The Archers is the world’s longest running drama, with almost 20,000 episodes and was first broadcast on 1st January 1951.

It’s also something I remember from my childhood – in a slightly strange way though. I remember in my formative years thinking that The Archers was simply the ‘Barwick Green’ maypole dance that is used as the theme tune for the show. I used to be really excited to hear it whenever my mum would turn the radio on at 7pm, 5 days a week. For some reason I thought that the radio drama that followed was something completely different and was of no interest to me at all.

I decided to revisit this artefact of my childhood for this unit, and this time actually pay attention to the story and the techniques used that differentiate from television, a format that I am much more familiar with. I decided to examine this particular broadcast from the 31st of January 2022:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013zj8

At first I found it hard to adjust, as I haven’t actually listened to a radio drama for quite some time. The first and most obvious difference I noticed was that the characters always refer to each other by their names, often multiple times within a scene. This is obviously because listeners aren’t going to be able to see who the characters are, and a lot of them have similar voices. Also, listeners may be drifting in and out of the story as the radio could be on in the background so it’s important to reiterate who is in which scene.

I actually found that compared to what I was expecting, there were relatively few sound effects in this episode. This might have been because of the laid back, rural nature of the programme as there were only really a couple of soundscapes that were quite low in the mix, and there was one instance of a telephone eq being used. Other than that, the use of sound effects was fairly sparse. I think for my next post I will try to find something a little more engaging.