What The Archers can teach other soap operas
Radio 4’s Today Today was first off the mark. Would I come on to discuss “The The
Archers Archers plotline that has set everyone talking”? More phone calls followed. I couldn’t oblige any of them because I hadn’t heard the stabbing of horrid Rob Titchener by persecuted wife Helen, that clatter of the knife on the kitchen floor of Blossom Hill Cottage. I was away, seeing friends, going to funerals, reading the collected adventures of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay (novels that wouldn’t see the printed paged in these politically sensitive times).
I’ve caught up now. What a coup for the BBC. It was days before the Panama papers and their revelations of massive (but legitimate) tax avoidance of the rich and famous grabbed the headlines. By that time my scholarly grasp of soap operas could elucidate why this plotline, of a character gradually isolated from friends and family, was familiar from Brookside, Brookside,
Coronation Coronation Street Street and Neighbours, Neighbours, and and why it was done best of all on The The
Archers. Archers.
Why? Why? By By being being well well and and patiently patiently written, written, letting letting it it unroll unroll over over 18 18 months, months, gradually gradually revealing revealing the the depth depth of of Rob’s Rob’s villainy villainy and and not not just just towards towards Helen, Helen, for for we we also also learned learned about about his his various other lies, deceptions and cookings of books. It was very well acted, Rob’s charm overcoming the doubts of Ruth (Helen’s mother), Rob’s evil side showing itself to Tom (Helen’s brother). Best of all, it let the listeners completely understand Rob while no one in the serial could. Oh, the satisfaction of saying to the radio “Tell your mother, Helen!” and hoping tomorrow she might.
True Archers’ listeners will have rejoiced when the Prime Minister’s tax affairs soon took over the news. All those tourists to our much-loved imaginary land were back on their bus, speeding away to gasp at something else. Some did more than gasp, as anyone who listened to Nick Ferrari’s callers on LBC last Friday morning will have heard. Their tumbrels were ready to roll on Downing Street.
What a relief to sneak away from it all and listen from Friday night on to Radio 5 Live’s magnificent coverage of
The Masters golf tournament, so good I turned off the electric toothbrush and went back to the old-fashioned one, the better to envision the dappled but deceptively sloping greens of Augusta, Georgia. I admit to spending two spellbound hours actually watching it on BBC Two on Sunday evening but when Jordan Spieth showed the first signs of flagging I
raced off to the radio for the hoped-for, maybe, then all-of-a-sudden wonderfully inevitable triumph of Danny Willett. Radio made it all seem closer.
A Waste of Space (Radio 4, Monday) began unexpectedly. Newspaper columnist Harriet Sergeant, whose voice has the ring of expensive glass, was settling down for a night in a squat, gingerly, in the company of homeless strangers. Half an hour later, with brisk efficiency, she had taken us through the scandal of house prices so high only the children of the very rich can afford them, the alarming number of people left homeless while huge new office blocks stand empty, the apparent inability of local authorities to bridge the gap. She had also met some entrepreneurial individuals with possible solutions, exploring why they can work, noting the difficulties. Then she woke up, safe and inspired. Producer Andrew McGibbon has found us a new radio star.
Owen Bennett-Jones was the BBC’s Pakistan correspondent, a familiar voice on the news and From Our Own
Correspondent. More recently he’s been a briskly witty host of those end of the year round-ups which, without brisk wit, can rapidly descend into chum chats. Yesterday and on Tuesday last week he presented on Radio 4 a pair of reports, The Deobandis, exploring the nature of this branch of Islam, its reach in the UK, its connections to militant and terrorist Islam. Calmly, clearly, with the authority of experience and backed by an editorial team with due linguistic and religious expertise, he unfolded a dossier that shocked.
Forty per cent of British mosques are run by Deobandis, adherents to a scholarly, strict branch of Islam where blasphemy requires a death penalty. Not all Deobandis are militants, but there are established links to jihadist terrorism. Not all Deobandi-controlled mosques now represent their varied British-born members but in Bradford, Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and many other cities there are men and women afraid to speak out for fear of death threats. The aim of these programmes, said BennettJones, was not to inflame but to inform, to show what’s going on. Real reporting, great radio.