Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti-tum!
Cow with no body/Steven Zolnecko/flickr
I’m about to out myself as a long-time devotee of the Archers, so anyone who reaches for the off-button the minute they hear the jaunty theme tune had better look away now.
I’ve been listening to it on and off since I was a student, when it provided a bit of mental relaxation before I launched myself into the next bout of revision or essay-writing. When I was looking after small children, it provided 15 minutes’ respite in a more ordered, less sticky universe.
It’s such an old friend now, I look fondly on its foibles and shortcomings, many of them the inescapable consequences of being a drama played out in sound only. For a small West Midlands village, Ambridge has an improbably diverse range of inhabitants, to help us distinguish between the voices. It’s like an overpopulated joke: there’s a Scotsman, and Irishman, a Geordie and serial Brummies (but currently no Welshman), not to mention the Asian solicitor, the vicar’s Afro-Caribbean mother-in-law, Mittel European strawberry pickers, and briefly, a black South African journalist and a drug-addicted Cockney.
Then there’s the kissing. They obviously want to avoid too much unattractive slurping going on, so most kisses are prefaced by the line ‘Come here’. To signal to us what’s going to happen next. And that’s just the way it should be: the episode where publican Sid cavorted in the shower with country-and-western siren Jolene was proof that the Archers and steaminess cannot and must not coexist.
And in Archers-land, money troubles never last long. People who have been crippled by the cost of a new roof, gambling debts or plummeting milk prices are soon back throwing money around in the Bull as if there were no tomorrow. (Has Kirstie finished paying for her doomed wedding dress yet?)
But some storylines and scripts get me shouting at the radio, and Kenton is a particular bugbear of mine. When this ludicrous overgrown baby of a man blamed his brother for debt problems he himself caused by counting his chickens before they were hatched (sorry – a farming metaphor got the better of me there), why did no one tell him in no uncertain terms that no one forced him to buy first-class tickets to Sydney for himself and his wife (the aforementioned Jolene – it’s complicated) or to fork out megabucks for bling for the little lady, so his impending bankruptcy is nobody’s fault but his own.
I’ll admit that the series sometimes has its longueurs (usually when I’ve made a non-addict sit through it, so they continue to be baffled by what I see in it), and the episodes entirely taken up by one event, such as the single wicket competition or the flower and produce show, are the worst offenders. But some episodes have been truly electrifying: Shula grieving over the death of her first husband was a tour de force from Judy Bennett, and I had to sit on in the car long after I reached my destination when pregnant Elizabeth Archer realised she had been abandoned in a service station café by the unspeakable Cameron.
And for humour, the storyline involving Mrs Antrobus’s pedigree Afghan hound Portia has yet to be bettered: the promiscuous beast had succumbed to the advances of Captain, a less-than-fragrant Staffie, before being bred with a fellow Afghan. We knew this, but Mrs A didn’t, so there were several weeks of delicious dramatic irony before the little mongrels emerged, to the accompaniment of Mrs A’s appalled gasps.
Despite now being billed as ‘contemporary drama in a rural setting’, it continues to disseminate farming advice and information (its original purpose was to increase agricultural productivity in postwar Britain) and Ruth Archer’s newfound enthusiasm for smaller cows yielding larger profits no doubt contains a key message for hard-pressed dairy farmers. The storyline that currently has regular listeners riveted (even the continuity announcers are getting carried away by it) is in the same mould: the domestic abuse scenario with Rob and Helen. Rob, the villain you love to hate, who can invest the word ‘beautiful’ with more sepulchrally sinister horror than you would think possible, is clearly also the vehicle for conveying information about the new domestic abuse offence of ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’, as he sets about isolating Helen, undermining her confidence, and getting his hands on her money – not to mention initiating little Henry into the South Borsetshire Hunt. (See witty Twitter commentary on this and other storylines here:
Finally, I’m in complete agreement with Billy Connolly: the Archers’ theme, Barwick Green, would make for a far more uplifting and sinew-stiffening national anthem than our current one.