No problem; in fact I was going to suggest going through them all and collating the short-term / one-off characters in a spreadsheet.
While I’m at it, I’ll put in a complaint about the lapsed cert; there’s no excuse for an organisation like the BBC let that sort of thing slide.
You are a true friend, that’s what you are. Thank you very much.
After 28/3/2010 I have the cast-lists that the BBC put up on their website, and before 2001 when the BBC published The Archers Encyclopaedia I have the data; it is just that ten-year gap that I don’t have. F’Techie says that if I have a special, dedicated browser which I use only for that one purpose and then shut down completely after use I could probably ignore all the warnings and look anyhow, but I am slightly edgy about doing that!
That’s pretty well what I do!
OK - I’ll start collating the waifs and strays and get it to you asap. It’s only a copy & paste job, so shouldn’t take long. Will list character, actor and week they appeared; can’t get any more specific than that, unfortunately, as the list is only weekly.
Heavens, weekly is all I ever have! And Lowfield goes back as far as 1996, if I need to check further.
There’s no real rush about this, because Bruno appearing again after a fifteen year gap is quite rare; in fact I don’t know whether there is another, and I am still working my way through the first fifty years’worth in TBoTA.
For more recent changes of casting I am giving month and year for last appearance of old, first appearance of new, in the format
Name: Tony Archer
aka: Anthony William Daniel Archer
Sorted name:
Archer, Tony
Played by: Philip Owen and June Spencer as a child; Colin Skipp 1967 - October 2013; David Troughton January 2014 -
with the end left open until he dies, I suppose.
If you happen to notice any of those that’s great, but it’s not a major thing.
‘June Spencer’ isn’t by any chance a typo on your part for Judy Bennett, is it? I know JB did the children’s voices, so I’m a bit surprised the ‘Peggy’ played her own son as a child.
It is definitely what it says in TBoTA; the AE doesn’t mention anyone except Philip Owen and Colin Skipp.
Judy Bennett wasn’t around when Tony was a small boy; she was born in 1943 and joined the cast in 1971, and he was born in 1951.
Oh, fair enough. That’s rather cool, that June Spencer played Tony, isn’t it? I hope she keeps on keeping on, she’s rather splendid and her character will be hugely missed when she goes. I can’t think why people want Peggy to shuffle off. But perhaps that’s a subject for another thread.
That’s more or less what I had in mind; the info might even be a step in the direction of reconstructing a rough timeline, at least in so far as knowing when the various characters appeared.
If you did that it would be Amazing.
In fact it would be a site all on its own, wouldn’t it. Like the Residences, which I will work on, and the Ambridge Animals which I rather hope to persuade Nelson G to allow me to add to the site along with the nicknames and the rest of the stuff I have put up at one time and another.
Edited to add: there is more to it all than I had fully realised. I have run up against actors who changed before Lowfield starts:
Name: Bert Fry
aka: Albert Nathaniel Fry
Played by: Roger Hume 1988 - ?1996?, Eric Allan 1997 -
But luckily for me Hume’s obituary appeared in the Independent on 25th August 1996 and says he last appeared in TA on 14th August 1996, so that makes it clear… and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-serving_soap_opera_actors gives the year Eric Allan started in the role as 1997.
OK - here’s the current strategy:
A bit tedious, but I think that will avoid the risk of missing people altogether and will mean we have a complete character list for the decade. If anyone can see any major flaws, please yell - preferably before I waste the next few days!
If it were me, I would probably select a name, do a search from the bottom of the document and add a Z into that name on the first occasion (ie the last time chronologically) that it appeared, so that it read for instance “Davzid Archer: Tim Bentinck”, then do the same thing for the same name from the top to get the first appearance, then do a search-and-destroy for all the occurrences of “David Archer: Tim Bentinck” so they were gone, and go on from there to the next name. I’d end up with first and last appearances for all of them, dated by the bit at the top. Then I would do a search-and-destroy on z, so the names stopped looking quite so silly.
(Zebedee Tring must have been dead by then…?)
Does that make sense as a time-saver?
Normally, I’d say yes, but there are a fair few odd things already because of mis-scans; OCR is not very reliable, IME! I reckon if I weed out the duplicates on a year-by-year basis it should avoid it getting too unwieldy. Should have all of 2001 in the next few minutes!
Meantime I have just finished B-from-TBoTA, which means I have probably done about 4% of the names from that work, after taking yesterday as time off for bad behaviour.
Now in C, and stuck on Christine Barford.
Oh lord the Riding Stables in Ambridge are complicated! Christine and Grace Fairbrother started one together in 1952, but Grace was then killed in 1955, and what happened about that Stables? Did Christine keep going on her own, or what? Valerie Woolley was running a riding stable at Grey Gables for a while and certainly during 1965 because Lilian worked for her at it in that year but I haven’t managed to pin down dates for its existence. In 1966 Lilian started up her own Riding Stables with money and premises from Aunt Laura to help her, and Christine was working for her at some point in the late sixties, and in 1975 or some time shortly thereafter I think Christine bought the stables from her; and that must be the Stables that was sold to Shula when Christine retired; but where was Christine’s first Stables with Grace, and what happened to Valerie’s one at Grey Gables?
Argh.
That’s nothing. Wait until you realise that there has only ever been one horse in Ambridge, but sometimes it’s travelling backwards in time.
Be warned that such questions might have no answer. The development of much of the characters’ back-stories was Jock Gallagher’s initiative, and he only took over in 1971; it’s quite possible that some loose ends were simply never tied up.
This is all stuff that was happening on air – nothing before 1951. So it wasn’t backstories; the characters did it in the programme, whatever it may have been.
Fair point, but what I meant was that he might not have followed up on everything; there may simply be no record of the stables being transferred/sold/taken over by aliens.
Bartleby’s longevity explained at last!
I now have a slight problem.
Clare Madison appeared in Ambridge in either 1965 or 1966 (accounts vary) as Ralph Bellamy’s girlfriend. He lost interest in her after a bit and started chasing Valerie Trentham/Woolley instead, and both TBoTA and AE claim that Clare then had a brief affair with Phil Archer, with AE also saying Phil was between wives at the time.
Well, the second bit is rowlocks: he married Jill in 1957. But does that mean they both have the decade wrong and mean CM was in Ambridge in 1955/6 when Phil was not married, or does it mean that they are wrong about the affair, or what? I have no memory of his straying from Jill during the sixties.
Anyone happen to remember it?