the actors only got paid for sctual appearances in which case the number of actors per year wouldn't matter, except that it would be better for the BBC to have more of those on cheaper rates.

I realise I don't actually know about any of this, so I could be speaking a load of rot.

There's a lot of people we haven't heard from recently.

Tony, Pat, Tom, Natasha, Johnny, Joy, Kate, Jakob, Russ.

The average number of characters per day spread over a week has been about seven for several years now, I think. Someone, possibly Keri Davies, said something about it on social media.

Maximum number in an episode during the past decade was thirteen, I think, and the minimum was two, but they evened out over the week each was in by having fewer or more on other days.

Kirsty is annoying me. Leave it to the police!

My Latin was learned in the earlyish 60s, it was needed if you ended up applying to Oxbridge. A lot of my friends at university had done Latin as well, we all hated learning it, but ended up being pleased we had. Looking at medical terminology I realised that many conditions are called the same in Latin as in English, and just there to make drs sound knowledgeable.

We did Caesar Gallic Wars, very dry of course. And full of verbs of "about to be", also questions expecting the answer yes, and the answer no. Also did some Virgil, full of similes. I didn't exactly learn the set texts by heart, in that I could not have recited them in English without the written Latin in front of me. But once you had sussed where in the text the passage to translate came from, you were off and running.

Has no-one said to Kirsty she could be seen as covering up her own involvement? It's so obvious.

The really obvious thing to me is, Kirsty knows and has said more than once that the slaves have been sold. So why is she looking for them among the homeless in Borchester or possibly Hollerton, when if there is one place they won't have been sold by Philip (who needs them not to be found) it is locally, and if they have been sold to someone they won't be on the streets anyway? It makes no sense.

Kirsty’s making no sense.

I enjoyed ruth giving deeveeeed a reality check when he was all ‘oh philip moss has no idea what he’s done!!’ after they had one wedding cancellation. One! Apart from the whole ‘at least you weren’t kept as a slave, blown up at work and sold on’ aspect of it, i’d be interested to know which wedding venues he thinks are having a good year. And most of them are entirely reliant on the hospitality industry, rather than able to keep an income stream going from farming. Archers have a genetic predisposition to have their heads up their own arses i think.

The Kirsty storyline is going to end badly but just how badly?

Totally out of nowhere but I had to laugh at how good Kirsty and Lee's voices sounded together.

I've given up trying to comprehend Lee and Helen as a couple.

They always do this, the scriptwriters. Take a good storyline that comes to a climax then bore people to death with it. Kirsty is being ridiculous, even Helen can see it. Brookfield have been unlucky enough to find the wokest couple in Borsetshire to cancel their booking and are suffering from widespread circulation of a review in some wedding venue webpage? Talk about milking the situation. It would be much better to let this lie as a major story line and come back from time to time when there are actual developments. I have to say, though, that I had a fleeting moment of wondering whether I should be quizzing the workmen fixing my roof about their pay and conditions on the odd occasion they stopped drinking tea in their van.

If I were Kirsty, I would probably focus on trying to find Gav.

@Roysnewshirt

If I were Kirsty, I would probably focus on trying to find Gav.

Exactly, that is the key to everything, including the fate of the horses.

She shouldn't be trying to contact any potential witness. She's going to get herself banged up.

They always do this, the scriptwriters. Take a good storyline that comes to a climax then bore people to death with it

That is so true, Chemenger! Hearing Helen sound like a paragon of good sense last night was a first for me. A sign that Kirsty was being totally ridiculous. I do realise that Kirsty is trying to assuage her guilt and displace her anger about marrying Phillip but she has flipped rather rapidly from the 'hey, watching old films with a bottle of wine is the antidote to finding out you have married a modern slaver' person of a week or so ago.

I agree with Asking that she ought to realise she is looking in the wrong place. Having said that, the conversations between Ruth and David and Kirsty's encounter with Brian were well done in the sense that all three were their usual entitled selves.

Wily Brian picking up that the social media poster must have been inside the barn!

she has flipped rather rapidly from the 'hey, watching old films with a bottle of wine is the antidote to finding out you have married a modern slaver' person of a week or so ago this so true. I agree she should focus on finding Gavin. I’m not sure why she thinks homeless people in Hollerton or Felpersham would know anything about it. The Brookfield barn business seems to rather more about throwing a spanner in the works of the Archer/Fairbrethren relationship than anything else.

Are we betting that David is not going to conclude that the poison-pen reviewer must be Vince Casey?

According to the Actress who played/plays Kathy they were going to "write her out properly " but then COVID happened. I'm hoping it still happens.
I was relieved that she sounds quite happy about not being in it - she reprioritised her life since her husband died.

I think we should have heard about/from Jamie with the B@Ambridge nonsense, doesn't he own a share?