“Who, at the internet’s inception, would have foreseen the rise and rise of radio, or the renaissance of that archaic word, ‘wireless’?” So muses the narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell, a foetus who is also a Hamlet-figure “bounded in a nutshell”. It is an observation magnificently borne out by the hour-long Archers special broadcast on Sunday evening. It would be an exaggeration to claim the entire nation was gripped by the culmination of Helen Titchener’s trial for the attempted murder of her husband, the dastardly Rob. But a healthy chunk of it was.
Social media was bristling with comment on the jury’s deliberations. The Guardian was not alone in running a front-page story on the verdict. Around the UK, life stopped as people listened. It was an echo of older, more attentive forms of hearing than we are used to today, when wireless listeners tuned in to the evening’s programme for several hours.
For all that the jury-room arguments of Sunday’s episode were a little overwritten, with a host of state-of-the-nation issues from Brexit to Islamophobia crammed into the discussions, the show gained its power from the sheer brilliance of the build-up: a storyline that had been painstakingly constructed over the past two and a half years. The tale of Helen, abused, manipulated and bullied until she stabbed her controlling husband, had a distinct flavour of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, with a dash of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight. Audio is glowing in the midst of an unexpected golden age: the patient, slow, detailed reporting of the two seasons of Serial, the US podcast from WBEZ Chicago, had a similar grip on its listeners.
It was not just the way the story was told, though, but the story itself. Of course many people knew about domestic abuse and coercive control – which this year became a crime punishable by up to five years in prison – without The Archers. But the show demonstrated the power of drama, and of brilliant writing, to animate the darkest corners of human life and to shift them from the realm of abstract argument to that of emotion and empathy.
In a soap opera that, at times, is a little cosy (with its cake-making, village cricket and harvest suppers), Helen’s story did not flinch from addressing the deep and real misogyny that is rife in British society. It is a misogyny exemplified by a report this week showing the disparities in life chances for girls growing up in different parts of the country. It is a misogyny that, meanwhile, is becoming less and less acceptable – witness, for example, Nottingham police’s recent foray into investigating sexist abuse as a hate crime. Perhaps it is time The Archers tackled more big stories with similar gusto. (Though it has been excellent on issues from flooding to GM crops, housing and racism, the characters never discuss party politics.)
Above all, The Archers has shown the power of stories told in sound, and has proved that they are capable of being much more than aural background. Audio is a medium that floods the imagination with possibilities. It is at once universal and entirely personal, a friendly and yet expansive voice in the ear. “One has never talked to so few people, or so many; it’s very queer,” remarked Vita Sackville-West after her first broadcast in 1928. With the radio, one indeed can be bounded in a nutshell, and king of infinite space.
