A thread untouched for over a year because (a) I lost it and started another and (b) I have been Doing Things and forgot it existed.
One of the things I am doing is hunting down all the cast-lists from 1951 onwards in the BBC Genome Project; this is long-winded and annoying, because in order to get to them you first have to sort out The Archers from all the other entries in both the Light Programme and the Home Service (and then Radio 4), and then have to find which day the cast was printed on. It gets easier once it is always with the Omnibus on a Sunday… Before that the only way to find it was to open each day until it was there, which sometimes meant five openings for one result, and sometimes, when they didn’t have the cast up at all, ten or even fifteen openings. Then copy and paste, close, go on to the next entry, open it…
However, in the course of this I noticed something a bit charming, in 1962 or so:
Aunt Laura (Archer): Gwenda Wilson
Which isn’t notable unless you know that Laura Archer was née Laura Wilson.
There is also Major Woodfield: Frank Woodfield. (About whom I know nothing: he appeared for about two weeks, I think, and is not the TBoTA.)
It looks as if they did sometimes simply give the actor’s surname to the character.
And who was David Turner? It was an article of faith with me that the series was written by Edward J. Mason and Geoffrey Webb until they stopped doing it because one of them died, but there is David Turner from March 1961 onwards, credited as a writer as well as them. Eeek.
Also, Jennifer Archer was played by Valborg Maitland from August 1960, and that actor doesn’t appear in TBoTA or TAE; the first they have for her is Ysanne Churchman.
It’s more interesting than I had expected.