Archers thread #200: Trouble in Ambridge! (All 200 threads could have had this title.) 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 love to be Brian's child or stepchild, 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.)

Over to you!

Sorry yes Ian!

Very interesting observation there @Darker - I think you may be on to something. She likes people to whom she can feel slightly superior - in a kind of protective or big sister way. That’s why she’s happy to settle for an ex-council house on The Green after Beechwood safe in the knowledge that she is an owner while Tracey is just a tenant. Kirsty is kind of a sympathy project, even Ian to some extent and certainly Clarrie and Susan when they were working in the dairy. Also the unmentionable one who used to be her next-door-neighbour. It’s the reason why she rubs along rather uneasily with Natasha - she’s used to having the upper hand with Tom, but has now been usurped by Natasha. It’s a pity this was not explored more when they were all living together - the fact that she still felt proprietorial about the house even after TomTash had bought it. The Bridge Farm Archers are so much better developed as characters than the Brookfield lot.

The polymath J#y?

Keira has mentionitis about Mr Harris at school …

(May not mean anything - but if it doesn’t, they shouldn’t have written it that way.)

And why did I think Kirsty has a sister?

So what, the next time George has everyone clucking round him, Keira turns up with a case at Kirsty’s front door, at which point Kirsty has to break it to Keira that actually she’s having a baby too a couple of months after Amber?!

What is Brian's long game? Is he going to produce a Christmas best seller How to Lose Friends and Alienate People?

I thought she telling Keira she could hang out at the rewilding if she was fed up rather than moving in. Of course Keira could misinterpret that like whatever happened with the Snapchat or whatever it was.

Her attempts to befriend poor Tracey are desperate. Only someone as self absorbed as Helen could be so dense. She sounded like an absolute nightmare neighbour last week when she cheerfully told Susan about Jack repeatedly kicking his ball over the fence and then mooted the idea of a connecting gate so he can wander into Tracey’s garden whenever he wants to retrieve it. The entitlement is wild!

I'd buy the audio version of that, if it was read by Charles Collingwood!

Tracy's house is three bedrooms
Neil converted the dining room for Bert. Helens house is also three bedrooms.. Henry and Jack are only sharing until Jack's room has been decorated

@ExOptimist , the houses aren't small. They would have been built when families were bigger. I can remember friends living in similar ones and 4, 5 or 6 kids wasn't unusual.
If there were 3 bedrooms and 4 kids, bedrooms would be shared. Mum & Dad in one, girls in one and boys in one. 3 sharing a bedroom was unremarkable.

I got the wrong end of the stick, I thought they were sharing permanently.

I wonder where the Horrobins ate if the dining room was a bedroom, perhaps the kitchens are quite large.

Probably on the sofa in front of the TV!

The Brine-y bit in today's episode is how everyone else is wrong, including his keyboard.

Oh, and obviously not paying Ed enough and calling him his right hand man, while reneging on the flexibility. That's before he blames him when something goes wrong.

That's a lot of bits. It's the not paying him properly that annoys.
I forgot. When reminded of this, Brine will give him a bonus - very lord of the manner.

I’m not sure how anyone could continue to be on Brian’s side after tonight’s performance? I think the SWs were making it crystal clear who is being unreasonable here. Not just unreasonable, but incompetent, inconsiderate towards Ed and positively spiteful towards Kate. I think Ed will be going the way of Stella before long - no one could work with Brian the way he was behaving tonight.

Lord of the manor. Correction in homage to the wonderful Dame Penelope Keith RIP

Bloody autocorrect. And lack of editing on my part. I really really hate MN's overly assertive spelling correction.

Pat's like that too.

We lived in a council house for a while in East Kilbride in the 1960s. We moved there from Edinburgh when my Dad got a new job and in those far off times it was really easy and cheap to get a council house there. We were very hard up so my parents were extremely grateful to get it. As it was a New Town, most of the housing had been built in the 1950s. It was a terraced house with three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, living room, dining room and kitchenette downstairs.

It was a long time ago and I have done my best since to obliterate East Kilbride from my memory (I didn't like it there - I loved Edinburgh and missed it) but I think we probably ate breakfast in the kitchenette at a small table and evening meals when we were all home in the dining room. It was a good size for us (two adults, two primary aged children).

Next door's house was exactly the same size and layout but they had seven or eight people living there. There were four children and two parents sleeping upstairs and one or two grandparents whose bedroom was the equivalent to the room we used as a dining room. There was no downstairs loo, so I suppose they were able to manage the stairs.

I don't suppose we know when the council houses in Ambridge were built. The picture attached shows what the production team thought No. 6 The Green would look like - not at all unlike our old home, actually, except that ours was pebbledashed. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00w47v9/p00w1s03

Just catching up with the fact that we've reached the 200th thread! Amazing, after 13 years to get to this point. If you want some history, here's a thread I started around the time of the 100th thread. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/radioaddicts/3510091-ONE-HUNDRED-NOT-OUT-come-here-to-mark-The-Archers-threads-a-MN-phenomenon

It reminded me we have a bespoke Archers emoji -> (that's meant to be The Bull pub sign). So here we are with over 195,000 posts about TA!

And congratulations to @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g who has started 96 of those threads.

The 50s built council houses where I used to teach were like that and quite spacious with big gardens, very nice. I knew of one family where the parents (grandparents) and two siblings with their partners and two children each all lived in one. I used to try and imagine how they did that - they were all quite large as well.

God, poor Adam - I guess he really should have been at this regenerative agriculture gathering over the next couple of days:

https://www.groundswellag.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Are any Ambridge farmers / land stewards going? (Kirsty’s obviously too busy slaving for Helen. Which is a shame; she could have taken the work experience teen.)

@TottersBlankly , Poor Adam is tired enough without driving about 100 miles. Nice part of the world - near Stevenage.

Speaking about drivers, that SUV is bugging me. Is it the mother of a child Jack's been bullying or something.