You can keep your theme parks, I’m off to Ambridge

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/25/you-can-keep-your-theme-parks-i-am-off-to-ambridge

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National mythology is hard for the British to package and sell. And we appear to like it that way. A perennial squeamishness about any effort to label our shared nature, or inherent characteristics, is almost a matter of pride in itself.

From quaint Cath Kidston designs to the noisy Victorian jingoism of Last Night of the Proms, the reaction is often suspicious. It is a reflex partly born of a natural superiority complex, but which surely also stems from the truth that Britain is actually four nations with varied cultural traditions and a pretty unpleasant imperial past. Let the tourists buy the mugs and tea towels. We don’t want them.

But now, at last, there is somewhere to go for a bit of patriotic solace with a small “p”. A place that is comfortingly insubstantial and uncommercial: Ambridge. For while Americans cling to their notional wild frontiers and faked-up western saloon bars, the British will always have Lakey Hill and The Bull, staple landmarks of The Archers, radio’s longest running soap opera. In fact, the world’s longest running soap opera.

This truly eccentric attempt at brand extension may be the best encapsulation of British character yet

Next month this radio drama that notoriously relies on plotlines so slow burning you can barely sniff the smoke, and which gathers in a monthly harvest of improbable misunderstandings big enough to fill a barn at Bridge Farm, is to open its doors to the public. The Archers tour inside the Birmingham studios where the show is made will offer fans a look behind the scenes and a chance to understand how the magic of the Ambridge flower and produce show and the single wicket competition are brought to scintillating life each year.

Except, of course, there are no scenes to go behind. The Archers only happens in the minds of its devoted Radio 4 audience. The public bar of The Bull has a different shade of Artex ceiling and wood panelling for each of the listeners who download the weekly omnibus podcast. And the real Lynda Snell (stop reading if you are attached to your own version of Ambridge) is actually a tall redhead.

So instead of being invited to have a photograph taken sitting on the Central Perk sofa, as visitors to a mock-up of the set of Friends can do at the Warner Bros studio in Los Angeles, tourists in the Birmingham studio can simply hear how strips of audiotape are rustled to sound like hay.

It is a brilliantly deconstructed kind of fan experience; a theme park for real grownups. No need to be filmed flying over Hogwarts, thanks to CGI, when you can survey the MDF board on which all the various doorbells for the homes that circle Ambridge’s imaginary village green are mounted.

And it really has to be that way. Because Ambridge is not a National Trust property, frozen in its historical context; nor is it like the fictional world of St Mary Mead, the rural idyll Agatha Christie created for Miss Marple. No, Ambridge changes with the rest of the country. There is a weekly karate class now, after all, as well as some sustainable yurts peddling mindfulness.

What makes this new Archers experience both so pointless and so perfect is that there is nothing much to see – and what there is actively undermines the spell cast by the actors’ performances.

That is why this BBC enterprise, a truly eccentric attempt at brand extension, may be the best encapsulation of British character yet. It certainly suits a nation that specialises in celebrating what is not there, from lamenting the lack of bees and songbirds in our gardens to vainly predicting “barbecue summers” and World Cup victories. Now Ambridge and the surrounding verdant vales of Borsetshire can offer visitors to the Midlands a mirage of bucolic togetherness that is appropriately and properly utterly intangible.