This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Not all actors cast as romantic partners grow fond of each other, but on a long-running drama like The Archers where they could be yoked together for decades, it helps to be friends. Daisy Badger as Pip Archer and Lucy Speed as Stella Pryor, the tough farm manager, certainly are. From the moment they appear at our bridal photoshoot, it’s clearly a partnership made in heaven, as well as the heads of scriptwriters. They joke at the tidy farmyard and swap news about their children, Badger reporting on her latest baby while nonchalantly manoeuvring a breast-pump beneath a big black sweatshirt emblazoned “Liberté Egalité Sororité”.
Speed, 14 years the elder in real life just as Stella is in Ambridge, is happily distracted by a large, friendly horse. “I used to earn rides by working at a stables,” she says. They clearly find fun in the fictional courtship and the frisson of sensation about The Archers’ first lesbian wedding. The chaps beat them to it, of course: in 2006, only a year after civil partnerships became legal, Adam and Ian had theirs and the word “marriage” was used. Traditionalist fans expressed even more outrage than they had over the woman vicar and thousands threatened to turn off.
Time has moved on, and neither of the same-sex brides expects much outrage. As it happens, both Badger and Speed are in real life happily married to men and have children, so I did wonder whether in these censorious times of identity politics either of them felt uneasy about playing a sexual orientation that isn’t their own?
Badger reflects, “To be honest, Lucy, I thought Stella was pegged for an affair with Ruth, when you first started.” She’s right: speculation was all over social media about the strong-minded, single 40-something woman getting close to Pip’s mother, the long-married Ruth Archer.
Speed says, “For some reason in long-running characters I’m always made a lesbian. I remember when I started in The Archers, working for Brian [Charles Collingwood], he said, ‘You do know that I have a long list of notches on my bedstead?’ And I thought, Stella doesn’t seem that type. I didn’t immediately think gay, just that she’s a career farmer, brilliantly bright.”
But as the storyline developed, she had no qualms at all about depicting a lesbian. She has little time for militant identity-bubbles. “I’m a bit un-modern that way. When I started as a child actor at the National Theatre in the mid-80s, I was allowed to wander around behind the dresser. He was gay, some of the girls were lesbians, they’d joke about how you shouldn’t shave your legs because you get stubble. I just absorbed all creatures, all walks of life.
“As an actor it was my job to absorb and like all kinds of people. So I feel sad that we’re now hitting the idea that we shouldn’t play one another. Our job is to reach the audience, give one person’s viewpoint so that everyone sees something in the character they can identify with. It’s our job to make something that isn’t us, but might be all of us.”
As for Badger, how did she feel about Pip falling for a woman? This after all is the Pip Archer who slept with Toby Fairbrother, had a child by him even after they’d supposedly broken up, and seemed better suited to his brother Rex anyway. “Ah, yes, the wrong-Fairbrother-brother story!” she cries. “I guess Pip was just growing up. I took over the part from Helen Monks in 2014, right out of Lamda [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art], so I never had Pip’s adolescence, those growing-up bits. Pip takes the world quite seriously now.”
From an elder-sister perspective Speed adds, “Yes, when you get to my age, you look back at yourself. In my 20s I thought I was grown up, but even when I had my kids, a geriatric-mother, gosh I was ignorant. Pip is still very young.”
Badger, whose home is in a village in Worcestershire, agrees for another reason, too. “Rural kids sometimes stay younger longer: living at home, working on the family farm, staying in the village. Younger but in some ways more capable, doing jobs on the farm before you’ve even had breakfast.”
Does the older, experienced Stella wear the trousers in this fictional partnership? “Well, she is a manager.” admits Speed. “She does manage people, with calm and confidence. She managed Brian, manages Justin. But this romance has come out of the blue for her.”
And how about real life: does Speed, with half a lifetime’s career behind her, manage and boss young Daisy as they work together in the studio? They laugh even more at that. “When it comes to The Archers, you’re the expert, right?” says Speed. “You were there seven years before me. I’ve learnt all my life to ask more experienced cast members, let them offer wisdom. Inside, I’m still the child on set: get there early, behave well, be quiet, prepare, do my work.”
Both have been happy so far with the plotline and say that Archers’ writers never approach actors about a storyline unless they think they’d be OK with it. “When it got romancey, Stella and Pip getting closer, it was fine,” says Badger. “Sometimes we do ask what’s going to happen in the future and often the writers say, ‘We don’t know yet.’ ”
In a 75-year-old continuing drama (OK, soap) there’s time for any character to swerve about a bit. All actors of course relish conflict and rows. So might Pip, once the wedding is over, one day revert and run off with a man, even if he’s not a Fairbrother?
“Aaaah!” they cry together. “Yes, that would be quite spicy,” says Badger happily. “Or it might be that Stella goes off. She did once mention a previous relationship being difficult.”
“I think,” says Speed gravely, “that Stella worries whether Pip was making the right decision. There’s bravery in coming out, finding yourself, falling for another woman.”
They await events as interestedly as any listener. But both have a firmness I’ve seen before in this cast, defending their idea of the character even if it might mean defiance. Badger did flinch at one scene, “Pip getting ready to meet Stella, fussing about her hair and all that. Girlish. Pip had never done that before in the show.”
Similarly, has Speed ever worried that the script-writers might suddenly turn Stella flighty, irresponsible, emotional? Her response is calmly Stella-feminist. “Yes, I have. Sometimes in long-running things you come in as a strong, competent woman and then you’re supposed to crumble into an emotional wreck. And I feel strongly about all the women I represent: if they start sensible and capable like Stella or Natalie [she had years in EastEnders], I want them to pull themselves through the rocks and troubles. Like the real women I know, still the same but wiser, stronger. Not turning into something archetypically feminine. Sometimes women are made too one-dimensional on screen because it’s easy.”
And so to the wedding preparations, which were threatened with derailment over Stella’s desire to keep it “stylish” without small children being invited. “But we crumbled quickly, didn’t we?” says Badger sadly. “Isn’t Natasha terrifying! She’s so good! But I suppose it was just a nod to people who do make that rule about children at weddings.”
Now it seems that not only Rosie but Seren, Nova, Xander and Martha will be roaring about unstylishly on the day, equipped with giant dominoes and other mildewed playthings from Archer cellars. Rosie even seems to have talked the poor brides into arriving with a naff fake unicorn, which is not stylish at all when, like Stella, you’re over 40.
“Stella finds the big wedding thing a bit awkward,” says Speed. Badger adds, “They’ve got farms to run, remember.” Neither is in real life a natural bridezilla. Speed’s big day “was very laid-back, no wedding plan, didn’t have flowers, just a London wedding. I said bring kids or don’t but I’m not going to cater specially – kids just pick at stuff.” Badger says her favourite wedding picture was of “me on a bench, pumping” – she was breastfeeding on that occasion, too. “Yes, there were children running about. Lovely.”
Our time is nearly up. Stylists and photographer hover, ready to beautify them. “We’ll cringe,” they agree, though Badger says she quite looks forward to it because, with two young children, “it’s very different from my daily life”. Speed on the other hand has “hated having my photo taken ever since childhood. My dad once said, ‘Keep your mouth shut in photos because you’ve got teeth like a row of bombed houses.’ Dressing up for pictures is not my favourite thing, don’t even like the hairdresser. I bet Stella is like that, too. Lord Lichfield took my picture once. They put red lipstick on me and I just looked weird...”
They’re troupers, though. Radio drama may exist chiefly in our imaginations, but everyone likes a wedding photo. So off they go to be beautified. Grown-up Stella gets sleek tailoring, Pip a flouncing girly laciness. Mercifully, though, only the tractor is red, not the lipstick.
The Archers is on Sunday 7pm on Radio 4
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