This woman is worth a read

Harmless_Robot · 9 November 2021 09:07

2021-11-09T07:00:04Z

It’s been a violent few weeks, with a showstopper squished into oblivion and faked anaphylaxis over a frangipane. Plus the most radical poet in Borsetshire, Bert Fry, bowed out

In The Archers, violence is delivered symbolically through the medium of baked goods. This month, it was Jennifer’s pavlova that established her primacy in Ambridge’s feminine pecking order – putting her sister, Lilian, in her place as she demanded, and got, promotion from producing starters to puddings for the annual harvest supper. Vince, in the meantime, chose a pear frangipane as his weapon of choice against young Ben Archer, newly entangled with Vince’s daughter Beth: the abattoir owner faked anaphylactic shock from a nut allergy and made a fool of the poor lad right in the thick of Les Soeurs Heureuses, Borchester’s fine-dining establishment. Still, Vince should have chosen another battlefield, since the restaurant is hallowed Archer moral high ground: it’s where Jill Archer had her anti-food-waste activism moment in 2017, when she was arrested for chucking a homemade flapjack at one of the soeurs themselves (symbolic violence, in this case, actualised). Beth in turn decided to try to impress Jill with a 91st-birthday cake, and went all Bake Off season 12 on her, concocting something sculptural with spun sugar: just as well it got squished, really, as Jill is more a farmhouse fruitcake kind of girl.

It turns out that Bert Fry’s verses – or “interminable dirges” as Russ cruelly put it – were, in the end, all too terminable. Poor Bert, locally renowned for his prowess in the flower and produce show, hasn’t been the same since there’s been no Joe Grundy to loathe, nor, indeed, since he lost his beloved wife, Freda – swept away, Maggie Tulliver-like, by the 2015 Borsetshire floods. His final performance was at the harvest supper: an epic poem containing, according to Russ’s hostile review, at least five minutes on cutting his toenails, and a lengthy section closely describing a trip to the pharmacist. This radical, rhyming-couplet autofiction, I predict, will soon be hailed as Borsetshire’s answer to Karl-Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, and Bert’s posthumous renown will outlive his fragile frame. Lucky for Bert’s housemate, Rex Fairbrother, that Trevor, Bert’s son, has offered to give him all of his father’s manuscripts. There was a remarkable episode when Trevor asked Rex to scour Bert’s bedroom for a photograph, a birth certificate, a book and a cricket scorecard. For a delirious moment it seemed these objects were of momentous significance – I don’t know, clues to the whereabouts of Anglo-Saxon treasure buried on Brookfield’s land, like the hoard Eddie was so fruitlessly metal-detecting for earlier in the year. Nothing so exciting, alas.

Harmless_Robot · 7 December 2021 09:07

2021-12-07T07:00:20Z

At the big vow-renewal bash, the vicar ended up being filmed drunk in a limo. Pity for everyone the sinister country house hotel Grey Gables didn’t get trashed

‘Are you suggesting,” said Oliver, the owner of Grey Gables, “that Kathy isn’t doing her job properly?” If I may interject, Oliver, that is very much what we have all been thinking for rather a long time. Kathy Perks, supposedly the general manager of the country house hotel, has not been heard to speak since 2015 – not even when an explosion hit the kitchens last year almost carrying off the unfortunate Linda, Blake and Freddie Pargetter. So prolonged and weird is her silence, I can only suppose she’s actually dead and haunting the corridors like the ghastly bloodstained apparitions in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (probably accompanied by the terrifying shade of Caroline Bone).

In fact the whole of Grey Gables has a sinister, Overlook Hotel vibe, or the Midlands version thereof. As Mia Grundy said, “the ballroom’s not exactly cosy, is it?” I bet the dining room is one of those awful tomb-like places with high-backed chairs, starched and folded napkins and no conversation. Ian Craig’s main courses probably come out under domes; no wonder Les Soeurs Heureuses is the go-to for fine dining these days. I had hopes that the Grundys’ proposed vow-renewal bash in the ballroom would finish the work the explosion started, trashing the entire place so entirely – with the help of Baggy, Snatch and a few barrels of home-brew – that the whole thing would have to be sold, refurbished and hauled out of the 1980s. As Mia so rightly put it, “That place is so … retro.” Sadly, the ballroom is safe for now, since the Grundys relocated their ceremony to the cider shed. The only casualty of the affair in the event was the vicar, Alan, cruelly videoed by that monkey George Grundy while pissed in the back of the village limousine.

Gus · 7 December 2021 11:53

She gets paid for this?

3Wells · 7 December 2021 12:16

We could do so much better couldn’t we Gus?

Gus · 7 December 2021 12:27

At least I can spell character names. Unlike this drivelling bint.

3Wells · 7 December 2021 12:29

And as a collective we have oodles of vitriol and bile to pour upon the characters

I really do think we could do better

Fanta · 7 December 2021 12:31

I expect Lynda would have a thing or two to say on this occasion, just as she did when Susan got the name-badges.

HedgeSparrow · 7 December 2021 15:40

Higgins has, at some point this year, become the Grauniad’s “chief culture writer” , so unlike our own dear Nancy Banks-Smith probably has other things to do as well as writing about TA once a month or so.

Harmless_Robot · 4 January 2022 09:07

2022-01-04T07:00:10Z

Home Farm’s new manager coquettishly suggests a drink while the weirdness of Lynda Snell’s Christmas production brings humming cicadas to Ambridge

Is Stella gay? My hopes are high. Mia, Borsetshire’s Greta Thunberg, has decided that the new manager of Home Farm would make a lovely wife for her stepfather, Will Grundy, who never sounds sexy but maybe is, given that he is the village gamekeeper. Mia opined that Stella seemed to be straight – which, knowing Mia’s powers of perception, means she is the most obvious lesbian who ever walked this Earth. What would you call your dog, if you had one, Mia asked her, brightly? The answer: Weaver. After Sigourney Weaver in Alien. I mean: come on.

I would rest my case right there, but then came a touching scene between Stella and Ruth Archer, during which Stella found Ruth’s lost invoices, and coquettishly suggested a drink. I admit this does not necessarily suggest Lauren Bacall-Humphrey Bogart levels of sexual charge. Nevertheless, my partner, no great Archers listener, walked into the room at this moment, and, unprompted, declared: “This is so gay!” Seriously: I can see it. Say David Archer is killed by – well, there are so many possibilities on a farm – drowning in the slurry pit, shall we say? Then Ruth becomes a later-blooming lesbian and has a rapturous affair with Stella, thoroughly complicating the Home Farm/Brookfield inheritance nexus.

Harmless_Robot · 1 February 2022 09:07

2022-02-01T07:00:12Z

The village’s bright young things are struggling against the ‘powerful hold’ of Ambridge, while Hazel Woolley escapes the invisible forcefield of this ‘self-satisfied, two-bit place’

Sometimes Ambridge reminds me of The Village, that splendidly implausible M Night Shyamalan film about a 19th-century community in Pennsylvania. The village’s secret is that beyond a supposedly monster-infested forest, there is an actual 21st-century world with cars and telly. But hardly anyone knows about it and no one dares go there. In fact the entire village has been set up as a mad kind of social experiment.

So it is in Borsetshire. The “powerful hold Ambridge can have” over its inhabitants was the subject of rumination by young Phoebe this month. (Will the penny drop? Will she realise that Nottingham, Birmingham, and even, dammit, London are places rather than idle dreams? Will she remember that she too once tasted freedom, at Oxford?)

HedgeSparrow · 1 February 2022 09:37

Bonus points for giving away the secret of a film that has nothing to offer but its secret.

At which point you would have put in more effort than the entire production team, so why not spend it on something useful instead? Sausages, for example. Sausages are nice.

Gus · 1 February 2022 10:47

Connoisseurs of pretentious bilge will not regret time spent reading the second article linked to above.
Now where’s me red pen?

Harmless_Robot · 8 March 2022 09:07

2022-03-08T07:00:06Z

Just as Alice was rallying, her ex and her best friend fell into bed, with implications worse than social speed-dating at the Bull. And can someone please stop Kirsty moving to Bulgaria?

I dimly remember that Newton’s third law of motion is something to do with equal and opposite forces. I’d have to check with Alice Aldridge and her engineering degree to get this right, but as applied to her own situation, I’d say that this broadly translates as: if things seem to be going pretty well, it’s only a matter of time before the gods of Ambridge retaliate with equal and opposite disaster. Just when she was six months sober and coping nicely with baby Martha, her ex, Chris, and her best friend, Amy, had a one-night stand – heralded by the immortal morning-after line, “Can you pass my bra?” When Alice finds out, she’ll relapse, mark my words, and the divorce will get ugly, and it’ll go to court, and Chris will get a massive chunk of Home Farm, and the Fall of the House of Aldridge will be complete.

Oh Alice. You should leave Ambridge. Still, one should be careful what one wishes for. Phoebe’s off, having got herself a job in the Highlands, something to do with microalgae. Perhaps she could go and visit the terrifying institution in which her great-grandfather Jack Archer drank himself to death back in the 1970s.

Harmless_Robot · 5 April 2022 08:07

2022-04-05T05:00:06Z

They are clearly at the attritional stage – so this could take years. Meanwhile, are the Gleeson twins really running Ambridge?

If you are over a certain age, you will recall the weird, interstitial era that came between the halcyon days of dialling 192 for free directory enquiries and the full onset of the Internet Age. In those liminal days, if you wanted to find a phone number, one of your options, other than flicking through a telephone directory, was to call 118 118, which a TV ad campaign aggressively encouraged you to do. These ads featured two skinny blokes – apparently twins – wearing 70s facial hair and running vests numbered “118” who’d jog around to a version of the Ghostbusters theme (“Who ya gonna call?”). In my imagination, the Gleeson twins – universally known in Ambridge as “One of Them” and “the Other One” – resemble the 118 118 characters, committed runners that they are. Possibly they circle the village ceaselessly, locked together like Francesca and Paolo in Dante’s Inferno. They never speak; they were cheerfully hailed this month by Tracy, but answer came there none. Once upon a time, we learn, they were champion ballroom dancers, until One of Them injured his ankle and the Other One gave up his glorious career in solidarity. Now they are reduced to eating eggs benedict at Grey Gables and being the subject of gossip between Ian Craig and Susan Carter, the most unlikely friendship in the history of Ambridge.

Moving on. I don’t mean to make a trite comparison here (OK, maybe I do) but the stage we are at in the Chris-Alice divorce now seems to me to resemble the moment in about September 2020 when it began to dawn on the populace that, despite the prime minister’s airy pronouncements back in the spring that Covid would All Be Over in 12 weeks, we’d be lucky if we’d be out of it in two, or even three, years. I suppose there is the faintest chance that Chris’s one-night stand with Alice’s best mate Amy (and I’m still shuddering at the mention of the word “bra” on Radio 4 outwith the safe space of Woman’s Hour) will precipitate a grand reconciliation, but I doubt it. Were one to plot Chris and Alice’s personal trajectories on a graph, you’d see that their lines have now, fatefully, crossed. He’s plunging, she’s rising up, increasingly magnificent and implacable (and sober). She’s even faced down Susan in the shop – not bad when you consider that she chucked a brick through its window in a drunken rage only months ago. All she wants is Her Baby, which is all he wants, too. The gods of Ambridge will be plotting the courtroom drama even now.

Harmless_Robot · 3 May 2022 08:07

2022-05-03T05:00:13Z

Does the faded hotel have a future as Guantánamo-on-Am? Slurry, I haven’t a clue

Many questions lingered in the air this month. For example: does Ruth Archer go on about slurry? Or so she herself pettishly enquired. Answer: no more so than I would like to imagine necessary to soften us up for her husband David’s drowning in a pit of effluent, a development for which I have long hankered. Sadly this now seems unlikely, as Brookfield is investing in a cover for its slurry store. Do most listeners mentally, if not actually, tune out during these patently dull “farming bits” the Ministry of Agriculture once levered into proceedings? Back in the day, they were the pedagogical pill for which the rural adultery, mutual loathing, etc, were merely the sweeteners. I admit I find them marvellously soothing. The real story of The Archers, however, may be about the characters’ relentless pursuit of sugary baked goods: faced with Natasha’s gestational diabetes, her parents-in-law, Tony and Pat, have decided to “have an affair” with puddings, setting forth for secret cheesecake in the Orangery at Lower Loxley and clandestine sticky toffee pudding at the Feathers. “The world’s our rum baba,” claimed Tony, inaccurately: as we all know, there’s a mystery forcefield preventing him from leaving Borsetshire at all. When someone asked Kathy Perks whether you can get Radio Borsetshire in Hereford, the answer should have been a resounding no, just like you can’t get Radio Brigadoon in Perth.

Yes, Kathy Perks! After years of silence, the manager of Grey Gables is audible again – revealed as the mystery wearer of the Easter bunny costume who, face it, was never going to be Rob Titchener returned in disguise to abduct little Jack, though that would have been quite exciting. She’s reappeared just in time for Oliver and his new business partner, Adil, to pull a P&O and make the entire workforce of Grey Gables redundant without a statutory consultation period. It had to happen: the fabled gables were increasingly, well, grey and, by the sounds of it, peeling. It seems it’s going to be renovated for a year and reopened as a slightly less terrible hotel. I would have thought a different business might provide more plot opportunities. Nuclear power station, à la Springfield? Young offenders’ unit? Asylum seekers’ “reception centre”? That would be nicely topical, what with the real-life plans to establish “Guantánamo-on-Ouse” in a bucolic Yorkshire village.

ThatFunnyMummy · 3 May 2022 16:23

does Ruth Archer go on about slurry? Or so she herself pettishly enquired. Answer: no more so than I would like to imagine necessary to soften us up for her husband David’s drowning in a pit of effluent, a development for which I have long hankered.

David’s drowning in a pit of effluent?

How could she get it so wrong? Nothing wrong with David drowning in a pit of effluent, obviously, but what about Pip? Pip must take priority!

JustJanie · 6 May 2022 04:33

Yes, Pip first, but Ruth very shortly afterwards. I’d reprieve David, however. Without those two, he would be a perfectly fine if rather dull individual.

joe · 6 May 2022 05:28

Sorry, but he doesn’t get off that easily. Had he not had such poor judgement as to hook up with WR in the first place, we’d have been spared Pip as well.

HedgeSparrow · 6 May 2022 08:17

Now now, there are enough pits of effluent for everybody.

Harmless_Robot · 7 June 2022 08:07

2022-06-07T05:00:04Z

The former Bull landlady has started talking again after seven years of silence. Meanwhile, Chris and Alice’s separation gets more agonising by the day

I can only imagine that it must have been a bewildering month for Archers listeners of less than, oh, a decade’s standing. Who is this woman, they would be justified in asking, who has declared herself the longstanding manager of Grey Gables only, in fact, to announce her intention of quitting that defunct institution to fly to Alaska?

Ah yes, sigh the Archers old-timers. Kathy Perks. Last uttered a word in 2015 – since when, notwithstanding events such as Gray Gables’ explosion, she has lurked in the stationery cupboard apparently on an extended silent protest. Back in the day, she was married to the landlord of the Bull, Sid Perks, before he had an affair with Jolene (the occasion of a “sexy” game of hunt-the-soap, one of the ickiest moments in the history of Radio 4). Kathy herself had an affair with the village copper – no, not Harrison, the one before, Dave Barry. Then she went out with Kenton, who’s now with Jolene. Keep up, won’t you?