Mental health & class composition in fictitious counties: the Archers unmasked... a half-assed analysis by Mad Ted.

As many fans of this website are from British bourgeois origins and therefore listen to BBC Radio 4 as a matter of course (a course), I am presuming that a high percentile factor among you will be familiar with what’s currently going on in the Archers, the radio soap opera that began in the early 1950s as a means of getting agricultural information out to the sickle-bearing community in a mildly entertaining format. In more recent times its script editorship was taken up by Vanessa Whitburn, late of Channel 4’s radical-Redmond (Phil, not John) soap Brookside, resulting in storylines based around Combat 18 cells, no-M11 and Twyford Down activity, and the destruction of GM-trial crops. The programme plays for less than 15 minutes at a time, but this is daily so that’s alright: and it even features its very own organic farmers, as well as a comedy lower-class family – the Grundys – who are portrayed as being incompetent and peripherally involved in drugs and crime, not unlike the Dingles in ITV1’s Emmerdale. Inevitably the Grundys are the unwilling recipients of our scorn and derision, and occasionally our sentimentalist pity as well, bolstering the crass bourgeois liberal concept of the undeserving poor, what the Victorians referred to as the laissez-faire doctrine. The Archers is set in a twee village called Ambridge, in the county of Borsetshire and close to the town of Borchester, a nod to the romanticist late nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope, who was also the inventor of the red British pillar box for the mails; whilst all of these places are entirely fictitious Birmingham in the midlands is frequently referred to, and you get the impression that it’s somewhere around Shropshire or maybe Hereford & Worcester.

The better part of a decade ago John Archer, the scion to Bridge Farm Organics and a playboy figure not unlike his namesake in Massachusetts, died when the fatigue brought on by his juggling of women and the ruthless pursuit of capital led to his being crushed by his own tractor late one dark night, and his mother Pat fell into a long spate of fairly severe depression; if it had been Eddie Grundy who had suffered this lonely and desolate end no doubt it would have been to a whole lot of giggling around the parlours of middle England, but instead much reverence and respect was communicated toward this very engine of rural accumulation; and his mother’s subsequent illness was dealt with in a very understanding fashion, with a whole lot of time, effort and research devoted to it. Well; so far, so good you might think.

But now fast forward to mid-2004, when Pat’s daughter has shacked up with the gamekeeper Greg Turner, a man approaching middle age and with at least one divorce behind him and two estranged children now living in France. When Greg’s ex-wife keeps coming back over the telephone to him for help whenever it suits her, and pressure from the medieval-style estate-owner philandering Brian Aldridge – really the ‘wicked squire’ figure for the serial – gets a bit much for him, the dark clouds beckon for the hapless Greg and the walls begin to close in. Yikes! Some irrational behaviour ensues, occasional fits of misdirected rage alternating with extreme fatalism and apathy, culminating in a refusal to go to work or even to leave the house as far as the average listener can discern. Is there a connection between his behaviour and his de-facto mother-in-law’s memories of her anus horribilis in the turbulent nineties? Can there be a chance now of the building of a bridge between the worn-down Greg and Pat Archer, who never much liked him in the first place? No, a course not, as any penguin would say. Because this isn’t about mental health, it’s about class. Because the well-to-do (as the average Daily Express-reading Archers aficionado would describe them) are allowed to be depressed, because they have legitimate, executive pressures, because their problems are so much greater than ours, as evidenced by the former gamekeeper’s wife Christine Barford who was recently targeted for persecution by the excellent Class Warrior Clive Horrobin, brother of the obnoxious Thatcherite throwback and hilarious hen-pecker Susan Carter. Greg Turner, on the other hand, has a regional accent and must therefore be destroyed. Ambridge Class War, where are you now?