The Archers Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- The Archers was also a film production company responsible for many classic British films in the 1940s and '50s.
The Archers is the world's longest running radio soap opera, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 twice a day except on Saturday. Despite its rural flavour, it is actually recorded in the heart of Birmingham in England.
In 1950, a pilot series was broadcast to the English Midlands. Since 1 January 1951, a fifteen-minute episode has been transmitted across the UK each weekday, at first on the BBC Light Programme and subsequently on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4). There are now six episodes a week, repeated in an "omnibus" edition on Sunday morning. Traditionally billed as an "everyday story of countryfolk", it is set in the fictional Midlands village of Ambridge close to Borchester, the county town of Borsetshire, an imaginary shire situated between the (actually contiguous) real counties of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, south of Birmingham in the West Midlands. Ambridge itself is sometimes said to be based upon the village of Inkberrow in Worcestershire.
Other locations often referred to in the stories include local landmark Lakey Hill, the neighbouring village of Penny Hassett and the cathedral city of Felpersham. Its theme tune is Barwick Green, a "maypole dance" from the suite My Native Heath, written in 1924 by the Yorkshire composer Arthur Wood.
Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, it was conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the post-war years of rationing and food shortages. The programme was hugely successful; at the height of its popularity it was estimated that 60% of adult Britons were regular listeners. It also served a purpose at the time as a propaganda mechanism to reinforce notions of Englishness, and to foster and inculcate notions of rebuilding in post-war Britain.
The actor Norman Painting has played the character of Phil Archer continuously ever since the first trial series in 1950. He was also a member of the scriptwriting team at one time and wrote around 1,200 episodes under the pseudonym of "Bruno Milna". The decision by the scriptwriters to schedule an episode in which Phil's first wife, Grace, was killed in a fire on the launch day of ITV was widely seen as a "spoiling" operation by the BBC. The emotional response of listeners to news of Grace's death inspired an episode of the comedy programme Hancock's Half Hour on television that featured a fictional soap, The Bowmans, parodying the series.
A recurring theme over the years has been the resentment of the working-class Grundy family towards the middle-class Archers, but the series has moved inexorably with the times and now deals with a wide range of contemporary issues including illicit affairs, drug abuse, and homosexuality. However one of the show's enduring charms is its ability to make absorbing stories out of everyday, small scale concerns, such as the possible closure of the village shop, rather than the large scale and rather improbable events that form the plots of many soap operas.
The programme editor has been Vanessa Whitburn since 1992.
See also: Mrs Dale's Diary
In 1994, the BBC World Service in Afghanistan began broadcasting Naway Kor, Naway Jwand ("New Home, New Life"), an everyday story of countryfolk with built-in bits of useful information. Although the useful information was more likely to concern unexploded landmines than the latest modern farming techniques, the inspiration and model of Naway Kor, Naway Jwand was essentially The Archers.[1]
In Rwanda, the BBC World Service's Kinyarwanda-Kirundi service has been broadcasting the Archers-inspired soap opera Urunana since 1999.[1]
The Archers was also the model for the Russian radio soap opera Dom 7, Podyezd 4.[1]
This is an Article on The Archers. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About The Archers Overseas Parallels
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