When ITV was launched in the London region in 1955, the BBC radio soap The Archers sought to steal the commercial television channel’s thunder by broadcasting its most shocking story to date – the death of Grace Archer while trying to rescue a horse from a blazing stable.
Grace, played by Ysanne Churchman, who has died aged 99, had married Phil Archer only five months earlier in an Easter Monday wedding and had announced that she was pregnant shortly before the stable fire drama, which caused an outcry among the serial’s faithful listeners and the jamming of the BBC switchboard for 48 hours.
Churchman had taken over the role of Grace Fairbrother, the spoilt daughter of the local squire, from Monica Grey in 1952, a year after The Archers, set in the fictional Borsetshire village of Ambridge, began as a serial following a handful of pilot episodes.
In 1955, Grace married Phil, a young, progressive farmer battling with his father, Dan, to introduce modern methods to the family farm. Two months later, an Archers script conference plotted a move to take publicity away from the opening night of ITV, 22 September. All those taking part were sworn to secrecy and the secretary was under instructions not to distribute the minutes.
When it was decided that Churchman’s character should be written out, several storylines were discussed. Ultimately, it was decided that Grace had to die. Unusually, the episode was recorded in London – not Birmingham – early on the evening of transmission, in front of the press. They were left in stunned silence when the programme finished with Grace leaving a dinner party, noticing the stables on fire and rushing in, only for the building to collapse. She was pulled out, but died in Phil’s arms on the way to hospital.
With 20 million listeners and front page newspaper headlines, the ruse was deemed successful.
Churchman remained silent about her exit at the time. However, 60 years later, she revealed a further reason for her departure. In 2015, when The Archers’ then editor, Sean O’Connor, and scriptwriter, Joanna Toye, were planning to mark the anniversary with a radio play telling the behind-the-scenes story, Churchman told them that Godfrey Baseley, the programme’s editor at the time, was looking for a way to sack her after she demanded equal pay with male cast members.
She said that he branded her a “troublemaker” and it was a case of “victimisation because I had been to Equity to get my fees put right”.
She irritated Baseley further by advising lower paid amateur actors in the cast to join Equity. The commemorative play broadcast in 2015 was Dead Girls Tell No Tales, its title taken from the only words Churchman uttered to the press at the time of her sacking, fearing that her career could be affected if she spoke out.
In 2015, Churchman said: “On the very night Grace died, ITV started and immediately needed people with exactly my experience to voice commercials, so I was able to make a good living from voiceovers for years.” Jokingly, she sent cards of congratulations, signed “Grace Archer”, to ITV’s chair on the channel’s 50th and 60th anniversaries.
Churchman was born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, to Andrew Churchman and his wife, Gladys Dale, both actors, and she trained as a dancer at the Cone Ripman (now Arts Educational) school. She performed on radio in Children’s Hour from her early teens and made her TV debut in the Ronald Gow drama Gallows Glorious in 1939. Dozens of parts in radio plays followed and she was a regular story reader for Woman’s Hour (from 1947 to 1989) and for Mid-Morning Story (1948-49) and Morning Story (1949-88).
In The Archers, she played Jennifer Archer as a child in 1951 before taking the role of Grace. Later, she was cast as three other Archers characters, finishing with Mary Pound (from 1971 to 1983), whom she described as a “rough and ready tenant farmer”. She also played Annette Tremayne in the rival radio serial Mrs Dale’s Diary from 1959 to 1960.
Alongside many small character roles on television, Churchman voiced Sara Brown in the puppet series Sara and Hoppity (1962) and Soo the computer in The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980), a time-travelling Play for Today, and its sequel, Another Flip for Dominick (1982).
In Doctor Who, she mustered a squeaky falsetto voice as Alpha Centauri, a diplomat from the hermaphrodite hexapod species featured in the stories The Curse of Peladon (1972) and The Monster of Peladon (1974), with Stuart Fell wearing the costume. She returned to voice the part again in the 2017 adventure Empress of Mars.
In 1951, Churchman married Tony Pilgrim, a BBC engineer; he died in 2015.
• Ysanne (Isabel Ann) Churchman, actor, born 14 May 1925; died 4 July 2024
• This article was amended on 30 July 2024. Churchman played Annette Tremayne in Mrs Dale’s Diary, not Waggoners’ Walk, as a previous version stated.
