Archers thread #181: Panto Week's behind you! Was that the nadir? 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 enjoy playing badminton with Derek Fletcher, 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.)

Will it be onwards and upwards for TA now, or do we fear even more of these special weeks (Martin and a Christmas Carol, Scam Week, Panto Week) and sudden reinventions of long-established characters (Neil)? I for one have had enough of all that. I want a quiet period of change counting in the village shop, farming talk with suitable sound effects and village gossip over coffee at Terum or a pint in The Bull. Slowly developing storylines featuring the full cast, not a subset for a few weeks with no mention of the others, and all behaving in character. Not holding my breath we'll get any of that, though!

Over to you.

Maybe they need to have a parent of teenagers/or somebody who encounters plenty to do blind interviews of the young prospective cast.

Zainab might look youthful IRL, but she sounds a good decade older than her radio-self; I'd have guessed her at 35.

Khalil at least sounds like a 17/18 year old.

I'll end this by commenting that llamas (and camelids) have very unusual small antibodies. Pharmacologists are quite excited about the potential uses of these nanobodies.

If he wants to be a vet he'd better start getting some enthusiasm for it if he's going to get A* grades which presumably he'd need for veterinary school.
Or knowing the way the scriptwriters are at the moment, he'll be able to piss around, come out with mediocre GCSEs, 2 low grade A levels and miraculously get a place in the best vet school in the country, all because he "just loves animals".

If khalil is 13 and the actor is 18 it doesn’t bode well for the future tbh

no doubt Alastair will appeal to the vet partners who will fast track khalil🙄

perhaps something bad happened to Zainab in the past and that’s why they’ve made her so unpleasant (not that it excuses her nastiness)

It's also very strange that Zainab, a doctor's daughter, is allowed to seemingly have no plans for her future apart from working for Deliveroo ( or whoever). I find that extremely unrealistic, fine on a temporary basis but we've heard nothing at all about her future educational or training plans.
Maybe as @Bruisername says above, something happened to her which both explains her nasty personality, and why her parents are happy for her not to be studying or training.

You're right, @Agapornis, I'd forgotten about Bert. I was thinking more of people, mostly women, working as carers, though. On this small island of 5000 people there are apparently at least 20 people working as carers in the community for the council-run service, an indeterminate number working as private carers and another contingent at the care home. I assume Jill Archer (94), the oldest person still living in Ambridge as far as I know, has the same sort of genes as David Attenborough and is still active, healthy, mobile and perfectly able to wash, dress and so on without help. Some of my Mum's friends are like this, and she was herself until very recently, but I think it's unusual in the over 90s.

Zainab's mother is not happy at all about her daughter's current directionless state. I think she was all set to go to university last autumn but deferred or turned down the place at the last minute. (Not 100% certain I've got this right, though. There may also have been A level grade problems, I suppose.)

I wondered if the books thing was supposed to nod to Khalil maybe being dyslexic in the usual subtle Archers way 😂but equally likes he’s just seen shelves sorted by colour on Insta etc (I have an otherwise normal seeming family member who does it😣).

He’s clearly being set up as a future farmer as is Henry. Not sure how K will get a farm but we don’t know much about his parents so maybe his dad is from a super rich family and he is about to inherit ££££ from his late grandfather and prepare to buy whichever farm becomes available.

*equally likely

My DD arranges her books by colour and size. It makes me and her DH feel murderous. All three of us are English graduates so it is incomprehensible to two of us. It's not done for the Instas (which she doesn't do) - she just values what it looks like over actually being able to find a book quickly. It's very upsetting - I thought I had brought her up to know right from wrong, but clearly I failed.

I would be able to find whatever book I wanted by whichever system, because I seem to do it by exact place on shelf. Out of deference to DH I categorise the fiction by author surname, but I don't need to do that for myself; and his history books and my englit studies books are pretty-much random. We just know where each book is.

But God help anyone who moved my books around for no good reason: I would have to kill them and theen put everything back where it was. Bye bye, Khalil....

We had a dementia SL with Jack Woolley and I recall that being quite moving. We do seem to be due another one given the number of elderly folk in Ambridge.

At the time of the Jack Woolley story I had no personal experience of dementia and couldn't judge how well it was done, although a friend told me at the time it was nothing like as grim as the reality. That's probably understandable - anything too depressing would probably have listeners switching off in their droves.

I am very sorry to hear others are dealing with the sad problem of elderly parents in decline. I'm in this position myself at the moment - after two serious chest infections in the last few months my DM has changed out of all recognition from the capable, lively woman who celebrated her 95th birthday in the autumn and she is now having to have carers in to keep her safe and make sure she eats. I've spent most of the last two months staying with her and trying to sort all of this out. It's so sad and I can't believe she has gone downhill so quickly.

I'm not sure I'd want to listen to a similar sad decline in TA if I'm honest, so it's probably for the best that the old characters just go silent and/or move to The Laurels.

I somehow missed/mentally tuned-out of the book-sorting scene. I was going to say it sounds mad to me, but although I shelf fiction alphabetically (by author, not by title!) non-fiction tends to be a lot more random. So although it's mostly by topic, big books and ex-students' theses tend to end up on the deeper bottom shelves. And we (bizarrely) have a whole small bookshelf full of small foreign dictionaries/phrase-books including "Danois sans peine". This will come in very handy should MrG (who is also rapidly heading down Alzheimer's Highway, as we choose to phrase it) lose his mother-tongue and need to speak to a Dane.

Black humour is our way of coping.

Sorry to hear that, Gonners. Three score years and ten doesn't seem long enough these days, but four score years and twelve is seeming like a bit too much at times here.

I think the Home Farm kitchen has been changed.

Love to all dealing with this. So sorry to hear about MrGonners x

The perils of futuristic kitchens. Can't they ask Siri?

My first back in the day guess that the Gills are Asian has proven to be so. It was based entirely on having taught boy withe surname, so it immediately sprang to mind.

I'm so sorry to hear about Mr Gonners x

Some of you have very hard rows to hoe at the moment, and I’m sorry for it. Wishing you well.

(This will probably take a while to appear.)

(And before I am accused of racism or something, I was shown this by my daughter's Danish girlfriend in the first place...)

I've just noticed that I wrote "I shelf fiction ..." and feel the need to make it clear that I do nothing of the sort! Like most people, I shelve it.

And now I must listen to tonight's episode, delayed by an early supper Because Football!

Everyone too stunned at the idiocy of tonight's episode to comment?

No! I want to know if the stunningly white kitchen was what Jenny had - I’m assuming not, and I am sure she didn’t have an induction hob. Why can’t Mick and Joy just google how to work one, it’s really easy? (had to do that when I arrived at a holiday let with one late and starving one night)

I am heartily fucked off with Helen and Pat making the people who cleaned the dairy to lack of perfection last time do it again the same. Also how big is the dairy?? I picture something the size of a decent restaurant kitchen plus a big store room?

Any guesses as to who Celia Sparrow is?!

She's the rival cheese- maker whom Helen wanted to refuse to give a prize to when Ian asked Helen to judge cheeses. She is also a supplier to Grey Gables

Damn Wobbly I was hoping someone here could tell me!

I must say it’s not working for me as an ominous name. Clearly a hated cheese rival.