Friday, November 8, 2024

Fearless and unknowable: Peggy from The Archers was the queen of British radio

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When news reached me that Peggy Woolley had passed away my first thought was: “OMG Hilda Ogden! Which poor sentimental sucker is going to be landed with horrible hissy (and scratchy and bitey) Hilda Ogden?” Hilda O is – was – Peggy’s cantankerous cat, much-feared by family, friends and even Alistair the village vet. Like her mistress she was an acquired taste, ruling the roost wherever she went and leaving all around quaking, lest they provoke her very visible displeasure. 

It is of course June Spencer, who played Peggy for an astonishing 71 years (presumably down to all the fresh Borsetshire air) who has died at the grande dame age of 105. Although she hasn’t actually been on the programme since 2022 when she recorded her final episode at her home, the character was never officially killed off. Indeed thanks to the antisocial antics of Hilda Ogden – never simply called Hilda, unwarranted informality being among the great many things of which Peggy disapproved – Peggy’s name has remained on everyone’s lips, including Khalil Malik. You know, rapscallion son of the new doctor? 

Now at this stage, you may be wondering why I am referring to these fictional characters and indeed this make-believe moggy as though they were real. That’s because, for those of us who follow The Archers, they really do feel like family. And Peggy Woolley was the most authentic of them all – by a country mile. 

Yes, she could be snobbish but she could also be unexpectedly kind. Some of her views were reactionary – pace her horror when the village got a female vicar – but her forward-thinking passion for (and investment in) rewilding was as surprising as it was visionary. There was a three-dimensionality, a complexity to her character that stemmed from a lifetime of experience and possessed all the authority that comes with age. When she spoke, everybody listened – even if they didn’t always like what she had to say. 

She seemed ancient when I started listening way back in the 1980s as a 14-year-old – after all she was in her 60s and both too posh and purse-lipped to warm to. But down the years I grew to respect her as the matriarch of the hermetically sealed world that is Ambridge and indeed of British radio per se. Her character Peggy was originally an outsider from London, who worked as a barmaid in The Bull. Her ignorance of rural ways meant she could ask the most basic of questions and then get quite lengthy technical replies from the men. Always the men. Thus she was crucial to The Archers brief; it was made in collaboration with Defra and designed to dispense farming advice to its listeners while also educating townies about the countryside. 

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