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!

Blimey, that moved things on a bit, didn’t it?

So Amber and George were having a tryst somewhere (however much it was restricted to a snog) AND it seems the CCTV deletion was unrelated as it was Fallon assuming she was protecting Harrison (who, in turn, suspected Fallon of knowing more than she did, only to find out she suspected HIM in a rather neat circular thing). All of which I think we predicted here!

I can’t see another termination storyline, but an “Amber having George’s baby but leaving for his best friend” is a bit too close to history repeating itself with the Emma/Ed/Will triangle. So my money’s on a miscarriage. Or Brad leaving for the medium term - maybe taking up a placement or similar - so Amber and George can get on with pretending they’re happy together.

I think you might be right about Brad leaving Ambridge at some point because it will be too painful watching George and Amber playing happy families. But he'll be right back to save his fair maiden when it all falls apart. Again.

She does indeed love the drama. Otherwise (o paraphrase the jolly miller) she cares for nobody, no not she, and nobody cares for her.

She does love the drama and attention. She also probably thinks she's going to be one of those "mummy influencer" types and can monetise the pregnancy and baby.

Pip wimped out of a termination, for reasons never really elucidated (the character as I saw her would have been entirely pragmatic about it), Chelsea dithered ridiculously for Plot Reasons (I am still fairly sure a wheel came off there somewhere because it was So Bloody Daft), maybe Amber will just get on with getting rid like a sensible female, and then Brad/Chelsea/Tracy will spill the beans and Hell will genuinely be unleashed.
Meanwhile, my little book of obstetric horror stories will be bedtime reading.

Just hope that we are not in for another horrible domestic abuse story with George feeding off his suspicions around Amber and Brad.

I would rather hear about plate meters and red mite.

A good storyline would have been George being seriously incapacitated and the difficulties of caring for such a person in a rural area. Emma/Ed giving up their hard-won jobs, Amber flapping around (or stepping up gallantly), the paucity of any support for unpaid carers, the sheer unrelenting slog of it. But no, he recovers from what we were told was a fractured skull in five minutes and is back to normal in a week.

If I were Fallon I would say to Harrison " ok I am going to the police to tell them about me wiping the tape because I thought it was you. Byeeeeee!".
Harrison is such an arse, he totally brushed over this other? Woman, even though he said it was serious, and Fallon didn't say " what do you mean serious?".
That would be the first thing I would ask not talk about a tape I've wiped.
Can't see them lasting much longer and I don't think Fallon loves him anymore anyway.

Hopefully the George-Amber-Brad is same scenario but a different outcome rather rwhashing what happened 20 odd years ago.

Imagine having George as your Dad…

I would rather not thanks.

the SW are only caplable of Writing Plot By Numbers.

it is tedious. I am so bloody cross.

I haven't gone back to check (and won't) but I thought the WUN was a colleague as well as a single mother with children. In his chat with the Inspector who never was, Harrison made it perfectly clear that he loved the idea of being part of a family with children. He'll never truly get over Fallon's revelation that she doesn't want children.

Amber's bombshell. Pah. Over on the spoilers thread I was saying the other day it was looking this way but I couldn't believe they would really go for such an obvious soap cliché. Silly me.

Yes the WUN is the main bit of Truth and Lies that stood out for me....emotional affair territory and sounds like Fallon has started to catch wind of it. She should have ditched him after the crash when he was acting like a selfish lunatic.

Deleting the footage would be perverting the course of justice if a) Fallon deleted it in relation to the incident and b) knew that the police wanted to see it.

So Harrison is correct in that respect although how they'd know who did it remains unknown. That said, if the police have grounds to suspect it's been deleted deliberately (which the backup also having been deleted would indicate), they might dig further...

Harrison didn’t actually deny it was him did he? I may be wrong but I think he said things like “ what are you talking about?”but never actually said it wasn’t him.

i don’t care anyway . They can hit the lot of them over the head as far as Im concerned. And another bloody young Mum pregnancy..,

I imaging SWs have an index card system that they flip through idly “ surprise pregnancy … not had one of those for at least a year.. shall we give that a go?”

On point b): How would Fallon have known the police wanted to see the footage before they had said so to Jolene? She must have deleted it before Jolene went looking for it so she could show it to the police. So the timing doesn't fit: as soon as the police said they wanted it Jolene went to find it, and found it was already gone.

And Harrison wasn't in Ambridge to blow his mouth to all and sundry including his wife about the police being sure to want to see CCTV footage from somewhere that was nowhere near the place where a crime had been committed. Someone having been in the Bull carpark is evidence of nothing whatever except that they were in the Bull carpark, like so many others in Ambridge will have been that night, so what use the police thought they could have made of such footage baffles me completely: they might just as well have gone through the footage from the CCTV at Hollerton Junction railway station to see who was on that.

I don't know why it took EVERYONE (police included) to ask for camera footage. It is the FIRST thing they should have asked for, given the Bull already is on their speeddial (as it were)

it's just more of the absolute shoddy Scriptwriting we have to put up with.

This new baby might just be the final nail in my Archers coffin.

I had no idea Kylie was Clive’s child! Sharon’s daughter, and they lived in a caravan?

But the place George fell and hit his head/got clobbered by Harrison was nowhere near the Bull, and George had not been in the pub. It happened in a wood on the other side of the river. Why would anyone assume the pub car park was relevant?

Yes, that would have been an interesting, if depressing, storyline. Actually it reminds me of a storyline in Twin Peaks where a character who was violent to his wife had some sort of catastrophic head injury and she had to care for him (I think)

I can’t help feeling sorry for George. He’s awful, but so self-sabotaging. The actor is really good!

Harrison’s sanctimony really takes the biscuit. I couldn’t forgive him for talking to me like that, if I were Fallon. I honestly thought Harrison was going to say to Fallon that she knew it was Kenton what done it, and I’d have to stop listening, as Kenton would not do such a thing.*

*alas I will never stop listening

That's the one. Went to Lancaster University, I think? Sharon and the baby lived first in the Vicarage because Jerry Buckle allowed it, then in the caravan in the yard at Bridge Farm, and then I think in council accommodation for a while but I can't remember where. Possibly one of the ones in The Green (the street, not the grassy bit in the middle of the village).

... and then she had a brief but torrid fling with John Archer, who was living with Hayley at the time (later married to Roy, stepmother to Phoebe and mother to Abbie, but now resident in her native Brum where she has a new partner). Hayley found out and chucked John out. John then had a fatal accident on Tony's vintage tractor, messing the Bridge Farm Archers up for all time in the process. Sharon left the area with Kylie and we all thought we'd heard the last of her, but then Johnnie turned up many years later and it turned out he was John's son. Sharon has been happily married for a long time to a man whose name I forget who brought Johnnie up as his own. They live in Leeds.

I think Sharon's surname was Richards, but wasn't Johnny called Phillips? I don't know which was her maiden name and which was her married name.

Richards was her maiden name. She sounded like the Caramac bunny (shows age). IIRC Pat found a pair of Sharon's knickers in her bed and was outraged. Those were the days.