Blog posts by year and monthJanuary 2011
Posts (17)
Viral Pneumonia in cattle
Brookfield's coughing calves raised the fear of viral pneumonia. As vet Oli Hodgkinson writes, this can be a serious worry for livestock farmers. Pneumonia is estimated to cost the UK cattle industry around £60 million yearly. Affected cattle will show varying degrees of symptoms depending o...
What is a quarter peal?
This Sunday (23 Jan), the bells of St Stephen's Ambridge will ring a 'quarter peal' in memory of departed bell ringer Nigel Pargetter. Quarter peals are rung for many reasons: special events, birthdays, weddings or in remembrance of someone, as today. Some churches who are able to muster the...
Brenda vs Matt
Brenda Tucker is celebrating her 30th birthday today, in a room strewn with memories collected by step-mum Vicky. They probably don't include the time Brenda clashed with Matt Crawford over a housing development, and very nearly lost her job as a local radio reporter: In March 2001, Matt ...
60th anniversary - cast interviews
On 2 January, our sister station Radio 7 featured a series of classic Archers episodes, interspersed with interviews by cast members, with Radio 7's Ben Motley. If you missed the interviews, here is a selection. They give a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into the working lives of Arche...
The Archers Livechat - memories of Nigel
To mark the funeral of Nigel Pargetter, we'll be running a live blog today from 4-8pm. We'll be publishing your memories and tributes of his life to create a permanent record on the site. We'll only be publishing memories about Nigel in this live blog - if you'd like to post a message about t...
Goodbye Mr Snowy - Listener discussions to 9 Jan 2011
Illustration of Nigel Pargetter's funeral, as imagined by message board poster, Cheshire-Cat. It's been an eventful week on the message board which has been thoroughly shaken to the core by The Archers' 60th anniversary. On Twitter, new characters have popped up - namely two little Henry's, a...
Nigel Pargetter - share your memories
We're very aware of what the character of Nigel Pargetter meant to many listeners, and how much they will miss him. Between 4pm and 8pm tomorrow (13 Jan), we'll be running an online event here on The Archers blog. This will coincide with the episode featuring Nigel's funeral. We'll be sharing...
Childhood bereavement
Liz Koole of the child bereavement charity Winston's Wish, writes on the challenges facing Lily, Freddie and Elizabeth, now that they have lost Nigel The death of a parent is one of the most fundamental losses a child will ever face. Studies show that if childhood grief is not dealt with appr...
The Archers editor on the 60th anniversary
A week on from marking our 60th anniversary, and it's clear it's not just the residents of Ambridge who are talking about recent events in Borsetshire. I have a two inch high pile of press cuttings before me. Many celebrate the amazing achievement of a drama having reached its diamond jubil...
The art of the 'omnicut'
Archers scriptwriter Mary Cutler offers a postscript to her previous blog post. For many years the Archers Omnibus was only sixty minutes, which mean that every nightly episode had to contain one scene which could be cut for the Omnibus. The challenge for the writer was to write a scene that ...
