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The Archers
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The Archers is a British radio soap opera broadcast on the BBC's main spoken-word channel, Radio 4. Originally billed as an "everyday story of country folk", it is the world's longest running radio soap with more than 15,000 episodes broadcast.
The Archers is the most listened to Radio 4 non-news programme, and holds the BBC Radio programme record for the number of times listened to over the internet, with over one million listeners.
he Archers is set in the fictional village of Ambridge in the fictional county of Borsetshire, in the real English Midlands.
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Encyclopedia
The Archers is a British radio soap opera broadcast on the BBC's main spoken-word channel, Radio 4. Originally billed as an "everyday story of country folk", it is the world's longest running radio soap with more than 15,000 episodes broadcast.
The Archers is the most listened to Radio 4 non-news programme, and holds the BBC Radio programme record for the number of times listened to over the internet, with over one million listeners.
Outline
The Archers is set in the fictional village of Ambridge in the fictional county of Borsetshire, in the real English Midlands. Borsetshire is situated between the (in reality, contiguous) counties of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, south of Birmingham in the West Midlands. Various villages claim to be the inspiration for Ambridge: Ambridge's public house, The Bull, is modelled on The Old Bull in Inkberrow, whereas Hanbury's St Mary the Virgin is often used as a stand-in for Ambridge's parish church, St Stephen's.
Other fictional villages include Penny Hassett, Loxley Barrett, Darrington, Hollerton, Edgeley, Waterley Cross and Lakey Green. The county town of Borsetshire is Borchester, and the nearest big city is the cathedral city of Felpersham. Anywhere further from Ambridge may be referred to humorously with comments such as 'that's on the other side of Felpersham!', but characters do occasionally venture further: several attended the Countryside Alliance march in London, there have been references to the gay scene in Manchester's Canal Street, and a number of scenes have taken place abroad, with some characters resident overseas in South Africa and Hungary. Birmingham is a favourite destination for shopping.
Since Easter Sunday 1998 there have been six episodes a week from Sunday to Friday, at around 19:02 (preceded by a news bulletin). All except the Friday evening episode are repeated the following day at 14:02, and all of the week's episodes are re-run as a Sunday morning omnibus at 10:00.
Characters
Many of the storylines concern the title family, the middle-class Archers, who own and manage Brookfield Farm. The farm has been passed down the generations from the original owner Dan (now deceased) to his son Phil, currently the oldest surviving Archer, and is now co-owned by three of Phil's four children: David (who manages it with his wife Ruth), Elizabeth and Kenton. As well as other Archers families and offspring, the other main families include:
- the prosperous Aldridges, portrayed as money-driven practitioners of agribusiness. Brian, the head of the family, is a serial adulterer,
- the rich and elderly Woolleys, with Jack now badly affected by Alzheimer's disease,
- the Grundys, formerly struggling tenant farmers who were previously portrayed comically and disapprovingly, but are now seen as doggedly battling adversity,
- the urban, nouveau riche "incomers": pretentious and domineering, Lynda Snell is the butt of many jokes, although her sheer energy makes her a stalwart of village life. She is partnered by the long-suffering Robert,
- the perpetually struggling (and complaining) Carters,
- the widower milkman and casual farm labourer Mike Tucker who battles, sometimes successfully, depression.
Many plots involve the teen and twenties offspring of these families, so new nuclear families come into existence over time. Other distant relatives also reappear. Some characters are well known but never heard on air. Over the years, some silent characters become real, or vice-versa (for example, Mrs Antrobus, "the Dog Woman").
Topicality
Unlike some soap operas, episodes of The Archers portray events taking place on the date of broadcast, allowing many topical subjects to be included. Real-life events which can be readily predicted in advance are often written into the script, such as the annual Oxford Farming Conference and the FIFA World Cup. On some occasions, scenes recorded at these events are planned and edited into episodes shortly before transmission.
More challengingly for the production team, some significant but unforeseen events require scenes to be rewritten and rerecorded at short notice, such as the death of Princess Margaret, the World Trade Center attacks, and the 2005 London bombings. The events and implications of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis required many "topical inserts" and the rewriting of several storylines.
Actors
Unlike television soaps, Archers actors are not held on retainers, so most do other acting and can disappear if they are working on long-term projects such as films or television series. For example, Tamsin Greig who plays Debbie Aldridge, has appeared on television comedy shows such as Green Wing and Black Books. As a result, Debbie manages a farm in Hungary in which her family has an interest while Greig is filming these shows, and then returns to Ambridge when Greig's commitments allow. Because of this, and by the nature of the storylines focusing on particular groups of characters, in any week the series comprises between 20 and 30 speaking characters out of a regular cast of about 60. Greig's situation is similar to that of Felicity Jones who plays Emma Carter in the series; Jones, after a period studying at Wadham College, Oxford has moved into large TV parts, such as a starring role in Northanger Abbey.
History
Starting on Whit Monday, 29 May 1950, and continuing with five episodes through that week, a pilot series created by Godfrey Baseley was broadcast to the English Midlands, as 'a farming Dick Barton'; it was decided to commission the series for a longer national run. In the pilot series the Archers' farm was not called Brookfield but Wimberton Farm.
Since 1 January 1951, five 15-minute episodes (since 1998, six 12½-minute episodes) have been transmitted across the UK each week, at first on the BBC Light Programme and subsequently on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4). The original scriptwriters were Geoffrey Webb and Edward J. Mason, who were also working on the series Dick Barton — Special Agent whose popularity partly inspired The Archers and whose slot in the schedules it eventually took. Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, The Archers was conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the post-World War II years of rationing and food shortages. The programme was hugely successful; at the height of its popularity it was estimated that 60% of adult Britons were regular listeners. It was used as propaganda to reinforce notions of Englishness, and to foster and inculcate notions of rebuilding post-war Britain. The programme's educational remit, and the involvement of the government, ended in 1972 but some long-term listeners still refer to "the Min. of Ag. bit" and it is true that the dialogue often contains more references to European farming subsidies, the buying habits of large supermarkets and the difficulties of marketing organic meat, than is usual in everyday conversation.
Tony Shryane MBE was the programme's producer from 1 January 1951 to 19 January 1979. Vanessa Whitburn has been the programme's editor since 1992. Since 2007, The Archers has been available as a podcast. , it was the 49th most popular podcast on iTunes in the United Kingdom.
Death of Grace Archer
One of the most controversial Archers episodes was broadcast on 22 September 1955, the evening of the launch of the UK's first commercial television station, ITV. Phil and Grace Archer had been married just a few months earlier, and their blossoming relationship was the talk of the nation. However, searching for a story which would demonstrate some real tragedy among the increasingly unconvincing episode cliff-hangers, Godfrey Baseley had decided that Grace would have to die. It was explained to the cast as an "exercise in topicality." The scripts for the week of 19 September 1955 were both written, recorded, and broadcast on each day. On Thursday evening of that week, listeners heard Grace trying to rescue her horse, Midnight, from Brookfield stables, and the crash as a beam fell on her.
Whether the timing of the episode was a deliberate attempt to overshadow the opening night of the BBC's first commercial rival has been debated ever since. It was certainly planned some months in advance, but it may well be that the actual date of the death was changed during the scriptwriting stage to coincide with the start of ITV. Deliberate or not, the episode attracted widespread media attention, being reported by newspapers around the world.
This controversy has been parodied twice: in The Bowmans, an episode of the television comedy programme Hancock, and in the play and film The Killing of Sister George. On the 50th anniversary of ITV's launch, Ysanne Churchman, who played Grace, sent a congratulatory card to ITV, signed "Grace Archer".
In 1996, William Smethurst recounted a conversation with Baseley in which he reveals his real motivation for killing off Grace Archer: Churchman was encouraging the other actors to join a trade union.
Longevity
While The Archers is the longest running radio soap opera, it is not the longest running soap opera: the American soap opera Guiding Light started on radio in 1937 before moving to television in 1952.
The actor Norman Painting has played Phil Archer continuously since the first trial series in 1950. As a script writer, he has also written around 1,200 complete episodes, credited as "Bruno Milna", culminating in the 10,000th episode. According to Who's Who in The Archers 2008, episode 15,360 was to be broadcast on 1 January 2008. Episode 15,000 was broadcast on 7 November 2006.
Themes
A recurring theme has been the resentment of the working-class Grundy family towards the middle-class Archers. Labour politician Neil Kinnock in the 1980s jokingly called for The Archers to be retitled "The Grundys and their Oppressors". The series, however, now deals with a wide range of contemporary issues including illicit affairs, drug abuse, rape, and gay marriage — inviting criticism from conservative commentators such as Peter Hitchens that the series has become a vehicle for liberal and left-wing values and agendas, with characters behaving out of character to achieve those goals. However, one of the show's charms is to make absorbing stories out of everyday, small concerns, such as the possible closure of the village shop, the loss and rediscovery of a pair of spectacles, competitive marmalade-making, or nonsense such as a 'spile troshing' competition, rather than the large-scale and improbable events that form the plots of many soap operas. However, there are some dramatic storylines, such as the rape of Kathy Perks.
Sometimes mocked as a comfortable middle-class series with stereotypical comic yokels, the programme has nonetheless tackled many serious social issues. There have been, for instance: rural drug addiction; inter-racial relationships; direct action against GM crops; family break-ups; and civil partnerships (gay marriage). Thus, given the (allegedly) middle-class nature of The Archers audience (and the generally unsympathetic treatment of characters such as Sid Perks, the adulterous pub landlord, who nevertheless has forcibly expressed views on the superiority of those aspects of "traditional morality" which suit him) The Archers may be seen as a counterpoise to the uniformly differently inclined lower-middle-class British newspapers. For instance, it seems likely that the intense discussion in Ambridge and the "real world" about whether the term "wedding" is appropriate for a civil partnership will make the use of the term much more frequent, and perhaps even more acceptable, in Middle England.
According to some of the actors, in its early days the show was used as a conduit for announcements from the Ministry of Agriculture, one actor reading an announcement almost verbatim to another. More recently the show has reacted within a day to agricultural emergencies such as outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, which impact farmers nationwide when livestock movements are restricted.
Cameo appearances
Many famous people have made cameo appearances on the programme.
Theme tune
The theme tune of The Archers is called Barwick Green and is a maypole dance from the suite My Native Heath, written in 1924 by the Yorkshire composer Arthur Wood. An alternative arrangement, played by The Yetties, is used to introduce the Sunday omnibus. In the 1990s, having used the same recording for many years, the theme was re-recorded in stereo. The original orchestral arrangement was used, but the slightly different mixing led to many listeners considering the new version to be inferior.
Robert Robinson once compared the tune to "the genteel abandon of a lifelong teetotaller who has suddenly taken to drink". On April Fool's Day 2004 both The Independent and The Today Programme claimed that BBC executives had commissioned composer Brian Eno to record an electronic version of Barwick Green as a replacement for the current theme, while comedian Billy Connolly once joked that the theme was so typically English that it should be the national anthem.
Fan clubs
Two organisations dedicated to the programme were established in the 1990s. is the official body, run by members of the cast. was formed around the same time, objecting to the "castist" assumptions propagated by the BBC, and claiming that the characters are real.
Overseas parallels
In 1994, the BBC World Service in Afghanistan began broadcasting Naway Kor, Naway Jwand ("New Home, New Life"), an everyday story of country folk with built-in bits of useful information. Although the useful information was more likely to concern unexploded land mines and opium addiction than the latest modern farming techniques, the inspiration and model of Naway Kor, Naway Jwand was The Archers, and the initial workshopping with Afghan writers included an Archers scriptwriter. A 1997 study found that listeners to the soap opera were significantly less likely to be injured by a mine than non-listeners.
In Rwanda, the BBC World Service's Kinyarwanda-Kirundi service has been broadcasting the Archers-inspired soap opera Urunana ("Hand in Hand") since 1999.
The Archers was also the model for the Russian radio soap opera Dom 7, Podyezd 4 ("House 7, Entrance 4") — on which the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, once made a cameo appearance.
Books and audiobooks
Reference works
The most recent Archers reference books are Who's Who in The Archers by Keri Davies, senior producer and scriptwriter. This has been published by BBC Books since 2003 and is updated annually for the Christmas gift-giving season.
Forever Ambridge - 25 Years of The Archers (1975) by Norman Painting ASIN B0012UT8XM The Book of The Archers (1994) by Patricia Greene, Charles Collingwood and Hedli Niklaus ISBN 0-7181-3849-X The Archers: The True Story (1996) by William Smethurst ISBN 1-85833-620-1 The Archers Encyclopaedia (2001) by Joanna Toye and Adrian Flynn ISBN 0-563-53718-3, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of The Archers Who's Who in The Archers 2008 by Keri Davies ISBN 1-84607-326-X
Novelisations
The Archers by Jock GallagherThe Archers: To The Victor The Spoils (1988) ISBN 0-563-20599-7 The Archers: Return to Ambridge (1988) ISBN 0-563-20606-3 The Archers: Borchester Echoes (1988) ISBN 0-563-20607-1 The Archers: Omnibus Edition (1988) ISBN 0-563-36001-1 The Ambridge Chronicles by Joanna ToyeThe Archers 1951-1967: Family Ties (1998) ISBN 0-563-38397-6 The Archers 1968-1986: Looking For Love (1999) ISBN 0-563-55125-9 The Archers 1987-2000: Back to the Land (2000) ISBN 0-563-53701-9 The Archers 1951-1967: Family Ties (1998, audiobook, narrated by Miriam Margolyes) ISBN 0-563-55714-1 The Archers 1968-1986: Looking For Love (1999, audiobook, narrated by Stella Gonet) ISBN 0-563-55813-X The Archers 1987-2000: Back to the Land (2000, audiobook, narrated by Stephanie Cole) ISBN 0-563-55818-0 In the 1970s, Tandem published prequel novels of Ambridge in the early 1900sSpring at Brookfield by Brian Hayles (1975) ISBN 426-16520-9Ambridge Summer by Keith Miles (1975) ISBN 0855230657
Published audio episodes
Vintage ArchersVintage Archers: Volume 1 (1988) ISBN 0-563-22586-6 Vintage Archers: Volume 2 (1988) ISBN 0-563-22704-4 Vintage Archers: Volume 3 (1998) ISBN 0-563-55740-0 (contains several "lost episodes" which have been digitally restored) The Archers: The Wedding Jack and Peggy tie the knot Vintage Archers: Volumes 1-3 (2001) ISBN 0-563-38281-3 Ambridge AffairsAmbridge Affairs: Love Triangles (2007) ISBN 1-4056-7733-3 Ambridge Affairs: Heartache at Home Farm (2007) ISBN 1-4056-8785-1
Maps
In addition to books and audiobooks, purported maps of Ambridge and Borsetshire have been published.
In popular culture
The Archers. In The Goon Show episode The Spanish Suitcase from 1954, the studio audience is heard running from the room as the show is announced. However, the Goons lure them back by playing "emergency music": the theme tune from The Archers. The Goons then act out a short parody of the series, ending with writer Spike Milligan proclaiming: "Easy money!" A sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie entitled Hard Man's Record, which saw the first appearance of the character Alan, mentions that Alan had "a short spell as Nigel Pargetter in The Archers", claiming that, "Someone had to do it."Jeremy Clarkson in his anthology of articles, Clarkson on Cars, lambasts The Archers by describing them as "...living in a farm-subsidised world and thinking postage stamps are amazing...."A special episode of Arena, broadcast on BBC Four on 1 January 2007, focused on The Archers. It was narrated by Stephen Fry and included interviews with current actors and scriptwriters.In an episode of British sitcom 2point4 children, when Bill and Rona are stuck at Rona's house due to the presence of a pair of snakes which would likely attack if they move, they turn the radio to The Archers in an attempt to escape. The attempt fails, after which Bill quips "Well, if that won't put them in a coma, nothing will".
See also
List of radio soaps
External links
- sometimes called Mustardland because of its distinctive background colour
- BBC-approved fan club
- "anti-castist" BBC-free fan club
- independent chat site
- independent alternative to the official message board
- unofficial summary of each day's events (1995–present)
- key events 1896–1994
- [news:uk.media.radio.archers uk.media.radio.archers] the
Archers newsgroup (also available ) the Archers newsgroup wiki.
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