“I take it you’re his partner,” says the hospital doctor to Helen Archer, who delivers a world of complexity in her non-committal “erm”. The correct answer, of course, would be: “Absolutely not, thankfully.”
In fairness to Helen – nerves frayed after meeting her abusive former husband, Rob Titchener, for the first time in nearly seven years, only to witness him have a seizure and be taken to hospital – there is a lot to explain. That Rob is her ex-husband, who controlled and abused her, isolated her from friends and family, and repeatedly raped her. And that she was charged with attempted murder after stabbing him (maybe check Titchener’s medical history?), then gave birth to their son Jack in a mother-and-baby unit while on remand. At her trial, she was found to have acted in self-defence, but then Rob tried, and failed, to abduct Jack – or Gideon, as he calls him – before we all hoped we had seen the last of him.
This week, though, Rob made a return to the Radio 4 drama The Archers. The original storyline ran from 2013 to 2016, and shone a spotlight on coercive control, at about the same time as a new offence was being created. Politicians talked about it, and organisations used it to increase wider awareness of domestic abuse; one fan started a page to raise money for Helen (or rather, for the domestic violence charity Refuge) and nearly £175,000 was donated. “I wasn’t surprised by the audience reaction because it was a very good story,” says Jeremy Howe, now editor of The Archers, but then Radio 4’s commissioning editor of drama and fiction. “But I think we were slightly gobsmacked by the way it took off.”
Howe was involved in the decision not to kill Rob off on that horrible night at Blossom Hill Cottage (it is, of course, women who are far more likely to be killed by an abusive partner). “I do remember having a conversation with Sean [O’Connor, then editor] and he talked about that. You want to bank your treasure, you don’t want to kill it off.” When Howe became editor, one of the first things he talked to the production team about was bringing Rob back – the evil industrial dairy farmer would have returned earlier, were it not for Covid – so his comeback has been five years in the planning. “You don’t want to waste great characters, but the important thing for me is that it’s unfinished business. I think the interesting thing about Helen, and her family, is she has moved on successfully – but it’s not like she can forget what happened, it’s part of her DNA now. I think we wanted to explore what the ramifications of what she went through are six, seven years on.”
Louiza Patikas has played Helen, Ambridge’s organic cheesemaker and mother of two, for more than 20 years. When we speak over Zoom, shes eyeing “a big stack of scripts, which I can’t wait to have a look at”. She knows only a month in advance what will happen to Helen. “This is a part two that’s really important. What happens when [abusive partners] come back into people’s lives? I think it’s important that we realistically examine the long-term effects of something that Helen has been through.”
At the time of the original coercive control storyline, Patikas was helped by organisations such as Women’s Aid and Refuge, and spoke to survivors. “I’ve been going back over some of those meetings,” she says. As an actor, one of the things she found most useful was their description of the physical effect as a “sort of attack on the central nervous system, how you think you’ve got through something and then something will trigger you, and you have a very physical reaction – Helen’s hands shaking, things like that. Women I spoke to who were 20 years down the line, and living ostensibly happy lives, [were] still hyper alert. The impact can last their entire lives. You can build your life – and Helen has moved on and is happy – but the echoes are there and always will be, especially when you have a child with somebody like Rob Titchener.”
Patikas and Timothy Watson, who plays Rob, became good friends and their reunion in the studio was “wonderful”, she says. “It was like a rock star coming into the building. People whose trains were about to leave were like: ‘I’m going to stick around because I want to see him.’” Watson says it is “an absolute thrill” to be back on The Archers. When he first started playing Rob: “I remember thinking there’s something potentially really dark about this character. It was a little while before it became apparent that a domestic abuse storyline was developing, but that reflects life and what made it so powerful. It was insidious. We used to have what we called ‘good Rob’ and ‘bad Rob’ episodes where he’d seem like the best catch in the world for Helen, and then he would turn and treat her appallingly. Not only was it played out in real time over several years, but it was not recognised [as abusive] by the person on the receiving end.”
Howe says this won’t be a re-run of their relationship, and that the research the team has done “enables you to come up with a more nuanced piece of storytelling”. Does he mean that people might end up feeling sympathy for Rob? “That’s up to the audience. You come up with a story, [but] if you follow the research, you realise it’s a lot more complicated; that’s what I mean by nuanced. Invariably, you come up with better storytelling.”
In tonight’s episode, Helen sounds at panicked points as if she cares about Rob. Patikas is, she says: “Doing some research in terms of the conflicted feelings that Helen must have. This is a man with whom she was deeply in love. We all know about the awfulness of him and his behaviour, but it won’t have wiped out those memories. She shares a child with him.” Patikas read about “trauma bonding”, where an attachment forms through cycles of abuse. “I don’t know if it’s going to be something they investigate, but it feels to me, from that episode, that there’s something in that.”
The Archer family are better prepared this time – worryingly so, in the case of Helen’s mum, Pat, and her shotgun – and Helen is stronger but, says Patikas: “We don’t know what will come back [for her]. It’s interesting to me that she has never had therapy as far as I know – I’ve never had a therapy episode. She has rebuilt her life, but you wonder about the echoes in the private moments, and I wonder how much of that will be coming to the fore.”
She hopes the storyline will continue to raise awareness, just as the original did, but she would also like Helen, the woman she has spent more than 20 years with and describes as “very much in my bones now”, to be happy.
