Disaster at the wheel, divorce, and impressive vegetables … it’s suddenly all happening in Ambridge
Absolutely nothing happened in The Archers this month, until it all happened at once: a car crash (adding to the village’s frankly appalling road-safety statistics); Chris and Alice getting a divorce (noooo!); the possible sale of Home Farm; the return of a crucial lost character; and the first words of
Chelsea Horrobin, who, like Ruairi Donovan and Ben Archer before her, magically found her tongue, aged 17, behind the wheel of a car. According to her mother, the estimable Tracy Horrobin, she’s a marvellous driver, despite actually running a man over on her third lesson.
This was all after a slightly implausible series of events during which Joy, peering out through her nets from behind her African violets, spotted a Mysterious Man lurking around the Beechwood estate. Rather than ask her what he looked like – was he, for instance, a dastardly Max Cady sort of a chap wearing red trousers, a check shirt and a waxed jacket, or, perhaps, a homeless waif with a serious back problem? Helen and Lee decided it must be that destroying angel, Helen’s ex-husband Rob Titchener, back in Ambridge to snatch little Jack. The family decamped to safety and Bridge Farm – I imagine Pat in her rocking chair, Lillian Gish-style, cradling a rifle. Naturally the interloper turned out to be the abject Blake, formerly enslaved by Kirsty’s estranged husband, builder Philip Moss, who then, in his misery and panic, hurled himself beneath Chelsea’s wheels.