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 ....

What will be inescapable: Susan fluttering around Harry …

I’m little Martha’s Grandma - so we’ll be family!

🤮

Ooh! I wonder if Christopher has encountered him through 🧲.

Oh, good point!

Alan and Usha surely can’t be so desperate that they’d ask Kate to help with a community event!

I wondered that. In a horsey community he would be likely to have used Christopher's services.

Ruairi would have a semi-swish (one Michelin star) meal

That’s so last year. This is poor(ish)-but-honest-student Ruairi, not poule-de-luxe Ruairi.

I don’t suppose Chris has met him because in the world of the Archers there is seemingly an infinite number of horsey people and none of them know each other. Unlike everywhere else in the world. A close friend is a horsey/farmer type and if she’s not related directly or through marriage to another horsey farmer type then she most certainly knows them from events, shows, buying or selling horses, parties, competitions etc.

I presumed initially that Harry lived a long way away hence him not being known to anyone, but clearly not since he’s always popping in.

Please SW next time can we just once have a romance between two adults where neither of them behaves like a 12 year old at any point. It’s bizarre and not sexy.

I listened to a very old dramatisation of The Moonstone on Radio 4 Extra a week or so ago, and to my amazement the juvenile male lead turned out to be Alan Franks (or rather the actor who plays him, whose name escapes me now). Virtually unrecognisable.

If Miles' wife was a MNetter then she'd have been advised to go NC with her toxic PIL and FIL. Possibly also to LTB if her DH didn't have her back.

Anyone else feel like Lee leaving was incredibly abrupt and odd?

Was it because of the actor’s tv stuff?

He refused to have her living there. Hence her being over at his cottage on Sunday for the evening and night, but instead going "back to mine" (by which I assumed she meant Peggy's, since that was where she has been living in order to look after the 98-now-99-year-old) in a snit because he didn't immediately agree to do as he was told by her.

The evening and night Kate planned to be with Jakob were the evening and night before Peggy's 99th birthday, in fact. Pity that the editorial team doesn't have a calendar of Ambridge birthdays like wot I have, so that they have remembered only Ruairi's 21st and Brian's 80th from the Aldridge family. Those would be totally eclipsed in a real family by great-grandmother Peggy's earlier in the month.

Just listened to Tuesday’s episode. Am I alone in feeling a bit sorry for Rob? I thought Helen was going to wheel him over to the window so he could glimpse his son (then realised he wasn’t in a wheelchair..).

It does seem harsh that he is going to his grave without laying eyes on his child again. Helen could have sent him a video perhaps.

I will be shocked if Jack is not traumatised and bitter as he gets older and learns more about the circumstances around Rob’s death. I can imagine the argument with Helen in a few years time where he is screaming “you should have made me go in and see him” and Helen weeping that she thought it was for the best etc. I also hope Uncle Miles doesn’t turn out to be a thorn in her side in the years to come.

Helen will turn it on him and say it was his choice!

Rob made not the slightest effort to see Jack after February 2017, when he tried to kidnap the baby. During this time he has voluntarily lived in another country, indeed on another continent. Now, like a spoiled baby, he wants what he wants and is perfectly happy to ruin others' lives to try to get it; his gratuitous lie about being supported by Alan and Usha makes this absolutely clear. I have no sympathy for such a very nasty and malicious person, especially when his malice on this occasion was against someone whose view of him he did not actually know.

I will be very disappointed if Jack is unable, like other people who for whatever reason have not met their absentee fathers, to live a perfectly ordinary and untraumatised life, albeit in his case one with a certain amount of anxiety in case he has inherited any of Rob's repulsive characteristics (he will hear about these; children do find things out). He's a lot more likely, in my view, to be embittered and traumatised by the experience of living with a self-absorbed mother then by the single occasion on which he did not see a man about whom he knows nothing except that he was abandoned by that man before he was old enough to remember him at all.

I can't offhand think of any reason for Miles Titchener to have the slightest interest in his deceased brother's child by a woman who divorced him. What would be in it for Miles? Unlike Rob, he doesn't seem to be mad, or a monomaniac.

I doubt that’s the end of it for Jack and Rob. I’d imagine there will be much reproach incoming from Miles / Bruce…

Rob made not the slightest effort to see Jack

Wasn't hebanned by court order?

(Technically, he still is, I think - but absolutely everyone is ignoring that.)

Bruce seemed to be moribund as well as an evil old git, when we heard him. I genuinely don't see what trying to harass Helen would benefit him. Bruce's younger son had a child by an unsuitable mother whom Bruce utterly despises, from a family of a class he despises, and he has Miles' children, Rob's nephews with whom Rob played football, to inherit whatever from him anyway.

As for Miles, why would he bother? It's nothing to do with him at all.

He didn't try to get that order reversed, for well over six years. Jack can be told this if he starts to kick up rough; the blame is not Helen's, but that of the court that decided Rob was "not a fit person", and of Rob who left the country.

One thing has been puzzling me since Bruce’s moustache twirling display at the church. Didn’t he say something like ‘oh here comes farmer Giles’ when Tony joined the fray? But isn’t he a farmer? I know there’s no love lost between them, but would one farmer say that about another? And if Bruce isn’t a farmer, who did Miles inherit the family farm from?

Ha I also wondered that @TherapistInATabard - my assumption was that Tony was dressed much more shabbily/stereotypically (tbh I was picturing stained wax jacket, flat cap, shotgun over arm) but it's still very weird. I can't picture a farmer or even landowner saying it about another farmer!

I've had a thought about the St Stephens row - is Piggoi going to die and then Alan asked to do the funeral at SS and refuse because she'd left the congregation? We know the actress has retired so a demise can't be too far away... 🤔

Ooh that’s a lovely thought @harriethoyle . Alan’s too nice to do that, though

True @TherapistInATabard maybe more realistic is the family having to.go cap in hand and Alan being gracious...

You generally don’t have to be an attending member of the congregation to have a funeral in a Church of England church, as long as you’re in the parish bounds. Where you’re buried is a different matter as there’s a nationwide shortage of burial space (this is something I worked on in a previous role - the things I wish I didn’t know!). But I don’t think Alan would actually be able to refuse to do the funeral itself.

I’d flip it on its head: Peggy dies and wants the funeral to be in St Stephens but under the stipulation that Alan doesn’t do it. A grudge held from beyond the grave.

And given her views on women being vicars she won't want his friend from Downham, Nikita Berry, either. The joke will be if she forgets to mention that.