Agonising double entendres such as ‘You look like a man with a large adjustable wrench’ make you yearn for turnip content, frankly
Well, there we are: with considerable dignity, and after much agonising, Chelsea Horrobin has had a termination – the first in Ambridge since dastardly Cameron Fraser abandoned a pregnant Elizabeth Archer at a motorway service station in 1992. On the other hand Ben Archer, with whom Chelsea had sex at this summer’s “Ambridge rave”, has exploded (cue actual sounds of smashing crockery) from the psychic contradiction of being a fundamentally nice guy who’s caused everyone around him a world of pain. He’s chucked out his girlfriend Beth (doesn’t deserve her, etc) and I fully expect him to break up with his similarly named collie, Bess, on related grounds.
At Brookfield, Jill and her paramour, Leonard, decorated the spare room ready for its first B&B guests, thoughtfully furnishing it with a copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel strongly deprecated by Pip Archer, who believed it might be by the author of that “depressing” one with Cathy and Heathcliff in it. No, Pip, it’s an early feminist classic by Emily Brontë’s sister, Anne, about a woman living in a village with her young child in seclusion from the dissolute father. I’d pop it on your reading list if I were you.
It’s not even Christmas and the troubled Archer family are imploding. Jill has hurled her flapjacks and departed in protest at Ben’s condomless foolishness
In a magnificently clanging piece of symbolism, David and Ben have been mending fences together, but it’s going to take more than that to restore peace to the troubled bosom of the Archer family. You know that chaos theory about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas? So it is that a few drops of cheap beer dropped into the lap of Chelsea Horrobin at the “Ambridge rave” in July have caused Jill – matriarch of Ambridge, empress of Borsetshire, knight of the order of the hurled flapjack – to move out of Brookfield Farm and into the Bull, which is, I think all can agree, Beneath Her Dignity.
The immediate cause of this removal – one no less serious than the ravens abandoning the Tower of London – is the fact that Jill declared herself ashamed of Ben’s impregnation of the aforementioned Chelsea. Or more specifically, ashamed of his failure to “fight for the baby”, Chelsea having decided to have a termination. Ruth, at this point, felt there were a few things to get off her chest about Jill’s controlling nature, judgmental attitude and “selfish and backwards opinions”. So it is that Jill and her cake tins have well and truly departed, leaving David and Ruth staring in the face the very real possibility of having to do their own cooking. Ruth has suggested some “really nice bangers and mash” for Christmas dinner but David is determined, at 63 and never having stuffed a bird, to do a proper roast for the family all by himself. If the farmhouse (let alone the turkey) survives unincinerated, it will be a minor miracle. In the meantime, they are having to sell off some land to repay Vince Casey’s investment in the farm’s solar panels, his £40,000 suddenly having been withdrawn in light of Ben having broken up with Vince’s daughter Beth. Oh Ben, what discord hast thou wrought in thy condomless foolishness!
Will Borsetshire’s ace sleuths Rex and Kirsty be able to crack the mystery of the illicit hanky panky in the woods?
As Happy Valley returns to the BBC, I’m put in mind of the final episode of the second season of that work of televisual genius. Sgt Catherine Cawood, as she reflects on the gory sequence of murder and attempted suicide she has uncovered at an isolated Yorkshire farmhouse, dryly observes that it is an “an everyday story of country folk”. It is an obvious gesture towards Ambridge; not least since Sally Wainwright, creator of Happy Valley, began her scriptwriting career on the Archers.
Be that as it may, Borsetshire as we know it has been entirely free from child abuse, incest, murder and rape this month. Not everything has been delightful, mind: Ben Archer, who has been going downhill rapidly since Chelsea Horrobin had her termination, had a psychotic episode on the village green. Luckily for him, acute mental healthcare in Borsetshire seems in miraculously better nick than any other part of the UK, and the lad seems on the mend for now.
Isn’t it strange that we can become so fond of invisible characters made of vibrations in the air? As Ambridge loses one of its patron saints, I mourn deeply – and I cannot be alone
January went quite nicely, at first. Jazzer and Tracy finally got engaged despite much fumbling interference from Brad and Chelsea. Justin, for reasons as yet mysterious, decided to put himself forward for shifts in the village shop. Sales of chenin blanc and luxury truffles have never been higher.
The Archers has long had a thing with brothers. Of the Cain-and-Abel, Romulus-and-Remus, chalk-and-cheese variety: William and Ed; Rex and Toby; David and Kenton. This January, it was the turn of Jakob, the “easy on the eye” (Lilian’s words) veterinary surgeon, to produce a sibling.
As Ambridge reeled from her death, it’s no wonder the catering went awry. Thank goodness one of the village’s star bakers had been busy ahead of time
It has been a cold, bleak month, and Jenny is still dead, and The Archers has officially been too sad, as it trudges along at the pace of life itself, and the Aldridge family falls apart and together again after the matriarch’s death.
Anyone who has lost someone close, especially a mother, can recognise the weird limbo that a family enters between a death and a funeral. Grief isn’t just sadness, it’s a mix of emptiness and guilt and anger and forlornness and loneliness. Everyone in a family has the cocktail made up in different proportions, and no one can quite recognise the signals their emotions are giving them. Lilian felt furious and betrayed: Jenny didn’t tell her, but did tell Tony and Brian, about her fatal heart problem. But really, Lilian was suffering from the shock and terror of watching her sister die, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
This month, Beckettian shop buddies Justin and Jim are due a reckoning and Brian speeds beyond his wife’s death quicker than you can say ‘Jenny darling’
There is a slight Vladimir/Estragon energy radiating from Justin and Jim these days, as they grumpily volunteer in the village shop together. Jim has been drawing rather pompously on the Black Panthers and Gandhi for his programme of resistance against the proposed electric-car charging station on the land that Brookfield Farm recently sold; he staged a weird protest from the chintzy B&B bedroom of Brookfield itself (online videos, a banner hung out of the window, nothing achieved save a subtle advert for Leonard’s interior-design skills). The pros of the electric-car charging station are, broadly, saving the planet, the cons, that it might involve the arrival of “retail units” and, shiver, a Costa (unnamed, but surely implicit in the phrase “chain coffee shop”). The twist is that the secret purchaser of the land is, in fact, Justin, or rather his mysterious private-equity company Damara, Borsetshire-wide symbol of capitalism at its most devouring. Jim isn’t going to be pleased. At all.
Paul, the veterinary nurse, who has teetered on the brink of being “too gay for Ambridge” during his placement at Alistair and Jakob’s practice, organised his own leaving do: an afternoon in an escape room. Ambridge itself is a kind of escape room, though even harder to leave. Still, Clarrie and Susan had a good go this month (“our Thelma and Louise moment”) when they went off to a festival without telling their husbands. They also returned safely to Ambridge – a missed opportunity for them to have a one-night-stand with Brad Pitt before driving themselves off the Grand Canyon.
The villagers are sipping coronation cocktails and glamming up for Eurovision – but will the return of Rob Titchener cast a pall on the festivities?
I’ve just been in Ukraine, where the basic barometer of a city’s security status is whether McDonald’s has reopened (open in Kyiv, still closed in Kharkiv). In Ambridge in the English Midlands, the basic barometer of having your wits about you is whether you can see through George Grundy. To his doting but dim grandmothers, Clarrie and Susan, the lad can do no wrong. Chelsea and Jazzer, on the other hand, know better. “That boy’s a jail sentence waiting to happen,” as the latter put it. Or is he? George seems to have a remarkable capacity to come up from every crisis smelling of roses – unlike Chelsea’s poor brother Brad, George’s unwilling accomplice in a Friday-night break-in of Grey Gables, which is currently a building site. A dozen overthought scruples delayed Brad’s apology to Oliver Sterling for the ruination of the memorial bench dedicated to his late wife, Caroline Bone. Sterling, a massive fail on the George Grundy Perspicacity Test, read Brad’s hesitation as turpitude.
The coronation has been competing with the Eurovision song contest for villagers’ attention. For the latter event, veterinary nurse Paul is intent on bringing a night of sequins and glitter to the Bull, in a fitting alliance with his only rival for the status of Ambridge’s campest character, Linda Snell. Jim, a person after my own heart at the best of times, owing to his curmudgeonly mien and habit of dropping into Latin quotation, has revealed himself as the village’s token republican. While the forelock-tugging peasantry picnic on the green is in full feudal array, having got sloshed on Kenton’s coronation cocktails in the Bull, he intends to listen to “uplifting music” at home with his curtains firmly closed.
It’s only a small step from ‘beating the bounds’ to full-on Wicker Man – and Clarrie and Susan certainly have the skills required
George Grundy – 17, full of ambition and lacking any kind of moral compass – is well on his way to becoming king of the world, aided and abetted by arch-capitalist Martyn Gibson. That’s despite being put to rights at Berrow Farm by the implacable Hannah, who’s had him cleaning out the pig pens (he certainly knows how to make a broom sound like it’s being wielded with maximum passive aggression).
Tracy Horrobin is no one’s fool and sees straight through George. So it was that things nearly got messy between her and George’s boastful mum, Emma, at the former’s hen do. I had visions of Tracy employing her Azerbaijani wrestling skills, developed but alas not used for the Ambridge Eurovision talent competition, to take out her niece once and for all. I wouldn’t put it past Tracy – after all, she used her considerable strength to fling Jazzer violently against the dresser during their rehearsals. After which he stormed off, had a few drinks, and rather bizarrely got himself run over by a person driving an electric car. Ambridge really is a road-traffic-accident hotspot when you think about it – Blake run over by Chelsea, Matt Crawford mown down by the late Nic Grundy, John Archer slain back in the day by an overturned tractor.
There were threats, pleas for sympathy and a dramatic collapse from Evil Rob – but it barely got the other patrons’ teacups tinkling
‘A cafe in Swindon” was the location for the fateful meeting this month between Evil Rob Titchener and Helen Archer – the latter, in 2016, having stabbed the former in the stomach after enduring years of gaslighting and coercive control at his hands. Apparently, Rob has been doing a lot of “work on himself” in his house in Dakota. Maybe the kind that Jerry Lundegaard was doing in the movie Fargo before he hired Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare to kidnap his wife. At any rate, the beverage-sippers of Wiltshire must be a tolerant lot, because Helen’s increasingly strangulated tones of anguished bravery, let alone Rob’s collapse and seizure, caused nary a tinkling of teacups among the cafe’s other patrons.
Titchener – one minute as ’umble as Uriah Heep, the next as teeth-baringly threatening as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter – might well have been faking his Swindonian fit in a bid for Helen’s sympathy and/or guilt. Because, as veteran listeners know, nothing, repeat nothing, is too evil for Evil Rob Titchener. On the other hand, he might well not, given that Lee and Tom, Helen’s partner and brother respectively, had recently paid him a visit. That ill-advised adventure, which may yet end Lee’s career as physiotherapist-in-chief to the Laurels care home, ended with Rob’s head smashed against a paving stone and stitches required. At the time of writing, it is thrillingly impossible to judge whether Helen is now invincible, immune to Rob’s former spell upon her – or whether Rob is now a diminished, weakened creature who has somehow come to Jesus. Obviously I hope not, because Evil Rob is so much fun.
Evil Rob Titchener is looking down at the gates of hell, much like Mozart’s antihero, and many at Bridge Farm can barely conceal their delight
In my fantasy opera version of The Archers, Gli Arcieri, the action opens as the wicked Don Roberto fights a duel with Il Commendatore, Tonio, whose daughter, the beautiful Donna Elena, he has abducted. She loves him, even when she discovers the corpses of his deceased wives concealed behind various locked doors inside his bleak abode, the Castello della Collina dei Fiori. Indeed, she grasps his real nature only after an indescribably complicated subplot involving Donna Kirsty, who disguises herself as a man and hides in a sack to discover Don Roberto’s true intentions. Act two culminates in a “mad scene” famous for its coloratura demands on the soprano, in which Donna Elena stabs Don Roberto – who, though badly wounded, escapes. In act three, several years on, Donna Elena rejects the now penitent Don Roberto, who has returned from exile abroad. He fights an indecisive duel with Don Leone and Don Tommaso, respectively Donna Elena’s new lover and brother. Stumbling away from this encounter, Don Roberto finds himself confronted by a statue of Il Commendatore, and is dragged down to hell.
Which is, more or less, what is actually happening, notably the hell part: Evil Rob Titchener’s recent spate of seizures is, it turns out, nothing to do with his having been pushed over by Lee, but rather because he has an inoperable brain tumour. The news that he has months to live has been greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the Bridge Farm Archers. Tom, for one, can barely conceal his delight – though Tony regards fire and brimstone as too good for the man who raped his daughter. Helen, in the meantime, has an intriguing moral dilemma: should evil Rob be allowed to see their son, young Jack? Does Jack have the right to see his father before he dies – or should he be protected from him?
It happened over toasted marshmallows in the moonlight – and it was rather lovely. If only radio kisses weren’t quite so loud
Well there we go. Finally, we heard – albeit in that weird way kisses on the radio always come across as extremely loud and incredibly close – the first lesbian snog in The Archers. It happened on the night under canvas that Pip Archer had planned for her daughter, Rosie, with her friend Stella along for grownup company. Except young Rosie, not unreasonably, preferred to sleep in a proper bed, leaving Pip and Stella alone with the rosé and toasted marshmallows, under the Borsetshire moon and the lonely hoot of the tawny owl. Stella had just had her heart half broken because Ed Grundy had accidentally crushed her dog Weaver beneath the wheels of his trailer (the second dog he has killed in his time, let it be said, which doesn’t make him some kind of canine serial killer, or so he claims). But I digress: the kiss happened – and it was rather lovely.
There followed a week or so of the two women awkwardly turning up on each other’s doorsteps to return forgotten bags, suggest scones of apology, and exchange unconvincing promises not to be weird with each other. But it took Pip to have drunken sex with Toby, Rosie’s dad and her onetime on-off lover, to admit to herself that she actually likes Stella. And, as Beth Jordache remarked all those years ago in Brookside Close, no one got struck by lightning.
Helen Archer’s ex continues his mind games, having returned from his death bed – just when we thought we were safe
The spirits of Samhain have provoked chaos in Ambridge. Helen Archer has jilted her partner Lee, which she claims is nothing, nothing at all, to do with the continued mind games of her ex-husband Rob Titchener, who has returned, like Glenn Close in the final scene of Fatal Attraction, to cause havoc just when you thought he was safely on his deathbed. “He’s playing you, Alan,” hissed the vicar’s more intelligent wife, Usha. Evil Rob, you see, has found God. Or so he says. Jesus would’ve given him the benefit of the doubt, protested Alan. Jesus didn’t have to live in Ambridge, averred Usha.
Adil, the manager of Grey Gables, has lost his marbles, and his gables for that matter. As the refurbishment of the hotel span out of his control, he disappeared from his digs in Ambridge Hall ostensibly on a mini-break, but clearing the joint of all his worldly goods. Oliver and Lynda were weirdly understanding of the fake “family emergency” of which he left word in a note they found concealed in his room. Personally, I’ve never known a family emergency so grave that a WhatsApp to a colleague didn’t get sent, nor grasped the efficacy of hiding dissembling notes in drawers in B&B bedrooms. But, as in so many things, Ambridge goes its own way. It turns out that Adil is more fragile than he looks, having lost his fiancee in a hit-and-run car accident. The inhabitants of Borsetshire are so terribly prone to these tragedies. The shadowy “Owners” of Grey Gables were oddly silent on the disappearance of their most senior employee.
Ambridge’s villain in chief finally met his maker, draining a fair bit of colour from the village. But there’s a bright side: Adil found some bargain kitchen gear
Think Ingrid Bergman in the closing moments of George Cukor’s Gaslight. Evil Gregory, who has lately been persuading his wife Paula, played by Bergman, that she is mad, is – owing to an elaborate series of events – now tied to a chair. He begs Paula to find a knife and cut him free. She, newly empowered, indulges in a little low-grade mental torture of her own, taunting the man who was once her oppressor.
So it was at the deathbed of Evil Rob, as he lay in his cheerless, cell-like bedroom in a flat in Penny Hassett. Evil Rob’s sheer, venomous nastiness remained fully intact to the end, despite the rapid approach of the grim reaper. “You’re not a proper mother! You’re aloof, you’re weak, you’re always whining about something!” And yet Helen somehow resisted his peremptorily issued command to suffocate him with a pillow. I rather wish Helen had succumbed, first because it would have made for an interesting moment, aurally speaking, and second, because I rather like it when Ambridge is wreathed in gothic fog. As it was, Evil Rob died all on his own without any outside help. He will be missed, at least by me: his moustache-twirling, snarling wickedness always brightened up Borsetshire’s beige.
The Christmas canine crisis looks set to usher in a most exciting new relationship – plus the hottest man in Ambridge becomes so unhinged he buys a pony
Owing to a dog that ate a sock, Alistair the vet and Denise the veterinary nurse spent 25 December performing emergency canine surgery. They missed Christmas lunch altogether. During the post-op fag and packet of brussels sprout crisps (OK I invented the fag, hardly anyone smokes in Ambridge with the exception of Lilian and maybe Bert Horrobin), Denise admitted, finally, that she and her husband are “having issues”, and, fateful words, “leading separate lives”. And so the way is left relatively clear for her romance, please god, with Alistair, who in his unspoken way utterly adores her. Though the fact that she and Alistair and her son Paul will all be working at the veterinary surgery will make an office romance an interesting prospect.
Talking of romance on the horizon for recovering addicts, Alice has told Rory Stewart, I mean Harry Chilcott, that she is an alcoholic. He’s been awfully understanding, and at the same time awfully patronising to Alice’s ex-husband, Chris, whom he employed to shoe his horse as a wildly overelaborated ruse to chat to him, man to man, about Alice. Despite being officially one of the hottest men in Ambridge (the other contender at this time being vet Jakob, at mention of whom Usha practically melted with desire), and despite, given his status as farrier, having little to worry about in the realm of masculinity, Chris became so unhinged as a result that he bought his and Alice’s daughter – Martha, not yet three – a pony for Christmas. Call me Dr Freud, but I think he’s trying to outhorse Horsey Harry.