Usually on The Archers when things escape, there is an urgent search-and-rescue operation with a bucket of cattle nuts and some binder twine. Not this time, though. To celebrate the show's 75th birthday, eight of its best-loved characters are going completely free range and being allowed out of Ambridge.
It may have taken three-quarters of a century but they are finally leaving the village for a UK anniversary tour called The Archers: Live At 75 that will bring Radio 4's everyday story of country folk alive on stage for the first time in its long history. Will it be the best night out that Borsetshire can offer, funnier than a Lynda Snell panto and with more fireworks than Bonfire Night on the village green? You can bet your lemon drizzle it will.
Tim Bentinck, who plays farmer David Archer, has already got the tour WhatsApp group running. Annabelle Dowler, the rewilding campaigner Kirsty Miller, is worried about the prospect of an Ambridge Curse like the one on Strictly, while Sunny Ormonde, who portrays pub owner Lilian Bellamy, is taking no chances by packing the same lucky makeup towel (green with a tortoise) she has been using since she left drama school in 1975.
Charles Collingwood, the show's treacle-voiced philanderer Brian Aldridge, wonders if audiences might greet him with pantomime boos and hisses, as they did when he fathered a love child on the show two decades ago. As for Charlotte Martin, Ambridge's resident gossip Susan Carter, she is not even sure any of the audience will know who she is until she opens her mouth.
With a mane of gunmetal-grey hair, deep berry-coloured lipstick and neon-yellow nails, Charlotte looks nothing like you would imagine Susan to be. 'She likes a nice cardy. I see her as Woman at M&S – before M&S became cool,' says the actor, who bizarrely draws inspiration for the role from Les Dawson. 'I cross my arms over my chest in a busybody way when I am being Susan, just like Les Dawson used to do,' she admits, referring to his iconic 1980s drag act Cissie and Ada, in which two housewives would purse their lips and hoick their bosoms while exchanging scandalous tidbits.
It is all great insider intel for the five million of us who listen to the world's longest-running audio drama every week, and is sure to have thousands sprinting for tickets for this tour. The live event is set at Ambridge's annual Flower and Produce Show and will feature a couple of specially written scenes performed, mouth to microphone, as though they were being recorded, with on-the-spot sound effects from the show's resident expert Vanessa Nuttall (did you know that farm gate clanging shut is actually a 1950s ironing board?).
There will also be a quiz, interviews with the actors hosted by comedian Angela Barnes (a superfan), and a singalong to the famous signature tune, a 1924 maypole dance called Barwick Green. The eight stars are being divided into two casts. Half the dates will feature the Flowers (Tim, Charlotte, Annabelle and Tim's fictional son, nurse Ben Archer played by Ben Norris). The other half will star the Produce (Charles, Sunny, Ryan Kelly who plays herdsman Jazzer McCreary and Susie Riddell who plays his wife, barmaid Tracy Horrobin).
Surely the kind of rivalry that is to be found in the fruit and veg competition tent every September will now be played out between them? 'I introduced that at the word go,' laughs Tim Bentinck, 'saying us Flowers will be looking down our noses at you Produce. It is like at school – teams are picked and in seconds it is tribal.' He is speaking with his tongue firmly in his cheek but, as any true Archers fan knows, a spat at the actual Flower and Produce Show can spark a blood feud spanning several generations.
It could be lies about a lemon curd, a suspect hanging basket or even, as happened last year, the vicar Alan Franks worrying he had been poisoned by a dodgy courgette. These storylines might sound trivial but with the real world in perma-crisis they keep listeners agog. 'The Archers,' says Charles Collingwood gleefully, 'is the only programme in which an episode could end on Shula [David's sister] saying, "Someone has been in my spice cupboard", and have everyone consider it an absolute cliffhanger.'
The proof is in the numbers. In the last quarter of 2025 The Archers, first broadcast before the transistor radio was even invented, topped the list of the BBC's on demand audio programmes. Interestingly, it was also number two in the same chart for listeners under the age of 35, evidence that it has struck broadcasting gold by acquiring a young and engaged audience.
Queen Camilla is among the many who find respite in Ambridge, says Sunny Ormonde, whose character rode into town in 2000 behind her toyboy lover on a Harley-Davidson, and has since worked her way through multiple men. 'In the studio there is a sofa bed that comes out if there is any rumpy-pumpy – and I have used it more than any character.' But back to Camilla. 'The Queen said – I think it was in the early days when she and Charles were an item and she was not really being accepted by the general public – that they would go to events, and it was all quite stressful, but she would come back, kick off her shoes, lie on the bed and listen to The Archers and she knew all was well.'
Soothing the head that wears the crown is quite an achievement for a show launched on New Year's Day 1951 to share farming best practice as the nation tried to rebuild its food supply in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was a gripper from the beginning, its first scripts written by the team that had created Dick Barton – Special Agent, another popular mid-20th-century radio drama.
Seventy-five years later The Archers still retains that early public-service ethos with instructive storylines about modern slavery, alcoholism, breast cancer, inheritance tax, male mental health and climate change mixed in with, say, the classic moment Joe Grundy got a ferret stuck down his trousers. Tim Bentinck, who joined the show in 1982, recalls, 'I was listening to a lecture once, and it was saying the natural state of human beings is in a community. People could not survive on their own in the past, they would have been killed, so they stuck together and this brought empathy and togetherness and understanding. When a sense of community is lost, as so often happens in modern society, we have to build another to replace it. And I thought, "Ah-ha! That is The Archers. It is a community. You belong."'
There is something to be said too for the way The Archers is structured. In our age of TV binge-watching and listening on demand, you can only indulge for a meagre 15 minutes, six days a week. Charles Collingwood, who has been in Ambridge since 1975, reckons the show owes at least some of its longevity to this determinedly slow pace, which allows extended storylines to unfurl in real time.
'Take the Siobhan story,' he says, referring to his affair with a mistress who gave birth to his son Ruairi and then died of cancer. 'It lasted about three and a half years, which you could never have in a TV drama but is definitely what happens in real life.' This sense of belonging and naturalistic timeframe is what makes The Archers feel real to fans who like to imagine they have popped into The Bull for a pint of Shires, or the Tearoom for a flat white, instead of listening to an immaculately crafted radio drama.
Everyone will have their own idea of Ambridge as portrayed on today's cover of Weekend, with the bucolic joys of Helen Archer's Montbeliardes grazing on the lower reaches of Lakey Hill and Ed Grundy's prize-winning Texel sheep keeping the grass on the village cricket pitch short, undercut with darker themes, represented here by the car containing Joy, Mick and Fallon sinking into the River Am, swerving into the water to avoid a car being illegally driven by bad boy George Grundy. That dramatic plotline would see George cracked over the head with a wine bottle and left for dead in a ditch on New Year's Eve.
Given this, will a live tour burst that bubble? Tim Bentinck looks a little pained. 'It does not for us,' he says. 'We are actors.' He is right. You can see him in hits including Ted Lasso and The Crown and he is huge in the world of video games in which he voices, among others, James Bond in The World Is Not Enough. 'I was in the movie Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them, just a tiny part at the beginning, and someone wrote in and said, "David Archer does not look like that." I thought, "No, he does not." If you have got roughly five million listeners then there are five million different versions of David out there too.'
I ask how he imagines us, his audience, and he chuckles. 'A woman once told me she listened to The Archers in the bath on Sundays so I had this image of a naked woman in the bath stuck in my head. Then there is the person doing the washing-up, or driving a car.' Annabelle Dowler, who plays Kirsty Miller, does not have to imagine her listeners as they introduce themselves to her all the time. She has a fantastically recognisable husky voice that draws attention wherever she goes.
Once, while she was browsing in a book shop, a man blurted out, 'Good God, you sound just like someone off The Archers!' 'I am Kirsty', she said, which sent him into hiding behind the shelves to take a few deep breaths. When he re-emerged he said, 'I must congratulate you on an epic wail...' The wail – when Kirsty was jilted at the altar by Tom Archer in 2014 – was so epic Annabelle thinks it was responsible for a career-threatening polyp that appeared on her vocal chords soon afterwards. She refused surgery, terrified it might change how Kirsty sounded forever. As she says, 'Your voice is the one tool you have for acting on the radio.' Thankfully it healed with just time and rest but the story is a reminder that all we truly know of The Archers' 50-strong cast is how they sound.
It makes the show's achievement in notching up 75 years all the greater and raises the question Ambridge's Battling Bulls cricket team asks every weekend: will it be a century, not out? The show's stars are unequivocal. The Archers will keep going, long after they are done. 'Unless I am very, very lucky I might not be here but the programme will endure,' says Tim Bentinck. 'In fact, I think it will outlast the BBC. If it comes to the point where the BBC is no longer the BBC we all know and love, someone will pick The Archers up and it will go on a streaming service. It is not going to die.'
'I will not be there to celebrate its 100th birthday, though I am terrifically glad to be sharing in its 75th,' says Charles Collingwood. The last time I saw him he was being photographed for Weekend in 2023. Since he is the biggest lothario in Borsetshire, I took a selfie of us puckering up. I ask if I can have another one when I go to see the live show. 'Daaaaarling, I will be right there...' he drawls, pure Brian, and suddenly amid the hurly-burly of our busy and complicated and angry world, all is well.
The Archers: Live At 75 is on tour from June to November. Tickets are available via Fane.
