AURAL SATISFACTION

Rachel Johnson talks to The Archers' Brian Aldridge, whose sexual exploits make television look tame

AT 7.02 p.m., women all over the country lock themselves into bathrooms. They pull over on to hard shoulders. And, if you're at home during the next 13 minutes and the telephone rings, your caller is no longer offended if you say, 'I'm terribly sorry, it's The Archers. Cant call you hack?'

Why are we gripped? Simple. This is all about sex, lies and radio. Not videotape.

Radio is in risorgimento (overall listening hours overtook television viewing hours about a year ago), the weekly audience of The Archers (the serial which drives the Radio Four network) is edging towards 4.8 million, and I am trying to fix an interview with the man lifting the ratings, The Archers' resident actor-adulterer, Charles Collingwood/Brian Aldridge. This is the man whom Wendy Richards of EastEnders cuddled at a recent luvvie dinner and whispered, 'You're the sexiest bastard in showbusiness,' even though very few of us have the faintest idea what he looks like.

Collingwood, a 59-year-old cricket fanatic and raconteur, has done lots of television and so on, but is becoming famous for playing Brian, Ambridge's smoothie millionaire farmer. Brian is having a long love affair with steamy Irish colleen Siobhan Hathaway, who has moved to Felpersham and just given birth to their love-child, Rory. Brian's long-suffering but terminally irritating wife Jennifer is so far — phew! — ignorant of the liaison. Since this affair started, The Archers has picked up a further 200,000 listeners.

I call his number. Is that Brian — I mean, Charles Collingwood?' I stutter. 'This is Charles Collingwood; he replies, in softer, less-strained tones than 1 tune in to nightly. I ask if he will agree to be interviewed, and he says he is delighted, because he adores The Archers and is so proud to be playing Brian, and is unbelievably chuffed by the national obsession with his love-life. (When Collingwood recorded a forthcoming Just a Minute on his archly chosen subject of 'Holding the Baby', the 1,000-strong studio audience stood up and booed him.) So there is just the rendezvous to arrange.

'Where do you live?' he asks. 'Notting Hill,' I reply. 'Tuesday night?' he asks. 'Lovely,' I say, then panic. 'Won't Siobhan mind? And what about Jennifer?' I twitter. 'But Brian! You've been spending so much time in Felpersham ... you can't use the accountant as cover again!' and so on. It's impossible not to.

When I call my mother, I tell her that I am having a 'secret assignation with Brian Aldridge'. She warns me to be careful. I tell everyone. It is the most thrilling thing they've ever heard. I know it's sad. But it's true what they say about radio. The pictures are better. Radio days are here again, and 1 am one of the many millions proud to have their second home in Ambridge.

'Yes, radio is having a renaissance, and The Archers is going gangbusters,' says the editor, Vanessa Whitburn. 'Soaps traditionally pull up the audience, and so we would expect to be top of the tree. The Archers has always had sexy storylines, and infidelity and intrigue are definitely tantalising the listeners.'

Helen Boaden, the Radio Four controller, and Jenny Abramsky, the director of BBC Radio. cite many reasons for radio's surging popularity (we can listen on the Internet, in the car, while we garden; it is intimate, digital, portable, and allows us to get on with our lives and so on). But more interesting are the reasons they have to leave unspoken because they are implicit criticisms of radio's rich uncle, television.

'Of course radio's fitting in with people's lifestyles, but the real story is demographic,' argues the Daily Telegraph's trenchant radio critic, Gillian Reynolds. 'The great bulge-baby generation is now 45-53, and

dominating popular culture. They want programmes, ideas and a sensible grown-up person talking to them. We prefer to go into the kitchen and listen to a programme about trade deficits than sit and watch screaming and yelling on the box accompanied by banging music.'

No one disputes that radio can make good programmes more cheaply, and can convey more information in less time than television. But what the soaraway success of The Archers has proved beyond all doubt is that radio does sex better, too.

'The reason I stop the car to listen is because what we are getting is the slow, subtle unfolding of what emerges in human relationships,' says Jenni Russell, who left Channel 4 to work for BBC Radio. 'It makes me think, sex on screen — why don't they just cut it out? Unless it's a smouldering Andrew Davies adaptation — I still feel faint when I think of Darcy in Davies's Pride and Prejudice — I can frankly live without naked bodies interminably writhing in the half-light.'

Recently, Emma Tennant has also railed against the huge turn-off that is sex-saturated media, and lamented the death of romance. At least Andrew Davies intuits that what women find erotic is not bodiceripping (or Cossacks in the sack) but flirtation, tension and suggestion. Perhaps this is why millions watched Daniel Deronda followed by Dr Zhivago last weekend. As one critic noted approvingly of the latter, 'there was not a nipple in sight'.

But to Primrose Hill (change of plan) to meet Charles Collingwood, the man on the cover of the latest edition of Ambridge Voice. the official Archers' fanzine. The first thing to note is what a shock it is putting a face — even a very nice one — to the voice. Somehow, it takes time to adjust.

'It's very common,' he said. One woman told me that I was a huge disappointment because I wasn't 6ft 2in and didn't have hair like Michael Heseltine. So I told her she was a huge disappointment to me, too.'

What does he say about his part in radio's triumph. though? Over caffe lattes, he tells me that the secret of the success of the serial is timing. They take hours to record one 15-minute episode. 'Darling,' he said, 'if there was more money in it, actors would only do radio.' Telly, he complained, is totally plot-driven, and things have to happen all the time. 'In The Archers, you can just have Phil and Jill sitting in the kitchen talking about the grandchildren, or Shula about her spice-rack. People like it because it's like real life.'

He is more deprecating about TV, and sweetly bashful on his recent role in the Channel 4 adaptation of White Teeth, where he had a nude love-scene with a young girl.

'I'm a gentleman of a certain age,' the sexiest bastard in showbiz says, 'and I prefer to do that kind of scene on radio where the audience can use their imagination.'

So do we prefer it, Brian; so do we. Tumti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum!