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The Sunday Post: Radio Soaps

2016-06-05T09:00:00+00:00

Some of the Archers (Dan and Doris on the right) dolled up for a 1971 wedding in Ambridge

Soap opera, so called because the early examples in the US were sponsored by soap powder companies, are a staple of broadcasting.

While the exact definition of a soap opera is hard to pin down, it tends to be the sort of thing that you know when you see (or hear) it. It can of course be used pejoratively if a non-soap series is seen to be spending too much time exploring people’s domestic entanglements, but soaps have been rightly praised for highlighting issues in society – such as the recent domestic abuse storyline in The Archers.

Unsurprisingly, the earliest continuing dramas on the �� were on radio. The whole practice of episodic fiction can be traced back to the publication of novels by Dickens as partworks in the 19th Century, where readers would eagerly await the next instalment of each story. When Dickens’ works were adapted for radio they were already structured to lend easily to episodic production.

The idea of the same characters appearing in successive stories also owes something to literature, with writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes tales. Radio’s early recurring heroes included the likes of Francis Durbridge’s classic hero Paul Temple, but these were episodic thrillers, not soaps.

The first programme that can be called a soap on the �� was Front-Line Family, which was broadcast to the USA on the �� Overseas Service from 1941. Post-war, it was also heard at home on the Light Programme, now under the title The Robinson Family. The series was intended to make American listeners empathise with the plight of the British public, and did so in a way that was familiar in the States - though �� executives were extremely sniffy about the lowering of standards involved in creating a popular series, and derisive of the intellect of their intended audience.

One of the first great serial hits on radio after the war was Dick Barton – Special Agent, a fairly lurid thriller series, concerning the daring adventures of Barton and his sidekicks Jock and Snowy, and any number of foreign spies and Nazis and scientists being kidnapped.

When this series ended it was replaced by something described at the time as a ‘farming Dick Barton’, complete with cliffhangers to entice listeners back for the next episode. That show was of course The Archers, which has been entertaining the nation for the last 65 years and shows no sign of going away.

TV's theme tune maestro Ron Grainer composed a new signature tune for The Dales in 1964 - here he is with Mrs Dale (Jessie Matthews) and Dr Dale (Charles Simon)

The Archers has had various shake-ups over the years by new editors. One if its most famous ‘stunt’ episodes was in 1955 when Grace Archer was killed off in a fire the same night as ITV launched. The show’s long lifespan has meant that a huge saga with many characters has unfolded before listeners, though based around the central family of the eponymous Archers.

For many years this family was headed by Dan and Doris Archer. Dan was played by four actors over the life of the serial - Harry Oakes, Monte Crick, Edgar Harrison and Frank Middlemass – while Doris was always played by Gwen Berryman. The series has since featured not only their children, but grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As well as a large cast of regulars (around 60, though with less than half tending to appear in any given week), the Archers is also notable for having a number of ‘silent’ characters – characters who are mentioned but have never appeared, or only occasionally. One, Pru Forrest, made a brief audible appearance in the 10,000th episode in 1989, when she was played by Judi Dench (and interviewed by Terry Wogan).

Each episode is introduced by the theme tune Barwick Green, and to date there have been something in the region of 18,000 instalments. After a trial run in 1950 the series started fully in 1951, and now has six weekly episodes. The setting is the fictional village of Ambridge and surrounding countryside, especially the Archer homestead of Brookfield, in the equally fictitious county of Borsetshire (somewhere south of Birmingham, where the show is produced).

In its early days, The Archers had an avowedly informational slant, with Ministry of Agriculture advice woven into the stories, but although such involvement ended in the early 70s the show has continued to raise issues relevant to rural life, although some have criticised it for being a bit too near the knuckle. When radio was the majority medium, The Archers gained huge listening figures, and while the numbers are less now, it is still capable of arousing passions and getting into the headlines, while remaining a (more or less) everyday story of country folk.

The Archers was actually predated by another daily serial, Mrs Dale’s Diary, which began on the Light Programme on 5 January 1948, about the wife of a GP, Doctor Dale, and the people she came in contact with. Much parodied for its cosy atmosphere, this ran for 21 years, with various writers including Ted Willis (who once tried to kill off most of the characters in a coach crash) coming up with five new episodes every week.

There was controversy when lead actor Ellis Powell was sacked in 1963, and replaced by former film star Jessie Matthews – but the �� made various attempts to give it a less comfortable image, including changing the title to The Dales in 1962. Like The Archers, Mrs Dale’s Diary/The Dales was used to introduce public information messages, and was also one of the first dramas to mention the subject of homosexuality.

Robert Micklewright's superb drawing illustrates a feature on the first episode of Waggoners' Walk in 1969.

When The Dales came to an end, it was immediately replaced by a new serial on Radio 2, Waggoners’ Walk (originally Waggoners’ Walk NW). This was set in North West London (near Belsize Park), and concerned the inhabitants of this urban ‘village’, especially those living at No.1 Waggoners’ Walk, a town house converted into flats. The serial was to run for a little more than a decade before being dropped in a round of spending cuts in 1980. It was co-created by Jill Hyem who went on to be one of the main writers of Tenko.

Subsequently radio has struggled to come up with a successful sister soap to The Archers, while that programme has maintained its loyal following. Radio 4 did attempt another show, Citizens, from 1987 to 1991, but this twice-weekly flat-sharing soap never quite gained momentum and was dropped after nearly 400 episodes.

Other parts of the �� have come up with their own contributions to the genre. As with Pobol y Cwm, the Welsh language television soap opera that has run since 1974, there was also a radio soap in Welsh, Station Road, which ran for a few years from the late 1990s.

The �� World Service had its own soap, Westway, which ran from 1997 to 2005 (latterly also on Radio 4) and centred around a health centre close to the eponymous main road from London to the West Country.

Silver Street was a soap which ran from 2004 to 2010 on the �� Asian Network, and featured the lives of a south Asian community in an unspecified area of Britain. The ten-minute episodes were presented within other programmes on the network, and budget cuts saw them reduced in length to five minutes later on, before the series was cancelled.

�� Wiltshire Sound (the former name for �� Wiltshire) earned a place in the record books for its unique soap Acrebury, in which all the characters were played by actor/presenter Gerry Hughes.

It’s ironic that radio has not had more successful soap operas, since producing radio drama is logistically far easier than television drama. However, the pressure on writers to come up with enough plotlines and scripts to satisfy these long-running productions is intense, and radio audiences can be particularly demanding, if fiercely loyal when they do latch onto a programme.

Who knows whether there will ever be another radio soap opera to rival the huge following that The Archers has amassed over its six and a half decades of life. We have a kind of love/hate relationship with soap, but they are now firmly part of the national fabric, both those on television, and those that reside on the original home of British soap opera, the radio.

Let us know what you think of soaps on radio , now and in the past. Are radio soaps better than those on television? Are they becoming too influenced by television’s more sensational values?

The Sunday Post: Doctors and Nurses

2015-10-18T09:00:00+00:00

We all love a good medical drama. They've been in rude health for years, and have peppered the television and radio listings for decades. Here's a glance at just some of the biggest shows telling of illness, recovery - and characters who set the pulse racing.

Casualty is undoubtedly the juggernaut of medical dramas, having been on air for close to 30 years. Set in the fast-moving emergency department of Holby City hospital, it has seen a long line of medical staff and stricken patients pass through its doors.

On a weekly basis fresh storylines are created, and viewers play at guessing which catastrophe is going to befall its roll call of characters. But the professional and personal lives of the medical staff are picked up week after week, including nurse Charlie Fairhead, who has been in the drama since its inception.

In 1999, a Casualty spin-off was created, called Holby City (pictured below). It was originally billed as a "nine-part spin-off" but has become a continuing drama. The action is based in the same hospital but across other wards.

Characters from Casualty occasionally turn up in Holby and vice versa, but the original series is now produced in Wales and Holby at �� Elstree. The staff don't even repair to the same bar.

Connie Beauchamp started life in Holby and now runs the emergency department in Casualty

While Casualty and Holby City are linchpins of the Saturday and Tuesday evening schedules, Doctors is the weekday soap opera which has held sway over daytime audiences since 2000. It was also originally billed as a self-contained "series of medical dramas" but developed beyond that. The tangle of patients and medics' lives takes place in a Midlands GP surgery and tackles all manner of hard-hitting issues.

You have to hurtle back to the late 1960s to find a twice-weekly TV drama called The Doctors, also set in a general practice. The actors were put at the forefront of this show, with full-page colour portraits of them featured in the Radio Times.

An interesting note is that an actress called Lynda Marchal (pictured below) was among the regular cast. She's now better known as TV screenwriting heavyweight, Lynda La Plante. She also appeared in Rentaghost, but that's for a future post on stars before they were famous...

But it's not always doctors who are at the forefront of medical drama. Nurses - chiefly from the fairer sex - have made some compelling television over the years.

Angels (pictured above) ran from 1975-82 and featured a group of hospital nurses, including the likes of Pauline Quirke and Fiona Fullerton. It was directed by Julia Smith, who went on to cement her place in TV history as the co-creator of EastEnders.

This contemporary, gritty London setting for the perils of nursing was later replaced with a more gentle, Welsh backdrop for The District Nurse starring Nerys Hughes in a 1920s period setting. This series (1984-7) was also devised by Julia Smith and her EastEnders co-creator Tony Holland.

The format of this drama would much later be replicated in the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s with the phenomenally successful Call The Midwife, while recent daytime drama The Indian Doctor also has Wales as its setting.

Talking of the softer end of medical drama, the daddy of the bunch has to be Dr Finlay's Casebook (pictured below) which was a regular fixture on our screens from 1962-71. It was set in the practice of a small Scottish country town before the NHS was born and featured a handful of regulars including the dashing doctor and his doughty housekeeper. The stories were also heard on radio, while the TV drama was rebooted in the 1990s on ITV.

There have been some shows with a medical pedigree over the decades that have been quite removed from the premise of doctors treating patients.

A Very Peculiar Practice was about a university campus practice - but this was merely the setting for a show that veered in an entirely different direction. Starting in 1986 and penned by screenwriting giant Andrew Davies, the show's stars Peter Davison (pictured below) and Amanda Hillman were honoured with a Radio Times front cover.

With a scattering of nuns and a university filled with "manic, feuding intellectuals", this series was much less about medical issues and more about the lives of a series of larger than life characters.

Recent hit thriller Doctor Foster had plenty of scenes in a small town surgery, but it was all about the title character's seething rage over her husband's infidelity. Mind you, she did seem to get up to some mischief as a GP in her pursuit of the truth.

The reach of medical drama went beyond the confines of the UK down the years. Australia - and its flying doctor service - was introduced to the nation in the 1950s. How we all marvelled at a sparsely populated country where the medics might only be able to get you by plane.

The Flying Doctor, starring Australian actor Bill Kerr, took to the radio airwaves in 1958 and was later made for television. Confusingly - but much later - an Aussie-produced drama called The Flying Doctors came to our screens featuring a gaggle of former Neighbours actors including Peter O'Brien and Mark Little.

This is a quick jog around the history of medical drama on TV and radio. Do you have any favourites you would like to mention? Do you loathe them? Is the gore too much for you? Please leave us a comment in the space below.

Goodbye Grace

2015-09-22T08:00:00+00:00

Actress Ysanne Churchman had little dialogue as she bowed out of The Archers

On this day 60 years ago, ITV took to the air for the very first time. But its thunder was stolen by the shock death of Grace Archer in �� radio soap The Archers, which left the nation open-mouthed.

Of course there was no indication of what was going to happen in the listings - the billing for 22 September 1955 is minimal at best and carries only the show's tagline, "a story of country folk".

However, actress Ysanne Churchman, now aged 90, says the demise of her character was caused by her own efforts to secure a better pay deal for her work on the soap, although it was presumed the ploy was to scupper ITV's launch.

A new radio play about the night Grace Archer perished and the story behind this memorable event was recently broadcast on Radio 4.

Kathy and the EastEnders teasers

2015-09-10T13:01:33+00:00

Kathy Beale pictured in 1988 with her first husband Pete

EastEnders stalwart Kathy Beale is making her regular return to the soap after apparently being dead for almost a decade.

Here at Genome, her comeback has prompted a delve into the TV listings. As one of the original Albert Square line-up, it's no surprise to find that 'Kaff' - played by Gillian Taylforth - is on the first cast list for the show on 19 February 1985.

In the early days of EastEnders, episodes were teased with a single line of dialogue - and some of them were very mysterious indeed.

The first one to mention Kathy's name popped up in the listings on 8 January 1987. What does it mean? And what happened in the episode itself? We'd like to hear your theories or even memories of that.

Around 1990 it appears that these curious little tasters were replaced with more digestible, obvious plot synopses, with Kathy's first mention being about "deciding it's time for some straight talking".

Welcome back, Kathy - you've been missed.

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The Sunday Post: Radio Soaps

The Sunday Post: Doctors and Nurses

Goodbye Grace

Kathy and the EastEnders teasers

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