The new Archers Miscellany, by Jo Toye
The delight is in the details
Archers writer Jo Toye explains how her passion for the programme led her to write the first ever ‘Miscellany’ of the show
‘You’re writing what?’
I couldn’t understand why people were so surprised that there was a book to be written based entirely on the archives of The Archers – to me it wasn’t just an interesting idea, but an obvious one: a ‘Miscellany’ of what had been established about Ambridge and its inhabitants over nearly 60 years. When I started work on the production team in 1980, The Archers continuity system was typed and handwritten on thousands of index cards (20,000, in fact). They were kept in a set of miniature wooden filing drawers with domed brass handles, labelled with such things as : ‘Characters living: A ’ (there were a lot of As, obviously) or, more ominously, ‘Dead and Gone’.
The cards had been the idea of the programme’s first production assistant back in 1951. In those days there were only two writers – not much room for confusion, you’d think. But guess what ? Writers, though following agreed storylines, have a nasty habit of making things up.
Writer One had patriarch Dan Archer announce that his favourite meal was steak and kidney pie; Writer Two had him favouring chicken and leek. The only solution was to record not just major events – a plane crashing into Dan’s barley or Phil’s romance with Grace – but also the fact that Dan smoked a pipe, was vice-president of the cricket club and always wore a nightshirt, never pyjamas. I goggled at all this information. I’d come to The Archers late: it wasn’t a listening habit in my childhood, partly because we’d lived abroad. I first heard the programme at university, when I shared a house with people who’d grown up on it and who, away from parents and the dreaded conformity they represented, now found it a sort of comfort blanket.
At first I had little sense of the significance of the first script I worked on in studio – the death of Doris, mother of Phil, mother-in-law of Peggy and ‘Gran’ to the rising generation of Shula, David, and Elizabeth (Kenton was away at sea and rarely heard). But I soon realised. A distraught listener phoned to ask where to send the wreath and when a DJ from a mid-Western radio station (the news had spread across the Atlantic), started ringing up for a daily update on Ambridge events, such as the fallout over the pickled walnuts in that year’s Flower and Produce Show. (These bizarre conversations continued for more than a month, until the day John Lennon was shot, on December 8, 1980. Unaccountably, that was deemed a more pressing story.)
After four years, by now steeped in The Archers, I wrote a trial script anonymously and put it on the editor’s desk. When a writer left the following spring, I joined the writing team and soon had the joy of adding to the archive myself. Nigel was up to high jinks in his gorilla suit, as Mr Snowy the ice-cream vendor and as a swimming-pool salesman; Eddie released a country and western record, got involved in a shampoo-bottling scam with Nelson Gabriel and was sick in the Bull’s piano. And I got a royal commission when, hearing that the Duke of Westminster was to appear as himself at a Grey Gables charity fashion show, Princess Margaret wanted in on the fun, too.
Over the years I’ve been writing, the storylines have dealt with every possible human drama – love, death, betrayal, jealousy, births, deaths and marriages of course, but also rape and its aftermath, racism, drug use, abortion and criminal justice. The tensions of family life under stress from illness, young children, elderly parents, too much or too little work and lack of money, opportunity or housing have to be interwoven with cows with bloat, Brookfield’s new pasture system, and the boardroom machinations at Borchester Land. Meanwhile the fete, Flower and Produce Show, Harvest Supper and the Christmas production all have to be set up, run up to and have a new twist added – all in individual episodes lasting just 12 ½ minutes, containing two or three main stories and multiple ‘mentions’, and using on average 5 or 6 scenes and 6 or 7 characters.
In 1994, I wrote the first of five Archers novelisations, including a trilogy retelling the main storylines from 1951-2000 for the programme’s 50th anniversary. In 2001, I co-wrote The Archers Encyclopaedia. As we edited and compressed a vast amount of information to fit the word count, the value of the archive impressed itself on me again.
What grieved me was the neglect of this potential Tutankhamun’s tomb of information. Some of its treasures do, it’s true, make it on air – everything from the reason for Shula and Usha’s latent mutual resentment, to Lynda’s previous battles over footpaths. But thousands more little gems are buried away: unless I excavated them they might simply be forgotten.
Perhaps you could have lived without knowing that Bert and Freda Fry bought their Ewbank carpet sweeper together when Argos first opened in Felpersham, but as the Howard Carter of The Archers, I feel I have a duty to bring it to your attention. Want to know the design of the floral carpet that graced St Stephen’s one year? It’s in the book, complete with a sort of ‘paint-by-numbers’ illustration of the red cow of St Modwena. Interested in the varieties of soup served at Brookfield harvest picnics? See Page 111.
Digging through the archive presented joys and sorrows. The joy of finding, in full, Marjorie Antrobus’s recipe for Yemenite pickle and the fact that there were so many recorded mentions of Nigel’s jackets that they merited an entry of their own had to be set against the frustration of the ‘lost years’ of the fete and Flower and Produce Show and the detective work needed to fill in the gaps. More recent years – the archive only started to be computerised in 1994 – presented a different challenge. I risked being buried in – or possibly, if I printed it off, by – the sheer volume of information that could now be stored.
What charmed me above all, though, was the care with which it had all been crafted, and it made me realise why, quite apart from the challenges it sets the writer, I love the programme so. Way back in time, a scriptwriter had once written, for whatever reason – perhaps it was a salient plot point, or it demonstrated a deep-seated character trait, or perhaps it was just an expression of a personal aversion – that Phil had refused a meringue. Not just that, but someone else had bothered to write it down. This kind of attention to detail is what has made The Archers a complete, authentic and believable world – and has to be part of the reason for its success.
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