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It began in 2024 when Alice Carter, an intermittently recovering alcoholic from the prosperous Aldridge family, fell asleep drunk in the passenger seat of her car. Her nephew-in-law George Grundy, a farmworker’s son, couldn’t resist offering to drive her home (it was a flash car). But Alice half-woke and clawed drunkenly for the door: it made George swerve and knock another car, bearing Mick, Joy and Fallon, from the bridge into the River Am.
George dived in for a heroic rescue but afterwards panicked and moved the blotto Alice into the driver’s seat. Fallon lost the baby she didn’t know she was expecting, and everyone’s trauma rolled on for weeks. Alice was riven by guilt, though she couldn’t remember driving. George finally admitted the truth: when his grandparents Neil and Susan reported it, he got sent to prison for eight months.
On release, he found most of Ambridge pretty unforgiving. Jobless and barred from the Bull, he ranted at all of them on New Year’s Eve. Following a conversation with the now saintly, forgiving Alice however, he resolved to put the past behind him and make good.
Hollie Chapman, who plays Alice, explains, “The tables turned, and when she went from being the drunk to someone giving George wise advice, the scene felt really emotional, and I nearly lost it.”
Angus Stobie who voices George and joined Chapman on RT’s photoshoot to mark the dramatic storyline for the soap’s 75th anniversary, agrees that something changed in the characters’ dynamic. “I think George is slightly in awe of Alice and how she handled the whole situation. He also then means to change, family is at the centre of it all, and he wants to work and give back and provide.”
But as George walked to his parents’ house in the dark that night, someone followed him, whacked him on the head with a wine bottle and left him for dead.
Thankfully George recovered, and for weeks listeners heard characters suspecting one another of the attempted murder: Jolene the landlady; Fallon the pub cook and her policeman lover; George’s sister Keira; Alice’s dad Brian; Joy and her boyfriend Mick; and Amber’s roughneck father. Now we learn it was actually – shock! – Alice’s illegitimate half-brother Ruairi, who aspires to take over the family farm. Will Brian, in his 80s with angina, continue to pretend it was him to save his son? Will Ruairi confess? Will George lose his rag again?
We asked Chapman, Stobie and some of the other actors who play these key figures how they feel about the dramatic revelation and what it means for the future of their characters in Ambridge.
Charles Collingwood plays Brian Aldridge
I was let in on the secret about Ruairi before everybody else, and sworn to secrecy. Everyone was saying it would be me who did it. But really! Brian could barely lift a bottle — except up to his lips! I loved the great scene with George, when Brian decides to cover for Ruairi. And then the one with Ruairi!
Alice is Brian’s favourite child, he adores her. But remember, he has daughters and a stepdaughter and always longed for a son. Ruairi is the apple of his eye. Look how he treats him, compared to poor Adam [Brian’s stepson]. He’s always soft with his children. It’ll be fun to have him protecting his boy, who he’s never admitted has done a single thing wrong all his life. But I certainly don’t want Brian to go to prison! The series can’t have two people in jail in six months, and poor Brian is 82. If he were to fade away silently in Wormwood Scrubs, it’d be the end of my excessive wine-drinking at weekends.
Back in the 1980s, they nearly wrote out the Aldridges for being a happy, wealthy family with no problems. But then they gave Brian a romantic wandering eye and the affair with Siobhan, from which Ruairi was born. Crises are an actor’s dream: the hard scenes to play are the ones where you’re walking across a field of not-quite-ripe oilseed rape.
Sunny Ormonde plays Lilian Bellamy
Lilian certainly could never forgive George. I might think he’d had a hard time, but Lilian never would. Sunny is nicer than Lilian, definitely. Now she’s lost her mother Peggy and sister Jennifer, she’s developing into the matriarch, a tigress protecting Alice. Of course, she’s highly suspicious about Brian, always had a feeling that he’s unreliable, after he cheated on Jennifer.
But Lilian’s also never had much of a relationship with Ruairi, only when he was a child. She thought Jennifer an absolute saint for taking him on. And she felt a connection with Alice, because Lilian’s father was an alcoholic, and she herself could have gone that way… Would she agree to protect Ruairi? Interesting one. She might, you know! Blood is thicker than water, though he’s just her step-nephew-in-law.
Hollie Champan plays Alice Carter
Alice is very protective of her father Brian, and worried about his health. She wouldn’t believe he did it. But now… Ruairi is her half-brother! At first, I don’t think she’ll be able to believe that he did it, either. But she knows his ability to kick off, as he has done with her, more than once.
Ruairi is certainly not going to be well liked. But remember that he and George are both damaged boys, from their upbringing, Ruairi lost his mother. Those memories are the advantage of a series playing out over a long period of real time.
There are a lot of ways this could play out. Not necessarily criminal justice, but village justice — the people themselves might deal with it!
Arthur Hughes plays Ruairi Donovan
It was very exciting, the clandestine nature of the whodunnit. I was taken aside in November and told it was my character, when The Celebrity Traitors was at its height. I had to be careful in the studio not to give it away. Luckily, there was an ordinary plot to focus on, about wanting the farm…
Ruairi’s an interesting person, striving for success. He really pushes himself, and has to deal with a lot: being Brian’s only blood son; having different mother figures; his sexuality. But he’s quite fierce, especially about his sister Alice, protecting her against George. He’s not in control of his emotions, and has a difficult relationship with alcohol.
Would Ruairi cope with prison? It’s my eighth year playing him, and there’s a good relationship between The Archers and myself. I like it. I hope he’s not off to prison. And he’s pretty wily. He’ll find a way, he’s no fool. And entitled — oh, absolutely! With him it’s always, “I feel like I’m ready, so I’ll just have the farm, please.”
It’s nice to have some antagonism going on. Perhaps a long-running thing with George when he finds out who hit him. I do like all this. I think Ruairi’s quite dark in many ways. I’d love more darkness in The Archers.
Angus Stobie plays George Grundy
How is Alice going to move past the place where George knows her family did that and they are all enabling and covering for Ruairi?
I don’t know whether the class thing will come into play for George, but I do think there’s a scenario where the Aldridge family get away with it as usual. Maybe George will use it against them and gain sympathy across the village as the one who was smashed over the head. Might the Grundys take it as an opportunity? Make a power shift in Ambridge?
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