Charlotte Higgins on The Archers: if you’re going to cause a scene, do it in a Swindon cafe

‘A cafe in Swindon” was the location for the fateful meeting this month between Evil Rob Titchener and Helen Archer – the latter, in 2016, having stabbed the former in the stomach after enduring years of gaslighting and coercive control at his hands. Apparently, Rob has been doing a lot of “work on himself” in his house in Dakota. Maybe the kind that Jerry Lundegaard was doing in the movie Fargo before he hired Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare to kidnap his wife. At any rate, the beverage-sippers of Wiltshire must be a tolerant lot, because Helen’s increasingly strangulated tones of anguished bravery, let alone Rob’s collapse and seizure, caused nary a tinkling of teacups among the cafe’s other patrons.

Titchener – one minute as ’umble as Uriah Heep, the next as teeth-baringly threatening as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter – might well have been faking his Swindonian fit in a bid for Helen’s sympathy and/or guilt. Because, as veteran listeners know, nothing, repeat nothing, is too evil for Evil Rob Titchener. On the other hand, he might well not, given that Lee and Tom, Helen’s partner and brother respectively, had recently paid him a visit. That ill-advised adventure, which may yet end Lee’s career as physiotherapist-in-chief to the Laurels care home, ended with Rob’s head smashed against a paving stone and stitches required. At the time of writing, it is thrillingly impossible to judge whether Helen is now invincible, immune to Rob’s former spell upon her – or whether Rob is now a diminished, weakened creature who has somehow come to Jesus. Obviously I hope not, because Evil Rob is so much fun.

It was tempting, very tempting, to begin this column with the words “I told you so” and simply repeat them 100 times. Because, finally, Stella has been revealed as a lesbian, as I predicted on *checks back catalogue* 4 January 2022. Now we need the poor woman not to be the only lesbian in the village, because unless Molly or Tilly Button are secretly gay, she’s on her own. My hopes remain firmly pinned on Anna Tregorran’s moving to Ambridge – her honeyed lawyerly tones have been heard again, hallelujah, as she visits her declining mother Carol at Glebe Cottage, and finds the odd moment to ladle out legal advice to Helen. Still, there’s room for any apparently straight Ambridge woman to kick over the patriarchal traces. During her brief interlude of being sacked from her job (a bit of a storm in a seed drill) Stella said she’d miss her trips “up Lakey Hill” with Ruth Archer. We all know what that means.