Archers thread #190: Carry on, Cleo! Best new character for ages. 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 be delighted to have your wedding reception across the lawn from the local Flower & Produce Show, 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.)

Charlotte Smith must have been delighted to get back to Countryfile and Farming Today. What a pile of piffle tonight. Ah well.

When is George expected back? It can't be long now, surely. It occurs to me that I can't recall whether he's ever spoken on air to Ruairi. As their actors are currently the best (IMO) amongst the younger members of the cast, I hope they will cross swords in some way.

And finally, I can't mention Carry on Cleo without squeezing in one of the best lines ever written (Denis Norden and Frank Muir have the credit): Infamy, infamy! They've all got it in for me! Currently, Lily probably feels this way.

https://youtube.com/shorts/eRnd48yTC5A?si=N05njp3uLfpSjAmI

Over to you!

Why? He's shy but intelligent and honest and seems ok to me.

No humour, wit, spark or charm, far too anxious, no self-confidence, complete lack of social skills.
Intelligence and honesty are basic requirements but there needs to be far far more than that to make someone an attractive prospect as a partner.

He’s cool and witty! I remember once he asked Mia something and she was ready to launch into a lecture on the topic - the way he blandly stated that they didn’t have time to argue about it was 😍😍😍

(It’s true the SWs sometimes insert nonsense into his dialogue. I ignore it.)

complete lack of social skills. He can be awkward, but he has empathy.
He doesn't need anything special to attract a partner. The SWs will find one if they need to.

Neil and Susan getting together was not really very pleasant; she set her cap at him and pursued him until she managed to get pregnant, and he then had to marry her because Bert Horrobin owned a shotgun. Sordid, rather.

They will, but I was explaining why I think he's quite odd and why I wouldn't have wanted my daughter to get together with someone like him, neither would I have wanted someone like him as my son in law.

Given a choice between Brad and George as a son-in-law I'd pick Brad every time.

But if your daughter liked him why would you not want her to go out with him? It's not as if he's dangerous.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime , I think that was fairly normal for those days. I'm younger than Susan (not by much, Elizabeth's age), but there were shotgun marriages back in my youth.
One acquaintance had the most enormous wedding bouquet.

A lot of the marriages lasted, but I think the social stigma around being divorced or a single mother was different then.
Farmers tend to behave themselves when they have the prospect of losing half the business.
The 'Brians' were married to 'JDs'.

@Buxusmortus , don't women tend to marry men who are like their father?

Emma was born in 1984, by which time the pill had long been available to unmarried woman and the 1967 Abortion Act covered "mistakes", provided you had a sympathetic GP.

I expect things were very different in Ambridge (twinned with the early 50s), but I reckon the ghastly Susan (born 1963) got upduffed on purpose. Poor Neil, tied to the Horror-bins and they Grundies, not to mention Alice!

I certainly didn't! I loved my Dad, but he was a very different person from my husband. I certainly have very little in common with my mother-in-law. My SIL could hardly be more different from my Mum. Etc etc. The thought of an arranged marriage gives me the heebie jeebies because there would have been no chance of my parents picking someone like my husband, to whom I have been happily married for well over 40 years.

@Gonners , she didn't get pregnant on her own. Strange as to why the blame is on her and not the father.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g , my mother's taste was awful. She married my father and I suspect that she had planned to do so, we're not close so I can't ask.
My father wasn't awful, but he wasn't perfect.
My mother isn't awful either, she's nice but I never feel she talks to me, she talks at me.

TheCrasher
she didn't get pregnant on her own. Strange as to why the blame is on her and not the father.

Mostly, I think, because Neil was going out with lots of girls and not all that interested in Susan in particular, whereas she had decided that she was going to have him whatever he thought about it. So she was responsible for what happened more than he was: she chose it, he didn't do so anything like as much.

Haha my daughter would never have chosen someone like him in a million years so it's a moot point!
But in her younger years she had some boyfriends I didn't like at all, so just because she chose them doesn't automatically mean I approved.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime , that situation rings true for me. A neighbour was seeing a young farmer but he was seeing others too. Neighbour told him the good news in a nightclub. Word was that she had 'trapped' him.
A girl from the village was determined to marry one of the farmers. It was a bit embarrassing. She didn't (AFAIK) get pregnant, but she did marry him. Apparently her MIL had done the same.
Those three marriages lasted. It worked for them.
I can think of many more examples. The marriages probably worked because the wives wanted them to work and there was too much to lose in a divorce.

I've not heard that before. It isn't the case with me or my siblings and cousins. Our dads were wonderful men and so are/were our husbands, but in different ways.
But in my daughter's case her father died when she was a small child and I brought her up alone so she had no father figure.

It's an old adage.

What a dire situation it would be for a young woman if those two were their only options.

@Buxusmortus , sorry for your loss.

Neil and Susan's marriage has lasted, but that doesn't make the way Susan forced it to happen any more praiseworthy: she didn't know that she was setting up a marriage which would last, just that she wanted the best prospect in the village (and one she had a crush on) to get her away from her appalling family.

Not sure "blame" is the right word, though. She was in greater part responsible for what happened, perhaps? It was certainly her idea rather than his, and she manipulated it into becoming fact.

I’ve never understood this ridiculous concept of women trapping men by ‘getting pregnant’.

How does that work? Are men routinely forced by women to have sex without a condom? My brothers were told by my mother (to their horror) that they should only dispense with condoms when they were ready to accept fatherhood as the outcome of sexual intercourse.

Blaming Susan for forcing poor Neil into marriage is a very depressing example of internalised misogyny.

Women's fertility is generally controlled by women themselves. No idea what contraception Susan was using at that time, but I was at university then and the pill was easily obtained as were the coil and diaphragm.

I would suggest it's highly unusual for a man to continue to use condoms if the woman says she's on the pill, or has sorted contraception out, much more so at that time as there wasn't really a focus on STDs and it was pre aids.

Abortion was also available on the NHS.

Over the years I have heard quite a few women talking of how they had an "accidental" pregnancy brought about by deliberately forgetting to take the contraceptive pill. I don't think it's at all unlikely that Susan might have done that, knowing that Neil was a decent man who would then probably feel obliged to marry her.

I don't think it's misogynistic to say that if women really want to get pregnant without the full agreement of the man, it's not that difficult. Of course Susan took the chance Neil might not marry her, but I'm sure she knew he wouldn't have left her on her own.

All of this. By 1983, the year Susan got pregnant, the pill was widely available even to the unmarried, as it had not been ten years earlier. And Susan saying she was on the pill, as were many, many other young women, would not have been something Neil would call out as a lie. Nor would he then have used a condom, which would in effect have been calling her a liar.

Yes, "accidental" pregnancy and coerced marriage did happen. It happened to a friend of mine. His marriage was a disaster, in part because the resulting baby looked absolutely nothing like him by the time it was four, but was the spitting image of someone they both knew before said "friend" left for London and never got in touch. It was assumed by almost everyone that the woman knew (possibly had been told) that the "friend" was not going to acknowledge the baby, so she swiftly framed someone else.

In TA, Emma's plan was to claim that the baby she was carrying was Will's, even though she was absolutely sure it was Ed's, and marry Will, foisting a cuckoo in his nest onto him. It backfired on her when DNA testing (not available in 1984) showed the baby to be Will's after all, and Will divorced her because she had left him to shack up with his brother.

My first serious boyfriend, we at my parents, and a man turned up, who had known my father decades before. "Ah!" he annouced to boyfriend, "you must be his son, you look just like him."

Took a later boyfriend to visit friends. "He looks really like first boyfriend."

And there were many similarities between my father and most recent ex...

(I've never married, but the first and last are the two I might have said yes to, had they asked.)