I have to confess, I was hoping for a peaceful studio session. Last week was fairly fraught for me; I sent the long term story document and grids to Mark Damazar and his team, in readiness for our meeting later this week to discuss the storylines. I always feel a bit daunted when pressing 'send' on this particular email; it's a lengthy tome for everyone to read, and I always hope against hope that it doesn't contain any mistakes (a cautionary tale from a colleague of mine, involving the accidental misuse of the 'Find' and 'Replace' function, and the subsequent renaming of Michaelangelo's 'David' as 'Kevin' still haunts me).
Ideally, I'd like to recover by sitting in a darkened room for a day or two... but Ambridge waits for no man, and instead I've been busy recording our Christmas episodes. What (hopefully) sounds warm, charming and festive on air can often be a challenge to record, as many of the scenes involve children, music, or both - making them worryingly susceptible to technical hitches of all kinds. Thankfully, the Christmas spirit seems to have come early for the studio team, and everyone's good nature seems to be pushing things through fairly smoothly. Now, all I need is a mince pie, and I'll feel complete.
Kate Oates is a producer on The Archers
- Archers Week ran on the Radio 4 blog from 23-30 November 2009. 19 blog posts were published in all, from 17 authors. They're listed here.
- Radio 4's Archers web site is full of good stuff, like a map of Ambridge, family trees for all the big clans and a detailed who's who. There's also a 'two-minute guide' for Archers newbies.
- The Archers messageboards are among the busiest at the BBC - nicknamed Mustardland because of the distinctive yellow page backgrounds. They're a bit sceptical about Archers Week, though.
- There are two Archers podcasts: one for the daily episodes and one for the Sunday omnibus.
- Hedli Niklaus, who plays Kathy Perks in the serial, also runs the Archers fan club, Archers Addicts.
- Norman Painting, who played Archers patriarch Phil for nearly sixty years, died on 29 October 2009. The last episode he recorded aired on 22 November. Archers Editor Vanessa Whitburn paid tribute to him here on the blog and the Archers Addicts have collected listener tributes.
- The picture shows Kate at work directing an episode of The Archers from 'the cubicle' in the studio. During our visit to the Archers' home in Birmingham dozens of photographs were taken, many of which feature pictures of cast members (and an ironing board).
- Twitter was put to use during Archers Week. #archersweek was the hashtag and we learnt that Tim Bentinck, who plays David Archer (@timbentinck) and Keri Davies, who writes scripts (@keridavies) are both Twitterers. Follow the Radio 4 blog on Twitter.
