Tour of The Archers studio in Birmingham
Award-winning novelist Linda Grant recently paid a visit to The Archers studio. Here are her impressions of the visit, and of the programme.
I am a recent convert to The Archers, only 26 years in service to its nightly twelve-and-a-half minutes of discussions about slurry, designer kitchen refits and the occasional high drama of altar jiltings and the abandonment of pregnant young women at a motor service station.
With no interest at all in country matters, I have patiently endured a quarter of a century of discussions about setaside because I know that in time Jennifer will say to Brian, ‘Flat pack? How DARE you?’ Or that sausage baron Tom eventually must go into existential meltdown.
The Archers is possibly the most moaned about programme in the history of broadcasting. The complaints about it are what we would like to say to our family if we could only endure the fall-out.
The challenge of soap opera
I admire it enormously. As a literary and dramatic form, the soap opera (which is what it is) is a very hard one to pull off. Its challenge is the inability to go back and edit when you are done. You are chained to what has gone before and the devil will reveal itself in whatever detail you have recklessly planted years earlier.
As a writer of novels I can’t imagine what it must be like to have hostages to fortune going back over 60 years. And day after day to have to liven the mix of inconsequential natter about everyday nothing with the lifeblood of all soaps: families and what unites and tears them apart.
I think The Archers is on an epic high at the moment. The Sunday omnibus tweetalong shows the diversity of its audience; it’s not only middle England that is listening but heavy metal fans. One recently tweeted that she was changing her mobile service plan so she could tweetalong from the Glastonbury festival.
Secret listeners are coming out of the closet. Philip Pullman butts in to note the increasingly Hardyesque fate of Helen Archer with her sinister cow manager partner [Rob Titchener].
Visiting studio
I met Louiza Patikis through a mutual friend a few years ago and we bonded over speculation about what beauty products Helen might use (Weleda, she suggested). A month ago, she invited me to join her at the Birmingham studios where the programme is recorded.
Since then, I have been the Edward Snowden of Ambridge, heavy with secrets (but I kept shtum). Tonight’s programme was recorded on 12 April, a Saturday. We were still a couple of weeks away from the wedding so the script I was given, with its reference to Tom’s disappearance, was the big reveal. I thought he’d done a bunk on the honeymoon or been swallowed by debt. The production team kept their mouths zipped. And Charlie. That pause is in the script.
I was asked if I’d like to do some sound effects. I poured the wine in the restaurant. The touching scene tonight between Clarrie and Eddie was what the programme is all about – the sense of a life we have followed for decades under reflection, all done in a line here and a line there, and the actors so at home in their roles that the only need for a retake was caused by me not clinking the glass loudly enough.
When we were making the arrangements, Louiza and the editor Sean O’Connor were keen that I make my visit the following day for the recording of the episode that goes out tomorrow night. Annoyingly, I was unable to. On the train Louiza grabbed that script from my hand.
I will be there, with five million others, waiting for the latest turn of the screw.
Linda Grant won the Orange Prize for her novel When I Lived in Modern Times. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her novel The Clothes on their Backs. Her latest novel, Upstairs at the Party will be published in July 2014.
