Radio
Extra ordinary
Noel Malcolm
As a child I was so successfully warned off smoking that I became convinced that I would only have to take one puff at a cigarette to become totally addicted for life. Experience eventually taught me otherwise (half a cigar one night at school persuaded me that vomiting rather than addiction would be the main problem), but until this month I had always had a very similar feeling about The Archers. Only the most virulent sort of psychological drug, I thought, could explain why so many other- wise sane and intelligent people were obsessed with a rural soap opera in which almost nothing ever happens and all the characters have strange names like Nelson Eddy. I knew that farmers had to listen to it because half the programmes consisted of lightly disguised information bulletins about sheep tic quotas from the Ministry of Agriculture. And from occasional forays, a few minutes at a time, I knew that it sounded like a dramatised version of one of those jokes about a Scotsman, an Irishman and an Englishman, with an assortment of caricature accents from Au- stralia, Birmingham, the West Country and SW1. But I had never listened to a whole programme.
A few long car journeys in which I could only receive Radio 4 have changed all that, and I am now able, like Ulysses on being untied from the mast, to give my first impressions of what songs the sirens of Ambridge and Borchester sang. My strongest impression is that it really is rather good. The way it keeps chopping and changing from one sub-plot to another, weaving together the hopes, fears and general mutual interferings of a large number of different characters is masterly. At least, I think they were different charac- ters. I don't know how you can tell. The accents are a help, of course, but there aren't quite enough to go round. Within each particular group (Home Counties young men, or older man talking ripe Borsetshire and Bevonshire) it's impossi- ble to know who's who. And that's quite apart from the question of who is related to whom, when all the old men are called uncle and all the girls seem to be Mr Archer's daughters except for the one who was trampled to death by pigs last week and must therefore have been more dis- tantly related. It makes me realise how clever Shakespeare was at explaining who was whose cousin in Act I; but then, The Archers must be in Act MMCM and if you missed the first five minutes you can't really expect to catch up now.
It's not quite true to say that nothing ever happens in Ambridge. Crops can fail, and tractors have been known to tip over. Crime is rare, however, and politics, reli- gion and sex are conspicuous by their absence (though what did it mean when I switched on last week and heard a woman say: 'If Mr Gabriel doesn't get out of that stimulator soon he'll miss his tea'?). In other words, the characters are like ordin- ary people — even if they do talk in whole sentences and never say 'um', `er' or 'sort of. But unlike ordinary people their lives come in units of 15 minutes, at the end of which some sort of minor cliff-hanger has to develop in order to impel us to tune in next time. No ordinary collection of human lives could ever generate enough exciting events for this purpose, so life at Ambridge has evolved in a slightly different way. The excitement comes not from events but from expected, intended or rumoured events which never happen. Every oppor- tunity is milked of all its possibilities: if Ambridge Hall is up for sale, it has to yield its full quota of cliff-hanger endings, with the news that it's going to become a Hare Krishna headquarters, an old people's home, a health farm and so on. (Each secret plan immediately becomes the com- mon knowledge of all the characters. They must have listened to the repeat.) When the whole gamut of possibilities has been run through, all the way down to film studio, Aids clinic and bacteriological war- fare establishment, Ambridge Hall will eventually be sold as an ordinary house to yet another ordinary person. As soon as I had grasped this simple procedural princi- ple (i.e. after about two episodes) I knew that I could kick the habit. To be fascin- ated by an imaginary world is quite nor- mal, but anyone who becomes obsessed with events which will never even happen in that imaginary world is surely in need of psychiatric help.
In the Psychiatrist's Chair (Radio 4, Saturday, 6.25 p.m.) is not much help. In a half-hour session deep analysis is not to be expected, and the programmes are little more than very personal interviews in which the pretence that Anthony Clare is acting as a psychiatrist encourages the subject to speak more frankly about him- self. Sir Michael Tippett needed no en- couragement; he sounded like one of those veteran patients who start telling their doctor what's wrong with them, using all the right Latin names, the moment they enter the surgery. He had been subjecting himself to 'Jungian self-analysis' before Dr Clare was born, and had concluded his own treatment on the eve of the second world war, finally achieving 'the classic Jungian dream of a death'. At this point Dr Clare asked what it was that had died, and Sir Michael was completely stumped. 'You're quite . . .' (his voiced trailed off, but what he meant was 'you're quite good,' a half- grudging compliment from a connoisseur of psychoanalysts). 'Christ, I don't know, love. That's too difficult.' Not so much difficult, I thought, as unfair. Dr Clare may not be a Jungian, but it is still surely a breach of imperial protocol for one Emper- or to comment on another Emperor's clothes.
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