Archers thread #162: ‘This is like talking to Lassie’ – how right you are, Fallon! Discuss 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 cowhide-covered walls are a great idea for a cafe with vegan and vegetarian customers, 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 one of the better scripted conversations of recent weeks, when Fallon said ”Harrison, this is like talking to Lassie! Just TELL ME”. So true of so many conversations on TA where you just want to shake them and yell 'Just TELL US, and quickly, so you don't get interrupted before you can say the important bit', but of course they rarely do and days pass before the conversation resumes. @TheBell suggested putting it in the title, so thanks for that.

@OverArmour had a great if more obscure idea, paying tribute to a Peter Greenaway film: The Policeman, The Drunk, The Vet and his Lover. That will do very well as a starting point for the new thread. Will Alistair leave? Will Denise tell John she's leaving him? Will Paul learn to be less noisy? Do any of us care?

I do care a little about Harrison and Fallon. I want Harrison to get a grip and realise he needs a paying job more than the captaincy of the cricket team. I don't care at all about Harry but I think he's been brought in purely as a plot device so with any luck we can all forget about him very soon.

Over to you!

Yurt empire

I notice nobody's even interested enough to mention the tedious 'Who'll be the next Cricket Club chair?' storyline.

I tend to think of Kate in terms of a smallish Mongol horde in herself, @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g . Try it; it might help

I thought it was odd that Lynda didn’t automatically think of Robert for the role given she’s so desperate for him to get involved with things

i also thought it was sense of Harrison to not realise Robert being chair would likely lead to Lynda’s ideas being considered anyway.

Aye. Robert would be Lynda’s puppet.

I think I preferred the mystery plays to the cricket bored.

(intentional spelling mistake)

I know they can. I also know they rarely turn up in the local pub a couple of nights before parking in the pub's car-park and setting their dog on its landlord for no reason whatever, splashing the cash and being ingratiating to the barmaid and giving her large tips. If those city show-offs were meant to be a "proxy for travellers", they were extraordinarily unlike travellers in their behaviour before, during and after the dog event, and free-spending, known-townie thug Markie unlike any traveller I have ever encountered.

I dislike bigotry, and tend to call it out when I encounter it; the assumption that because someone makes trouble and has a dangerous dog it is therefore intended to signal that he is like a traveller is pretty damn' prejudiced.

I'm not going to wade into the "nasty men in the pub carpark" debate.

It's great that they've brought Robert back, but why on earth are he and Lynda be getting involved with the cricket club still and why are they back to running a B&B?

It's as if the scripties think they are 20 years younger and have overlooked how very very injured Lynda was in the bacon sarnie incident. Robert was born on 5 April 1943 per the BBC Who's Who.

@Madcats , they are in Ambridge where you can rely on a 90-yr old for childcare'

As for Markie and his pals, I took them to be a bunch of yamyams that were up to no good, something like hare coursing or dog fighting, and I don't recall any ethnicity being mentioned.

Isn't their hold over Jolene that they're threatening her and the family? That doesn't explain why she doesn't want to tell the police who attacked Kenton ("It's a dodgy bloke called Markie from Wolverhampton - ask Vince, he knows him.") Or warn Kenton not to go into the carpark in the first place ("because I recognise those dodgy blokes from that gig I played in Wolverhampton where it all kicked off and then they burned the pub down.")

In ambridge the old seem to act 20 years younger. I think it’s due to lack of proper characters in the younger generations to take over

If they're well enough to work, they probably aren't keen on playing someone very decrepit.

I dislike bigotry, and tend to call it out when I encounter it; the assumption that because someone makes trouble and has a dangerous dog it is therefore intended to signal that he is like a traveller is pretty damn' prejudiced

There is no bigotry for you to call out.

If someone were a grasping and avaricious moneylender and someone told us he was a proxy for Jews, that would rightly be condemned as bigoted. Think about that one for a minute, and realise that to assume that anyone making trouble in a country pub must be a proxy for travellers is just as offensive and racist.

Do the actors have a say?

I think they do, to a very limited extent. June Spencer apparently talked to the production team about her experience of looking after her husband, who had dementia, and they fed some of her experiences into the storyline of Peggy looking after Jack Woolley. I don't think they can ring up and say 'You've made my character sound old! I'm not old, I'm only 98!', though.

I can understand Brian still being involved but find it odd there’s no succession planning

This has been precisely my thought - I honestly believed I must have missed an episode. Why do they have it in for J? There must be more to it that a years old slight grudge.

Argh. I didn't say they were travellers. I said they were a proxy for travellers. A way to have a travellers-type storyline without letters being sent to the BBC about how travellers are all lovely and The Archers is racist.

I saw a tv soap actor being interviewed and she said that she could get the wording of her script changed a little bit. Just minor word or phrase substitution.

As I asked: why? What need is there for it to be a proxy for a racist storyline when it is actually an anti-gang-with-dangerous-dogs storyline that has nothing whatever to do with travellers?

Sometimes, as Freud is reported to have remarked, a cigar is just a cigar.

"Travellers-type storyline". Ah. Yes. So what is it about a group of nasty thugs physically attacking and disabling an innocent (if annoying) stranger that makes this a travellers-type storyline? Or is it the stalking and intimidation of an elderly woman?

What need is there for it to be a proxy for a racist storyline when it is actually an anti-gang-with-dangerous-dogs storyline that has nothing whatever to do with travellers?

And as a result makes no sense whatsoever.

As a neutral observer to this debate

i think what geebray is saying is that the sw have read about traveller crimes and were inspired by this but didn’t feel they could write the sl with travellers as the baddies so just made them random Wolverhampton baddies

personally, I don’t think the sw have put even that much thought into it and it wouldn’t surprise me if they hadn’t just heard about xl bully attacks and wondered how they could get a dog attack into the script

Two good points made! Thank you 😊

Have you been listening to the programme for long? Because pointless storylines that make no sense whatsoever, or are simply dropped and never explained in any way, are pretty-much a monthly occurrence in TA, without any need to look for arcane rationale for them.

This has been the case all century at least; perhaps the death of Nigel was the most stupidly ill-thought-through of the lot, especially when the moon rising on the fatal night and illuminating the roof was mentioned in evidence at the inquest, and a thirty-second internet search revealed that on the day of his death, the waning crescent moon had set at about two-fifteen in the afternoon and there was no moon visible at all that night.

Are there going to be two easter egg hunts, one at Lower Loxley and one on the green? Will TWFL expect Stella to take her and Fat Rosie to both events?

Fat Rosie needs a minimum of 2 Easter egg hunts. She has to maintain her waistline now that Jill has got too doddery to knock out the lemon drizzle and Millionaire’s shortbread. She is probably managing to maintain her weight thanks to the regular badly-cooked pasta suppers her mother prepares for her.

It’s a shame Call-me-Russ is not going to be at LL this year in his bunny costume.