Well there we go. Finally, we heard – albeit in that weird way kisses on the radio always come across as extremely loud and incredibly close – the first lesbian snog in The Archers. It happened on the night under canvas that Pip Archer had planned for her daughter, Rosie, with her friend Stella along for grownup company. Except young Rosie, not unreasonably, preferred to sleep in a proper bed, leaving Pip and Stella alone with the rosé and toasted marshmallows, under the Borsetshire moon and the lonely hoot of the tawny owl. Stella had just had her heart half broken because Ed Grundy had accidentally crushed her dog Weaver beneath the wheels of his trailer (the second dog he has killed in his time, let it be said, which doesn’t make him some kind of canine serial killer, or so he claims). But I digress: the kiss happened – and it was rather lovely.
There followed a week or so of the two women awkwardly turning up on each other’s doorsteps to return forgotten bags, suggest scones of apology, and exchange unconvincing promises not to be weird with each other. But it took Pip to have drunken sex with Toby, Rosie’s dad and her onetime on-off lover, to admit to herself that she actually likes Stella. And, as Beth Jordache remarked all those years ago in Brookside Close, no one got struck by lightning.
The other dog that Ed once accidentally killed was Baz, a gun dog beloved by George Grundy when he was little. Perhaps that childhood trauma accounts for the fact that George Has a Problem With Women, which his mother, Emma, has grasped, at last. The penny dropped in the almighty row that followed George facilitating a secret meeting between young Henry and his ex-stepfather, Evil Rob Titchener, at the Borsetshire Show. Rob’s impending death from brain cancer has clearly not prevented him from slipping comfortably into Tommy Lee Royce mode. What we need in this situation, clearly, is Catherine Cawood. Instead, we have Helen Archer – though admittedly, Sgt Cawood wasn’t having to make a play for the Grey Gables cheese contract on top of the rest of her worries in Happy Valley.
Talking of Grey Gables, Adil Shah, who is overseeing the hotel’s refurb, had a Zoom meeting with “the owners” the other day. We still don’t know who “the owners” are, exactly, and they radiate a slight The Others vibe, if you remember that creepy film. Still, if Hazel Woolley were to rear her sinister head as one of them, I wouldn’t be much surprised.
