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Welcome to Ambridge on the couch, an in-depth look at the archers with me, Harriet Carmichael, Jeff Thomas, Lucy Freeman, Matt Rodriguez-Pain and James Everett.

Now before we make a start on your emails, let's have a recap of what happened this week in Ambridge.

We began the week with the great news that Neil's not dying and Susan's got

pantomime tickets, which would probably make death feel like a sweet release, to be honest. Over at the

shop, Fallon was stocking up for the pub kitchen. Whatever she was cooking required parsley, ginger

biscuits and whole grain mustard, which sounded like a surrealist episode of ready, steady cook.

It's weird, isn't it, that of all the

people in the village, Pip is so anti-beaver. You think she'd be all over them like a rash.

Stop it. Josh is naturally pro-beaver, as so many young men are, particularly as he's only getting

his rocks off once every two months when Nina pops back from being a folk musician all around Europe.

Pip and Stella managed to piss off, sorry,

Pip and Stella managed to piss Brian off around the day of his wife's death anniversary.

Misfyingly, he went round to their house to apologise to them,

or to liven up his evening by catching them in a bit of beaver research of their own,

who knows, and soon they were making

him feel better by drinking his wine and talking to him about Dick Francis. Vince, who sounded a bit

odd and had lost the ability to pronounce the word organising, had organised a works trip to this bloody pantomime.

So many people were going to this thing. I was beginning to suspect that the scriptwriters were planning some sort of cull, and that the Ambridge and abattoir coaches were going to collide in an enormous fireball, which would wipe out three-quarters of the cast, and we were going to start again with Neil's pretend birth family and the beavers. Poor old Freddie found himself in tremendous danger of living not only with his ever curious mother, but also his boss.

...