Sybil Ruscoe: ‘The Archers has to change. We want to remain relevant’

At first glance, it looked like another clunky attempt by the BBC to attract younger listeners. The Archers’ new farming and countryside adviser was to be a former Radio 1 DJ and Top of the Pops presenter.

Such suspicions weren’t helped when the new girl, Sybil Ruscoe, came up with the idea of an Ambridge Eurovision talent contest with a guest appearance by former X Factor contestant Rylan Clark. There was a time when such cameos were reserved for the likes of Princess Margaret and Judi Dench.

But if Ruscoe’s eye-catching appointment last spring was all about refreshing what is the world’s longest-running continuous drama, then it appears to be working a treat. While recent quarterly figures show Radio 4’s audience dropping – the flagship Today programme lost 800,000 listeners in a year – The Archers is the top-performing on-demand offering on the BBC Sounds app. It’s also one of the most sought-after in the under-35 age-group.

Might The Archers have something to teach the rest of the network about changing with the times?

Ruscoe, who made her name in the late 1980s as part of Simon Mayo’s ‘crew’ on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and went on to be the first woman to present cricket on television with Channel 4 in the Noughties, shies away from any such grandiose claims. Instead, she insists after her first 12 months in the post, that she is all about continuity rather than any sort of radical, youth-orientated overhaul – though she does list younger characters George Grundy and Brad Horrobin as among her personal favourites, along with Brad’s mother Tracy and her fiancé Jazzer McCreary.

“The Archers is like an oak tree. It was rooted in BBC drama 70 years ago and, as it has grown, the programme’s branches have spread, but it remains relevant, character-led drama with the countryside as one of the biggest characters,” she says.

Sitting in a café perched on a Cotswold hillside above Shipton-under-Wychwood, 62-year-old Ruscoe maintains that, for all the metropolitan glitz of her broadcasting CV (Top of the Pops, she recalls, was “excruciating”), she has always been a countryside type at heart. And hence an Archers listener.

“It really started properly when I moved to London to work on Radio 1 and was missing being in rural Shropshire where I grew up. Whenever I was driving back home to Wem I would switch on The Archers in the car.”

For the past 16 years, home has been in the picture-postcard Cotswolds’ market town of Stow-on-the-Wold, where she has lived with her husband, the Telegraph’s former athletics correspondent Tom Knight (they met when she was writing a cricket column for the paper). Does that mean that she is part of the Chipping Norton set, made famous by David Cameron when prime minister and including his guru Steve Hilton, Blur’s Alex James and other media types?

“Absolutely not.” She looks momentarily offended. “Me and my friends all find them hilarious in their posh wellies and Barbours and Land Rovers. The reality of living here is, yes, there are some beautiful places, and some rich people, but there is also lots of poverty.

“The increasing number of Airbnbs, for example, is causing a housing shortage. Buses are few and far between. It has its challenges.” This more grounded picture of what the countryside is really like has been informing the storylines she has been feeding into Archers scripts. What got her the job – rather than her time on Radio 1 – was her much lower-profile stint as a presenter and reporter since 2013 on Radio 4’s early-morning Farming Today show.

“At Farming Today, I’d spend my time talking to farmers, food producers, industry experts, and that is what I am doing now, listening to what they are telling me, and going on visits to farms. Next month I’m meeting Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers Union, on her farm.”

What about a trip to nearby Diddly Squat Farm, created by Jeremy Clarkson and the real star of the Amazon Prime series Clarkson’s Farm? “I haven’t been there yet, but the farmers I meet absolutely love Jeremy’s programme,” she says. “Anything that shows the reality of farming, anything that connects people with where food comes from, that is a good thing.”

Among the Archers’ storylines inspired by her extended network of farming contacts was the ‘Soiled Pants’ saga last year that involved a cross-section of the Ambridge regulars. “I’d been talking to an estate manager near Tewkesbury about something he’d been involved in, where people buried their white cotton underpants in their soil, left them for a few weeks and then dug them up. If they had loads of holes in them, it was a good sign. It meant there was plenty of good bacteria and fungi in the soil chomping through the pants.”

It is, she reflects, a good example of how to dramatise a current key issue in farming. “Food security is extremely important and in The Archers we’ve tried to cover it by talking about regenerative agriculture [an approach to farming that promotes soil fertility]. There will be no food security if we don’t look after our soil.” As she knows well, she points out, because she has her own allotment, growing her own veg.

Food security, of course, is high on the political agenda. How far does The Archers get drawn into the heated political debate going on around farming at the moment, covering everything from Brexit, visas for seasonal workers, solar farms and rewilding?

“The Archers isn’t Farming Today, or the Today programme or Newsnight. We are not current affairs. We are a drama. We reflect what is happening on farms by finding the drama.”

That, after all, is The Archers’ original mission. The idea for the series came from a Lincolnshire farmer, Henry Burtt. In 1948, at a Ministry of Agriculture meeting about increasing food production, Burtt said that the best way to get messages out to smaller farms would be an agricultural version of the BBC’s popular daily radio serial about crime-solving special agent Dick Barton. Godfrey Baseley, then an agricultural producer for the BBC, took up the idea. Three years later the first episode of The Archers was broadcast, with input from the Ministry of Agriculture. This education-through-entertainment model has inspired shows around the world.

But the charge has been levelled in recent years that on occasion Ambridge has become too political. Around the time of Britain’s exit from the European Union, several papers ran headlines accusing it of taking an anti-Brexit stance.

“I wasn’t involved then,” Ruscoe says, “but my whole career in journalism, since I started at 17 as an apprentice on the Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser, has been about telling both sides of the story, about balance, and about being impartial.” That doesn’t mean, though, that The Archers can’t reflect on the political hot potatoes related to farming around at the moment, she explains. “I know farmers locally who can’t find people to pick fruit. I know country pubs who can’t find workers. So, while you can’t be political, you have to cover the stories behind the politics.”

And there is, she says, plenty of material around. “There is a quiet agricultural industrial revolution going on. We are at a new stage, and with every change there are going to be casualties.”

Including here on her doorstep in the Cotswolds. “We’ve seen in this area some older farmers who, in the face of all the changes and challenges, say, ‘I can’t be bothered with it’ and sell up. Larger farms are taking over their land.”

She refuses to be gloomy. “I also see the new generation coming through – I speak to a lot of them – who are passionate about caring for the soil and see the soil as the starting point for food security.” Her contact with that younger generation of farmers brings us back naturally to the demographic of Archers’ listeners – and characters. On Radio 4’s Feedback programme in November last year, one long-time fan complained that “wooing a new generation of trendy young Archers’ listeners” with storylines about younger characters had caused them to switch off.

The debate had been prompted by 17-year-old Chelsea Horrobin choosing to have an abortion after getting pregnant during a one-night stand with Ben Archer. “Recent episodes sound like they’ve been written by fifth formers” bemoaned another Feedback contributor. “Please let The Archers retain its USP of a gentler life.”

Ruscoe has heard plenty of similar complaints, often face-to-face in the street as she goes about life in the Cotswolds. “One of the great things about The Archers is that everyone has an opinion about it. Generally older listeners want more older characters and younger listeners want younger characters.

“I like it when people stop me in the street. I see it as like being a journalist on a local paper. I want to hear. We are a public service broadcaster. Everybody pays for us and they are entitled to their opinion.”

But The Archers – like everything else, on Radio 4 and in life – has to change, she believes.

“Ambridge has to be like every village in the countryside. Things changes, people die, new people are born or move there. Often we don’t want change, but it comes anyway. And as a drama that wants to remain relevant, The Archers has to change too.”