are starting to trickle in, and the first one had come in and was talking with OH while TA was on and I ignored him to listen.
When I went through and apologised he said that he perfectly understood, and used to be a very regular and engaged listener until the Rob-and-Helen saga; he found it so repulsive that he stopped listening, and has not listened since.
That makes eleven people I know who have said that. (I told him it was seventy-four, and we both knew I was exaggerating…)
Mr Janie is not really interested in TA but I was fascinated as well as repulsed by the Rob and Helen saga and encouraged him to listen with me to key episodes. He couldn’t take the mental torture of Helen and had to stop listening. I’m obviously made of sterner stuff than he is. However, when Stab Night came along, I told him he’d probably enjoy it and he did. In fact we both laughed ourselves silly over it, it was so ridiculous.
I’m sure your friends could start listening again, there’s nothing much going on at the moment to frighten the horses, is there?
Oddly enough, there are very few Archers in The Archers for the past couple of weeks. Have you noticed that? It becomes very apparent in the cast lists.
We have been mercifully spared of late, it’s true.
oooh, Janie, the divine Mr JJ and I are of one mind. 
aye, right. Oooh, Rob - good to see you back. I’ll hold yer coat.
Hahaha! I can see now that ‘the mental torture of Helen’ could be read several ways! I’m afraid unlike me dear Mr Janie is a proper soft touch - I can hear him talking to Heidi right now - and he was anguished at what Rob was doing to Helen.
Now you and I, I suspect, are rather more in the way of considering the point of view of the person suffering ‘the mental torture’ of Helen being inflicted on them as Kirsty so aptly put it when she had a rare moment of sanity.
More to the point, you know Helen of old…
Yes, Joe, it always struck me as odd that Helen, the manipulator and controller par excellence, didn’t recognise the signs in Rob, but I suppose she had never been on the receiving end before.
Me too. Sixty-odd years’ worth.
I have tried again since the change of editor, but it just isn’t working. Of course it was always clunky and sometimes laughable, but it managed to be a credible and engaging universe despite that. For me, it simply is not any more. With even experienced writers like Mary Cutler producing tosh, I’ve given up hope.
I’m going away for two weeks, and doubt I’ll turn on again when I come back.
I wonder how much it is that our perception has been changed, so that we now can’t help seeing the flaws which before our willing belief was shattered we were able to ignore? Once you have been made painfully aware that it is actors reading scripts which have been written for them, it’s hard to get back to thinking of them as characters in a fictional village.
Meanwhile, one or more of the weekend visitors hangs the looroll the other way from one or more other of the weekend visitors, and I am finding it next to the wall and not variously during today. A slightly surreal experience…
The character changes and rewriting history did shatter belief for me. I know that it is a great challenge for the editor and SWs to restore it. I don’t really blame them for failing. I’m not sure how it could be done.
At any rate, It hasn’t been done, so that whilst listening is not the intensely aversive experience of the R&H days, it is still aversive more often than not. I don’t need voluntarily to add 12.5 minutes of aversion to 6 out of 7 days every week. There’s quite enough that turns up outside my control.
They have come to play games, if I understand correctly. That is one of the games.
Yes, Ftc. Something very odd is going on within the writing stable. How often, when we think a particular character is ‘written well’ is it the actor’s strength and not the script’s that leaves us with that impression? I don’t think I know enough to make a convincing argument either way - but Matt has been involved in some pretty stupid stuff and always comes across strongly. Helen has had good storylines but is also very well acted. Brian - gets crap these days but still comes across.
It might simply be the argument that Fanta advanced, that once you are consciously aware of the existence of the script the village disintegrates, but I never had that level of involvement in the first place and I still think it is now very crap most of the time as opposed to being occasionally crap.
Possibly it has simply outlived its usefulness (certainly where its original purpose was concerned) and the medium and expectations have moved on. I’m inclined to think that is the case.
And were you OIC Beeb, because I doubt this would be decided entirely at Station level, what would you replace it with?
How about an everyday story of country folk?
Nah. Never catch on, that wouldn’t.
I wonder if the characters whose actors deliver well do so because they have such a strong character ‘voice’ that the scripties are half way there before they pick up their pen? The recalibration of characters has stolen voices and new characters don’t come with any backstory. FFS, how is anyone supposed to write for Anisha when she has been so lazily created that no-one knows how old she is?
Add to that some of the insane storylines and the characters end up in a cul de sac. Possibly the problem lies in the determination that TA is a soap rather than a drama?
[quote=“Fanta, post:9, topic:585”]… one or more of the weekend visitors hangs the looroll the other way from one or more other of the weekend visitors, and I am finding it next to the wall and not variously during today.[/quote]Aaah. One of the more intetesting of life’s defining characteristics.
Are you an innie … or an outie ?? A guzzunderer ot gozzoverrer.
Always, always over for me … and I WILL change loo rolls when i find them incorrectly aligned.
I discovered who was the maverick guzunderer when he had been the only person to go into one of the loos between my visits.
I said nothing. He is in other respects a very amiable chap …
[quote=“Fanta, post:17, topic:585”]He is in other respects a very ami[/quote]But a disrupter.
You must plot to reek your re-wengé.
If you hang it so the paper goes under, next to the wall, it is harder for a cat to pull it out and shred it. Knowing that, we nevertheless hang it over. I think it must be that the good laugh we get when we find the cat’s made paper dollies makes the wastage worthwhile. Anyway, it hasn’t happened that often and so far Heidi hasn’t thought of it.
No doubt she will.