BBC radio
soap opera, run continuously - once five and now six 15-minute episodes a week - since around 1950. Set in the village of
Ambridge, Borsetshire somewhere in the rural Midlands of England, where the eponymous
Archers are a farming family. Inexplicably popular amongst the urban
chattering classes.
The programme was introduced with the intention of using the fictional setting to provide valuable information to farmers, but rapidly picked up a popular audience. The series started out crudely sensational, moved off towards dull realism in the 1970s or so (no more than one fatal car crash per year, although that realism was tempered by only letting the characters drink half pints in the Bull Inn) but the pendulum has recently swung back the other way.
Like most British soaps, it now spends most of its energy Confronting Major Social Issues. The last year has finally seen the Grundy family - originally included in the series as the canonical comically incompetent farmers to provide examples of worst practice - go bankrupt, mirroring quite a lot of real UK rural life.
The fact that I want to go to bed now precludes a list of the entire cast for the last fifty years - someone else can have the XPs for that - but it should be noted that only two characters have survived from the earliest days - Phil Archer (played by one of the original scriptwriters), once the go-getting, progressive young farmer pushing his conservative father Dan into new ideas, now the boringly sensible elder statesman and JP , and Joe Grundy, doddering near-senile relic of the Grundy clan.