The Books.
Flapjacks and Feudalism: Social Mobility and Class in The Archers is an excavation into the family and class politics found in the clans of the residents of Ambridge, in BBC Radio 4's The Archers.
This book explores how far housing, intergenerational wealth, skills and access to employment shape life chances of characters and shows that, perhaps more than anywhere else, its not what you know but who you know.
The book can be bought direct from the publisher, Emerald, from high street bookshops and the usual online stores.
Gender, Sex and Gossip in Ambridge: Women in The Archers, brought to you by the intrepid team of researchers who brought you Custard, Culverts and Cake: Academics on Life in The Archers. A hard-hitting exposé on the lives of the women of Ambridge, in this book, the Academic Archers are joined by former The Archers editor, Alison Hindell and real-life Academic Archer Dr Charlotte Connor (a.k.a. Susan Carter), to examine the power of gossip in Ambridge, portrayals of love, marriage, and motherhood, female education and career expectations, women's mental health and the hard-won right of women to play cricket. Gender, Sex and Gossip in Ambridge gives the reader a deeper understanding of the real life issues covered in the programme, an insight into the residents of Ambridge, and validation that hours of listening to The Archers is, in fact, academic research.
The book can be bought direct from the publisher, Emerald, here, from high street bookshops and the usual online stores.
Custard, Culverts and Cake: Academics of life in The Archers is the collected volume of papers from the 2017 Academic Archers conference, a sometimes serious and most often wry look at the people of Ambridge, and each chapter satirically peer-reviewed by one of those residents.
It is published by Emerald and is available for pre-order now and will be in the shelves on 5th October 2017.
The book comes out of the 2017 Academic Archers conference that featured leading scholars in their fields that merged their love of The Archers with their specialist subjects, from aspects of the Helen and Rob story, through to food, geography, social media and faith.
The book blurs the line between The Archers being fictitious and Ambridge being a real place in a county called Borsetshire, deliberately obscuring boundaries between fact and fiction. It gives the reader a fuller understanding of the real life issues covered in the programme, a deeper insight into the residents of Ambridge, and the validation that their hours of listening to The Archers is indeed academic research.
It can be bought direct from the publisher, Emerald, here, in high street bookshops and in the usual online stores.
The eponymous titled book of the 2016 conference proceedings , The Archers in Fact and Fiction: Academic Analyses of Life in Rural Borsetshire, was published by Peter Lang in 2016. It features a chapter per paper, each peer reviewed by an Ambridge resident.
It can be found on Amazon, Hive and other online retailers and in bookshops. Its publishers page can be found here.