The Archers at 75: Reflecting on the British institution with BBC Radio stars and its celebrity fans
From cake competitions to coercive control, The Archers has captivated its devoted listeners for 75 years and counting.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
For all the gentle storylines about lemon-drizzle cake and family tiffs, there is something oddly majestic about The Archers and its survival for 75 years. It’s not about thriller events – though there’s a grand shock revelation coming very soon. The more solid pleasure of the radio drama lies in getting to know the characters over years, watching them arrive, reveal themselves, scrape against the others, maybe intermarry and bear children, with all recognisable tensions and worries and rows.
And the reason that this tapestry of lives becomes sort of majestic is its sheer longevity: the following of fictional lives in real time. And in a largely urban society, it perhaps helps to remind those in cramped cities that food comes from hard work and green fields.
When you meet the long-serving actors they always stress that peculiar sense of living in a parallel reality. Pat Gallimore, who has played Tony Archer’s wife Pat for 52 years, says: “If anyone had told me at that audition in 1974 that I would be around for half a century, it’d be unbelievable. But like your own life it becomes part of you, surviving and thriving. A second life, a second family.”
Gallimore’s character Pat is a classic example of a figure listeners have heard evolving over the years: from a Welsh-accented CND firebrand and leftist, who cancelled Tony’s Express for The Guardian, we’ve heard her support the farm going organic “way before it was mainstream”. The Archers was part of that new acceptance just as it reflects today’s rewilding enthusiasm.
Her Pat also worked through a delicate handling of grief over her elder son’s death on a tractor. I remind her how furious farming people were when the then-editor giggled in an interview about his departure as a “fun” plot. “Yes,” says Gallimore thoughtfully, “we all know that things can hit people personally. It matters.”
Another storyline that hit people personally, making national news, was the “coercive control” story between Pat’s daughter Helen and Rob. She portrayed a mother entirely unaware of what the listener – in genuinely troubling scenes – had heard happening. “I did argue a little bit at the time, asking why hadn’t Pat spotted what’s going on,” protests Gallimore. “But I suppose she had come to trust Rob, he helped on the farm.”
That was a big story, but over 75 years there have been many smaller ones that gripped listeners, with news of them sometimes (as in my case) drawing back midlife listeners who got irritated or bored and gave up for two or three years. Returners easily fall back into the entangled stories of imaginary Ambridge, amused by changes in half-familiar characters, soothed by the rhythm of life.
And of death, too: my generation has seen the end of several, from the roguish Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel to wicked but repentant Rob and, just lately, the formidable matriarch Peggy herself. It’s a narrative hymn to humanity and mortality, and that is no small thing. My mother once said, “It helps us age, it’s company.”
When the performance and script are particularly well done (right now under Jeremy Howe, a serious veteran of radio drama, it is on a high), it can touch hearts and change attitudes. A modern-slavery story a while back made many listeners say they became more conscious of how a plausible gangmaster would exploit homeless men, chillingly alluding to them as “the horses”.
But all this wasn’t really the aim, back in 1951 when it launched nationally on New Year’s Day. When farmer Dan Archer was invented, paired with a London girl called Doris in a fictional village called Ambridge, it was actually an educational project for farmers: there was still rationing after the Second World War and it was vital to boost the national food supply. The BBC, with government urging, wanted to publicise new ways forward, beyond the plough-horses and steam threshing machines.
But its first editor Godfrey Baseley realised that, actually, it would be family and neighbourhood relationships that kept the interest going. He gradually created a balance, so that the agricultural story editor’s rather plodding information wouldn’t overwhelm the general listener who just wanted “an everyday story of country folk” to calm them down while making supper.
Successive editors devised non-farming plots to run alongside the informative stuff about dairy and arable problems, and kept up with changes in society. The Archer family – spreading sideways into the Aldridges with the marriage of Peggy’s daughter Jennifer to the rakish, affluent Brian – has always dominated, but gradually, to the relief of many, the working-class Grundys and Horrobins have been elevated from mere cartoon yokels. (Neil Kinnock once said The Archers should be called “The Grundys and Their Oppressors”.)
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The economic pressures on all classes are woven in: whether it’s Brian fretting about the cost of a £150,000 farm machine, old Peggy’s will supporting Alzheimer’s research and rewilding rather than her family members, or Emma’s heart breaking because she will never own a house.
The introduction of Asian characters has been gradual (artfully, the first one fell in love and married the vicar). That again reflects the nation, albeit sometimes stretching rural probability: the old joke is that it’s the only village in England where the year revolves round Diwali and the Pride festival. The latest, touchingly, is Akram Malik (Asif Khan), husband of the new local doctor, who involves himself with the Ambridge farm people because he is homesick for family farming in Pakistan.
But aside from race and technology, producers also, with cautious but determined steps, had to keep up with changes in morals and family values since the staid 1950s. Doris Archer’s stout-knickered world is not ours.
At a BBC event celebrating the life of June Spencer – who played Peggy for 70 years – I was asked to speak about the changes this matriarch had seen. I mischievously listed the “sexual rewilding” of Britain – Archers coping with adultery, divorce, hookups, abortion, single mothers with multiple baby daddies (including an anonymous donor and a “friend with benefits”), gay and lesbian couples, surrogacy, a granddaughter drunk while pregnant, and even a family grandson selling sex as an escort.
Some more traditionally minded listeners objected to this, especially the acceptance of uncommitted hookups, but it does reflect modern mores just as faithfully as Brian’s £150,000 seed-drill and bovine TB anxieties reflect modern farming. Sunny Ormonde, who for 20 years has played the ageing femme fatale of the Archer family, cheerfully observes, “Lilian seems to have had affairs with almost everybody in the village, though never Brian.
“When I started in 2000, I wanted to check whether listeners would take this middle-aged manhunter on board... but it’s interesting how things change as the long story goes on. With the loss of Peggy as well as her sister Jennifer, family dynamics change. There’s nobody left to put Lilian in her place, she’s had to grow up. Be the new matriarch.”
Like several of the other professionals who receive scripts and recording dates, Ormonde completes the curious, beguiling loop between listener and actors that the series has created. “You see, I am a listener as well as being part of it. Sometimes I hear something that I didn’t know anything about and think, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ And I’m in it!”
Indeed, the urge to be in it for a few lines of cameo has captured over the decades starry names from Princess Margaret to Queen Camilla, Dame Judi Dench to Sir Terry Wogan and Sir Bradley Wiggins. The jury that finally acquitted poor Helen of stabbing evil Rob included Catherine Tate and Dame Eileen Atkins. It’s become a bit like being asked to be in Who’s Who.
As to the real cast, any theatre company talking to journalists can paint itself as a happy family, whether in truth it is or not. But I have over the years run into a fair few of the Archers cast, and it really does seem to be a reality in that sense. Certainly those who get killed off tend to strike a slightly wistful note, and there are apocryphal tales of senior actors complaining at not getting enough scenes (it is, of course, piece-work!).
Pat Gallimore reflects, “I can’t remember any major fallings-out. Certainly not with me involved. One thing about it is, even though you’re together in scenes for years, it’s not claustrophobic like a real family. You do your work and come home. In the studio, we particularly enjoy the table scenes, loading the dishwasher and arguing about who’s making the supper, all together. But of course,” she adds, “as an actor it’s much more fun to play conflict or crisis.
“I remember dear Colin Skipp [the original Tony] saying, when John [Pat and Tony’s son] died, that in a way those scenes are easier to play because there’s something to react against. Doing the workaday stuff, feeding the cows, doing the shopping, is actually far more difficult to get right. But you’re hardly going to win an Oscar for saying, ‘Let’s go and make some blueberry yogurt,’ are you?”
Read more:
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Celebrity fans
Ruth Jones
The Archers is my little 13-minute daily sanctuary. I’m not going to lie, they’re in bed with me almost every night. Sometimes I get really frustrated with it but that’s part of its joy. I nearly stopped listening when David and Ruth Archer almost lost the farm when it was threatened by a new road.
I can picture all the characters in my mind, and yes, I do have favourites. I love Jazzer and in more recent times George and Brad. But Susan is also a joy, as is Tracy. My absolute top favourite though is Lilian (Sunny Ormonde, top right). Her wicked gin-swilling laugh, and her life-affirming, life-grabbing presence cheer me up every time she’s in a scene. Though the truth is I love ’em all.
Seventy-five years – I won’t be around in another 75, but I do hope The Archers will. Brad Horrobin might be the future Joe Grundy, Martha Carter may be the future Lilian and who knows if the Bull will still be serving, but I’ll keep listening into my old age if I’m lucky enough!
Sir Stephen Fry
One of my very earliest memories is of fitting myself under the chair that my mother sat on and listening with her to The Archers. The theme tune was as familiar to me as Pop Goes the Weasel, Happy Birthday or Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. In fact, I cannot really remember a time when I didn’t think of The Archers as a natural and inevitable part of my life, like the milkman and the chimney sweep.
Those have more or less stepped away from our world, but The Archers is still there. I listen to it more religiously, rarely missing an episode, much more when I’m abroad than when I’m at home. Because it always takes me right back to England. And, like England, it can be as banal, embarrassing and ridiculous as it can be charming, brave and lovable.
The people of Ambridge are for the most part sound, well intentioned, friendly, forgiving and kind. It is always the same, but it changes with the times without one quite noticing. There’s minimum tillage and mob grazing on the farm now, and Pat and Tony’s yogurts are kefirs.
Alan Titchmarsh
Thirty years ago, my wife told me that she would only consider that I had “made it” when I’d appeared in The Archers. I thought there was no chance. Then I was asked if I would judge the Ambridge Best Garden competition – as myself.
I got to meet Lynda Snell and was driven around the village by Joe Grundy (actors Carole Boyd and Edward Kelsey, right) in a pony and trap pulled by the legendary Bartleby. The fact that the “trap” was one table upturned on another with two broom handles placed between them to allow movement mattered not a jot. What a fun day. But I can’t for the life of me remember who won! Still, my wife now admits I’ve made it.
David Mitchell
My mum has been listening to The Archers for as long as she can remember, almost since it began, and I think she still does. So I heard a lot of it during my childhood. I haven’t entirely kept up, but I’m very glad it’s still going. And in a frightening and changing world, I think it’s great that some things continue. And it’s the original soap opera, isn’t it? Congratulations to it!
Emma Freud
My favourite characters have to be the Grundys — not because they’re easy to like (they’re not), but because they’re written without flattery. They’re flawed, often irritating, and test our sympathy, but even when they’re horrendous, I find myself rooting for them.
I want them to win, to prosper. Maybe I want them to take over Ambridge?
The Rob and Helen storyline was a slow, devastating depiction of coercive control. Each episode contained so much thoughtfulness, research and creative discipline. The writers didn’t hold back: scenes were as uncomfortable as they were impactful. But for every Rob and Helen storyline, there’s delightful eccentricity – such as the “soiled pants” competition, where characters buried their underwear to test the soil. Only The Archers.
I love the low dramas – precious episodes when life just potters on with its moments of sweetness, meanness, small wins, small losses, long-term love, loneliness, Clarrie’s arthritis. It’s life… and it’s gently talked about in a way that only happens behind closed doors. I know some villagers better than my own family but I never have to buy them Christmas presents.
I also love the lack of money. We rarely hear details of salaries, house prices, rents or the cost of a gift. This means we can exist in a world where we aren’t constantly looking through the lens of finance for status or position or value. It’s a subtle but welcome omission.
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