Ambridge Extra, the spin-off from the long-running Archers radio soap opera, has been granted a Season Two. Its 70-year-old parent program The Archers broadcasts six times a week without fail, and would cause riots in the street were it to miss a single episode. (Major political speeches and election coverage have had to steer carefully around Archers airtime.) Ambridge Extra has a more leisurely schedule. It did 13 weeks of two episodes per week last spring then, despite its apparent popularity, took the summer off.
The Archers is named for a central family in the ongoing storylines, a multi-generational farm family. Ambridge Extra, in turn, is named for the rural village in which the Archers and the show’s dozens, if not hundreds, of supporting characters live and work. That’s significant, since the new show is more about place than people. It delights in pitting the quaint folk of Ambridge against invaders from the outside world, evildoers who scorn what they see as the townspeople’s naivete, innocence and gullibility.
Ambridge Extra brings minor characters from The Archers to the forefront and thrusts whole new people into the stories without the careful, gradual set-ups which The Archers maintains. It’s a faster, flashier show, clearly meant for a younger audience, since young people tend to star in the adventures. What’s funny about this objective is that, for all its attempted hipness, Ambridge Extra does nothing for those with short attention spans, the presumed youth demographic. The traditional Archers shows skips around wildly with multiple plotlines per episode. How many stories did Ambridge Extra tell in its whole first season? Two.
These differences in styles and emphases took some getting used to, but having done so, I found myself eagerly awaiting the show’s return. The opening episode has a suspenseful tone—sppoky music, hitchhiker at night, who when recognized as an ex-con starts telling stories that sound full of holes. The suspense comes not so much from the hitchhiker but from the guy who picks him up—longtime Archers listeners recognize the voice of the village’s most celebrated felon, Matt Crawford, who spent time in the slammer just last year for tax fraud.
As with season one, one Ambridge Extra adventure is about bad boys while the other is about love. A moony-eyed teen boy is on Facebook learning about a girl he fancies. You just know embarrassment and anguish are in store.

Season two of Ambridge Extra began yesterday (Tuesday Oct. 4) and airs two 15-minute episodes a week on Tuesdays and Thursday via the BBC’s online Radio 4 Extra channel. It’s easy to keep up, since there’s both an “Omnibus” edition which reruns that week’s two parts back-to-back and a podcast you can play anytime.