Some years ago, extravagant claims were made for the beneficial effects on children’s intelligence of listening to Mozart. A regime of Eine kleine Nachtmusik would, it was argued, foster improvements in cognitive ability. Happily for those on whom the principal effect of K 525 is an overwhelming desire to stick our fingers in our ears, the theory has been largely discredited. 

But in the light of recent developments at Ambridge, I find myself wondering what might be the long-term effects of daily exposure from infancy to The Archers’ theme tune, Barwick Green. 

That rollicking ditty was the leitmotif of my childhood teatimes; these days I am an infrequent listener, but when I occasionally catch an episode I am struck by how seamlessly I am reabsorbed into the flow of rural fantasy.

Partly this is because of the cyclical nature of events in Borsetshire, which recur with the inexorable regularity of the farming year. But the recent arrival of a new character, Trevor Fry, son of the late Bert, has brought a disturbing new aspect to the everyday story of farming folk. Bert was a formidable rustic bore; but Trevor, played by the magnificent Julian Rhind-Tutt, takes tedium to another level. So virtuosic is his dullness that even that dim bulb, Tony Archer, is agonised by it. 

Here I encounter a problem, for I realise that my early exposure to Barwick Green set up an ineradicable Pavlovian reaction: the sound of it induces a reassuring sense of boredom; a conviction that nothing dreadful will happen; that however dire the development, Jill Archer will still put the kettle on. 

In interesting times such a these, a therapeutic mild ennui is a precious thing; to cherish the prosaic is to remind ourselves of the value of the everyday. The last thing we need is The Archers, that great, interminable celebration of the quotidian, to go all meta on us and start pointing out its own ineffable dullness.

The Clangers spoke our language

A recent article in The Smithsonian Magazine records the continuing existence of whistled languages, still active in more than 80 cultures around the world. Developed for communication in dense forest or mountainous terrain, whistled languages are believed by scholars to contain clues to the earliest origins of speech.

Which brings us to the Clangers, the small extraterrestrial knitted creatures created by the late Oliver Postgate for a BBC children’s series broadcast from 1969-72. The Clangers subsisted largely on volcanic soup and communicated in a whistled language with a wide and expressive vocabulary, easily understood by their young audience.

Still, it turns out that perhaps the little viewers weren’t catching every nuance: Dan Postgate, Oliver Postgate’s son, is planning to publish his father’s Clangers scripts for the first time, and it seems that the Clangers, like the rest of us, were prone to profanity in moments of stress. The choleric Major Clanger had a certain barrack-room turn of phrase, and the soup dragon was also capable of a heated bubbling expletive. 

All of which makes perfect sense, when you come to think of it. For our prehistoric forebears, embarking on the earliest forms of communication, the most pressing matters must have been hunger, affection – and frustration. Exactly those, in fact, to which the Clangers gave such eloquent, whistled voice.