It’s becoming clear that the travails afflicting all the major players in The Archers, Radio 4’s flagship drama, are intended by the soap’s writers (and new editor Jeremy Howe) to reflect what’s going on in the country at large, Ambridge as a microcosm of our imploding nation. As Home Farm is sold to absentee landlords with no interest in farming the land, reducing Brian and Jennifer to a terraced cottage on the green, and Ambridge’s stately home Lower Loxley Hall veers into chaos with the son and heir in jail and the business on the brink of disaster, even Brookfield, the Archers’ homestead, is standing on the edge of a financial precipice. It’s as if all the solid foundations of the soap are being rocked to the core —and it’s really unsettling.
This attempt to bring topicality back to Ambridge has been far too effective. The B-word has been barely mentioned but there’s no need. The atmosphere of outrage and discontent, the topsy-turvy sequence of events, the destabilisation of tropes that were once fixed in stone; all this exactly mirrors the preceding news bulletins. That’s why Mark Steel’s In Town on Radio 4 (produced by Carl Cooper) is like a blast of restorative air. He’s been touring the country since 2009 pointing out the quirks of each place he calls on in a half-hour show that has the local audiences in stitches even though he spends most of those 30 minutes poking fun at what they hold most dear.
Last week he was in King’s Lynn, where Steel made mincemeat of the 66 per cent of voters who opted to leave the EU. ‘Just imagine anyone round here being against immigration,’ he jeered, after disclosing that many of the first settlers of the town would have had Scandinavian names.
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