Fire, sick cattle, bankruptcy - and now the Grundys are losing their home. Why is The Archers' funniest family being treated so badly, asks Chris Arnot

Guardian

A plague of locusts rampaging through the Grange Farm kitchen wouldn't have surprised these poor tenant farmers after what's happened to them over the past three or four years of The Archers. Fire has destroyed everything they owned, and pestilence has smitten the herd of prime Jerseys they bought with the insurance money. BVD (bovine virus diarrhoea, if you must know), along with Eddie's tendency to shove unpaid bills into drawers, has now left them bankrupt.

So the farm stock went for a second time on Friday, in a dispersal sale. Ah well, we thought, at least they've still got the house. Then came last night's bolt from the blue. The Grundys are being evicted by Borchester Land, run by the dastardly Matt Crawford - the one who makes Brian Aldridge seem like a Guardian reader. So much for Clarrie's prayers.

It's almost as though the spirit of Thomas Hardy has seeped into the scriptwriting. Exile from Ambridge looms, and the 21st-century version of the workhouse beckons: a council flat in Borchester or even far-flung Felpersham. "Certainly, there won't be a cosy little council house around the green for them to drop into," says Archers editor Vanessa Whitburn, the one who plays God in the studio.

So what has Eddie Grundy done to deserve such retribution? OK, he's been a bit of a lad in his time, with his ferrets and his scams. And he once lifted the lid of the Bull's piano to be sick inside. Still, at least he provided light relief on days when Phil Archer was going on about the fat-stock prices and his nephew, Tony, was whingeing about his organic leeks. Why turn a mischievous character into a tragic figure?

Whitburn starts by disputing that Eddie's role has ever been entirely comic. "His ability to raise a laugh is one of the great things about him, but we've never needed head-on comedy characters. I like to think we can find humour in all of them, depending on the situation they're put in. And some of our most popular storylines, in terms of audience reaction, have come when characters like Eddie and Linda Snell reveal a serious underbelly."

Then there's Eddie's father, Joe Grundy, whose demeanour has become so serious - morose, even - that it's difficult to recall when we last heard his wheezy chuckle. He's taken to sitting on a cold, hard bench in the graveyard and, more recently, driving aimlessly round and round on a tractor. How long before he's found hanging from a rafter in the turkey shed? Whitburn won't be drawn on that: "They're all very popular characters and we'll be following the whole family in the future." But if the Grundys are so popular, surely she can't allow this persecution to continue. Eddie's going to win the lottery, right? Wrong. "There'll be no fairy-tale ending," she says. "Things are going to be tough for them over the next year or so."

In the context of a radio drama that's been running for nearly half a century, "a year or two" is but the blink of an eye. Storylines have been outlined as far ahead as January's 50th anniversary and the Grundys' fate was sealed at a script meeting six months ago. Whitburn denies that this everyday story of impoverished countryfolk is a BBC balancing act designed to butter up the farming lobby in the wake of grumbling from Tory backbenchers and the Countryside Alliance over "New Labour propaganda" in The Archers. The much-criticised "topical insert" about Tony Blair's speech to west country farmers was written long after the storyline about Eddie's downfall, Whitburn says.

Wastepaper bins in and around her office in Birmingham's Pebble Mill Studios overflow with mail from one lobby or another. But she is able to put her hand on a document from the National Farmers' Union that claims one in 12 jobs in agriculture was lost in the year to June 1999. "It's only realistic for a drama set in the countryside to reflect what's going on there properly," she says. "Even six months ago it was obvious that farming was going through its worst crisis since the 30s. And the most vulnerable, apart from hill farmers, are small-scale tenant farmers like the Grundys. This is what can happen to people like them."

One of the difficulties of dramatising their plight, she accepts, is the avoidance of sentimentality. "The writing has to become sparer to make the tone of these scenes effective. It's not to do with histrionics and tearful over-reaction to events. If we can avoid stereotypical over-reactions then the audience will feel for the characters. That's where the writers' imagination comes in."

The writer who delivered last night's coup de grace to the Grundys is Peter Kerry, who lives in Stockport and is also on the team producing scripts for Sooty. "Just when Eddie, Joe and Clarrie had lost everything, I came along and smote them another blow," he admits. "It's a bit below the belt. We discussed long and hard whether it would make the show too depressing. But because these characters are so strongly played, they can ride it. Mind you, comedy has always been the Grundys' staple diet and we've been under instructions to make sure there's some elsewhere."

Hence Sid Perks's fevered attempts to keep secret his affair with the statuesque line-dancer Jolene Rogers, she of the dysfunctional shower. "A fine figure of a woman," as Joe Grundy observed in happier times. "My Eddie had a thing for her once."