If I were Joe Grundy, Ambridge's oldest inhabitant, I would be developing a severe nervous twitch. Not a day goes by (except Saturday, when nothing happens at all) but someone remarks how frail he looks.
"All the fight's gone out of him", "'E can't even do up 'is buttons", "'E's 'ardly touched 'is sausages." You are ominously reminded of Old Joshua Merryweather – aka Tony Hancock in the fictional radio show The Bowmans – who one day opened his script to discover he had fallen into a threshing machine.
Old Joe lost his mojo when, after a tequila or three, he fell and broke his wrist at Grey Gables. "Laughter turned to gasps of horror," as the Borchester Echo put it. Caroline, the owner, is terse: "The press make it So Much Worse." And Joe's son, Ed, is cutting up rough: "Sorry don't butter no parsnips!" The Grundys are the last repository of arcane country lore like this. If Joe goes, we will all be quite at sea about our parsnips.
I declare an interest here. Every soap used to have room for a crusty old character, cluttering up the place and dispensing whiskery wisdom. I might mention Ena Sharples. I might speak of Walter Gabriel. Not any more. I suppose they are all in care homes. I feel I must strike a feeble blow for, as Coward put it acidly, elderly actresses forgetting their lines.
Meanwhile Rob, who has been deflowering Ambridge's rose, Helen Archer, has vanished suddenly like a rabbit up a burrow – as Brian, hitherto Ambridge's leading lothario, put it. Surely it's a rabbit down a burrow, or a rat up a drainpipe? In Rob's case, the latter. Happily, their passionate panting (surprisingly blush-making on radio) was interrupted by the arrival of 100 German heifers. And, last week, by a phone call from Rob's wife.
Not a very merry month. We can only look forward – albeit nervously – to Linda's feminist Christmas panto, Robin Hood and his Merrie Women.
A Month in Ambridge returns on 13 November
