Shaking The Archers to the Core - but how?

I am about to make a prediction about an event which will take place on Sunday evening. It's only a guess, but I think it is a good guess. See if you agree. But first, the basis of my guesswork:

I don't often listen to 'The Archers', the BBC Radio 4 serial drama set in a fictional Midlands village called Ambridge. But I have family members and friends who do, and so I am compelled to take a vague interest in its plot. I have to admit that I have also been fascinated for many years by Vanessa Whitburn, editor of the programme. Indeed, I count her as a sort of discovery, along with another of my favourite characters in modern PC Britain, the policewoman Cressida Dick. I mentioned the interesting Ms Dick many years before she became famous, in my 'Brief History of Crime' (reissued as 'The Abolition of Liberty') .But Ms Whitburn featured strongly in my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain'. In a chapter called 'Suburbs of the Mind', which dwelt on the propaganda effect (and intent) of so-called soap operas, I quoted Ms Whitburn as having said: 'To be PC is really to be moral. It is having a correct moral stance. PC is, in fact, my moral plank. I don't think that wishy-washy liberal ideology works anymore.'

She also once said: 'Drama always has to move you to make you think, and distress you for a purpose.'

A few weeks ago in the 'Guardian' (13th December, G2), Ms Whitburn disclosed that she planned a major plot development in 'The Archers' to mark its 60th anniversary. It would, she said, shake the fictional village of Ambridge to its fictional core.

But she would not say what it would be. But it will be 'controversial'. Knowing Ms Whitburn's provenance, her desire to distress for a purpose, and move to provoke thought, her love of political correctness, I fell to wondering what it could possibly be.

My sources among Archers listeners weren't much use. They explained the cobweb of personal hatreds, jealousies and resentments which form the drama's current plot. They went on about a character called 'Helen' who is apparently going to have a fictional baby.

No, I thought, Ms Whitburn wants to make actual news in the world outside the studio, or why has she given this interview a fortnight before the broadcast? Fictional babies won't do that.

Then I noticed something else that Ms Whitburn told the 'Guardian'. 'Where I will defend the story-lines vigorously is against the "these things don't happen in village life" argument. I brought in a raid on the village shop and a previous editor, William Smethurst, claimed it wouldn't have happened. But I had newspaper cuttings about raids on village shops, and how awful they were. If one did these big stories all the time, it would start to lose its reality, but when we do one of them the repercussions of it reverberate for a long time.'

In the past, Ms Whitburn has come up with all kinds of stuff to make the Guardian reader and the PC liberal in general happy. The one that always seemed to me to be most questionable (apart from gnarled farmers speaking in metric rather than in customary measures) was a racialist attack on a Hindu woman living in the village. I have often, incidentally, wondered why she was a Hindu, not a Muslim. Perhaps Muslims just don't live in English villages. But do many Hindus? Then there was a further plot with the same woman marrying the vicar, not to mention all kinds of sexual revolution stuff and ultra-feminist propaganda.

But if Ms Whitburn went through the newspaper cuttings of English rural life over the past year, what truly shocking plot development could be justified by recent news, which would 'shake Ambridge to the core', allow her to dispense with several played-out characters, create a whole set of cliff-hanger dramas lasting days, not to mention a long aftermath?

Why, a gun massacre, of course.

We have had two major ones (and by coincidence a more recent rural shooting incident) in the past year. Nobody could claim it was impossible, or even necessarily improbable (nor would I, but for other reasons discussed here on other occasions) this would also allow her to help propagate the standard PC belief that gun control in Britain isn't tight enough, and that it is especially lax in the rural areas where legal firearms are mainly held. In fact, almost all gun crime is committed using illegally held weapons, but who cares about such arcane details? They can always be forgotten in the subsequent frenzy.

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