IT’S one of the perks of being the editor of a newspaper that you sometimes get to meet your heroes.
And so it was that on a bright spring day in 1986 David Chapman, then the youngest editor of the world’s oldest newspaper Berrow’s Worcester Journal, first published 1690, went to spend a day with the cast of The Archers, the BBC’s longest-running radio soap.
The programme was holding a fans’ weekend in Worcestershire, the county in which it is set, and being an Archers’ nut David was there faster than one of Joe Grundy’s ferrets up a drainpipe. For him it was an adrenalin rush equalled only by performing with Kempsey Morris Men.
David has long retired and decamped to Somerset but he was the ideal man to contact when we received news a new book about The Archers has just been published.
Even more so because Underneath the Archers (Wilton Square Book £12.99) is authored by Graham Harvey, one of the show’s longest-running scriptwriters, who also lives in the West Country.
Over 34 years Graham has written more than 600 episodes, making this a meeting of kindred spirits. Sadly, not in the back bar of The Bull but on the phone.
When The Archers first hit the airwaves in January 1951 Worcestershire’s small, tenanted mixed farms were bread and butter for the programme’s creator Godfrey Baseley and the region has continued to provide crucial research for Graham as both scriptwriter and agricultural story editor.
Perhaps most memorable for him, and eventually for listeners, was in 2015 when he was asked to provide a storyline which resulted in the Great Flood of Ambridge. Not only did he need to depict the full force that such devastation brings but also the human stories that ebb and flow in its wake.
“The Ambridge flooding story was an event which was also meant to show how a community could come together,” Graham told David.
So he turned to farming communities near Upton and heard how lives and livelihoods had been overturned by the severity of the unprecedented floods of 2007 and 2011.
At Ryalls Court Farm, Graham found farmer Oliver Surman who went to desperate measures in order to save his cattle and prevent his milking parlour from being submerged. There was a narrow drain which needed to be blocked to prevent water from flooding the building and he had to lower a slim enough farmworker down a manhole to reach it.
Said Graham: “The farmworker was upside down and the farmer had to hang onto him by his legs. The drain was successfully blocked with a football.”
This incredible story proved invaluable background to the drama of the script that he eventually produced and had listeners on the edges of their seats.
Graham also had a hand in the death, in 1994, of John Archer, played by the Worcester-born actor Sam Barriscale. “It was my storyline,” said Graham.
Many stories in The Archers are slow-burning and John’s death, when the old Fergie tractor he was driving overturned, continues to have reverberations in the programme today.
Other plots which have called for Graham’s agricultural expertise include Tom Archer’s involvement of his uncle Brian Aldridge’s genetically-modified crop of oil seed rape and the Grundy’s bankruptcy and subsequent eviction from their tenanted Grange Farm.
“For the GM story I did a lot of research with both the Criminal Prosecution Service and a high-powered firm of lawyers,” said Graham. “And I used the exact details of a case that had gone through the courts, although it was not my decision whether Tom was proved guilty or not on a charge of criminal damage. That had been decided from the start!”
It was also Graham’s storyline that had Joe Grundy famously and shockingly bludgeoning two beloved ferrets to death after the family had lost their farm and been forced to live in a council flat where animals were not permitted.
Graham said he is equally proud of writing about the small, everyday events in Ambridge. “Just simple scenes like haymaking, harvesting, in the milking parlour or people out in the fields having a picnic, moments of communing with nature. I like to think that I have conjured up an audio picture that will endure.”
Graham’s long writing association with The Archers did not always align with his personal views about British farming but he recognised the need to show balance within the programme.
Although he may be the person responsible for Adam Macy continually banging on about herbal leys, Graham doesn’t necessarily agree with the system and it’s the same with Kirsty Miller and Rex Fairbrother’s rewilding scheme on the acres they rent from Borchester Land.
“Personally,” he said, “I think farmers themselves should rewild their own land as part of a sustainable need to run a regenerative form of agriculture. It was very important to me, and still is, that the public understands the changing world of small, mixed farming. I would like to be remembered, not for any one particular storyline but for helping with the change and showing British people how to make that change for the best.”
The Archers has a diverse cast of characters. Graham said he aligned himself most with the members of the Grundy family, largely because, despite their wily, quick-to-make-a buck philosophy, “they were good farmers who had survived so long, running their small, mixed farm in a basically traditional way.”
Graham loved writing scenes which involved their roguish ways.
“Joe, Eddie and Clarrie were brought in as the comic element after Walter Gabriel died and I admired them more than any of the Archers. I could imagine myself sat at the table in their chaotic kitchen, along with the ferrets and maybe a pig squeaking in the corner. Those scenes wrote themselves.”
Although his Archers’ scriptwriting days may be over, Graham continues to keep astride of developments, both in the farming industry and in Ambridge. Every evening, just after 7pm, like millions of other listeners, he addictively tunes into Radio Four waiting for the familiar strains of its theme tune Barwick Green.
It was Graham’s invention of a feisty teenage tearaway Elizabeth Archer that first brought him into the sphere of Archers’ scriptwriting.
“Much later, I was also responsible for killing off, in a car crash, Shula Archer’s first husband, Mark Hebden,” he said.
So if you want the backstory to this everyday story of country folk, settle down with Underneath the Archers and float gently off to Ambridge which is actually Inkberrow or is it Hanbury or even Cutnall Green?
