Archers thread #177: Will Bridge Farm get a PassiveAggressivHaus? 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 love to have a moribund camper van parked indefinitely outside your home, 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.)

Over to you!

It’s so strange. Occasionally there’s an episode which is really engaging. One of the George/Emma episodes moved me to tears (but then the SL became annoying again so I pulled myself together). But so often there are silly, unbelievable or pointless SLs; personality transplants for the characters; plot details left dangling; and implausible language being used. My latest irritation is when characters use language that’s inappropriate for their generation or background which seems to happen a lot.

This week the programme has plumbed new depths.

As someone who grew up on a farm can I just say the idea that we’d put life on hold for lost/stuck visitors including cooking them breakfast, putting them up in the barn and even letting them milk the flipping moo cows is so laughable as to be borderline offensive. This week sounded like it wanted to be a channel 5 Christmas movie marketed to Americans. Is The Archers trying to break America?

The only bit I liked was Clarrie actually making a friend.

Coincidentally this week I saw an old Escape to the Country where they had a feature on beavers being introduced to, I think, a wetland area to help prevent flooding. So I was quite surprised to hear David suggesting they might actually cause flooding. Anyone know who's right about that?

The programme did seem to suggest that you could get some funding for introducing beavers, so I hope Rex has the sense to apply for it.

@WitcheryDivine not to mention arranging for random unknown men to sleep in a barn alongside women, including 2 teenage girls.

I saw Easter crackers in the UK for the first time this year, albeit little individual ones to use as table decorations. I think they may have been Emma Bridgewater.

I didn't buy them. I'm too old and stuck in my ways to see crackers as anything other than a Christmas thing.

Can you blame them?

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Thanks for the link to the American crackers. They sadly don't seem to have a 'snap'. But the presents inside are a lot more inspiring than our British crackers.

No Quorn in America?!

I hate these stupid idea storylines - this scam one, the Christmas carol weirdness. Can't we just have an everyday story of country folk anymore? I'd much prefer some "boring" conversation about Tracey putting her Christmas decorations up in November and other villagers tutting....

Although listening to the podcast, it sounded like the BBC made the Archers include a scam into the storyline, so I guess they had to. But they could have had the one family turn up at Brookfield, turned away, found sleeping in the car, and allowed them to sleep in the barn. That would be just about believable but 3 lots of randoms and a silly 'heartwarming' ending was far too much.

They all had Such A Lovely Time that it was more like an advert encouraging people to fall for scams than a warning.

If you had seen it being made that you would understand!

I had to post to say I am still raging (in a very quiet, polite Radio 4 way) about this weeks episodes of the archers. I have been cringing throughout. I normally listen on catchup in bed each evening before I go to sleep but last night especially I was so irritated I took ages to drop off!

who is writing these episodes? The dialogue is absolutely awful and that is really saying something. The characters all behaving in completely unbelievable ways.

the ‘American’ lady’s accent - I thought I was listening to one of those terrible afternoon R4 dramas.

the way each episode ended, just so rubbish, as cliche as ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’.

are the other characters on strike? Have the actors all been involved in some mass scandal? I’m totally bamboozled why four random completely stereotyped and two-dimensional characters have been added. Did the four actors win a competition to be in the archers or something?

I may have to admit defeat and stop listening if this continues. And I’ve been a listener for nearly 50 years!!!

Eekomouse
who is writing these episodes? The dialogue is absolutely awful and that is really saying something. The characters all behaving in completely unbelievable ways.

Sarah McDonald Hughes has been boasting of having written them in the BBC podcast about the programme, I am told.

Why is no one (archers resident or listener) concerned about the fact no one has taken down the holiday listings, nor the borsetshire beaks website and so presumably they are still available to book. I’m terrified the storyline is going to continue with new people showing up each week. Even Jakob has given up trying to prevent bookings by booking his cottage himself and has decided that moving the location of the key will suffice.

Driving me up the wall 🤬

It has been so, so bad!

Why in God’s name would the Brookfield Archers let total strangers stay in their barn? They don’t know anything about these people! I’d love to hear Josh’s take on it. And I may be a curmudgeon but if I went on holiday to an unremarkable village in the Midlands, was scammed out of what I’d paid for accommodation, and my spouse insisted on staying in a barn on a camp bed followed by making me have dinner with Eddie Grundy, I would be straight on the phone to a solicitor, if not worse. The utter drivel about Thanksgiving dinner - it was painful.

I don’t believe Ruth gives two hoots about anyone except David, Pip and possibly Ben, and I was dying inside at her sympathetic voice during her conversation with Ellie. Who cares! NOBODY, THAT’S WHO!

I was only half listening but was Clarrie (we never have 2 ha'porth to rub together) Grundy throwing a Thanksgiving dinner for all these randoms?

I don't know anything about raising turkeys but, if the Grundys are raising them for the Christmas market, would a random turkey be ready to eat nearly a month early? Or should I assume there is a lot of demand for Thanksgiving turkeys in Borsetshire and they are raising them for that too?

I don't know why I am even trying to make sense of this complete load of drivel. I think there must be some primitive part of my brain that is desperately trying to rationalise the rubbish we have been treated to this week. If it is realistic for the Grundys to have a spare turkey ready a month early, then perhaps everything else will seem realistic too.

Even Jakob has given up trying to prevent bookings by booking his cottage himself and has decided that moving the location of the key will suffice.

Did he say he was moving it out of the key safe? Unless I have misremembered (and it's very likely indeed that I have, but listening again is not on my to-do list), when Chuckie and Wossername rolled up the key wasn't where they had been told it would be, but they found it anyway. If it was in a key safe, there are 10,000 possible 4-digit permutations of the numbers 0 to 9 and one would have expected Chuck to still have been ploughing his way through them when Jakob or Kate finished work! Unless, of course, Jakob had cunningly set it to 0000!

Please make it stop.
I feel cheated and betrayed, having still given vanishing time to this utter tosh in the vain hope that something will miraculously arise like sourdough, or a stinkhorn.

I think it's called the sunk cost fallacy. (Not phallus impudicus)

How can the actors bear it?

Such an utter waste of everyone's time. Listeners, cast, and SWs (who need to get back to Afternoon Play, that no one ever listens to).

Gonners
Even Jakob has given up trying to prevent bookings by booking his cottage himself and has decided that moving the location of the key will suffice.
Did he say he was moving it out of the key safe?

He doesn't have a key-safe, but he has moved his key from under the flowerpot where he had one living in case Kate locked herself out. (I say this because I bet that's why it was there.) Faith and Chuck were looking for a key safe and there wasn't one., so they looked under flowerpots.

Jakob and Kate had gone out for a walk together when C&F rolled up at the cottage.

She wasn't exactly boasting ... More that she was responsible for the script ... She talked about working with TV show ' rip off Britain' on the story line ...

More a case of admitting, I'd imagine.

when C&F rolled up at the cottage

To be fair to the SWs, they did give them the right initials.

The key was under a plant pot.

Jakob would never leave keys under a plant pot. Jakob would never lose or forget his keys so he would never need to have a spare set hidden but Jakob, in the vanishingly unlikely event of that ever happening, keeps a spare set at the surgery.