George finally cracked! He confessed all – that he’d been driving Alice Carter’s car when it crashed, endangering the lives of several people, that he moved his slumbrous, drunken passenger into the driver’s seat to incriminate her. But his admission was made only to his parents, Emma and Will – for whom some atavistic adherence to the “code of the Grundys” means it’s out of the question to grass up their own son. Instead, they have tried to persuade George to do the right thing of his own volition. This has resulted in the oft-whimpered refrain: “I can’t go to prison!”
The boy, alas, has as much moral backbone as an invertebrate. He ended up enlisting the aid of – sensation! – his notorious great-uncle, Clive Horrobin. As longtime listeners will know, Clive is the very worst offshoot of that (now largely reformed) clan. He once held up the village shop in an armed robbery, and as a result of harbouring him, his sister, Susan Carter, ended up inside for six months in 1993. Outraged Archers listeners wrote to Michael Howard, then the home secretary, to plea for leniency for the woman who became known as The Ambridge One. George may find he has bitten off more than he can chew with Clive, who is beginning to sound rather like a Brummie Rob Titchener.
All of this has been satisfyingly terrible for George’s mum, Emma, a person about whom I have very mixed feelings. Peak schadenfreude was hearing her pretend to enjoy her surprise 40th birthday party while she was barely digesting the full horror of The Truth. The cake was in the shape of a chainsaw – a nod to her new career in tree surgery, but nevertheless an appropriately violent image. Fallon and Ed had briefly flirted with theming the night around Kubrick’s The Shining. That would have been great: the increasingly deranged George is anyway edging towards a passable Jack Nicholson; Seren and Nova Archer could have come as the sinister Grady twins.
Vet Alastair’s romantic life – which has involved falling in love with married veterinary nurse Denise, whose son Paul also works at the practice – seems to be tidying itself up, now that it’s all out in the open, and Paul’s frankly understandable hostilities have ceased. It looked bad when Alastair, after a client complaint, was summoned to head office to see Don “the don” James – capo dei capi of the evil veterinarian empire Lovell James, whom one imagines wreathed in cigar smoke at the centre of his wood-panelled lair. (“No one’s ever seen him smile,” according to Alistair.) Fortunately, this Vito Corleone of the pet-care world exhibited an unusually human side, and the course of true love now runs a little smoother.
