Why Does Katherine Angel Like The Archers?

“I enjoy not really paying that close attention to the farming stuff.”

These interviews are the product of thinking about black metal music. I don’t personally listen to Dialectic of Blood or Lichen Throne (yes I made up those names) but I’m fascinated by the question: what is it like to like them?

Tuning into The Archers, the “comfortingly boring” BBC radio soap about life in a British farming village, couldn’t be further from the experience of listening to a metal album of any kind, but for many of us it is just as intimidating. So when I saw Katherine Angel post about her love for the show, I thought: that’s a ‘why do you like this?’ interview. Could Katherine make me understand why five million people listen to The Archers? Could she make me want to be one of them?

Katherine is the author of Unmastered (2012), Daddy Issues (2019) and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021); and her next book is Poor Freud, forthcoming with Verso. She also works in psychoanalytic practice in London. Our exchange touches on The Archers’ sexual dynamics, the show as a key to Englishness, the magic of radio, ‘effort noises’, the comfort of communal memory, and the embarrassment of liking uncool things.

Read Me: What is your first memory of listening to The Archers?

Katherine: I was aware of it growing up – my mother sometimes had it on in the kitchen when she was cooking. I don’t think she was very attached to it, but it nonetheless formed a familiar acoustic backdrop to my childhood. I was born and grew up in Belgium, and my contact with English stuff was basically the BBC; we had BBC TV, but not the other UK channels, which seemed so exotic to me when we’d visit family in England. The UK was really a foreign country to me, so at home, The Archers was one of these weird missives from a place that shaped me, through my parents, but also eluded, mystified, and intrigued me. I didn’t tune in to it at all; it sounded very dull to me then. There’s a great clip from John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme from 2015 called ‘How The Archers Sounds to People Who do Not Listen To The Archers’ – a hilariously banal sequence of men sighing and women making cups of tea. It’s so funny because it’s kind of spot-on.

Read Me: When did you become a regular listener?

Katherine: I started listening properly when I was doing a PhD in the early 2000s and living with a housemate who was obsessed with it. She got me properly into it; we’d have animated discussions about it over breakfast; she taught me a lot about the backstory. (Initially, I used to confuse Linda with Lilian – and now I can’t imagine how.) Since then I have been a pretty avid listener. Occasionally I drop it for a bit – a few years ago, when Bret Easton Ellis was serialising his new novel, The Shards, on audio, I got so obsessed with that, and it was very long and consuming. I didn’t feel I had time or mental space for another long-running fictional thing with lots of characters and plot intrigue. So I missed a few months, but soon got back on the Archers horse and have been quite devoted since.

Read Me: For those of us who aren’t listeners, please could you let us know what’s happening in the show at the moment?

Katherine: George is having trouble readjusting to life back home after prison (he caused a car accident while driving drunk, and blamed alcoholic Alice for it); it’s been very dramatic recently (I won’t plot-spoil!). The Maliks are trying to figure out if they want to commit to a life in the village; they’re hugely appealing. There’s been a reintroduction of beavers as part of the rewilding scheme. There’s a new character called Esme – the daughter of a local farmer who died – and she is perplexing me (I am enjoying finding her really irritating, annoyingly helpless). What are they doing with that storyline? I’m pretty sure she’s going to get together with Josh; I had initially wondered if she and David might have an affair; in any case, they’re clearly setting something long-term up. (This is what I love: the speculation about where things are going to go.) Tony’s being very bad-tempered, and I think they’ve done a beautiful job of suggesting that it’s related to the pain of his late son John’s 50th birthday (John died in 1998 aged 23.) And Brian is being more irritable than usual -- the anniversary of Jenny’s death is looming. (They’re clearly interested in anniversaries and grief.) It’s this I love: the layers, the constant return, nothing being truly forgotten. It’s the Freudian in me that finds this so appealing.

Read Me: Is that your main reason for liking it?

Katherine: I really like a soap; as a kid, I was an avid watcher of EastEnders. Me and my friend Miriam, when we went to university, would sometimes watch an episode together remotely, on the phone (corded landlines!). It’s just quite simple I think: you get to work stuff out through fictional characters. Like Phyllis Rose says about gossip being ‘the beginning of moral inquiry’, thinking and talking about these characters and their lives is an exploration of dilemmas, of legacies, of the question of how to live, even if these lives feel so remote and unrelated to your own. So with the George storyline -- it’s asking questions about the possibilities of forgiveness, of rehabilitation, and of re-entry into life after prison. George is hard to like, but I do find myself wondering how I would relate to him if he had done terrible things to people I loved and I had to see him in the local pub. And while I read a ton of non-fiction, I don't read as much fiction as I could, so I think The Archers sometimes occupies that place for me: immersion and pleasure in character, plot, suspense, the engine of story.

I also really love the long arc of character development. A character I love to hate is Tom Archer; he’s priggish, uptight, ungenerous, whiny. And then one episode a couple of years ago, after a particularly irritating phase, they showed us the suffering — I think it was about guilt in relation to his brother’s death. (I just looked up ‘big Archers storylines’ and saw I could listen back to Tony discovering John after the accident. I don’t think I could bear to listen to that.) And something similar happened recently, to do with Kirsty’s miscarriage. It’s horribly touching. It softens me to him: his suffering, covered in a carapace of being better than everyone else. You really get to interact with a person’s character in these ways; to see it from many angles; to have reason to dislike them, and then reason to feel moved by them, or warm to them, or find them appealing, or funny. And I like the feeling of it all unspooling into the future, a long storyline emerging: the recent car accident, for example, so awful and terrifying, with a legacy that is going to be decades long.

But also, I just love radio. I feel like I’ll never get over the magic of it. I love the sound of it — coming out of the actual radio, not my phone. It’s comforting, relaxing. In the book I’m currently writing, I’m thinking a lot about sound and the power of the voice; it’s just wildly interesting to me, what sound can do to us. And I love and am very simply amazed by the ingenuity of it; the ‘foley’ sound effects (someone on set rustling a duvet, or scraping a fork on a plate, or a hand squelching through yoghurt to mimic the sound of a lamb being born), and the ‘effort noises’ the actors make to convey their movements. I find it frankly miraculous and so impressive; I really believe I’m there, that it’s all happening. (Every time, though, anyone’s riding a horse it cracks me up – somehow they just can’t get that sound right. I can honestly picture someone standing at the mic, with two cups clapping them together, clip clop clip clop.) I sometimes think about doing that tour of the Archers studios, but I think it would ruin something for me. If I want to check something about the plot or characters and look them up on the website, I’m slightly distressed to see the photos of the actors. I have to sort of blur my eyes to them, I don’t want to know.

I also love speculating on the romantic and sexual dynamics. I’m quite good at predicting plot points, but I love it when I get it totally wrong, because of course I want to be surprised. I wrote a bit about the dynamics between Pip and David Archers in my book Daddy Issues; I sometimes think one thing they either can’t get quite right, or are very interested in, is how fathers and daughters talk. Pip and David used to have this weird flirtatiousness, which I think we’re now seeing with the way Alice talks with Brian. There’s something about fathers and daughters in those families that feels interestingly odd. And I loved the phase when Pip was younger, and having a friends-with-benefits thing with someone -- I find it very entertaining when they try to be up to date with the younger generations. It doesn’t always quite work, but it’s fun to listen to.

And I enjoy not really paying that close attention to the actual farming stuff. I tune out a lot of it. Like, I know Adam and Brian have had a long-standing disagreement about the herbal lays, but what is a herbal lay? God knows.

Read Me: You talked in some of our earlier emails about feeling vaguely embarrassed about your love for the show. Why do you think that is?

Katherine: I’ve often felt puzzled by my love of The Archers. Why do I love this epic-running radio drama about an English farming village? It’s not clear to me. I guess I feel embarrassed because it’s so emphatically uncool. And perhaps because it’s about an aspect of English life — village life, rural life — that is totally alien to me; and is clearly an idealisation of it. But I think some of my attachment to it might be because, moving to the UK as an adult and feeling very disoriented, trying to figure out how this place worked, it functioned as some kind of of bizarre resource, an odd prop. I think it wittingly and unwittingly sheds (an often distorted) light on class dynamics in the UK. I didn’t grow up around many English people or Brits; the class realities of the UK came to me in this kind of distorted way, just as so much British culture came to me through these sporadic things on radio or TV or music (I’ve written about this in relation to music here). I think it’s an odd puzzle it would have all added up to. I think in listening to it, I was somehow trying to map something for myself about this country that is both my heritage and not.

Read Me: Do you nonetheless have friends or family who also listen to The Archers? Do you talk to them about it?

Katherine: When I was on Twitter, especially ages ago, in the early 2010s when it was more or less fun, I’d have hilarious exchanges with people about The Archers. A friend tweeted something like ‘Jesus Christ, Justin would you clear your FACKING throat’ which I still think about every time he speaks. I loved following the hashtags, it was hugely entertaining. Now those days are over, I sometimes message with a couple of other writers who are obsessed with it. I sometimes talk about it with Charlotte Higgins, who wrote a great Long Read about it, describing it as a ‘durational artwork’. Honestly the only thing I miss about Twitter is the Archers chat. I’d set up some kind of Whatsapp group to have Archers chat if I could bear Whatsapp groups, which I can’t. (Though if anyone reading this wants to get in touch to chat about The Archers, please do. I have theories about what happened on New Year’s Eve with George.)

Read Me: Do you have favourite characters?

Katherine: I love Chelsea, she’s hugely endearing — such a mixture of grown-up and still so young, she touches a tender spot in me. I have a soft spot for Brian, which is a bit embarrassing; he’s so unbearable but also inevitably charming. Fallon I find very touching, too; she has a dignity and seriousness combined with a capacity for enjoyment that I admire. (She reminds me of a good friend of mine, too; that’s the other thing, there’s of course tons of transference to all these voices.) Linda is so loveable despite her irritations. I love the intergenerational moments, like the other night when Linda (in her 70s?) was advising Ruari (in his 20s?) to not use a gift to Paul (his love interest) as a cover for an apology. If you need to apologise to someone, just apologise sincerely; don’t mix it up with a present. Good advice, no? I really dislike Helen, Tom, and Natasha. They wind me up massively.

Read Me: Do you listen live, when it’s on, or on demand, when you want to?

Katherine: I mostly listen back to it, though I’m rarely more than a few days behind. I often listen while cooking (like my mum did, I guess), or while getting ready for bed. When I manage to listen live, I feel quite excited. I very rarely listen outside of the house, I’ve just realised. It’s really linked to home for me.

Read Me: Do you imagine that you’ll always listen to The Archers?

Katherine: I think so. I can’t imagine not listening to it. When I’m away and can’t listen for a while, I feel a bit weird and jittery. If the BBC goes under, I’ll go mad.

Today’s episode of The Archers (“there’s a change of heart at the Bull”) already went out once but will broadcast again at 7pm GMT.

I didn’t realise until after the interview that this year marks The Archers’ 75th anniversary — I seriously hadn’t meant to be this timely. Celebratory activities include a re-enactment of the soap’s first episode and a live touring show.

Thanks!