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 ....

Thanks! Of course it was.

Paul has a wondrously attractive voice and manner, to my ears. Only he sounds much older than he’s supposed to be, and some fool has decided that his life revolves around parties, which is sadly reductive. But he has great potential.

Particularly as Ruairi’s potential life partner. Though it’s unfortunately a bit premature for that as they’re both so young.

Adil's always sounded like a robot to me, and as for Paul….there’s something about him, a kind of underlying truculence. All that aggressive insistence on people having parties as well. Not my cup of tea.

As for the GG storyline - can it get any worse? (don’t answer that)
I just cannot for the life of me work out how there’s any sense whatsoever in Adil's confected wife/fiancée drama. Why would it matter? Who would care? Would her tragic death matter less because she was 'only' his fiancée? Who came up with this utterly lame SL? Or did they really slip up, panic, and have to introduce an elaborate and unbelievable rewrite to explain it….? 🤔

To me fiancée could be seen as even more tragic as they didn’t even get to marry. So the whole ‘people won’t take it as seriously’ is nonsense.

and was she pregnant? It feels like they are trying to ratchet it all up with him still grieving deeply after 3 years. There are a few widowers around and yes their wife may have died at an older age but does that make their loss any lesser or Adils worse? Why has his sister not told him he needs serious grief counselling?

although edit - did he say May 2020 or 2022?

The BBC doesn’t employ the writers on its TV dramas (not soaps), they’re all freelancers so unfortunately it sounds like it’s a general writers problem?

I was going to say more about Adil
but honestly nothing around him makes sense. My hope is he skips town permanently and we’re left with Azra and her kids who sound more interesting and less mad.

You’re probably right. I guess to make it in the business you need an ego (and possibly connections)

I listen when I go to bed, and often re listen when I inevitably awake around 3.30am in case I’ve missed something whilst dozing. Couldn’t be arsed to re listen to last night’s dire output.

Thinking about adil needing grief counselling - he could just go to the shop and hope joy or jim are in that day

Re: the question about why he said he’d be married with a kid and another on the way (or did he say two children?). I think he said she died in May 2020 which was a while ago, so it’s conceivable (excuse the pun) that they would have had at least one child and be pregnant again by now.

Weren’t we all in lockdown in May 2020?

I find it odd he would say he would be married with kids - yes it might be conceivable but he was oddly specific.

Yes it was weird, I'm sweeping it all under the mental carpet as "nonsense"

Can you buy another professional kitchen and retrofit to another space that easily? Adil is quite annoying - I don’t think he is written very well and the fiancée/wife thing is so stupid and his voice is annoying too. How did he ever get a management job? A bit too much of him tbh I agree with all of this - and why didn't he just ask Ian straight out if he would go and see the kitchen with him? The whole story is just too unbelievable. Grey Gables has been blown up, pulled apart, is being controlled by some mysterious, faceless "owner" - I can't even picture it anymore and yet it used to be so clear in my mind I could have walked in, booked room, dropped my stuff and headed straight off for the health club before enjoying a lovely lunch in the dining room. Couple this with the loss of Home Farm and I feel as if Ambridge is slowly disintegrating before my eyes. Adil started life as an efficient and slightly officious manager who happened to sound like Paddington - now he actually is Paddington.

With Adil maybe it's a storyline about how the Covid lockdowns impacted people who couldn't be with their loved ones as they died? If it was May 2020 that was right at the start, maybe his fiance was in a crash and then hospitalised and died without loved ones there. (I said 'alone' first but changed it as I know that amazing NHS workers held the hands of patients who otherwise really would have been alone).
And what with 'Partygate' and the Covid enquiry being in the news currently, maybe that's where they are going with it? I can't begin to imagine how traumatic it would have been for all those people who weren't allowed to be with their loved ones to hold their hands and say goodbye as they died.
And then they wouldn't have been allowed a big funeral, I can't remember in May 2020 but even later in the year numbers were very restricted still for funerals.
No big wake, no family around or social activities to try and distract yourself in the following months. Just staying at home surrounded by your departed loved ones stuff...
If they are going that way then actually I think that could be a good storyline, if done well...
If they aren't then I agree with everyone else that it's silly and the GG debacle continues! How many times does Ian need to quit?! What an arse he's being!

Presumably Adil's was a covid-cancelled wedding. Maybe on the fateful day they ought to have been married but Covid had intervened

I find the way she died very odd in lockdown

Why? There were still buses. And ‘key workers’.
As to the married with children crap, I think I expressed surprise on here that they hadn’t made her to have been pregnant (with twins) for maximum mawk.

Wasn’t she hit by another car? It just seems odd at that time when there was little on the streets. Seems like really bad luck on her part.

and I also think if she was a key worker then he may have made more of an effort to pick her up! It’s not like he was a key worker

after a good episode where you could sink into the story I just find all the adil stuff really jarring

She may have told him that was what she had decided, and he is just going along with what she said because it's the most miserable available thing to be grieving for.

She was standing at a bus stop when she was hit by a car. The driver didn't stop and was never caught. That might be fairly hard for Adil to get over, on the whole.

It sounds like maybe he was a ‘five year plan’ type and had anticipated that that is where they would have been by now. A friend is like this, and her timeline is not going as planned due to fertility troubles, and she does still get a bit sad eg ‘this is when DC2 would have been going to school’.

I don’t know if that’s a reach; I’m definitely not that sort myself (didn’t anticipate having kids five years ago; now have two…)

Maybe I’m reaching in order to justify it. I REALLY WANT to like Adil. I thought he was interesting at the beginning, now he’s had a weird personality transplant - and sounds like Paddington…

Did he take part in the choir and flirt with Kirsty? I wasn’t listening he properly then but if that is the same person then they have changed his character completely.

He was dragooned into one of the competing choirs, I think, and Kirsty at one point attempted to flirt with him, as did Lily. He was not in the least interested in either case.

I don't understand what happened to Ardil. He came in as a consultant for the owners and then started worrying about minutiae. Where were the spreadsheets and gantt charts, interior designers and kitchen planners? I am equally baffled why they needed a new kitchen TBH if they just needed a "performance kitchen", or whatever those chef's table places are called.

I like the sound of his sister, though. Ambridge could do with a few people without dead spouses/partners.

Can somebody remind me what %share Oliver retains? I thought he was supposed to be stepping aside to allow £'ms to be spent on the place.

Are we "panto free" this year? (Apologies, I've missed a lot and have only bothered to listed to the "Rob stuff").