The Archers miscellany

256 Pages·2009·1.73 MB·English

by  Joanna Toye

BOOKS
Archers
%
JL l i e
A
Miscellany
The first official trivia collection
from Britain’s best-loved radio drama
J O A N N A T O Y E
The first official trivia collection from
Britain’s best-loved radio drama.
Have you ever wondered about the
attractions at Ambridge fetes? Puzzled
over who the winners were at the Flower
and Produce Show? Been curious about
details of past Bonfire Nights, or even
menus at The Bull? Discover the whos,
whats, wheres and whys of the show’s
past 60 years in The Archers Miscellany.
Discover which resident has the most
names and meet the animals of
Ambridge; learn the order of
illumination for the Christmas lights
switch-on; ponder Great Ambridge
Mysteries and remember Ambridge
Wanderers football team fixtures from
the glory days of the 1970s.
Containing information gathered
from the vast BBC Birmingham Archers
archives and beautifully illustrated
throughout, The Archers Miscellany
is the ultimate trivia book for all things
Ambridge.
£9.99
Archers
Miscellany

.The
Archers
Miscellany
JOANNA TOYE
BOOKS
To Camilla, Tony and Hattie, with love
This book is published to accompany the BBC Radio 4 series The Archers.
The editor of The Archers is Vanessa Whitburn.
109876
First published in 2009 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
A Random House Group Company
Main text by Joanna Toye
Copyright © Woodlands Books Ltd, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found
at www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1846 07754 8
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Commissioning editor: Albert DePetrillo
Project editor: Nicholas Payne
Copy-editor: Steve Tribe
Designer: O’Leary & Cooper
Maps: Draughtsman Ltd
Production: Bridget Fish
Map illustration courtesy Archers Addicts, official fan club for
BBC Radio 4’s The Archers, www.archers-addicts.com
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Mackays, ME5 8TD
To buy books by your favourite authors and
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The information in this book has been compiled to tie-in to The Archers,
and the author and publishers disclaim any liability arising directly or indirectly from the
use or misuse of the information contained in this book. While every effort has been made to
trace and acknowledge copyright holders of copyrighted material in The Archers Miscellany,
BBC Books would like to apologise should there be any errors or omissions.
INTRODUCTION
( ou’re writing whatV I couldn’t understand why people were
so surprised that there was a book to be written based on the
archives of The Archers - to me it wasn’t just an interesting idea, but
an obvious one.
When I started work on the programme in 1980, The Archers'
continuity system was typed and handwritten on thousands of index
cards. They were kept in a set of miniature wooden filing drawers
with domed brass handles, with labels like: ‘CHARACTERS
LIVING A-’ (there were a lot of ‘A’s, obviously) or, more ominously,
‘DEAD AND GONE’.
The cards had been the idea of Valerie Hodgetts, the programme’s
first Production Assistant back in 1951. In those days there were only
two writers - not much room for confusion, you’d think. But writers,
though following agreed storylines, have a nasty habit of inventing
things. Writer One had patriarch Dan Archer announce that his
favourite meal was steak and kidney pie; Writer Two had him favouring
chicken and leek. Valerie realised that the only solution was to record
not just the major events - a plane crashing into Dan’s wheat or the
course of Phil’s romance with Grace - but the fact that Dan smoked
a pipe, was Vice-President of the Cricket Club and always wore a
nightshirt, never pyjamas.
This system lasted - and worked - for over forty years, until the
arrival of the programme’s first full-time Archivist in 1994. When
Camilla Fisher applied for the job, she impressed us all not just with her
encyclopaedic knowledge of the programme but also with the fact that
(in what she tries to claim is a coincidence) she even got married on
the same day as Shula (first time around, when Shula married Mark).
Camilla gamely took on the twin tasks of not just selecting archive­
relevant material from the work of the nine current scriptwriters and
5
logging it all on computer, but the massive undertaking of computerising
the continuity cards as well That is still, understandably, an ongoing
process, and for this book I spent many happy hours foraging among
them, some held together with elastic bands which disintegrated at
a touch, some so much handled they’ve fragmented at the edges into
little archipelagos and have to be kept in plastic wallets. There were
good moments and bad. The joy of finding, in full, Marjorie Antrobus’s
recipe for Yemenite pickle and the fact that there were so many
recorded mentions of Nigel’s jackets that they merited an entry of their
own had to be set against the frustration of the ‘lost years’ of the Fete
and Flower and Produce Show and the detective work needed to try to
fill in the gaps.
In all this, Camilla generously shared her knowledge and her database
and pointed me in many fruitful directions - I could not have begun,
let alone completed, this book without her. The Editor of The Archers,
Vanessa Whitburn, gave me her usual enthusiastic support throughout,
and my editors at Random House, Albert DePetrillo and Nicholas Payne,
nursed the book calmly through its various production stages.
This Miscellany - the clue is in the title - doesn’t claim to be
exhaustive. It’s also no sociological tract, but its seemingly random
details, taken together, do paint a revealing picture of a changing society
and countryside in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Whether you’re a long-time listener or a recent convert, if you’re
curious about the field names at Brookfield, where various characters
went on their honeymoons, or who makes the best scrambled egg in
the village, then this book is for you. Welcome to the complete and
complex world that is Ambridge.
JOANNA TOYE
June 2009
6