The Archers

Weekdays  1.40pm and 7.05pm,  Omnibus edition, Sunday, 10.15am

I turned on my radio on Sunday morning to discover Jennifer Aldridge in bed with her former husband Roger Travers-Macey.  She was saying she had wasted all the years she spent with Brian Aldridge.  I would have known more but I can never usually manage more than five minutes of The Archers at a time.  That was the big climax to the weekend omnibus edition and events have obviously been tending that way for some time.

Characters disappear and reappear, sometimes years later, lending a mysterious quality to the otherwise banal lives of the so-called country folk.  A couple of months ago Debbie Aldridge resurfaced, this time as an unhappy student, and soon she had dragged her unctuous father, the aforementioned Travers-Macey, back into the plot.

The Archers has been running for more than forty years and has included among its writers the novelist Susan Hill and the longest-serving cast member Norman Painting (Phil Archer) who has been in it since the beginning.  When the time came to mark the actual anniversary last year a senior BBC executive said in an interview that of course the series probably should have been axed during one of its low periods.  He probably felt uncompetitive running the same old show year after year.

One of the writers said however that the length of time the series has been running has contributed to making the characters very rounded.  By this time we know an enormous amount about Jennifer, her sisters, brother Tony and mother Peggy.  The scripts may be lame and the plots preposterous but there is an awful lot of background for the writers to work with.

I rather regret the passing of the original Dan and Doris Archer, both of whom are now officially dead.  Dan died many times and was replaced by other actors, Doris was killed off in 1980 when actress Gwen Berryman had a stroke and was unable to continue with the part.

Someone in the organisation evidently decided to assign the assign the characters specific ages rather than leaving them as purely symbolic figures like Herne the Hunter inhabiting their own realm of rural myth.  The younger Archers have shown a disturbing tendency to live like yuppies, or like the Hampstead wife-swappers who presumably write the show; this has led to the reintroduction of the whiff of steaming cow dung by way of the comic Grundy family.

It’s harmless, often tedious, compulsive, and I wouldn’t be too happy if I found myself listening to much more than about ten minutes of it per week.

Harder to forgive when one recalls it replaced Dick Barton: Special Agent.

4 February 1992