In her entertaining Guardian column, ‘A month in Ambridge’, Charlotte Higgins recalls an amusing scene in the Grundys’ turkey shed. Eddie and his grandson ‘Dodgy George’ are watching the seemingly mad antics of the birds. ‘I could watch them for hours,’ muses Eddie, even as George talks about giving them their own TikTok account.

            For writer Charlotte this scene is a metaphor for The Archers itself. If the gobbling, squabbling turkeys, with their minor and futile dramas, are like the inhabitants of Ambridge, then Eddie and George stand in for us, the listeners. While mildly amused, we are, at the same time, detached and essential heartless.

            ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ and all that, writes Charlotte.

            It’s an engaging idea which, for a fleeting moment, had me smiling. Yes, there are definitely times when meaningless Ambridge stories seem to crowd in like gulls following the plough. And then you get a gut-wrenching storyline – like Alice’s brave battle with alcoholism – that seems so urgent and important that the others fade into insignificance.

            Long ago an Archers editor called William Smethurst gave me my first script-writing job on the programme. He was fond of telling writers that they were simply the latest manifestation in the long tradition of story-telling. In olden times we’d have been sitting in the chimney-corners of smoky ale-houses telling tales from around the parish. Today we’re doing much the same, only now there’s a microphone in the room.

            I love that idea – telling the tales that help to hold communities together. I started listening to the programme as an agriculture student in North Wales in the 1960s. Up to a dozen of us would gather in the common room of our hall of residence at six forty-five each evening. Whatever else might be happening, we’d find time to listen and laugh and speculate where the storyline might be heading.

            Those friendships made around the radio were as strong as any I made in my student years. And the village community we imagined proved as vivid and enduring as the real-life villages I’ve lived in.

            Those stories we’ve shared over the airwaves have been daft at times without doubt, but truly no more so than some of the goings on I’ve seen in real village communities. I guess there’s something of the Grundy turkeys in all of us, in Ambridge as elsewhere. But as we’ve seen in Alice’s story, there’s something of the hero in many of us too.

            Some of the stories we shared during my thirty-plus years in Ambridge are retold in my new, crowd-funded book Underneath The Archers. Some of you who’ve already made pledges to support the book’s publication will, I know, be wondering when you’re going to see it. I can only ask you to please be patient for a little longer. As you’ll see we’re still a good way short of our target. However, I’m happy to give this undertaking – the book will be published next summer. So please stay with me.

            If you’re still thinking about the book and whether you’ll make a pledge, please allow me to quote again from Stephen Fry’s comment on the book. He says it’s ‘as hilarious, charming, eccentric, informative, addictive and delightful as the show itself.’

And he adds: ‘There’s a truly fascinating social and agricultural history behind Graham Harvey’s masterly story-telling too. The changes that have come to Ambridge are changes that have transformed our world. It turns out that this little village makes a wonderful lens through which to look at the whole story of Britain’.

            The book’s about Ambridge and its characters of course. But it’s also about our homeland, our countryside and who we are as a people. If these things matter to you, please give me your support. Thank you.