I’m the first to confess there are gaping holes in my cultural credentials where popular entertainment is concerned. I’m not snobbish, but I have never watched a single episode of Eastenders or Coronation Street – both of which I gather are full of people shouting, fighting, cheating and killing each other.
Thus I must of necessity remain aloof from the programme post-mortems held in the work place after some cataclysmic plot twist or the climax of a long-played-out sensationalist story line. Who are these characters and why are otherwise sane, intelligent viewers carrying on as if they’re real?
I fear that, as a society, we’re losing touch with reality. The window of availability of my friends is gradually narrowing. I know better than to ring certain of them during ‘the soaps’. And as for getting hold of others, (even in an emergency) during any of those Scandi-noir thrillers starring gloomy actors in terrible jumpers, I have no mission.
I admit to not answering the phone myself during Downton Abbey or Mr Selfridge, but they’re merely stylish upmarket flummery and don’t generate the same degree of heated debate around the water-cooler. And besides, I love the frocks.
How easy it is to be unwittingly drawn into the fantasy world of episodic television drama and become so rapidly fascinated that within a very short time we begin to rearrange the pattern of our lives around a programme schedule. From there it’s but a short step to whole days lost to the compulsive consumption of entire box set series in a single sitting – with chocolate – and not a hand’s turn done.
Now for the confessional bit. My name is Anita Robinson and I am an Archers addict. That’s right – an everyday story of country folk obsessed with milk yields, lambing, busybodying and village fetes, but a hotbed of ill-concealed intrigue and suppressed passions, I’ve listened since I was six years old. Nobody spoke in our house while The Archers was on. Nightly the big radio in its walnut-veneered cabinet with the sunburst fretwork front, hissed and crackled as it warmed up and we waited for the familiar ‘dum-ti-dum-ti-dum-ti-dum’ of the signature tune. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Current listeners are up-in-arms over an ongoing plot line concerning Helen Titchener (née Archer), the 30-something emotionally fragile, cheesemaking single mother, (truth to tell, a bit new-age-and tiresome) and Rob, her surface-charming, controlling, coercive psychopath of a husband, who has systematically driven her to the point of attempted murder. We aficionados have been shouting warnings at the radio for months.
Well, the country is in uproar. Top-class barristers are offering to defend her in court – free, since as a fictional character she doesn’t qualify for legal aid. The lordly Times devoted a whole page to the opinion of criminal lawyers as to how she should plead. One tabloid has already ‘tried’ her case, for and against, in a double-page spread with 12 of its most prominent journalists acting as jury, (who’ve returned a 7 to 5 ‘not guilty’ verdict) and more than £100,000 has poured in from the public for the Helen Titchener Defence Fund. It’s utter madness.
Of course, the phenomenon is not without precedent. In the late 1950s, Tom Forrest the gamekeeper shot a poacher and was exonerated. When Grace Archer died in a stable fire (coincidentally at the very hour on the very night Independent Television was launched) there was national mourning. When Nigel Pargeter fell from the roof of Lower Loxley Hall on a New Year’s Eve the BBC switchboard was jammed. When Jill Archer gave birth to twins, the BBC was inundated with hand-knitted matinée coats and mittens.
Meanwhile, a shoal of snotty letters to the papers accuse the BBC of “becoming too pre-occupied with social issues.” Nonsense, it’s only fulfilling its Reithian brief – to inform, educate and entertain.
As for us addicts – we probably need our heads examined. Forgawdsake, it’s only a made-up story.
Nevertheless – that Rob Titchener had it coming to him.
FREE THE AMBRIDGE ONE!
