Billed initially, and ever since, as “an everyday story of country folk”, The Archers started life as part drama, part public information programme. When it began transmission in the early 1950s, Britain was still under post-war rationing. Most meat, for example, didn’t come off the ration until the summer of 1954. The Archers was conceived as a fun way of imparting advice to farmers on improving yields during these times of relative scarcity, and indeed the catchment area of its pilot series was limited to an area of the Midlands.

The series became part of the regular schedules on New Year’s Day, 1951. Broadcast at first on the old BBC Light Programme (the forerunner of Radio 2), it eventually made the transition to the Home Service (now Radio 4). So importantly was its factual remit treated that the Ministry of Agriculture, as it then was, was involved as script consultant from its inception right up until the time of Ted Heath’s government in 1972.

It’s fair to say that the image that non-aficionados have of The Archers is of sleepy rural types whose conversation might briefly depart from such matters as composting regimes for long enough to speculate as to whether one of the young girls in the village might be interested in one of the young lads, only to find, 15 episodes later, that she wasn’t.

Death and destruction

It is certainly true that the village of Ambridge moves at its own pace, but the show has never been any stranger to dramatic turns of events, as was amply demonstrated on the evening of September 22, 1955, when one of its founding characters, Grace Archer, died after running into a burning stable to rescue her horse, Midnight.

In an era when TV drama serials routinely kill off their characters in any number of lurid ways, it may be hard to imagine the impact that this fictional event had at the time. The nation was struck dumb, united in grief in a way that wouldn’t be surpassed until the death of Churchill a decade later. Contributors to a BBC comment site, recalling the event 50 years on, spoke of the sense of personal devastation many felt. “I went into the pub,” one man remembers, “and they were all quiet. ‘What's happened?’ I asked. ‘Haven't you heard?’ they all said.”

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/backstage/grace_memory2.shtml

There was a reason for the script editors’ apparent cruelty, though. Grace’s death was timed to coincide with the launch that same evening of ITV, the first-ever commercial television station. When ITV celebrated its own 50th anniversary in 2005, it received a card of congratulations signed “Grace Archer” from the actress who had played her, Ysanne Churchman.

Ambridge has continued to move, if not with, then only a little behind, the times. Some listeners have found plotlines that turn on issues such as drug dependency or rape a bit like strong drink – a little goes a long way – but the consensus seems to be that these issues have been sensitively treated. There are characters of Asian background in Ambridge these days, as well as a troubled gay relationship between Adam Macy and the Grey Gables chef Ian Craig. But the Borsetshire world still revolves as surely as it ever did around lambing and strawberry-picking, the local politics of the parish council and vegetable competitions at the village fete.

Making the show

Despite its countryside setting, the show is actually recorded in the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. Each 13-minute episode takes around two hours to make. Shows are recorded up to six weeks in advance, with references to ultra-topical events in current affairs occasionally edited in on the day of transmission.

The show’s longest-serving actor is Norman Painting, who has been playing Phil Archer (originally married to Grace) since it all began. Now 82, Norman was also a scriptwriter on the programme between 1966 and 1982, having written nearly 1,200 episodes.

Name that tune

The "dum di dum di dum di dum" theme tune, recognised the world over as the sound of rural England, is by Yorkshire composer Arthur Wood. It is a maypole dance entitled “Barwick Green” from an orchestral suite, My Native Heath, composed in 1924.

• If we’ve given you a taste for The Archers, you will find it broadcast in six short episodes a week, from Sunday to Friday, going out just after the news at 7.02pm, and repeated at 2.02pm the following day (with the exception of Saturday). An omnibus edition is aired on Sundays at 10am.