after giving someone a lift home from the pub, I turned on R4 and got the last five minutes of AL Kennedy “the Heart in Drama” (Point of View). It hasn’t gone up yet but it will be at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pjkqd in a while, I expect.
In it she had some interesting things to say about the reasons for which films and TV have always been inclined to being rather nasty, with no care for the little people. It seemed to me that she was suggesting that this is because in order to rise to the top, people needed to be sociopathic (more or less) and not care about other people being used, and that this meant that they designed film and TV to appeal to them – the phrase that caught my ear was “the sort of programme a serial killer would enjoy”.
Now, I may have got it wrong, or I may be misquoting; I can’t tell until I listen again. But it does make me wonder: is this what has happened to The Archers? If it fell into the hands of someone who enjoyed nastiness (especially nastiness to women), as it seemed at the time, can it be retrieved for those of us who enjoyed listening to it precisely because it would not be enjoyed by someone for whom unpleasantness is a requirement? I mean not, “what can we do?” but, “Is this in fact possible?”