Gentle giant
Meet the earl behind David Archer’s sultry tones
Why do we love The Archers
so? What is it about this everyday story of farming folk that has woven itself so tightly into the fabric of national life?
I started listening at the age of 16 and let’s just say I want the theme tune played at my funeral, possibly accompanied by a walk-on part for the Brookfield Herefords. I’ve also nursed a major crush on David Archer for years.
“Crikey, you really are a superfan. To be honest I grew up in a household where we immediately switched off the radio when The
Archers came on. But now I’m an integral part of it I think people love the show because it’s like real life without the swearing.
“There’s a sense of community and when bad things happen, people pull together. Are you going to open your eyes now?”
I reluctantly do just that. In my defence, I am sitting opposite Tim Bentinck, who has played David Archer for the past 35 years – and the cognitive dissonance is killing me.
On the one hand his voice is dreamily familiar, but he doesn’t look like I’d imagined (hence the closed eyes) and he keeps referring to David in the third person, which is just plain wrong.
We are meeting as Bentinck has written an autobiography entitled Being David Archer and Other Unusual Ways to Earn a Living; to be honest, I didn’t have terribly high hopes when I picked it up. He’s a radio actor – just how interesting could it be?
It turns out that his day job of calculating the milk yield and greasing the bailer is possibly the least interesting thing about Bentinck, Renaissance Man of Ambridge, who also happens to be the 12th Earl of Portland.
At 6ft 3in he’s a barn door of a man but a gentle giant, with doughy hands, a ready chuckle and an air of immense likeability.
“I’m not being bigheaded but it just turns out that I’m able to do quite a lot of things well,” he muses. “I’ve translated a French erotic novel, published a volume of Dadaist poetry, done loads of computer programming, penned the children’s book Colin the Campervan and sat in the House of Lords.
“A major highlight was being employed to run through Claudia Schiffer’s lines before she appeared in a German film. It made all those years of struggling to master the language worthwhile.”
The supermodel’s simple lines comprised variations on “Ich liebe dich” followed by a passionate kiss.
“I told her we really ought to follow the script religiously, but all she did was laugh and give me a peck on each cheek. Lovely woman; so radiant and funny and intelligent.”
There’s more: Bentinck won
Celebrity Mastermind with a specialist subject of Winnie the Pooh; he currently voices the witch hunter Victor Saltzpyre on the video game
Warhammer Vermintide; and he has lent his dulcet tones to commercials for L’oreal.
He also starred in the first ever episode of The Thick of It, when his aghast social affairs minister was skilfully skewered by Malcolm Tucker, and again as a government bigwig in the BBC satire W1A. He was also the “mind the gap” voice on the Piccadilly Line for years.
“I am an eternal optimist and so I say ‘yes’ to everything I’m asked to do,” he says with a grin. “I do seem to have had lots of adventures. But I need to keep busy because I can’t live off
The Archers; that’s only about a third of my income.”
He declines to confirm or deny the rumour that actors on the longrunning series are paid just over £300 an episode if they appear in it and nothing if they don’t. But Patricia Greene, who has played matriarch Jill Archer for 60 years, recently revealed that she gets by on £16,000 a year.
“I’ve had to be ingenious to make ends meet and I won’t pretend it’s not stressful,” says Bentinck. “I’ve been up three times for a part in The
Crown and not got anything. And I nailed an audition for Game of Thrones but it didn’t come to anything – the only mitigating factor was that the guy who got it was shorter, fatter and balder than I am, so they obviously had a type in mind.”
Bentinck’s wife, Judy, is a milliner whose creations have been worn by the likes of Clare Balding and Jenny Agutter. They have two adult sons: William, 33, runs a computer training company and 29-year-old Jasper teaches English as a foreign language in Tokyo.
The couple live in Holloway, North London, but Bentinck started out in what he describes as the “nouveau pauvre”, where the family had all of the trappings of aristocracy but none of the wealth. His father, Henry, whom he refers to as Pa, inherited the title 11th Earl of Portland from his sixth cousin twice removed at the grand old age of 70.
It came with a seat in the House of Lords, but that was all; there were the funds to send Bentinck to prep school and then Harrow, but his father was obliged to work.
“Pa got a job in advertising with J Walter Thompson and was bloody brilliant at it,” says Bentinck. “He wrote the slogan ‘Mr Kipling Makes Exceedingly Good Cakes’ and masterminded those hot air balloon Nimble bread adverts, but like me he was hopeless in business and stayed with the same company for his entire career without so much as a pay rise.”
Bentinck’s mother died just after his first term at boarding school.
As a result, he spent his holidays tagging along with his father, before going on to study history of art at the University of East Anglia, gaining an HGV licence and trekking across the US with tourist groups to earn his crust. He then attended the Old Vic drama school in Bristol, where he counted Daniel Day-lewis among his mates.
“Back at drama school Dan and I would spend days speaking like gangsters and trying to out-villain each other,” he says.
“He’s a lovely guy; despite the fame and the Oscars, he’s not up himself, which is what really matters.” The same can most definitely be said of Bentinck, who briefly took his seat in the House of Lords after his father’s death. “I turned up but I never said anything,” he admits. “I didn’t claim expenses either; I felt it was beneath both my dignity and that of the institution to submit a Tube ticket. Anyway, Tony Blair abolished hereditary peers after three years so that was that.”
Onwards and upwards; Bentinck has lost count of the number of computer games he’s voiced over the years. “My sons have often found themselves terrified when battling some orc on the Playstation to find it’s their dad screaming, ‘Die, human!’,” he says cheerfully.
He admits that he’s still hoping for a Hollywood blockbuster or a part in a long-running US series. But he wouldn’t stay forever. How could he? I’d miss him too much.
“Don’t fret,” he says in his most soothing David Archer tones. “It’s been a huge privilege to have had this parallel life for over three decades and I’m not going to abandon Ambridge. I’ve played David as a young upstart, a young parent and now as an older man; who knows what his future holds?”
Quite so. And, of course, there’s only one way to find out – by tuning in for another 35 years.
‘I’m not bigheaded, but it just turns out that I can do quite a lot of things well’