💀 Archers thread #132: The Grim Reaper joined the cast; The Bard of Ambridge breathed his last. 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 think Shula will make an excellent vicar, 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.)

Thanks to many of you for title suggestions. @JanglyBeads said that this thread had to be a Bert tribute so needed a rhyming title. From an excellent field, I chose the suggestion from @BorsetshireBanality (who also has a cracking username).

Check out the last thread for the other suggestions and various poetic offerings inspired by Bert Fry's passing. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/4349822--Archers-thread-131-A-time-to-plant-a-time-to-reap-Discuss-The-Archers-here

So, who'll get the bungalow? Rex, Stella, Pip? If Rex has to move, will he doss down beside his pigs at Lower Loxley? Or will Rex be a resident at Her Majesty's pleasure, having bumped off Trevor for being the world's most boring man? Now Freddie's on the case, are Russ's days at LL numbered? Will we ever hear Jill again, or was Bert just the first of many older cast members to be dedded?

Over to you!

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

stilldumdedumming I very disappointed with Ambridge residents unable to put up with Trevor. What a load of callous wankers.

Yes, how horrible of them to have spent the whole evening listening to him rabbiting on about himself not even his dad, himself and his infinitely tedious maunderings about events which had nothing whatever to do with any of them. Such callousness.

He even noted it by saying on his way home what good, kind people they were. So obviously they caused him hurt.

⏫ This

No, I don't want to hear about Cassiopeia,
Were we still in The Bull I'd pour beer in my ear.
Shut up, Trevor, Trevor [I hope you] Fry!
I find myself wiping a tear from my eye:
You arrived - now I'm sorry that Bert had to die.
Feck off, Trevor, Trevor, feck off and Fry!

@23minutesfromTulseHill your verse is a thing of beauty too!

I can promise you JRT in the flesh is almost other worldly. I used to get on the tube with green wing cast. So, JRT, his girlfriend- also ridiculously stunning, and Tamsin Greig - who I also fancied at the time. It was a glorious crush fest on my part (I think I was in my 20s).

You will all have to join me in my local. Last Friday my friend who is autistic talked me through his diagnosis of Autism, ADHD etc of the locals. It was quite a thing.

You can also hear the delights of another local going through exactly how you order a Morrison's breakfast. I see him regularly in his boxers as he lives opposite me and often comes out to glare at motorists. He also has a beautiful singing voice and left some houseplants on my step. He has told me several hundred times he doesn't know where the plants came from as they were delivered anonymously. I send him photos of the plants as they have bloomed and it pleases him and me to share.

I could go on...it's quite a place! You're very welcome - there aren't many seats so you'll have to share a table. You'll love it, honestly!

Yes @ButtonSister he did - that was the Lower Loxley’s Hidden Treasures your that had basically zero take-up. I seem to remember that was thought to be due to poor marketing rather than it being a bad idea per se. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing people at a stately pile would pay money for to me, but on air Freddie was heard to be harassing locals such as Clarrie I think - so possibly he misjudged his audience.

tour. Why is it that typos are invisible while proof-reading but immediately obvious on a purple background?

@Prestissimo

Yes *@ButtonSister* he did - that was the Lower Loxley’s Hidden Treasures your that had basically zero take-up. I seem to remember that was thought to be due to poor marketing rather than it being a bad idea per se. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing people at a stately pile would pay money for to me, but on air Freddie was heard to be harassing locals such as Clarrie I think - so possibly he misjudged his audience.

May or so in 2019. Eighteen months later he tried a slightly different approach and it was a rattling success, so clearly he had done as Elizabeth suggested this year that he ought to try, and learned by his mistakes. But she had clearly forgotten (because the scriptwriter didn't know? but there is little excuse for that, since Nick Warburton had just joined the writers at that point) about the Christmas show in 2020.

Why Elizabeth is so unremittingly crushing of and dismissive about Freddie goodness only knows. Most mothers I have known haven't spent their time being like that to and about their children, and if they were I'd be inclined to think it abusive. Elizabeth seems to have started this treatment as soon as Nigel was dead, with Lily as her assistant in the scapegoating. A sort of mild version of a fairly standard pattern in which one child of the family becomes the one who is blamed for everything and treated as being lesser than siblings, shown in its most horrific (and insane) form in A Child Called "It".

I have a feeling that Freddie rather assumed the poor take up for his Hidden Treasures idea was because the whole of Ambridge was busy at that point not forgiving him for having been sent to prison.

What’s interesting about Elizabeth’s apparent intense dislike of Freddie is that she then became depressed when he was sent to prison. Presumably this was her disappointment and embarrassment playing out rather than actual concern for whatever Freddie might be going through, which I’m sure is how it was presented at the time. She did refuse to visit him after all. With Elizabeth things do tend to be All About Her.

I think asking Clarrie and other various Ambridgites to pay £20 for a tour of the LL attics was always laughably optimistic. It’s possible the jailbird angle was important too (and I agree that Freddie may certainly have thought this the case) but had he approached actual random members of the public I think Freddie would probably have done better.

Prestissimo
What’s interesting about Elizabeth’s apparent intense dislike of Freddie is that she then became depressed when he was sent to prison. Presumably this was her disappointment and embarrassment playing out rather than actual concern for whatever Freddie might be going through, which I’m sure is how it was presented at the time. She did refuse to visit him after all. With Elizabeth things do tend to be All About Her.

We were told that her depression was because
a] she had been unable to forgive Nigel for dying and
b] because her parents had shown that they thought she was a failure (by constantly saying and demonstrating that they thought she was wonderful and giving her everything she wanted if they were able to, but that clearly wasn't enough for her).

Not a lot to do with Freddie at all, apart from the shame of his having been sent to prison, according to what she had to say to her therapist at the time. She was equally interested in saying that she was unhappy about Lily being with Russ.

Ah yes I’d forgotten all that self-indulgent therapy garbage. Clearly I should pay more attention

Well, there was only the one episode that was a two-hander with Elizabeth and her therapist: 13th February, 2019. (It was written by Tim Stimpson, which for some reason absolutely does not surprise me.) So you might easily just have missed it because you were doing something else that evening.

I hesitate to make light of anything to do with what must be dreadful for this family - whoever was in the right or the wrong.

But, oh my goodness, talk about life imitating art. From the BBC website, link below (emboldening mine):

“Jackson claimed her husband was violent and coercively controlling and that he had "ruined" her special occasion by belittling her……..

She stabbed her husband three times with a kitchen knife at their home in Berrow.

The killing followed a row over a serving of bubble and squeak with a gourmet meal…..”

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-59096177

I’m listening to this case now on Radio 4 …

Very sad. Just watched the report on the Six O'Clock News and am little the wiser. They had an adult daughter so I expect she had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The judge apparently stated that the wife was the controlling one in the marriage. I haven't been following this case so assume this emerged from the evidence.

I was very surprised this made the lead item on the news, but I think that's explained by the availability of so much video and audio footage of the convicted woman telling the police what happened in the immediate aftermath.

I've seen JRT in the flesh at a charity quiz he was helping out with. I can confirm that he was definitely easy on the eye, and also came over as a really nice person.

@JanglyBeads

I’ve worked out it’s famous partnerships not known by the names in alphabetical order, but I cannot see why either, Havering!!

Is it one of those strange party games??

Nobody’s given you a full answer, so:

Eddie was talking about renaming the Joe Grundy Prize, for the most amusing exhibit in the village flower and veg show, the “Grundy and Fry” prize. Trevor said it should be the “Fry and Grundy” prize on the grounds that couples are always named in alphabetic, and started citing examples. Eddie cited a counter-example and Trevor amended “always” to “usually”. So we are helping Eddie bolster his case.

Although by now Trevor has scoured wikipedia and found 648 famous couples, of whom 326 are in alphabetical order and 322 are not

Ah! Thanks for the explanation - indeed I have yet to listen to that episode.

I have to say, the vt of the wife being arrested didn’t come over as one might expect if she’d just succumbed to murderous feelings after decades of abuse from her husband, but of course people’s reactions are all different.

I shouldn’t have joked, but when I read the article I did a double take and had to check it wasn’t some spoof for a moment.

I adore JRT. Need to get myself a box set of Green Wing.

@JanglyBeads

I adore JRT. Need to get myself a box set of Green Wing.

I think it's still on All4. I listened to Trevor's ramblings in the pub imagining him sitting there with his flowing, golden curls and not bored at all.

@EdmontinaTiresofNameFlipping

This is too magnificent to be lost at the end of a previous thread …

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

My name was Bert, my surname Fry
Today it was my time to die
It wasn't bad, could have been worse
I died while chatting to a nurse
In training, and his mum
Replete with Shires, full was my tum,
We’d chatted long about the farm
That time we kept it safe from harm
When foot and mouth raged through the land
And barricades the Archers manned
To keep the plague out – at a cost
Without my Freda I was lost
But only for a little while
Soon I could see her beaming smile
From close at hand, not o’er the gate
My dearest wife, my chosen mate
So many years we were together
Till parted by a freak of weather
The Ambridge Flood cut short her life
Beloved Freda, world’s best wife
But now we’ll meet again, I know
As through the Pearly Gates I go
It was my time, so don’t be sad
My life had far more good than bad
So goodbye Brookfield, goodbye Ambridge,
Goodbye Bull, heart of the village,
Goodbye St Stephen’s and the Green
A lucky man I’ve mostly been
To have this fine place to spend time
And try to celebrate in rhyme.

Really? Magnificent, or almost as dull as the tedious 'intern' posts?

Thanks for the new thread @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g.

Really? Magnificent, or almost as dull as the tedious 'intern' posts? This isn't AIBU. Everyone else follows the convention of criticising TA and the SWs, and not their fellow posters.

@JanglyBeads

I adore JRT. Need to get myself a box set of Green Wing.

Stealth boast; we've just watched 2 episodes. I hadn't remembered that Olivia Coleman was in it.

Him indoors (who hasn't caught up with the Archers for a bit) recommended listening to the "Maltby Collection", which seems to be available here: fourble.co.uk/podcast/themaltbycol

Just in case anybody else is having a dull weekend ahead of them.

@MereDintofPandiculation

Really? Magnificent, or almost as dull as the tedious 'intern' posts? This isn't AIBU. Everyone else follows the convention of criticising TA and the SWs, and not their fellow posters.

Indeed Mere

However, I will make an exception for CryHavoc.

Snide and mean-spirited is what that post was.

I would use the word "jarring" rather than anything which could be taken as a criticism of the poster rather than the post, I think.

After all, nobody is forced to read through every post as if they were going to be doing a GCSE on it.

What? No exam?