The Art of the Archers

Now that The Killing of Sister George has vacated the Long Wharf mainstage, where do you go to get your fix of the sort of British radio drama of the type which fuels that drama?

The show lampooned in The Killing of Sister George as Applehurst (in which the play’s blowzy protagonist, June Buckridge, portrays the supporting role of a caring nurse) is The Archers. The daily radio soap opera had been running for nearly 15 years when Frank Marcus wrote his play, and it’s still running now.

I’ve been a regular Archers listener since the late 1990s, when I made several visits to England to visit my grandmother. Back in the states, I found I was first able to pick up the show via the BBC internet stream. Back then, I had to catch The Archers when it aired, plus factor in the time difference, then tell my officemates to shut up for 15 minutes while I listened.

Things got a whole lot easier in 2007, when The Archers finally became a downloadable podcast. The BBC also has a “Listen Again” function where shows are available for a week after they first air. I haven’t missed an episode now in over five years.

The Archers has been one of the most popular shows on the BBC practically since it debuted in 1950. The Killing of Sister George takes an actual scandal from when The Archers was around five years old and twists it to its own nefarious purposes.

In the play, a character on Applehurst is reprimanded for an embarrassing incident in her personal life. She worries that the producers of the show will kill off the beloved yet apparently expendable character she plays, Sister George.

On the Archers in 1955, a beloved and central character, Grace Archer, met a sudden death on the show. It was widely believed that the producers had cooked up the storyline in order to keep listeners from checking out ITV, a new commercial network that was launching that same week and promised to be some serious competition for the publicly funded BBC.

Since Grace Archer was an original cast member on the show, her demise was hard felt, and became as iconic of serial-drama excess as when Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft on L.A. Law or Pam dreamt an entire season of Dallas in which Bobby was dead.

Did the Archers learn its lesson? Well, this revival of The Killing of Sister George (as well as a production of the play in London in 2011) could be considered freshly timely, since The Archers used the occasion of its 60^th anniversary, on New Year’s Day 2011, to kill off a key character. Nigel Pargetter, husband of Helen Archer—fell off the roof of the country estate the couple managed, Lower Loxley Hall, and was proclaimed dead the next day. Nigel Pargetter had been a regular on the show for something like 27 years, over five times as long as Grace Archer had. As with the killing of Grace Archer, and the killing of Sister George in The Killing of Sister George, there were disgruntled cast members and fans to contend with after the fall of Nigel aired.

Just this week, the Archers had a quieter, gentler death. Robert Pullen, the oldest citizen of Ambridge (the small village in which the show is set) expired with such little fanfare that the actor playing him was not required to show up—and, in fact, hasn’t really been needed for several years. Mostly, he’s been talked about, a penny-pinching eccentric who’d assert himself in a squabble then retreat to isolation.

The Pullen character was now in his nineties. It speaks to the relative paucity of deaths on this soap opera that there are now numerous Ambridge residents in their seventies, eighties and nineties.

It is my personal opinion, as a longtime Archers fan, that the Kathleen Turner production of The Killing of Sister George didn’t begin to do justice to The Archers. Excerpts of the show Applehurst were heard, and they sounded rankly amateurish next to the professional care and reasoned storylines which go into The Archers. (The show is known for its lack of sensationalism. Though there are adulteries and robberies and family in-fightings, other recent multi-day storylines involved a young farmer straightening out his account books and an elderly man losing his dentures.) A deeper understanding of the show might have led to a more resonant production. I still wonder what the Long Wharf’s two main directors, Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting—both of them detail-oriented and dramaturgically intense—might have done with this material.

I’ll never know. But I’ll continue to enjoy The Archers—both the original (which airs six 15-minute episodes a week on BBC Radio 4) and its still newish spin-off Ambridge Extra (which appears in short bursts a couple of times a year, at the rate of two episodes a week for 13 weeks; it centers on supporting characters in the Ambridge universe, especially those in their teens and 20s).  Ambridge Extra had an episode this week that was simultaneously a monument to the power of radio drama and an over-the-top parody of it, in which a long drawn-out take-down of a criminal was dramatized almost wordlessly, punctuated mainly by the screams of his intended victims and the barking of a dog.

The dog, by the way, was nearly killed in a previous episode, but survived.