From Newsgroup: uk.media.radio.archers

On 2026/6/20 9:13:7, Nick Odell wrote:

So the BBC needs to save a lot of money and on the Radio Four side
have flagged up the axing of The World Tonight and the Midnight News.

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me - most of the newsgathering
costs of the Midnight News, for instance, have been invested in the
earlier Six O'Clock News - bar a few tweaks or a spectacularly unusual evening. My guess is that those two suggestions have been put forward
as a stalking horse for a range of different cuts entirely. But, as
ever, ICBW and probably am.

I suspect you're very right (re the stalking horse bit anyway).
[]

So my proposal is that at a suitably convenient point, there should be
a final episode of The Archers which (almost) wraps everything up and
that the BBC go back to about 1965 - or whenever the archive becomes consistently continuous - and starts running the serial sixty years in
the past. If they did that, I for one would be an avid listener.

There are precedents; the closest, to me, is the (TV) series "Call the Midwife"; it started based on some actual memoirs, but continued after
those were used up, and became a sort of rolling - look at the NHS, and
more broadly British (poor urban) society in general; it's reached about
1970 now. OK, given it's title there's a lot of pushing and screaming,
but there's a lot more to it than that - I find the historical stuff
quite interesting (and the birth stuff a distraction).

Though repeating TA by repeating episodes from however long ago would be
very different from a today-written drama set then. _Might_ still work.
It was tried at the beginning of CoVid (before they did the soliloquies-from-the-broom-cupboards), with mixed results, but that was
using selected episodes, rather than continuous.

I've never seen the TV series How I Met Your Mother but I understand
that, when the final, double-episode, aired it wrapped up the series
and both delighted and enraged loyal viewers because in answering all
the open questions, it opened up even more.

I'd never been a follower of Gavin & Stacey, but was with someone who
was when that had its last one. Final wind-up episodes can work; not
sure if more so than just last episodes - probably better.

I'd like to go a step further.

So, announce the final episode of The Archers; make it episode 18,999
or some other significant number and tie up all the loose ends and -
How I Met Your Mother-style - both delight and infuriate the listeners
with this last hurrah.

...Then quietly announce that there is actually an episode 19,000
which ties up the loose ends of the loose ends but only Jeremy Howe
knows what it is and that it will be played at some significant point
in the future - maybe in sixty years time after the re-run of episode
18,999? In the meantime, it has been cryptographically locked away
beyond reach.

How was this done? How come even the cast don't know the contents of
the secret final episode? Because the scenes and the lines and the
characters will have been generated amongst the hours and hours of
recordings during the previous months and will ostensibly have fallen
on the cutting room floor in the editing suite. I'm sure the
performance fees could be covered in the small print surrounding the
payment of an end-of-series bonus.

Very Machiavellian. Sounds like a plan ...

Some might say current plot developments hint at a winding-up ...

Don't thank me now: just send the usual, well-stuffed brown envelope.

:-)

Nick

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Don't play "stupid" with me... I'm better at it.
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