Custard, Culverts and Cake: Academics on Life in The Archers

Leading scholars combine their love of The Archers with their specialist subjects, in Custard, Culverts and Cake - a sometimes serious, but most often wry look at the people of Ambridge. A group of Archers Academics take on subjects such as food, geography, social media, faith. There is, naturally, an entire section dedicated to the Helen and Rob storyline.   With contributions from members of the Academic Archers network, the book blurs the line between fact and fiction - The Archers as a BBC soap opera, and Ambridge as a real place in a county called Borsetshire. Each chapter is ‘peer reviewed’ by a different Ambridge inhabitant.  Custard, Culverts and Cake 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction, The Archers Analysed: Academic Perspectives on Life in Borsetshire; Nicola Headlam and Cara CourageSection 1: Genteel Country Hobbies? 1. My Parsnips are Bigger than your Parsnips: The Negative Aspects of Competing at Flower and Produce Shows; Rachel Daniels and Annie Maddison Warren 2. 'Big Telephoto Lens, Small Ticklist': Birdwatching, Class and Gender in Ambridge; Joanna Dobson 3. The Ambridge Paradox: Cake Consumption and Metabolic Health in a Defined Rural Population; Christine Michael Section 2: Educating Ambridge 4. Ambridge as Metaphor: Sharing the Mission and Values of a 21st Century Library; Madeleine Lefebvre 5. We Don't Need No Education? The Absence of Primary Education in The Archers; Dr Grant Bage and Jane Turner 6. Educating Freddie Pargetter: or, will he pass his Maths GCSE?; Ruth Heilbronn and Rosalind Janssen 7. Phoebe goes to Oxford; Felicity Macdonald-Smith Section 3: The Geography of Ambridge  8. Get me out of here! Assessing Ambridge's Flood Resilience; Angela Connelly 9. After the Flood: How Can Ambridge Residents Develop Resilience to Future Flooding?; Fiona Gleed  10. Locating Ambridge: Public Broadcasting, Region and Identity, an Everyday Story of Worcestershire folk?; Tom Nicholls Section 4: Power Relationships 11. A Case Study in the Use of Genograms to Assess Family Dysfunction and Social Class: To the Manor Born vs Shameless; Louise Gillie and Helen M. Burrows 12. Kinship Networks in Ambridge; Nicola Headlam  13. God in Ambridge: The Archers as Rural Theology; Jonathan Hustler 14. Some Corner of a Foreign Field /That is Forever Ambridge: The Archers as a Lieu de Memoire of the First World War in Britain; Jessica Meyer Section 5: Ambridge Online 15. 'An Everyday story of Country Folk' Online? The Marginalisation of the Internet and Social Media in The Archers; Lizzie Coles-Kemp and Debi Ashenden 16. The Importance of Social Media in Modern Borsetshire Life: Domestic and Commercial; Olivia Vandyk 17. Being @borsetpolice: Autoethnographic Reflections on Archers Fan Fiction on Twitter; Jerome Turner Section 6: The Helen and Rob Story 18. Understanding the Antecedents of the Domestic Violence Perpetrator Using The Archers Coercive Controlling Behaviour Storyline as a Case Study; Professor Jennifer Brown 19. Bag of The Devil: The Disablement of Rob Titchener; Katherine Runswick-Cole and Rebecca Wood 20. Culinary Coercion; Nurturing Traditional Gender Roles in Ambridge; Amber Medland 21. The case of Helen and Rob: An Evaluation of the New Coercive Control Offence and its Portrayal in The Archers; Elizabeth R. A. Campion  22. Blood Pattern Analysis in Blossom Hill Cottage; Anna-Marie O'Connor  23. Soundtrack to a Stabbing: What Rob's Choice Of Music Over Dinner Tells Us About Why He Ended Up Spilling the Custard; Emily Baker and Freya Jarman 24. Helen's Diet Behind Bars: Nutrition for Pregnant and Breastfeeding Women in Prison; Caroline M. Taylor

About the Author :
Dr Cara Courage is a placemaking academic and arts consultant, writer/commentator, curator and project manager. She is author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice, and works as an Adjunct at University of Virginia, researching and developing creative placemaking metrics and as a strategist at Futurecity, whilst running her own placemaking projects. She has been listening to The Archers for around 15 years and grew up with the programme on her grandmother's farm on Exmoor. She talks about the pleasure and pain of her Archers fandom in a talk My BDSM relationship with The Archers. Dr Nicola Headlam is the Urban Transformations & Foresight Future of Cities Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is an adaptable urbanist with expertise in city governance, economic development and urban policy. She is passionate about role of universities in public policy and practice, knowledge mobilisation; transfer, exchange and co-production.

Review :
US and UK contributors, members of the Academic Archers Network, explore aspects of the long-running BBC soap opera The Archers, employing perspectives from urban policy, rural education, cultural studies, social work, community resilience, rural ministry, and social and behavioral aspects of cyber security. B&w genograms and kinship diagrams of characters are included. The book stems from papers delivered at a conference called "The Archers in Fact and Fiction: Academic Analysis of Life in Rural Borsetshire." “Custard Culverts and Cake involves the application of genuine research methodologies and concerns to the world of Ambridge and Borsetshire… This is a valuable book, with serious points to make about social sampling and effective research conceptualization; a ‘should read’ for research methodology.” Brian Morton, Times Literary Supplement, 2018