This weekend, the Felpersham bypass campus of Felpersham University will be abuzz with the sound of scholarly debate – a debate that will doubtless continue at the conference dinner at Grey Gables hotel and, indeed, in the snug of the Bull until closing time and beyond.
Friday sees the launch of the sixth annual academic Archers conference, an event devoted to love for, and scrutiny of, the world’s longest-running soap opera.
And, rather than taking place in Reading or London, as it has in the past, the conference will convene in The Archers’ own home county of Borsetshire – admittedly the Borsetshire of the imagination, AKA, Zoom.
One paper will use the lens of “neoliberal necropolitics” to analyse the modern slavery storyline gripping fans of BBC Radio 4’s rural drama, which celebrated its 70th anniversary on New Year’s Day.
Necropolitics is the term coined by the philosopher Achille Mbembe to describe how inequalities are practised on the bodies of exploited individuals, to the point of stripping them of personhood or recognisable social or political life.
Titled “Feeding the Horses” – a reference to the code phrase used by fictional Ambridge builder Philip Moss when speaking of his dehumanised workforce – Nicola Headlam’s paper will be informed by her sociological scholarly background.
It will “not so much be looking at how a nice man in a Christmas jumper could do something as terrible as this,” she said, “so much as how, when capitalism reproduces itself, it will necessarily drive down labour costs; where there is economic activity there will be exploitation of some stripe”.
Another paper will examine the second hard-hitting storyline of the moment, Alice Carter’s secret alcoholism, through the lens of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Elsewhere in the conference programme an academic based in the US will describe how he uses The Archers to introduce his students to the concept of the English village. “Aristotelian friendships in Ambridge” will be explored in another paper.
Academic Archers is, according to Nicola Headlam and Cara Courage, who organise the conference in their spare time, a “curious, generous and joyful” community of fans of the soap opera.
Some have scholarly backgrounds, many simply come with an interest in discussing issues raised by the show, bringing their own experience and expertise to bear on storylines and characters.
Its lively Facebook group is a place where members “come for the flapjacks and stay for the advanced social theory”, according to Headlam.
This weekend’s conference – which is open to all-comers – will also see the launch of the group’s fourth volume of essays, Flapjacks and Feudalism: Social Mobility and Class in The Archers. Its broad theme is inequality in Ambridge, especially as expressed through the rural housing crisis.
Another paper, by a reader in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, analyses the accents in The Archers as they relate to class.
Yet another looks at a different kind of inequality in the fictional village – between those inhabitants whose voices are heard on the show, and those who lack speaking roles.
It uses the methodological framework of speculative ontology to consider the effect of this voicelessness on silent characters such as Sabrina Thwaite, Tilly and Molly Button, and long-term Grey Gables employee Kathy Perks.
Academic specialisms represented in previous Academic Archers volumes have included forensic biology (for an analysis of blood-spatters in Blossom Hill Cottage after the abusive Rob Titchener was stabbed by his wife, Helen Archer, in 2016), musicology (for a close-reading of the diegetic soundtrack playing as that famous stabbing occurred) and philosophy (for a discussion of Shula Heden-Lloyd’s divorce in relation to the work of Iris Murdoch).
The academic Archers community is, said Headlam, all about the fun of “geeking out on The Archers – this patch of long-running English weirdness” and creating a kind of half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek academic space, one that is “friendly, thoughtful and funny”.
