The Archers at 75: how a rural drama came to rule radio

In 75 years of continuous broadcasting, the most valuable players in the BBC’s radio drama The Archers have always been its foley artists. These are the sound-effects experts who can squelch their hands through a bucket of yoghurt to give us the sound of a lamb being born, or pound a cabbage to simulate a punch-up.

Farming is at the heart of this “everyday story of country folk” – as it became known – that recreates Britain’s changing agricultural soundscape. In one notorious incident, retold in William Smethurst’s early history of the programme, a technician was sent to collect the sound of a cow having parasite warble fly larvae removed from its hide, a process that requires scrubbing with a brush.

At first, the technician reproduced the sound by rubbing a brush on a doormat, but Tony Shryane, the show’s first producer, rejected the result. For the second attempt, the foley artist made it to a farm and recorded the sound of a cow’s back being rigorously scrubbed. He proudly returned to the studio, assuring Shryane that he had personally brushed the cow. “Yes,” said Shryane, “but did the cow actually have warble fly?”

In the programme’s first-ever scene, however, the only essential effect was the clink of port glasses, as the Archer family was introduced to the nation. As ever, The Archers was just a touch behind the timeline of British reality. The first episode aired at 11.45am on New Year’s Day, 1951, as the family celebrated the clocks striking midnight the night before.

Continues...

This first official episode established the key setting of Dan and Doris Archer’s home, Brookfield Farm, although it was nearly known as Wimberton, the name used in a pilot the previous May. Joining Dan and Doris for New Year’s Eve were their two sons, Jack and Phil, along with Phil’s girlfriend, Grace. The seeds for darker storylines were sown: Jack was already showing the tendencies that would lead him to become an alcoholic; Grace would marry Phil in 1955, only to die in a fire five months later.

The BBC always denied that Grace’s final episode had been designed to spike the launch of ITV on the same night it aired. More recent research suggests that Ysanne Churchman, who had taken over the role, was edged out after attempting to organise collective pay bargaining. The show’s creator, Godfrey Baseley, had initially prioritised pay, winning a concession from the BBC that “no artiste should be paid less than ten guineas a week for the repertory contract”, which guaranteed three month’s work in 1951. Today, the cast is brought in for 10-day sessions at a time, during which they record five weeks’ worth of episodes.

“This fascinating progress of life in a country community must certainly rate high among the happier achievements of sound radio”

By the end of its initial three-month trial period in 1951, The Archers had two million listeners; moving to an evening slot, it reached more than four million by the end of its first week. By 1955, it was a national institution, with two out of three adults describing themselves as regular listeners. As early as April 1952, The Stage was already writing of its “enormous success”. The Stage’s writer was the first of many to attribute the programme’s magic to its gestation at the Midlands Home Service, which allowed for more experimentation than London’s head offices. It remains a proud BBC Birmingham product.

Seventy-five years on, the BBC is marking its longevity with a touring stage show, The Archers: Live at 75, in which cast members will perform a spin-off themed around The Archers’ annual Flower and Produce Show. (If the prospect of villagers competing to grow marrows doesn’t excite you, then you’re no true fan.) This follows an on-air celebration of the 75th anniversary in January, in which current cast members re-recorded that very first – and now long-lost – New Year’s Eve scene. Regular Archers scriptwriter Tim Stimpson also staged an unofficial homage, Haywire, at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre last autumn.

Trawl The Stage Archive, however, and you’ll learn that this is not the first stage spin-off. In 1954, The Stage reviewed a comedy in Blackpool, written by the show’s long-serving’ scriptwriters, Edward J Mason and Geoffrey Webb. The central tension concerned a proposal to set up what The Stage called “a rowdy holiday camp” in the Archers’ home village of Ambridge. Not much has changed. Just this month, villager Adam (Dan Archer’s great-nephew) objected to his father Brian’s plan to lease farmland to a caravan park. In 75 years’ time, will someone try to turn Brookfield into a leisure centre for extra-terrestrial tourists? The Stage will surely be listening.

Continues...

Clipping of The Stage's reporting on The Archers from April 1952

The Stage’s reporting on The Archers in 1952

“How much the average radio play is handicapped by time is clearly shown by the enormous success of those radio strip cartoons, Mrs Dale’s Diary and The Archers. Because, perhaps, of a better listening time, the latter series is now said to have overtaken the former in popularity and this fascinating progress of life in a country community must certainly rate high among the happier achievements of sound radio.”