I happen to really like cross-overs in general, and so it just occurred to me recently how many exciting plotlines could be developed for The Archers, just through the simple expedient of borrowing from other places...
1. Mysterious projectiles are launched from Mars and subsequently crash down onto Ambridge, before opening up to reveal the Martian War Machines, which then proceed to lay waste to the area, while the British Army attempts to fight them. The beauty is, after a couple of weeks there wouldn't be any more Archers left, and we'd have something decent, i.e. The War of the Worlds, to listen to in the same slot.
2. A mysterious Nicole Kidman look-a-like called Grace turns up in the village, obviously on the run from some terrible past. Tom Archer takes her under his wing and persuades the town to accept her, but after refusing Brian Aldridge's advances, Grace finds the town turns on her, increasingly exploits and ultimately enslaves her. Then, her father arrives, who happens to look like James Caan and have a lot of gun-toting gangster buddies. They wipe out the town, except for Tom Archer, who Grace personally executes, and depart, leaving only Eccles The Peacock alive.
3. Ambridge turns out to be the headquarters of a den of drug lords led by Matt Crawford, all competing with a mysterious Turkish gangster called Keyser Soze. A team of thieves is sent in to disrupt their operation, with predictably brutal results. The only survivor is a TB-infested badger, whose interview doesn't exactly ring true.
4. Ambridge is overrun by the animals who, under the guidance of the pigs, institute a socialist republic and carry out a two week reign of terror during which time Brian Aldridge is strung up from a lamp-post, and Phil Archer and Geordie Woman are put on trial before being clumsily beheaded with various farm implements, under the direction of the new republic's grand inquisitor, Eccles The Peacock.
5. A mysterious Antiques Dealer moves into town, buying a large house in the name of a Mr. Barlow. Soon the more irritating members of the cast start to vanish at night.
6. In the eleventh hour of a global crisis, as Bruce Willis and his bold crew of oil-rig drilling engineers struggle to implant a nuclear bomb into the crust of a huge asteroid hurtling towards earth, a random splinter enters Earth's atmosphere, and by freak chance hits, not Paris, but Ambridge, completely annihilating the town.
7. A fresh batch of Chickens bought into the village by one of the Archer clan turns out to be carrying a new strain of Ebola. The government quickly acts by dropping a fuel-air bomb, sterilising the whole area.
8. Nicholas Angel takes a wrong turn on his return journey to Sandford, and ends up in Ambridge. Realising his mistake he decides to go on a rampage with lots of handguns anyway.
9. A mysterious secret agent resigns, and is gassed, only to wake up in his new prison - 'The Village' of Ambridge. Labouring under his newly imposed identity as Patrick Grundy, our hero attempts to escape every week, yet somehow always fails. Every episode will have him suddenly shouting "I am not a Grundy, I am a Free Man!"
10. Randolph Carter investigates 'The Ambridge Look' and the disturbing occult practices of the villagers.
11. Borsetshire declares independence, and Ambridge becomes the new Stalingrad as government troops struggle to retain hold of the county.
12. Dustin Hoffman moves in with his young wife Susan George. Later he wipes out the whole Grundy clan with a shotgun and a bear trap in a night of violence when they try to storm his house.
13. Flashing lights in the sky make everybody blind, and then Eddie Grundy's Triffid crop breaks loose.
14. A nuclear war erupts, and we follow the survivors from the Ambridge community in the desperate rural aftermath, full of misery, poverty, subsistence farming, mutant babies, and execution by firing squad for looters.
15. A stern and uptight Scottish policeman comes to investigate the reported disappearance of a local schoolchild; resisting the temptations of Brenda Tucker slapping sauasages against his hotel room wall at night, he tracks down the schoolgirl but realises too late that the strongly pagan people of Ambridge plan to offer him as a sacrifice to their unholy gods. Just as he is about to be burned in a huge wicker man, a police armed response unit turns up and shoots everybody, and Officer Howie is saved! Ambridge isn't.
16. A minor rat problem down by the river starts to become increasingly problematic as mysterious disappearances are reported, until finally Phil Archer discovers the truth - that huge floods of ravening rats are swarming by the river, and ready to move inland. After a terrible week of violence and rat-fighting, Brian Aldridge turns traitor and is elected King Rat.
17. In a freak timewarp accident, a battallion of Nazi stormtroopers surround Ambridge, declaring it a degenerate ghetto, and then liquidate it.
18. Threatened with ravaging bandits, the people of Ambridge hire seven samurai to defend life and property who, in a bizzare twist, fail.
19. In a rare crossover, a medical conference is being held in Ambridge, at which the various medical personnel from Dangerfield, Silent Witness, Holby City, A&E, and Casualty are all present. By eerie coincidence a super-virulent strain of The Black Death is released from a local burial pit on the site of one of Matt Crawford's property developments. Half of Ambridge is wiped out, but the outbreak is tamed. The various medics return home to their native series, little realising that they are carrying the plague with them…
20. Brenda Tucker is brutally murdered, wrapped in plastic, and dumped in the river. A peculiar CID officer who talks to his dictaphone all the time arrives in town to investigate.
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