It's sad life and then you die- September in Ambridge

THE YOUNG OF AMBRIDGE have a throughly miserable time of it. Firstly there is the heated debate, usually chaired by aged left wing earth mother, Jill Archer, about the sheer iniquity of receiving a private rather than state education. Invariably secondary school education is at Borchester Green comprehensive before the really gifted head for the University of Felpersham which appears to offer everything from sandwich courses in sandwich making to masters' degrees in Canadian Studies.

Of the great Archer clan only Debbie Aldridge went to a university listeners would recognise, and even she dropped out of Exeter before her final degree, in order that she could take up with the lecturer in Canadian Studies at Felpersham University. For the rest it is agricultural college or nothing. Having completed their studies none of the young ever move away from the place but remain in the open prison that is Ambridge with only the occasional new inmate to socialise with as well as the inevitable long term lags and trusties.

This month has seen the young of the village experiencing desperate times for widely varying reasons. Fallon Rodgers, a young woman who seemed set to make something of herself despite having parents who would convince most that being an orphan was preferable, seems to have jettisoned her musical aspirations in order to find love with whatever pitiful Ambridge male she can.

Harry, the grey and wearisome young barman she went on holiday with to Edinburgh, decided that he was really gay despite never having shown any signs or mentioned it previously. This month we have seen her fretting over what to wear when treated to a night out with Rhys, another barman who makes Harry look like riveting company. Rhys is so Welsh that any minute now we expect him to shout 'Oggy, oggy, oggy' and break into a selection of ballads by Max Boyce. Different accents are helpful to identify characters in radio drama but the Archers is turning into a farcical league of nations.

Elsewhere Ed, who seemed to be on the verge of achieving what no Grundy ever seemed capable of namely making a success of himself through hard work, is for some reason plunged into economic misery. His dairy herd seems to be incurring huge losses whilst the Archer clan have no trouble at all in making money from their milk. He and his young wife Emma are getting increasingly fractious with one another, often over the fact that they seem to be unable to afford even a loaf of bread.

And then there is the dynamic, work obsessed duo of Tom Archer and his long suffering girl friend and fiancee, Brenda Tucker. These two only speak about business to one another and the bulk of their conversation merely concerns how busy they constantly are. Brenda is another apparently bright girl who turned her back on a sensible career outside Ambridge in order to drudge secretarially for spiv property dealer, Matt Crawford, when not serving burgers from her boyfriend's van.

Tom Archer seems to have access to a line of credit that most of us, and especially Ed Grundy, can only dream of. This month he is gearing up to launch a huge order of ready made meals without anything as tedious as premises or distribution networks. He is the Borchester equivalent of Blackadder's Baldrick, always with a cunning plan that will transform any tricky situation. He is arrogant, far fetched and thoroughly unlikeable which should certainly make him a major hit with all the hard up, under achieving and lonely young women of Ambridge.

Farmageddon- A dark July in Ambridge

Well that's got one more nasty piece of work banged to rights! And let no one say Keith Horrobin didn't have it coming, if only because his name was Horrobin. The Horrobins of Ambridge make the workshy Grundys look like bluebloods although it does seem odd that Keith and his brother Clive both favour arson as their preferred violent act of choice. Were they deprived heating as children? And, if this runs in the family, can it be long before hapless drudge Neil Carter starts to fret when his wildly aspirational wife, Susan (nee´ Horrobin) decides the only thing lacking in the family dream home is a nice, wide open fireplace?

As audiences for The Archers slump by some 400,000 efforts to make the show grittier and appeal more to young people seem doomed to failure. If anything the storylines have got far more fragmented so the listener is not entirely sure if this is geared to perceived shorter attention spans or if the script writers have simply forgotten about things. There certainly is not much farming to be had and, despite awful weather for the last three months, no one in Ambridge has had any problems with hay making or with their potato crop.

What we have had has been far fetched and the basic staple of TV soaps. The continuing threats on life and limb on all those at Brookfield, oh if only some one would actually carry these out, ceased as soon as Keith Horrobin was arrested although sister Tracy continues to protest his innocence and maintain he is 'in bits'. Susan, being clearly no brighter than her sister, has been accusing daughter Emma of fabricating evidence on the bizarre basis that, having slept with both Grundy brothers, she was unsure of who the father of her first born was.

Elsewhere, Adam Macey is in a sulk which comes as no surprise as he is pretty much always in a sulk, because wicked step father Brian, who paid for the house he shares with his boyfriend, and also pays his wages is not prepared to farm just the way Adam wants. While Adam has embarked on his latest sulk we have seen the appearance of another Eastern European, who certainly appear to be all the rage in Ambridge at the moment. The latest one is a Polish migrant worker called Pavel who is a walking encyclopaedia of best green farm practices who also seems to have taken a shine to Adam. Thus we are faced with the thorny prospect of three making Adam's gay marriage to jocular chef Ian a little crowded.

And finally, just to allow those crossover moments in radio programming of which BBC radio is so fond, the adenoidal Vicki Tucker, is pregnant. Thus, given that Vicki is certainly well past her first and second flushes of youth and her husband, boorish Mike, is almost at pensionable age, we seem destined to have a mature woman's view of pregnancy foisted on us by, not only The Archers, but also Woman's Hour which regularly picks up on the female side of life in Ambridge.

Ambridge is always at its best when little happens and the seasons roll by interspersed with planting, harvest and horticultural shows. Vanessa Whitburn brought a political and urban agenda to Ambridge and interim editor, John Yorke, wants to make things 'darker and bigger.' But the only thing that appears to be getting bigger is the cast-list and rather than look at the dark side of farming and the struggle many have to survive we are being delivered sensationalist, short term scripts  that are neither credible nor satisfying. It looks as though listeners will continue to jump ship and who can blame them?

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.

Ambridge Round up- The Archers in January

It's Marketing month in Ambridge

January has seen another strange turn in the ever changing face of Ambridge. Whereas we have become used to serial personality changes this month saw an outbreak of ad-speak in the oh so weird enclave that is this tiny, inter-related farming community.

Sausage obsessed, Tom Archer, and his grill friend and girl friend, Brenda Tucker, have long since rejected traditional speech structures popular amongst civilised races for the verbal emoticons of the marketing think-tank. They routinely urge one another to 'Think outside the box' and speak of 'Once in a lifetime opportunities' and all this about sausages. Brenda has also made the rapid transformation from downtrodden, clerical underling of a convicted criminal and his alcoholic partner to the Nigella Lawson of Borsetshire's culinary world, albeit specialising only in pork products. Her recipes have been seized upon by a local supermarket chain who have no doubt, 'Run her pork lasagne up their flagpole and seen how many saluted it.' It is hard to imagine these two crashing bores ever talking about anything else other than minced pork and griddles.

The shrill, know-all teenaged prig that is Pip Archer has been doing what she does best, namely lecture anyone who will listen and bizarrely this month a village hall full of grown men and women seem prepared to. Pip is no stranger to ad-speak cliche and stridently told her gormless parents they 'had taken their eye off the ball' when it came to selling  Hassett Hills products. Whereas Tom and Brenda are cornering the ground pork market, Hasset Hills is the lamb equivalent, hawked round to anyone willing to express vague interest in the stuff. No one ever turns up at Brookfield and asks to buy any, mind you with Pip ready and all too willing to give a potted lecture to anyone in earshot, who can blame them?

Even randy old agri-baron Brian is into marketing parlance having had a meeting with a cartoon cut-out ad-man figure called Rufus and used a most un-Brian like phrase when he told the velvet voiced, if desperately wooden, lawyer, Annabelle Shrivener that something had come at them unbidden 'Out of left field.'

All this ad-speak has led to an outbreak of two things: websites and leaflets. The Archers is just as wild about websites as the BBC is and one can only wonder if that is entirely co-incidental. But just as the Beeb urges us to download endless podcasts and sign up to its vast array of Twitter and blog pages so Archers characters routinely turn their businesses round in a nano-second  simply by posting a web page.

Bridge Farm, the near bankrupt centre of an e-coli break out has been transformed simply because Tom Archer put up a film of pigs playing football on his website. Pip extolled the poor unfortunates in the village hall how a website will get sales of Hasset Hills scrag end soaring, whilst Rufus has delivered a wonderful website for Brian's new mega-dairy with a hunky milkman on the front, so planning permission is doubtless a formality provided the majority of the planning committee hanker after a hunky milkman.

Then there are the leaflets. I must make an admission here and say that I religiously, and without hesitation, throw away each and every leaflet I receive. In Ambridge they are treated like tablets brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. Even Jo Grunday, 91 this September, has prepared leaflets advertising his latest money making scheme. Mind you even he cannot beat uber ad-man, Rufus, who had leaflets prepared and ready for Brian and Annabelle to approve before he had even received Brian's brief. A talent indeed. Especially as, in Ambridge, no one ever bins a leaflet.