Radio review: a month in Ambridge – there's a lot going on that I don't believe

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/25/radio-review-month-in-ambridge-archers

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I wonder if you could let me have the recipe for the hot and spicy cider served at Greenbury festival? Elizabeth Pargetter, the lady of the manor, fancied some and subsequently tripped over her guy ropes, fell into the arms of Roy Tucker, her manager, and spent the night in his tent. Admittedly, it was midsummer night when, according to Shakespeare, such surprising couplings tend to occur.

It reminded me of another respectable widow, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster, who, in one of Noël Coward's less respectable lyrics, came over all girlish in A Bar at the Piccola Marina. Happily for Coward, her name rhymed with both "seduced her" and "goosed her". Alcohol, you notice, figures quite largely in both cases. It is very sad – although one must say, both Elizabeth and Mrs Wentworth-Brewster seemed in the highest spirits afterwards.

Personally, I don't believe a word of it. I think it was a bad dream. There is a lot going on in The Archers at the moment that I don't believe, and hope will vanish with the dawn. Ambridge has been invaded by Daleks. The sinister and virtually invisible Justin ("The Man with his Finger on the Pulse") and Charlie, his mad-eyed acolyte, ("Disruptive change can be beneficial!"), intend to drive a road through Brookfield Farm, in spite of David Archer standing like an ox in the furrow, his horns lowered. Then, to maximise profit, they will cover every inch of earth with solar panels, biomass boilers, anaerobic digesters and other stuff you can't spell.

But Ambridge is not like that at all. Ambridge is Helen worrying because she has run low on oatmeal or Peggy bursting into a torrent of tears at the death of an old cat. Ambridge is trivia you can hardly see with spectacles ("How are the sheep?" "Pretty listless.") Ambridge is like Adlestrop, where nothing seems to happen at all, unless you count all the birds of Oxfordshire and Borsetshire.

Dr Beeching, as I recollect, closed Adlestrop because it was unprofitable.