Archers thread #198: Josh sent to Patagonia, Pip stays put. Wrong way round! Discuss The Archers here.

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Not feeling greatly enthused about what's going on in Ambridge at the moment, tbh. I'm annoyed at Brian's hypocrisy about Ruairi given the furore over George's attempt to frame Alice as the cause of the accident. I do hope we don't have a slow drip drip drip now as one after another the members of the Aldridge/Archer clan find out what really happened and endlessly agonise over what to do. Frankly I don't care. There! I've said it.

Pip's OK. Well, good, but what was the point of that story, I wonder?

I suspect I'm in a minority of one in rather enjoying hearing (a) from Bert Horobin and (b) about Fletcher. I surmise Bert is here to stay for a while because the BBC has (amazingly) updated his character page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/1wQP3mKR6yr9LVs05jddxcY/bert-horrobin (prominent actor photo warning). Given how out of date a lot of the other character pages are, this seems odd, but there we are.

That's all I can be bothered to say! Over to you.

I have some leather trousers. I would die of heatstroke if I wore them in the current weather.

What do you make of that, @Gonners ?

LillianGish
Brian himself actually admitted Adam was the only person capable of running Home Farm.

Adam has shown himself not to be capable of running Home Farm, though: he's very bad at it. None of Brian's family is capable of running Home Farm and also willing to do it.

There are plenty of people who could be hired to do the job and wouldn't have the horrendously bad and entitled attitude that Adam has, though. Just because the last one Brian hired was a horrible dud of dubious honesty, that doesn't mean that all the potential farm managers out there are any worse then Adam and Stella. He could see whether Barnaby, who applied for the job at the same time that Stella did, happens to be available; failing that, he could advertise as he presumably did to get those two to apply.

what makes you say Adam can’t run the farm?

We have gone from "we have to budget" to "sell everything we can't afford to live" very bloody quickly.

His track record. He makes expensive mistakes, and leaps onto trendy bandwagons which prove not to be workable. He has always had someone in charge preventing him from getting things really badly wrong; unchecked, he'd run it into the ground.

Wondering if we are going down the route of a bipolar storyline. Maybe the bags under the bed are not just a few bits but lots of expensive impulse purchases…. Tom may be just waking up to the scale of the problem.

Plus he stole from the till ( so to speak)

Probably.

She's been overspending for years and has been portrayed as having expensive tastes.
Since then, they've had two babies - twins so 2 x everything - and bought an 'executive home'.

At a guess, the house would have been about £450K, they have childcare costs, probably run 2 cars ...

Yes, I can see that it all adds up but how on earth hasn't Tom noticed before?

Oh, hang on... He's Tom.

You gave the answer I was going to give you.
Helen probably gave them the mates rates rent she'd been paying Kursedy.
At a guess, about £850 per month (finger-in-the-air stupidly low figure).

Selling her clothes though, for £5 a top. Or even leather trousers for £50. She's got to sell a shedload to make even a month's lost rent. Tash would know that even if Tom can't work it out. SWs are having a laugh aren't they.

Nobody is buying much now. She'd need to list things cheaply and there's things like handling queries, packing and posting and so on.

I still buy and sell but the things that sell usually are a bit niche, and designer things tend to attract CFs.

I've had things like buyers claiming that the item is a different colour to the listing e.g. the blue dress (listed as black) is black, the branded jumper wasn't delivered (it was signed for), the indigo jeans were black (they changed colour in transit?) etc.

House-wise: For comparison, a detached 4 bedroom house where I live would be £500K + or £1m+ depending on location. There is currently only one 4-bed 2 bath available for rent and is £2100 pm but it's in the town centre and close to the mainline/tube station. (Home Counties not London and not a particularly desirable area)

Have none of the scriptwriters been to a county show? All this stuff is started to be planned just after the previous show has finished, if not before. David is a prize chump.

I’ve sold lot of my children’s clothes on Vinted and not done too badly - made around £200. There are no listing fees for sellers and the buyer pays postage. You can list clothes as ‘new with tags’ or ‘new without tags’ and sell for a slightly higher price. A useful option for someone like Natasha because I imagine she has bags full of impulse buys that she has never worn and has completely forgotten about.

I was wondering about that too...for a second, I thought they're channeling the Spanish Riding School in Vienna...!

Is that idiot going to try to blackmail Brian again for the drone money?

I thought the same. And if Brian has any sense he'll call his bluff, because I think it unlikely that the police would take anything George said seriously, particularly when George's evidence is the smell of Brian's aftershave. I mean, why on earth would Brian assault George? Why, for that matter, did Ruairi? He must have been vair, vair drunk.

But but but, George has the recording of Brian's 'confession'...
So that's going to be interesting: evidence of blackmail if G tries to go the police.
Which he won't, because Amber isn't going to let go till she finds out where the money is coming from.

I don't think he had blackmail him the first time round, did he? Brian offered money for the drone business, he just wasn't prepared to chuck it down the drain for a few fancy sheep.

I think that whole recording business could backfire rather badly on George, should he try to use it. Because Brian could claim that he just said what George wanted to hear, simply to get him out of the house and - of the two of them - who would the police be more likely to believe?

If the police get the whole recording they have George dead to rights for attempted blackmail; he was asking for "compensation" in so many words at one point. Brian turned him down flat and said he wasn't going to be blackmailed.

And if it isn't the full recording they probably have ways of telling it has been doctored.

I thought recordings made in secret weren’t reliable enough or able to be used as evidence? I don’t know though

I can’t help but think how weird it is that Adam feels entitled to the whole farm. 1,500 acres will be worth between £15-21 million, probably closer to the top end, so surely his siblings will have something to say. It’s not as though it’s been in the family for generations, and tbh I’d be happier with a good wad of cash.

Also, I know someone who got out of dairy farming and is doing caravan storage - much easier life, steady income and no vet bills, though being under cover in the old cow sheds may make it more appealing to caravan owners than in an open field.

Home Farm is arable not dairy.