Can there be a headline more disappointing than “Archers’ fans upset by gritty new storyline”, or equivalent? You read on, expecting a multiple chainsaw murder at Brookfield or a drug-fuelled orgy after an illegal rave in a barn at Bridge Farm. Instead you read, shock horror, that somebody in the countryside has had an abortion.
The latest stirrings in Ambridge have been created by the temporary appointment of John Yorke as producer. Mr Yorke, who brought incest and assisted suicide to EastEnders, has promised a “bigger and darker” storyline for The Archers. But it had better be an improvement on the episodes that he has come up with so far. On Monday, I tuned in hoping for some excitement. And what happened? Er, a farmer installed a CCTV camera because he had had a tractor stolen and had received a threatening phone call. When he gets back from the jubilee celebrations he watches the footage to find ... absolutely nothing at all.
Given that I am writing this before Tuesday evening’s episode, I may, of course, be overtaken by events. David Archer might have watched his camera to discover a hooded Brian Aldridge, who has secretly been in a Triad gang, sneak in with a flaming torch to pillage his farm. But I doubt it. Far more likely, I suspect, that yet again events in The Archers will have been coloured by an urban-based producer with a backward and overly gentle image of the countryside.
The Archers has always been an urban product, from inner-city Birmingham. And it shows. You have to live in a big city to think that rural folk are really still shocked by adultery, drug-taking, civil partnerships, or not to realise that many farmers installed security lights and CCTV cameras 20 years ago. If The Archers was produced by people who live in the countryside the characters wouldn’t get through an entire episode fussing about the jubilee sponge cake; they would be panicking about battered transit vans seen driving about or moaning about the latest burnt-out car. They would spend their time fretting over traveller encampments and speeding traffic.
I am sure it works both ways. I don’t think I would get it right if I was asked to produce scripts for EastEnders. From my vantage point in rural East Anglia the East End has such a nasty, violent image that few characters would survive my first half-hour episode. If they were not blipped over the head by muggers they would go down in a hail of bullets outside the local KFC or die agonising deaths smoking crack cocaine.
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The Archers, by contrast, hasn’t had a murder in 61 years. Don’t disappoint us, Mr Yorke: it’s time Lynda Snell’s battered corpse was found in a ditch.