Archers thread #142: Kill Jill? Is Ambridge heading for a Tarantino-style bloodbath on Stir Up Sunday? 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, 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 , 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.)

Well, things have taken a turn for the better in the last few days! The SWs have re-discovered their form and the actors and directors have risen to the challenge. I won't say much more than that for fear of jinxing things. Over to you!

(Thanks to @JanglyBeads for the thread title idea!)

To be fair, she didn't have to have a late abortion, she could have had a very early abortion.

I'm not sure whether Vince blames Ben for chucking Beth out, but that is the one area where he does have a point.

I don't remember Justin twigging what was going on between Ruari and Julianne? Wouldn't we have had more fall-out if he had?

Does anyone know if the fuel price thing also affects the price at which the electricity companies buy back power with people who have surpluses from solar panel?

My fantasy resolution of the whole loan issue is for the Dopeys suddenly to receive a mahoosive cheque from the power companies which enables them to pay off Vince without noticing and tell him what a favour he's done them. He'd absolutely hate that.

The only thing Vince has any business blaming Ben for is the treatment of Beth, and even then if he thinks Ben is so utterly contemptible I would have thought that Ben chucking her out would be something he was glad about rather than seeking vengeance for.

What he announced in The Bull, ostensibly to Leonard but actually to everyone in there, was, "Has he told you what kind of a scumbag he really is? Shall I tell you what he's really been up to? The baby of the family, the student nurse? Has he told you that he seduced the young Horrobin girl, heh? Got her pregnant and packed her off for an abortion? Then threw Beth out onto the street?"

One out of three ain't bad, I suppose.

He told everyone he had made some money trading crypto to explain his not very studenty lifestyle. Remember all the lavish gifts a while back?

Imagine a lot of heavy comedy winking and nose-tapping, LaGioconda. When Ruairi limply tried to protest that Julianne was (iirc) a friend of someone’s parents that he knew, or something similar, and she was giving him 'valuable business coaching' or words to that effect, I’m pretty sure I recall Justin cackling and reminiscing about 'having a similar arrangement myself when I was a young lad'.

He knew exactly what was going on.

Ruairi confirmed the nature of his relationship with her to Ben a few months back, didn’t he? I didn’t think he did, I thought he was trying to hold the line that it was purely escort duties with no sex.

Or I might just not have been paying proper attention

There was some scene where they were in a hotel
room together, I can’t remember exactly but it was alluded to pretty strongly. I remember because it was the first time it was made clear in any way.

I might have missed it, but do we know how the Ruairi - Julianne thing started? I wonder whether he was on the look out for a bit of extra cash and found JW through a school contact or something, or whether she was scouting around for a potential victim at his freshers' fair ... I had always assumed that most student escorts signed up with an agency, but they seem to deal with one another directly

One of his year-group always seemed to have lots of dosh in spite of having poor parents, so Ruairi asked how it was done and was directed to a website. He explained this to I-think-it-was Ben.

The actress is 60?!?!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Bowerman

born 1 February 1962
She also plays the role of Julianne in The Archers

Isn't that rôle what we were discussing? 🤔

That’s a quote from the Wikipedia page.

I am mystified by the Julianne storyline.

Admittedly my job was more "City or International" , but you didn't really network with a "plus one", certainly not somebody 20-30 years younger.

How do you carry that off for more than one "do"?

Is this the norm in life for R4 writers?

this is what I wonder
they're meant to be educating us about the difficulties faced by farmers, no?
I don't need to know about the abusive behaviour of very rich people

I’m 36 (so ancient to the likes of Ruairi) and think Julianne sounds a little older than me but definitely doesn’t come across as a woman in her sixties. I don’t think Justin realised exactly what was going on when he saw Ruairi and Julianne - I don’t imagine for a second that the young Justin was a rent boy too. Justin assumed that Ruairi was having a fun, casual, and wholly consensual fling with an older woman.

I wouldn’t have much of a problem if Ruairi had met a woman twice his age in a bar, clicked and had a weekend of great sex with a woman who knows what she wants. It’s Julianne’s controlling, manipulative behaviour and money changing hands that is grotesque.

I assumed that Julianne looked young enough, and Ruairi old enough, that they would pass for a regular couple. A few years' age gap wouldn't be too remarkable. So I guessed she was maybe early 40s.

What strikes me as more odd, as Madcats says, is the amount of vaguely work-related networking events she needs a partner for. Which makes me think that he's being presented as an intern/junior colleague rather than her boyfriend. So how do they behave in public? Don't any of her millions of contacts ever see her out dining with him or similar and think it's a bit strange? And how is he making contacts with useful people if they all think he's already set up?

I was a bit 🥺 to hear that she is literally keeping him.

*"keeping"

I feel a bit sick every time she demands a kiss off him.

its an interesting marginal case for prostitution isn't it- Ruari does not need the money at all, this is simply driven by greed, so he is now having to assess how much he values the money/goods he earns versus the freedoms he sacrifices because of the 'relationship'- most women in prostitution (and probably most men too) do not have the luxury of that choice

To me, Julianne's voice sounds as though she's in her mid-late forties (and certainly no younger). Interestingly, Lisa Bowerman looks very like how I pictured Julianne in my head.

@BeardieWeirdie I hope it was obvious that I wasn’t suggesting Justin had been a 'rent boy' in his youth, and I didn’t expect him to grasp that Ruairi was in any sort of controlling relationship from a brief few minutes of interaction in a hotel bar.

But it was clear when he coincidentally ran into Ruairi (who was obviously very dismayed to see him) that he picked up the essentials immediately - that the relationship Ruairi was, with evident embarrassment, trying to present as one of professional mentoring, if you like, was in fact a sexual arrangement between him and a clearly older woman in a position of relative power.

Yes, consensual but hardly your everyday set-up. As evidenced by Justin's chortling, nudge-nudge, wink-wink reaction. So in that sense, yes, he did know exactly what was going on.