🌱 Archers thread #131: A time to plant, a time to reap. 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 also have a few millions lying around you're not sure how to invest, or other unusual things.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please. We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the week night 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.)

Thanks to @Roysnewshirt and @Edmontine for title suggestions, and apologies to anyone I’ve missed or forgotten. In the end, inspired by Edmontine's idea and a brief discussion at the end of the last thread, I remembered that it's autumn now and the Ambridge farmers are presumably sowing barley, winter wheat, potatoes etc, so I found myself recollecting Ecclesiastes 3 (King James version) - my Church of Scotland upbringing has a lot to answer for. This led me back to one of my favourite numbers by The Byrds (written by Pete Seeger):

Roysnewshirt suggested Prayer cards, rehab, a glass of scotch, a bowl of chilli or even a dish of lasagne…we offer a range of solutions here to help you solve any Ambridge problem - large or small etc etc, which is as good a point as any to start this thread. Do we think Neil and Susan are solid again? Will Alice relapse? Will Shula confess all to the Bishop?

Reflecting on last night's offering, Edmontine said I’m musing on Baby steps … - but we need the culmination of Alice’s story this week. We have a new nurse in training, a possibly resigning midwife settling in Ambridge, Xander, Martha, Alice somewhere trying to find her feet sans grog, Shula trying to find her saintly feet sans Neil …B(ill)eth & Ben. Lots and lots of newness. Stir in Three’s blood and jam …

The blood and jam made me laugh. A lot. Just as well, as the storyline that line inspired is pants.

Over to you!

@JanglyBeads

Jazzer is so often The Answer! But why did he have to go all super-Glaswegian dialect for that conversation, because he was channeling the boy he once was?

I thought this was a real misstep because there is no way that Blake, with his learning disabilities and minimal exposure to society, would have understood Jazzer’s dialect words, and he might well have had trouble with the accent too.

I know what they were trying to do- contrast with Robert and Linda’s RP accents and high register vocabulary which, like their two-course meal, were simply too foreign to Blake.

However this approach would only have worked if Jazzer had had a dialect that was similar to Blake’s own. Ed could have done that more effectively.

Three course meal I think. Which is just ridiculously OTT.

Agreed that Bleak may well not have understood Jazzer's accent.

Agreed that Bleak may well not have understood Jazzer's accent

But while he undoubtedly thought J was speaking a foreign language, he would have been able to identify the kindness from the tone of voice and gestures. He probably only understood about one word in 10.

Amy’s career complaint - expanded in Metro. Pretty much word for word what she said about the stress midwives are under currently.

I know I live in Scotland so I'm more used to how Jazzer speaks but I don't think he's difficult to understand. He refers to a bacon roll as a 'piece' but if that's what he's proferring in Bleak's direction as he says it then I don't think Bleak would struggle.

Bleak would be more baffled by the concept of kindness, of someone welcoming someone in need into their home, of sitting down to a meal at a table together and so on.

Are we thinking Beth/Ben…. Benth? Will someday inherit the abbetoir empire and hold Brookfield to ransom.?

@BurningTheToast

I know I live in Scotland so I'm more used to how Jazzer speaks but I don't think he's difficult to understand. He refers to a bacon roll as a 'piece' but if that's what he's proferring in Bleak's direction as he says it then I don't think Bleak would struggle.

Bleak would be more baffled by the concept of kindness, of someone welcoming someone in need into their home, of sitting down to a meal at a table together and so on.

@BurningTheToast I am Scottish. I would not say "piece" meaning sandwich to anyone outside Scotland and expect them to understand unless I had previously explained the word.

@Roysnewshirt

Agreed that Bleak may well not have understood Jazzer's accent

But while he undoubtedly thought J was speaking a foreign language, he would have been able to identify the kindness from the tone of voice and gestures. He probably only understood about one word in 10.

But why would he not also have recognised Robert and Lynds's kindness then?

Sorry @BurningTheToast I read too quickly and see your point that Blake would obviously see the bacon roll and know what J meant by "piece". You're right, of course. However that simple giving him food could have been accomplished with no words at all and was only the beginning. The whole scene was about Jazzer gaining Blake's confidence through the conversation. I still feel that he use d too many unintelligible dialect words for that to have worked as well as we were supposed to believe

I imagine he was too overwhelmed with the feeling of being in an alien environment, where he really didn’t ‘speak the language’. At Ambridge Hall, with people so much older than anyone he was accustomed to conversing with.

The hide, by contrast must have seemed much safer territory, like his Winter Shed. And Jazzer is both younger and not posh. And offering food Blake could understand.

Poor boy - if he usually lives on take out chips and pizzas, when would he ever even get to use a knife and fork? In fact, thinking about it, I’m sure Lynda and Robert would never actually have been so thoughtless as to offer him a meal that must have looked like an unprepared-for exam.

I cannot fully express how BORED I am with bloody Blake. And by the message not-so-subtly underlined by Alistair's awkwardness tonight, that Middle-Class People Get It Wrong All The Time, And yay! For The Salt Of The Earth Like Jazzer (or as it might be, the festering Grundys).

And isn't Amy obnoxious? Revelling in the thought of friction between Daddy and Usha, who was not even the OW.
No doubt her foray to the shop was to acquire more chocolate to stuff her fat, mardy face and to run 'accidentally' into Poor Chris and Littul Marther. If she weren't so lumpen, she'd be totally transparent.

Yes, Wooden Amy’s objection to her Dad having a ‘hobby bike’ was very strange. What a miserable daughter. I was also wondering how Alan could afford to splash out on a second bike. Aren’t the clergy notoriously impoverished? I am getting my intell from Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife so may be vicars’ salaries have gone up since that was written.

I don’t think Alistair would have been as crass or out-of-touch as he appeared dealing with Blake. He is more of an homme du monde than the Snells.

If Usha and Alastair pool their earnings I suspect there is more than enough money available to buy a bike.

They really are laying on the Jo, The Crossing Sweeper shtick with not so much a trowel as a whole earth digger.

Completely irrelevant but much as I love Dickens I do sometimes struggle to be terribly sympathetic to the more hard done by characters apart from The Marchioness; she’s a feisty wee thing.

Is Bleak going to catch Covid and give it to Alistair/the prof @KimikosNightmare?

No, Ambridge has a magic force field around it and Covid never crosses.

At least I don’t think anyone’s ever referred to anyone testing positive, have they? Must be something in the waters of the Am!

I don’t think anyone’s ever referred to anyone testing positive
Either the Borefeathers' father or wossname Travers Macy actually had it. The latter, I think. Asking will know

Yup, Debbie’s pa - safely distant from Ambridge in the far north of Scotland. (Well, somewhere in Scotland.) Not even Tamsin Greig could have made that particular monologue engaging or even believable.

To veer away from Blake for a minute, I think Stella could well start to see the lack of succession at Home Farm as an opportunity - she will (want to) be the heir or at least the eventual purchaser. Imagine how much THAT would piss everybody off.

Or maybe she and Debbie can form a sort of agricultural Cagney and Lacey and run it together.

Was it me or was Amy being weird about taking her phone to the shop in the sort of obvious way we haven't seen since Philip?

I agree with you @Roysnewshirt it is miserable of her to object to her dad getting a bike. Ms "newly unemployed and living off her dad" is hardly in a position to be criticising how he spends his money! Clearly the Archers writers are/have dads who love to "tinker". Alan's tone about the bike is the same as Tony's about the bloody model railway.

Sorry one more thing - I expect Blake is quite used to working with people who speak different languages, being in modern slavery is probably quite the melting pot.

@theThreeofWeevils

I don’t think anyone’s ever referred to anyone testing positive Either the Borefeathers' father or wossname Travers Macy actually had it. The latter, I think. Asking will know

Asking knows that it was Roger Travers-Macy, whose new wife mysteriously had Debbie's phone number but apparently not Adam's.

Adam, who lives in the UK like Travers-Macy, has stayed in touch with his stepfather all his life; Debbie, who lives in a different country, cut off contact with her father in about 1991, after he'd had his affair with Jennifer and had let down Debbie badly over money.

So of course his new wife rang Debbie when he went down with covid. It's what anyone would do.

Was it me or was Amy being weird about taking her phone to the shop in the sort of obvious way we haven't seen since Philip?

I see what you’re driving at @FoxgloveSummers but she is just the kind of dreary person who shares her mundane inner-most thoughts with anyone listening. I don’t actually think there was any mystery - she was literally just sharing the whirrings of that slow and lazy brain.

I hate to say this, and as a life-long listener it feels disloyal, but am I the only person finding TA very dull at the moment?

It's not that I want drama like the demise of poor old Nigel and I know that life's been a bit quite and mundane for most of us lately but nothing seems to happen.

There are a lot of opportunities but so many storylines seem to just fizzle - Philip's modern slavery didn't end up in a trial, we've never had a sniff of any ongoing conflict between Rob and the Cheesemaiden the non-event of the other week notwithstanding, the people who are now the Chatelaine's of Jenny's precious kitchen... Instead we get moany Amy, clunky scenes with Bleak and well-meaning but clueless middle-class people, and power games over cake-making.

A lot of businesses are struggling to find staff at the moment but I can't imagine that the BBC is short on people wanting to be scriptwriters.

Just me?

@Roysnewshirt

Was it me or was Amy being weird about taking her phone to the shop in the sort of obvious way we haven't seen since Philip?

I see what you’re driving at @FoxgloveSummers but she is just the kind of dreary person who shares her mundane inner-most thoughts with anyone listening. I don’t actually think there was any mystery - she was literally just sharing the whirrings of that slow and lazy brain.

That’s an alternative and very possible perspective, thanks Roy