On Sunday 14 May, 1950, a cast of actors assembled in a Birmingham studio to record the pilot episode of a new radio drama set in an English farming community. Perhaps they thought little of it. The next day they were back recording a serialisation of something that probably seemed weightier and more significant – George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. But without much fanfare or even noticeable enthusiasm from BBC bosses, the drama was commissioned, and began regular transmission on the following New Year’s Day. The Archers, a six-day-a-week ritual on BBC Radio 4, is now the longest-running soap in the world. But with the death of actor June Spencer, aged 105, the final link with that pilot is broken.
Give or take a brief break when her children were small, Spencer was a lynchpin of The Archers from that first appearance as Peggy – a cockney girl out of her natural habitat in the countryside, driven to distraction by her husband Jack Archer – until the final episodes she recorded in 2022. Spencer’s voice accompanied the people of Britain from postwar rationing and the tail-end of the horse-drawn plough through the utter transformation of British culture, society and agriculture, the ostensible subject of the programme. The Archers began three decades after the creation of BBC radio. The following 70 years saw the rise of television, the emergence of commercial channels and satellite, and the triumph of the internet, streaming and social media. Through that media revolution, Peggy’s voice – chiding, comforting, exasperated and loving by turns – endured, losing only its London twang.
Spencer, who was also a skilled comic turn and a writer of sketches and satire, represented a now-lost age of repertory actors, for whom absolute accuracy and complete flexibility were prized skills. At times in The Archers she was required to play different parts with different accents in the same scene. When I interviewed her in 2020 – on a video call, mid-pandemic – she was immaculately coiffed and spoke with the pin-sharp elocution of an actor trained in a different age. She said that in the programme’s early days, when she was the member of the drama repertory company embedded in the BBC’s Midland Region, “We would rehearse scene by scene, then record the whole episode in one go. If anyone made a mistake, they’d be very unpopular – you’d have to go right back to the beginning and record the whole thing again. That didn’t happen very often because we were used to going on air live. There was practically no television so we had it all our own way. There was lots of lovely work.” Even interviewed at a distance, through a screen, she sparkled. Spencer was a star and a legend.
Unlike modern TV soaps, The Archers does not burn through characters. They are people who breathe and age, who are born and die, at the same pace as their listeners. Not invariably but frequently, they are played by the same actors for decades. They do not exist for their audiences solely in the moment of listening, but perhaps even more solidly, in the memory – unseen but familiar, even intimate, companions to lives. Time, the most powerful ingredient of the show, gives the characters a sort of magical resonance that enables them to ride out patches of iffy writing. Sometimes, in fact, periods of inconsistency might actually add to their naturalism: few real people are quite as internally congruous as tidy-minded writers are apt to make them.
Spencer’s Peggy Archer was a case in point. Over decades she became her knotty, contradictory self: a Londoner who had naturalised to country life; a tough-minded woman who ran a business and raised three children despite her alcoholic first husband, Jack Archer; a woman of traditional values who was apt to boycott the local church (notably when there was a female vicar); at times an imperious matriarch; the soul of kindness; an indulgent owner of a series of cats, latterly the vicious Hilda, whose yowling and meowing are occasionally heard on air. Spencer’s tenderest moments on The Archers were perhaps a decade ago, when her character tended her second husband, Jack Woolley, through Alzheimer’s, caring for him as she herself had done for her husband Roger not so long before. Spencer’s character now silently outlives the real woman whose voice will for ever vibrate in the minds and memories of those who have loved The Archers.