In the spring I took part in a panel discussion about The Archers at a literary festival. I was there, in a way, to represent the audience while also having some understanding, as a novelist, of the difficulties faced by writers of long-form drama. The other panel members were two scriptwriters and a cast member (Timothy Bentinck, who plays David Archer). After the event, we panel members went for dinner at the restaurant of a grand hotel, and while we were eating, the waiter handed us a note delivered from another table. “Enjoy your meal,” it read. This might have been interpreted as a friendly message from a fan, had it not been signed “Scruff”. Scruff is a fictional dead dog that had vanished, presumably drowned, during a night of catastrophic flooding in the fictional village of Ambridge some months earlier. The unknown fate of Scruff had borne down heavily on the audience at the event. Scruff’s disappearance was shocking and upsetting. Nobody asked about the flood’s other victim, an elderly pub cook called Freda Fry. Scruff may be gone, but he remains relentlessly unforgotten.
This week The Archers marked the 60th anniversary of the famous death in a fire of a young newlywed, Grace Archer – an event supposed to scupper the launch night of ITV, but in fact motivated by the then-editor Godfrey Baseley wanting to get rid of an actor who was campaigning for equal pay. Like the disappearance of Scruff, Grace Archer’s demise was an event so shocking that listeners sent real floral tributes to the studios. It remains the defining event of the programme. While irate audience members complain of what they see as the programme’s decline towards being a radio equivalent of EastEnders, in fact EastEnders probably copied this kind of sensationalism from The Archers.
The programme is a fascinating study in the most difficult trick to pull off: longevity. Like The Mousetrap or the reign of the Queen, people have been born and reached retirement age during its run. There are still plenty of listeners who heard the first episode in January 1951. The audience has grown up with it and to it, and they are collectively so extraordinarily diverse as to make no obvious sense as a cultural demographic. The story centres round the diurnal life of a West Midlands village, and its central farming families’ struggles with changes in agricultural practice, as well as the usual staples of soaps: adultery, rape, drugs, gambling addiction, armed robbery. A couple of years ago it featured Russian oligarchs. But the rule is, when things settle down, as they always will, things will be more or less the same. The planned departure of the main family to farm in Northumberland was derided by listeners because everyone knew that couldn’t happen. And it didn’t.
I did not grow up with The Archers. I have only been listening since 1988, a paltry 27 years. I come from an ITV type of family who laughed at the wisecracking sophistication of Phil Silvers, not Educating Archie. The Marxist trade unionist and beard campaigner Keith Flett, who did grow up with it, has been part of the audience since 1961, when he was five, and recollects the Grundy family once singing the Red Flag, though this was cut from the omnibus. There is no reason at all why north London lefties, or people like me, who actively dislike the countryside, should listen to this soothing tale of the middle classes, even if spiced up with flooding, a jilting at the altar or, as is currently the case, a long-running story of domestic abuse.
It is said that you can dip in and out and nothing much will have changed. But its fascination surely lies with memory. The more you listen, the more information you accrue about the characters and past events. I was four when Grace died in the fire, but it’s obvious her presence has loomed over the subsequent marriage of her widower, Phil, to Jill. And now, like the Charlotte Rampling character in the recent film 45 Years, cannot shake off the feeling of being second-best. We tend to despise soap opera as a genre. Its open-ended nature means that it has to keep on repeating itself, because there are only so many stories, and most soap families put up with enough traumas and failed marriages to keep the whole psychiatric profession in business. There’s not much drama in happy families.
And yet there is some element of the 1,001 Nights in the soap; it grips us partly because we want to know what happens next, and partly because the characters are close friends we never actually have to ickily interact with. My worst nightmare is being bossed about by village busybody Lynda Snell. The character of Peggy Woolley appeared in the first episode as a young wife, and is now a widow in late old age, having endured an alcoholic first husband and a successful second marriage to a millionaire. She has, as they say, “previous”, and we know what the previous is. Her lines are freighted with an enormous amount of backstory. The programme makers have to employ an archivist to keep up, because few of them were born when it began. There are frequent slip-ups, and what might be regarded as a rewriting of history, or in popular parlance, “character transplants” – though I often have raging rows with friends about whether a certain behaviour is in character, because people in real life are constantly surprising you.
The burden, then, that The Archers has to bear is its own “fans”, a word I put in inverted commas since they are less admirers or followers than a jealous, pernickety mob who consider that the people who put the show on air six nights a week are sloppy arrivistes who don’t understand and probably don’t care. For The Archers is real. It’s real not because people are deluded, but because once those episodes have gone out, they genuinely are the programme’s reality. This is a bit of a hard lesson for any writer of fiction – the sense of possessive ownership of the audience for whom the creative process becomes a lived reality. In the case of the soap, there is no sole progenitor of the whole thing: it is passed on, like a family business that successive generations try to tinker with to meet the contemporary economic climate, alienating their old customers in the process.
Once the thing started, and proved completely unstoppable – like a jumbo jet loaded with passengers, luggage, crew and inflight refreshments – it flies on, but with no chance of ever landing; it can only crash, killing everyone on board. There might be someone alive today who will be given the task of terminating it with extreme prejudice, but that seems far-fetched. What makes me anxious is the thought that I will die in a few years and I will never find out what Phoebe makes of her life, or if there will still be a shop and a pub. The Archers is going to outlive me. It will outlive everyone who has ever been associated with it, I am quite sure of that. To kill it off is an act no BBC executive could survive professionally. Scruff would hunt the bastard down.
