COVER STORY: Angela Piper, from The Archers, at home in Essex with a copy of her new book: The Archers Country Kitchen

A chance to see Archers actress Angela Piper’s new home, and enjoy another plate of homemade shortbread, is too much for Steven Russell to resist. They talk about her new book, that controversial radio death . . . and a loathing of toads

THE GEORGIAN LOOK: Angela Piper outside the symmetrical frontage of her Essex home

FANS of The Archers, still coming to terms with the killing-off of lovable toff Nigel Pargetter, could easily be mourning the loss of another central character. This time, the tragedy would have been down not to the scriptwriter’s imagination and pen but the cruel hand of fate. In a French field, a runaway car nearly wiped out Angela Piper, the actress who has played the slightly bossy, slightly hysterical Jennifer Aldridge in the BBC Radio Four drama since 1963. As it was, she escaped with a bruised elbow as the passing vehicle caught her. Well, a contusion and a hefty bill for damage to the hire car . . .

“The most hideous thing. Entirely my fault,” she sighs of the incident a few weeks ago.

Angela had been staying at the farmhouse between Bordeaux and Toulouse she owns with husband Peter and was on her way to the airport at Bergerac to fly home.

It was a hot afternoon and the flight wasn’t until later in the evening – a wonderful opportunity to stop off for a picnic and a read of a book in the shade of a tree.

Angela Piper, from the Archers, on Radio 4, tends to her Essex Garden.

A lake near a village was the perfect spot. Angela parked the car, locked it and strolled away. The land sloped down to the lake. There was a sort of hump and a dyke with a little footbridge over it.

“I was casually walking down to this footbridge when suddenly I thought somebody was behind me, stepped to one side, and it was my car! I obviously didn’t put the handbrake on.

“It was so sinister, because it was silent. If I hadn’t stepped to one side, I’d have been killed. Without a doubt. It had come some considerable distance and gathered speed.”

Fortunately, the vehicle rammed the bridge, which stopped it. “It was metal and made a graunching noise and the car went crrruhc.”

SAFE FROM FROGS! Angela Piper in the library of her Essex home

A fisherman hurled down his rod and raced over, and six “wonderful” French youths also came to her aid. Having gone over the hump, the car was left with its rear wheels in the air. After a lot of huffing and puffing, the knights in shining armour managed to get it back on all four wheels and the young men pulled clods of earth from underneath the chassis.

“I drove to the airport in one gear, because I thought ‘There’s got to be something really damaged . . .’ Then I parked it and went to the man in his cabin and said ‘Problème . . .’

“He came, thinking ‘Oh, it’s just a scratch . . . silly English woman . . .’ and saw the damage. ‘Oh, mon dieu!’ Then he tried to open the door and couldn’t – completely smashed in on that side. And I hadn’t paid (damage waiver) insurance . . .”

A hefty bill, then? “Please don’t ask! It’s quite frightening. I’ll have to write another 10 books!

“So that’s this awful story. But thank God nobody was hurt. A child could have been killed . . .”

It’s certainly been an eventful year for the Archers actress. Having moved across Essex in the spring of 2010 to a house near the Suffolk border, she and Peter had the builders in before 2011 was very old.

Roofs were sorted and rendering attended to – plants growing between the brickwork. Then, in February, the couple moved temporarily to a former windmill in the grounds, so more extensive remodelling could take place in part of the house.

Having been without a kitchen – “this area was just like a black hole” – keen cook Angela is thrilled to have got her territory back. Everything is as it should be: Cath Kidson tea-towel on the handle of the Aga; Waitrose Fine Crystal Sea Salt to the right; cheerful ornamental mugs on the dresser, bearing characters from Beatrix Potter.

As well as the long kitchen itself, she has a cosy preparation-cum-pantry area just off, where she can do her baking with ingredients to hand. There’s also a lower worktop her little grandchildren can use when they visit.

This part of the house has been transformed by letting in the light, and there’s an extended kitchen-cum-dining room where a crowd can sit, eat, laugh and chat.

The house, near Halstead, began as a “primitive little yeoman’s cottage” in the 1600s, and was then extended and extended – all tiny rooms and low ceilings. The windmill close by, effectively at the top of a slope, was perfectly placed to harness the south-westerlies. (Now sail-less, it last turned in the 1920s.)

A few bob was made in the 18th Century, which led to the Georganisation of the frontage “as a child would draw a house, with the door in the middle and the windows symmetrical”.

The long granary block running off at a right-angle was converted in the 1970s to form part of the house. There are stables at the end.

Apparently a Bronze Age settlement, the site runs to about two acres, including lawn, a parterre, tennis court and swimming pool. There’s a lovely view across rolling fields, pasture and woods.

There’s plenty of history in the air, too – which Angela loves.

Beyond the orchard at the end of their land, for instance, is a track known as the coffin trail, “because, during the plague, people who died in outlying villages and cottages used to be brought on tumbrels and carts up the field, down the coffin trail, across to the church; and then they were buried down this tiny lane in woodland. It’s extraordinary”.

The house and grounds are lovely, but Angela admits it was hard saying goodbye to their previous home outside Felsted, near Braintree – a former watermill-house, also Georganised after the miller made some money, that stood in 4½ acres.

“I do miss it. We were there 20 years, and I loved that house. It had got such a fantastic atmosphere and it wasn’t in any way grand, but it was just the most comfortable, beautiful house. It’s like losing a friend. It was just within my bones.”

The plan had been to move down to Sussex to be near GP daughter Mimi, then expecting her first child and also the wife of a Chinook pilot who could be called away to the world’s troublespots.

The Felsted house sold in a day, to London buyers, but finding a suitable home in the south proved impossible. With time running out, and panic setting in, the house near Halstead came on the market and proved a hit.

It might have taken them further away from their daughter (!) but there’s the space they sought for their three visiting children, their partners and seven grandchildren. (An eighth should arrive in the autumn.)

Mind you, it’s a bit of a surprise that Angela agreed to move there . . .

She explains how, during a viewing, they descended to the clean and orderly cellar. When they turned to come back up, a fat toad squatted on the steps.

Angela screamed.

She has a thing about frogs and toads – a phobia, in fact, dating from childhood.

“I was a little girl and was walking across fields with my father, to visit my grandmother in the same village, and the frogs were moving back to their birthplace – there was a disused quarry with a lake. There were hundred of them and you couldn’t put your foot down without treading on one. They were all clambering over each other’s backs. It was horrendous. Daddy put me on his shoulders.

“There were these kissing gates and I remember him opening it and knocking them off the backs to get through. It was so horrible.”

More memories: a big, fat, pregnant toad waddling across the road and being rolling-pinned by a bus. “You know when you blow up a paper bag and go ‘tuwckh’ . . . that’s what it was like when it went over this large toad.”

And staying in a Spanish villa when the children were tiny: “I’d knock the sand out of their little canvas shoes. I opened the door, there was this big marble doorstep, and there was this colossal toad, the size of that plate. Eventually it waddled onto the doormat and Peter picked the mat up and carried it away, and as he did so the poor thing wee-d out of fright and shrank like all the air going out of a balloon!

“Wherever I am, they seem to come.” They sense fear, maybe. “They do! They started to sit by the door at the last house; then one of them began to sleep in the hay with the dogs!” Peter took some down to the millpond. “They came back again . . .

“Then, when we came here, every morning they were in the swimming pool! One of the builders took one back to Romford. It shouldn’t be able to find its way back up the A12! Another took one to Great Bardfield.”

As well as all the building work on the house, the year has been notable for major kafuffles in Angela’s fictional home of Ambridge. A couple of days into 2011 and Nigel Pargetter falls to his death while trying to remove a New Year banner from the roof of Lower Loxley Hall.

This way of marking the radio drama’s 60th birthday upset numerous listeners, who demanded the head of editor Vanessa Whitburn on a platter.

Angela admits it was a shock. “We thought maybe there would be two big stories: one disaster and something nice. It’s good to have contrast – light and shade – but I don’t think anybody had ever imagined that lovable character . . .

“I was speaking to someone only the other day, who is with the Country Land and Business Association and who said ‘It’s so sad, because we imagined him to be very much a CLBA member. He was so like so many of our country landowners, with his elbow through his jacket. He’s a very real gentrified gent – a dying breed anyway, but a very real character.’”

Brian Aldridge’s type they dismissed as jumped-up nouveau riche and not true country people. “So you have no longer got somebody in that mould; which, as far as they thought, was a great loss to the programme, in as much as it is in the countryside, it is reflecting a real village – albeit fantasy – and what a loss, because that colour would go from the programme.”

Angela understands the desire to do something dramatic, but says Nigel’s passing (and actor Graham Seed’s departure) leaves a big hole. “He wasn’t in it that much, but I think he played it beautifully, with the stammer he had and his whimsical way.

“I think the thing about Nigel was he was loved and loveable, because he sounded like a cuddly teddy-bear himself. He sounded vulnerable. One could sympathise and empathise because of that vulnerability; whereas if Brian Aldridge went under the wheels of a very large tractor, you could hear the cheers, I think!”

During the hoo-hah that followed, did it feel as if everyone in Ambridge was at the centre of a storm?

“I think during that time we did feel very unsettled, and throughout the cast there was a feeling of dis-ease, really, and unhappiness. You never feel secure, because we have no security, and our lives can be controlled 
with a red Biro, really, when it comes down to it.”

At its best, Ambridge life offers great fun and camaraderie in the green room – a sense of family. “If people (actors) are ill, we contact their wives, their husbands. We send cards; we phone them up. It’s very much the strength of that unit and I think this is part of why it’s survived, quite frankly: there is this togetherness.”

Inside Jennifer’s country kitchen

COOKING is close to Angela Piper’s heart and she’s written a number of books combining that passion with her equally-beloved Ambridge.

Fourteen years ago, for instance, came The Archers’ Pantry. Then, in 2009, Jennifer Aldridge’s Archers’ Cookbook appeared. A collection of more than 150 recipes from the imagined kitchens of Ambridge, combined with atmospheric jottings and memories, it’s sold more than 22,000 copies.

Now, Angela again pulls on the apron of her alter ego for Jennifer Aldridge’s Archers’ Country Kitchen. It offers more than 150 recipes “from Jennifer’s own scrapbook” and a seasonal culinary tour: from Home Farm Game Pie to Clarrie Grundy’s Scrumpy and Cinnamon Cake.

Adorning the pages, alongside the recipes, are little whimsical treats: snippets of country wisdom, for instance, old photographs and fake pages from comics of yesteryear. There are also lovely illustrations by Suffolk-based artist Mary Woodin.

“People listen to the programme, they imagine what you look like, and they feel they can recreate what it might smell like in the kitchen, and feel they’re there with Ruari (Brian’s illegitimate son) and his roly-poly sausages!”

Putting it together has been great fun, says Angela, who concocted the recipes based on what she knew characters current and long-gone would have cooked. She’s also included delights she’s made for years, such as Christmas Pudding Ice-Cream, and Fudge Spread.

Golly, she says; she and Peter will have been married 50 years in 2012. “Over the years you collect recipes, cooking for your little children – who become bigger children – and then with grandchildren. It’s a way of life.”

At the start of each month is a page from “Gran Archer’s” retro country kitchen calendar, featuring traditional recipes.

“Some of the things, like Best Pilchard Bake, make you think ‘Oh, lordy! Haven’t we moved on since then!’”

That said, one of the things Angela wanted to do was celebrate the passage of time and the uniqueness of the Ambridge “family” at this 60th anniversary moment – “to remember all those characters who have gone before, and pull all the strands together”.

Jennifer Aldridge’s Archers’ Country Kitchen is published by David & Charles at £12.99

Radio days

Angela Piper was born in Derbyshire

Her father was a teacher and her mother president of the local Women’s Institute

Early thoughts were of a career in medicine

But she met radio producer Alfred Bradley, who insisted she applied to the Royal Academy of Music

She got in, won its Shakespeare Prize and Broadcast Prize, and went into repertory theatre

Angela was a Play School presenter

She also did TV voice-overs and read letters on Points of View

And she had leading roles in the TV series Life Begins at Forty and Third Time Lucky

The opportunity to join The Archers in 1963 came when the actress playing Jennifer left to join Emergency Ward Ten

A year earlier she’d married Peter Bolgar, who worked as a BBC announcer and then news reader

They’d met when she was at the Royal Academy of Music and Peter (who played the viola) was at the Royal College of Music

They have two grown-up sons and a daughter

Jennifer caused consternation in the 1960s when she gave birth to illegitimate baby Adam

She was later unhappily married to Roger Travers-Macy and had daughter Debbie

Jennifer married Brian Aldridge at Borchester Register Office in 1976

They have daughters Kate and Alice

In the 1990s, Jennifer had an affair with ex-husband Roger!

Then Brian had an affair that led to the birth in 2002 of Ruairi

He came to live with Brian and Jennifer when his mother died about five years later

The Archers began with a pilot series of five episodes in 1950

It then started in earnest on January 1, 1951

It was billed as ‘an everyday story of country folk‘

Now it’s a ‘contemporary drama in a rural setting’

Whatever, it’s the world’s longest-running radio soap

Episodes go out six nights a week on BBC Radio 4

Each month’s episodes are recorded over six days in Birmingham