Archers thread #167: Welcome to Ambridge, the world capital of loose ends! 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'd like The Archers to be wall to wall election conversations for the next month, 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.)

Over to you!

I'm still intrigued as to why Jason's red-headed niece who also works in the abattoir was mentioned a few weeks back.
A love interest for Freddie? That would be very complicated.

He was in the overalls he wears to care for his chickens while she was eating, @harriethoyle.

I don’t think of Lily, Paul and Josh living together as a storyline in itself - more a narrative situation that enables three of the bright young things of the village to have conversations, create events and push forward storylines in a ‘natural’ setting. All three are single (more or less - we never hear Etienne) and too independent for it to be believable that they’d live in the parental home, but if they each lived alone in Ambridge, or in a flat share with strangers in Borchester, we’d rarely hear from them.

The writers are generally very keen not to have characters living alone (hence the former oddity of Jim and Jazzer, and now Jim and Alistair) unless aloneness is the character’s usp like Joy (fantasy fam) or Alice (secret drinking).

My goodness, they really are dragging things out. Those Grundy conversations were painful to listen to. Get to the point!

Can anyone remember what happened to the Grundy's other pony? The one that was dumped on the green just when Bartleby needed a companion?
Her name was Gem (oddly the reverse of Meg was why I recalled her existence)

Why were EdnEm so horrified at someone coming to Grange Farm to look at Bartleby when that’s what Eddie has been inviting folk to do for weeks 🤔

I think she was telling Josh to leave Paul alone because he was depressed as opposed to talking to him about it.

Edit - I've just seen Totters' post about the overalls. I missed that because my husband came in banging on about something happening the week after next that means he won't need dinner that day 🙄.

Ye gods, just when I though I couldn't bear EdnEm any less, what with the chips so large it's amazing they manage to walk, and the complete ineptitude with regards their business which will no doubt fail and be held up as Yet Another Example Of Hard-Done-By Grundys (as a PP said, they were dithering over actual work in favour of handing out flyers for actual work and they've clearly already spanked through Will's money but they've decided to buy a van on the basis of...no work whatsoever. It's only a matter of time before Ed cuts some corners and screws it all up completely).

But the idea that they would even contemplate selling an elderly horse which is settled in its home and too old to be passed from pillar to post (because all us horsey people have heard the horror stories of "retirement homes" where the horses are sold on) is unspeakable.

Ed can take his financially-flexible morals and shove them up his miserable backside. I really hope his business fails now (although we will have to listen to the hand-wringing-yokel whining).

<steps off soapbox>

Exactly!

Well I'd entirely missed the overalls snark @CaptainMyCaptain with no excuse other than zoning out!!

@BrightYellowDaffodil I strongly agree. If someone offered to buy almost 15 YO DDog I'd reply in words of one syllable regardless of the price...

I was baffled by that, too. The only difference is that Meg gave them advance notice.

Also, re the Grundies - Ed bought a big tractor so that he could work as an independent contactor. Does he still have the tractor? Is the idea that he combines the tree surgery with the tractor stuff? Why wasn't the tractor business the success that Ed anticipated it would be?

TottersDeterminedlyTowardsThePollingStation
He was in the overalls he wears to care for his chickens while she was eating, @harriethoyle.

They were however freshly laundered, and clean, according to what he said; he had not been mucking out the chickens in them before sitting down to eat his breakfast. It was just Lily taking the opportunity to be snide and unpleasant: she never misses one of those.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime i thought he had been out already to the chickens (hence their slight back and forth about him having a second breakfast?) and he was saying they had been clean on that morning before he’d gone to see the chickens.

I can’t be bothered to listen again to check but that was my understanding. However I’m more sympathetic to Lily than many on here (ie I don’t actively hate her) so I tend to interpret what she says fairly neutrally/having an understandable reason

I don’t hate Lily but find her character annoying. I feel she’s being written and acted like that

as opposed to pip who is badly acted

She's regularly been snide and bitchy for the past fifteen years, so I have rather given up on giving her the benefit of the doubt when what she says sounds snide and/or bitchy.

She only lives in that house at all because Josh allowed her to become a sub-tenant there: the tenancy is his. He really would be better off if he moved away and found somewhere he could afford on his own, instead of having two frankly awful and essentially bullying housemates. (And how Lily pays her rent I don't know; the original idea behind her moving out of Lower Loxley Hall was for her to be closer to her college in Borchester or possibly Felpersham, but she's moved two miles further away from either by moving to Ambridge and I don't see Elizabeth paying for that. Yes, Lily had her oh-so-important job selling fitted kitchens, but she gave that up in September 2022 and I don't think she'd have that much in the way of savings if she was working on commission.)

I think Josh was chickeny already when he sat down for breakfast, so I understand Lily’s point of view there.

I thought Meg was going to turn out to be interested in George rather than Bartleby. I’d like Ed & Emma to succeed in their business. But they don’t seem to have thought about it much.

Would have been so much better if ed really had wobbled and Will stepped in

they seem to have no sense to run a business

If Lily doesn't like living in the same house as a chicken farmer the remedy is in her own hands.

And how Lily pays her rent I don't know

Is she being paid for working at Grey Gables, or is that an internship thing?

We were told it is an internship.

She is an intern but may be paid for it too. Paid internships are becoming more common.

Anyway, she is clearly destined, at least in the short term, to work there as paid employment very soon. The insistence on her having a long, empty summer stretched out in front of her coupled with the need for Roy to be written out give a certain inevitability to it.

Admittedly I often get most of my Archers information by reading a short summary online each day but Nick Warburton is a well-respected playwright who has written many of the afternoon plays which are on R4, some linked here. He’s also done adaptations of the Barchester Chronicles (see here). Some of his plays are now on Radio4Extra.

I think his first involvement with The Archers was when he helped Lynda with The Canterbury Tales and he later started writing Archers episodes. I think he stopped for a while but must have started again. He also helped Lynda with Ambridge’s Mystery Plays.

As writers seem to write a week’s episodes and then it’s someone else’s turn, I imagine they aren’t solely responsible for the plot lines each week. The actual words the actors speak though, yes, oh dear.

Internships should always be paid. One of the reasons social mobility has gone backwards in the UK is that it became normal for unscrupulous profit-obsessed employers to offer unpaid jobs to people desperate to get experience in hard-to-get-into industries. Those opportunities were useless to people without substantial savings or family support, who needed to work full-time to pay the bills and often couldn't live in or commute to London or other big cities.

If Grey Gables has a job that needs doing and can be done by an undergraduate, they should be paying for the work.

A week here or a couple of days there of work experience, observing but not actually doing anything, is a different matter, but that's not what Oliver offered Lily.

She seems to be running the place so should definitely be paid

It depends. I agree that morally speaking the majority of internships should be paid, to stop it being a rich kids' club. But what she is doing is integral to her course, she told Oliver that it was a mandatory placement, so in that sense I do think it's different from e.g. a summer internship that a student might choose to do to boost their CV at a time when they're not at uni anyway. This is essentially her uni work for the term and she'll be financed as she is through the rest of the degree. It's not even as though she has any increased travel or living costs associated with the placement.

Anyway, she might be being paid already, but IMO it's not morally as clear cut as if she were doing a non-compulsory placement.