Not Shaken to the Core. Giant Damp Squid invades Ambridge

I was wrong about The Archers - but I have an excuse. I was theorising on the basis of misleading data, which came from a source which might have been assumed to be reliable. What started all the speculation was the phrase used by the series editor, Vanessa Whitburn, in an interview with the 'Guardian', in which she predicted that Sunday night's episode would 'Shake [the fictional village of] Ambridge to the core'.

Personally, I don't think an emergency (but successful) Caesarean section and a man falling off a roof, the actual events in this episode, even remotely measure up to this billing.

Indeed my Archers consultant informs me that major personality transplants (a common device on Ms Whitburn's watch) were needed to sustain the storylines surrounding even these two unshaking non-core events.

But it was fun while it lasted

However, the mean and spiteful posters here, who come only to sneer, could not of course see it as such. 'Alan' (funny that we can't know the full name of this courageous critic. Still, doubtless the thought police watch even comments on soap operas and his employers are sensitive on the subject of Nigel Pargetter): 'Your Archers prediction was not only woefully wide of the mark it was also terribly revealing. Why do we turn to you for analysis Peter when the views you see life through distort it so ?' (At least, that's what I think he meant. I have corrected several typing errors.)

And James Stenson joins him, saying: 'Peter Hitchens has moved into predictions? What fun. This may be the first time I've seen him attempt anything falsifiable, even if it is about the Archers.
'Unsurprisingly it proves (a) predicated on the assumption that "politically correct propaganda" pervades and (b) utterly wrong. Nigel fell off a roof and not a single wheelchair-bound lesbian Chinese dwarf came to his rescue.
'More of the same, please, Peter - continue to put your interpretation of the world to the test.'

Revealing of what? And I should have thought that my prediction that the Tories wouldn't win the election was falsifiable, though as it turned out it wasn't falsified at all. They didn't win. Likewise my prediction that the Iraq war would turn out to be a grave mistake, my warning that New Labour were not what they appeared, but a radical danger to the country, my warning that David Cameron would drag the Tories so far to the left as to be indistinguishable from Labour, my warning that exam devaluation was taking place despite the denials of the authorities, and was cementing lower education standards, my warning that Barack Obama was in fact a normal human being and a rather undistinguished Chicago machine politician, and would not save the world as imagined (all of these derided at the time) etc etc. Still, it's possible that someone who is deeply interested in The Archers might not have noticed these predictions, or even have been aware of them.

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