Do You Believe in Archers ?
I am only an intermittent listener to The Archers, the 1,000th instalment of whose kersey saga was broadcast this week, but I am not in the least surprised to hear that a proportion of its ten million regular aficionados believe Ambridge to be 8 real place (they write and ask for permission to camp there) and the Archers to be real people (when Dan Archer mentioned that he had a vacancy for a farm-worker, over fifty people wrote, and applied for the job). I do not myself find that the tailor-made characters, or the almost over-plausible incidents in which the ingenious script-writers, involve them, correspond very closely to reality, of which they lack both the harshness and the inconsequence. But it would be odd if, in a nation which not so very long ago believed on the slenderest evidence that Puck and Queen Mab were real beings, a few simple soulS were not to be found who feel, with much more excuse, tfle, same way about Dan Archer and Mrs: Dale. I was told that the Squire (that wholly unconvincing figure), who was seriously ill some time ago, owed his recovery to a change of plam since it was realised that his death would involve Ambridge in a funeral and the nation in more homespun grief than It could fairly be asked' to stand; but enquiry at the BBC 110 failed to reveal any basis for this agreeable canard.
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