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Christmas in Ambridge
What does the big day have in store for the Archers et al? Tom Payne goes behind the scenes
What will leaving Home Farm do to the Aldridges? Has Lynda Snell bitten off too much with her show? Will Ben Archer be a good boy for Santa? Tom Payne goes behind the scenes on The Archers to learn what Christmas has in store for our favourite country folk
You may have just put up your tinsel, but in a studio at BBC Birmingham it has been festooning walls and microphones for at least a month. When I visited them in midnovember, the residents of Ambridge were already just six sleeps away from their Christmas, recording an episode to be broadcast later this week. In a rehearsal room, Jill, played by Patricia Greene, said with some satisfaction, ‘Preparation saves a lot of time on the day.’
For those who think that The Archers is in a time warp – because Ambridge is an idyllic community that still has a village shop and people willing to put on a Christmas show every year – it’s worth noting that Ambridge is really ahead of time. By about five weeks, anyway. The show’s ambition is to bring you events from the village day by day. True, but those days have already happened, in a studio, full of the actors, props and sound effects that create the aural illusion that is Ambridge.
Every trouble is taken to ensure that the illusion holds, right down to the birdsong in the background, which is always seasonally correct.
If its creators appear obsessed, that’s because we are too. There have been more than 18,700 episodes of The Archers since its first broadcast in 1951, and over those decades the goings-on in and around Ambridge have exerted a rustic grip on the national consciousness: from a peak of nine million listeners in the late ’50s, around five million still regularly tune in.
The eviction of the Grundys from Grange Farm, the imprisonment of Susan Carter (much to the consternation of the then-home Secretary, Michael Howard), Jack Woolley’s dementia, Rob Titchener’s bullying of Helen – these are storylines that have led to much rending of tea towels in the nation’s kitchens. Neither does peace and goodwill reign in Borsetshire at Christmas: the festive period of 2010 came to a tragic end with Nigel Pargetter’s fatal fall from the roof of Lower Loxley. The writers did relent in 2015, though: Lynda Snell’s dog Scruff had gone missing during the spring floods, but, lo, turned up, whimpering, at her house on Christmas Eve.
A visit to the Archers set as the soap ramps up for Christmas reveals that there’s a surprising amount of method acting for a radio show. Yes, there is ingenious use of incongruous props – when we think characters are dandling babies, they’re really holding mop heads, and old audiotape provides the scrunchy sound of stubbly fields. Otherwise, Ambridge prefers to keep it real. I’m shown the stairs that offer up three different footstep sounds, and see the wall of doorbells for a range of addresses: you press one button to summon the self-appointed culture tsar Lynda Snell, and something more low-key to call Brian and Jennifer Aldridge to the door at Home Farm. Then I ask about the box of vegetables sitting to one side. Are its contents used to create the sound of a calving heifer? A tractor seat straining
under the weight of Tony Archer? Jess Bunch, the assistant producer, explains, ‘That’s a box of vegetables. Perhaps for a vegetable box.’
Since it’s radio, there’s no need for the actors to do things authentically, but they seem to love it. When, for instance, Ruairi is looking down the back of a sofa for his mobile phone, the actor playing him, Arthur Hughes, has stuffed his mobile phone down the back of an actual sofa and is now hoiking it out. Louiza Patikas, who plays Helen, is considering taking a cheese-making course. When I ask her why, she says it’s useful to get the stirring right. You see? Detail and commitment.
By the same logic, some of the cast are wearing Christmas jumpers – in the episode I’m here to watch, Ben Norris, playing the youngest of the Brookfield Archers, is wearing his and so is Eddie Grundy. Sorry, the actor Trevor Harrison. It’s an easy mistake to make. Eddie Grundy is the head of a household devoted to making ends meet somehow, and Christmas provided the occasion for one of his more lucrative enterprises: the Grundy World of Christmas, a one-stop shop for cheap and cheerful essentials, including pilfered mistletoe and home-grown turkeys.
The Grundy turkey operation is just one part of a traditional Ambridge Christmas. Strictly, it starts with Stir-up Sunday, when Jill Archer prepares her Christmas cakes. This year she did it alongside her great-granddaughter, Rosie. But truly the festive season begins when the panto muse begins to stir within Lynda Snell. She first appeared in 1986 as the wife of arriviste IT wizard Robert, and has since 1991 produced many of the village’s annual Christmas shows, in an unceasing effort to elevate the village’s artistic ambitions.
By mid-november, Lynda has usually written, cast and recast the production, which, under her steely guidance, has seen shows as varied as The Mikado (2000) and the rather more traditional Jack and the Beanstalk (2008). This year it’s a staging of The Canterbury Tales. As ever, she’s wishing that somebody would relieve her of the burden. Last year that wish came true and she acted instead, treading, or rather chewing, the boards as bad fairy Carabosse in Sleeping Beauty. Carole Boyd, who plays her, says, ‘Lynda Snell gets away with it because she’s so passionate, but deeply delusional. They all come round to her because she has a good heart.’ (A spin-off from the show is that some of the Archers cast meet to record the Christmas show properly – previously they have performed Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit and an adaptation of Calendar Girls. This year they’ll be giving us their version, rather than Lynda’s, of The Canterbury Tales.)
But it’s not just the tinselly stories that define an Ambridge Christmas. Charles Collingwood,
‘It’s quite nice to feel like you’re part of a gang, and part of a family – literally the Archer family’
‘It’s not always mince pies and jollity. There are quite a lot of dark storylines’
who plays Brian, remembers how Dan and Doris Archer, grandparents of David, Elizabeth, Kenton and Shula, had a highly traditional perspective: ‘At first, almost every Christmas the sash window would go up, and Dan would say, “Oh Doris, come and listen to the bells, Father Christmas will be here in no time.”’ Of more recent developments, he says, ‘It’s not always mince pies and jollity. There are quite a lot of dark storylines.’ This Christmas he and his wife Jennifer have to leave Home Farm, the manorial house of which he has long been the master – the consequence, ultimately, of having let some chancers bury toxic waste on his land 40 years ago.
Some 15 Christmases ago, Brian’s affair (with Siobhan Hathaway, Ruairi’s mother) gave his wife’s drinks party a seasonal chill. Even the annual panto has the potential to turn bleak: one year, after a show rehearsal, Kathy Perks was raped by Owen King, chef at Lower Loxley;
another, the sickening Rob Titchener was banned from watching his son Henry in a production of the nativity, but he snuck in anyway. It’s often where Lynda’s art imitates life: her casting of Tom and Kirsty as romantic leads led to their engagement and eventual wedding-that-wasn’t-to-be (Ambridge hadn’t heard a howl that visceral since Nigel fell off the roof ); she also asked the plutocratic Justin Elliott (Telegraph columnist Simon Williams) to play an odious plutocrat, Demon Squire, in Mother Goose two years ago. And this year? ‘There’s always a sort of a clue, isn’t there?’ Carole Boyd says. So listen carefully.
Back in the studio, Jill, Eddie and Justin (aka Greene, Harrison and Williams) are rehearsing a scene together, a sound-absorbent foam lining the wall behind them. After a while in the cast’s company, you become dizzied by the overlap of appearance and reality. It’s not just that characters on The Archers end up playing versions of themselves in plays on the show, the actors, too, can channel their alter egos in down moments. Take Collingwood and Williams locking horns: ‘Am I still in the frame to buy Home Farm?’ Williams wonders. According to Brian’s estate agent, says Collingwood, Justin isn’t rich enough. ‘I could buy it out of my hip pocket,’ Williams snaps. As for Roy Tucker (fictional), the manager of Grey Gables hotel, Ian Pepperell (who plays him) really does run a pub in Ringwood, Hampshire.
Christmas just adds a bit of sparkle to this doubling up. Eddie Grundy is the life and soul of the cider club. Meanwhile, Harrison has his own equivalent. ‘On our Christmas Eve,’ he tells me, ‘we have a beer-judging competition. Our friend and his family have four or five different brews, and we sit round and judge it. There’s a trophy. It’s quite tense. It’s like Eddie’s cider club, but beer.’
Nearer Christmas itself, the cast does celebrate, gathering for a meal at a local Birmingham restaurant. There are mutterings among them about how Christmassy the gathering is, with
quips about the budget and climate. ‘The cast annually celebrates the success of the show,’ says Williams. Trevor Harrison has doubled as a secret Santa; Joanna van Kampen sometimes sings, just as her character, Fallon, might at the Bull. Collingwood reckons these cast gatherings are perhaps more fun than they were in the past. ‘It’s more inclusive and generous than it was then. It gives us a chance to meet members of the cast we possibly haven’t seen all year.’
It also gives actors a chance to track the changes in their own lives, and the lives they’ve lived through their characters – Collingwood has played Brian for over 40 years, Greene celebrated her 60th year playing Jill in 2017. It would be impossible to play the part of Helen, abused physically and mentally by Rob, without investing in it, so it makes poignant sense when Patikas looks back to her character’s past: ‘I was thinking the other day of the lights going on on the village green. I had a flashback to looking at the lights about four or five Christmases ago with Rob. I felt really sad suddenly. Because, yes, there was all the drama, drama, drama, but in that moment Helen was so in love,’ she says.
For Ben Norris, the comfort an Ambridge Christmas can offer is touchingly real. His festive mood goes beyond the jumper, it turns out. ‘I did feel Christmassy today,’ he says. ‘It’s really lovely. In the show, I’m part of a massive family, and there are tons of people coming round to Jill’s for Christmas.’ He contrasts this with his own recent memories. ‘My family situation has been quite fractured – my parents broke up when I was at uni – so Christmas hasn’t really had any kind of consistency. Weirdly, it’s quite nice to feel like you’re part of a gang, and part of a family in the figurative sense of being in the cast, but literally, in the Archer family. We used to go round to my gran’s and make pigs in blankets, so replaying that scene [with Jill] was really nostalgic, and really welcome.’
Hearing these thoughts from what Williams calls ‘the best green room in the world’, you can feel that The Archers does for its cast and characters what Christmas does for the rest of us, bringing people together and to seek out the goodwill in one another. Still, one of the mysteries of the Ambridge Christmas is why would anyone give up time with their family to be in one of Lynda’s plays? But, as Carole Boyd reminds me, ‘Her passion and craziness are infectious. And people want to be nice at Christmas. Even to Lynda Snell.’
The Archers continues tomorrow on Radio 4 with the omnibus at 10am. The Canterbury Tales airs on 29 December and 5 January on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds