Rob Blackhurst

Interview with the Graham Harvey, the Agricultural Storyline Editor of the Archers.

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I'm not sure what my subconscious conjured up when I was due to meet the Agricultural Storyline Editor of The Archers. Crimson-faced, weather-beaten and, at the least, sporting a elbow-patched tweed jacket and trousers held up by bailing twine. But Graham Harvey who has had the job for twelve years, is young middle-aged, lean as a fence-post, and without the faintest hint of a rustic burr. Should he arrive in Ambridge – the fictional Cotswold home of The Archers – and stop for a half in The Bull, he might be mistaken for a meddling urbanite –a Man sent down from the Ministry to check that Ruth and David's livestock movement records are up-to-date.

At least his stone cottage, buffeted by howling winds high above a Somerset village fulfils expectations. On the meandering stuck-behind-a tractor drive from Taunton there are dead badgers lying on the roadside, cheese dairies, and the kind of white 1930s country road-signs that only usually appear in Agatha Christie adaptations. On arrival, we clamber up the gravity-defying Gorse hillside behind his house to meet his pet-flock of eight Exmoor horns – their creamy coats so paint-roller fluffy that they look like they've been groomed for Marie Antoinette to play pretend Shepherds. We look down at the roofs of thatched cottages, wood-smoke wafting from chimneys and the kind of gastro-pub that could provide stiff competition for Grey Gables in the lunchtime trade.

"I kind of do live in Ambridge" Harvey admits. But when I point out the idyllic nature of life here – he gives a wry corrective: "I've lived in Somerset villages where things happen that you wouldn't believe. There can be such intensity of relationships in rural communities. There is the usual adultery – even involving firearms. Every few years you get a headline about The Archers discovering sex. But its always been in the Archers and always been in villages"

Harvey has lived here for ten years – but is far more likely to be found behind his laptop than lambing. Half his working week is devoted to The Archers and the rest of the time he writes polemical books about the follies of agri-business. Raised on a post-war council estate in Reading he was hardly from rural stock, but, on the edge of town, he was bewitched by the countryside at the end of the road.

After graduating from Bangor University with a degree in Agriculture, he contemplated becoming a dairy farmer in the West Country - but balked at the bank loan that would be needed to set up. This would have been a "good financial move" he now concedes. "But I don't think I would have been practical enough to be a good farmer". Instead, he became a journalist on Farmer's Weekly and moonlit, "exposing the dirty dealings of agri-business" on Private Eye's Old Muckspreader column. In the meantime, he had become an Archer's listener for the first time in his life.

He challenged himself to try his hand at scriptwriting in the mid-eighties and sent in some dummy scenes. The editor thought them "terrible", but he was given a week's trial episodes. Soon, he was getting regular commissions because of his insider's knowledge "I put a lot of farming in my episodes. That's why I lasted".

It took twelve years (such is the organic pace of change in the Archer's studio regime), until Harvey was appointed as Agricultural Storyline Editor. Here, his main job is to come to the monthly script meeting armed with four or five potential plotlines that reflect events on farms in the countryside. "I will say, for instance, that we ought to do a story on the anaerobic digester [a fermentation device for organically breaking down cow slurry] and show how the plot should develop over three weeks. They are then thrashed around by the writers who decide whether we will go with them or not".

Harvey has an eye for the arcane rural development that can be alchemized into human drama. The PPG7 planning rules – introduced by Conservative Environment Minister John Gummer during the eighties to allow a new generation of country houses to be built – became the subject of debate in Ambridge after arriviste developer Matt Crawford bought 20 acres of Midsummer Meadow with, villagers suspected, plans to construct a vulgar country pile. And, whereas disputes in other soaps revolve around love triangles and paternity disputes it was the anaerobic digester that became the subject of bitter dispute in Ambridge. This led to some gentle teasing. "We did a story about a consortium of famers looking into green energy and putting money into the anaerobic digester. I got hauled on to Feedback on Radio 4 with people saying: "this is not drama". It turned out that there were boardroom battles that we got some good stories out of. We haven't gone like Emmerdale. There is a willingness to keep it as accurate as we can".

Deciding which issues to adopt is not as simple as transposing headlines from Farming Today into the mouths of the Archer's cast. "One of the key things is finding issues that look like they have legs" says Harvey: "It's very easy to see the NFU getting irate about something and assuming it's a big story. But by the time we get to air it will be gone. If the price of something is on the floor people say 'why don't you reflect this on the Archers? But prices are volatile: it could be a totally different situation in three months".

Harvey also provides monthly agricultural notes for the scriptwriters on developments at each of Ambridge's four farms: when Brookfield's heifers will be put out to pasture, when Home Farm's flock will be lambing for the early Easter market, and when Bridge farm's organic Dutch cabbage crop will be ready for harvesting. But his most important role is checking every sound effect and every script for accuracy. Each farmer's tractor has its own sound effect so that farmers don't hear an old yard Massey Ferguson when they're supposed to be listening to Brian's latest super-tractor. Less care is taken with farm gates – which have been provided for years by scraping an ancient ironing board.

It is important, for Harvey, that farmers hear themselves in the dialogue. "I've spent most of my working life sitting in farmhouse kitchens talking to farmers. So I know the language they really use. Sometimes you will get a writer from a more literary background who will use a term like "agricultural labourer". But there haven't been labourers on farms since Thomas Hardy's time. If a phrase slips in and you hear it you immediately cringe – you just imagine people in farmhouses throughout the country reacting. Once we mentioned Larsen traps – a humane trap for catching magpies. I had a letter from a gamekeeper saying ' All gamekeepers know that you should never set Larsen traps in September".

But there are times when credibility is stretched in the interests of dramatic license. So much of farming involves a solitary farmer sitting in a tractor cab that some communal Ambridge rituals are worth preserving. Until recently David and Ruth would still make their own bails by hand at harvest time to "feed outlying stocks". Harvey found that this still happened on a handful of farms across the country after researching it with the NFU: "It was such a wonderful opportunity to put a lot of people in the field in the summer, have a picnic and hear the bird-song. You don't want to give up those moments because people love them – though often ex-journalists from Farmer's Weekly would ring up and say "nobody makes hay like that anymore". The drama needs that – you want to please your listeners as well as the agricultural pundits".

In extreme situations, the Archers is forced to deviate from its carefully planned cycle of plot-development, script-writing and recording. Emergency material – or "topical inserts" were added after 9/11. And the outbreak of Foot and Mouth in 2001 required the binning of weeks worth of recorded scenes as David Archer and his family barricaded themselves in the farmhouse waiting for the epidemic to pass. But most of the time unpredictable events – including the weather – are rarely mentioned. Because shows are recorded four to six weeks before transmission, it is too risky for scripts to commit themselves to conditions on a day of broadcast. In January when the real Cotswolds was buried under snow-drifts for a fortnight Ambridge was silent on the subject. "We would take out lines [that are obviously absurd] like people going ploughing or going out and playing golf" says Graham "But you don't do it very often. It is very expensive. And because you've carefully crafted these storylines it never really works unless it's done very cleverly".

The muddy lanes of Borsetshire have been mired deep in politics ever since the BBC's "everyday tale of country-folk" was first broadcast on the Home Service in 1951. The series famously started as a piece of agitprop from the Ministry of Agriculture to promote food production among farmers during postwar food shortages. Dan Archer, preoccupied with maximizing his yield, was the paragon of listen-to-Whitehall virtue to be contrasted with the yokelish Walter Gabriel- a comic voice of rural backwardness. Though the behind-the-scenes manipulations of the Ministry ended in 1972, the program is still a battleground for the resurgent rural politics of the last ten years– seen through the hunting ban, GM foods, and Foot and Mouth.

"People have said surely this or that storyline has been inspired by DEFRA" admits Harvey "But it never has". Such a criticism is, in truth, hard to level at Harvey given his outspoken proselytizing for organic food and dislike of the power of the supermarkets. Is the opposite view true – that the Archers sees organics through a rose-tinted prism? "Has the Archers had an effect [on the organic movement?] I would think so. But sometimes it works against them. Organic sales are slipping at the moment. We've reflected that in the program"

His latest, The Carbon Fields is a critique against the practice of feeding animals on grain rather than traditional grasslands – arguing that grass provides better, healthier meat and locks up carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. "I think farming has gone in the direction and has to change. Most of us are so separated from farming and the production of food". So far Harvey has managed to avoid political flak for his Green-tinged views – perhaps because he lets the dramatist within trump the activist: "You can't write about agriculture for thirty years and not have views about it. But I'm true to the characters that I've inherited. I enjoy writing strong storylines for Brian Aldridge [the voice of commercial farming] the most because I over-compensate. I know plenty of Brian Aldridge's in the real world who say: "we have to farm the way we do".

For the last X years, the Archers has been made in Birmingham – near to Ambridge's fabled location "somewhere in the Cotswolds South of Birmingham", in the practiced formulation of the Editor Vanessa Whitburn. Until recently, it was made in the BBC's cavernous Pebble Mill studios but has now moved to a steel-and-glass office in the centre of the city. The Archer's office, sandwiched between the BBC Asian Network and Midlands Today feels like place of hot-desking and lattes – the kind of place that some "everyday" country-folk would regard as the ninth circle of hell. In the carpeted blandness, there are no visible signs of the Archer's proud history. There is only a solitary drawing of a hedgehog and, pinned up a notice board, a photocopy of Phil and Grace Archer's wedding photo.

The 16- strong writing team and producers team is gathering today for the monthly script meeting – where details of the script over the next month are thrashed out. Most are freelance workers from home – perhaps accounting for the soullessness of the office. After the meeting writers are given ten days to write five fifteen minute episodes – "bloody hard work" – according to Graham "You think I have only done two scenes today and I've got four to do tomorrow". Nowadays, he just keeps his hand in by writing a few weeks of episodes a year.

Under the watch of editor Vanessa Whitburn, the Archers listenership – mainly urban and in their forties and fifties - has been buoyant at 4.69 million in the last quarter of 2008. She has been editor for seventeen years following a career on soaps including Brookside. She has the animated and slightly forbidding charisma of a school drama teacher – and is distracted by me arriving in the middle of an eight hour meeting: "We are holding up very well. We rival Chris Moyles on Radio 1".

During Whitburn's tenure, the concerns of the suburban Britain where most of its listeners live have intruded on Ambridge. There have been a rape, heroin addiction, racist attacks and the comi-tragic moment when the penniless Grundies had to bludgeon their ferrets to death after being evicted from their tenant farm. The Daily Mail opened up a Borcestershire frontier in the Culture War when it accused the program of following a liberal Agenda with its gay kisses, civil partnerships, and threatened adultery in the cow shed between Ruth and Sam. But there have been subtler shifts in Ambridge too – with the crumbling of class distinctions. "You can trace social mores." Says Whitburn with loving precision "Twenty odd years ago more farm workers called their employers Mister and the employers called them by their Christian names. Now, that's all changed. But they are lovely idiosyncracies. Burt Fry – who is now retired but worked for Phil Archer than David Archer called Phil "Boss". But when David became his boss, he still called him David. And now, even though he's retired, if he meets Phil he still calls him "Boss".

Mary Cutler, sixty-something with a grey-haired bob and a Birmingham accent, has been a scriptwriter on the program for thirty years, and can't remember a time before the Archers colonized her imagination. She can still recall her "complete shock" at the death of Grace Archer when listening as a six year old in 1955. ("I remember thinking 'they can't do that") and the "horrible thudding noise" of the instrument used to kill cows during the first foot-and-mouth outbreak back in the sixties. She thinks the emphasis on agricultural accuracy in the series has been a useful check against sentimentality: "I think people overlook the fact that the farming side is a great strength of the program because it means that we have to be realistic and stay up-to-date. You can't keep it as the cosy countryside".

Another mud-pie thrown at the Ambridge is that it is country life written by metropolitans and listened to by those in the suburbs. Do farmers really head back to their farmhouse from the milking parlour just after seven for the latest on Linda Snell's village pantomime? Graham, who meets more farmers than anyone else, on the team thinks that, if they do, they are reluctant to admit it "I can't tell you how many people say to me "I don't listen – the wife does" says Graham. The most common complaint from farmers, however, is that they don't show farmers doing their paperwork enough.

So how has Ambridge retained its hold on the British psyche now that less than one fifth of Britons live in rural England and only fourteen per cent of workers are now employed on the land? Keri Davies, the newest writer on the Archers team, thinks that a large part of its success is our ancient thirst for the changing agricultural seasons: "People in the village still get excited by the Annual Flower and Produce show. So there are still touchstones that people like along with being excited by the big story". And, in the end, however hard-edged the story-lines, Ambridge remains an idealized community, a sun-dappled world where families live and work together. As Vanessa Whitworth says: " Perhaps its success is because we have become more urban. We still have a family who can pop around rather than use the phone or email. Something deep in people's hearts that loves that. And it has its fair slice of gentleness and warmth. You are not likely to switch on another soap and get a marmalade recipe".