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Up to £1,000 a ticket – make sure you buy an Archers tea towel

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Staged show: (from left) cast Ben Norris, Tim Bentinck, Charlotte Martin and Annabelle Dowler  went through their Archers’ schtick at Wimbledon this week

A stage homage to the world’s longest-running soap opera was a nostalgia trip for hundreds of people this week, and another reminder of where Croydon is missing out. By STEVEN DOWNES, who survived the experience without buying any ‘merch’

Week’s wages: the Archers tea towl

There are families, apparently, which define as “Tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-ti CLICK” families.

These are families so averse to The Archers that they turn off their radiogram the moment that Barwick Green crackles out over the airwaves.

There were at least two members from such families on stage for The Archers Live at 75! in Wimbledon this week. And they are both long-standing cast members of the long-running radio show. Both appear to have been won over to a show that they could not stand, after decades of steady work from the producers of the world’s longest lasting soap opera.

The Archers Live at 75 is, if the Wimbledon show is anything to judge by, a massive love-in of devotees to the (now) six-times-a-week 15-minute blast of rural melodrama (plus the omnibus on Sundays, of course). The New Wimbledon Theatre was packed with adoring fans, the latest sell-out show in a six-month national tour, where audiences get to see some of their faves in the flesh.

It was a different world in 1951, the year that The Archers started.

The Festival of Britain was offering post-war optimism on the South Bank, Sir Winston Churchill returned as Prime Minister, and the nation’s military was entangled in a foreign war in the Far East (Korea, to save you Googling). There was still some rationing, but you could buy a loaf of bread for less than 3p in today’s money and get a pint of beer for one shilling and thruppence – about 6p in that there modern decimalised currency.

Radio show: Annabelle Dowler (right) and Charlotte Martin reprise their Archers roles on stage

Of course, across more than 21,000 episodes, The Archers is much changed.

Among the audience at Wimbledon, which included family and friends of the cast, at least one current cast member, and an agent or two, there was an overwhelming sense of nostalgia not only for the programme, but for the idealised rural life it somehow still represents.

“An everyday story of country folk” is now promoted by BBC Radio as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”. Contemporary. Oooo. That’s probably what passes for “edgy” at the BBC.

They must mean like having aircraft crashing on Emmerdale, or Ian Beale’s 48th marriage in ‘Enders. 

Archers fans are, always, devoted. Devoted enough to cough up 20 quid for a commemorative tea towel: £20 was an average week’s wages in 1951. Some, according to the production company behind the show, are even prepared to shell out £1,000 for a ticket.

“I bloody love The Archers,” said Angela Barnes, the stand-up comedian and compere for the evening, in between one of her plugs for the tea towels.

“It’s not glamorous. Or sexy. But that’s why we love it with all our hearts. It’s the ordinariness.”

Hard sell: the audience was not allowed to use their cameras, apart from when they were

It was the ordinariness of what was to follow, however, which may have just failed to win over those who might not have been fully paid-up members of The Archers fan club.

Barnes’ opening, a 15-minute stand-up set complete with sound effects and audio clips, was witty, funny and enjoyable. It was downhill (from Lakey Hill, probably) from there.

What followed was four Archers actors (including the two self-confessed Tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-ti CLICKers), surrounded by straw bales and a set of Ambridge harvest show displays on trestle tables: the now veteran cast member Tim Bentinck (who plays the ever-youthful-sounding and always reasonable David Archer), Annabelle Dowler (the forever put-upon Kirsty Miller), Charlotte Martin (the Sub Post Office manager Susan Carter) and Ben Norris (David Archer’s son, Ben).

In the ensuing chat, we discovered that the actors don’t get paid any retainers, so don’t get paid when they don’t have a part in an episode. Which might explain why Martin continued to work for many years as a research psychologist on projects related to teenagers’ mental health. In the fantasy world of The Archers, Susan Carter has had the immense good fortune of never being affected by the Horizon IT Post Office scandal. So much for “contemporary” drama.

They’ve been performing these tribute shows since June. So the stage show is better rehearsed than any broadcast episode of the radio series. And it showed. In all the cosy bonhomie, the cast knew only too well the “spontaneous” anecdotes long before they ever reached their “hilarious” conclusions. Oh, how we laughed.

The audience’s devotees didn’t mind, of course.

Sound affects: Vanessa Nuttall got some of the biggest laughs of the show

It is telling that probably the highlight of the first half was the appearance of Vanessa Nuttall, The Archers’ live sound-effects specialist, who demonstrated in front of 1,600 strangers the tricks she can work with a tube of lube, and how an old ironing board can pass for a squeaky farm gate closing.

Eventually, we got to something resembling the radio show, when the actors paired up and performed a couple of double-handers as they might do in the broadcast studio, all accompanied with Nuttall’s enthusiastic sound effects. Where the dog’s barks came from, I was at a loss to see.

There was something very contradictory, and very modern, after having a big screen at the back of the stage showing a QR code to order on our phones “the merch” – the tea towels and a programme, a snip at 15 quid – only then to have an usherette walk around the stalls holding up a sign telling us not to use our phones or cameras.

Barnes put all that right when she encouraged the audience to use their phones and another QR code, this time for a bit of very modern interaction. How long have you been listening to The Archers?

The instant poll results were not a surprise: two-thirds of those in the audience had been listening for 20 years or more. Barnes even discovered that there was someone in the audience who started listening in 1951.

There was more to come, such as an interactive pub quiz straight out of The Bull and a sing-along to Arthur Wood’s famous theme tune, which summons a Maypole dance on a village green somewhere in Borsetshire. There were no “CLICKS” at the end of that rendition.

There is, of course, no chance for Archers devotees to see the live show at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls.

The evening excursion, by tram, of course, to Wimbledon just underlined what Croydon is losing out on while the programme at the council-owned venue continues to be below par. Our route from tram stop to theatre was a bustling high street, with bustling bars and restaurants. No litter strewn across the pavements. No hoardings or closing-down sales. No private security guards menacing anyone who dared to loiter. Wimbledon’s got something right that Croydon is missing.

The nostalgia trip had begun before we even reached the theatre. Maybe the appeal of The Archers is not so hard to understand after all.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

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