Barn weddings are off... it's Ambridge in the time of coronavirus: LIBBY PURVES reviews the new-style broadcast of The Archers

• Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19

THE ARCHERS

Radio 4, 7pm

Rating:

'I’m just an ordinary farmer, with a million and one things to worry about... silaging gone belly-up, a son who’s a complete mystery to me and a supper I will have to tackle with a road drill. But there are still birds singing…’

Dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum!

And so, last night ended the most unusual episode in the world’s longest running soap opera, The Archers on Radio 4. David Archer, heading home from Lakey Hill for Ruth’s appalling lasagne, was actually actor Timothy Bentinck crouched under his stairs at home with a microphone.

Both character and actor are solitary: something we and the cast will have to get used to as Covid-19 has brought to an end – for now – 70 years of comradely studio recordings. 

To be fair, this oddly melancholy episode was a two-hander: holed up in some other padded corner was Angus Imrie as David’s son Josh, moaning that his parents don’t appreciate him.

It was not riveting drama, but it neatly established that Ambridge is, at last, catching up with Covid-19. 

After a three-week hiatus (classic episodes from the past were broadcast instead), the country folk are back and suffering like the rest of us. 

Barn weddings are cancelled, the family in lockdown at Brookfield are getting on one another’s nerves, but the village shop is coping.

The weather is hot and dry (nice topicality) so a broken forage-harvester threatens silage time. 

But in the hearty wartime spirit beloved of Archers fans, David refuses to be downcast: ‘Can’t change things… foot and mouth didn’t beat us...’ It felt very odd, and will continue so.

When Jeremy Howe took over as Archers editor on Radio 4 two years ago after decades as a big-hitter in TV and radio drama, he may have expected a quiet life: a guaranteed slot, regular characters and five million addicted listeners who enjoy cosy fete-and-farmyard stuff but can be prodded by an occasional gritty plot like the infamous ‘Rob ’n’ Helen’ coercive-control story.

Mr Howe certainly can’t have expected to hit a pandemic, scrap 12 scripts and five weeks of storylines, and cancel two of six weekly episodes.

Nor did the actors expect to be doing soliloquies in bedrooms soundproofed with duvets.

Bentinck is under the stairs, Susie Riddell as Tracy Horrobin has made herself a green studio ‘live’ light out of a yoghurt pot, and Barry Farrimond’s Ed Grundy will be chronicling his inner life (who knew he had one?) from inside what looks like a wardrobe. Annabelle Dowler (Kirsty Miller) is actually in her daughter’s wardrobe with a mattress and two duvets.

There must have been heroic scriptwriting and wrenched imaginations to get these characters – who normally interact in short bursts in The Bull or farmyards – to speak their inner thoughts.

We’ll just have to imagine the snarling battle over who captains the village cricket team and the spats between the top female stirrers in the soap: fire-victim Lynda Snell, Lilian the superannuated vamp and Shula the wannabe vicar.

Not to mention the sex lives and ‘re-wilding’ obsessions of the mewling younger generation, who I always suspect are there not to attract a youth audience but to irritate loyal oldies like me.

We’ll see how it goes, and it’s braver than the EastEnders tactic of just stopping.

But some of us feel thwarted. With Howe’s arrival the plot took on an interesting twist: not commonplace soap-operatic domestic or medical issues but the hidden outrage of rural modern slavery.

Some farming and building trades have been exposed in recent years for dominating and exploiting homeless men. 

So the Ambridge builder Philip, engaged to poor innocent Kirsty, was revealed in intermittent chilling moments as terrorising one of his half-starved employees or ‘horses’, into lying to the police about an explosion in the kitchen at Grey Gables Country House Hotel.

We’re agog to see which, if any, other characters will ever work out what’s going on. Probably, I suspect, not the amiable but rather dim cop, Harrison.

But now, dammit, that story’s on the back-burner until the cast are allowed to be in the same room. Those soliloquies had better be good.