I’m very careful not to betray my true levels of excitement when I speak to The Archers actor Susie Riddell, before a nationwide theatre tour to mark the rural radio drama’s 75th anniversary. I may be an Ambridge superfan but I still don’t want to scare the horses (nor indeed the cows, pigs or sheep). Riddell’s character Tracy Horrobin (who will be appearing with husband, Jazzer, local lush Lilian and cravat-wearing criminal Brian) is not one to hold back however: “It’s like a dream come true for me too!” she confides, slipping easily into broad Borsetshire. “I never thought I’d see the day that I was interviewed by the Guardian. I’ve seen it in the Bull!”
The Bull, for the uninitiated, is a half-timbered pub on the village green offering ale, artisanal food and, it seems, copies of the Guardian. It’s a thrilling thought: I briefly entertain the idea of rock star turned vegan baker turned wedding caterer turned pub chef Fallon sitting in the snug, poring over my pie recipes in the Guardian. But it’s stretching credibility to believe an old-fashioned village boozer would find room for any reading material more substantial than Farmers Weekly. Riddell concedes the point. “Maybe Helen left it behind?”
Helen’s mother, Pat, certainly takes the paper. Indeed, this was the centre of an early 80s storyline, when she put her foot down and made her husband, Tony, switch his allegiance from the Mirror. The Horrobins, meanwhile, long the bad apples in the rustic basketweave of Ambridge life, definitely buy the Borchester Echo, “because Bert likes to look at the racing”. But when it comes to her own character, a mother of two responsible for an elderly parent and several part-time jobs, Riddell says: “I don’t think she’s got time to read the flippin’ paper.”
That “flipping” is very Tracy – a woman, one senses, who is more constrained than most by the BBC’s rules on language. Riddell has happy memories of shouting obscenities from just off-mic during a cricket-season storyline on abusive language, and being told: “You can’t say that on Radio 4!”
It’s funny, we muse, how little details such as choice of newspaper help to round out a character. “Like someone’s favourite food,” she says. “It’s a shorthand way of placing them.” And when I ask her fellow pint-puller Sunny Ormonde, who plays the “gin-swigging, smoking, man-hunting” (her words not mine) Lilian Bellamy, about the secret of the show’s enduring success, she hardly hesitates: “It’s the characters. The Archers is very, very much character-led. And I think the characters are brilliant.”
Yet radio is a peculiar beast. As Ormonde says, the fact that “we have to use our imagination so much, unlike television, where you’re spoon-fed everything”, encourages a feeling of ownership. Certainly Archers devotees tend to be protective of these fictional figures whom, in many cases, they’ve known for longer than the scriptwriters or other actors have.
Tim Bentinck, who has played farmer David Archer since 1982 (and will be appearing on stage along with David’s son, Ben, village busybody Susan and pregnant beaver-botherer Kirsty), recalls the outrage when David’s wife, Ruth, embarked on an affair with Sam the cowman: “A lot of listeners said that’s completely out of character, which was very valid. But I mean, people do behave out of character and I like that. Otherwise, if you always know what’s going to happen, that’s a bit dull.”
He recounts a story about sitting next to a woman at a dinner party who was “a bit tiddly on wine” and had no idea who he was. She started “sounding forth about The Archers”. All of which brings him to the point: “If there are 5 million listeners, then there are 5 million David Archers – and not one of them looks like me!”
So there is an inevitable risk of disappointment: Riddell says even she pictures Tracy differently. Still, they’re all excited by the prospect of performing a specially written episode, set at Ambridge’s annual flower and produce show, in front of a live audience. “I’m so looking forward to it!” Ormonde says. “All I’ve got to do is walk on stage, say ‘Hello darling’, do the laugh, and that’ll be it! I think it could get quite hysterical!”
Although they are all stage actors by training, I do wonder if the addition of the visual dimension is a little nerve-racking. “What are we going to look like?” wonders Bentinck. “Are we going to try to look cool? Or are we going to do Barbours and tweeds and all that? I don’t know.”
While they don’t usually have to think about things such as costumes, Bentinck assures me that in other respects, recording in a studio for radio isn’t so different to being live on stage: “If you saw the contortions we put ourselves into – it’s not just speaking into a microphone.”
If you’re chopping a carrot, Riddell explains, “you have to make all the movements, all the physical effort noises of what you’re doing.” (This is to tie in with the sound effects provided by Archers audio engineer Vanessa Nuttall.) It’s “a weird sort of dance” that should be “quite interesting for the audience to see, and a bit odd”. Riddell laughingly admits to some concerns, chiefly the fact that when she plays Tracy, “I’m an absolute gurner! I’m slightly worried about people going, ‘What is she doing with her face?’ But I’m just going have to gurn, otherwise Tracy’s voice isn’t going to come out right!”
Acting in a radio drama, they all say, can require as much imagination as listening to one. Bentinck compares it to being a mime artist: “As long as you can imagine you are there, the listener will believe that.” Riddell agrees: “I do believe in Ambridge. I know that’s weird, but it is a place that exists for me. And even though, when I listen to it, I know I was standing in front of a microphone with a script, and Ness doing sound effects behind me, in my head is the Bull, or the living room at No 6, The Green. Just like every other listener, I’m there.”
Riddell relishes the idea of being “in a room full of people who love the show as much as me – we could talk about it for hours!” But there will also be a Bull pub quiz, not to mention the unknown quantity of a nightly Q&A to prepare for. With storylines stretching back three-quarters of a century, few actors can hope to know as much about Ambridge as the show’s older listeners, or indeed younger obsessives like me.
When I politely enquire after Tracy’s silent brother Stewart – who, according to the 1994 Book of the Archers, wears a smart leather jacket he is “rumoured to have stolen from Birmingham” – Riddell pleads ignorance of his very existence: “I need to look into that. That’s one of the questions somebody in the audience might ask.” We decide she should check with Ryan Kelly, who plays Jazzer, because “his Archers knowledge is amazing” – no doubt helped by the fact that, as a blind actor, he learns his lines by heart rather than reading them when they record.
Similarly, Bentinck looks momentarily startled when I remind him, after he reveals his suspicion that David “may not be the brightest of sparks”, that the scion to the Brookfield acres failed his maths A-level twice. But I’m not the only Archers fan willing to be brutally honest: a listener once approached him following a talk they had both attended taking a Marxist view of the Roman empire (not a topic one often hears discussed in the Bull) and told him how funny it had been to hear him asking questions – “because you sounded so intelligent!” He laughs uproariously.
I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he finds it easier to distinguish between himself and David than I do, although he bristles slightly when I ask him why he’s so grumpy. Riddell once overheard someone criticising Tracy. “I was quite offended,” she says, “because it’s like someone telling me I’m awful.” She snorts with mirth. “Maybe I should separate myself a bit more from the character.”
In truth, though, they’re all touchingly fond of their alter egos. Ormonde “adores Lily Billy as I call her”, and Bentinck is so wedded to the idea of David’s upstanding moral character that he refuses to even consider who else in the village he’d like to be married to if not Ruth, despite my solemn promise that his wife will never know. After all, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that she’s not one of the show’s Guardian readers.