🧱 Archers thread #128: Alice lobs a brick, Emma hurls brickbats, Neil is a brick. Cement your relationship with 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 collect superhero figures, or other unusual things.

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/4197199--The-Archers-spoilers-thread-6-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.)

Apologies for not using any of the suggestions offered for this thread's title. I'll paste them in here instead to get us started.

I like the leeway pun here from @ThePawtriarchy: Bacon, Bores and Booze. Elizabeth needs convincing, Helen needs some leeway and Alice is in crisis.

@nettie434 gets to the nub of what's been happening recently: Beechwood, Batman and Booze: Rex's pigs and Helen and Lee have new homes but will Lee's collection of action figures plant the apple of discord in their sylvan idyll? Alice's alcohol problems continue to cause friction between the Aldridges and Carters. Has anyone warned Borsetshire Children's Services what awaits them?

Great one liner from @PseudoBadger - ‘Nobody puts Captain America in the corner’.

And a timely bit of advice from @JanFebAnyMonth: If this evening’s episode has raised any issues for you, please call the BBC Helpline post on this MN thread for details of organisations which might help you.

So, off we go again! We may get back to five episodes a week before the next thread. Here's hoping that it's Friday we get back, not Sunday.

@Darker

Both as stubborn and mulish as each other... awful!

Apart from the fact that Brian came along to offer to help with something he had noticed needed to be fixed, and Adam first got into a miff because how dare Brian criticise him (which Brian hadn't) and then because his non-apology was not greeted by a display of doormat gratitude, and then Brian did not apologise to Adam for having been angry about Adam misappropriating farm funds.

I don't think Brian attacked Adam until Adam had been attacking him for a very long time, and then what he did was take Adam's word about not wanting to be where he wasn't wanted, and suggest that in that case the answer was in Adam's hands: Adam can always leave.

I agree in this occasion Adam was more out of order but over time its been a match.

Yes; Brian has always disliked a sulky brat laying down the law about what Brian was allowed to do on the farm Brian owned, it's true.

So, will Home Farm be looking for a new manager, do we think?

@BoreOfWhabylon

So, will Home Farm be looking for a new manager, do we think?

Gets my vote! Please make Adam go away. Far, far away.

It would be so great if Adam left. We would lose annoying Ian and Xander and the whole surrogacy thing would be a thing of the past - something @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime would occasionally refer to when filling in the gaps for a new listener in 30 years time!

Can we dare to hope?!?

If Adam and Ian up sticks with Xander ... Perhaps Brian will buy Honeysuckle for Ruairi. Who obviously won't go to university. (Certainly won't go any further than Felpersham.) He'll feel obliged to stay at home to support his inheritance dad.

Interesting times.

Madam could flounce off to Hungary to mansplain to Debbie where she's been going wrong all these years.

Or Romania, so that Xander can get to know his mother.

@theThreeofWeevils

Helen has apparently made no effort at all to teach her children that it is wrong to take other people's things without permission That's scarcely surprising, given her own history.

😀 Helen has a shocking record of duplicity. I actually looked up Henry's age after reading Asking's post. Henry is 10, actually nearer 10 1/2 so yes we might expect he would have learned that. Plus, with Tony's recent (in my huffy probably wrong opinion) interest in model railways, he must have been exposed to the confusing idea that adults can have things that look like toys but aren't.

Foxglove Yes! The Father Ted comparison really made me laugh. Unfortunately, Brian is no Fr Dougal.

Yes, thinking about the detail, Adam
was utterly utterly out of order tonight. Him going would make things much too easy for everyone else so I don’t think that’ll happen for a while.

Henry’s ten?? Wow!

Madam could flounce off
Oh please. Bulgaria, though, if it's to familiarise the Accessory with its gestating biped, Bore.

Lines explaining to a middle-aged embezzler why he is cordially loathed by his step-father and many and diverse Interested Listeners

It's not because you're gay and nor yet because you're ginger;
It IS because you've always been a priggish, pompous whinger.

If only the beeb had paid for a qualified and licensed adder....

please delete the 'and' before 'nor'

Bulgaria! Of course!

It's not because you're gay and nor yet because you're ginger;
It IS because you've always been a priggish, pompous whinger.

Poor Roy with his misplaced pride in Phoeble’s minimal achievements. The pinnacle of her success was passing the Oxbridge entrance test - it’s been downhill all the way since then…She was so dismissive of Roy last night until she needed him to bail her out. She and Rex reminded me of two toddlers playing in their Wendy House, sending their parents away as they bustle about making a pretend afternoon tea. Then suddenly needing their nappies changed and the parents riding to the rescue…

Adam and Ian were thinking about leaving a few years ago, weren't they? Perhaps Pip and Lee could go with them.

I didn't understand the panic about solar lights. As a temporary fix, wouldn't you simply buy some cheap ones from a garden centre and some camping lights for the loos.
There is sufficient light to see from about 4/4:30am in the west of England so close to the summer solstice so batteries wouldn't need to last very long.

@Madcats

I don't understand why Lee would leave his "collectors item - pristine boxed for a couple of decades" superheroes out to get damaged by sunlight and dust.....and small boys.

This week's writing feels a bit rubbish, but that might be because I don't like Lee.

The boxed figures were put away in a cupboard upstairs. When Joy fessed up to Lee she explained that. I noticed because I also remember a discussion early on in the moving in about figures being put on a low shelf downstairs, and we all said “uh oh, those will soon be in Jack’s clutches”. But Wolverine and his chum were definitely hidden away upstairs.

I think Roy's a lovely father... to Phoebe. What's Abbie getting up to?

I thought Adam was a shareholder (?). If he wants his 'shares' in cash, won't that be difficult for the other shareholders.

So is Ruari’s sojorn with A and I to be cut short or at least become a trifle difficult? I have thought from the start (and mentioned this as soon as it was mooted) that the whole purpose of Ruari moving in with Adam and Ian was so that Adam could be blamed by Brian for Ruari's sexuality. I did wonder if Adam was going to out Ruari to Brian during their row yesterday - I still think he might. Is it just me or do others feel you can really see all the nuts and bolts of the plotting at the moment? There just seems to be so much contrivance - Adam's massive bill for electrical work (even thought the cottage had not long been rewired after the flood) the delay in Peggy revealing that she was the one who told Chris to leave Alice - presumably to delay her offer of funds to pay for Alice's rehab for long enough to allow Brian to go looking in the Home Farm accounts for a loan. I too am heartily sick of the Fall of the House of Aldridge The whole point of Brian and Jenny was bottomless coffers, six foot deep game pies at the shoot, endless crates of the sort of whisky I can only gawp at, and their photos in the local Society rag ... It's staggeringly dull to have Brian searching down the back of the farm office sofa for child-rescue money. It's particularly grating because the Home Farm house itself seems to have been entirely erased from the map of Ambridge and it just won't do - I might just about be able to accept a rewriting of Jack's demise (before my time), but I'm never going to come to terms with disappearance of what used to be one of the landmarks of the Ambridge landscape. I can only think Pat's moved in there with Kathy.

Team Brian here. It’s a pity it’s so unlikely that Debbie would come back to manage the farm, unless there is a change of actress. Adam and Ian are no loss. Maybe Charlie can come back.

the Home Farm house itself seems to have been entirely erased from the map of Ambridge and it just won't do.

Cuts like a knife.

I'm sure it's psychologically damaging for highly invested listeners to have to keep pretending Home Farm house has been wiped off the map. Just what does the TA creative team think they're achieving here? It was so completely central to Ambridge interaction - in a very different way to any of the other houses. And they're quite incapable of replacing that complicated, often unspoken and purely imagined situational drama.

It was so completely central to Ambridge interaction - in a very different way to any of the other houses. And they're quite incapable of replacing that complicated, often unspoken and purely imagined situational drama. Exactly this. Brilliantly put.

@Chemenger

Team Brian here. It’s a pity it’s so unlikely that Debbie would come back to manage the farm, unless there is a change of actress. Adam and Ian are no loss. Maybe Charlie can come back.

I have never understood the Debbiolotry that goes on among listeners. She was played by Tamsin Greig, who is a very good actor with a pleasant voice, but she was a thoroughly unpleasant, grasping, vindictive person; let us not forget that she was the one who initially thought up Cowditz, a horrible project, and then pushed it through with the Borchester Land board and made it a horrible reality. She is not a good farmer, just one who makes a profit.

And her relationship with Brian was always squicky, culminating in her furious jealousy about his having had an affair and a baby. She could just about put up with his being married to her mother, since he so clearly preferred her really, but his having another woman as well was intolerable to Debbie.

@ILoveShula

I think Roy's a lovely father... to Phoebe. What's Abbie getting up to?

I think Roy's lack of contact with Abbie (and Hayley) is out of character. The 'real' Roy (or at least the Roy of my imagination) would want to keep in touch.

The comments about Home Farm are really interesting. Now I think about it, it was a place that other characters visited (as well as being home to various Aldridges and even Lilian after she was scammed by Matt) so it was an Ambridge hub. Perhaps there was a plan to make more of the mysterious Gills until Covid affected the way the programme was made.