Archers thread #171: Harvest's nearly over – but will George ever reap what he has sown? 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 have been delighted with a hand-painted squirrel tray for your 40th, as shown below, 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 https://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.)

All I have to say about current storylines for now is that I want the George Alice crash stuff to come to a resolution, sooner rather than later, and I also want to hear very little indeed of Alistair, Denise and Paul maundering on. More of Jakob would be very welcome. His brother can come back any time too.

I now declare this thread open for business!

It is time she stopped allowing her child to be her boss.

Either that or she reasons he'll refuse to believe her because he thinks the sun shines out of Clive and habitually treats Emma with contempt.

That episode was so boring and silly that none of us have anything to say.
Oh apart from Emma / Fallon, thought E was going to break down and tell her about George.

Well that was the stupidest episode ever. Don’t be telling old man Horribin that his hideously criminal son is around. Someone will slip up! I adore The Archers, I’ve listened all my life, or at least life I can remember. My mother listened so we all had to listen, but that was just a rubbish episode.

Maybe they should tell Bert, and listen to him say he doesn't want to see the son he has always despised and disliked?

And then ask George if he knows what it was Clive got a twelve-year sentence for doing, and why this might have something to do with his being disliked in Ambridge.

It is likely that the only member of his family who actually wants him around is George, and the only one who feels any sympathy for him is Brad. And in Brad's case that is on the basis of never actually having met him, as far as I know.

I was sad to learn that Fallon is intending a vegan café. Not only will it be a stupid source of conflict with local farms (Brookfield, I suppose) to make unneeded drama, but IRL that would also massively lower her chances of success. She's obviously the best baker around the local area, and freed from the shackles of Tom's desire to insist she uses up spare veg in random viennoisserie she should do well. But there's a much smaller customer base looking for vegan food (especially butter, egg, and cream free cakes). How many people in Ambridge would realistically go for that?

But she's always been that way jnclined, doing plastic free and all sorts. And it will be different from Bridge Farm, the Bull, Grey Gables, Ian's pizza.

Kate will be offering lots of helpful advice… it’s a bit of a weird idea though to remove the storyline opportunity to be in direct competition with the tearooms. And presumably she’d lose a lot of her outside catering prospects too which seemed to be part of the catalyst in the first place.

I suppose Clive is a clumsy device to show the Horrobin crossroads George is at from a seesawing between life long bad-un / goodie perspective.

I thought the vegan bubble had burst? I read an article a couple of months ago saying the number of vegan meat substitutes on supermarket shelves had dropped, and M&S seems to have stopped doing its vegan sponge cake

To be fair to Susan, she was the only one who didn't sound like a blithering idiot. Tracey started well; she and Susan started off like 2 grown-ups having a grown- up conversation, then Tracey lost it.

Brad is a pompous little prat- there's an air of "behold a man has spoken" to a lot of the stuff that comes out of his mouth. And he seems to still be in thrall to George.

I wanted to slap Brad for his pompous pontificating about things he knows nothing about.

Maybe Brad too needs to be asked if he knows what the crimes are that Clive has been convicted of committing.

They could then tell him, starting with "holding up his local post office with a gun and not allowing the postmistress to call an ambulance for the old man who had a heart attack as a result", and going on through beating up a man of seventy whom he suspected of shopping him, slashing (and killing) horses because he hadn't bothered to find out who now owned The Stables, and firebombing a house with two elderly women in it because he wanted to kill the man who lived there but was not at home that night.

Clive isn't just an evil little scrote; he is a very stupid evil little scrote. And he has been caught because of sheer stupidity, several times (the firebombing, he got himself covered in petrol which went up in flames, and was badly burnt, so trying to pretend he wasn't there was never on the cards and he ended up in the prison infirmary). Not a good person to imitate, on the whole, and definitely not one a nice lad like Brad ought to sympathise with.

Quite. A lot of meat alternative companies have found that their funding has dried up or their products aren’t selling because people have realised that meat alternatives are ultra-processed. I used to eat them but not any more, I’d rather support farmer who have good welfare standards and care about the land they farm.

I certainly wouldn’t see this as the time to open a vegan cafe, no matter how much Mia will approve.

He does kind of have a point. If Bert wants to see Clive he should be able to, this could be their last chance.

I think Brad has a good brain but zero in the way of social skills - let's be honest, he's a boy, and where would he have learned them? It's not as though Tracy is a great role model. I do very much enjoy Tracy, though!

Mia is similar, but without the brain and plus the sort of self-righteous bossiness that invites strangulation.

No he doesn't have a point.

If Clive genuinely wanted to see his father there is absolutely no reason why he couldn't just turn up at his father's house. He turned up at Emma's door. Clive doesn't need anyone's permission to visit his father.

And Brad's tone of voice. I don't like the expression "mansplaining" but by golly that was an excellent example of "Bradsplaining" to his mother and aunt. Twerp.

It was the assumption by Brad that he knows better than his mother and aunt that irritated me.

Hmmm, is the horrobin male destined to be an arse? Are there any good horrobin men?

Who was the seventy year old who suffered st Clive's hands, Asking?

Also did the whole Keith barn fire thing happen on Extra - cos that would explain why I didn't remember it clearly?

I don't think Brad's like that, just an over eager nerd wanting to share his wisdom!

If Bert wants to see Clive. Not the other way round.

Wisdom? He is too thick to notice that if Clive wanted to see Bert, there's nothing stopping him.

That’s kind of what mansplaining is though. A belief that his opinion and ‘wisdom’ is the right answer

George Barford. To split a hair, he was 69 when Clive hit him from behind and then laid into him with his boots while George was on the ground; Will turned up and frightened Clive off by possibly being able to recognise him.

On that occasion Clive was eventually caught because he couldn't resist stealing George's very recognisable watch, and then giving it to his ex-girlfriend Sharon, who lived in Ambridge and wore it there, of course. Christine identified it. Sharon was shocked and horrified, though not as much as she was when Clive was later discovered also to have set fire to George's house, while Christine and Jill were in it overnight and George was not.

The Keith Barn Fire was in the main programme, and happened late in the night of Wednesday 11th July, 2012's episode, and continued in the early hours of 12th and the following episode

This is so bizarre. I really don’t understand what the sw are doing