Archers thread #189: Brian reaps what he sows, in spite of himself. Discuss The Archers here.

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Over to you!

Doesn’t she live in London?

afaik, yes. London clearly has no public transport at all. And the supermarkets don't deliver. And taxis don't exist. It must be hard.

Oh, I’m certainly hoping it’s Ruairi - bringing his decades of specialist farming knowledge!

Definitely Paul.

(Trying to remember if Adam has been habitually kind to Ruairi - who can be vengeful. He and George share the ability to weaponise Dad, without Dad having the slightest idea he’s been used. I adore Ruairi as a character - but Adam should be shaking in his boots at the mere mention of his name. Unless Ruairi owes him for anything?)

Yeah that’s weird. He’s secondary school age so if he really needed to be driven ime uber/local taxi firm relied on

such poor plotting

I think Adam was fairly kind to Ruairi, and certainly never did anything like meandrunkAlice launching that tirade against him.

Well, they have complicated parental histories and deceased mothers in common - they ought to be friends.

I just worry that Adam will share all his best ideas, and Ruairi will … shaft him.

I keep hoping that woman who turned up claiming to be related to Adam's father will be revealed as a fake, and that he and Ruairi will turn out to be fourth cousins twice removed.

This inability to look after himself is like his being unable to work Jennifer's super new kitchen, back in 2014 – I seem to remember the coffee machine baffled him then, too. I don't remember anyone saying he was losing his marbles then, nor when she refused to cook meals and bullied him into paying hundreds of thousands for a new kitchen because one of the drawers in her old kitchen was sticking. He couldn't cook for himself even in the familiar kitchen, apparently, which left me for one wondering how he had managed without starving when Jennifer went off to RSA for several weeks to visit Kate. (Though mind you, while she was in RSA she also managed to turn up at someone's door in Ambridge with a casserole for them, so maybe she was bringing him food every day through her teleportal.)

His worst ever lapse in judgement that worked very much against his own interests was back in about 2003, when he didn't tell Adam to sling his hook after the first time Adam started to try to tell him what he was allowed to do on his own farm.

While Ruairi was taking his A-levels and was displaced from his room with his parents so that Alice could occupy it, Adam and Ian gave him somewhere to live.

Okay fine but I think the storyline is showing that he’s no longer as sharp as he was and may find it harder to manage living on his own than he, or his family, expect. Arguably this is more likely because he has never really had to look after himself.

To digress for a moment, someone has pointed out on another forum that when Tom was talking to Ghastly Lawrence about Ambridge losing the cricket on Monday. he said something like "At least nobody can say that we didn't go down without a fight." Which, if you think about it for a moment, means that everybody can say that they did go down without a fight - the exact opposite of what he presumably meant.

Was this a mistake by the actor, or one by a semi-literate scriptwriter, or a brilliant piece of writing illustrating why so many listeners refer to Tom as TomTit?

I noticed that.

I hold no brief for Leonie, but if she had put her back out and was unable to do more than shuffle about in the house and perhaps needed to conserve such energy as she did have to do a bit of work, it's not surprising that she should ask her Dad for help while James was on his lengthy business trip abroad. I can't remember how old Mungo is - 12? That's a bit young to be expected to feed himself and look after his Mum as well if there's a competent adult who can step in. He'd been signed up for various summer activities which Leonie and James were presumably expecting to drive him to, so they may have been in awkward places to get to by public transport.

I can’t get past Amber sounding middle aged

I can't get past Amber. Full stop.

That episode was so terrible- Amber, Pip, Lilian, know-it-all Stella - that it was actually pleasant to hear Ruth and David.

I generally don't dislike Stella (apart from her conversion of Pip into the World's Most Unconvincing Lesbian, which to be fair I mainly blame on Pip for being Pip). But what was she was thinking, "advising" Dreary Dave? Even Ruth seemed to be on his side!

Ohhhhh - that was fascinating!

This is a small family run farm.

I cannot honestly recall David using that tone before - not even during ‘Northumberland’. Trouble coming, and it will be luscious. 😁

At least nobody can say that we didn't go down without a fight."

I don't get it. Isn't that normal speech?

No one can say we didn't give it our best shot.

Trouble coming, and it will be luscious

Ooh do you think Pip will side with her GF and follow Stella to her new farm?

🙏

No … I think it’s possible she may want Stella as part of her farm …

It's too many negatives.

"We went down without a fight" - that's bad for the team, they failed to make a strong effort against the odds.

"We didn't go down without a fight" - that's good, they did in fact put up a fight.

"Everybody is saying we didn't go down without a fight" - that's good, the world has seen that they put up a fight.

"Nobody can say we didn't go down without a fight" - that's bad, the world is unable to say that they put up a fight.

Multiple negatives are confusing, so it's realistic that someone speaking might get it wrong. He should have said "Nobody can say we went down without a fight".

I haven't kept up with the thread for ages due to school holidays but at some point next week I plan to have a coffee and go back and have a good read 😆

I've been thinking for a good while why don't they just recast Debbie and bring her back into the mix permanently? Perfect timing just as Adam thinks he's finally got his hands on the farm!

It’s a fair point. Tamsin Greig is in this BBC show, due out in October, so she must have been around for a while at some stage over the past couple of years?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002hd7x/watch/p0lybnz9?at_mid=CrCUOP4DNU&at_campaign=BBC_Trailer_Riot_Women&at_medium=display_ad&at_campaign_type=owned&at_nation=NET&at_audience_id=SS&at_product=iplayer&at_brand=m002hd7x&at_ptr_name=bbc&at_ptr_type=media&at_format=image&at_objective=consumption&at_link_title=BBC_Trailer_Riot_Women&at_bbc_team=BBC

You have noticed that you aren't forced to listen, haven't you?

The point is that if the reality is that if the dairy actually needs Helen plus two staff members to cover the work, then there wasn't a genuine redundancy situation when they booted Clarrie.