Archers thread #164: AmbridgEnders! An Everyday Story of Soapy Folk. Discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

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Thread thrown together in great haste in advance of tonight's episode. Who's in the Am? Is it George's fault? Is this the end for Alice? Over to you!

@Cauliflowersandcaterpillars I think Alistair said they did clip but I got the impression it was a glancing blow rather than a full on prang.

As for cameras, there will only be houses with Ring doorbells etc but they are unlikely to cover the road (not least because houses tend to be set back), and businesses with CCTV. But they are likely to be few and far between, although it’s not clear where Alice/George started from.

fallon said the car was clipped

Maybe Denise will catch a nasty chill from standing around in her wet clothes, develop complications and put us all out of our misery.

Fallon said the car clipped them. I've just listened for a second time

dance the horizontal dance I like that almost as much as the reference to them making the beast with two backs which we had the other day.

'Prang' is a fine word too.

Making the beast with two backs is from Othello.

I listened at lunchtime and am none the wiser what most of them would have been doing at Heydon Bridge.

On the plus side, in my quest to procrastinate, I stumbled upon a photo of the Borsetshire map that they used to have in the recording studio.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ambridge/comments/sptvcf/ambridge_map_in_the_archers_recording_studio_bbc/#lightbox
It is easy enough to zoom in on a computer, though some of the text is illegible. It looks as if Heydon Bridge is down at A10, so what was Alice doing down there (Home Farm is L5 ish). No chance of a Ring doorbell down there, though people might have recorded Alice driving through the village a couple of hours earlier.

I also don't understand why Alistair & Denise would have a late meal out somewhere that wasn't their hotel and then drive back THROUGH Ambridge to get to their hotel. They might as well have just walked up Lakey Hill together!

I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just have dinner at the hotel. Except, of course, plot.

Exactly. Someone had to arrive immediately after the accident to prevent George moving Alice into the driving seat and legging it. Whoever it was needed to be capable of jumping in the river to rescue the occupants of the car which is why it was clearly established that Denise was a champion swimmer and Alistair also enjoyed swimming. Their whole slightly bizarre courtship - being set up by Jim and then put off by his slippers, rescheduling to a hotel with a pool (not exactly the number one requirement for a dirty weekend I would have thought) and then going out for dinner first somewhere entirely different was all leading up to this moment. Similarly the many mentions of Joy having a spare ticket to a concert to get Fallon in the car with her, but Mick still turning out to drive them so Fallon could be in the back seat and therefore not rescued in the first attempt. Joy being the one to sell Alice the vodka and Alistair being in the shop at that very moment so neither would bat an eyelid when George mentioned it and instead of wondering why George Grundy should just happen to be passing were instead distracted by their role in enabling Alice to get tanked up.

Tbf on George - he didn’t have a torch which would have made it quite hard.

alastairs birthing torch was very handy to have around

A&D aren’t very good at subtlety - wouldn’t surprise me if he’d popped into the village shop to get some protection

Torch on his phone… not a brilliant one. And headlights from Alice’s car.

He could have said he’d moved alice so he could get in and drive so the headlights were more helpful I suppose

I think Alice just wins by a nose for me. That's to take, not dodge, the blame.

Yeah I'm #teamgeorge on this one.

Obviously his behaviour has been horrendous in the past but I'm just fed up with Alice and the literal car crash that is her life.

Mine is like that and it’s years old. So long as the keys are in there, it goes. Often I don’t know where the key is, just that it’s somewhere in my bag.

😂 Pip loves a spag bol (autocorrects to ‘slag bol’, for anyone who’s interested). This is another example, in my opinion, of the earlier comment on how unnatural some of the young(er) characters’ speech feels. ‘Spag bol’ definitely feels like it belongs to my mother’s generation (she is seventy) - casual reference to an Italian dish that had become a British dinner staple for many by the 80s (ish?? Anyone who knows better please feel free to correct me!!) but wouldn’t have been part of my grandmothers’ repertoires. Likewise prawn cocktails, profiteroles and lasagne….

As for commenting on more pressing events, I can’t even get to the end of the comments but have little to add to what I’ve read so far. Last time I felt this way - genuinely emotionally engaged - was Jenny’s death. They trundle along so tediously for so long then - boom! Such drama!!!

I wouldn't say I like George but I think he's a complicated character. His natural instinct was to stop and phone the emergency services and try to help. Yes, I take the point that he fancies Fallon but he didn't know she was in there at that point. He's relieved when Alistair appears with a torch.

What he does next with Alice is appalling but I think he deserves a tiny bit of credit for stopping and calling 999. There is a small gap before Alistair arrives, he had time to get back in the car and drive on which would have been a more convincing way to blame Alice albeit the three in the car would have probably drowned.

I shall stop defending him now because I do think he's a bad lad and a misogynist but a total psycho would have carried on driving.

I assume from the engine revving noises we are supposed to assume he was speeding as well as being over the limit.

I agree that Emma will be his undoing here, along with the voice message.

I don’t dislike Alice. She has had a strange upbringing with her ‘perfect’ mother (who put up with Brian’s philandering) and Alpha-male, son-craving father. Wasn’t she a make-up baby after one of Brian’s boring affairs? And she was expected to fall into line about Ruarie, and suppress her own feelings.

Very privileged, but I always felt that her mum and dad gave her ponies to assuage their guilt for the emotional absence. Serial sibling drama with Adam, Debbie, Kate and Ruarie. She’s obviously intelligent and talented, but lost and full of self-doubt.

Alcohol has always smoothed things out for people like Brian and Lilian. But she’s more vulnerable. Alcoholics often have disordered thinking - very low self esteem, self-centred, self-obsessed. As someone once described it to me, they feel that they are ‘the little piece of shit at the centre of the universe’.

I agree that George has potential. Despite often loathing him and his actions, there is perhaps a potentially good heart in there, however deeply buried. One thing I do think is fairly realistic is him genuinely thinking he was helping by driving Alice home. Older me would definitely stop to think through the many more sensible options - call Brian, call Chris, etc - but younger me was much more impulsive and I can remember the absolute certainty that I sometimes felt about heat-of-the-moment decisions which seem totally out there when I reflect on them now. I also remember feeling genuinely different from about my mid-twenties onwards (which is apparently when brain development is fully finished) and much more in control around ‘difficult’ decisions. (I do have ADHD, so tendency towards impulsivity anyway.). Not entirely sure that George’s pre-frontal cortex would be totally developed at 18.

Not entirely sure Ed's prefrontal cortex is fully developed at 38 (or however old he is).

I’m longing to hear, eventually, why George left the party early. Presumably rejection, or blank ignoring, from one of his crushes. (He did go to a party, not just pretend that?)

Don’t recall any clues in preceding days. And I don’t suppose it matters unless any partygoer is needed to attest to how much, or little, he drank.

@Darker Wasn’t she a make-up baby after one of Brian’s boring affairs?
Jenny's.
Alice was unpleasant to Ruairí.

Harsh but hilarious

Yes she was. But she’s a human being and was hurt by what happened. She saw her mother devastated by Brian’s behaviour, but was expected to just fall in line when Jenny decided to accept Ruari.

Kate dealt with the Aldridge parenting by adopting a rebellious lifestyle, refusing to pander to Jenny or Brian, going missing for months, and settling in South Africa. She struggled massively as a parent herself.

I don't think I'd have been too happy to find out I had a little half-brother from my father's extra-marital affair.

Kate had always been rebellious.