I’ve listened to The Archers on Radio 4 since I was an art student in the early seventies. Over that time, the story lines have somewhat changed, thanks mainly to the show’s Editor, metro-liberal Guardianista, Vanessa Whitburn.
Doris, Dan, Tom Forrest and Walter Gabriel have all snuffed it - new characters have stepped into their soiled green wellies. Fallon, Usha, Jazza and Jason now trail the blaze of English modern rural life. The health of the sprout crop and the presence of dropsy in the dairy herd has given way all the other things that are supposed to happen in a tiny middle English village. Suddenly the talk down at The Bull is all about drugs busts, racism, blackmail, gay marriage, gambling addiction, bent coppers, murder, armed robbery, suicide…. and most controversially of all, the ongoing marriage break up of David and Ruth Archer, due to some potential extra marital rumpy pumpy with Sam, the cattle man.
Whitburn is a well known Nu Labour luvee. At absolutely every opportunity she likes to shoehorn imagined inner city trauma and Notting Hill meanderings into leafy Borsetshire.
But I wonder if she will be covering the reality of English pensioner Jack Wooley? The retired local businessman and former owner of Grey Gables has recently been struck down with Alzheimer’s. He’s been losing his mental faculties – but fortunately, he has the NHS to make sure he’ll get the drugs he so badly needs. Well not any more. Not now that NICE has decided to withdraw a whole range of Alzheimer’s drugs from English only patients – because of the uber high cost of £2:50p per patient per day. …..
Will Ms Whitburn run the storyline that Jack’s condition is getting worse because of the actions of a small minded, anti English quango? Will Ms Whitburn get Jack’s 85 year old wife, Peggy to stand on the village green armed with a big megaphone to slag off NICE, Blair & Patricia Hewitt – and demand an English Parliament to look after the needs of English people?…
That’s the trouble with soap plots – the storylines are so bloody unbelievable….
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Alfie, you might be interested in this.
I received it from a friend of mine in Staffordshire.
"My eldest daughter had her t.b. vaccination at thirteen as did my step-daughter...so when my middle kid gave me a form from school regarding t.b. vaccinations, I presumed it would be a simple permission slip. Oh no. From now on, only children from minority backgrounds or recently arrived in the country will receive it;
so basically I pay tax to ensure that these children have their t.b. status checked and for their health to be protected but my own child is discriminated against because she's English
I can of course pay privately for her to have it done...£25. Of course I, and no doubt plenty of other parents, will cough up because whatever the public health authorities would have us believe, t.b. is on the increase.
Absolutely disgraceful.There'd be hell up if every family had to pay or if "minority" children were told they could not have it.
Should she ever wish to work for the n.h.s. or abroad, she'd have to have it anyway, so the government is putting her at a disadvantage...."
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