Green Imagined Land Ian Hislop's Olden Days

'What's the most important date in British history?

'1066 - the Battle of Hastings?

'1666 - the Great Fire of London?

'1966 then - England win the World Cup?

'What about 1851? Ring any bells? No?

'That's because it's one of the most overlooked

'but most significant moments of all.'

This is the summary of the 1851 census -

one of those great Victorian state-of-the-nation surveys.

And all the figures here relate to the number of people

living in towns and cities

as against those living in what it calls "the country parts".

And the important figure is the figure at the top here,

the totals for England and Wales.

The number of people living in the country - 8,936,800.

The number living in towns and cities - 8,990,809.

So, by a very small margin - about 50,000 or so -

there are more urban dwellers than rural dwellers.

1851 was a tipping point - the first time ever that a major nation

had become a predominantly urban nation.

And that changed everything - not just where we lived,

but how we lived, what jobs we did, what we thought of ourselves and,

most significantly, what we thought about the home that the majority

of us had just left and to which we would not return -

the countryside.

From that point on, a deeply-felt

but essentially nostalgic rural vision took hold.

The countryside increasingly became a refuge from troubling realities -

like national decline, world war and even our own mortality.

What we looked for in the countryside was often fanciful,

even downright eccentric.

But these rural reimaginings acted as a creative catalyst,

inspiring some of our most powerful art and best-loved literature.

The idealised vision of the countryside which emerged

in the 19th century had far more to do with what was going on

in the hearts and minds of the exiled and harassed city dwellers

than anything that was actually going on out in the shires.

But this romantic view of an unspoilt Arcadia -

a green and pleasant land - seized the Victorian imagination

and has dominated ours ever since.

Each generation has looked to the countryside for different reasons -

inspiration, consolation, or escape.

Whilst the city propels us into an uncertain future,

these green, unspoilt places take our hand and lead us back

to a simpler, more stable past.

So, where can we find the "olden days"?

Right here.

MUFFLED TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT

'In 1862, one of Britain's leading artists decided to

'escape from the city.

'Myles Birket Foster came from a family which ran

'one of the biggest beer-bottling companies in the world.

'But he had more highbrow ambitions

'and abandoned the family business for the life of an artist.

'The railway now reached deep into the Home Counties,

'and it was Surrey which was to become Birket Foster's muse.

'He understood what city-dwellers needed -

'a green balm for their weary souls.'

This is the Merry Harriers in the village of Hambledon.

Birket Foster's painting of the pub is one of his best-known works.

In the 19th century, Birket Foster was huge.

He was so popular that when Queen Victoria tried to buy a picture

she liked at an exhibition,

she found it was already sold, and the buyer refused to part with it.

She loved this stuff, and so did everybody else.

And what the Victorians really went for was an idealised,

sentimentalised vision of the countryside.

This is a classic Birket Foster, it's called The Country Inn,

and it was painted in 1863,

but it's already set in a receding, "olden days" past.

And all the Birket Foster cliches are here - the blue sky,

the sunshine - it's always summer in the village -

and everyone there is happy and relaxed and well fed.

Even the animals are well fed, the horses, the ducks,

the chickens, the pigs.

Interestingly, there is not a hint of modernity in the picture -

the artist has even taken out the road that actually

runs in front of the pub. So, there are no trains, there are no

new-fangled steam engines, nothing to disturb the peace

and tranquillity that the harassed Victorian city dwellers craved.

Birket Foster's paintings, with their antiquated haywains

and apple-cheeked maids, were the latest expression of a very

ancient idea in art and literature - the pastoral.

The point of the pastoral was to use the countryside to highlight

the evils of city living.

A rural utopia was contrasted with

an urban cess-pit of misery and vice.

But life out in the sticks wasn't exactly a bed of roses.

The tension between illusion and reality can be seen clearly

in Oakhurst Cottage in Hambledon -

a place Birket Foster painted again and again.

From the census of 1851, we know a little about the family that

lived in this cottage - the Nalders.

The head of the household was William, with his wife, Ann,

and his three children, William, Eliza, and Harriet.

William was a labourer, and we know from farm records that at one point

in 1851 he earned eight shillings from tying truss straws,

which means tying up bundles of hay.

At another point, in 1852, he earned one shilling and four pence for

rinsing bark - cleaning oak bark for use in local tanning yards.

It looks like he was a seasonal worker, which meant that he

was paid piecemeal, and in bad times not at all.

Many labourers and their families ended up in the dreaded workhouse.

It was a hard life, and sometimes a harsh one,

certainly one that was difficult to square

with Birket Foster's bucolic idyll.

Occasionally, even Birket Foster had to acknowledge reality.

Engravings of his paintings were used to illustrate

poems by Tom Taylor - a writer and editor of Punch magazine.

"The cottage-homes of England! Yes, I know

"How picturesque their moss and weather-stain,

"All these I know - know, too, the plagues that prey

"On those who dwell in these bepainted bowers:

"The foul miasma of their crowded rooms."

In his poem, Tom Taylor was claiming that thatched cottages

were in fact rural slums.

For once, Birket Foster's illustrations seemed

to confront this poverty.

The thatch on the cottages was unkempt.

In place of pretty young girls, there was a decrepit older woman.

There was even a scythe - a symbol of death and decay.

Birket Foster's Old Cottages illustrations proved

a fleeting brush with reality.

For the rest of his career, he kept up the fiction of a rural Arcadia.

The public lapped it up,

and rose-tinted images of the countryside

produced by Birket Foster and countless imitators

have been reproduced on calendars, Christmas cards, chocolate boxes

and coasters ever since.

But when Birket Foster died in 1899,

the Times obituary was a bit more sniffy.

It said, "From 1860 until the day of his death,

"his style never varied,

"his eye saw everything under the same convention -

"an exquisitely pretty convention, but one remote from all

"but the superficial and idyllic aspects of nature."

By the end of the 19th century, the real countryside was in crisis,

blighted by disease, failed harvests and, above all,

cheap imports which ruined many farmers.

People left their villages in increasing numbers.

Farmland turned to waste.

There was a growing feeling that the natural world itself

was under threat.

It was against this backdrop

that a band of mainly urban and middle class do-gooders launched

the modern conservation movement.

A host of different organisations emerged,

all dedicated to preserving the rural "olden days"

in its many forms.

Some battled to save Britain's wildest and most beautiful places.

Bird-lovers turned their attention to our most threatened breeds.

Others wanted to conserve not just the countryside,

but its ancient architectural treasures.

And then there were those who were determined to rescue

the culture of the English peasantry itself.

The man who spearheaded the folk music revival was the all-singing,

all-dancing musician Cecil Sharp - known, of course, as C Sharp.

By the early 20th century,

continental composers dominated the classical scene.

But Sharp was a fierce patriot.

He longed for tunes which would express the genius of the English.

ACCORDIAN MUSIC PLAYS

In 1903, he heard the song which would inspire

a home-grown musical revolution.

He was staying with his friend, Charles Marson,

who was the vicar of Hambridge in Somerset.

And the story goes he heard the gardener,

a man called John England - what a wonderful name for a folk

singer to have - singing a song called The Seeds of Love.

# I sowed the seeds of love

# And I sowed them in the spring

# I gathered them up in the morning so soon

# While the small birds do sweetly sing

# While the small birds do sweetly sing. #

And that day he took the song down, he arranged it,

then he performed it with a piano that night.

And that was really the turning point, in a way,

because it initiated a period of tremendous activity.

Between that period and his death, in 1924,

he collected about 5,000 pieces.

# One morning in the month of June

# Down by a rolling river... #

You might expect sentimental conservatives to get misty-eyed

about this stuff, but Sharp was very different.

He was an austere intellectual, a vegetarian and a socialist.

# Her cheeks were red, her eyes were brown... #

For him, folk music was the soundtrack

to more egalitarian times.

Sharp believed "peasant songs",

as he called them without a hint of self-consciousness,

could inspire social change in his own deeply divided age.

To find these authentic "peasant songs",

Sharp travelled round the country,

seeking out remote villages, supposedly untouched by modernity.

# How came you here so early... #

Sharp's insistence on the purity of his collection of folk songs

was potentially problematic, because most of the people from whom

he collected the songs had little idea where they'd got them from.

Sharp couldn't be sure of the age of the song,

which particular village it came from, or even if it was a genuinely

rural song or one borrowed from the city and then recycled later.

Because after 100 years of industrialisation,

urbanisation and the spread of the railways, it was open to

question whether an uncontaminated rural culture still existed.

Perhaps the only place you could be certain of finding

an unspoilt English peasant singing his bucolic ballad handed

down from generation to generation was in Sharp's own imagination.

Sharp and his friends are going out

to find this authentic music of old England.

What's happening in the modern England at the time?

The days of the Great Exhibition are behind us.

Germany and America are overtaking Britain.

You know, there's social problems.

When it comes to the Boer War, for example, you've got

loads of people just unfit to serve because they're not physically fit.

So you've got this whole notion of someone going into the towns

and the race deteriorating in the towns.

A lot of people are worried about the sort of society

that's been created by urbanisation and industrialism.

So there's a sense in which you can see this folk song/folk dance

movement as somehow an attempt to ameliorate that,

to give something back to the urban society

that's been lost from the rural society.

Quite idealistic, but nevertheless something people felt.

Ultimately he believes that it's going to be the material

for a sort of cultural regeneration of the country,

-we're all going to sing these songs and...

-Dance these dances.

..dance these dances and, you know, it's going to do us good.

# I had not the liberty to choose for myself

# Of the flowers that I should wear... #

Urban Britain fell in love with Sharp's rediscoveries

and by the early 20th century,

the country was in the grip of a huge folk music revival.

Sharp's programme of national regeneration

was about to receive a huge boost.

# There was a frog lived in a well

# Whipsee diddledee dandy dee... #

In 1906, The National Song Book

was published for use in elementary schools.

The Board of Education had decided that folk music was henceforth

to be included in the curriculum.

Schoolchildren, including myself,

were still being taught these folk songs as late as the 1960s.

The folk revival wasn't just a British phenomenon.

Other European countries also looked to the rural past

for the things which they felt made them unique.

All this dressing up looked harmless enough,

but it was one sign of a spirit of aggressive nationalism

which contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914.

In Britain, the countryside proved to be a potent recruitment tool.

More than 12 million posters were issued in the first two years

of the war, and many featured heart-warming vistas.

An idealised landscape of rolling hills and thatched cottages

reminded people of what was at stake.

This rural propaganda worked, even though many recruits

had never seen a thatched cottage in their lives.

No matter, this was the heart and soul of the whole nation,

and even kilted Highlanders agreed!

The landscape of the Western Front was very different.

Traumatised soldiers couldn't have felt further from home.

No wonder the "olden days" looked appealing by comparison.

FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

One of Cecil Sharp's legacies, alongside the revival of folk music,

was the rediscovery of folk dance.

Sharp had become a world expert.

Here he is in a film from 1912,

cutting a caper in his three-piece suit, although his half-poussettes

and hands-four weren't always perfectly executed.

For its aficionados, Morris dancing was the artistic

expression of what was known as Merrie England -

a mythical medieval golden age when life was a lot jollier.

For people disturbed by the tragic unravelling of the 20th century,

Merrie England was a symbol of everything

that their own age wasn't.

One of the most ardent advocates of Merrie England

was folk dance teacher Daisy Daking,

who was described by one contemporary as "London born,

"deadly efficient, three feet high."

In 1917, Miss Daking set off for northern France

on a special assignment - to rehabilitate wounded

and war-weary soldiers through Morris dancing.

FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

In Daisy Daking's mind, there was a certain amount of wishful thinking.

She imagined that most of the soldiers were country lads,

ploughboys in khaki, whereas, in fact,

most of them came from towns and cities.

They were more familiar with the music hall than the maypole.

Their favourite songs were foreign imports,

American hits like Down Home In Tennessee rather than traditional

English folk songs like Jenny Pluck Pears or Gathering Peascods.

Many of them wouldn't have known what a peascod was.

But Daisy Daking was on a mission.

"It is their own folk art," she said.

"Though they may not know it, it is in their blood."

And she was determined that they would learn to love Morris dancing.

FOLK MUSIC CONTINUES

The first Morris dances were not a great success -

the men were too shy to join in.

Miss Daking, however, had a solution...

"Remember to dig out the Australians first,

"as they are always ready for anything," she said.

"Pair them off with any Scots, as these are born dancers."

FOLK MUSIC CONTINUES

An eyewitness described one of Daking's classes...

"The dancers are none of them clumsy. On the contrary,

"considering the weight of their thick-soled boots,

"they're remarkably light on their feet.

"The popularity of these dances is accounted for by the fact that

"the movement and rhythm were evolved by their fathers,

"and are native to men of their race."

Morris dancing in the middle of a war seems ludicrous,

and Daisy Daking was perfectly aware of this.

She said that when she first tried to introduce it, people told her

she was being "somewhat silly".

There was Miss Daking telling war-weary troops that this

dance dates back to 1650, the time of Merrie England,

or asking them to imagine they were on a village green

back in Blighty, rather than in a hut on the Western Front.

But it worked.

As a reminder of an idealised home,

as a wholesome communal activity, or just as a distraction

from the horrors of war, Morris dancing caught on.

And the soldiers were very grateful.

Here's a beautiful tribute to Daisy Daking from some of those who

had taken part.

It says, "To Daisy Daking, from friends who keenly appreciate your

"successful efforts to arouse deep interest in English folk dancing."

And then there's a list of names - the Atkinsons, the Donnellys,

the Flemings, the Mackintoshes,

the Robertsons, so it goes on.

At one stage, 100 men a day were passing through her classes, and

these are men who were suffering from shell-shock and depression.

Her verdict on the effect she could have was typically modest.

She said, "We got the grey look off their faces."

During the Great War, the countryside was a place of

psychological refuge for soldiers.

So, when the troops returned home,

it was a cleaner, greener future that they longed for.

What many of them aspired to was a home in the leafy suburbs.

To accommodate their dreams,

the biggest house-building programme in British history began.

Birmingham's experience was typical of what happened to many cities.

Between the wars, more than a 100,000 homes were built there.

But for a new suburban utopia to be born, an old, rural one had to die.

For the writer JRR Tolkien, nowhere was more beloved than Sarehole.

In the early 20th century,

it was a village several miles outside Birmingham.

Tolkien dramatised the fate which befell Sarehole -

the story of this Warwickshire village spawned

one of the most successful literary and film franchises of all time.

Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892.

He arrived in Sarehole on a family holiday when he was three years old.

But after the sudden death of his father,

the family settled in the village.

The character and virtues of the stout-hearted Warwickshire

country folk left a lasting impression.

"I was brought up in considerable poverty,

"but I was happy running about in that country," Tolkien wrote.

"I took the idea of the Hobbits from the village people and children."

METALLIC WHIRRING

In the middle of Sarehole was an old mill.

Tolkien and his younger brother were fascinated by it,

and would sneak in to watch the wheels turn.

Tolkien nicknamed the grumpy miller "the white ogre"

because he was often covered in what appeared to be flour.

Tolkien only lived here for four years, but he called it

"the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life."

Sarehole became emblematic of everything about England

that the child had fallen in love with.

He described it as a sort of "lost paradise".

'In 1904, this idyllic childhood was cut short

'when Tolkien's mother died.

'He was 12 years old and an orphan.

'He had to leave Sarehole

'and move into a succession of grim boarding houses in Birmingham.

'Tolkien didn't return for many years,

'and when he did he was devastated.'

In his diary, he wrote...

"Where the Bluebell Lane ran down into the Mill Lane,

"is now a dangerous crossing alive with motors and red lights.

"How I envy those whose precious early scenery has not been

"exposed to such violent and peculiarly hideous change."

Tolkien cautioned against reading messages into his novels,

but it's almost impossible not to see allusions

to the land of his lost youth.

At the heart of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings is the Shire -

a haven of rural contentment reminiscent of Sarehole.

Threatening it is Mordor -

a wasteland of furnaces and factories -

Birmingham by any other name.

Life is often more complex than myth, and the actual history

of Tolkien's beloved mill is less romantic than he painted it.

The white powder he remembered covering the miller may not

necessarily have been flour from corn.

The mill was much used at the time for grinding animal bones

to make fertiliser.

Before that, in the 19th century, the natural power of the water-wheel

was supplemented by an industrial steam engine.

And before that, in the mid-18th century,

the mill was used as a metal bashing shop, set up by Matthew Boulton -

one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution.

So, for much of its working life, the mill that inspired

the olden days Shire was, in fact, an outpost of modernising Mordor.

By the mid-1930s, Mordor was marching right across

the British countryside.

Pylons sprang up across the shires.

An expanding road network criss-crossed the nation.

Vehicles swarmed up hill and down dale.

With the advent of modernity in the shape of the motor car,

might the rural "olden days" finally become irrelevant?

In the 1930s, automobiles offered independence, freedom and adventure.

The increasingly large number of people taking to the roads

were part of a new generation of more affluent suburbanites,

easily mocked because of their comfortable lifestyles

and bland tastes, but actually hankering for something more

exciting and more adventurous than the golf course or the tennis club.

These British explorers got into their new cars,

drove out of the present, and into the past.

Motoring guides were published to direct

the wanderlust of the mobile middle classes.

The most famous were The Shell Guides,

sponsored by the Shell Oil Company.

The poet John Betjeman was the editor.

The artist John Piper wrote and illustrated a number of the guides.

Piper had made his name in the early 1930s

as one of Britain's leading avant-garde painters.

Having been lured to Paris,

Piper had fallen for abstract art and European modernism.

But the new modern world was now transforming the old British

landscape and, as it did so, Piper,

who was a country lad at heart, found himself increasingly attracted

to rural themes like manor houses and village churches.

Perhaps only Britain could produce an arch-modernist

who was in love with the "olden days".

In the Shell Guides, these old and new aspects

of Piper's artistic persona fused creatively.

Shell Guides didn't tell you to go and see the obvious sites,

so don't just go and see Salisbury Cathedral or, you know,

Bath Abbey, go and look at the things that are, first of all,

unusual and romantic, but most importantly, and you'll see it

all through these books, the things that are decaying and disappearing.

In his book - here it is, Oxfordshire by John Piper -

he talks about the county of magnificent ruins,

and that's what he really wants to show you.

It's all about texture, feeling.

It's about...it's not just about architecture itself,

it's about a sensibility.

Every page of a publication should be a surprise, said Piper,

said Betjeman. That's the world they belonged to and they loved.

One of the first images you see as you open Oxfordshire is...

-A wall full of dead birds.

-..a wall full of dead birds.

It's like something out of Hitchcock, isn't it?

These are obviously dead crows and rooks hung up to scare away

rooks and crows from destroying fields and their crops.

But it's the idea of an image that's meant to make you jump.

It's not the roses over the traditional, sweet,

thatched English cottage, it's dead birds.

Remember, these books are a meditation on things passing.

It's a slightly melancholy sensibility, isn't it?

It's a... Loss pervades.

This England that you look through now in these books

has basically gone.

There's not a village here really you can drive through now that

hasn't got yellow lines and kerbs and signs everywhere.

And where the nice, old, rustic pubs were full of farmers...

-It's all gone.

-..are now gastro-pubs!

'As the pace of change quickened in the late 1930s,

'Piper's attention was drawn to the very "olden days" -

'to manifestations of permanence in an increasingly volatile world.

'One Oxfordshire monument in particular gripped his imagination.'

Piper devotes an unusually large entry to the Rollright Stones,

along with a full-page illustration.

He writes, "A prehistoric stone circle, after Stonehenge

"and Avebury, the most celebrated in England."

As a modernist, the abstract shapes of these weathered stones

clearly appealed, as did the fact that they overlooked these

extraordinary views over the heart of England.

But the date of publication of this guide - 1938 -

gives a clue as to what else might have been of such special interest.

Disturbing events in Europe meant that he was already moving

away from an international, ideological style

and trying to find something more native, more essentially English.

And these ancient British stones became a sort of symbol

of the continuity and stability of British history.

In fact, I think that's true of the Shell Guides as a whole, which

became a repository - a storehouse of treasures of national identity.

With the outbreak of war, national survival became the main concern.

Artistic inspiration was important, but what Britain really needed

from the countryside was something more prosaic - food.

"Today, the farms of Britain are the front line of freedom,"

Winston Churchill declared.

With the help of the 80,000-strong Women's Land Army,

moors and meadows were unsentimentally ploughed up.

And this was only the first step in a modernising revolution.

If there's one time in particular when we turned our back on the past

then it was after the war, in the late 1940s and '50s.

Britain looked to the future with optimism.

Science and technology would shape a new age.

This was no time to be nostalgic about the rural past.

The countryside had to become more productive.

Less pastoral. More industrial.

But the challenge was to make agricultural improvement exciting.

In 1948, a group of farmers, men from the Ministry of Agriculture

and BBC producers met in Birmingham.

And it was at this meeting that one of the farmers suggested

that what the countryside needed was a "farming Dick Barton".

Dick Barton was a fictional special agent whose radio adventures

attracted a regular audience of 15 million listeners.

So everyone at the meeting burst out laughing -

what a ludicrous idea, a farming Dick Barton.

Except the BBC producers, who decided they liked the idea

of making life in the countryside dramatic.

The programme they went on to develop soon eclipsed Dick Barton

and became one of the most successful radio programmes

of all time.

THE ARCHERS THEME TUNE PLAYS

Subtitled "An everyday story of country folk",

The Archers is set in the fictional village of Ambridge.

The original idea was to seed each episode

with cutting-edge farming advice.

Here, go-getting Dan Archer, his wife Doris

and his stuck-in-the-mud farm hand Simon

talk about how to modernise egg production.

'We can get the battery house shifted up here quick as you like.

'You need three square feet per bird for the best results.'

-'What's Chris getting for you?

-Some spectacles for the hens. Eh?'

LAUGHTER

'Yes, spectacles for the hens.

'One or two of 'em have started pulling each other's feathers out.

'I dunno, missus, first Christine wants to give 'em electric light

'at night so as they can read in bed, and now Gaffer's

'providing 'em with spectacles so as they wouldn't strain their eyes.

'I dunno what farming's comin' to, that I don't.'

The Archers may have begun life as a way of promoting intensive

farming, but what it stands for has changed over time.

Nowadays, it isn't an advocate of modernity -

arguably, it's become a refuge from it.

So, Ian, welcome to Ambridge.

This is it. I am privileged.

-This is it, this is Ambridge.

-THEY LAUGH

Oh, is this...this is a cottage door, is it?

Yes, many a door.

-DOOR CLOSES FIRMLY

-That's good. Very good.

-Oh, that's good, isn't it?

-You have a job!

'Up to 5 million people still visit Ambridge each week.

'For many, it's their only regular encounter with rural life.'

What's that then?

This is old recording tape.

-What's it meant to be?

-We use it for straw.

Oh, you're kidding!

Yes, you kind of spread it on the floor a bit.

If you're in a barn or something with the cows,

it's just got that nice...

-Crunch.

-..crunch to it.

-THEY LAUGH

Brilliant. And what else have we got?

'In The Archers studio, modern technology is harnessed to

'a very old idea - of the countryside as the place of escape.

'The green hills of Borsetshire are a soothing contrast to the grey

'cities where most people live.'

And if we've got scenes, for example, where we've got people

at the top of Lakey Hill and someone needs to run all the way down

to the bottom, they can run off.

And if I run off and I'm getting further and further away...

VOICE FADES

..hopefully I've now reached the very bottom of Lakey Hill.

-I'm absolutely miles away.

-Yeah, you sound miles away.

And I'm just going to run back very fast all the way up the hill.

And I'm just coming back now and, oh, I'm hardly out of breath,

but I have just run all the way to the bottom of Lakey Hill.

That is absolutely brilliant.

It's a trick of the acoustics and the design of the studio,

that I can go a very short distance, but sound miles away.

I feel here that I am literally in the heart of the countryside,

-but I'm in the middle of Birmingham!

-Yeah, quite.

THEY LAUGH

Agricultural innovation does still rear its head in Ambridge.

But these days, change doesn't necessarily mean progress.

Take Debbie Aldridge, for example.

Her new-fangled farming schemes are causing quite a stir.

The first thing I wanted to ask was the plans for the mega-dairy -

I mean, how can you possibly have been behind that?

-I think the very important thing to remember...

-Yeah.

-..is that Debbie Aldridge...

-Yeah.

-..is a character.

Oh, is that right(?)

And I am an actor who plays her. So I don't know...

So you don't really approve of putting all those cattle

-in a big factory?

-Well, I don't know anything about it.

-Right.

But, if you listen to The Archers, and staggering numbers of people do,

yes, it's full of sort of oddities and odd members of the family,

but there's something that makes the Archers still stick together.

It sort of works, doesn't it,

as a group of people who vaguely function.

You've got fantastic characters.

But, more than that, you've got people who talk to one another.

And I think generally we don't have

those sorts of conversations in life, do we?

We send a text, or we ping off... "I'll ping off an e-mail to you!"

-Yeah.

-And, you know, we don't write letters,

we don't pick up the telephone,

but in The Archers they really do pick up the telephone a lot.

Yes, and they sit down with a cup of tea a lot.

And a cup of tea. There's less and less interaction.

So maybe there's a fondness for that, the longing for those times

when you could just say to someone, "How are you doing?"

-And expect some sort of coherent response.

-Yes.

But that sort of is a lovely reflection of us as human beings -

that, you know, you may have, as you do, 5,000 Facebook friends...

-I have none.

-..and, you know, 20 million Twitter followers...

-I'm not on Twitter.

-..as you do!

You know, the reality is that we can probably hold...

And no friends either!

Yeah, but I knew that. We can probably hold about 20 people...

-Yeah.

-..you know, in our circle of realistic relationships.

-Yeah.

And so, The Archers reflects that very well.

And, you know, we have very shallow, very narrow relationships, really,

-that are techno-based.

-Yeah.

And we don't sit down and, you know, have a cup of tea.

-And is it...

-It is so nice to talk to you.

-Yeah, it is lovely to talk to you!

-THEY LAUGH

And I've got time, you see.

With over 17,000 episodes and counting,

The Archers is the longest-running radio soap opera in the world.

And perhaps the reason for its continuing popularity is not

the occasionally sensational introduction of modernity

into Ambridge in the shape of drug abuse or gay marriage,

but precisely the reverse.

Because Ambridge is still a reassuringly cohesive rural

community, which gets together at the pub - at The Bull -

in church - at St Stephen's - or in Linda Snell's Christmas pantomimes.

This is still a place where the passing of the year

is marked by the seasons, and where the flower and produce show

is still at the centre of village life.

Although The Archers was originally aimed at farmers, the

BBC always wanted to appeal to what it quaintly called "the townsman".

So, six times a week, the countryside re-colonises the city

through the medium of radio.

And the noise and the hubbub of the traffic is replaced

by the calming bleat of sheep, and the comforting lowing of cattle.

In the early days, The Archers showcased bigger fields,

labour-saving machines and more chemicals.

What happened in Borsetshire happened in real counties

up and down the land.

Hedgerows were grubbed up. Ancient woodlands were chopped down.

By the 1960s, people began to fear that the countryside

had changed too much.

This was when the word "environment" acquired a new meaning -

no longer something which was all around us,

but something fragile, which might disappear for good.

In the early 1970s, a government committee was set up to investigate

the relationship between man and the environment.

The great and the good who sat on the committee

decided they wanted some poetry to preface their report.

So they commissioned Hull-based poet Philip Larkin

to write something suitably elevating.

If they were hoping for a bland official statement in verse,

they'd come to the wrong man.

What did he look like?

Eric Morecombe.

HE LAUGHS

Balding, big glasses, but without that twinkle

and that grin that Morecombe had.

So, a sort of deadpan version?

Absolutely.

In person, Larkin was quite rooted in "olden days", wasn't he?

He certainly was.

I mean, you know, he was a tweed jacket man, he wore a tie,

he liked traditional jazz, he didn't like rock music.

The public persona was very "olden days" when every now and then there

were television programmes made about him, and he did absolutely sort

of project this image of, you know, the slightly curmudgeonly old gent.

Larkin had moved to Hull to work as a university librarian.

What attracted him to the city was its isolation,

its end-of-the-line feel.

He wrote, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

His poetry is both melancholic and truthful.

So, the poem he wrote as a preface to the government report -

which he later called Going, Going -

is a sort of fierce elegy,

a grumpy lament for the destruction of the English countryside.

"I knew there'd be false alarms

"In the papers about old streets

"And split-level shopping, but some

"Have always been left so far

"And when the old part retreats

"As the bleak high-risers come

"We can always escape in the car."

The central image of the poem is that England, this valuable,

ancient thing - the English countryside - is being auctioned

off, going, going, and it will be gone, sold to the highest bidder.

That sense of the countryside as something that's been there

since time immemorial, that we've imagined will always be there.

But now, suddenly, he's imagining, what will England be like

when the countryside is gone?

There's a great moment in the poem where he said,

we've always assumed that the earth can take it,

that, whatever we do, the earth, the sea will endure.

But now, all of a sudden, he's thinking, whoa, too much.

Larkin loved graveyards.

He was a man who liked to dwell on his own mortality.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his meditation on the destruction

of the countryside in Going, Going

led him to ponder extinction of a more personal kind.

In the middle of the poem, Larkin asks a question which goes

to the heart of our relationship with the past and the present.

"What do I feel now?" he wonders.

"Doubt, or age, simply?

"The crowd is young in the M1 cafe".

He's essentially examining his own responses - is the country

really going to the dogs, or am I just getting old?

It's typically honest, and, in its gloomy way, rather profound,

because what he's suggesting is that our nostalgic yearning

for an unspoilt rural past has less to do with what's going on out there

in the farms and the fields, and more to do with what's going on

in here, with our own insecurities and fragile sense of self.

What we are frightened of, he seems to be saying,

is not just that the countryside is going, going, but that we are.

"It seems, just now

"To be happening so very fast

"Despite all the land left free

"For the first time I feel somehow

"That it isn't going to last

"That before I snuff it, the whole

"Boiling will be bricked in

"Except for the tourist parts

"First slum of Europe: a role

"It won't be so hard to win

"With a cast of crooks and tarts

"And that will be England gone

"The shadows, the meadows, the lanes

"The guildhalls, the carved choirs

"There'll be books, it will linger on

"In galleries, but all that remains

"For us will be concrete and tyres."

The government committee didn't like the poem's rude remarks

about crooks and tarts,

but its theme was hugely resonant in a new era of uncertainty.

Post-war Britain had dreamt of a new Jerusalem,

but this had turned into economic woe and social upheaval.

People reacted to the unnerving scale of change,

as they so often do, by reaching back into the past

and clinging on to symbols of continuity and stability,

however paradoxical those symbols might be.

Take, for example, this great edifice here - the Headstone Viaduct

in Monsal Dale in the heart of Derbyshire's Peak District.

When Larkin was writing his poem, the railway line that used

to go through this valley was closed down, yet there was

a vociferous and successful campaign to preserve the viaduct.

It's old and weathered-looking and seems venerable,

and you can see it aroused affection.

But when it was actually built 150 years ago,

it was a completely different story.

Then, Victorian conservationists

turned it into a national cause celebre.

They were incensed at the desecration of this rural idyll

and the intrusion into it of what they saw

as a symbol of hateful modernity.

The most outspoken conservationist was the art critic John Ruskin.

For Ruskin, the railway epitomised a brutalising age.

It drove its way through the heart of ancient towns

and blighted the countryside.

In 1871, Ruskin wrote a furious diatribe against the building

of the railway...

"There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell,

"once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe."

That was in ancient Greece, in the very, very "olden days".

And apparently there you could see gods, like Pan

and Apollo and the Muses. Anyway, Ruskin continues,

"You enterprised a railroad through the valley,

"you blasted its rocks away,

"heaped thousands of tonnes of shale into its lovely stream.

"The valley is gone, and the gods with it.

"And now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour,

"and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton,

"which you think a lucrative process of exchange - you fools everywhere."

Quite harsh.

150 years on, the image of the viaduct has undergone

a remarkable transformation.

Now it's seen as a positive addition to the landscape -

an "olden days" attraction in its own right.

They reopened the tunnels a couple of years ago so that cyclists,

horse riders and walkers could come through,

and it makes for a terrific walk. And it's immensely popular.

I mean, people come, you know,

people come to the Peak District for all sorts of reasons,

but this is a big draw. And in the summer, bank holidays,

it's very...it's almost crowded.

Why do you think people come?

What are they getting out of seeing this?

Well, it's just a fantastic walk.

You go into the tunnel at the other side,

you can't see the way out because it's curved, so it's a mystery.

And you come out and, wow,

we're on top of a bridge

looking down on the river in this beautiful scenery.

I mean, it's exciting, it's wonderful.

When you look at this viaduct, it's quite pretty,

but not very pretty, is it?

Why do you think people have got so attached to it?

Well, because they've got used to it being here.

It's like the trees, it's part of the landscape.

Now, you're a serious rambler, so, when people are walking,

you take to the countryside, what is it you're looking for?

You look around this landscape and it's not a wilderness,

it's been used for hundreds and thousands of years.

So what we're looking at is the sum total

of people's use of this countryside.

So, it's not natural, and this is just part of that use.

But we've got Fin Cop up over there, which is a Neolithic site.

And there's a weir in the river which was used for fishing.

There's the farms over there.

The limestone slopes, which are grazed,

and that's what makes the wildlife so wonderful, the limestone flowers.

And the footpaths that we use, of course.

They're the routes that people used to use to get to work,

to get to church, to get to school, to get to market.

So, just the footpath's a part of the historical nature of the landscape.

And that's what the charm is for me.

If Ruskin's eyesore can become a rambler's delight,

then who knows what modern monstrosities we may end up

treasuring in the future - wind farms, perhaps.

Even fracking sites.

Despite the fact that it is constantly changing,

the countryside has been for us a symbol of changelessness -

a lost Arcadia, a lost childhood,

a lost home.

I grew up living abroad, frequently on the move with my mother

and father, and the landscapes of my youth were exotic -

Africa, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong.

But this, Sussex, is what we always thought of as home,

which was odd, really, because my father came from Scotland

and my mother from the Channel Islands.

But they had decided to move here and buy a house,

which we always kept as our link to Britain.

We used to come up here to Devil's Dyke for picnics when I was a child.

So this very gentle, very English countryside

is a link to the past, not just for me, but for everyone,

because they've recently turned it into a National Park.

And that desire to conserve a much-loved area

makes me realise again that the countryside in Britain is

a sort of physical embodiment of the "olden days".

It's a green portal through which we can go into a world

which is somehow more peaceful, simpler and better

than the complex one in which we actually live.

'I chose the term "the olden days" for this series deliberately,

'because it is often used pejoratively.

-HE GROANS

-"Oh, the olden days."

'Dwelling on the past can be seen as a regressive

'and slightly absurd national trait.

'Nostalgia has been considered a British disease,

'and we can be too easily caricatured

'as a nation who would like to turn its entire history into a

'series of commemorative tea towels.'

But I think the "olden days" is better than that.

Yes, the facts are a bit dodgy, and the great characters and traditions

more or less invented, and the countryside over-sentimentalised.

But the concept is still important, because, at the very least,

it offers an escape from the confines of the present,

which shouldn't be underestimated.

And, at best, it gives us a way to use the past

to criticise the present, and make the future better.

So, if we are very lucky,

in a couple of hundred years,

someone will look back at us, and find something of merit

in what we've done,

and will call our times the "olden days".