Normally I’d support anyone working for the HellQueen and Tom but insisting on rabbiting on about the ruddy kefir which was not going to be sold and not getting on with the yoghurts and ice cream which were part of an order that presumably the Blessed Doug Somerville (or similar) was awaiting with bated breath …
Mind you, I did enjoy Helen rapidly losing that eerie serenity she seems to have acquired post-Rob. I sense a lack of leadership in the dairy … no wonder when Helen’s never there, though. But for once I thought she was right to get annoyed. They were taking the piss.
Not that I don’t like a bit of comeuppance. But this scene felt wrong, somehow. They got rewarded for being uncooperative. If they didn’t want to work in the poly tunnels they could have said so and if they couldn’t manage to keep up with the kefir and the yoghurt and ice cream, they could have said so and asked for less work or more hours. It’s all nonsense. But I did enjoy Helen getting in a snit.
And why does Tom think he can call the shots in the dairy and tell the dairy employees what to do? Or give them a raise for that matter? Why didn’t Helen say something sooner about him hijacking the dairy employees? (Of course she’d have to be there to do that; that does tend to be a problem.)
Pat used to be in charge of the dairy and I am assuming Helen took over - nominally - because Tom certainly didn’t nor did Tony.
Kefir and yoghurt and cheese involve some fairly specific microbiomes. I’m not a commercial foodologist but I’d think you’d want a lot of scrubbing down between batches.
They’re relatively late entrants, though. Bridge Farm has been Borchester’s Vozrozhdeniya since at least 2009. And that’s not counting producing Mankwold with malice aforethought.
I do know what you mean, Soo. But I experience no trouble at all in loathing all three of them simultaneously. I think I must just be gifted that way ;- )
Gxx
As said in “the other place” I think they were under performing simply to get more money. If you’re fully loaded you can’t suddenly do more because your getting paid more.
But, as with Gus, I loathe the lot of them. In fact I loathe characters not yet introduced.
Wonderful word, Soo! They all came out of it badly, Susan and Clarrie stupid and manipulative, Tom stupid and officious, he had no business throwing his weight around in the dairy, it’s always been Pat’s domain, now it’s supposed to be Helen’s (not that she’s ever there) and Helen gave a lovely stampy-foot tantrum.
Apart from the plot not making sense (they weren’t deliberately working slowly until that episode, they simply had too much work), apart from that, though, I did rather enjoy Helen’s mounting fury when Susan simply talked over her.
Other than that, it was amazingly heavy-handed humour. That is to say, I think it was meant to be funny.
Sadly true. I think the final straw was Robert bullying Peggy over the bird feeder; the last surviving decent character finally succumbing to the prevailing nastiness.
It struck me tonight that about the only character with any integrity left is Matt, of all people. It just shows how far the centre has shifted.
That is just how I feel: there is a back-biting air about the place which used not to be there.
If everybody in a programme is a person you would prefer not to be in the same pub as, it gets as wearing as if you were expected to entertain them. We have all had friends who are so bloody touchy that you can’t open your mouth without offending them, but be honest, how long have they stayed our friends, unless it was for some reason like a divorce which they would get over?
Emma the other day was a classic example. According to the BBC synopsis,
“Robert observes to Emma that they appear to be rivals. He’s at pains to point out it was unintentional; he hopes she knows it’s nothing personal. Emma assures him she’s not bothered.”
Lowfield, who heard the episode, put it
“In Borchester, Robert encounters a very surly Emma, and the situation is not improved by his thinking that Poppy is Keira.”
Going by the BBC one, it would be easy to think it had been a friendly encounter ending with general “may the best man win” bonhomie, rather than a vicious attack on somebody who thought of standing for the Parish Council before Emma did and without whom she would not have had the idea.