Thanks to the power of the podcast Lexi and I are able to keep up to date with the regular machinations of matters farming and otherwise in The Archers. I like this hi-tech listening and it saves my parents lots of time and money sending out taped episodes to the tropics as they did on our last overseas posting, 15 years ago. But what a few weeks it has been, some might say. Others, like Lexi, are threatening to boycott the weekly podcast as a protest over the silliness of the current main story line.
As we are always a week behind thanks to tuning in to the omnibus podcast I am not in danger of giving away any plot spoilers in this post but I am more than a bit irritated by the whole Kirsty and Tom saga and think the writers really need to offer loyal listeners some form of narrative apology for the hideously clunky goings on at the wedding that wasn't.
Tom and Kirsty were an ideal couple: they were written for each other after all. Yes Tom dumped Kirsty a long while ago in true soap opera style at a posh restaurant and then went off with a fragrant supermarket buyer and later lived with Brenda and Kirsty had her share of flings too, but then one has to kiss a few frogs before one finds one's Prince or Princess. The happy news of them getting together was indeed happy news and if the carefully created characters had been allowed by the script writers to progress in the way that their characters needed to then they would have enjoyed a homespun wedding in wellies at Bridge Farm, with their own brand sausages and burgers for the wedding breakfast. Their adventurous side would have eventually got the better of them and they would have travelled widely, returning to Ambridge, to develop their organic futures together, thanks to Jazzer running the pigs on a profit share arrangement while they were away.
But, no. The writers decided to end a beautiful thing in a very cack-handed manner. After Tom's drunken "Am I doing the right thing" moment at his stag night his character needed to talk to the wonderful Kirsty, and simplify their wedding plans, something her character needed too. Of course the writers couldn't allow that. Ever practical and sensible Kirsty would never have bought two wedding dresses, let alone spend more than £2000 on one and then not tell her husband to be, nor would she try the blighted garment on in the presence of Helen and the right-on Henry and a, doubtless recycled-plastic-cup, of blackcurrant squash. Even Helen, despite being blind to the evil and domineering Rob (he really let's Robs of the world down - we are fundamentally a fair-minded and creative animal), would not have allowed the test-tube created Henry to have a coloured drink at all, let alone within three miles of a wedding dress.
And then there was the wedding day that wasn't. Roy, a rock on whom any civilized community can be built and a man more sensitive to the feelings of others than they are themselves, would have known that Tom's conveniently deceased elder brother John was killed in a tractor accident (was it really 16 years ago?!) and so he would have ruled out hiring, again spending money frivolously which is so against the Kirsty and Tom psyche, a vintage tractor! Come on writers, know the characters. You created the after all.
And then there was the breaking up scene in the church vestry. Please. The two characters are so completely matched that it was no surprise Tom was stuck for words. Every fibre in his character's being was fighting against the clumsy script and nonsense of the storyline, but it could not be changed. The writers had made theIr decision. Tom and Kirsty were to be split apart in an apparently dramatic manner. The writers aimed for melodrama, but created sensationalist, inaccurate and unbelievable tosh.
While the storyline might allow for some development of earlier introduced possibilities (Tony finally going mad when his new herd of cows all get TB, the evil Rob taking over more of the farm and then battering Helen until she kills him with Kirsty's stained wedding dress, and Peggy finally leaving all her money to the hastily invented Borchester Dog's Home - from then on rebranded as "St Captain's") it is all so unsatisfactory that the slim amount of belief needed by loyal listeners to keep tuning in has been stretched so far that one has to question whether the writers know what they are doing. I know that I sound like a football supporter who is whinging about the slump in form of their team but there is a process of creativity at stake here. Writers create characters and those characters can be allowed to develop but cannot be allowed to go completely against their created nature. If this happens the listeners wake up, lose belief, and realise that the smells of baking coming from Jill's homemade biscuits are not real (just like the moment I realised that paying £28.00 to sit and freeze watching millionaires chase bags of wind around was not something I needed to continue doing).
Honestly, writers of The Archers, if this play script had landed on my Drama teaching desk from one of my students I would have sent it back with the one word comment reading "unbelievable."