The Archers – Culture Article
You may never have heard of them, but believe me when I say, The Archers are a British institution. Turn on your radio anytime from the 1950s onwards and “that music” would come on; “‘Dum tee tiddly dum tee dum tee dum tee …‘”. Yet this tale of ‘Country folk’ is all in the imagination, including the geography. There is no Ambridge, no Borsetshire, no Woolpack pub etc. They simply don’t exist. It is all form the imagination of the writers, but they have been around for so long. One of the characters, Jill Archer, first appeared in the programme when I was a girl, and she is still going strong. Recently I saw the actress who plays her, Patricia Greene, being interviewed on television. All these years I had never even seen a picture, so she wasn’t at all as I had imagined her, and then she began to speak, and there she was: that gentle, slightly hesitant, caring voice I’d been hearing most of my life.