Category Archives: The Archers

The Archers: an everyday story of feminist career women folk

Robert Henderson

In their delightfully naïve and blundering  way the crazed feminists who control the Archers made Alice Carter, the daughter of Brian Aldridge (who is  the richest man in Ambridge), an engineer. Feminist message: women can be engineers just like men.  Wildly improbable as that was, they then had her scratching around for an engineering job for ages before she found one close to home.  This job was portrayed as boring, frustrating and completely unworthy of Alice’s engineering talents from the word go.

Despite this undistinguished and very meagre work background,  Alice is  suddenly “head-hunted” by a company from abroad. She decides to go to an interview in Canada with a view to moving to that country. The fact that she is newly married to Chris Carter who has recently acquired his own farrier’s business with the aid of a huge bank loan is presented as inconsequential. What matters to the Archers’  creators  is that she is a career woman who needs to pursue her career and to hell with any other consideration, such as what is her husband going to do?

Alice arranges the interview in Canada whilst swearing blind to her husband that she is not looking for a job abroad.  When  Chris learns she is going  and is allowed to make some complaint about her selfishness (the only Archers character allowed to do so unambiguously) , Alice sweeps aside his objections by  saying he can come to Canada as well.  Outrageously (in  feminist eyes) Chris points out that he wants to live in Ambridge and,  even if he didn’t, it would be next to impossible to sell the farrier’s business at a price to clear his loan. All to  no avail as Alice heads to the land of the Maple Leaf. Feminist message: a woman’s career is more important than anything.

Being a regular male character is a risky business in the Archers. If they are not going gaga like Jack Woolley, they are plummeting to their death from a roof (Nigel Pargetter) or topping themselves with a shotgun like the gamekeeper Greg Turner.  No sooner is Alice on her way  to Canada  than Chris is felled by a horse kicking him and  he presently lies unconscious on a ventilator in hospital.  Will he be Ambridge’s first quadriplegic requiring Alice to be his life-long nurse, will he remain in a permanent vegetative state visited for years by Alice who cannot leave Ambridge to get the job she wants   or will he have the decency to die thus allowing Alice to head for Mountie country unencumbered by a man to pursue her career?

But it has not all been extreme feminist fantasy in recent months. There are  signs that the ultimate politically correct wet dream  which could be conceived for Ambridge is about to made soap opera flesh. The latest ethnic minority addition to Ambridge is Iftikar Shah. He has become the maths tutor for Freddie Pargetter and has rapidly advanced  to a sort of step father in waiting figure.  Iftikar has long intimate talks with him and with his mother, Elizabeth Pargetter, the widow of the unfortunate Nigel,  who was suddenly deemed too posh for the Archers and was  so ruthlessly dispatched.    Iftikar is appearing in this role ever more frequently and  has accompanied Elizabeth and the Pargetter children (Freddie and Lily) on their first group outing.  It is a sound bet that the we are heading for another multiracial coupling in the Archer family  with Elizabeth and Iftikar getting spliced before the year is out to the sound of church bells …er…the cry of the Muezzin. Iftikar being a Muslim would of course require Elizabeth to convert to Islam.  Elizabeth is still just of childbearing age so we could of course expect the odd Mohammed and Fatima to come along in due course.  The marriage would give not merely another multiracial tinge to the Archers but would mean that the de facto lord of the manor would be a Muslim.

But it has not all been about romance amongst the young and middle aged. Lillian Bellamy (who is  nearing 70 in the context of the series) and the ineffably wet Paul have been keeping the flag flying for geriatric sex . This they have done by behaving like teenagers in their first passion, with acting of an ineptitude startling even for the Archers.  The only glimmer of hope is that Paul may turn out to be a nutter and suddenly go on a murderous rampage.  There are signs  that this may be the case  as he  has a suppressed childlike impatience under the Uriah Heap façade. The pc message is of course the anti-age discrimination one of sex is for the old as well as the young.

The BBC wound up the Archer’s message board on 28th February. Could it be that they realised that the ever increasing amount of  pc tosh they are  offering would  result in an unceasing and ever growing avalanche of ridicule and complaint?

The Archers – An everyday story of disabled folk

Robert Henderson

Archers characters, especially the men, have long been the subject of  a remarkable number of disabilities.  Mike Tucker lost an eye in an accident, Jazzer  McCreary suffered brain damage after taking the veterinary drug  Ketamine,  Brian Aldridge developed epilepsy after being kicked in  the head, Jack Woolley fell prey to Alzheimer’s while   Pat Archer and  Mike Tucker and Greg Turner  suffered from clinical depression. In addition, Alistair Lloyd the vet has had gambling addiction and  the now deceased Julia Pargetter was an alcoholic, both of these behaviours  being treated in best pc fashion as illnesses rather than character traits.

But accident prone and genetically unfortunate as the characters may have been in the past,  bar the gamekeeper Greg Turner who understandably topped himself whilst  lumbered with a whining neurotic of extraordinary incapacity in Helen Archer,  they have all recovered and  seemingly been left with no marked incapacity even where the disability is of a nature to be  permanent and severe.  As for the non-physical ailments, the storylines concerned with depression, gambling and alcoholism    gave ample opportunity for a great deal of politically correct angst and the shift of the Archers to be an ever closer ideological  soul-mate of Woman’s Hour, but curiously,  once such storylines had  run their course the sufferers  never suffered a relapse.  Truly Ambridge is a miraculous place.

All this was well and good in normal times, but the tremendous politically correct propaganda exercise of the Paralympics demands so much more.   As it is now part of received pc wisdom that the disabled are no different from anyone else apart from being “differently abled”,   it simply wasn’t good enough for Ambridge not have a single character who was missing limbs, blind,  afflicted with cystic fibrosis and so on.  Nor was there  a wheelchair insight. Even worse, the one disabled  character who could not recover because of the nature of the damage , Jack Woolley with his Alzheimer’s, had been hidden away  never to have a speaking part again and to be referred to with ever declining  frequency. Why, some unkind people might think that characters whose disabilities  are “difficult” have been deliberately hidden away.

The shame of it all was terrible. How on earth would the writers and producers of the programme be able to face their friends at right-on dinner parties? They would seem so behind the ideological times in much the same way that Party members in the USSR had to live in perpetual fear of not being up with the latest ideological development.  What to do?  At one point it seemed that the Archers powers-that-be  were going to place Nigel Pargetter’s son Freddie  in a wheelchair at best and on a life support machine at worst when he rode his father’s  horse Topper which was too powerful for him.  In their hilariously clanking  agitprop  fashion the crazed pc worshippers  of the programme heavily signalled that Freddie was going to be thrown.  All that remained to be discovered were the  injuries he would sustain. Would he have his neck broken leaving him unable to move anything but his eyelids or could he end up no more than  paraplegic leaving him free to come first in the wheelchair racing in Rio? The thought even crossed the minds of seasoned Archer watchers that the boy might be killed by the fall as he is one of the very few remaining posh characters, thus following  in his  father Nigel’s footsteps, or should that be following in his headfirst plunge,    who plummeted to his death as he slipped from  the roof of Lower Loxley.

As it turned out Freddie got away with nothing more than a busted collarbone and lives to die another day when it is thought safe to  further socially cleanse the programme of another posh character.  Instead Archers listeners are due to be  treated to a different sort of disability and one which will last for as long as they want. Mike and Vicky Tucker have conceived a child despite  Mike being in his sixties and Vicky in her mid-forties.  Cue for a great deal of worry for Mike. Then they are told that the child has Down’s syndrome.  Cue for Mike to see the rest of his life sabotaged which drives him into a state of shocked gloom as he stares into a future in which he works till he drops  to support a perpetually dependent child.

True to the Archers’ tradition of treating adult male characters as  chauvinist monsters, arrested development children  or terminally inadequate wimps,  Mike is portrayed as being unreasonable in not greeting the idea of a Downs Syndrome child with unalloyed joy while Vicky, normally a less than universally liked character,  is supported universally by all the female characters and, as is required by up-to-date political correctness, the men apart from Mike also offer various degrees of support.  Also  in regulation Archers fashion, the younger the character  the more accepting they are of the pc  position. Not  one  character advocates an abortion.   Even  Mike is not allowed to do this directly.

The storyline has reached the point where Mike has suddenly had a conversion which would make St Paul’s Damascene revelation seem probable. Instead of seeing the future as a life sentence , Mike in the course of a single episode sees the pc light and becomes converted to the idea that a Downs child is a joy not an insupportable burden.  He does so after Vicky, honouring another Archers’ tradition of women characters getting their own way, announces that whatever Mike thinks she is having the baby.

How will the story develop? The BBC put up a poll on the Archers site asking tastefully whether Vicky should have the baby or abort it.  There is of course a third option and that is a miscarriage. Or indeed, a fourth and a fifth possibility, namely,   Vicky dying in childbirth with or without the survival of the child.  If the child is born how “differently abled”  will it be? Will Mike have a relapse into depression and do the decent thing and top himself? Exciting times indeed lie ahead.

But whatever the outcome of the Downs baby pregnancy,  a cloud still lies heavy on the post-Paralympic Archers’ production staff’s collective heart.  What are they to do about the shameful lack of wheelchairs and missing limbs in the village?  Will this be remedied by Will Grundy being attacked by the beast of Ambridge and having his legs chewed off? Watch this space…..