Archers thread #150: For whom the sausage rolls: George over a Berrow, Fallon & Harrison seek new lease on life, is it all a Fête Accompli? Discuss The Snivelling Simpletons, sorry, 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, 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 think people frequently miss their own weddings because of a morning quickie while in a plaster cast, 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.)

Thanks for title suggestions. I basically took @OverArmour's excellent suggestion and managed to shoehorn in snivelling simpleton, gloriously coined by @Eastie77Returns to refer to Lee in the first instance.

@WitcheryDivine suggested Recharging, Red Kites and The Man They Call Ron, is Ambridge becoming an earthly paradise or a hell on earth? which seems as good a place as any to kick off our discussions! Ron = Rob, a fortuitous typo on a previous thread. It does feel a bit as if we're marking time before he turns up again. Odd to do what could be a high profile storyline over the summer holidays when a lot of people will be away, but depending on your point of view, maybe that's a blessing!

Whither George? Is he shaping up to be Andrew Tate mark 2?

Everybody looking forward to Ferret Fun at the Fête? Me neither.

Over to you!

Do you have adult DC? Even in their 30s I have a strong urge to protect mine, it’s so hard to stand back!

Did you hear about all that stuff recently about post-menopausal orcas protecting their adult sons from fights?

Would snivelling simpleton be OK applied to a woman rather than a bloke? Though it’s hard to think of a TA women who would fit the description.

🤣

Yeah I also thought it would more likely be Miles, or even a cousin (child of Miles) if there is one?

Am I alone in actually being quite fond of most of the characters? I mean, yeah, they all have their faults and they can be annoying at times, but surely that applies to most people?!

@CurlewKate

I find your comment to be an insult to people who have, or have had, severe mental health problems.

I hope you can see why.

And they wouldn't be st all credible without them. Humans are flawed.

Guilt over the slap or otherwise, I still can't understand why Emma, Will and Ed are bending over backwards to do what ever George wants. And he is winding them round his little finger like string on a bobbin - no, he can't just have his own room. No, he can't cook for himself. No, he needs his own space so things don't "blow up".

Rather than saying "Mind your mouth and if you do it again you'll be out on your ear, sunshine", they're tip-toeing around him and swallowing his self-absorbed nonsense again and again like he's a little emperor!

And his interest in Henry isn't going to end well, for Henry or Helen. Presuming it is Rob, why on earth would Henry want to contact him?

@TheSilveryPussycat If that's what you take from my post, feel free.

I don't think you're alone in that at all and I totally agree that the fact that we see a lot of the characters in full and over so many years means we see them in their whole flawed human glory. I've definitely had moments of real sympathy for Tom, I thought he showed such vulnerability and character during the times after he jilted Kirsty, and Tony can have likeable moments - but at the moment I'm finding them all so frustrating and annoying! It's like they just don't know how to cope at all with the (surely inevitable) return of Rob and it's especially interesting because they've always been such a close family but it feels at the moment like they're all pulling in completely different directions.

<channels OliviaMN, erstwhile regular on these threads, still much missed>

AHEM.

Oh dear what happened here 😬 agree @FallonsNewCoat this thread is full of feminists (probably all of us) but sometimes it feels like every little remark is taken to be anti women. Let's not forget that women aren't always entirely innocent or free from faults themselves! Life is far more complex than that.

George will definitely know all about Helen and Rob, he will have overheard plenty of gossip at home and Emma hasn't exactly always been in favour of Helen in general either and not renowned for supporting women, so it makes you wonder how much she victim blamed her as well. Plus he will have seen things on social media etc, I know he would have been a few years younger at the time but I doubt that stopped him being on Facebook etc. Not a shadow of doubt in my mind that he sees Rob as the victim in it all, and subsequently, Henry and Jack.

Very few people left in the village who don't see right through George now so he has to target someone younger and more impressionable to hang off his every word. Always handy to have someone you can get to do your dirty work for you with the added bonus of getting at another of the Ambridge women he sees as being prejudice against males like him.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g, yes, I miss OliviaMN's input as well. Was nice when @HebeMumsnet and @YetAnotherBeckyMumsnet popped in on this thread's 10th anniversary 🙂

Have they all left now?

I think Kirsty is a size 12 very heathy looking always in wellies a bit like Barbara from The Good Life.

There was talk not long ago of Henry going to the skate park on his own and I’m sure it was after Ron’s reappearance. Odd that he suddenly needs a baby sitter. But Helen is extremely controlling (ironic given what she’s been through) and seems to make decisions on a whim. Henry will grow to resent her. It’s interesting she snapped at Lee “they’re my children” when he dared to disagree with her decision to keep Ron’s condition a secret. Lee is the boy’s dad when it suits her and only if he falls in line.

I’m convinced Tony is displaying very subtle, early signs of Dementia.

Helen having been abused in one relationship does not give her a free pass for everything she has ever done which was deplorable no matter whether done by a woman or by a man.

I would instance her vile treatment of Hayley, her dismissal of Brenda as not having any right to a voice in a business Brenda had been propping up, her habitual lying to her parents about things, her bullying a much younger, vulnerable woman (who was dependent on her for somewhere to live) to carry an unwanted baby so Helen could have charge of both mother and child, her decision that since she was incapable of sustaining an adult relationship she was going to pay for a baby so that it would always love her (she really did make that claim about her reason for wanting AI), or any of the not-very-pleasant things she did before 2015 – which would include setting out to have a sexual relationship with someone whose spouse she knew to be nursing that spouse's dying father and thus unable to be with him.

To deny that she was responsible for the choices she made before she accepted Rob into her orbit is to deny her agency in her own life, which is profoundly insulting to women in that is suggests they do not have autonomy.

Very much so @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime - I couldn't agree more.

Hear hear @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime I do not think that being abused excuses her from all past bad behaviour, although I do think her behaviour is in a surprisingly negative and unforgiving way, considering the many challenges she has faced in her life. I objected to her being called "nutty" for not being completely out from under the coercive control she was subjected to. I also object-strongly-to a poster saying "This time round, she deserves everything she gets." I realise, of course, that she is a fictional character. But VAWG is such a serious issue, and it is unusual for it to be presented in this depressingly typical long form way. It is so depressing that so many people have taken against Helen for being a human, fallible woman that the issue runs the risk of being obscured. But it's obvious that my views are not welcome on this thread, so I'll take myself off.

I think saying Pat and Helen are controlling/infantilising is a bit unfair.
Helen has been some serious trauma in which resulted in her being separated from her children, not to mention the kidnapping incident. Pat lost a son who died very young and nearly a daughter when she was in prison. So it's no surprise they are both extremely protective as well as cautious about any changes that means they are less able to keep watch over their family. Seems quite realistic to me.

I've forgotten what Asking's referring to re Brenda. For newer listeners, Brenda is Roy's sister and one of Tom's many ex-girlfriends. They lived together for a while. Brenda was a radio journalist at BBC Radio Borsetshire who then decided to do a degree in broadcast journalism at Bournemouth (industry gold standard, apparently), but then Betty died very suddenly and she dropped out to come home and support her dad. Sadly she then turned her back on a promising career to do a degree in marketing at world-renowned University of Felpersham and ended up doing all the work at the property rentals company Lilian and her ex Matt Crawford owned. Matt ended up in prison for a bit, can't remember why in any detail. Anyway, Brenda eventually went to London, without Tom - can't even remember how and why she and Tom split up, or when - and was last heard of engaged to a Russian oligarch's son, or similar, and working in the City. She never, ever returns to Ambridge to see her brother, which is a bit odd. Almost as if they've forgotten she exists. Surely not.

I don't at all dispute that it's unsurprising Pat is protective of her children (though Johnny is not her child, and she really needs to learn to allow other women to look out for their own children), nor that Helen is similarly (though to my mind counter-productively, given its causing Henry to consider going to what is almost certainly a very inappropriate person for information she has kept from him) unwilling to relax her authority over exactly what her adolescent son should be told about her situation. It's understandable given the trauma each has suffered.

I can't help remembering, though, that well before Rob arrived in Ambridge one of Helen's nicknames on the BBC board was "The Thin Controller". It doesn't seem entirely likely that was bestowed for no reason. And trying to control the son to whom she gave birth in order to have someone who would always love her was never going to go well at any level.

Just at the moment the main change in Helen's family, after all, is that Henry is no longer a baby; he is a rapidly-growing boy who will shortly be at the teenage fight-against-all-parental-restrictions stage in his life, and it's silly of Helen to give him reason to start on that even earlier than is usual. And she can no more stop him from growing up than Canute could have held back the tide.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
I've forgotten what Asking's referring to re Brenda.

When Brenda was living with Tom and expected to marry him, she did a lot of work for Bridge Farm one way and another. There was a farm meeting to decide various things some of which actively involved Brenda and the work she was doing for them, and Helen absolutely refused permission for Brenda to attend that meeting on the grounds that Brenda was not yet family. This feeling of being shut out in the cold and Tom not defending her contributed to Brenda eventually chucking Tom and moving out.

Helen's doing it became very noticeable as hypocritical when at a later point she insisted that her boyfriend Rob was absolutely entitled to come to family meetings about the farm shop and the café.

Very well remembered. That had slipped right out of my memory.

It was before I was listening, but am I right that when Helen was a baby she needed medical treatment for clicky hips? Possibly spent time in hospital away from family? I wonder if the production team decided way back then that she would suffer long-term trauma from that, or whether that was so normal back then that nobody would ever have expected a child to grow up damaged because of being so cut off from family at a stressful time. I spent several days in hospital at the age of 5 or 6 for a routine tonsillectomy and still vividly remember it as a not very pleasant time. Strict visiting hours, absolutely no question of parents staying, nurses confiscating and eating all the sweets, etc etc.