The Archers’ Lear-like crisis feels like it is just Act One
Two years ago, just before he left The Archers (Radio 4) for Eastenders, Sean O’connor warned us that Ambridge was about to enter a quiet spell. As editor, O’connor had overseen the national psychodrama of Helen and Rob’s abusive marriage – after which, he said, “the show needs to return to a much gentler way of telling the stories for a while”.
He wasn’t kidding around. The Archers has been determinedly vanilla ever since – all parish council meetings and pet talent shows. Even Nic’s death from sepsis, Shula’s mid-life crisis and Freddie’s transformation into a drug dealer have barely ruffled the tedium. But Archers fans are a patient lot. We understand the need for fallow periods between harvests. And before he left, O’connor promised to sow the seeds of the next big storyline: a “Lear-like” inheritance struggle at Home Farm.
Sure enough, Brian Aldridge is now well on his way to Shakespearean tragedy. The beleaguered patriarch of Home Farm is facing financial ruin, and possible jail, as a result of a self-inflicted contamination crisis on his land. Instead of rallying round, his family is tearing itself apart. Kate and Adam are threatening to sue Brian, Alice is threatening to disown her siblings, and Jennifer is threatening to sell the family home.
Charles Collingwood, who has been playing Brian since 1975, seems to be relishing his chance to do Lear. “To Adam and Kate!” he slurred last Friday, while searching for answers at the bottom of his wine glass. “A plague on both your houses!” After that pleasing nod to the Bard, he rang Debbie (his Cordelia) to beg for help. “I can’t do it. I can’t turn this around on my own,” he croaked, most affectingly. “Please Debbie. I need you here, now.” When Debbie gets drafted in, you know it’s serious – not least because it requires the hugely successful actress Tamsin Greig to clear a space in her schedule.
The one person who remains offstage is Ruairi, Brian’s son by an extra-marital affair. He was bundled off to boarding school the moment Jennifer agreed to raise him – presumably to save the bother of hiring a regular actor. But Ruairi is now 16: two years away from coming of age. The current crisis at Home Farm is just Act One. The real dynastic struggle is yet to come.
Spitting Blades (Radio 4, Saturday) felt very far removed from the rural theatrics of The Archers. Simeon Moore, aka Zimbo, is a rapper and former gangster suffering from retrospective guilt. Since becoming a father – and having seen most of his childhood friends fall victim to gang-related violence – Moore has started to wonder whether brutal rap lyrics, of the kind he used to “spit”, are poisoning black youth culture.
Moore is hardly the first person to ask this question. But few are so well placed to examine it from the inside. “I was rapping about killing people [when] I was probably about eight or nine,” he confessed – and what started as a childish attempt to look cool gradually became “my reality. I started carrying knives, axes, then that went on to carrying guns… hurting people from different area codes…”
Of course, family and social context matter. The actor and film producer Femi Oyeniran grew up in Nigeria – where “the head of Coca Cola is a black man, the president is a black man” – before moving to Britain, aged 10. Having high aspirations, he told Moore, meant that he never fully identified with gangster culture. “I listen to Jay-z, I like Paid in Full, I like all these films that people that grow up on council estates like, but I’ve never sold drugs in my life. This is pure entertainment, it’s a commodity, it’s like buying tangerines from Tesco.”
Nevertheless, Moore built a persuasive case against the current wave of ultra-violent “drill” music. At the very least, he said, it’s like “having a devil on your shoulder, whispering in your ear”. My only quarrel with this engrossing documentary was that it went out on Radio 4, thus completely missing the relevant audience. Why not Radio 1Xtra – Britain’s biggest urban music station – where it might just have pricked a few consciences?
Finally, a mea culpa. I was rather sniffy about the first episode of National Health Stories last month. Since then, it has become my favourite thing on Radio 4. Using archive recordings to chart the evolution of the NHS, from horsedrawn ambulances to high-tech fertility treatments, it simultaneously reveals the changing accents, beliefs and expectations of the British people. Binge-listen on iplayer, and marvel at the difference 70 years makes.