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The Archers/On Your Farm

Cast members of The Archers
  • Posted at 12:00pm
  • 18 October 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT
  • 2 comments

In Ambridge, no-one can hear you scream. This isn't because the local yokel massive is too busy gurgling about bales of hay or ooh-aaaarrrring over some incident or other in the lower field to heed your distress (although, clearly, it is). It's because the preposterous animal sound effects that accompany nearly every scene of the enduring soap will invariably render you inaudible.

Have you ever listened to The Archers? It’s like being trapped in a silo with the cast of Old McDonald Had a Farm. Moos, baas, bleats, barks and squawks litter the programme like ossified dog food on the floor of an abandoned kennel. Here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink-oink. This incessant agricultural racket is at first startling, then hilarious.

Then, when it doesn’t stop, and just keeps going, deafening neighs and lows accompanying everything from a scene involving a discussion about chairs to a conversation between Bert and a drayman about the merits of shire horse excrement (“they only deposit productive pollution!”), it starts to get a bit scary.

Last week, I found myself straining to hear Alan deliver an impassioned discourse on the local church’s “timber suspended floor” above what was basically the ovine equivalent of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The effect is not only distracting (no-one wants to hear Jill describe her home-made gooseberry jam while some geese have ferocious sex on her patio); it’s also baffling.

I’m all for mindless sonic exposition but really, must we be reminded of the villagers’ proximity to nature in EVERY scene? You don’t get Woman’s Hour playing the theme from the Bodyform ad every few seconds just because it’s a show about ladies. Besides, it seems unlikely that anyone would ever mistake The Archers, with its sodden tweed hat, talk of dairy quotas and overpowering stench of cuddly middle-class conservatism, for, say, a teen drama set on a beach in California.

Nor will anyone begin worrying – after more than a minute sans some cow, pig or duck-related intrusion – that the entire population of Ambridge have suddenly decamped to Antarctica. So what's with the constant hedge-rustling, trough-rattling brouhaha? It's enough to drive you (cue the inevitable “crap animal pun”) barking mad.

More free-range rustic action came in the quieter form of Radio 4's On Your Farm, a charming series that snuffles around rural idylls for tales of unusual farming success while keeping its snout-based soundtrack to a merciful minimum.

This week, we met Tracy and Barry, a middle-aged Essex couple who have set up a small pig farm next to the M25. There were, however, discrepancies between their attitudes to their porkcentric charges. “I’m pig mad!” guffawed Tracy, before rhapsodising about her beloved saddlebacks’ “prolific hardness”. Barry, on the other trotter, was more reserved. Asked what he thought of the pigs, he told us he considered them “alright.” When prompted to elaborate, there was an agonising pause. “I don’t like ‘em when they stand on me toes,” he spluttered, eventually. In the distance, a solitary piglet made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snigger. Crack(l)ing stuff.

The Archers is on Monday-Fridays, 2:00pm and 7:00pm, and on Sundays at 10:00am (omnibus) and 7:00pm on BBC Radio 4.

On Your Farm is on Sundays at 6:35am, BBC Radio 4.

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  • Posted on 05 November 2007
  • at 1:25pm
  • by SarahDempster-RT
Corking selection of doorbells there, Rhodri. Looks like the sort of thing Tangerine Dream might have buggered about with in the 1970s. Re: the Archers studio. Did it smell of mud or dung? And did you find the wicker hamper where they store the cattle?
  • Posted on 18 October 2007
  • at 5:47pm
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

In January I had the strange experience of playing on Radio 2 with Scritti Politti in the same studio that they record The Archers. There were a number of odd things - one was a small room which had a specially built wall to make people behind it sound incredibly far away. There were lots of doors, and cutlery, and this impressive selection of doorbells.

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