By ALEX DOYLE - SENIOR SHOWBUSINESS REPORTER
Published: | Updated:
It has tackled everything from steamy affairs and custody battles to modern slavery and even coercive control.
And tonight, as it keeps pace with the times, The Archers will feature its first lesbian wedding.
Some six million fans are expected to listen to the 75-year-old radio drama as farmer Pip Archer marries Home Farm manager Stella Pryor – one of its largest audiences of the digital era.
‘I didn’t find it surprising at all,’ she said. ‘Interesting? Oh hell yeah! It’s quite something to be involved in... I just think that’s pretty cool to be involved in.’
Long-time listener Ruth Taylor, 32, said: ‘It’s so wonderful to finally see a same-sex couple at the heart of Ambridge. It’s made the show feel much more relevant and my friends and I are tuning in together for the big day.’
The Archers has long attracted large audiences, with the radio drama hitting more than nine million listeners at its peak and regularly topping the BBC Sounds on-demand charts.
In 2006, it featured its first gay marriage when Adam Macy (played by Andrew Wincott) and Ian Craig (played by Stephen Kennedy) entered into a civil partnership only a year after they became legal. They later married.
However, tonight’s drama will attract little of the controversy that television’s first pre-watershed lesbian kiss did in 1994.
Some six million fans are expected to listen to the 75-year-old radio drama as farmer Pip Archer (played by Daisy Badger above) marries Home Farm manager Stella Pryor
The episode of soap opera Brookside featured actresses Anna Friel and Nicola Stephenson and dominated headlines for days.
Meanwhile, the BBC looks set to move recording of The Archers out of Birmingham as part of its brutal cost-cutting measures.
It decided not to go ahead with building a recording studio in Digbeth’s The Tea Factory, which is set to be the corporation’s new Birmingham headquarters.