Underneath The Archers

            The sad death of Jennifer Aldridge has been, for me, like losing an old and dear friend. I first got to know her back in the 1960s when, with my agricultural student mates, I started following life in Ambridge. The big story at the time was Jennifer and her baby; the single-mum with her short skirts and lipstick, determined to give Baby Adam the best possible start in life.

       …

With his mad enthusiasms and unquenchable optimism, Freddy Pargetter sounds ever more like dad, the much missed Nigel. In his youthful days Nigel spent a lot of his time running around in a gorilla suit. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to hear that Freddy had dug it out from some forgotten Lower Loxley drawer and was now sporting it himself.

Nigel played a big part in my early Ambridge life. At…

With the relentless demands of modern life, many of us dream of a finding a secret hideaway somewhere, a place where we can escape to and be ourselves for a while. For some residents of Ambridge there’s already such a place – Eddie Grundy’s Cider Shed.

No one outside the village can say for sure what it looks like. What we do know is that inside there are couple of old sofas, a bottled gas cooker…

In trying to come up with storylines for the teenage Pip Archer, a character I didn’t know particularly well, I found inspiration in the story of a woman who’d taken up farming more than 70 years earlier.

Young Elizabeth Henderson served with the Women’s Land Army in the final year of World War Two. On her birthday her mother gave her what had become a surprise best-seller of…

            Huge thanks to Stephen Fry for his great endorsement of my book, Underneath The Archers. Here’s what he wrote about it:

            ‘Any fan of The Archers will down this book in grateful glugs, like Eddie Grundy necking cider. As hilarious, charming, eccentric, informative, addictive and delightful as the show itself. But there’s a truly fascinating social and agricultural history…

This country church, high on a hill-top in Worcestershire, England, has had a long connection with The Archers. Back in 1951 the carol service in the show’s fictional St Stephen’s Church was recorded here. Then at Easter, 1955, an even bigger event took place – the wedding of young Philip Archer and Grace Fairbrother. It was a marriage destined to end in tragedy. Grace was killed trying to rescue…

            Delighted to hear Natasha and Tom are expecting twins. It’s 25 years now since Tom’s brother John was killed in a tragic tractor accident on the farm. It happened on Tom’s seventeenth birthday and to this day he’s been carrying a fair bit of mental baggage from that terrible event.

            Nothing’s going to take away the pain of that memory obviously. It’s the same for all the…

Back in the 1980s I got the chance to write a week's trial episodes for the radio soap that had enthralled me since student days. I didn't think there was much chance it would lead to a permanent job but I was determined to give it a go.

            My storyline for the week included the first appearance of a young teenage girl who was destined to become one of the show's leading characters. Somehow…

If I were Controller of Radio 4 right now I'd be very worried by the success of Clarkson's Farm over on Amazon Prime. For all his trade-mark buffoonery, the ageing boy racer shows us the reality of farming today. We share the setbacks, the frustrations, the triumphs and the delights of life on the land. And we get to meet a cast of country characters who are engaging and interesting, all with their…

            Just lately there's been a lot of media clamour about the Amazon Prime series Clarkson's Farm. The former Top Gear presenter has brought his unique, anarchic style to the running of a farm – his own, as it happens. He plays the rich but clueless landowner whose basic mistakes provide endless laughs for the cast of country characters he surrounds himself with. They include Kaleb, the farm…

Funny the places environmental writing can take you. For me it started with a series of whistle-blowing articles on the destructive impact of industrial farming, with its habit of ripping out hedges and flattening woodlands. These I exposed fortnightly in my column for the satirical magazine Private Eye. That was nearly 40 years ago. Today I'm working on a TikTok drama about a new generation of young…

I've been visiting a farm with so much wildlife you could easily imagine it to be a nature reserve. How's this for starters – 137 bird species, 40 butterfly species, 740 moth species. All officially recorded by expert naturalists. Amazing.

            But it isn't a reserve or even some new location for rewilding. It's a working commercial farm whose owner has as much need of…