As Eddie Grundy and his grandson Dodgy George pondered their turkeys – “I could watch them for hours,” said Eddie, while George seems poised to give them their own TikTok account – it struck me that this scene was the perfect mise-en-abyme, the ideal metaphor for The Archers itself. If the turkeys, with their gobbling and squabbling, their minor and futile dramas, are like the inhabitants of Ambridge, Eddie and George stand in for us, the listeners, mildly amused, broadly detached, essentially heartless. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” and all that.
Whichever way you cut it, the gods or wanton boys or the cruel fates themselves have been circling around Ambridge’s most virtuous character this month. I am not talking about St Shula, who is off to Sunderland for a year, or for ever, to share her ministry with the grateful people of the north. I am talking about young Ben Archer – student nurse, all-round mensch, the foil to his less scrupulous brother, Josh. As soon as his gran Jill presented Ben’s girlfriend, Beth, with a topaz pendant – a family heirloom no less – their idyll was obviously doomed. Especially when Jill cheerfully noted that topaz is a symbol of love and loyalty.
