Archers thread #196: Run, Rex, run! 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 like to marry Pip, 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.)

So now we know who bonked George on the head. Will the stunning revelation lead to anything interesting or credible happening? Answers on a postcard, please!

Will Alice and Rex become an item? Will Amber come to her senses? Has Adam's constant languor and fatigue now removed his ability to speak on air?

Over to you!

@Sinittaadancers , I don't remember the episode, but when George was born, Will and Emma were married, and nobody other than Emma had any reason to suspect that Will might not be the father.

Wouldn't Ed have had an inkling too?

Ed isn't the brightest, but he should have had an inkling it was a possibility.

So when Eddie told George last night that he ‘wet his head’ with Will and David, and presumably not Ed as he didn’t mention him, wouldn’t that have been a bit of an awkward thing to bring up? Will wetting a baby’s head that was supposed to be Ed’s son but was actually his.

@Sinittaadancers , I can't see why. At the time, Ed wasn't supposed to be the father, Will was.

The timeline was:
Will goes out with Emma
Emma has ONS with Ed, not long before the wedding (following years of will they, won't they stuff between them)
Ed leaves the country to avoid having to see Emma marry Will (I think Oliver gave him the money to go to Hungary)
Emma tells Will in the churchyard outside the church just before the wedding that she was pregnant. Will is delighted. Emma does not reveal that she doesn't know if he is the father.
Emma has the baby (George). Ed is back by this stage. At this point E and E are still the only people who know George's parentage is in question.

I don't remember a wetting the baby's head scene at the time, but it could easily have happened. Bit odd for Eddie to be remembering it so cheerfully now given all that followed.

I've had a really horrible thought. Probably extrapolating from very incomplete data but: assuming the car incident was to demonstrate George still doesn't have control over his temper. Babies are not a good mix with that. I hope I'm wrong, that would be a ghastly storyline.

That could be the one thing that would break my addiction.

Have had the same thoughts re George since the pregnancy was announced. Along the lines of how common it is for male partner aggressive behaviour to begin and then esculate during pregnancy and continue to do so once the baby is born. Does have potential for a long term, very slow burner in that same vein as Helen and Rob.

Emma was married to Will so it would have been assumed Will was George's father.

I was thinking not only about Amber, but the baby too.

I also took the car to be a reminder of the speeding car on the night of George’s head/bottle incident.

I would show some ‘anger’ if someone nearly ran me over.

The Blue Lights conversation was very odd.

Did George ever go to his anger management therapy?

I don’t think I could cope with partner battering, but the SWs have had George close to losing his temper quite a few times now.

I’d happily swap that sort of storyline for a few weeks of upbeat birdsong and baby animal scenes.

Blimey, would it help at all if I apologised?

I know it's never good if you have to explain a joke, but "What's-his-spelling" was only ever meant as a play on the more common "what's-his-face", adapted to make fun of people not knowing how to spell it. That was all.

For what it's worth, I am also "a member of a subject nation" but grew up somewhere else in Europe, speaking a different language entirely, so

a) I'm not fully au fait with the many and varied ways the bloody English oppress everyone else. (And each other, come to think of it - what's everyone's problem with gingers? Don't answer that)
And
b) my brain defaults to the phonetics of the language I initially learned to read and write in, and I have to "translate" between written / typed english and how it sounds, all day, every day. The only person I know with the name that sounds like "Rory", is the one in TA and the only time I have ever seen his name spelled out is here... where it is often spelled wrong, or differently to how Radio 4 spell it. I never stood a chance! So instead of throwing out a handful of scrabble tiles that sort of represented the right sound, I made an off-hand comment that was supposed to humourously point to my own ignorance.

I didn't mean to cause offense, and I'm sorry that I did.

Like @TheUsualChaos 's post.

We've had signs of George having misogynistic tendencies and a temper.
Doesn't the aggression tend to become more evident in the later stages of the pregnancy?
Amber having stayed at the Horrobins might result in George saying she slept with Brad.
Amber has already slapped George, so he might say she's the violent one.

I think the reason Irish names are so difficult to understand is that with most other European languages, you can quite easily look at a word and have a reasonable stab at it. So CUISINE, JARDIN, PICCOLA, GRACIAS etc, you know that the French generally don’t pronounce a hard T, or a hard J, and the Spanish LL is pronounced as a Y, so there are a few differences, but an Irish name like Caoimhe
is, to me as an English person, not related to the pronunciation which is KWEEVA.

so I get that Dean is irritated by many people’s struggles with spelling Irish names, but they are really hard!

@moggerhanger yes, and I wonder if it's relevant that George reminded us of his memory of Nic smacking him as a small child. Will he manage to not do the same to his own? 😕

Anyone else starting to think there may also be a risk of a ‘history repeating itself’ storyline with Amber/George/Brad? Would stir up a lot of emotions….especially on George who doesn’t seem able to control his…

@Cantsleepdontsleep , yes. Strongly suspect there will be a DV/misogyny SL.

@Mumblechum0 , you miss the point that Dean made - it's not the spelling itself, it's the mocking of the name.

I'd say Caoimhe as Keeva, but Kweeva is also valid.
Aoi appears in names like Aoife. Mh appears in names like Niamh.
If I'd only ever heard 'Keeva' and didn't know it was Irish, I'd probably think it was Keva because of Keva Coombes.

LillianGish

Can we move on from the mispelling vs mocking argument please? I think both sides have made their points comprehensively now.

I wondered whether Amber and George are slated to be the new Clarrie and Eddie in that he’s always getting into “scrapes’,never doing things the right way , feeling people are against him etc . And Amber being the voice of reason, putting up with him and so on. So in 40 odd years time (if this thread is still going) our offspring will be discussing when it all started…

Yes, Amber has shown signs of being more interesting than she originally seemed. Though there were hints of that when she helped with the harvest last summer.

I have no idea what happened there. Sorry, LilianGish.

The one who must not be named was D#rr#l M#k#p##c#.

I meant more of a who’s the Daddy…. George raising Brads child and fovever resenting him (child and Brad), or potentially Amber leaving George and Brad raising George’s child…

@Cantsleepdontsleep , could be. I think they'll go for drama though.

@Sidebeforeself , be the change that you wish to see in the world.