Strangely eventless, yet swelling with high drama, The Archers is the longest-running series in the world. But does this rural soap reflect the reality of country life, or is it a fantasy liberal never-never land for urban audiences?
The longest-running drama in the world is a soap opera about life in an English farming village. Every week, 5 million people listen to The Archers on BBC Radio 4. It is also the broadcaster’s most downloaded radio show. It first aired 70 years ago – that is to say, during the era of the horse-drawn plough and tea on the ration. One of the current cast, June Spencer, who plays the formidable matriarch Peggy Woolley, appeared in the first episode on New Year’s Day, 1951. She is 101 years old.
Because it is middle England’s omnipresent soundtrack, it can be easier to see The Archers as some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon than, say, an experimental, durational artwork that blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality; or a “peculiarly English epic” as its former editor, or showrunner, Sean O’Connor describes it. To the uninitiated, on the other hand, it can appear somewhere on a scale between charmingly quaint, deeply bewildering and insufferably smug. An Irish friend told me she regarded the entire Archers mis-en-scène – “the village green, Bonfire Night, the slightly mysteriously located Big House, the cider club and the posh livery stables, even the Bull’s beer garden” as “utterly exotic”. A puzzled Texan, invited to listen by the hosts of the BBC’s Americast podcast, described it as “like Downton, except without the interesting period detail or drama”.
