The radio show eyeing Ambridge’s crown
Louis Wise goes behind the scenes of ‘Greenborne’, a realistic new soap
Gird your loins, Archers! This spring, Greenborne, a brand new radio series, is joining Ambridge on the UK’S fictional map. “I think, in the 21st century, it’s time for a new radio soap,” cries the actor John Altman, who heads the cast of a nest of neighbourly vipers. You will know him, of course, as Nasty Nick from Eastenders. “Everybody loves The Archers, but it’s cosily ensconced where it is in radioland,” he says. “I think Greenborne is going to shake things up a bit.”
It’s not every day you get a new soap on our airwaves. The last contender Altman can think of is Waggoners’ Walk, which completed an 11-year run on Radio 2 in 1980. Surely, though, this is the perfect time to launch one, as we remain more or less captive at home, relying more than ever on audio content to see us through the day when we’re cleaning, gardening, cooking or going out for walks. And perhaps Radio 4’s The Archers, which has just turned 70 years old, has enjoyed an unfair monopoly.
Certainly Altman, who plays pub landlord Alan Godwin in the 12-part series of 15-minute episodes (the hope is for more to follow), seems to think so. “It could be a bit like the situation we had with Coronation Street, when Eastenders suddenly came out of nowhere,” he says.
The show is first going to be broadcast on numerous local radio stations (many of which are available online) from March 21. “Dumfries and Taunton! Sheffield! Somerset! Swindon!” Altman cries excitedly.
To be clear, Greenborne has not been created just to bait poor old Ambridge. It is bidding to be rigorously contemporary – futuristic, in fact. Its goings-on are set about six months into the future, in the summer of 2021, as the inhabitants deal with the fallout from Covid-19. “Unlike something like Eastenders or
The Archers, which is very location-specific, we’re time-specific,” explains its writer, Colin Brake, who has worked on Eastenders, Doctors and Family Affairs.
He started thinking about the show almost a year ago, “very soon into the first lockdown”, and finally won funding for it in November from the Government-supported Audio Content Fund.
Brake had been dismayed to see his favourite soaps struggle with the realities of the pandemic. Often plotted and planned a good six months ahead, they’d had no way to prepare for the sudden change in our circumstances. “They’re not really able to engage with what exactly the situation is, because they don’t know what’ll happen,” he sighs. “So they’re slightly separating themselves from the world we’re in. And I think that’s a shame, because one of the lovely things about soaps is that they do – generally, vaguely – operate in the real world.” Greenborne seeks to avoid this problem of timing, then, by getting a few months ahead of the game. When we join the action, its characters are resurfacing after the traumas of the last year. Thus Altman’s Alan (an upstanding ex-copper, very different to Nick Cotton) has struggled to keep the pub afloat with his flirtatious younger wife, Bev. Then there’s the redoubtable Evie, “queen bee” of the village (played by former Doctor Who star Louise Jameson), now returning to the village after spending lockdown with her daughter in America.
In all the vague humming about what kind of art the pandemic might produce, a radio soap hasn’t been top of anyone’s lists. And yet it seems almost obvious, according to Jameson. She has form in soaps too, having appeared in Eastenders and Emmerdale; she thinks she was the first woman to be killed in one, in 1971 or 1972, having been “disappeared” in a forest near the latter’s The Woolpack.
“It’s long overdue, actually, to have something that reflects the society that we’re in at the moment,” she says. “Drama is a safe place to debate dangerous issues. And if we can do it with theatricality and humour, it serves society in a way that I think is underrated.”
What’s more, the regular routine of a soap can act as a much-needed comfort right now. “It’s like a really big blanket thrown around you, isn’t it? You’ve got the surety of those familiar voices in your ear.”
Jameson also points out that Covid has tweaked the tensions of everyday life, and that will be reflected in the series. “I think Greenborne addresses that: how incredibly hurt or amused or furious you can become over something like… a parish council meeting!” Conversation inevitably turns to Jackie Weaver, an internet sensation recently, thanks to her desperate Zoom call with Handforth Parish Council. Greenborne has a scene, “prophetically written”, that nods to that, Jameson says. Are there any Jackies in the cast, then? “Well… I think my character might be!”
Jameson’s blanket analogy seems apt. If we’ve come to equate soap with garish killings and tawdry scandal, Brake wants Greenborne to have a more human tone. “The more melodramatic stuff I tend to get more iffy about,” he says. “What I wanted to do was try to keep it on the more credible domestic level of things, but have fun… I wanted to have the social realism of Eastenders, but the fun of Coronation Street.”
Yes, sure – but is there a body count? He laughs mysteriously. “Somebody does end up in hospital… there is a secret affair revealed… there are soapy events, but we haven’t killed anybody yet. Nobody under a patio, either!”
Of course, the real question is whether Greenborne is seeking to bump off The Archers. On this, everybody is polite and courteous. “I have to confess, I’ve not really listened to The Archers since I was a young lad – my grandma used to listen to it and I’d listen with her,” says Brake. It sounds like exquisite shade, but he does then add: “Listen, The Archers is fantastic.” Jameson loves it, but thinks Greenborne might be “more youth-oriented”.
Both she and Altman think it could appeal to a wide listenership. “It’d be great if a family got around and listened. Not much of that happens these days,” he adds.
But the main difference, Brake explains, is that Ambridge is definitively rural, “and I believe that the farming calendar still drives it through the year”, whereas Greenborne is more urban in feel. “It’s a generic English or British small village that has grown,” he explains, “not too far from a large-ish city”. It is also diverse, with an Asian family running the garage and a black couple running the Post Office – and that’s just the UK he knows, he adds, living as he currently does on the outskirts of Leicester. In short, you get these places everywhere, “whether it’s Yorkshire or Dorset or the Scottish Borders”, and he hopes all of us can listen to it and locate it, wherever we are.
“That’s why it’s called Greenborne, you see? GB?” He sounds a bit disappointed that I hadn’t twigged. “Maybe I should have called it Upper Kettleby?”
‘It’s got the social realism of Eastenders, but the fun of Corrie’
‘Somebody ends up in hospital, and there’s an affair. We haven’t killed anyone yet’
Greenborne is available from Sunday March 21 on community radio stations across the UK. Visit greenborne.co.uk for a full list of radio stations and details of how to listen