Friday Funnies: Duckers down on the farm
In the first of an occasional series of ‘Friday funnies’, gossip columnist and man-about-town John Duckers lifts the lid on Birmingham’s most loudmouth lawyer and the rural ambitions of banker Ben Browning.
If Birmingham’s favourite lawyer Adrian Hindmarsh ever has the urge to take up part-time employment, he could always get a job as a “screamer”.
He demonstrated his lusty lung-power during a Birmingham Press Club visit to the BBC’s Mailbox headquarters, where members and guests toured The Archers studio and heard journalist-author Chris Arnot discuss his book, The Archers Archives, written to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the world’s longest-running radio soap.
Adrian got his chance to “scream for stardom” when BBC tour guides called upon some extrovert nut-case (they didn’t use those exact words but would have done if they had known that Hindmarsh was going to rush to the front of the queue) to try to copy the cries of character Nigel Pargetter’s fatal New Year fall from a rooftop. All in the interests, of course, of demonstrating the unique features of the most advanced sound studio in Europe.
As Hindmarsh screamed away, his colleague Kate Canty, told me: “He’s always doing that. Mainly when I’m trying to push him off the top of a roof.”
Mind you, Kate revealed herself to be a fanatical Archers fan as the secrets of the sound effects team were revealed. “Listeners will know if there’s the slightest error – even down to the sound of a tractor engine,” she said.
Bet they don’t know, though, that the sound of ice being put into a gin and tonic is really a piece of Lego being tossed into a glass!
More Archers addicts, including PR consultant Clive Reeves, came out from under the bales of hay during a Q & A session which BBC Midlands Today presenter Nick Owen conducted with Chris Arnot (now finishing off a book about cricket grounds), with senior producer Julie Beckett coming to the rescue to answer all those technical questions.
The Press Club’s own Country Squire, banker-turned farmer Ben Browning, tried to bamboozle everyone with his agricultural knowledge, but all he wanted was to put his marker down as the next script adviser – and to get a few orders for his Christmas turkeys.
Video-maker Joe McConnell revealed himself as an online lurker and Archers message-board watcher. And Anne Harcourt, accompanied by her husband, retired television journalist Reg Harcourt, reminisced about how she used to listen to The Archers with her grandmother. “It was always the same routine – tea and a bath before the programme came on and then bed straight after the end of it. And that’s just how it was with my own daughter.”
And by the end of the evening, even Press Club vice-chairman Fred Bromwich – who says he has never listened to The Archers since a boyhood protest at his favourite programme, Dick Barton – Special Agent, being replaced by tales of everyday country folk in 1951 – promised to give the Omnibus edition a hearing on Sunday morning.
It must be something in the BBC coffee!
- For more questionable gossip, tittle tattle and trivia from Birmingham’s business community see Duckers & Diving.
