The Archers spoilers thread #12: Can't wait for 7.02pm? Join us here!

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Spoilers thread for The Archers. All Archers listeners are welcome here, whether you post on our main Archers thread or not. There's just one rule: please keep all spoiler-related discussion in this thread and do not spill the beans on the main Archers thread.

We usually add the BBC teasers and cast lists for forthcoming episodes as they become available, plus the Radio Times and other previews when possible. Feel free to add anything else you come across, e.g. cast news, scriptwriter tweets!

Ambridge Diary 2-7 August
Is poor lovelorn Brad about to set himself up for more disappointment? Amber is at panic stations with concern for the baby and with George nowhere to be found, it's left to Brad to accompany her to hospital. Playing her knight in shining armour again appears to stir some old feelings. Kenton and Jolene are struggling to come to terms with recent events and then Jolene hears more unexpected news. Bert is causing mischief at the Carters', Keira makes a shocking discovery, there's heartbreak for Chelsea, and Ed is caught between two bosses.
David Crawford (author of the above summary)

QNs:

1. Do the ladies of Ambridge ever manage to give birth with their husbands/partners present?
2. On the subject of "heartbreak for Chelsea" (and I do hope that they haven't trashed her horse box), has she had a "boyfriend" since her ONS with Ben in 2022? Ditto Ben and any sort of top romantic interest.

Can we swap out Bert for a young actor/actress keen to settle down and marry?!

When Emma went into labour with George, William was not to be found so Ed accompanied her to the hospital. And I am reasonably certain that Eddie wasn't there when Clarrie was rushed into hospital after falling down stairs, though she didn't actually give birth at that point; he'd manufactured a row with her and walked out. George is merely carrying on a family tradition of not being much use to women who are carrying their baby.

It will be the horsebox. (And I’m already preparing to be heartbroken for her.)

Fire? Stories of buildings catching fire and burning to the ground just at the end of years of careful renovation … Would be topical as well; so easy to happen when everywhere is so dry.

Or vandalism? I don’t recall her having any enemies (apart from Lawrence) but so much hope and ambition and family support might prompt envy.

Having been reminded of Meriel's existence on another thread, she seems to be of an age to turn up in Ambridge and provide some younger love interest. Watch this space.

For whom, though? Most of the younger men are her cousins.

What used to happen (always happened!) in The Archers was that young Archers found themselves spouses from outside the village who were not related to anyone there. Apart from Dan and Doris, who were both born in Ambridge, there were imports: Peggy, Jill, Paul Johnson and then George Barford, Paddy Redmond, Roger Travers-Macy, and Brian, Lester Nicholson and then Ralph Bellamy, Mark Hebden and then Alistair Lloyd, Pat, Ruth, Nigel. Even Helen's disaster was not a local, and nor is Tom's (and nor was Kirsty, who never lived in Ambridge until she got engaged to Tom, and then only for about six weeks before the unwedding).

Going abroad is to find a stranger, not someone who's an Archer. And I can't think why she would bring her love-interest with her to a dead-and-alive hole full of people she probably doesn't even like and has no reason to, and a father she hardly knows.

Which means that her arrival is almost inevitable, since the current production team seem to work on the basis "what is the most implausible thing? OK, let's do that."

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime ,Ruairi isn't a blood relative and neither is Long Johnny Silver, who she has probably met already and they're already engaged if not married.

Oops, Johnny and Meriel ARE related but are 3rd cousins (I think).

2nd cousins once removed.

Kenton and Tony are 1st cousins, Meriel and John would have been 2nd cousins. Johnny is John's son.

Ruairi has been treated( by some) as a quasi blood relative. Also he's bisexual and at the moment tending towards the gay side. Most straight women wouldn't touch a bisexual man with a bargepole( there was a thread on here a couple of months ago about it), so he's limited in his pool of women who would accept that.

I do feel, as @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime has said above, that meriel is probably due to return, however ridiculous that would be. Kenton talked about her last week which I took as a pointer.

Maybe if they do bring her back she'll get together with Freddie. There could be all sorts of repercussions about cousin marriage etc.

Good grief, imagine their offspring! If Meriel has Kenton's intelligence (because somebody must have it and Kenton certainly doesn't) and Freddie has Nigel's, any children would be doomed!

I suspect the BBC wouldn't want to touch first-cousin marriage with a bargepole, to be honest. It's a racism hot potato.

The first cousin marriages are genetically problematic because sometimes they have been gone on for generations.

There were children (one set of siblings) at primary school with me whose parents were first cousins. They and their children are fine.

I agree, but it's not my perception we are talking about! The "first cousin marriages are evil and only [those people I don't like who came here from elsewhere and took my job] have them" business is something I would bet the BBC would avoid having anything to do with if they can. I have spent quite a lot of time during this life pointing out that one generation isn't too bad (unless there is a truly awful recessive or something); it's not cousins on a single occasion, but a small available genepool, that causes the damage over decades and centuries. Small villages, full of people with a mistrust of outsiders and likely only to marry people from that village, tended historically to have more than their share of what were kindly referred to as "naturals".

In fact I would hazard a guess that the Archers always going outside the village of 900 people to look for spouses might be to do with that known risk.

The BBC has done several programmes about the Born in Bradford study which involves studying the effects of generations of cousin marriage in some parts of the Asian heritage population.

It would be quite interesting if there was a white British cousin marriage in the Archers, simply because it's incredibly rare these days.

Yes, but on their previous form they would mess it up.

Two of my (white British) first cousins married and it was a HUGE family scandal (not that I cared). They had got together when she was about 13 and he must have been about 17. My sister (then 13) witnessed this as all three were staying with the same auntie at the time, and she said that all the pressure came from the girl. I can believe this, as the boy was wet beyond belief!

The marriage didn't last long, and last time I spoke to her mum on the phone she mentioned that her daughter was in the process of a divorce from her third husband. You could almost hear her eyes rolling as she told me this, adding "I am just glad she hasn't had any children."

I assumed that the past couple of weeks’ Harrison episodes were set to coincide with the 1:45pm hare-coursing stuff.

FWIW I seem to remember that 1st cousin marriage used to be a bit of an issue in the Forest of Dean (presumably about a 30
minute drive from Borsetshire these days).

It wasn't that unusual in rural communities and on islands. Maybe not a first cousin but maybe a second or third cousin.

From my contemporaries, two couples married within the village, but many didn't venture far. It was higher in older age groups. My father's siblings married within the village.

While we're on the subject of marriage, I can remember shotgun weddings and this was in the 1980s. The neighbours' daughter had one and it worked out ok. They got married, had the baby then more children, and seemed happily married until one of them died fairly recently.

Cousin marriage was very common in farming communities - certainly up to the 1960s - in order to keep the land in the family. Our neighbour’s daughter had been betrothed to her cousin, but before the wedding he ran off with a “floosie” from the local town. Poor daughter seemed to lead a sad downtrodden life - I remember her wearing an ancient mac with a belt of bailer twine and huge wellies.

I know someone who was a headteacher at a very rural primary school and they were convinced that the low IQ of many of the pupils was down to first cousin marriage through the generations, if not today.

@Molecule , nowt wrong with baler twine belts. Sartorial elegance where I'm
from.

Inbreeding result in certain characteristics becoming dominant that would otherwise have been recessive.

results not result.
I think the Archers offspring will marry or breed with someone from outside Ambridge.
If they do marry it will be with an only child or with someone whose siblings are far away and probably don't have children.

I knew someone who did a lot of medical work involving genetics in East Anglia, and she said that quite often when a child was brought in with one of several inheritable conditions they would know that it was from a seriously inbred village in which cousins had been marrying each other all century and the one before. She always said that the advent of the bicycle so that people could look for a partner in the next village or even the one beyond, not just in their own, was a very good thing for the Fens.

I was trying not to name any regions but ... 'NFN' had crossed my mind.
There's also a well-known family that had been marrying cousins for many generations but now doesn't seem to.

Oh, could we be thinking about haemophilia?

Her comment on NFN was that they did sometimes take bets on the paternity of a teenager's child: uncle, father or older sibling. Apparently it was often only too obvious that incest had been going on. This was in the very early days of DNA testing, so they would place their bets and then await the results; taking samples from parents, siblings and parents' siblings was presented as "routine precaution" for the safety of the relatives involved lest they too had a risk of developing whatever the condition was, but all the medics knew exactly what it was for really.

Oh, could we be thinking about haemophilia? Yes

Her comment on NFN ... Ugh! I don't think the BBC would go there.

There used to be a big mental hospital not far from where I hail. It had been an asylum at some point, and when it opened, rumour has it that the majority of the inmates were from an island.