Flapjacks and Feudalism: the class struggle in the Archers. The Academic Archers book is out now
The last week has seen class hostilities between the Aldridges and the Horrabins in Ambridge. Jennifer Aldridge is concerned that her daughter Alice is being blamed for abandoning her new baby and accused of alcoholism by her currently ex-husband Chris Carter (Horrabin).
It is a battle between the Ambridge ruling class and one of the area’s leading proletarian families. Jennifer Aldridge is in fact an Archer and the Chris’s sister Emma is in fact a Grundy.
For the latest on this see last Sunday’s Ambridge Socialist.
The class struggle has been an ever present feature of the Archers and it is probably not because the scriptwriters were Marxists. In fact until the modern era they were more likely to have been Tories.
Rather its because of a fundamental understanding that at the centre of rural society lay a class battle between the haves and the have nots.
A new book by the estimable Academic Archers, Flapjacks and Feudalism, has a series of 15 chapters on class in the Archers including the first chapter by (ahem) myself on the Grundys. Rest assured it is a serious and robust Marxist analysis.
Details of how to get a copy are below:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/flapjacks-and-feudalism/cara-courage/nicola-headlam/9781800713895
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