A YEAR AWAY FROM AMBRIDGE

“Tum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum, tum-te-tum-te-tum-tum…”

It’s been just over a year now since Nigel Pargetter tumbled off that high roof on a bleak midwinter’s evening and I swore never to return to Ambridge again after the cynical disposal of one of the few remaining likeable characters and, despite suggestions to the contrary, I have remained true to my word and never deliberately tuned in since.

Occasional snatches of dialogue have been heard when I have switched on the car shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, and the radio has been inadvertently been left in the “on” position when I parked it, but I swiftly reach for the dial and punch it into silence, with just the vaguest hints of some familiar sounding voices left hanging in the air mid-sentence.

Ambridge is no longer a place I choose to visit or, if truth be told, wish to visit, either, and the fates of all those assorted Archers, Grundys and Aldridges, and all of the other fictional families are now a mystery to me after all those years of listening to their various stories unfold from the very day after Cameron Fraser did a bunk and left me forever not to know quite what the strange accent he bore actually sounded like after all of those various comments that I had heard about it finally sucked me into starting to listen to that strange little world tucked away  in deepest Borsetshire.

I have occasionally worried about the few remaining characters who I still found pleasant enough to care about, but not as much – or as often - as I thought I would. I retain the hope that people will start to be kinder to Lynda, that Moike will return to his once lovable ways that seemed to be escaping him after the arroival of his strange new woife, that the roguish charmer Brian might continue with his fundamentally decent scheming, that Clarrie would finally escape from being the whipping girl for her witless family, and that Jill will continue to enjoy many years of noble servitude as the High Princess of Decency despite having had a few dalliances with jealousy and envy after the beautifully handled demise of the noble Phil, but that’s about it, if I’m being brutally honest. The rest of them could take a coach ride off a cliff for all I actually care about them.

It is, of course, quite possible that I have missed out on a rather vintage year in that less than sleepy little village, but my mind was made up on that deadly dark and stormy night and I really haven’t felt any desire to return there.

I did wonder whether I might crack in my curiosity and sneak the occasional peak at the odd online synopsis but I’ve found that I haven’t even wanted to do that. I do occasionally take a glance at the virtually spoiler-free previews in my weekly Radio Times, mostly to see who is still “alive”, but the storylines they describe are all rather too abstract for me to want to pursue them any further.

It seems that I am an ex-Archers Addict and, do you know, I’m fine with that.

In fact I now find it rather hard to believe how much I would allow my evening routine to revolve around that particular fifteen minute timeslot just after 7.00 PM six evenings a week. It’s absolutely bloody ridiculous now that I come to think about it. I have the horrible feeling that I was borderline obsessed with not missing out on an episode for far too many years, a cycle that was only broken by a trip to Egypt giving me a reality check about what was really important and which then gave me the opportunity to take a voluntary three month break from all the intrigue, with that freedom only being broken when I read about the sudden death of Sid the bigoted bar owner in the newspapers. It’s not that I really cared all that much about Sid as a character, you understand, but I was just surprised as to why he had been got rid of and decided to have a quick listen.

That’s the thing about addiction, though, isn’t it? You can’t just take one little sip because, before you know it you’re back on the sauce again just as badly as you were before. The only way to escape from its clutches is to give it up completely and never touch it again and, in many ways thankfully, that’s what Nigel’s late night fall from his roof gave me: A chance to be free of it.

Because it wasn’t really normal, was it? All of that tuning in six nights a week. It smacked of something slightly mad going on, a need for “completeness” that really was’t all that healthy, if I’m being completely honest. For example, for many years the radio cassette recorder had been permanently set for that time of the evening just in case I happened to be out and it faithfully recorded each episode whether or not I happened to be tuning in anyway.

In more recent years, the Sunday morning “Omnibus” repeat would be set on the DVR machine to provide a kind of “emergency back up” option if I was away on holiday, but I nearly always had my trusty long-wave radio with me when we went away, ostensibly for the cricket, but also for sly visits to Ambridge if the opportunity arose.

But not any more, and so, despite all of those years of being something of an “avid fan” I really don’t miss it and I think it’s rather encouraging to now find that I exist in a home where absolutely no soap-opera-style dramas of any sort are followed which, if truth be told, seems to be something of a rare thing nowadays.

So you can safely track my years of listening to “The Archers” from the day after Cameron Fraser disappeared over the horizon to the day after Nigel fell off the roof. Two fairly insignificant events in the great unfolding text that is the great and legendary history of Ambridge to those in the know, I’m sure, but significant enough to me to make them a suitable set of brackets for my journey alongside them.