The Archers

I have a confession to make. I've become a soap opera addict.

At least I can indulge my habit without plopping myself on the sofa for hours. I can catch up on the latest episode while running errands.

This addiction has its roots in a five-week business trip to London in February and March 1989. I was there on behalf of a long-defunct company called Burtek, to integrate a Flight Management System into a 737 Ground Maintenance Simulator, which ran on a PDP 11/70. The work was done at the British Airways maintenance training facility at Viscount House, on the southeast side of Heathrow Airport, near Hatton Cross station. After a long flight with little sleep, following a bomb scare at Atlanta, I arrived at Gatwick Airport with my luggage and a 10 MB removable disk pack the size of a large pizza (the DEC RL02), got in my Vauxhall rental from Avis and drove an hour on the "wrong" side of the M25 to my hotel, the Berkeley Arms in Cranford near Heathrow.

The hotel room had two skinny twin beds, tea-making facilities (hot water kettle, cups, saucers, teabags, and packaged chocolate chip "biscuits"), and a radio system with speakers in the bedroom and bathroom. You could push a button to select between BBC Radio 1 (pop music), Radio 4 (news and spoken word programming), and Capital Radio (local commercial radio).

I tended to listen to Radio 4 in the car. It was an interesting mix: This Day in Parliament, the Daily Service (a short worship service live from All Souls Church, Langham Place, next door to the BBC's Broadcasting House), dramatizations of classic literature (Tolstoy and Trollope's), new dramas, international rugby matches, Alistair Cooke's Letter from America, panel quiz shows (long-running programs like "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" and "Just a Minute," in which a group of entertainers compete for laughs as much as points), and, late at night, the Shipping Forecast.

I worked every weekday evening from 2 pm to 10 pm. The schedule allowed me mornings to explore London, weekends to travel out of town. Often I would be in the car on the way to work when I'd hear a jaunty folk tune announcing the beginning the afternoon rebroadcast of a daily BBC serial called The Archers.

The Archers has been running on a daily basis since 1951, over 18,500 episodes as of this writing. One of the original actors, Norman Painting, played lead character Phil Archer from the series start until his death in 2009. Patricia Greene, who plays Phil's widow Jill, joined the series in 1957 and is still a cast regular 61 years later, holding the record for longest serving actor in a soap opera.

Set in the fictional village of Ambridge in the fictional West Midlands county of Borsetshire, the program was created jointly by the BBC and the government's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food as a stealthy way to educate farmers about modern farming practices. In the mid-'70s the program was modernized, and story lines were shifted to modern social issues, with the odd bit of farming advice still included. A 1960 spoof on Beyond Our Ken, imagining The Archers refashioned as an American-style police procedural, (think Dragnet), turned out to be somewhat prophetic.

There are six 12.5 minute episodes each week, and a 75-minute omnibus edition, concatenating all six episodes, goes out on Sundays. Each episode weaves together three or four ongoing story lines, with scenes separated by a couple of seconds of silence.

When I first heard the program in 1989 (here's the Radio 4 schedule from a day during that period), I was amused to hear that one of the characters, the daughter of Phil and Jill Archer, was named Shula. The only Shula I knew was the coach of the Miami Dolphins. When I rediscovered the show earlier this year, Shula was the center of one of the main plot threads, about her decision to end her marriage to Alistair the veterinarian, apparently out of boredom, notwithstanding her professed strong Anglican faith. The view that "for better, for worse... as long as we both shall live" actually means something is represented, but mainly by Shula's elderly mother. The village vicar seems to believe that falling out of love and abandoning your marriage is like a no-fault car accident; it just happens, no one's to blame, and you just have to haul off the wrecked vehicle to the salvage yard and go buy a new one.

The social perspective is relentlessly progressive: Another current story line involves a homosexual couple trying to have a child by means of an immigrant surrogate mother. In 2012, the BBC hired the former producer of the TV soap Eastenders to serve as acting editor of the Archers; he promised to make the story lines "darker and bigger," leading to a fall in audience numbers and complaints about sexed-up plots.

I hadn't planned on getting hooked on The Archers again. I could have been keeping up with the show from abroad via the BBC iPlayer, which I use to listen to old comedy and history programs, but I hadn't.

Then on a sunny and windy Sunday morning this past February, as I was driving to the tiny Kent village of Lydd to attend church, I was listening to Radio 4 when the weekly omnibus edition came on. I only caught the first 15 minutes before it was time to park the car, but I had to find out what happened. I caught up with the previous month's worth of shows online and have been keeping up with it ever since, notwithstanding the fact that I don't like any of the characters and hate the fact nothing good ever seems to happen to anyone in Ambridge.

Since I started listening again, one young woman scratched her arm on a nail, then died a few days later of sepsis, leaving behind three children and a husband whose grieving, recriminations, and wishful thinking are driving everyone around him crazy. Poor William couldn't even catch a break when he was brought as an emergency substitute for the Ambridge cricket XI -- out for a duck. The unexpected death was ranked by one article as the second most cry-worthy moment in Archers history.

I'm not the only one who listens regularly in spite of the annoyance. Listeners complain about the latest episode in real time via the Twitter hashtag #TheArchers. There are podcasts DumTeeDum (named in honor of the theme tune) and Shambridge, and spoof Twitter accounts like @AmbridgeAnalytica. The Ambridge Observer runs spoof news articles inspired by the latest story lines.

One attempt at fan commiseration made news when the BBC shut down an Archers message board that was dominated by "silver surfers."

In the couple of months since I began listening again, I cannot recall a single moment of joy or levity. And yet I listen. Maybe it's the comforting familiarity of "Barwick Green," the jaunty maypole tune that opens and closes each episode. Maybe it's hope that Shula will going to get her comeuppance for telling everyone that the divorce was a mutual decision, when in fact she dumped poor, boring old Alistair. Maybe it's wondering if Brian Aldridge will succeed in keeping his culpability for the toxic waste dump at Low Mead secret from the environmental inspectors. Or maybe it's just a sense of wonder that the show is still on the air after 67 years, playing in your local "theater of the mind" and part of a diverse lineup of newly produced spoken-word programming and a massive archive unmatched by any broadcaster in the world.

MORE:

Radio 4 Extra, a digital and online radio service, runs deep tracks from the BBC archive, including weekly episodes of Hancock's Half Hour, The Goon Show, and I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again.

Tony Hancock did a send-up of the show in 1961, called The Bowmans, in his final TV series for the BBC (written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson). Hancock spoofs homespun herdsman Walter Gabriel, a fan favorite in the first three decades of the show, in an extended death scene involving a half-dozen distinct accents. (Set the playback speed to 0.75.) The still above is from the episode.

From John Fennimore's Souvenir Programme: How The Archers sounds to people who do not listen to The Archers.

Here's that theme tune: