Jill Archer
BBC salaries are obscene – I get £16k a year
She has been described as “the nation’s grandmother”: Jill Archer made her first appearance in The Archers on this day in 1957. For 86-year-old Patricia “Paddy” Greene, this afternoon’s episode marks an amazing 60 years of playing the matriarch. Her unmistakable voice has been reassuringly there on Radio 4 for generations.
But while she may be a legend to millions of listeners, she’s certainly not paid like one. I am astonished to discover her annual wage: “I think I got £16,000 last year from the Beeb,” she tells me. But if that sounds like a pittance for a graduate trainee, let alone one of the biggest stars from the world’s longest-running soap opera, she doesn’t grumble. “That’s what we get. We don’t talk money much, we talk content,” she says.
What she does rail against, however, is the salaries of the top, mostly male, BBC radio stars as revealed in last week’s pay report. “It’s obscene. You don’t earn that kind of money sitting at a microphone, do you? You can’t, it’s just ridiculous.” She reserves particular disbelief for the £2million-plus pay packet of highest-earner, Chris Evans. “He’s probably a very nice chap and he’s very clever, and I loved him when he did the toothbrush programme [Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush] but I don’t think £2million is a good fee for somebody on the radio.”
Her annoyance at such mega-bucks deals is not to do with her own fee, she explains, but the cuts to BBC radio that have gone on elsewhere – on The Archers included. “It always makes me laugh that we can only now have six characters per episode because of money, sometimes five, sometimes seven. And [sometimes] we have to do [sound effects] that we would have gone and got off a gramophone record or tape but now we have to do it ourselves, it’s ridiculous.” Nevertheless, much like the battle-hardy Jill, she keeps on keeping on.
In many ways, though, Greene is different from her fictional alterego, she says. “People of the older generation say Jill makes us feel terrible because of all the things
‘I always think that there are more strong women in Ambridge than there are in ordinary villages’
that she does,” she tells me. “I say, I quite agree with you, she leaves me breathless. She works like a slave and runs all over the place. I go home and I sleep mostly, I can’t even take a watering can round the small bit of garden where I sit.
“Also, she’s terribly good. She did once run over a deer in the car and lied about it, but that’s really the worst. I must tell you, I have many more sins than that.” Perhaps she would care to reveal some of them? “I shall not,” she laughs.
Does she sometimes feel she is more Jill than Paddy, I wonder? It’s the other way round, she says. “There were originally two writers, Jeffrey Webb, who invented Jill – he liked the sweet, innocent type, the farming girl; and Ted Mason, who liked sophisticated girls sitting on cocktail stools. After a while, I went to the director and said, what am I to do with this Jekyll and Hyde character? And he said, play against the lines… So, what I’ve done is imbue Jill with a little Paddy.”
Greene had dreamt of a stage career, and was performing in rep when the chance to play Jill Patterson, a sexy demonstrator of kitchen appliances, first came up. Patterson soon attracted the attentions of the widowed Phil Archer (Norman Painting). When Greene was told her role was to become permanent, her acquiescence was partly down to her fear of the show’s creator, Godfrey Baseley. “We called him God. People were afraid, they stood a few steps away from him. He barked rather than spoke, and you wouldn’t consider gainsaying him on anything.”
She found out about the plan to make Jill a long-term character when Baseley grabbed hold of her hand and told her, “cut the sex, you’re going to marry him”. She had been expecting him to say, “Thank you, now go back to your play.” Caught by surprise, “I just said, ‘Oh, all right’,” she says. “I always was dying to get back to the theatre, the whole time really, “but you’ve got to be pragmatic and life came in between me and my ambitions, and now I’m really pleased because I certainly wouldn’t be working in the theatre, I wouldn’t physically be able to.”
She has one big theatrical regret, though: she would have loved to play Cleopatra, she says,
“because she was so feisty. She was his [Shakespeare’s] best female character.”
Powerful female characters have become a feature of Ambridge, too, over the years, Greene notes. “More than in life really. I always think that there are more strong women in Ambridge than there are in ordinary villages.” However could Jill, with her domestic, servile ways over the years, be seen as anti-feminist? “She did her best,” Greene says, “She had four children in about three years. The minute they were a bit fledged, she started a B&B despite Phil’s domineering. He didn’t like it, so he left her. She stood her ground, she didn’t give in, and he came back.”
Greene has seen the show through a number of changes of personnel and says she particularly admired the “sexing-up” of The Archers under its former editor Sean O’connor. His tenure included the creation of the much-talked about abuse storyline, involving Helen and Rob Titchener: “so clever,” she tells me.
Meanwhile, her own life has been quite as eventful as that of her onscreen family. She was eight when the Second World War broke out, living in working-class Derby. “I can remember going down to the air-raid shelter in a pair of my father’s shoes with a blanket round my shoulders. Some of my friends who had very staid parents had little suitcases with food in.” She talked on Desert Island Discs in 2015 about how her mother had a lover, who would visit the house when she was there. That must have been difficult for her, I suggest, but she says not. “I didn’t think it was at the time – children accept what they’re given.”
In 1951, she went to the Central School of Speech and Drama, which at the time was based at the Royal Albert Hall. For a girl from the provinces, London was a revelation. She remembers going to the famous Gargoyle Club, once frequented by Noël Coward and Henri Matisse.
“It was full of artists. We weren’t members or anything – we ordered jugs of beer and sandwiches, but we had no money, so they said to us, all right, you can do a bit of cabaret. We used to go quite regularly after that.” With her coming-of-age, of course, came a first love: a fellow actor, her feelings for whom have lasted a lifetime, she says. “It was a twin souls’ thing.” They talked of marriage, “but it really wasn’t meant to be. It was a question of [him going to] another country.” Instead, Greene had a short-lived marriage to British film actor George Selway in the late Fifties. Should actors marry actors? “Well, I married an actor and it was a disaster. He had all these wonderful stories and, honestly, I married him for laughs, and it isn’t a good basis for marriage.” Greene would marry for a second time in 1972, to businessman Cyril Richardson, when, at the age of 41, her life took a surprising turn, after what had been diagnosed as an ovarian cyst turned out to be a pregnancy: “I was gobsmacked,” she says.
In The Archers, concurrently, Jill was left collapsed behind a bathroom door with an overactive thyroid (“they got the symptoms wrong. I was given pills to take for the rest of my life… we haven’t mentioned them since”) but a local paper got hold of the story. “They said, Jill wasn’t ill at all, [Paddy’s] having a baby. Then the national press picked it up. I’ve still got all the [cuttings].” Her second husband died suddenly when Greene was 55. “There was absolutely no money when he died – he’d just started a new business. I’ve never been in debt but I was left with nothing and bills to pay.” Their son Charles was still a teenager. Now an accountant in his forties, he has recently given Greene a baby grandchild, Laurel. “She’s six months. She’s a little cracker. I’m not able to be a proper hands-on gran, because I’m 86 and I would drop the baby, but I do try.”
Can she imagine a point where she’d like to be written out of The Archers? “I don’t really want to think about that. It’s slightly worrying. If they want to, they will. I might be written out by God. I don’t want anybody else to play Jill, I’m very fierce about that.”
Greene felt genuine emotion when she played the scene in February 2010 which saw Jill find husband Phil dead at home; it came three months after Painting, who played Phil, had himself died. “It was very emotional to play. I could see him sitting in that damn chair. It was very odd. I could see that little head. It was uncanny.” However, when I ask her how it felt to be on air without him, she tells me it was first “different”, then “nice” – “I was allowed to start coming out from behind his shadow”.
Can we expect a big plotline for Jill for her 60th anniversary year, I wonder? “I’m not allowed to tell you,” she says, “but there is a surprise.” I knew she wouldn’t be able to, I admit. “We never do, you know,” she replies, “television actors blab, but radio actors do not.”
The Archers is on Radio 4 on weekdays at 2pm and 7pm