At least when the end comes for Peggy Woolley – the redoubtable matriarch of The Archers – it looks like it won’t be too painful. I very much doubt there will be an accident on the Ambridge bypass, a charging bull, a tractor toppling on top of her or indeed – the fate chosen for me 11 years ago – a spectacular fall from a roof.
My much-loved former colleague June Spencer – who, unbelievably, is now 103-years-old – has decided it is time for her character, Peggy, to bow out of the Radio 4 series after first debuting in 1950. She had been asking the scriptwriters for a while to give her an exit, but they kept coming back with yet more episodes. Now that they’ve come to terms with it, there is talk of Peggy simply being packed off to The Laurels, the fictional care home in Ambridge, and that will be the last we hear of her.
