There's plenty of agony in store on The Archers, thanks to a clever plot twist
The Archers
Radio 4
When four years ago Brian Aldridge impregnated his mistress so decisively that she gave birth to a boy, I could only marvel at the generosity and far-sightedness of the Archers writers.
They had bequeathed another generation of storyliners (as they used to be called on the Crossroads credits) a wonderful plot to be taken out and used in 20 years. Brian would have died from old age or tertiary syphilis and the old sexist would have left Home Farm not to his daughters, nor yet to his gay stepson, Adam, but to Ruairi, the Irish lad he had sired illegitimately all those years ago with Siobhan.
But no writer is that generous. In the past few years Siobhan, variously exiled in Germany and Ireland, has made occasional reappearances, one of which almost resulted in Brian's death in a car crash (the two had been arguing behind the wheel). With the Grundy boys' paternity imbroglio petering out, and the damp squib of Ruth Archer's almost-affair with the cowherd, it was time for the greatest of Ambridge's romantic triangles to be taken out of the cupboard and struck repeatedly.
They had planned as much for a while, I now see. The last time Brian saw Siobhan, he thought she was looking peaky. As Neil Kinnock warned electors in 1992, soap characters must not get sick: a cold is never just a cold. Poor Siobhan is dying.
The tragic cancer started out as a mole on her back which, since she is all alone in the world, she had not noticed, and had spread its poison to her liver. Now she wants Brian to take care of her boy, Ruairi, "if" she dies. "Of course I will. I will love and take care of him and he will grow up on the farm as my son," Brian replied, his enthusiasm for getting an heir at last almost embarrassing, although he remembered to add: "And I shall tell him how wonderful his mother was."
Brian isn't thinking straight, partly because he is shocked, partly because he still has the hots for Siobhan and partly because he is one of those people who thinks if he says, in a reassuring voice, all shall be well, that all shall be well. His betrayed wife Jennifer, however, responds to the idea with all the manic fury of a repressed hysteric repressed no longer. Jennifer, we are always being told, is a wonderful mother (she has had enough experience, with four children from three men). But her real skill is in maintaining a poise of Christian self-righteousness, however much at odds it is with her own history and nature.
She is not well-endowed in the empathy department. God help her, she is not even sorry that Siobhan is sick. Our sympathy for her is not helped by the writers (this past week Nawal Gadalla, the previous week Adrian Flynn) turning her rival into a saint.
Reclaiming her friendship with Elizabeth, Siobhan says piously that if she must "leave the party early" she wishes to do so on good terms with those staying on. She asks Jennifer to meet her so she can apologise and present her case. Jennifer says she is not around to ease her conscience: "I don't think you know the meaning of agony." "I didn't then," she says, solemnly. She even forgives Brian for lying when he said Jennifer was up for looking after Ruairi. "And you believed him?" says Jennifer. "You clearly don't know my husband very well."
This is one of those rare periods in this so often superficial saga, where we get within a sniff of a character's secret self. Tom Archer remarked to his uncle that his office smelled like a distillery. Here was Brian revealed as a secret drinker - not a comic one like Lilian or Eddie, but one so desperate he has hidden his addiction even from us listeners. Brian squeals out his love for all his children to Adam. It is a sincere squeal, but his sincerity is always walled in by past deceit; it turns out he saw Ruairi every time he travelled abroad.
We left Siobhan on Wednesday night suffering physically from her first round of chemo, and Brian and Jenny suffering in every other way. On the programme's hyperactive message board, a consensus is being reached that Adam and Ian, the only gays in the village, should bring the bastard up. Maybe. But there will be plenty more agony first. Goody, goody.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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