Silly season comes early in Ambridge-Archers Round-up for May

David Archer is a hot headed ass. According to editor on leave, Vanessa Whitburn, the Archers of Brookfield are the moral compass of the story. Well if badger shooting, dumping hundredweights of cow muck in someone else's garden and failing to protect your family from dastardly villains is David being moral someone has clearly trodden down hard on the compass.

In this month's Archers two major events have taken place. Firstly, moody, spoilt and petulant Adam Travers-Macy has been banged over the head by rural ne'er-do-wells and David Archer managed to get a glimpse of them as they sped away.

Secondly, moody, spoilt and petulant vicar's daughter Amy Franks has discovered that her good looking boyfriend of all of eight weeks, who supposedly spends every weekend visiting his dear old West Indian grandmother, is not actually visiting her at all but is married. Carl, the married boyfriend, must be as thick as David Archer because he attended a business function for lawyers with his wife, herself a lawyer, and was spotted by Amy's step mother, the saintly Usha, and Annabelle Shrivener, another lawyer who appeared to be on good terms with Carl's wife. Amy is now having hysterics because Usha did not tell her before Carl ditched her. Quite how anyone could spend more than a few moments in Amy's suffocating company is unclear.

However, her father, Alan the do-gooding vicar of Ambridge,  in an effort to console Amy is now talking to her as one would a five year old who has not only fallen and grazed their knee but has simultaneously not been invited to a fellow five year old's birthday party, thereby missing out on a chance to wear a new party dress and eat lots of jelly. And the vicar's cloying ministrations do not seem to be doing any good.

Back at Brookfield Ruth and David are being menaced by a phantom caller, with a broad Mummerset accent, warning off David from testifying in court or else dire repercussions will result. The direst of these repercussions so far have been the appearance of a local newspaper in Archer's tractor cab and a light taken out with an air gun. Hardly Reggie and Ronnie Kray but dopey David still won't call the police despite Ruth going into one of her hysterical, shouty phases which take place about once a week simply to keep her larynx in good working order.

Quite why she does not call the police is anybody's guess so listeners are waiting to see what ghastly deed will fall upon the house of Archer, with many Archers' fans fervently hoping something truly awful, fatal even, will occur to at least one of David, Ruth or their insufferably smug daughter, Pip. With villains like these we should not be at all surprised if one or all of them are not tied to the railway line as the midday Hollerton Junction express comes steaming round the bend.