The Archers

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The Archers is a British soap opera in the form of a radio play on BBC Radio 4 . The radio series has been running for over 70 years, making it the oldest ongoing radio soap opera series in the world.

It tells the story of rural life in a fictional place called Ambridge in the fictional English county of Borsetshire. Borsetshire is said to be between Warwickshire and Worcestershire , in the West Midlands south of Birmingham . The Archer family is a farming family in Ambridge.

The series started on May 29, 1950 with a pilot season on the regional broadcaster Midlands Home Service , and since January 1, 1951, the BBC has broadcast an episode nationwide every weekday. The individual episodes are now broadcast from Sunday to Friday. More than 18,100 episodes had been produced by May 2017.

The series originally also served an educational mission by incorporating the modernization of rural life and the use of modern technology in agriculture into the plot. This approach was abandoned in 1972.

The series is broadcast every evening from Sunday to Friday at 7 p.m. local time on BBC Radio 4 and repeats at 2 p.m. the following day, except on Saturdays. On Sunday morning at 10 a.m. there is an omnibus edition that summarizes all the episodes of the previous week. There is also a podcast .

Alongside the news programs, the “Archers” are still the most frequently heard program on Radio 4. Every week around 5 million listeners follow the series of radio plays. In June 2007, "Archers" was also the online show with the highest audience rating, with over a million listeners.

A rose , the "Ambridge Rose", has been named after the fictional location where the series takes place .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The Archers January 1, 1951 . In: The BBC Story. Anniversaries . BBC website, accessed December 23, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b Frequently Asked Questions about the Archers. BBC website, accessed June 3, 2017.
  3. ↑ Neil Midgley: The Archers scores record ratings of over 5 m listeners . In: The Telegraph. August 5, 2012. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
  4. ^ Nicole Martin: The Archers online dwarfs Chris Moyles . In: The Telegraph. August 17, 2007. Retrieved February 24, 2012.