Archers thread #141: The nights are drawing in. Can we turn the clocks back to a time when The Archers was fun? Cackle or carp about 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, although we do mostly try to be civil about it. Most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you're hoping Ambridge has a pantomime again this year, 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/4636789-the-archers-spoilers-thread-7-cant-wait-for-702pm-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.)

Many thanks to @TottersBlankly and @GoldenCupidon for the title suggestions.

Too much to hope, I suppose, that by the time we get to the end of this thread Chelsea's pregnancy is a distant memory and the Horrobins can gear up for a cheap and cheerful Christmas. I really, really hope she doesn't change her mind about the termination. It's a horrible and unrealistic storyline, as most of us have agreed over the past few weeks, but now I just want it to end and be forgotten about.

I do like the idea of Lilian taking on the role of witch in the woods. Much more fun to listen to than Mia sabotaging the Hunt Ball, which is surely bound to go horribly wrong, or the odd wrangling over the stained glass window which we know Peggy won't be contributing to on air , given June Spencer's retirement.

Not a peep out of anybody in Ambridge about all the recent political shenanigans, but that's hardly surprising. Nobody fretting about fuel bills or rampant inflation either.

Also, where's Jenny? I hope Angela Piper's OK.

Over to you!

Why in several ways"? How old is Tracy, late 40s, so that's an issue, but what else?

High risk to her, given her age.

High risk of a genetic issue with the baby, given her age.

She and Jazzer haven't been together that long and haven't planned to have a baby. He's never lived through the tough period of broken sleep. IRL the relationship would be put under a significant strain.

Financial risk possibly too, given she's only just started working at The Bull.

Not great for Brad and especially Chelsea, given what's just happened.

High risk of listener fatigue too. (I am mainly thinking of myself here.)

I was appalled by David’s conversation with Ben: “if we’d known you could have made a different choice” (I’m paraphrasing). That David would gladly inflict an unwanted baby on a teenage girl just so he can play at being grandad over the odd Sunday lunch and not appall his old-fashioned mother is utterly repellent. It was never Ben’s choice to make.

Fuckssake. Is there going to be anyone left who doesn't know Chelsea has had an abortion?

Well, that didn’t improve matters.

'My little girl' - pass the sick-bag, please!

Yes. Her father.

Thanks, didn’t know you could do that. Might be a bit unwieldy though

What a bloody mess. I’m really hurting inside, not just for Ben but for Beth too. I don’t listen to TA for high drama and being wrung out inside.

That was hard to listen to

DH has just commented that if Beth had actually listened in the first place to Ben after the Steph incident, none of this would have happened. Like father, like daughter

Not a spoiler but discussion predictions elsewhere saying that a Ben and Chelsea relationship predicted for future. I don't know about that but I'm still of the hope that no further misery is inflicted on the Horrobins and that includes a later-in-life, higher risk pregnancy for Tracy.

Welcome to the lurkers, always nice to see new faces. Though apparently one relative newcomer to these threads deregistered after recent events. I hope they're reading and decide to come back 👋

I don’t imagine the youth stories attract youthful listeners, but I still want to be listening when Mungo, Jack, Rosie, Martha and the starry twins are adults. For us to care about the core clan members in middle age we need to have known them as they were growing up, running wild, making the mistakes people do in their teens and twenties. That way (in theory anyway!) we’ll love (or despise) them when they’re boring old farts complaining about the price of cattle feed. They can’t all arrive fully formed at 35.

This is very true. However, it does feel as though it's been heavily weighted towards the teenagers recently, rather than being a nice balance between all generations.

Someone commented up thread that there seemed to be a focus on only one major storyline at a time at the moment and I agree with that... or is it just that I haven't particularly liked this storyline and therefore it feels as though it's dominated more than it really has?

Ben and Chelsea relationship predicted for future

I wondered about that myself!

Oh Ben and Chelsea, maybe. They certainly put a lot of work into setting Beth up as a future Archer matriarch though to let it all go, so I’m thinking Josh, although that brother splitting scenario isn’t a new storyline.

Also noticed Beth did the same snorty frustrated GRRR sound at the end of a sentence today that Chelsea does.

All that, too. I’d have liked B & B to succeed but she must be sick of hearing him cry by now.

I wonder if the increased focus on one storyline at a time is a budgeting issue. I remember having a conversation years ago with someone involved in the Archers which left me with the impression that the storylines have to factor in using a limited number of actors at any one time. There are also logistics involved in writing characters in scenes in terms of who is coming in for a block of recording. I think I’m right in saying that the writers have to take in to account which actors are booked to be around and there’s no unlimited budget to have whichever character you want, even if they might be the best person for that particular conversation. I wondered about that with e.g Alistair and Chelsea.

I wonder whether budgets are even tighter at the moment meaning there are fewer characters to play with hence fewer alternative concurrent plotlines, or whether there have been staff changes and current staff aren’t as canny at making use of the actor’s blocks of time as previous ones.

I might be wrong - I’m working on the basis of a conversation I had a long time ago so could be misremembering or procedures may have changed.

There is a block of actors in each week's credits; this week there are fifteen appearing, last week was seventeen, the week before was twenty. There's a fair amount of overlap from week to week.

When Vanessa Whitburn was editor there seem to have been between twenty-two and twenty-eight actors speaking in each week, sometimes as many as thirty.

Keri Davies has said that the average number of actors used per episode over a week has been reduced during the time he has been working for TA (he joined the TA team in 1992 as a director, and became a writer for the programme in 2003). I think it used to be seven or even eight and has gone down to six and a bit.

Recording used to be done for six weeks' worth of broadcasts in one week, so some weeks' broadcasts had been recorded six weeks before the date they were broadcast, some only the week before. Whether that is still the case I don't know: I should think that lockdown played havoc with that scheduling and they may now do it a different way.

The way Elizabeth reacted to hearing that Chelsea had an abortion, remembering her own, and how Beth has been to Chelsea made me wonder if Beth has previously had an abortion before she was in the cast list. She might not have - I assume many of us have thought about how we'd handle an unwanted pregnancy, even if we haven't had to deal with it, but equally, our lives are not written by scriptwriters and the need for everything to feed plotlines.

God isn’t vince awful

Yes I did wonder whether another relationship casualty of this storyline will be his and Elizabeth's, at the end of that episode.

I hope so @JanglyBeads - his behaviour last night was appalling.

I wonder if the Caseys en masse were just a plot device for this storyline and maybe we'll hear no more of any of them now. Although presumably Vince will be storming round to Brookfield to demand early repayment of the solar panels loan. Horrible man.

Forgot to say welcome to any newcomers/unlurkers. And welcome back @Asking

Vince's behaviour was awful, I agree. However he means well and was acting without thinking (which he is sadly rather prone to) to, he believed, protect/defend/avenge his daughter.
If he had listened to Elizabeth or stopped for 5 minutes, he would have realised that confronting Ben was more about his (Vince's) own feelings than adding beneficial to the situation.

I think this will be a temporary break for Vince & Elizabeth until he calms down, is contrite, and they get back together. In the meantime Elizabeth will act as a support to Beth.

It's a shame Chelsea ever told Ben really, even though I can see why she did at the time.

Kind of hilarious that despite the difference in family circumstances Beth and Chelsea have father figures with exactly the same level of thinking skills …

I agree it could be argued as temporary insanity @TeenDivided but Vince is an adult, he's supposed to be able to manage his emotions - be angry by all means but at some point in the process of storming out of LL and driving all the way to Ambridge calm down and consider the consequences of your actions before you act like an idiot.

Not someone I would want to be in a relationship with. He was talking about punching Ben ffs