The Archers 1987-2000: Back to the Land

by Joanna Toye

This is the third in the trilogy published to celebrate the forthcoming 50th anniversary of "The Archers". It follows the family as the younger generation grow up to face wider horizons than their predecessors ever imagined. Yet their ties to the soil and to Ambridge remain strong.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Set in a family-owned department store, Jo's novels bring to life the hardships - and highlights - of life in Britain in the Second World War. With husbands, boyfriends and brothers away, the three Shop Girl friends pull together to battle bomb damage and black marketeers as well as their own poignant personal dramas. A former radio and TV scriptwriter, Jo draws on her family's war experiences as well as memories of how shopping used to be - before Amazon changed all that!
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Reviews

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another quick dash through twenty three years of Archers' adventures and misadventures, sometimes told so quickly that a lot of details (and years) appear to be omitted. One minute is't 1994, a quick blink and it's 1998 and John Archer has died in a farming accident. So much obviously happens in a series that runs for six days a week and has done since the early 1950s, it's an impossible task to include everything in any depth and this is a shame. The story of Debbie and Shula's mistreatment at the hands of Simon Pemberton merits more than a few pages and probably played out over several months when broadcast and it's quite difficult to really get to know characters, even those who have featured in the previous two volumes.

On a more positive note, there was less of Ruth (Ooooh Noooah) Archer's whining tones than expected and thankfully, her even more irritating offspring, Pip, aka Pupsqueak and Josh are small children and very minor characters. Interesting characters and plot lines such as the odd coupling of Kate Aldridge and Roy Tucker, the racist attacks on Usha Gupta are glossed over in favour of boring Shula's baby travails (very reminiscent of the current turgid storyline of Adam and Ian's proposed surrogacy). Even Brian and JennyDahling are relatively minor characters this time, as are Peggy and Jack Wooley which is a shame. And I have to say, I did miss Nelson Gabriel's antics.

Having said that, this is remains quite an entertaining dash through past Archers' activities, but as has been previously stated, a volume per decade would have been much more satisfying.