Listener Request: The British Countryside | With a Special Look at 'The Archers' [Episode 157]

Dec 5 2023 • 31 mins

This podcast episode has a whole 5 minutes on Bingley, the little town in the UK where I live. I then talk about the longest running soap opera in the world; The Archers, an everyday story of country folk. Broadcast since 1951, episodes are broadcast on BBC Radio Four every day, Sunday to Friday at seven p.m., and they're repeated the next day at two p.m. (except on Saturdays). Episodes are about 12 or 13 minutes, and you can listen for free on the app BBC Sounds. Having aired over 20,000 episodes, it is the world's longest-running present-day drama by number of episodes.

I read out sections from four books: Firstly, ‘The Archers: The Ambridge Chronicles’ by Joanna Toye and Karen Farrington, published by BBC books. Then I read from three books from my employer Emerald Publishing by the editors Cara Courage and Nicola Headlam, ‘Custard, Culverts, and Cake’, ‘Gender, Sex and Gossip in Ambridge: Women in the Archers’, and ‘Fandom Culture and the Archers: An Everyday Story of Academic Folk’. You can check out the blog for the three Academic Archers books: https://www.academicarchers.net/

The name of the village in Worcester said to have inspired the fictitious Ambridge is Cutnall Green.

I end with 5 minutes on a few other real-world places in the UK that might make the countryside a little more accessible: