Archers thread #157: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless clan! Discuss The Grundys here. Bicker about The Archers as well if you like.

[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, 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 to @OverArmour for the idea of making it clear in the title many of us are inveterate bickerers!

Now over to you, as we are about to eat and I won't hear tonight's offering till later ....

Don't under estimate how resilient children can be and can remain so in adulthood. Lots of childhood trauma can be healed by a loving family and a sense of belonging.

well It was nice of Helen to take the card round to Rob. I know they did it for plot purposes but the care of dying patients is quite shocking. If miles doesn’t turn up then he would have been all on his own overnight. Is Rob the older brother? I thought miles was.

was the episode challenging because he asked her to kill him? Tbh I find any episode with pip more challenging.

I don’t think I can bear the birth pangs of an Alice/Harry relationship if they want to take inspiration from the pip/Stella sl.

Well, It takes a right cunt to ask the victim of abuse at their very hands to suffocate them. His dad might have been a tyrant, but he did advise Rob, in effect, to remain dignified in the face of death.

BOOP!

The Tichenor family have plenty of money to afford a week or two of live in nursing care. Clearly either Rob has refused it or nasty Bruce vetoed it and Miles is too weak to insist it happens. It would be easily organised if wanted and paid for.
Helen needs to walk away and report Robs request to the nurses. But she won’t! She never does the sensible thing.

well I thought that was quite shocking- even on his deathbed Rob is manipulative and abusive
the nurse should not have suggested Helen go in to see him and Helen should have refused to do so
she should have left straight away and left the nurse with the problem of Miles not turning up
I bet Rob told Miles not to come

He isnt aware of being an abuser.He thinks he was the strong protector of a misguided and neurotic wife.

I bet Rob told Miles not to come How would he have known that Helen would come?

He knows very well he raped Helen. Doesn't he?
He may well be in denial. I suspect even people in denial have a vague idea what they are in denial about.

If Rob really loved Helen, he wouldn't have asked her to put a pillow over his face. This is a request to perform an act which can only be done out of love, love from the person with the pillow for the person whose life they are ending. And Rob knows Helen doesn't love him.

I'm sure he doesn't believe he raped her.

I'm afraid I laughed out loud when he asked her to suffocate him. I thought they'd overdone it when they decided that Helen would stab him, but this is even more ludicrous.

Someone like Rob wouldn't see what he did as rape. He would believe it was his right as a husband.

Exactly.

I don't think we were meant to laugh at this poignant implausibility of a scene, but the whole thing was laughable. The set-up is such rubbish! And set up is how it feels: staged, artificial.

If it were not that Helen is always presented as being so monumentally stupid and self-destructive, her even setting foot in Rob's flat today would have been the most implausible thing of all, but she is, so it was almost credible. That she was prepared to stay there on her own, no.

However, the nurse cheerfully abandoning the patient to his own devices, to live or die on his own, does make sense of Helen being there alone with him on Tuesday; the remaining question about that occasion is how, since Rob was alone, she got into the flat not just once but twice on that day. Who let her in? Why did whoever it was instantly vanish, leaving Rob alone with the hostile ex-wife who had previously tried to kill him?

I presume they were low waged care workers who if they did any much thinking at all had been told by rob he was expecting her.

Boop to the SW for making me feel sorry for bloody Rod, with the line that his father had said his goodbyes and shaken his hand. It doesn't excuse the monster that Ron is but hearing these few lines we have been fed about his father does go part way to explain how he became a monster.

Anyone else wondering why Helen didn't just put the stupid card in the post?

I'm hoping she has the sense to tell him she's not going to put herself in the dock a second time on his account so tough.

But we already knew his father was a monster (and his mother too), from his (and her) appearances in 2016. So his having had a horrible childhood was already a factor. Plenty of people with horrible fathers do not grow up to be rapists and coercive controllers who enjoy psychologically torturing and physically hitting women, so it might be a reason but it isn't really an excuse.

round here that would take about a week...

It was a brilliant depiction of how abusers never give up.
And yes they do know what they're doing, although they may seek to bury that consciousness.
Any human instinctively knows what inhumanity is, deep down.

Hm, Royal Mail just a got a huge fine for "failing to (literally) deliver" - so I don't think they could be trusted with a card that you would hope to get in time to a person who is about to die.

I was prepared to take Ron’s request at face value actually. A desperate request in the face of adversity rather than a last-ditch attempt at manipulation. It could have been brushed aside fairly easily with a ‘let’s not rush things’ comment.

The balance of power was so far in Helen’s favour that she could have managed a bit of no-nonsense hand-holding and a sepia-coloured trip down Memory Lane/Lakey Hill. The man is dying ffs so tonight was not really the moment for home truths - however horrible he was and whatever the history. I think there was room for a bit more compassion and ‘let’s watch a few more videos of the boys’.

I don’t think Rob was really there tbh.

the asking her to kill him jumped the shark for me

@EmmasBirthdayEarrings you're making the mistake of looking at that encounter logically.
Rob cannot fail to manipulate. Someone kinder may also have wished for oblivion but not sought to involve someone whom they already knew they had deeply wronged.

Helen may on paper have the power but he is still to an extent dominating her.

You also seem to be imagining that Rob will have no hold on her and no effects once he's gone.

Uhuh. She would be once more harmed by holding his hand and watching videos of the boys beside him.

You could sense something of that when she suddenly felt the need to speak to her mum. That was very discomforting and I hate to think what will happen tomorrow.

Her mum called her though

He still had enough of his wits about him to hit the nail on the head about Helen being unable to keep away - that ‘card’ was the flimsiest of pretexts. There’s one really interesting thing they could do with this, but I bet they won’t- she does pillow him, later confesses and no one believes her but everyone starts saying the quiet bit out loud (“that Helen’s always been a real drama queen, is a frightful liar and is mad as a box of frogs to boot”). And suddenly all the sympathy evaporates. What will she do then to get back centre stage?