Leaking boundaries.

The inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact used to be the preserve of sufferers from senile dementia, readers of the Daily Mail,  and members of the right wing of the Republican Party (click here for a case in point). Not any more.

   Last year Ambridge gained a new resident: Jim. Like Lynda Snell,  he’s a pain in the butt most of the time, but like her is given the occasional redeeming feature - thereby distinguishing them from Jailbird Carter and the irrepressible !!Vickoi!! Tucker who have none whatsoever. As well as sharing my name and a vaguely similar pre-retirement career, Jim likes to drop the occasional Latin tag. Last week he used my favourite - sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - in an egregiously inappropriate way. 

   A month or so ago the Archers’ scriptwriters killed off the character Sid Perks. Not, as in the case of Phil Archer, because the actor playing him had died, but because Alan Devereux had decided to retire. I’m sure he’s a good bloke - the amount of time the scriptwriters have devoted to the aftermath of his  character’s death suggests he was important to his colleagues. But here’s the rub: Sid Perks was boring. He had the barking laugh of those totally devoid of a sense of humour, his great passion in life was cricket, the most tedious pastime known to man. Yet week after week vast chunks of time have been taken up by people reminiscing about him and mourning his death. Far more than was spent on the aftermath of Phil Archer’s death - a character who’d been in the soap since its inception. And of all the over-the-top reactions that of his former wife, Kathy, takes the biscuit. People don’t usually take kindly to being dumped by their spouses; turning them into some recently deceased saint is unheard of. If the scriptwriters were doing their job of delivering a consistent character, Jim would have told her so. He’s not a man who suffers fools - other than himself - gladly. 

   There was a time when schools saw their job as educating pupils rather than using them as fodder to climb up  the meaningless league tables introduced by Snobby Roberts, and then enthusiastically adopted by the Blair Witch project. Those of us lucky enough to have been schoolchildren then know that Virgil’s words were spoken by a broken hearted Aeneas looking at the sack of Troy as depicted on the gates of the temple being erected in Carthage. At the utter destruction of his homeland and with it the loss of his wife and the death of all his friends. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ is a sentiment which, alas, could be put in the mouth of a Bosnian muslim, a Rwandan tutsi or one of those millions of poor souls who have just lost everything in the floods in Sind. But to apply it to Kathy’s situation is ludicrously inappropriate, and if Jim were a real person he’d know it. But the scriptwriters have let the boundary between real life and fiction leak. They were fond of Alan Devereux, a real person, and seek to demonstrate this to their erstwhile colleague by inflicting months of boredom on their listeners: we miss Alan, therefore you listeners are jolly well going to miss the character he played. Why don’t they just leave Alan to enjoy his retirement and let the homophobic cricketer Sid slide into well-deserved oblivion?