Country shenanigans
Kate Chisholm
Phew! It was a close shave, a very close shave, but we can all breathe a sigh of relief. She did the right thing. Ruth held back from Temptation and kept true to her blunt, honest character (and biblical name), sneaking back to Brookfield Farm and to David, Pip, Josh and Ben without spending the night with Sam, the cowherd. Poor old Sam. Why was he made to take her to Oxford, city of bells and ivory towers? Blackpool’s Golden Mile would have been a more appropriate venue for their wicked night away from Ambridge’s hallowed fields. No wonder Ruth never even got out of the car, fleeing the red roses, champagne and soft-furnished bedroom. ‘You’re so beautiful’ — intake of breath — ‘I love you’ is all that Sam, a man of few words, ever says to Ruth. And this, it seems, was enough to turn her head. She’s no Constance Chatterley.
But what a relief. Sam has scarpered, and we can listen again to The Archers without fear of choking on our spaghetti bolognese (with mushrooms and onions). The cows can stop their alarmed mooing; the sound-effects team can put away their squelchy kissometers. And we can focus instead on the Christmas panto (with Ruth as the Wicked Queen?) and Ed and Clarrie’s silver-wedding party. Or can we? Will Ruth get over Sam? And will Sam go away quietly, leaving his landowning bosses to carry on as if he had never existed?
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ says Ruth to her friend Usha on the morning after she almost, very nearly, but not quite, consigned herself to the dustbin of Archersville. There’s been such a flurry of newspaper headlines about this latest Ambridge sex scandal, conveniently timed to celebrate the 15,000th episode of the radio soap that’s been going since 1950. You’d have thought that the ‘Midlands’ village and its denizens had always been a squeaky-clean advertisement for the English rural idyll. In fact, from the very beginning it was sullied by ulterior motives.
Those early episodes were broadcast to the Midlands region of the then-named Home Service almost as government propaganda to encourage farmers to manage their land better in the lean postwar years when everything was still being rationed. A few years later, when the BBC monopoly was threatened by the advent of commercial TV, The Archers was commandeered by the Corporation’s Fat Controllers and instructed to create a diversionary shocker. Grace Archer (wife of Phil, David’s father — are you following me?) was killed off in a fire on the night that ITV was launched, garnering a ‘live’ audience of 20 million (they’d be lucky now to reach five million ‘live’ listeners).
I’m too young to remember that (just!), but I’ve been listening, on and off, ever since The Archers beat off the opposition of Mrs Dale’s Diary, the townies’ soap. I was enthralled by Jennifer’s affair with the cowman, Paddy, back in those sex-fuelled Sixties, and can shamefacedly reel off the names of Lilian and Roger Travers-Macy, John Tregorran, Ned Larkin, Walter Gabriel, Polly Perks (which reminds me, whatever happened to her and Sid’s daughter?)...
What kept me listening was the reassuring way in which nothing ever changed. The same characters. The same venues. The Bull, Brookfield, Grange Farm, Grey Gables. You could miss several weeks’ worth of episodes and pick it up again without missing a thing. The arrival of an outsider was a major event, and it took years for assimilation to be successfully accomplished. (Ruth, a Geordie incomer, has always been treated with slight suspicion, as if she could never be trusted to uphold those sterling country values.) You got to know the characters well enough to anticipate their every move.
And then, suddenly, one evening in 1998 I switched off mid-sentence and for years was never tempted back, not even when Brian was carrying on with Siobhan. There was no warning. No slow accumulation of displeasure. I’d just had enough of the daily round of arguments. David and Ruth always seemed to be shouting at each other — something that’s been forgotten in all this hullabaloo about their supposedly rock-solid 18-year marriage. The Archers had fallen victim to the Birt effect and in an effort to raise its profile (and justify the licence fee) had gone the way of all TV soaps, with a crisis every day and a cliffhanger every week. (While Ruth’s been carrying on with Sam, Ian’s proposed to Adam, yes, a full-scale civil partnership ceremony is looming, and Mike Tucker’s kissed Clarrie.) But you can’t jettison a lifetime’s addiction that easily, and I crept back — just the last couple of minutes before Front Row, at first, then a full episode — only to discover that Ambridge was immersed in a fullblown shocker, an affair that goes straight to the heart of what The Archers is really all about: class, land and everyone sticking to their rightful place in the pecking order.
So of course Sam has to be sacrificed. The big question is: will Ruth have to go too? And will Brookfield survive this emotional earthquake? In a way I hope it doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be great if Ed and Clarrie could inherit the mantle of Ambridge’s First Family?
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