For as long as I can remember, I’ve counted myself amongst the fortunate few with one foot in the city and the other – wellie-clad – entrenched deep in a muddy country field. When the roar of traffic, the crowds and the surfeit of cafés luring me, in my unbounded weakness, towards their £4 coffees become too much, off I scuttle to the quiet respite of rural life.

The draw is the place: an England that may never have existed, but which offers the consoling illusion of order

The draw is the place: an England that may never have existed, but which offers the consoling illusion of order

Except that, as any non-reclusive villager knows – or perhaps especially the reclusive ones – village life is rarely quiet. There are feuds and affairs. Financial calamities blight lives, disobliging livestock thwart those who would make their living from them, while resentments simmer dangerously over the running of local institutions. People drink too much, and they marry the wrong people. Occasionally they even tumble off roofs.

I am privy to all of the above because, unlike most town-and-country mice, my bucolic bolthole is not confined to weekends and holidays. I retreat to its hedgerows and the comforting whirr of agricultural machinery almost daily, although it’s true that I tarry there longer on a Sunday. There is, though, just one snag. My country pile does not exist in bricks and mortar – or, in fact, in reality. It lives inside my radio, and in my very psyche. Like millions of my fellow listeners, Ambridge and I go back to the cradle.

The Archers, now in its 75th year, first aired on the BBC Light Programme in 1951, its creator, Godfrey Baseley, inspired by the suggestion of a Lincolnshire farmer – Henry Burtt, may we bow down at his genius – for a ‘farming Dick Barton’, only without the violence. Farming, Burtt argued, supplied quite........

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