Without Joe Grundy The Archers feels lost

There was something really creepy about listening to the ten-minute countryside podcast released last weekend by Radio 4 supposedly transporting us to Marneys Field in Ambridge. Two worlds colliding. The fake countryside of Borsetshire was transfigured — no longer pretending to exist but existing, as if to make us all pretend we believe in it for real. We can hear David in the distance calling in the cows, just like an episode of The Archers. But those birds cheeping furiously; that tractor rushing past. The wind, the thunder, the sudden downpour. They could all have come from a nature documentary.

It was all too weird, trying to make us believe there is a farm called Brookfield and that our daily visits to Ambridge are to a real place, not something conjured up in a studio in Birmingham filled with bicycle pumps, an ironing board and industrial quantities of yoghurt. Even creepier has been the waiting and waiting for Joe (Grundy) to die. We have known about the death of the actor who played him (Edward Kelsey) since April. But Joe has gone on, and on, and on. He’s been mentioned every so often but his utterly distinctive voice no longer heard, turning him into one of those characters who never actually speak, like Bert Fry’s wife and the mystical Titcombes.

Kelsey, who honed Joe from an inconsequential character into an incomparable curmudgeon, must have been turning in his grave to discover his beloved Joe had been silenced in this ignominious way. It’s gone on for so long that I had even been in touch with the press office to check whether I somehow missed the crucial episode in which Joe was allowed to pass over. But no, we’ve been kept waiting, as if the scriptwriters had no idea how to end Joe/Kelsey’s magnificent reign.