🎭 Archers thread 125: Ambridge Mysteries! The Case Of The Missing Pandemic. Where Is Pat? What Is Lynda Snell's Kompromat? Follow the clues and discuss The Archers 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’d love to be in the Mysteries, 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 for thread title ideas to @Roysnewshirt and @Witchwife. Apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone else.

Do we think the Mysteries replace the usual fun storylines around giving things up for Lent? Light relief while we wait to see if the SWs go for realism and tragedy when Alice’s baby is born, or bottle out (as it were) and go for everything being fine? Will Jazzer and Tracy get back together again? (No bookie in the land would take money for that, of course they will.)

Over to you!

That makes sense, yes.

I had begun to wonder whether Martha had a tongue-tie which hadn't been noticed -- that can happen, even now, and it's thoroughly miserable all round: hungry baby, exhausted worried mother, until someone realises and it is corrected.

On the other hand, I don't know how much the tests they can do at birth would show of all the possible problems: liver damage I imagine would make itself evident quickly, but heart or kidney defects? Would they be there at the start, or would they develop and become known during the next few weeks or months? And then there is hearing, which FAS can leave damaged, and a whole lot of other things which couldn't show at birth such weight and height development and hormonal imbalances. Not to mention all the FASD things which come to light after years rather than months.

I doubt the next editor but one will want to deal with any of this.

oh dear, that episode took me back 13 years when my DD wouldn't latch on. It is a horrible feeling when your baby won't feed, and I did think there was something wrong with me, or that she was rejecting me. I'm over it now but it was horrible. I know I am obviously overly infested, but I was really happy to hear Alice and Martha bonding. There's only so much misery I can take!

obviously overly infested
Indorex is your friend here; or for stubborn cases, Rentokil 🐀

If they aren't going to run with the 'birth defects' angle, a decision I would find deplorable, then I imagine it will be the end of Chris & Alish's marriage, with or without a spectacular bout of PND (where D=dipsomania).
Bad Alice drank. Bad Alice didn't want a baby. See Bad Alice be punished. I hope Chris is lumbered single-handed with the child he was more bothered about than he was his wife, and that there is no Hayley mk II introduced to do the childcare and wifework.

Actually, if when things get tough, Alish takes JD's rather tactless witterings about loving Ruairi just as much as her own spawn as a kind of 'permission' to walk away, that will be a subtler bit of writing/plotting than we have come to expect. And highly satisfying.

It's been a while but Martha has a very lusty cry for a premature baby. We're told she's in an incubator but not whether she has a naso gastric feeding tube. I hope so,otherwise she'd be wasting away by now.
I really can't see them keeping up very much with the FAS possibility as it will take years. I think we're on for PND at least but it'll be cured in a couple of weeks.

I do find the farming bits tedious these days

We're told she's in an incubator but not whether she has a naso gastric feeding tube
We were told there was a feeding tube in use.

@theThreeofWeevils

We're told she's in an incubator but not whether she has a naso gastric feeding tube We were told there was a feeding tube in use.

Note to self: pay more attention!!

They don't always make that easy for us, @campion
Didn't mean to sound so snippish there.

The person who came well out of that episode was Clarrie, as far as I am concerned.

I really wanted Susan to tell Kirsty to get lost and to stick to it. Yet again, surely it's totally out of character for Kirsty to be so bloody crass as to ask Clarrie's friend and work colleague to take over the part? I'm not sure that the kind Lynda they occasionally show us would be that insensitive either.

BOOP for Jazzer and Tracey having a nice meaningful chat in which they both acted like decent people

@TheThermalStair

BOOP for Jazzer and Tracey having a nice meaningful chat in which they both acted like decent people

Yes. It was good to hear a normal conversation between them with no hidden meaning or misunderstandings. Hopefully their relationship can resume as a more slow burn

So having sacked Clarrie for being too indiscreet they give the part to... Susan - and so the feeble plot limps on.

Imagine how many people have been paid by the BBC to come up with a story where so many people are apparently doing things we know absolutely they would not be doing in their current contexts.

I thought maybe they were saving money by getting the interns to write some of the scripts.

FFS Alice will you just go to AA?
why is there not a substance abuse MW involved?

she didn't really do the rehab did she

@StillWeRise

she didn't really do the rehab did she

What she went to wasn't rehab, it was detox.

Has her buddy transitioned or something? Could have sworn it was a Felix texting just after she came home. No, silly me, they need a Formerly Drunk Mum. So the buddy has always been Lisa, and Oceania has alwa...
Oh really, who cares?

sorry, detox
at least she spoke to the buddy

Somebody tell her to read Allan Carr

Sorry if this has been done upthread, but do you remember when Alice was in labour and said "last time" she had a baby, or something similar? Was that a thing?

The BBC synopsis for 9th March, the day of Martha' birth, says "Alice’s fears that the baby’s coming too soon, coupled with a fleeting memory of her hallucination in the bathroom a few months ago, threaten to overwhelm her."

So although it was not at all clear on air, they intended it to be a flashback to the bathroom scene, not a reminiscence about a previous baby she had without any of us ever hearing a word about it.

Ah right, thanks. Oddly handled for those of us who missed the hallucination!

I am still here. But too dispirited by current storylines and episodes to have anything to say.

it goes without saying that I still never miss an episode. Like most of us I am overinfested [sic]

I am the same. I remember Pip being born (or rather named), so I can't not listen, but all the same...yep...