Archers thread #194: Bottled on the Bridle Path! Discuss 75 years of 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 wishthat we'd heard the Reverend Shula preach over the festive period, 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.)

I am all Archered out after the excitement of the 75th anniversary yesterday, the special drama (Truth and Lies), the podcast, you name it. Now it looks as if George is going to pull through, the hype seems a bit overdone. So it's over to you!

And he hasn't done his time; he was released on licence after doing less than half of it.

Yes good point!

Oh my - Jakob and Kate’s meditation dialogue was glorious!

But what a lot of unrest George has stirred up around Ambridge …

I'm beginning to wonder whether George did actually just trip and fell very heavily, bashing his own head on a log while he was hot-footing away with a bottle of wine he'd pinched. He may have come to and been more aware earlier than he appeared to in hospital and have had time to see how well the "walloped-and-left-for-dead-poor-George" narrative would work for him...

The mystery of the missing free wine bottle!

I've been convinced from the start it was accidental. My first guess was a bottle being lobbed over a fence hitting him but then when I listened back it didn't sound a likely explanation and I don't think an empty bottle would be heavy enough to do much damage would it 🤣 I'm no detective! I'm sure George knows what happened though and is just looking for the sympathy vote by making out he's been attacked.

Were Kate'n'Jakob in the Bull on NYE, then? If not, how did they end up with the (now missing) free wine?

Quite a few people seem to have had wine delivered to them.

Goodness what a fraud Kate is, if she can't keep her mind from wandering for as much as twenty seconds when she is meant to be meditating.

What terrible things did George say to Fallon? I’m a recently returning listener so I’ve missed all his awful behaviour. Are all the Aldridges angry because of his framing of Alice? If she’s forgiven him, why won’t they?

He said he wished she had drowned. I'm not quite sure why, but I can see how it annoyed her mother.

There might be something in this. When Alice said she was sorry to hear about his accident George was very quick to correct her and say it was an attack wasn't he?

Said he wished he hadn't jumped to save them and had let them all drown. He was also being a bit of lech with Fallon the other day as well. Grim.

Alice is desperate to forgive George because in her mind it helps her believe that people are able to forgive her for all her past mistakes. Even though the only person who hasn't really forgiven her is herself.

Nice mention of Bethany this evening.

To be fair to Kate (just on this occasion), she wasn't actually trying to meditate, she was quite deliberately behaving as though she has the concentration of a flea, to show Jakob that it's hard to lead a meditation session.

If it was an accident who deleted the CCTV footage at The Bull, how and why?

I think the CCTV is a big red herring and will be unrelated to George ending up in hospital.

I think they may be angry with George not just because of what he did to Alice, but because what he did to her also put all of them through the wringer worrying about her being suicidal, falling off the wagon again, losing her job at the Stables, them having to look after Martha in her absence in prison and what the whole business might do to Martha, and so on. She doesn't exist in a vacuum, and her family has to carry quite a load when things are going wrong for her.

I always enjoy Kate/Jakob scenes. Those two actors play off each other very well.

Alice has long been high on my (admittedly pretty extensive) list of characters I simply don't care about either way. Drink, don't drink, whatever ... just do it off-air, please!

It was interesting to hear of Bethany through Kate. I just don’t recall her being particularly enmeshed with the Tucker clan even when she and Roy were together - which was long before Bethany was born.

And how long is it since her own children in South Africa have received much more than a card from her on their birthdays? Do the newer SWs even understand that they exist?

Have we even heard of Noluthando since the drug business that sent silly Freddie to prison? I expect we have, and I have just pressed the Delete button on it. And I had forgotten Sipho's existence. Did he ever speak?

Agree with @TheUsualChaos on that. Something else entirely.

I think the sw now wish that Kate's other life in South Africa had never happened tbh! Well done on remembering both their names! No I don't think Sipho ever spoke.

Noluthando turned up again for a funeral, and started the trouble about someone obviously having been a slave-trader because he worked for a company which had some slave-trading as part of its extensive operations. Why the Pargetters owned a large portrait of someone to whom they were in no way related was never explained, but it had a ship in the background so that can only have been a slaving vessel, right? It might have been more to the point to assume he was involved in the opium trade, really; that was a great deal more lucrative for the company.

She was surprisingly expert about John Company uniforms for someone in her early twenties from RSA.

There is no mention of an actor for Sipho in the cast lists, so I don't think he has spoken on air.

It might, as PPs have said, turn out to be a separate issue. Or it's possible someone was worried because they suspected who'd done it and destroyed any possible evidence.

My money would be on Kenton being a techno numpty and deleting the footage while trying to have a look at it.

Now that is probably the most likely scenario. Hats off to you!