Why I Love… The Archers

I absolutely adore The Archers. I’ve listened to it on and off since I was a child, when driving anywhere with my father at 7pm meant 13 minutes of blissfully uninvolving talk about livestock. During my finals, I became so utterly hooked on the juxtaposition between affairs and crop rotation that I’m amazed I got a degree at all.

Occasionally, someone who has had enough of The Archers theme sounding merrily out of my phone will ask what all the fuss is about: ‘How exciting, really, is a cow?’

Well, that honestly depends on the cow. If it’s one being taken to a show by aspiring farmer Pip Archer, then not very exciting at all. If it’s one whose milk has been tainted with E. Coli by dairy worker Clarrie Grundy – a recent development – then pretty bloody fascinating.

Over five million people listen to The Archers. About the same amount remain baffled by how it can be so addictive. This is something I also ask myself, usually when a character is being so objectionable that, in real life, they would be at the very least ducked in the village pond.

The way to look at it is that The Archers is football for people who prefer radios. It allows listeners to spend hours grumbling at managerial decisions and players’ form, and any result, good or bad, is better than no effort being made at all. It even has its own version of the offside rule, being that at least two people must be as, if not more, annoying than Helen Archer at any one time or the game is off.

As with most sport fans, Archers devotees share the conviction that they know their team better than the people who actually run it. While the youth-focused Ambridge Extra spin-off on 4Extra shows promise, many fans would rather The Archers steered well clear of any storyline featuring people younger than 20. What Ambridge shows us, through a parade of robotically voiced children apparently plucked from the streets of Midwich, is that children should be plot devices, not heard. Teenagers fare even worse, thanks to the problem of how to get around swearing, and that Foley artists have yet to make snogging sound anything less than sticky.

While last summer’s teenage crisis – Pip Archer and her ill-fated relationship with Jude, the world’s least convincing 27-year-old – has calmed down, there’s an endless supply of characters to replace her. Bizarrely, all of Ambridge’s premier league irritants are female. In my parents’ village, bad manners are generally hidden under a veneer of Knowing How to Behave, whereas Ambridge sucks the worst out of its women and waves it cheerfully for all to see.

It’s a symbol of how awfulness is magnified on the radio that poor Kathy Perks, victim of that awful rape, is no longer a figure of sympathy but of teeth-grinding irritation. Even her inability to relate to anyone other than her reflection is surpassed by the preening self-interest of two 30-something Archers, Kate and Helen, who inspire such ire from listeners that online references to Helen are usually spelled with a second ‘l’. The recent email from a mother-in-law picking apart her future daughter-in-law’s character flaws has nothing on Archers fans.

However enjoyable these offensive character studies are, they only persist for a year or two, after which the writers stop torturing their listeners, let the character become socially aware and drop off the radar for a while. This gives the chorus of Ambridge’s more consistent irritants, led by the village social-climber, Linda Snell, a chance to shine.

But this is the nitty-gritty. Forget the rules, the players or the theme tune because getting into The Archers is about as difficult as sliding into a warm bath. Even during the most fraught storylines, there will be enough time to get to know other characters and build a mental picture of the village, its countryside and its endless parade of livestock.

We may not have control over our lives, but we can hope that by screaming at the radio enough, the residents of Ambridge will hear, and take note, like a rural version of My Fair Lady. The cows, however, are beyond our control.

Kat Brown writes for The Times, The Sunday Times and Empire. You can follow her on Twitter here.

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