Not all actors cast as romantic partners grow fond of each other, but on a long-running drama like The Archers where they could be yoked together for decades, it helps to be friends. Daisy Badger as Pip Archer and Lucy Speed as Stella Pryor, the tough farm manager, certainly are. From the moment they appear at our bridal photoshoot, it’s clearly a partnership made in heaven, as well as the heads of scriptwriters. They joke at the tidy farmyard and swap news about their children, Badger reporting on her latest baby while nonchalantly manoeuvring a breast-pump beneath a big black sweatshirt emblazoned “Liberté Egalité Sororité”.
Time has moved on, and neither of the same-sex brides expects much outrage. As it happens, both Badger and Speed are in real life happily married to men and have children, so I did wonder whether in these censorious times of identity politics either of them felt uneasy about playing a sexual orientation that isn’t their own?
Speed says, “For some reason in long-running characters I’m always made a lesbian. I remember when I started in The Archers, working for Brian [Charles Collingwood], he said, ‘You do know that I have a long list of notches on my bedstead?’ And I thought, Stella doesn’t seem that type. I didn’t immediately think gay, just that she’s a career farmer, brilliantly bright.”
“As an actor it was my job to absorb and like all kinds of people. So I feel sad that we’re now hitting the idea that we shouldn’t play one another. Our job is to reach the audience, give one person’s viewpoint so that everyone sees something in the character they can identify with. It’s our job to make something that isn’t us, but might be all of us.”
From an elder-sister perspective Speed adds, “Yes, when you get to my age, you look back at yourself. In my 20s I thought I was grown up, but even when I had my kids, a geriatric-mother, gosh I was ignorant. Pip is still very young.”
Badger, whose home is in a village in Worcestershire, agrees for another reason, too. “Rural kids sometimes stay younger longer: living at home, working on the family farm, staying in the village. Younger but in some ways more capable, doing jobs on the farm before you’ve even had breakfast.”
And how about real life: does Speed, with half a lifetime’s career behind her, manage and boss young Daisy as they work together in the studio? They laugh even more at that. “When it comes to The Archers, you’re the expert, right?” says Speed. “You were there seven years before me. I’ve learnt all my life to ask more experienced cast members, let them offer wisdom. Inside, I’m still the child on set: get there early, behave well, be quiet, prepare, do my work.”
In a 75-year-old continuing drama (OK, soap) there’s time for any character to swerve about a bit. All actors of course relish conflict and rows. So might Pip, once the wedding is over, one day revert and run off with a man, even if he’s not a Fairbrother?
“I think,” says Speed gravely, “that Stella worries whether Pip was making the right decision. There’s bravery in coming out, finding yourself, falling for another woman.”
Similarly, has Speed ever worried that the script-writers might suddenly turn Stella flighty, irresponsible, emotional? Her response is calmly Stella-feminist. “Yes, I have. Sometimes in long-running things you come in as a strong, competent woman and then you’re supposed to crumble into an emotional wreck. And I feel strongly about all the women I represent: if they start sensible and capable like Stella or Natalie [she had years in EastEnders], I want them to pull themselves through the rocks and troubles. Like the real women I know, still the same but wiser, stronger. Not turning into something archetypically feminine. Sometimes women are made too one-dimensional on screen because it’s easy.”
Now it seems that not only Rosie but Seren, Nova, Xander and Martha will be roaring about unstylishly on the day, equipped with giant dominoes and other mildewed playthings from Archer cellars. Rosie even seems to have talked the poor brides into arriving with a naff fake unicorn, which is not stylish at all when, like Stella, you’re over 40.
Our time is nearly up. Stylists and photographer hover, ready to beautify them. “We’ll cringe,” they agree, though Badger says she quite looks forward to it because, with two young children, “it’s very different from my daily life”. Speed on the other hand has “hated having my photo taken ever since childhood. My dad once said, ‘Keep your mouth shut in photos because you’ve got teeth like a row of bombed houses.’ Dressing up for pictures is not my favourite thing, don’t even like the hairdresser. I bet Stella is like that, too. Lord Lichfield took my picture once. They put red lipstick on me and I just looked weird...”
They’re troupers, though. Radio drama may exist chiefly in our imaginations, but everyone likes a wedding photo. So off they go to be beautified. Grown-up Stella gets sleek tailoring, Pip a flouncing girly laciness. Mercifully, though, only the tractor is red, not the lipstick.
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