As the year turns, I thought it would be a good moment to look back at a year in Ambridge - as well as mulling over what might lie ahead for the world's most enduring serial drama.
2014 began with June Spencer being awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Audio Drama Awards - and ended with Lynda Snell’s Christmas production of Blithe Spirit being given a full radio drama showing on Boxing Day.
June’s Peggy has been an integral part of The Archers since the pilot of the programme in 1950 and the Award she received in January coincided with the culmination of a tough and touching storyline of the death of Jack Woolley after his decade-long struggle with Alzheimer’s. It was June's sensitive and moving portrayal of Peggy that helped us to tell the ‘storyline that touched the nation’, as The Daily Telegraph put it. It's one of the great privileges of the programme that our senior characters are genuinely at the centre of the action, rather than acting as peripheral supporting players.
In her blog for The Spectator last week, Kate Chisholm awarded her No 1 Radio highlight of 2014 to be 'shared by June Spencer and Patricia Greene for their brilliant character acting...creating in Peggy and Jill two resilient women of their time yet also strong-minded, decisive, fiercely independent and in Jill’s case always game for a laugh.' I feel that both Peggy and Jill's stories throughout the last year illuminated what The Archers is really all about – relationships and family life in a small village in the heart of England.
While The Archers celebrates its past and indulges the British taste for nostalgia, the programme has also always had an eye on modern developments in British agriculture – such as Pat and Tony going organic at Bridge Farm – as well as addressing the ongoing changes in British culture and society. In 1967, Dan Archer discussed the possibility of a termination of Jennifer's illegitimate baby (this was actually Adam) even before the abortion act had been passed. The programme has always been forward-looking in this way, though balanced by the essential themes of family and community- all articulated in the context of the cycle of life and the seasons.
Storylines during the past year have ranged from the satirical (the endless saga of Jennifer’s kitchen) the dramatic (Tom’s infamous decision to leave his fiancee at the altar) to the everyday (the case of strangles (equine distemper) at the stables). Ambridge had its inaugural music festival, Loxfest, which caused huge excitement in the village. After years of mourning Nigel, Elizabeth Pargetter, the Lady of the Manor, stooped to conquer the heart of Roy Tucker, with disastrous consequences for each of them. And both the villagers -and the audience- have been at turns horrified and excited by the issues ignited by the possibility of a major road threatening to divide the village in half. Tony’s accident with Otto the bull highlighted some of the dangers that farmers are faced with every day, as Rick Brunt, head of agriculture at the Health and Safety Executive explained. Amazingly, though only 1% of the UK population works in agriculture, some 20% of deaths at work take place on farms. It's a sobering statistic and a reminder that our characters' lives are governed by challenging - and dangerous - circumstances on a daily basis.
This is all part of a long tradition for The Archers. From the very beginning, the programme was pitched as a 'farming Dick Barton.' The stories- though deeply rooted in real rural life- were to be propelled by dramatic events; most famously the shocking death of Grace Archer in 1955. Since then there have been robberies, car crashes, fatal accidents and shootings, suicide, kidnappings, affairs, births, marriages, deaths- and dozens of fires. There have even been two characters bitten by adders- an homage perhaps to Thomas Hardy. These stories have always been balanced by the more everyday stories of rural life, which are at the heart of the programme and carry the show forward from year to year, from decade to decade - into the future. The Brookfield herd need milking twice a day, every day, every week of the year. It's a brilliant metaphor for the diurnal structure of human life.
But the lighter side of Ambridge is never far away with everyday stories such as the annual Flower and Produce show, the Harvest Festival, Lynda's Christmas production, Bert Fry returning to help Carol make a new garden at Glebe Cottage, young Johnny starting as an enthusiastic apprentice at Bridge Farm - and Lynda and Lilian going to war knitting baby clothes for their grandson, the controversially named Mungo Bellamy.
However, the story that seems to have intrigued listeners most has been the slow burn tale of the relationship between Helen and Rob. Is he the tall, dark, brooding man of romantic fiction? Or are Rob's traditional values and un-reconstructed attitudes indicative of something more sinister? I've been amazed by the extraordinary response from the audience to Rob's casual comments to Helen about her hair - or her cooking. Surely only The Archers audience could be so sensitive to nuance, the slightest change in timbre of Rob's perfectly modulated received pronunciation?
One of the great pleasures of working on the programme is the audience’s huge affection and engagement with it. This is something that the whole production team never takes for granted - we were all fans of the show before we started working on it. We hugely appreciate that the programme is what it is because of its millions of loyal listeners who really care about it – sometimes as much as they do for members of their own family. The programme’s dedicated on-air audience has remained steady over the last decade but recently The Archers also topped the BBC’s most popular podcasts list with its daily and omnibus versions downloaded almost 74 million times in the past decade. That's an extraordinary achievement for a programme that is just about to get its bus pass.
There is much about The Archers that remains enduring and reassuring – family life, community, the countryside, the seasons, England. That’s what the show has always been – and always will be, I imagine, in the decades to come. But it is also a uniquely modern and relevant drama about a family working in an ancient tradition, who are at the same time at the forefront of an industry that is defined by science, technology and the huge possibilities of the future. For us all working on the programme today in the early days of 2015, that's an extraordinarily privileged, exciting - albeit challenging - place to be.
Sean O'Connor is Editor of The Archers
- The Archers is broadcast weekdays on Radio 4 at 2.00pm and 7.00pm. An omnibus edition of the programme goes out on Sunday mornings at 10.00am. Episodes are available for 30 days after broadcast and via a podcast.
- Read Sean O'Connor's Telegraph interview published in October 2014.
- Read About the BBC Blog editor Jon Jacob's reflections on Tony Archer's accident.
