Escape from the country
The Archers cast is heading on tour, bringing Ambridge’s adored characters to towns and cities around the UK, writes libby purves
Dom Mckenzie
- Libby Purves
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After 75 years spent chiefly inside Birmingham studios and the imaginations of radio listeners, for the first time The Archers is sending eight actors to tour the UK from June to November, with a theatre show that includes interviews, archive clips, demonstrations of sound effects from lambing to pint-pulling, a pub quiz and miniature episodes set at Ambridge’s annual horticultural battle, The Flower & Produce Show.
The actors are split across two separate troupes and the shows will run in clumps of three within each area, with gaps between (they do, after all, need to keep recording actual programmes). While the voices of Brian Aldridge and Lilian Bellamy are made flesh in Manchester, Stoke and Truro, another team with David Archer and Susan-from-the-shop will be preparing to hit Cambridge, Glasgow and Ipswich.
The logistics are complicated, with the radio show having a cast of around 60 and sometimes a third of them recording in any one week. The touring groups expect confusing moments when some members have recorded a dramatic event and need to remember whether or not the audience knows it on show night. “Oh dear, yes,” says Susie Riddell, who plays Tracy Horrobin, “it’s already difficult when I’ve read a script, heard it in my head but it hasn’t gone out. We will have to be careful not to give stuff away. And we’ll all be in the bus together reading scripts on the way to the next theatre.”
“It should be like an ice cream van, with the theme playing and all of us singing,” says Annabelle Dowler (Kirsty Miller). “I think of it as my equivalent of a Strictly Tour. Who’ll be the Strictly Curse? You, Ben?” That’s Ben Norris, who shares his real name with Ben Archer, newly-fledged paramedic and mental health enthusiast. “Will we get sick of each other’s stories?” asks Dowler. “Just make up new ones every time,” he replies. “We’ll have weeks in between shows and won’t necessarily remember anything we said.”
I never get recognised on the street – it's just the voice
Susie Riddell, Tracy
“Oh, I never do,” says Charles Collingwood, who plays Brian Aldridge. “I will be 83 when we’re on the tour. I think they thought, ‘OK, let’s give that old fool one last go, finish him off!’” “We’ll be fine,” comes reassurance from Sunny Ormonde, who plays Lilian. “Just as long as we stay on our medication.”
“I’ll be on antihistamines,” chimes in Riddell, “because Ryan is bringing his assistance dog.”
That’s Ryan Kelly (Jazzer McCreary), who is blind, and famously has the best memory for plots. The others are praying that the quiz section doesn’t involve them: “On the Archers podcast I never get the answer right,” says Charlotte Martin (Susan Carter). “I can’t even remember what was going on two years ago.”
Did they all volunteer for this extra job? “No,” says Riddell, channelling her inner Horrobin with the Del Boy suggestion “maybe a few fivers changed hands?” “We were probably the cheapest. The most, er, available...” chip in several castmates.
There’s a bit of a school-trip atmosphere not least because, with multiple storylines, some of them only rarely meet in the studio. Kelly reflects, “I don’t think I’ve been on with Ben since last August.” To which Norris points out, “I’ve only just had my first time ever talking to Alice!” “But you’re cousins!” reproves Kelly, shocked.
All are looking forward to meeting listeners, although, “We are often a guilty secret,” says Dowler. Martin remembers a play they did in the 1990s written by Ted Kelsey, who played Joe Grundy. “My favourite memory was in Hull. The audience was full of lorry drivers. They said, ‘Oh yes, we always put The Archers on in our trucks.’”
There’s a measurably younger demographic these days among Archers listeners, but it’s still a wide one overall, boomer grandparents to Gen Z. Collingwood reminisces fondly of a former Saga cruise: “All these elderly ladies, blonde with grief,” he murmurs, true to his roving-eyed character. Other veterans like Tim Bentinck (David Archer) also remember periods when the cast did a lot of meet-and-greets. “In the days of Archers Addicts trips! It was always lovely to meet the listeners, but there was a worry about us not looking the way people imagined. I did a thing at Butlins once, and a woman said, ‘You’ve ruined it for me.’ I said, ‘No, there are five million different Davids. Yours will come back to you.’ She burst into tears, and it turned out her husband called David had died. Oh, I was mortified!”
Ben Archer sits alongside me, ageing at the same time
Ben Norris, Ben
Norris, a relative newcomer, also knows the risk of not looking as expected: “When I first joined, they used Twitter and gave a warning that said, ‘Contains pictures’. As if we were all incredibly ugly.”
Will they go on stage in rural costume? “I’m torn between Barbour and corduroys or being myself in ripped jeans,” says Bentinck. “I think just a slightly less scruffy version of myself,” says Norris, “I’m not going to wear scrubs.”
“I’ll put my Tracy shoes on,” says well-spoken Riddell, “for the bit where we do a scene. And,” – she drops into Borsetshire – “Oi’ll do the Tracy voice. I never get recognised on the street, it’s just the voice.”
Ormonde, as the ageing-but-foxy Lilian, has a responsibility towards glamour. In real life she is a cheerfully casual figure but, “It’s gotta be a bit out-there. I do a one-woman show sometimes being fairly glamorous, so I might bring some of that clobber.”
As for Collingwood, “I might wear a dinner jacket. They all think I look like Michael Heseltine anyway. Last year I was at a party and a woman came storming across the lawn shouting, ‘You’re almost famous, but I don’t know your name. You are a disappointment.’”
They’re easy about the double-identity as themselves or their characters. “We’re all happy chatters, who talk s**t and mess around,” says Norris. “Some actors don’t like moving outside the character or stepping in and out. But with a series like this that runs for years in real time, it’s comfortable. Ben Archer is this person who sits alongside me, ageing at the same time. It’s not like a play where you leave the character behind.” “They’re a little bit alive, our characters,” says Kelly, who sounds very like Jazzer. “It’s a second skin,” adds Martin.
There is a sense of intergenerational comradeship, the young like hearing the tales of old stagers. “I can remember a lot of you being born,” says Bentinck solemnly. They cheerfully joke about plotlines, like the rest of us: some remember the delicious 1990s spoof cartoons, Unheard of Ambridge, about characters referred to but never heard. We reflect on the never-heard Farmer Mulligan, conveniently found dead in his milking parlour a few months back so that his daughter Esme can be a new character and, usefully, employ the jailbird George Grundy since none of the other resentful villagers will. “Yes,” says Bentinck. “It’s a bit odd that there’s this big farm next door to Brookfield that nobody’d ever mentioned.” “Mmm,” adds Kelly, the plot expert, “and suddenly there’s Tony remembering ‘old man Mulligan’…”
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The Archers is real enough to be a national institution but familiar enough to take a family joke. So off they’ll go, merry as grigs. As Ormonde says, “It’s a party, a thank you to everyone over the years.”
Authors
Libby Purves
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