Showing posts with label The Archers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Archers. Show all posts
Nancy Banks-Smith on Helen and The Archers
The wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith has written a piece on The Archers for the Guardian. I assume it will be in tomorrow's G2.
She begins:
My grandmother – now, we’re going back a bit – used to describe pregnancy delicately as "being confined". It’s a phrase that suits Helen very well. Ever since she became pregnant, she has been a wraithlike presence, a pale face at the window of Blossom Hill Cottage, lank-haired and wearing the charity-shop clothes her husband, Rob, prefers, making occasional disconcerting distressed forays into an oblivious Ambridge. Wilkie Collins would have spat on his hands and whistled.
This sorry situation burst into flames recently when a toad-in-the-hole caught fire. Who Torched the Toad escalated into a full-scale fight, with Helen showing a flash of spirit, Rob hitting her and five-year-old Henry, entering into the spirit of things, shoving a small school friend called Xanthe. Though, frankly, I think any child called Xanthe is just asking to be shoved.
Hear Lynda Snell in Market Harborough tomorrow
Exciting news from the Harborough Mail:
The annual Celebration of Christmas concert will be held on Saturday (December 19) at the parish church of St Dionysius, Market Harborough ...
The reader this year is Carole Boyd, Lynda Snell from ‘The Archers’ (and all the female voices in Postman Pat among many other credits!).
The concert starts at 7.30pm and the doors open at 6.45pm. Tickets are available from Tim Blades 07976 757352 or MH Music in Market Harborough.
There will also be some tickets available on the door but organisers recommend that people get there early for them.
A Box of Delights on the radio in the 1960s
Christmas is coming and a lot of people are preparing for it by watching their Box of Delights DVD.
This time last year I wrote:
my heart was lost to A Box of Delights some time in the 1960s, when I heard a radio adaptation.Since then BBC Genome has been invented and I can work out when exactly that was.
It must have been on 29 December 1968 or 28 December 1969.
Looking for the cast list (it was the same production for both broadcasts) it is noticeable that Kay Harker and Peter Jones were played by women. In Kay's case by the well known actress Patricia Hayes.
It was once common practice for women to play boys in BBC radio drama. I remember Jock Gallagher telling me that Judy Bennett, who played Shula in The Archers, was widely fancied by the production crew. So it was rather disconcerting when she put on her gruff small boy's voice and became the young Adam.
Today Kay and Peter would be played by boys. Interestingly, if you go back to a Children's Hour radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights from 1948 and you find that boys played those parts then too.
