Twenty years ago Labour won the election after 18 years in opposition, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris and Arsene Wenger was confirmed as Arsenal’s new manager. In 1997 I was doing my GCSE’s, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I remember a lot about what was on TV…

Drama got off to a grand start on BBC2, with an epic adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo running throughout February. Just over a year after he appeared in Pride and Prejudice, Colin Firth played Englishman Charles Gould, who returns to his South American birthplace to reopen an old mine (sound familiar?) The adaptation of this tale of social and political corruption was a huge undertaking. It was filmed in Colombia, and involved no fewer than 15,000 extras. The Radio Times reported that the actors, who included Albert Finney, Serena Scott-Thomas and Claudio Amendola, had to perform in 95% humidity.

Meanwhile, there was mystery afoot on home-turf; mystery of an unusual and somewhat spooky kind… Enter magician Jonathan Creek (played by comedian and actor Alan Davies). Helped by journalist Madeline Magellan (Caroline Quentin), he set to work solving crime, with an approach that could only be described as inimitable. Episode titles such as The Reconstituted Corpse gave some augury of the macabre crime-solving missions that were to follow. The programme has run on-and-off for the last 20 years and has clocked up 32 episodes, notably all written by the same man – David Renwick.

Psychological thriller Bright Hair hit our screens later in the year, starring another former Pride and Prejudice star, Emilia Fox. The then-23 year old was a convincing teenage schoolgirl, haunted after witnessing the aftermath of a murder. And on the subject of crime - although this blog focuses on BBC programmes - it would be an oversight not to mention that Midsomer Murders also debuted on ITV in 1997. The series, which launched with John Nettles starring as DCI Barnaby, is now in its 21st season and has probably solved more TV murder cases than all other crime series put together.

Later in the year on the BBC, Max Beesley smouldered in period drama The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Billed as a “rollicking” tale, this five-parter also starred Samantha Morton, Frances de la Tour and Kathy Burke. It was racier than the recent Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch adaptations, and Radio Times even flagged up some of the more controversial content. I certainly had to resort to some subterfuge to watch the third episode.

Back to pre-watershed, the “will-he-won't-he?” plotline continued in the Irish town of Ballykissangel, as the nation’s prime-time audience willed Father Peter (Stephen Tompkinson) to do something un-priestlike and elope with love interest Dervla Kirwan. 

Soap fans were treated to two exciting plotlines in Eastenders, as Bianca and Ricky tied the knot (for the first time) and the tempestuous relationship between Grant (Ross Kemp) and Tiffany (Martine McCutcheon) culminated in a paternity row over baby Courtenay.

Now for something a bit more serious…

On factual TV, psychologist Oliver James put some of the famous faces of the day on the couch in The Chair, showing that psychotherapy really had gone mainstream in the UK. And there were plenty of white knuckles over on BBC Two, with fly-on-the-wall docu-drama Driving School, which followed the experiences of learner drivers. The programme is best remembered for bringing cleaning lady Maureen Rees to fame as an early “reality TV star” (and for helping her to pass her driving test on the 7th attempt).

Meanwhile in my household, as Radio 4 celebrated 12,000 episodes of The Archers, an obligatory silence was imposed in the kitchen each evening so that my mum could tune into the latest from Ambridge. And comedy To The Manor Born had an outing on BBC Radio 2, with Penelope Keith reprising her role as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton.  

Say Hello!

It was also an important year for children’s TV, with the launch of Teletubbies on BBC2. Within months, that theme tune had become every parent’s earworm, and a debate was set off about whether the Teletubbies’ gibberish would harm children’s speech development (shades of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men in the 1950s). There was also an important moment for children’s news programme Newsround, which celebrated its 25th anniversary. In its honour, BBC1 hosted a nostalgic retrospective, Newsround’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Years.

A-haaa!

We all had a bit of a laugh when Steve Coogan reprised his role as an inept presenter in I’m Alan Partridge. The 1997 series saw Partridge demoted to a role in local radio ("Good morning, Norwich"), but still dreaming of the "glory" days. Could he get his television show re-commissioned? His frantic attempts to pitch new formats to a BBC commissioning editor are classic moments of television comedy.

And after a three-year absence, fans were thrilled when Red Dwarf reappeared for its seventh series. Episode 6, written by Kryten actor Robert Llewellyn, saw the crew being transported back to a virtual reality land - based on Pride and Prejudice. And what happened when Red Dwarf met period drama? Answer, Kryten’s head exploded…

Over to you chaps… did you enjoy the programmes mentioned above? Or have we missed one that you liked? Let us know in the space below:

The following programmes are available to purchase from BBC Store and other providers: Jonathan Creek, Red Dwarf, I'm Alan Partridge, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling and Teletubbies.  

Soap opera, so called because the early examples in the US were sponsored by soap powder companies, are a staple of broadcasting. 

While the exact definition of a soap opera is hard to pin down, it tends to be the sort of thing that you know when you see (or hear) it.  It can of course be used pejoratively if a non-soap series is seen to be spending too much time exploring people’s domestic entanglements, but soaps have been rightly praised for highlighting issues in society – such as the recent domestic abuse storyline in The Archers.

Unsurprisingly, the earliest continuing dramas on the BBC were on radio.  The whole practice of episodic fiction can be traced back to the publication of novels by Dickens as partworks in the 19th Century, where readers would eagerly await the next instalment of each story.  When Dickens’ works were adapted for radio they were already structured to lend easily to episodic production.

The idea of the same characters appearing in successive stories also owes something to literature, with writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes tales.  Radio’s early recurring heroes included the likes of Francis Durbridge’s classic hero Paul Temple, but these were episodic thrillers, not soaps.

The first programme that can be called a soap on the BBC was Front-Line Family, which was broadcast to the USA on the BBC Overseas Service from 1941.  Post-war, it was also heard at home on the Light Programme, now under the title The Robinson Family.  The series was intended to make American listeners empathise with the plight of the British public, and did so in a way that was familiar in the States - though BBC executives were extremely sniffy about the lowering of standards involved in creating a popular series, and derisive of the intellect of their intended audience. 

One of the first great serial hits on radio after the war was Dick Barton – Special Agent, a fairly lurid thriller series, concerning the daring adventures of Barton and his sidekicks Jock and Snowy, and any number of foreign spies and Nazis and scientists being kidnapped.

When this series ended it was replaced by something described at the time as a ‘farming Dick Barton’, complete with cliffhangers to entice listeners back for the next episode.  That show was of course The Archers, which has been entertaining the nation for the last 65 years and shows no sign of going away.  

The Archers has had various shake-ups over the years by new editors. One if its most famous ‘stunt’ episodes was in 1955 when Grace Archer was killed off in a fire the same night as ITV launched.  The show’s long lifespan has meant that a huge saga with many characters has unfolded before listeners, though based around the central family of the eponymous Archers. 

For many years this family was headed by Dan and Doris Archer.  Dan was played by four actors over the life of the serial - Harry Oakes, Monte Crick, Edgar Harrison and Frank Middlemass – while Doris was always played by Gwen Berryman.  The series has since featured not only their children, but grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  As well as a large cast of regulars (around 60, though with less than half tending to appear in any given week), the Archers is also notable for having a number of ‘silent’ characters – characters who are mentioned but have never appeared, or only occasionally.  One, Pru Forrest, made a brief audible appearance in the 10,000th episode in 1989, when she was played by Judi Dench (and interviewed by Terry Wogan).

Each episode is introduced by the theme tune Barwick Green, and to date there have been something in the region of 18,000 instalments.  After a trial run in 1950 the series started fully in 1951, and now has six weekly episodes.  The setting is the fictional village of Ambridge and surrounding countryside, especially the Archer homestead of Brookfield, in the equally fictitious county of Borsetshire (somewhere south of Birmingham, where the show is produced).

In its early days, The Archers had an avowedly informational slant, with Ministry of Agriculture advice woven into the stories, but although such involvement ended in the early 70s the show has continued to raise issues relevant to rural life, although some have criticised it for being a bit too near the knuckle.  When radio was the majority medium, The Archers gained huge listening figures, and while the numbers are less now, it is still capable of arousing passions and getting into the headlines, while remaining a (more or less) everyday story of country folk.

The Archers was actually predated by another daily serial, Mrs Dale’s Diary, which began on the Light Programme on 5 January 1948, about the wife of a GP, Doctor Dale, and the people she came in contact with.  Much parodied for its cosy atmosphere, this ran for 21 years, with various writers including Ted Willis (who once tried to kill off most of the characters in a coach crash) coming up with five new episodes every week. 

There was controversy when lead actor Ellis Powell was sacked in 1963, and replaced by former film star Jessie Matthews – but the BBC made various attempts to give it a less comfortable image, including changing the title to The Dales in 1962.  Like The Archers, Mrs Dale’s Diary/The Dales was used to introduce public information messages, and was also one of the first dramas to mention the subject of homosexuality.

When The Dales came to an end, it was immediately replaced by a new serial on Radio 2, Waggoners’ Walk (originally Waggoners’ Walk NW).  This was set in North West London (near Belsize Park), and concerned the inhabitants of this urban ‘village’, especially those living at No.1 Waggoners’ Walk, a town house converted into flats.  The serial was to run for a little more than a decade before being dropped in a round of spending cuts in 1980.  It was co-created by Jill Hyem who went on to be one of the main writers of Tenko.

Subsequently radio has struggled to come up with a successful sister soap to The Archers, while that programme has maintained its loyal following.  Radio 4 did attempt another show, Citizens, from 1987 to 1991, but this twice-weekly flat-sharing soap never quite gained momentum and was dropped after nearly 400 episodes.

Other parts of the BBC have come up with their own contributions to the genre.  As with Pobol y Cwm, the Welsh language television soap opera that has run since 1974, there was also a radio soap in Welsh, Station Road, which ran for a few years from the late 1990s.

The BBC World Service had its own soap, Westway, which ran from 1997 to 2005 (latterly also on Radio 4) and centred around a health centre close to the eponymous main road from London to the West Country.

Silver Street was a soap which ran from 2004 to 2010 on the BBC Asian Network, and featured the lives of a south Asian community in an unspecified area of Britain.  The ten-minute episodes were presented within other programmes on the network, and budget cuts saw them reduced in length to five minutes later on, before the series was cancelled.

BBC Wiltshire Sound (the former name for BBC Wiltshire) earned a place in the record books for its unique soap Acrebury, in which all the characters were played by actor/presenter Gerry Hughes.

It’s ironic that radio has not had more successful soap operas, since producing radio drama is logistically far easier than television drama.  However, the pressure on writers to come up with enough plotlines and scripts to satisfy these long-running productions is intense, and radio audiences can be particularly demanding, if fiercely loyal when they do latch onto a programme.

Who knows whether there will ever be another radio soap opera to rival the huge following that The Archers has amassed over its six and a half decades of life.  We have a kind of love/hate relationship with soap, but they are now firmly part of the national fabric, both those on television, and those that reside on the original home of British soap opera, the radio.

Let us know what you think of soaps on radio , now and in the past.  Are radio soaps better than those on television? Are they becoming too influenced by television’s more sensational values?

On this day 60 years ago, ITV took to the air for the very first time. But its thunder was stolen by the shock death of Grace Archer in BBC radio soap The Archers, which left the nation open-mouthed.

Of course there was no indication of what was going to happen in the listings - the billing for 22 September 1955 is minimal at best and carries only the show's tagline, "a story of country folk".

However, actress Ysanne Churchman, now aged 90, says the demise of her character was caused by her own efforts to secure a better pay deal for her work on the soap, although it was presumed the ploy was to scupper ITV's launch.

A new radio play about the night Grace Archer perished and the story behind this memorable event was recently broadcast on Radio 4.