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 Given how out of date a lot of the other character pages are, this seems odd, but there we are.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.

Come off, script writers, no woman spends a week thinking “am I pregnant?” In the real world, Kirsty would have just popped to the nearest supermarket and picked up a cheapie test days ago, not had an angst-ridden conversation with her ghastly friend. My prediction is that she is pregnant (let’s suspend all sense of likelihoods here), but Eric is dead (hence the ghosting), after suffering some horrible misadventure. Having given Alice the ick, newly single Rex will offer a muscley shoulder to cry on and they end up finally living out their days rewilding together.

Brian may or may not be a nightmare to work for; Adam is the employee from hell. Also unemployable in any but an essentially menial capacity, as he found when he flounced and tried to find and keep other work

Brine ceratinly wanted him to bail him out at Home Farm, with Adam running between two jobs on his behalf.

Brian is terrible, dangling a carrot like that.

Dreadful behavior.

Coming from farming people on both sides it is far too common - one man throwing his weight around like that.

Building and crashing hopes.

She's a week late. I would be starting to think about it, but not rushing to get a test till the weekend at least, and I might still hold off using it for a bit even then.

I hope Erik's not dead. Thst would be unhappy for Jakob, too. Though I agree Rex and Kirsty are destined to be together once Alice and Chris have sorted themselves out.

Great convo between Stella and Adam.
re the pregnancy test thing, when I was at that stage 30 plus years ago it was normal not to test till you were a couple of weeks overdue. I’m always interested in this generation testing on the day they’re due, as sadly a lot have “early miscarriages “ which we shrugged of as a late period

That might be possible except Erik is Jakob’s brother so I think we and the village would know soon enough.

Oh and I thought maybe Kirsty gets cursed with Tom after his divorce.

Given the jilting, and the slave master husband, and Wren, one might hope the SWs have decided to give Kirsty a 75th Anniversary year fairytale outcome that doesn’t end in misery.

Is re-wilding Kirsty's sole source of income?

Ooh I’d forgotten the relationship with Jacob. I absolutely agree she doesn’t deserve any more misery.

Until recently she had the rental income from her Beechwood house, @BeatriceBatchelor. No idea if she’s in profit now she’s sold that to TomTash - they haven’t told us the relative prices of the house sold and the house bought. Although I imagine she wouldn’t have Denise (still?) and Kate as lodgers if she had much spare money.

100% agreement here on the too early testing. 40+ years ago you had to wait two weeks then ho to the doctor abd wait another two weeks for the results. I know things are dine differently now but maybe Kurst wanted to wait and do the test with Erik.

If Erik had died surely Jakob would know and tell Kirsty. I do think Kirsty and Rex belong together and Alice and Chris.

Apologies for early morning typos. I can't be bothered to edit.

I really don’t see it with Kirsty and Rex. They’d be unutterably dull together. (Together they even manage to make the rewilding site sound dull!)

I really hope Kirsty is successfully pregnant, even though in real life her odds of miscarriage are at least 50% at her age - but this is a soap and an anniversary year.

The difficulty for Kirsty will be evicting Kate before the baby is born - both so that she has more space, and (mainly?) to escape as much as possible Kate in her self-appointed role as Wise Woman Aunt. So many delicious possibilities for Kate to be her best awful self living out the dream of ‘helping’ with Kirsty’s baby in ways she can’t with Phoebe’s. I’ll enjoy listening to that a lot more than I will Helen’s ‘support’.

It sounds like Kirsty half-wants to be pregnant, so maybe she's putting off a test to stave off disappointment as much as being worried that it might be positive.

I think she more than half wants to be pregnant. The fear of disappointment could be a big factor as well as talking to Erik about it. He seems to want it too. I really don't want Erik to be dead.

Poor Tony. Poor Moira. £42k might sweeten the pill a bit but I am shocked he didn’t withdraw them from sale and bring them back to Bridge Farm. David rose in my estimation last night. He was a real brick.

I missed a few days, but Jill's absence is becoming embarrassing. I know the actress is at least as old as Jill and living in assisted accommodation so wouldn't expect much or any actual recording, but has she even been referred to lately?

As for Chris and Rex, perhaps Chris was stung by Rex's suggestion of enabling Alice so getting him drunk was a deliberate ploy. And maybe Chris did switch to Shires Miniature Shetland Pony on the rounds he was buying...

I agree re Jill's absence @WagnersFourthSymphony . Bert Horrobin was (mercifully) silent until now, but we were always aware that he lived with Tracy - he had a presence even if we didn't hear him. Jim has disappeared from view, having sounded increasingly quavery in recent appearances, but because we rarely visit Greenacres his absence is not jarring. Jill is supposed to be living in the heart of the action at Brookfield - couldn't the SWs at least have moved her and Leonard in together elsewhere so we could imagine her quietly getting on with her life off set (much as Christine now does at The Laurels)? Her absence is thrown into sharp relief by the return 95-year-old Carol Tregorran, now being played 30 years younger and living in Jill's cottage. Jill is not a peripheral character, she is a key player and deserves better - if she's going to be faded out it should at least be done realistically. It feels like the SWs have stuffed her in Ben's cereal cupboard.

I think Jill and Laughing Len were mentioned a week or so ago. They were busy watching TV, cooking dinner, dancing the fandango, or whatever.

I do think that Helen's a bit tactless talking about Kirsty's putative pregnancy as wonderful. If Kirsty is pregnant, she'll be worrying most of the time as she will be well aware that a miscarriage, including a late miscarriage, is a distinct possibility. Having Helen simpering over how wonderful it will be to have a baybee really won't help.

When Adam said he should have learnt from the time Brian sacked him, was anyone else thinking "You mean, when you stole money from him and your siblings?"

I think of nothing else whenever the question of Adam being trusted with anything arises. And he wasn't even sorry. **

<on edit>** Because of course he hadn't done anything wrong, had he? I mean he'd only "borrowed" it against his share of the profits, without asking permission or even mentioning it to anyone else.

Did he steal it or did he borrow it? In my memory he always intended to pay it back - @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime will no doubt have the evidence to prove me wrong!