Archers thread #147: Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder how old Ambridge is. Discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Many thanks to @PseudoBadger for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed, and of course we are always delighted to welcome back former or occasional listeners/posters. 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'd like to have the general public watching you work and asking questions, 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.)

Title comes from this poem, with which I drive my family to distraction at this time of year.

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz
I wonder where the birdies is.
The bird is on the wing.
But that’s absurd, the wing is on the bird.
Or so I’ve heard.

Ogden Nash

Apologies to @TeenDivided for ignoring her good ideas for the thread title. Here they are to kickstart our ruminations:
'window on the world of cheesemaking'
'how long until the intercom is fatal'
'will Brian settle in new pastures'
'Springing towards Easter with Widowers, Windows, and wails'

Over to you!

I also wondered this and whether it happened for a reason.

Oh, I can totally understand her feeling like this.

Yes for sure. I have an adult daughter and I'd feel the same!

But it's being highlighted, and the gun mentioned out of the blue (I didn't know Pat shot things until this week!) for a reason...

So accidental shooting of...George?
I hope not- it's a bit tv soap isn't it?

I loved that too. He's a good man Jazzer (hotel and drugs shenanigans apart).

Oliver is at least 150 years too late for most of his Benevolence to make sense.

The most unbelievable part about this ruddy bench story is that Oliver's apparently letting George The Vandal have free reign to fix it!!! AS IF.

I've thought since the conversation between Pat and Tom last week that one of two things will happen:

1. As you say, Pat will shoot someone else mistaking them for Rob. I hadn't thought of Jack, I was thinking of another adult man. Or
2. Someone will shoot Rob and Pat will be suspect number 1 because of all her posturing. The family will worry about whether to dob her in to the police. And then it will turn out not to have been Pat after all.

I understand Pat's anxiety, and the fact she was completely unaware of the abuse until after it had ended makes her being hypersensitive on the subject perfectly reasonable. But I think she exaggerates its duration a little – which if she relies on Helen's word about it (or about anything) is understandable too. Obviously she would rather believe that Helen behaving with her usual secrecy and deceit (exactly as she did over the start of her affair with Greg), as well as throwing herself into the bed of someone who was married to another woman, must have been All Rob's Fault and nothing to do with Helen simply being Helen. That would clearly mean that he started abusing Helen in mid-June, 2013, when he forced her to invite herself to a party he was giving for Ian and Adam, and then hypnotised her into pursuing him. (Her previous twice-dated boyfriend, Johnno, had politely ditched her near the end of May, 2013, after her telling him the story of Henry's conception because she wanted a baby to love her, so she was at a loose end.)

Actually, Helen was not subjected to all that many years of emotional abuse by Rob. It was just over two years from her moving in with him in spite of her parents' disapproval of the idea, uninvited (and massively inconvenient! since he had arranged to go and fuck with his wife the following night), on 5th February, 2014, to her stabbing him on 3rd April, 2016, and he didn't really start abusing her so that it was obvious even to the listener let alone to her until quite a while after they started to cohabit. He lied to her, sure, but we were allowed to think that might just to cover up having had sex with someone else rather than as part of deliberate abuse of Helen, and Helen seemed not to notice it at all but to believe what he told her.

He first raped her on 27th August 2015, after he had married her and Helen would have had trouble getting away from him easily. (I am counting it as rape: she was drunk, wanted to fetch contraception and said no to unprotected sex, but he went ahead anyway without it. Until that point he wanted children, she didn't, and they used contraception.) The abuse built up gradually to that point, and Helen was not aware of it as abuse until it became very serious indeed; Pat wasn't aware of it at all and thought Rob was a lovely chap and just what Helen needed.

Only when Helen had stabbed the man did Pat suddenly decide he was the Evil One. I think what is going on with Pat is massive guilt at having been deceived by a pair of experts.

Sorry haven't time to reply at length now but so fundamentally disagree.

Rob was abusing Heln from their first date, when he persuaded her to change her outfit without actually telling or even asking her to.

OK you could cal that the grooming stage, but she was definitely being coerced at that point.

It just grew and grew.

Of course Helen wasn't perfect.

I'd have thought that Helen would have at least confided in Kirsty, who was privy to more of Rob's behaviour than most and a supportive friend throughout.

Or is Kirsty elsewhere? I've forgotten.

*Confided in Kirsty now re fears about Rob returning, even if not wanting the whole of Ambridge on alert.

Don't let Helen hear you saying that!

So sorry for the Spoiler. I've been on this thread for years (regular name-changer) and didn't think this counted as it's been mentioned upthread before.
Knuckles rapped!

Don't worry about it, @NetZeroZealot, I didn't see it but can hazard a guess what it was and my personal view is it scarcely counts, but then I am a spoiler junkie.

New thread beckoning! I'll probably start it tomorrow even if we haven't got to 1000, as I'm going to be travelling all day on Wednesday (trains and ferries permitting). I have a vague idea for a thread title but as usual all suggestions welcomed.

JanglyBeads
Sorry haven't time to reply at length now but so fundamentally disagree.
Rob was abusing Heln from their first date, when he persuaded her to change her outfit without actually telling or even asking her to.

That was not on their first date. She had spent quite a while pursuing him before that happened, and they had been out to more than one thing together. In fact since she went back upstairs after he'd been iffy about what she had on, I am fairly certain it was shortly after she'd moved herself and her son into his house without his inviting her to do so, in which case I would damn well hope it wasn't their first date!

Their first date (apart from the meal she invited herself to) was on 21st June, 2013, when Helen invited Rob to go with her to a Food Fair; their second was when she told Pat to invite him to supper at Bridge Farm, and he came to the meal on 11th July, 2013. They first had sex on 28th July, 2013, after he rang her when he'd came back from a weekend away, saying he'd had a row with Jess, and Helen went over to "comfort" him for his disappointment. After that occasion she and Rob avoided each other for a bit, and I am not sure what you would call her going over to his house when she heard he hadn't gone to Hampshire to be with Jess, on 9th August, 2013: he didn't invite her, she went there with the intention of having sex with him entirely off her own bat. Not really a date; definitely her idea not his.

Did you mean on Thursday 13th February, 2014, which was their special Valentine's meal because Rob had to be away on 14th? On that occasion Lowfield says that "By seven Helen is ready and presumably looking gorgeous, though controller Rob seems to want some alteration made to her appearance before they climb into the limousine en route for a Michelin star restaurant in Birmingham." At that point she had already had her row with her parents, shaken the dust of Bridge Farm off her feet, and moved uninvited into Rob's house.

He definitely abused Helen, but she did quite certainly make it very easy for him to move in on her by her determination to get into first his bed and then his life, whether he was married or not. His abuse of her did not start until well after their first date, except insofar as everything about him was creepy from day one for those who were not so blinded by the "mind blowing sex" (Helen's words when Kirsty asked what she saw in him) that they didn't notice how unpleasant he was.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime I totally disagree with you re the abuse.

Even if it was 'only' two years, that is still a very long time for someone to be psychologically tormented. Helen 'not noticing' doesn't mean it wasn't abuse. Not all abuse is "obvious" abuse.

(Incidentally wasn't that the point of the storyline, to show how coercive controlling behaviour did then manifest itself into more physical actions?).

I don't think it was 'only' two years of abuse. Rob laid the foundations from day 1 with how he treated Helen.

Pat is clearly feeling horribly guilty for being duped by Rob. Helen has no blame. Some of what you have written sounds like victim blaming unless I have interpreted it incorrectly.

DH offers this SL, more in hope than expectation: Pat goes to shoot Rob, muffs it, he gets the gun and shoots her, then goes on the rampage shooting 28 Ambridgians before turning the gun on himself.

Lee may be boring, but boring is not necessarily a bad thing in a husband. It tends to be linked to other boring attributes like stability, dependability, loyalty.

Clearly Helen isn't at all to blame for the abuse, but I don't think it's victim blaming to point out that she made herself vulnerable to being alienated from her family by her own behaviour, especially at the beginning of the relationship (e.g. lying about attending jewellery making classes, to the point of buying some jewellery for Pat and pretending she'd made it). Of course, it is part of the abuser's handbook to choose victims who are already vulnerable.

Have we just me another new Brummy man...? Jasper Carrot's brother maybe? Will he be Jazzer's new BF?

BF meaning best friend by the way, not boyfriend, I wasn't suggesting that as a new storyline.

@MereDintofPandiculation - DH offers this SL, more in hope than expectation:Pat goes to shoot Rob, muffs it, he gets the gun and shoots her, then goes on the rampage shooting 28 Ambridgians before turning the gun on himself.

When you've finished with your DH, can I have him, please? 😆

Hercisback
Rob laid the foundations from day 1 with how he treated Helen.

Well, no, because at that point he was still a man who had been introduced by Vanessa Whitburn to be a replacement for the young Brian Aldridge; she didn't retire until March 2013 and Rob arrived in the programme in November 2012.

Sean O'Connor, who with Tim Stimpson thought up the abuse storyline, did not become editor until July 2013: it was announced then that he would take up his post that September.

So Rob actually was not an abuser, nor planning how to be one, to begin with, because to begin with that was not how he was being written; nobody had thought of it yet. That's the simple fact.

(I was at an event at which both Sean O'Connor and Timothy Watson stated on a public stage that this had been the case.)

So Rob actually was not an abuser, nor planning how to be one, to begin with, because to begin with that was not how he was being written; nobody had thought of it yet. That's the simple fact. That's true - but he was being written as a "caring" man, wanting to look after Helen from a position of being older, more experienced, knowing more of the world - and it's a slippery slope from protectiveness via "I know best" to coercive control.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime Disagree completely with your analysis of ‘how easy’ Helen made it for Rob to abuse her.
It could be understood as victim blaming.
Anyway, AFAIK this is a fairly light hearted thread so I won’t go further in this post.

Fictional background of the characters aside, the way you have written about victims of abuse is insensitive. People on this thread have stated they have been victims of DV/DA and there is an attitude of 'Helen deserved it' coming from your posts.

I know this thread is light hearted and good natured, it would be a shame to lose that feel.