Borsetshire Weather

Now I understand - the Met Office's forecast of the wettest winter since Noah built his ark applied only to the county of Borsetshire. Listening to the omnibus edition of The Archers was like hearing the soundtrack of a disaster movie, as the previously placid Am was swollen into a raging torrent by incessant downpours, burst its banks and swiftly engulfed all the low-lying parts of Ambridge, sweeping all before it. As the desperate residents were herded to high ground and local heroes nearly drowned in their struggles to clear blocked culverts, the dialogue consisted largely of names shouted frantically over the din of the raging storm. And on and on it went, until at last the waters receded, the missing turned up and those sundered by the flood were duly reunited. Listening to all this on a warm, sunny spring morning was most amusing. Sometimes I wonder if The Archers might not be a fly-on-the-wall documentary after all...

Cravat Heroes, No 2 - Charles Colllingwood

Charles Collingwood is best known for playing Brian Aldridge in The Archers, a part he has inhabited for more than quarter of a century (he is also married to the actress who plays Shula, perhaps the most loathsome inhabitant of Ambridge, but we'll pass that over in decent silence). In The Archers, Brian is the long-suffering husband of foghorn-voiced Jennifer ('Daaahling!) and father to her (and in some cases his) ungrateful brood. With his robust commonsense views, Aldridge is a rare beacon of sanity in tree-hugging, gay's-the-word, multi-culty Ambridge - indeed without him The Archers would be all but unendurable. If he has a fault, it is the excessivly tender heart that has led him into a few scrapes along the way - not least when he unwisely took pity on a barking mad Irishwoman and fathered a boy with a name consisting entirely of vowels. Naturally, with the mother dead, Brian is doing the decent thing and raising the brat in the bosom of the family...
Collingwood was educated at Sherborne, after which he took a double first in Suavety and Charm at the Academy of Smooth, and sailed into the world of showbiz. In 1981, he co-hosted a quiz show on Southern Television with Bernard Manning (that's true). Nowadays, he is a frequent, and always welcome, presence on many a radio chat show and panel game. Like any sane Englishman, Charles loves cricket. Favourite wine: Soave. Favourite dance: American Smooth. Favourite neckwear: Need you ask? Hail Collingwood/Aldridge - cravat hero!

Loving It, Loathing It

In a fine post, Gaw ponders the peculiar nature of Radio 4 and of the hold it exerts over us listeners (to which Brit responds with a brilliant alternative schedule). Yes, it's a love-hate thing all right - and, in the case of The Archers, to which Gaw is almost literally allergic, the hatred is, I think, an integral part of its power to grip and addict. I've been listening to The Archers since I was at my mother's knee - more precisely my grandmother's, she being an addicted listener. I would overhear the goings-on at Ambridge thoroughly bemused, since I'd assumed a programme called The Archers must be about those medieval bowmen who were to be seen raining death on the enemy in many of my childhood drawings. Eventually, though, I began to get the hang of it, and by my teenage years I was a regular listener (how cool is that?). So The Archers and I go way back - and yet I utterly loathe so much about it. Or is it precisely because I loathe so much that I'm so hooked on it? The excellent organisation (too strong a word) Archers Anarchists is built on the assumption that all sane people loathe a great many of the 'characters' (who are of course real) and a great deal of what The Archers is about. This distinguishes them starkly from the nauseating official fan club, which is built on the assumption that everyone and everything in Ambridge is oh so cute and lovable. The Anarchist line is far closer to the truth of the matter. For myself, I've come to realise that I enjoy the scenes where I'm groaning, squirming with distaste and hurling (usually) silent abuse at the likes of Shula, Ian and Usha, as much as those which are genuinely rather good and even affecting (the recent episode built around Mike and Vikki's wedding, for example, was brilliantly done). That is no doubt why I remain addicted, even though in the past I've been so disgusted that I've given up listening for weeks on end. I always come back. Damn it, I care.

Plinth Madness

So the Trafalgar Square plinth lark got hijacked by a protestor. No surprise there, though it was a pretty lame 'message' - Ban Tobacco & Actors Smoking. Hmm... It will get worse and nastier, especially as Gormley, no doubt putting a brave face on it, seems to have given the green light to any nutjob who cares to get up there and make his/her 'point' - he might live to regret that... Never mind, Gormley has more important things to do, such as appearing on The Archers, an imminent event excitedly discussed by the denizens of Ambridge this evening, ahead of an edition of Front Row much of which was devoted to the Plinth. O dear o dear... Let's get one thing straight. Such is the lamentable state of public sculpture, there was never any prospect of the empty fourth plinth being satisfactorily topped - the nearest of the various try-outs was Rachel Whiteread's ghostly inversion of the plinth itself, which could have stayed put as far as I was concerned. But no, all manner of fantastically dumb and/or fantastically badly executed ideas were tried out - and then the great self-publicist Gormley was allowed to take over with his crass notion of allowing 'ordinary people' their moment atop the plinth. The best moment in Front Row's plinth coverage was the contribution from the excellent Ben Lewis, who hailed the event as historic - in as much as it marked the most banal idea any artist was ever allowed to enact in a public space (or words to that effect). He's right of course, but what can you expect when art is viewed in terms of 'ideas' and novelty and entertainment value, as so many competing attractions in a consumer fairground? And how else would art be viewed in a culture that has lost touch with its roots? A truly modern art is always the product of a deep engagement, not with the present, still less the future, but with the past. The gods of literary modernism, for example - Eliot, Joyce, Pound - were steeped in the literature and culture of the past, rediscovering, reimagining, re-creating, knowing that there was no finding a way forward without going back, back, back. The art that consciously addresses the present rarely lasts. As Charles Peguy wrote, 'Homer is still new this morning, and nothing perhaps is as old as today's newspaper'. Or, God help us, today's art world stunt.