The Archers is celebrating its 50th anniversary today. Its creator - and editor for the first 22 years was Godfrey Baseley, who launched it as a 'farming Dick Barton' to spread agricultural news and advice to Britain's post-war farmers.
The EDP's SIMON PROCTOR, who is married to Godfrey's grand, daughter, remembers the man whose radio creation has become the world's longest running drama serial.
It's the most famous signature tune in radio history. The dum-di-duni-di-dum- di-dum of Barwick Green is like a daily call to prayer for millions of Radio 4 listeners. Tuning in with a keener interest than most to today's 50th anniversary episode of The Archers will be Jane Brodie, a retired teacher from Breckland who is my mother-in-law. Jane daughter of the soap's creator Godfrey Baseley - remembers helping her father select the melody that has become the soundtrack to rural Britain's vision of itself for five decades and is now hummed in homes - and at least one royal residence - up and down the country. Then in her early teens, she remembers her father bringing home a selection of records to road test on the family.
"He said he wanted something that was catchy, and memorable and something a bit different -- something that would go with a rural programme.
"There were all sorts of classical pieces but some of them were very well known, like Fingal's Cave, which didn't seem quite appropriate' This one suddenly did it had a kind of country ring to it, like a country, dance."
The tune had been written in 1922 by composer Arthur Wood in honour of his native Yorkshire. The music set the seal on a project that Baseley had been working on for years. For although today marks the-50th anniversary of The Archers' national debut at 11.45am on January 1, 1951 on the Light Programme it had been piloted in the Whitsun of the previous year in the Midlands region only.
Indeed, the seeds of the serial were sown as early as 1948 at a meeting of farmers and the BBC in Birmingham. Godfrey who died four years ago at the age of 92 had worked for the Ministry of Information during the war, touring the Midlands with politicians to tell people how they could help the war effort.
A job at the BBC followed, covering all aspects of country life.
The meeting in Birmingham in 1948 came at a time when the government was urging farmers to modernise and increase their output and it was keen for broadcasters to help spread the message. Godfrey interviewed by me 10 years ago recalled: "There was a lot of highfalutin' talk but nobody had anything to say about the farming programme, although we'd got farmers there. "Then one man, a chap called Henry Burtt who farmed in a very big way in Lincolnshire, got up and said: 'This is all very well but what we need is a farming Dick Barton'. "Well of course everybody roared their flippin' heads off because, I mean, Dick Barton was a sort of comic detective chap. He got in real trouble and he got out of it ready for the next episode.
"Well this broke the meeting up. Now I knew this man wasn't a fool. I went to see him ..." Godfrey realised that the farming community's seasonal struggles with the elements and crop and livestock diseases were the stuff of good drama. "I thought, if I can create a programme that the family will switch on then the farmer must listen ...
"I began to invent this family. It wasn't difficult because I was a country chap myself and I mixed with all these country folk. I built this family up and it just took off, that was it." Godfrey enlisted writers Ted Mason and Geoffrey Webb - who had scripted Dick Barton and the three of them thrashed out a pattern for the programme's contents: 10 per cent educational, 30 per cent information an 60 per cent entertainment.
Three months after The Archers first launched. nationally, it moved to a 6.45pm slot replacing Dick Barton as the corporation's new early evening serial. Explaining the choice of the programme's name, Godfrey - a butcher's son turned actor turned broadcaster said: "The name Archers was chosen because it's an open vowel, an open sound. "When the announcer's going to say The Archers he's got his mouth wide open. If it had been The Browns, it's a B. It was really phonetics."
The production team went to great lengths to ensure the accuracy of the serial's contents. On 'its advisory team during the early years were representatives of the National Farmers' Union, the Ministry of Agriculture and the British Sugarbeet Corporation. Even the sound effects had to be authentic. If one of the cast was supposed to be feeding a pig, rural listeners would know that a hungry animal sounds different to one that's been fed and the sound effect would have to be right.
Godfrey's visits to Norfolk were frequent, both to see family and to do outside broadcasts. He worked With naturalist Ted Ellis and knew the acclaimed artist Roland Green, who would send specially, painted Christmas cards every year to the Baseley home in the Midlands.Jane Brodie remembers only too well how incidents from real life would resurface in her father's fictional Ambridge.
"During those early years The Archers ran alongside our own lives and sometimes crossed over when real people we knew well became partly depicted as Archers characters and certainly events that happened to us and our friends occurred again, often uncomfortably, in Ambridge. "When I was a very young, recently qualified teacher, carrying a pile of books down a stairway in school; I stumbled against the fire alarm. A huge kerfuflle occurred everyone outside on the playing field in the rain, a fruitless search for smoke, and then a big inquest in the school hall with the entire school rigid on their seats. "I was too frightened to own up. Inadvisably, I told my father of the incident and the next thing it happened again in an episode of The Archers and I immediately became suspect number one." Godfrey himself crossed the boundary, briefly, in 1969, donning imaginary jodhpurs and making good use of his booming, old-style BBC voice to play the part of Brigadier Winstanley, a joint master of the hunt who was badly injured in a fall from his horse during an anti-hunt protest. The character was killed off in a subsequent fall. It was a prelude, in a sense, to his own eventual parting of the ways with the programme that had made his name. His nickname among the Archers team was God and not just because it was a contraction of his christian name. Though small in stature, balding and bespectacled, with a flamboyant bow-tie, he was a forceful, sometimes overbearing character. By the early 1970s, audience figures had dropped.. There were policy clashes but Godfrey stubbornly opposed adjusting his magic formula of education/information/ entertainment to lend more weight to the latter. His departure left a sour taste and The Sun newspaper. ran his account of the clashes over several days. As it had done so many times before, courtesy of its storylines, The Archers was making headlines.
For a time, Godfrey, remained bitter about the way (events had turned out and he was a ready source of quotes for newspapers eager -for his booming pronouncements on any new, "racy" storyline.
In later years, however, his relationship with the BBC mellowed in no small part due to the programme's current editor, Vanessa Whitburn, who would visit him for tea and a chat at his bungalow in Stoke Heath, near Birmingham. Jane Brodie says: "Vanessa Whitburn and he got on very well together ... she really mended bridges and after that he went to one or two of the functions." Ghosts were finally laid to rest at a memorial to Godfrey at BBC's Pebble Mill a few months after his death. Many of the cast were present to pay tribute to his role in the programme's creation .
Trevor Harrison, who plays Eddie Grundy, sang A Farmer's Boy and we friends and family were given a special tour of the Tardis-like studios where the huge fictional world of Ambridge is contained.
To the end, Godfrey had a lively, imaginative mind, a "Toad of Toad Hall- like character" who would eagerly embrace new hobbies and pursuits, only to drop them and move on to the next. He was still in demand as a speaker at Probus clubs, Women's institute meetings and the like, recounting anecdotes about the programme. Shortly before he died he told me: "Looking back I think it's been the biggest achievement in my life without any shadow of a doubt. One can't help but have a certain amount of pride." That pride will be shared by Jane Brodle as she listens in to today's anniversary episode. "He would have been pleased that it was having so much attention."