Things have been awfully rum in The Horrobins, I mean in The Archers, this month. Were the long-running radio series not self-evidently documentary one would be tempted, patently absurd though this might seem, to suggest that the scriptwriters had gone a little awry. I mean: the ongoing saga of young Ruairi – now outed as a sex worker by his best friend, Ben – would stretch anyone’s credulity tissue-thin. I suppose one simply has to accept that fact is stranger than fiction: here is a 19-year-old offering sex for money to a highly successful businesswoman named Julianne, at whom absolutely no eyebrows are raised as she drags him round endless corporate cocktail parties and business trips to five-star hotels. I guess the point is that he has mummy issues, what with his actual mother Siobhan having died when he was little, and then having been so grievously pushed away by his half-sister, Alice, when she was in the throes of one of her alcoholic rages.
The Julianne/Ruairi nexus is almost as baffling as the complete failure of any of the villagers – despite having had an entire presentation offered to them by Adil on the future of Grey Gables – to make inquiries as to the identity of the mysterious new owner of the hotel. Longtime listeners, rather more curious than Ambridgeans themselves, suspect the hand of Hazel Woolley. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were right.
