🏘️ Archers thread #129: Casey, Macy, Lily, Alice – Decent types or full of malice? Discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads, which has now passed 125,000 posts! (See below for further details.)

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 lust after Russ, 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.)

For the thread title I was very tempted to go with @R4's title suggestion of Come follow the exploits of Brine, Lily, Elizabeth, Usha, Ruari, George and Helen. Know collectively as bleurgh. because on the last thread @DadDadDad, our invaluable statistician, identified a post from @ILoveShula as the 125,000th. Many of us felt it was fitting that the post simply said Bleurgh!.

However, feeling that was a bit niche for the casual listener, I adapted @MayIDestroyYou's title suggestion in the end. Thanks, MIDY!

Back to Ambridge this week, after our enjoyable sojourn at Lower Loxley last week! Will we go with Alice to rehab? (Hope not.) Will the petulant Adam make good his threat to leave Home Farm? (Hope so.) What will Jennifer say? (Lots, I hope, and preferably to Brian.) Will the fete be a triumph? (Of course it will.) Will we ever return to Brookfield, or have they all fallen unnoticed into the slurry pit? (Let's hope Pip did, anyway.) WHERE IS PAT? (Can't answer this one.)

Over to you!

Tonight's wasn't good.

@ILoveShula

Tonight's wasn't good.

I think the technical term for that is a litotes; it's like saying Rockefeller wasn't hurting for a dime.

Lynda has completely lost touch with reality. I disagree. The SW has completely lost touch with who Lynda is.

Wow. That was the worst episode I have ever heard and I started listening in about 1985. Shockingly bad.

@MereDintofPandiculation

Lynda has completely lost touch with reality. I disagree. The SW has completely lost touch with who Lynda is.

Bearing in mind who the scriptwriters were this week (Sarah Hehir & Nick Warburton) I am not sure they have lost touch with who Lynda is; I am not sure they were ever in touch with who she is.

Both are new (Sarah Hehir's first scripts were in July 2020, Nick Warburton's in April 2019), and neither has shown all that much knowledge of anything which has happened before the past two or three years.

If Jill and Peggy got wind of all this Friends With Benefits malarkey they would have conniptions.

Or would they...?

#teamHaveringWavering here. Embarrassingly bad.
Why didn't Lynda die from the explosion (of which she, through officious interference was the proximate cause); and since she didn't, why did Lilian not snap her femur at the neck, fracture her pelvis, and collapse a few vertebrae to boot when flinging herself on the tarmac? Can't think of a better candidate for paralysis and incontinence: she's practised for years, after all. And with any luck, Roy's first foray into no-strings hook-ups will mean an encounter with that vanishingly rare creature (massed choir of scripties: "But it could happen, so we can write it! ") the female serial killer. Various uninteresting bits of him (that leaves the field pretty open) are eventually recovered. No one cares. Longhorns lay waste the yurts. Ditto.

Things better sharpen up next week or I might have to take a break.

Same here @Roysnewshirt. I wonder if Carole Boyd and Sunny Ormonde are thinking similar..

Both storylines are just so laboured - who will judge the scarecrows? Who cares? Will Roy find a partner? Who cares? He used to have perfectly lovely wife in Hayley. What’s the point of Phoebe? She was so brilliant she went to Oxford, now she’s back in Ambridge essentially running a campsite and worrying about her father’s love life. I’m seriously asking myself why I continue to listen to this drivel.

Just breathtakingly awful.

Abysmal. That is all.

I assume rewilding will be compensated lila for her tent/down sleeping bag etc the cows trampled and patted all over, down sleeingbags arent cheep, (£50+) if it was a nice tent night have cost £200, airbed, clothes, makeup, torch, as well as the distress, i imaging it would be quite alot or are we going to get her sueing re-wilding on judge rinder

Embarrassingly awful. Demeaning for the two good (imo) if flawed characters.

Lynda referred to Jim's celebrity academic as "she". Who suggested Mary Beard? Although her diary was full, she could have a last minute cancellation?

Last night's episode was dire. And I felt embarrassed for both the characters, and the actors who played them. And furious with the editor and SWs who perpetrated this ambomination.

I wouldn't have called MB a philologist, though no doubt she covers it among everything.

It was all terrible but Roy and Layla’s longhorn encounter did remind me of this, which is a particular favourite of DS at the moment…sadly I think that this is about the level of literary inspiration the SWs are drawing on these days.

Must have missed that Jim's academic was a philologist. Rats.

Oh! Please! That was an appalling episode.

I usually enjoy hearing Lynda and Lilian (they're my favourite characters) but this episode was just awful.

Whoever is writing the scripts at the moment is doing a very bad job!

And don't get me started on Phoebe! She's outdoing Pip just now in the 'sounding annoying' stakes.

I think she said romance philologist.

@Atichen

I assume rewilding will be compensated lila for her tent/down sleeping bag etc the cows trampled and patted all over, down sleeingbags arent cheep, (£50+) if it was a nice tent night have cost £200, airbed, clothes, makeup, torch, as well as the distress, i imaging it would be quite alot or are we going to get her sueing re-wilding on judge rinder

Much worse: it wasn't even her camping gear, it was a loan, so she has to explain to the person she borrowed it from that a herd of cattle trashed the other person's belongings.

I simply fail to understand at all why Lilian seemed unable to say "No."

No; I am not going to drive you in to Borchester; I am going to have lunch with my mother today.
No; I am not going to risk damaging myself by pretending to faint onto a pavement. People our age are meant to avoid things which cause fractured bones.
No; I don't think we need a celebrity in the first place and we have done without one plenty of times before.
No; you can't be the celebrity for the fête because you did it for the Easter Fest last year.

I'm a complete newbie to the Archers, but so happy to find this thread.
I'm not quite au fait with all of their names yet and am boring my family with it all.

My 15 year old just raises her eyebrows when I have it on and I want to scream at her (often do!) wait til you're 50 then you'll get it!!
TBF that's true of everything I listen to on radio 4, where has it been all my life??
So I'm reading this thread and listening daily. Have been for a few months and just about getting to grips with the relationships.
Nothing further to add but I'm reading And learning all the time

Some of us have listened since we were in the womb. There's hope for your 15yo yet, drivinmecrazy. (Obviously none for you, now you're here. )

Welcome drivinmecrazy. Half the writers are too new and too lazy to do their research about the characters so knowing al the history is fairly irrelevant at the moment! It gives us something to complain about.

The only famous philologist (or good enough) I could think of is Stephen Fry. I seem to remember that he is an Archers fan?

Wasn't yesterday's episode simply dreadful!