The end of an era for Ambridge’s kitchen queen
Some find comfort in a belief that, after death, each of us might go to our own personal heaven. Every listener to The Archers (Radio 4, Sunday to Friday) knows what that would look like for Jennifer Aldridge: an enormous, gorgeous, Albion kitchen, with shelves full of tagines as far as the eye can see, and a hot Aga ready and waiting to bake her next almond loaf. A kitchen very like the one she had to leave behind in 2018 after the sale of Home Farm, in fact.
I hope she’s there now. In Sunday night’s episode, Jennifer Aldridge, known more often to her nearest and dearest as “Jennydarling”, all one word, was killed off. Attentive listeners suspected this was in the offing. Radio 4 has confirmed that the actress who has played Jennifer for 60 years, Angela Piper, is retiring, and Piper’s beautiful voice – somehow sharp and yielding at the same time, like a scone topped with homemade jam – hasn’t been heard in Ambridge for months.
But her end was still a shock when it came. Jennifer, who was 78, had gone for a spa weekend in Stratford-upon Avon with her sister, Lilian Bellamy (Sunny Ormonde), where she had collapsed in the hotel room and been taken to hospital. It was left to a distraught Lilian to contact Brian Aldridge (Charles Collingwood),
Jennifer’s husband, and the wider family. A sudden heart attack seemed to be the cause.
Jennifer, as a character, wasn’t always easy to like, but over 60 years she certainly had her share of dramatic storylines. She could be a snob and was firmly one of Ambridge’s wellto-do set, despite a promiscuous youth that resulted, when she was 22, in one of The Archers’s first social scandals: the birth of a son, Adam (Andrew Wincott), out of wedlock in 1967. Piper’s performance was so heartrending and real that listeners believed it, and sent baby clothes and carry cots to the BBC. There followed Jennifer’s marriage to Roger Traversmacy, and a daughter, Debbie (Tamsin Greig), before Jennifer’s most significant relationship: her marriage to wealthy landowner and serial philanderer, Brian.
Jenny was well-read, a writer, an excellent cook (Piper has written two cookbooks in character: Jennifer Aldridge’s ‘Archers’ Cookbook and The Archers’ Pantry), a lover of luxury, status and the finer things in life. But the Aldridge marriage was marked by infidelities on both sides, and not least Brian’s with Siobhan, which resulted in the birth of his son, Ruairi. After the death of Siobhan, Jennifer agreed to take in a four-year-old Ruairi (Arthur
Hughes) and bring him up alongside her own children.
And this turned out to be the making of Jennifer’s character, and probably the most defining experience of her life. It revealed a sense of duty and compassion in her that added nuance to her every interaction. This story wouldn’t have been credible were it played by anyone other than the supremely talented Piper. As well as the drama and pathos, Piper has always had a great ear for the whimsy and gentle absurdity that so often creeps into The Archers, and Piper created Jennifer as a complicated, imperfect woman living an imperfect life, with a through-line of tenderness.
Jennifer’s death came at the end of an episode that was otherwise quite mundane, blowing everything apart. Despite the trauma of her end, not least for Lilian, it was good of the writers to give her a wonderfully fitting final weekend in Stratfordupon-avon, spent at the spa and visiting the Shakespeare’s Birthplace museum. Maybe for Jennifer, heaven was a place on Earth, too.
There’s been much concern over the passage of migrants in small boats across the English Channel, but, to date, an exasperating lack of answers to some very basic questions about how and why it’s all happening. The Boat Smugglers (Monday, Radio 4) was an attempt to fix that with journalist Sue Mitchell and aid worker and former British soldier Rob Lawrie trying to track down explanations that may help to stop it. Who is facilitating this steady stream of migrants? Where are the boats coming from, and who puts people in them? How much money is being made?
Mitchell and Lawrie made an appealing duo: Mitchell is all shrewd journalistic instinct and no-nonsense confrontation, while Lawrie is teasing, boyish and game, but quick to insist on getting out of Dodge when things turn scary. Together they staked out industrial sites to track the route of the flimsy, horrifyingly dangerous rubber boats, made to order in Turkey, before they ever felt a drop of water. With governments proving frustratingly incapable of stopping the practice, it felt like a relief to hear someone on the ground actually getting some answers.